I remember seeing an ad for the Newsroom in a magazine or catalog and was enthralled with the prospect of making a newspaper as cool as The Cat Chronicle and the other examples. Always lusted after it (and Print Shop Deluxe, of course,) great to see it again and great work on the reverse engineering.
Love this. I never used this program, but I used others and there were many hacks - for example, I once modified Koalapaint to be usable with a joystick, and much later a copy of the C64 Crystal Castles to have true proportional control using an unmodified Atari Trackball - but I figured all this was going into history's dustbin, to be forgotten. And here all this 8-bit era stuff is being lovingly preserved and even added to.
In case you're wondering - all this hardware, including the Atari Trackball, as collectible as it may now be, was given away years ago when it wasn't.
For what it's worth, the game was pretty straight code, and didn't use the timer interrupt at all. I was able to crank up the rate of that, to successfully poll the quadrature signals from the trackball (in trackball, not virtual joystick mode). And then pulse modulate a virtual joystick register appropriately and patch the game to read that instead of the real one. Amazingly this worked well, especially because the movement in the original joystick mode was way too fast so a good range of speeds was possible. Directions other than X/Y were combinations of small X/Y steps.
In case you're wondering - all this hardware, including the Atari Trackball, as collectible as it may now be, was given away years ago when it wasn't.