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Also, microwaves and stoves in 2024 after a power glitch:

That is also interesting... As far as I know C-Labs bought the falcon intellectual property from Atari when Atari went bankrupt. The white keyboard in falcon was observed only when Atari started selling the falcons, for just a few machines and until the grey keyboards got produced (they were delayed and Atari was in a hurry to start selling). How a C-Lab ended up with a white keyboard is a bit of a mystery... To me at least...

It would be nice someday to restore the joystick back to how it was originally going to be with variable degrees when ti was working on the keypad round wheel via rf or ir transmitter/receiver with the values being returned from +16 to -16 instead of just fixed at +4 and -4 and 4 player option

The C-Lab falcon lives, but has a bad fan, bad caps, etc. It will needing some work lol

Yeah Gary but to be truthful this dude would only have one leg to account for the TI doing everything but the CPU in 8 bit

I can also confirm 1 Falcon, which was pre-ordered, was shipped out today, restored to good working shape! I have high hopes all the others will work again

I ran into this recently and spent some time investigating it... basically, if a key on a keyboard column shared with the joystick is pressed, the joystick axis does not respond (only the key is read). Basically, this means that: - FCTN,1,2,3,4,5 - and Alpha Lock - will disable UP - 6,7,8,9,0 will disable DOWN - Enter,O,I,U,Y,P will disable RIGHT - Space,L,K,J,H,; will disable LEFT and =,comma,period,M,N,/ will disable FIRE As far as I can work out, this is because the keyboard lines are directly connected to the 9901, but the joystick lines run through protection diodes. So if a key is pressed it's basically going to sink all the current rather than pushing through the diode. Since it's hardware, you can see it regardless of the software. I was able to reproduce it in TI BASIC as well as my own software. Any game should show it too, doesn't matter if it means to read the keyboard or not. I was trying to use the joystick as a modifier for keypresses, copying code I used on the ColecoVision, and it took a while to figure out why UP+1 wasn't working... I'll add that discovery to Classic99 as well so it doesn't trip me up in the future, but I thought I'd share it in case the others didn't already know!

I can confirm, he's been helping me out with the Falcons, very very thankful for his hand in the restoration process of these computers

ZvPhK1ZSBtkw7fpX.mp4

Yep. Cosmetic condition plays a critical factor in the value of games in the rarity class of Rescue Terra I. And yeah, your game is pretty darned rare. But some will consider the bubbling of the label in your cartridge pic as "damaged". Others, not so much. Another critical factor in assessing value to a game like RTI is: how much fun is it to play? Many of the extreme rarities in the Atari 2600 library of games are not very much fun to play, which is a contributing reason for why they are as rare as they are in the first place -- the games sucked, nobody bought them, and therefore those games suffered the consequence of earning only very limited production runs. Rescue Terra I is a double rarity, as it is a super rare game that is also a great deal of fun to play. The RARE + FUN synergy working for RTI makes the game considerably more valuable to those that are aware of this. Rescue Terra I has long been one of my favorite Atari 2600 games, which is why I almost compulsively note its selling price whenever it pops up for sale or for auction on eBay. Earlier this month, for example, a copy of RTI sold at auction on eBay for $195. There were some 20 bidders competing for its purchase. That game was in much better cosmetic condition than yours, with no readily noticeable signs of label damage. It also came with its original Instruction Manual, also in very good condition. So you can use that as something of a baseline for the value of the THAT game, with YOUR cartridge-only copy of it being worth somewhat less than that. But not a lot less. With games this rare and this fun to play, many collectors looking to add RTI to their collections will be very forgiving about its cosmetic condition so long as it plays. And these are the types of collectors you want to attract to your "silent" auction anyway. These are the collectors who will actually end up buying it from you. Based on the above considerations, along with other observations I've made about the selling price of this game over the years, I would assess the value of your game at around $120. If you get lucky and two bidders get caught up in a bidding war over your game, you can always make a crazy amount more. But I wouldn't expect to get too much more than about $120 for it. I won't be making an offer, because I already have a copy of this game. But best of luck with your auction! -Ben

It’s out now. Anyone play it yet?

Oh, really?

Bump

I give everyone up to 3 "second-chance" entries into the drawing. So I could slim it down to the top 3 picks per person. I am doing it that way because I am lazy and don't want someone missing out on a second-chance entry. I'm trying to reward players who may not win, but put in effort and submit scores.

That is seriously impressive.

Well what kind of screws does the Top 3 on the GC Controller Ports has? I just want the 3 for the top & also the 2 screws that hold the faceplate

Yeah, I'm not gonna lie, it was those YouTubers opining that we've yet to see the console's true potential that reeled me in. Practically speaking though, it's not fair to compare things like OpenLaura to contemporary games. Games ship on a budget and with a deadline. Unless it's a developer's third round on a console refining their engine for one last sequel before the next gen thing comes out, they're never going to be pushing anything to its limits. Jaguar didn't have the longevity to get to that. With that in mind though, I think Battlemorph, Iron Soldier 2, and maybe Hiverstrike: Unconquered Lands are pretty good examples of the Jaguar pushed to its 3D limits via contemporary development. No doubt someone could do a passion project with carefully defined constraints that blows those away, but that's a whole different thing. It's hard to compare hardware abilities just by eyeballing game visuals. That's a combination of developer cleverness, artistic talent, and hardware abilities.

Wanted to make this video almost two months ago to mark the 3rd year I've been working on this silly project, but got sidetracked by major life stuff. The video is a little bit on the spoiler-y side if you're someone who wants to play things fresh.

Hopefully this game is better balanced and not as random and rushed as King of Edom.

The Happy 1050 uses that style for bank switching, with a JSR to the bank address followed by the target address. Makes disassembly fun, especially since the two banks overlap in address space. The 1050 Turbo had an even nastier form of bank switching, which has a bunch of trampolines like this: F804: 2C 01 F0 BIT $F001 F807: 2C 03 F0 BIT $F003 F80A: 2C 02 F0 BIT $F002 F80D: 4C 13 F8 JMP $F813 Why's it nasty? Because each one of those reads is actually a jump. The read triggered by those BIT instructions causes an immediate bank switch such that the next instruction comes from a different bank at the following address. It would have been worse had the trampolines not all been placed at the front of the bank where they were easier to track. 2600 games pull a lot of dirty tricks due to heavy use of bank switching and size-saving tricks. Tables are really fun, you see a lookup like LDA $F017,X and have to figure out it's actually LDA $F027-$10,X with X >= $10... or the sprite table that you tried to rewrite for GTIA also happened to overlap on one side with the sound table and on the other side with the score graphics.

Didn't see the above explanation, but did test with values of 266 Mhz and 2 NOPs. I picked those based on what I had used in the past. The SAMS burn-in worked on all 3 of my TIs. Will test 250 Mhz and 1 NOP next.

Maybe a basic way of sorting games like we started with, use a prefix (when alphabet sorted) to group them together, 1intellivision name.rom (1stonix.rom) 2colecovision name 1.col (2mousetrap.col) 2colecovision name 2.col (2carnival.col)

This hack has become my absolute favorite Atari 2600 game. I wish I could have this on a cart! I can't even play the original anymore.

it's a good question and hard to answer without more investigation into the potentiometers. The potentiometers are sealed and barely used, so it's not obvious. It's also possible I was dealt a lemon, but true durability can only be measured by the community.

It was newly formatted FAT32 using GParted. Fresh format and then copied the games over. I used the same process with the good working 32GB microSD card. I have run into this sort of situation with other flash carts and ODE's in the past as well, so now when I run into loading issues my first instinct is to try different media. Initially when I was getting the black screen with Iron Soldier 2 I searched the forums here and found some other posts with people saying the exact same thing so I chalked it up to a compatibility issue. I was quite surprised to see that the game actually DOES work...just not with my first choice of media. I think my point is really that if people are having issues launching titles it may be a good idea to try alt media. The 32GB microSD card model I use that is working great is quite cheap ($7 and change) and these have been pretty reliable.