Alternate Reality: The City (Atari 8-bit family)

You've been abducted by aliens and dumped into a strange, yet oddly familiar city. Can you find your way home? I mean, probably not, the planned five-game series was never actually completed, but still.

This needs some investigation. Discuss ideas and findings on the talk page. Specifically: Uncompiled code, but first, find an uncracked copy.

Developer Messages#

When booting Side 2 of Disk 1, the following read-me will appear on the screen. However, after going through the read-me, the game displays garbage.

Alternate Reality Designed & Programmed by Philip Price
P.O. BOX 2634 KAILUA-KONA, HAWAII 96745-2634 Music (All
are Original Scores) Composed by Gary Gilbertson Using
AMP 11.3 AMP 11.3 (Advanced Music Processor) was Designed
& Programmed by Philip Price Phil's AR System Structure...
(c)1985 100% Machine Language/Custom Operating System
with software Banked memory (disk and RAM based)/Custom
Interrupt Driven Sio with 2 voice music carry-over/Advanced
Music Processor 11.3 with songbooks, tunes and 2&4 voice
masked operation/Animation Frame Processor/Advanced Screen
Processor/Three Dimensional Object Manipulaor/Multi-process
Time slotted Queue/Multi-staged Booter and system
validator/128-color Graphics via Interrupts/Multi-Process
Interrupt router/Custom Crytographic Daga Storage (A easily
breakable simple Block Chained, multi-encryption cipher using
pre-generated primary keys, with formula and keys in
minimumally secured memory and disk) Program created on...
Atari 800, 800xl, 1200xl with TRAK drives and a modified 800
with LE high speed drives with these utilities of mine: PICTURE
CUTTER, WALL MAKER, MAPMAKER with MAP PRINTER, PICTURE PAINTER,
52K SWITCH, and CUSTOM MAKRO LIBRARY. and these programs
MICROPAINTER -DATASOFT INC. DOS 2.0, FIXDMP & AMAC -ATARI INC.
THE NEXT STEP -ONLINE SYSTEMS OSS/A+ 2.10 -OPTIMIZED SYSTEM SOFTWARE
6502 ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE ROUTINES -LEVENTHALL/SEVILLE
CRYPTOGRAPHY -DR. CARL MEYER ATARI OS RV A SOURCE DE RE
ATARI TECH USER NOTES 1200XL OS MANUAL My thanks to Gary for his
patience and faith in the project and fantastic music, Craig for
his beautiful pictures, all who buy this game, and God my father,
Jesus Christ my savior, and the Holy Spirit my comforter.

Also present on here is this notifier, with a compile date to go with it.

(C)1984 PHILIP PRICE
A.R. CITY Disk 11/16/85
Mod 0 Side 2
Write to me at...
P.O. Box 2634
Kailua Kona, HI
96745

Anti-Piracy#

As with many other 8-bit computer games, this game checks for a "weak bit" on the floppy. If this check fails, the players gets scurvy, which the player dies from after only a few steps.