English Manual for DAMS

[muckypaws]

Hello,

I purchased your software back in the 80s, it was sold by Audiogenic and marketed as ADAM, I was a fairly prolific hacker back then (went by many names), and every one, including complicated protection systems were all achieved in your software! My view was it was the best system out there for what I could do... Even wrote a fully fledged game and conversions with it!

This included Hex Protection, 6K Disc Sectors, Appleby and more.

The beauty of your system over the ROM utilities out there, is that I could load your code into the extra memory/ram bank, and page in/out as required. And due to this, more often or not if I messed up, I could recover my code after a soft reset.

The manual provided with the software was a really poor photocopy, however I've included this in this message to you as you were looking for English translation (at least).

I hope that you find it useful.

Kind Regards, Jason

ADAM Amstrad CPC.pdf

[pseguy]

Hello Jason

Thank you for your feedback, I am very proud of it!

The original documentation was not voluminous, but this translation seems very short to me.

Kind regards

Pascal.

[muckypaws]

It was enough to get me into full time hacking back in the day... I'm currently working on some tutorials disecting old protection systems of the 80's and early 90's on the Amstrad CPC, for which I'm going old school and how I achieved this with ADAM, along with a tutorial on how to use it.

I'm curious though... it was excellent for monitoring and tracing ROM routines etc, however the R register was never correctly preserved, was there a reason for this? It was used extensively in time critical decode routines of just about every protection system going.

Will you ever release the original source files?

Kind Regards Jason

[pseguy]

Hello Jason

So far I can remember, DAMS doesn't do anything with the CPU R register.

The source files here, are the original source file. In fact not really, it was my working copy, with some minors improvements, mostly a pageup/pagedown feature in the editor.

One major improvement of this version, are the comments I added eight years ago. It was a funny but difficult work because I had to learn the Z80 instruction set again after all these years. The original version had no comments at all (48Ko ram).

Kind regards

[muckypaws]

Hi Pascal,

Thank you for replying…

Is there any chance you can put the latest version on git as a .DSK file that I can load direct into either my emulator or CPC with USB Drive please?

I know what you mean about relearning Z80… most of my code back then didn’t have comments due to limitation of text space, plus Z80 is self documenting… I’m also relearning many of the tricks I had back then, sometimes wondering if I had too many beers… amazing how much you forget.

Page up and down would have been an amazing feature back then!

Apologies for raising this as an issue on your Repo, was the only way to make contact. Once again, thank you for making an amazing IDE it opened up an improved development environment for many of us back in the day, much better than Maxam and DevPac… but that’s just my humble opinion.

Kind Regards and thank you for sharing. Jason

ps. Could I obtain permission to distribute may DSK image of the original program with my upcoming tutorials?

On 24 Jan 2024, at 18:22, Pascal Séguy @.***> wrote:

Hello Jason

So far I can remember, DAMS doesn't do anything with the CPU R register.

The source files here, are the original source file. In fact not really, it was my working copy, with some minors improvements, mostly a pageup/pagedown feature in the editor.

One major improvement of this version, are the comments I added eight years ago. It was a funny but difficult work because I had to learn the Z80 instruction set again after all these years. The original version had no comments at all (48Ko ram).

Kind regards

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/pseguy/dams/issues/3#issuecomment-1908686541, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABZIO4ZZCSVJ2LXGI6CA4XLYQFGM3AVCNFSM6AAAAABCDP4M5WVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMYTSMBYGY4DMNJUGE. You are receiving this because you authored the thread.

[pseguy]

Hello Jason

I managed to assemble DAMS 1.2 using the README, but I've now to save it on dsk, and I couldn't manage to get a '|' character on my french keyboard with caprice32 to manage files on the floppy (erase dams.bin, rename dams12.bindams.bin, remove source files...) with amsdos commands, even with US keyboard mapping.

I don't have an original DAMS dsk, can you send it to me please.

You can distribute it with your tutorial.

Kind regards

[muckypaws]

Hello Pascal,

I use JavaCPC developed by Markus Hohmann, https://sourceforge.net/projects/javacpc/ from an emulation perspective it's pretty good, though the DDFDC is a bit ropey when it comes to protection systems.

For the | character in the emulator I use the Shift + [ combination.

A DOS Rom is a good Idea, JavaCPC let's me reference files on my Mac as opposed to inside the Emulator Disk itself. I'll give that a go!

Thank you for your permission.

The DSK Image attached, is from my original purchased back in the 80's.

Hope this helps?

Kind Regards Jason

ADAM.dsk.zip

[muckypaws]

PS, Just spotted your DAMS to ASCII Converter, I wrote one back in the day as I was testing MAXAM, but decided to stick with ADAM as it was far superior (IMO). If you're interested, it's located in my Repo here: https://github.com/muckypaws/AmstradCPC/tree/master/Tools/ADAM

[pseguy]

Hello Jason

Thank you for the ADAM disk et these advice.

I will dive into this world back again one day, for sure.

Kind regards.