Author: ijor (OL127-78.fibertel.com.ar)
Date: 06-22-2005 04:07
Steven from Atarimax was (as always he is) kind enough to promptly send me the images …
After some inspection and comparison against the 7.1 disks, I’m 1000% sure it’s a hacked version. Proof:
Back side:
The only change is that all (or most, didn’t check) occurrences of 7.10 and 1987 were changed to 7.25 and 1988 respectively. No single byte change in the code, no comma or space was changed or added. Quite suspicious in itself, there is quite some many pages of documentation in this side. You would expect at least a new sentence. Furthermore, when mentioning new features they always refer to features that were new in 7.1.
Front side:
Again, some 7.10 for 7.25 changes plus a few other minor differences:
The “Ramdisk” bytes were changed. Happy 7.1 supports the 130XE Ramdisk and the Newell 256K expansion. The documentation explains how to change these bytes for adding support for a different ramdisk. In this case they were changed, possibly for Rambo or some other RAM upgrade. As a consequence of this, the Newell 256K is not detected and supported anymore. This is quite a proof it is a hacked release. Happy would not abandon Newell support, specially when the documentation on the back side explicitly mentions it is the only 256k Ramdisk supported by default.
Some bytes were altered here and there in the PDB sectors. Most of them are not significant at all, they are in empty places that are unused by the software. And more than likely they were changed intentionally for obscuring the comparison with the 7.10 disks.
At least one PDB file was altered in such a way that it doesn’t work at all anymore. Plus the text was changed at another PDB file and it makes the Happy software to issue an error.
There is no new PDB file at all. Don’t know where Steven got the idea that there is a new one, there is not.
> ONLY Happy Computers can make .PDB files
This is of course not true. It is correct that the PDB format was never documented. But this doesn’t mean that others can’t make their own PDBs. A lot of undocumented stuff was studied and reverse engineered. This is true for the Happy, for Atari, and for computers in general. And yes, I’m not talking just in theory, I can make a PDB myself.
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