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ti99iuc and I finished up the manual for Atlantis. It can be accessed on GitHub here: https://github.com/CheungChang7/TI99_HOMEBREW/tree/main/ATLANTIS/DOCS Along with the files for the cartridge label. The files can also be downloaded below for convenience. I want to thank ti99iuc for creating the manual cover and cartridge label as well as helping me to get the manual good enough for publication ATLMAN.pdf Atlantis Cart Label with cut lines.pdf

I remember buying most of my 2600 games in the early 80s from Circus World, a toy store in our mall. They used to do a weekly ad in the local newspaper, and was always so excited to see that. Defender is one I really remember- $34.99! So expensive, I mowed tons of lawns back then.

GenXGrownUp has put up a really interesting interview with Gary Kitchen who did the 2600 port of Donkey Kong (the DK discussion starts at 5:42): Like Jennell, Gary makes it clear that developers were not asked to shank the ports, there was no Coleco conspiracy. Instead, the focus was on time to delivery and ROM size. Specifically, development needed to be complete in May '82 in order for production to be done by September, and the games to be available in the run up to Christmas. Further, Gary suggests that even if he had a larger ROM, he might not have been able to do much more in the 90 days he had for development. I suspect that, if he was still around, Frank Johnson might empathize with Gary's experience. The importance of ROM space is something that should not be forgotten when comparing DK ports. On the Colecovision, DK was originally a 24KB game written in Pascal. This compares with 4K decles (5KB) on the Intellivision and 4KB on the 2600. Therefore, it's not surprising that content was cut on the Inty and 2600 versions. I believe the Coleco version was reworked in assembly later, reducing the size to 16KB with no loss of functionality. This potentially shows the overhead of using a high level language, that more ROM space might have been traded for a shorter development time on the Colecovision version, and the efficiency improvement that more development time and experience can bring. So as a really naive comparison, even in it's optimised, 16KB form, Colecovision DK effectively had more than 5KB of ROM space per level, as compared with 2.5KB on the Inty and 2KB on the 2600.

The major different variant of 800XL is the later one which has Freddie. It would make sense that they use the 1-bit DRams only since we didn't see the 4-bit chips until later on in the XE lifetime.

Is there a gold cheat?

Oh and Ben, I made a video and dedicated it to you - you should feel honored. The video helps demonstrate that legit companies were in on the game too.

From the "Games Not Running! Screen Glitching! Why?" thread: Break Issues One issue which will crop up from time to time is screen glitching when BREAK is enabled on the cart. BREAK is the functionality which allows you to return to the game menu with a controller button combination or apply cheats to the running game. The way BREAK works is the cartridge takes over execution of the code from the game once per frame to do it's own thing and apply cheats and check for button presses. For some games this happens at a very crucial moment and causes graphical glitches. One common example is Ms Pac-Man (NTSC) and all it's mods, this game has very noticeable screen flickering / glitching with break enabled. Until there is a work-around for specific games with issues the best option is to disable break for the game. This does mean you will not be able to enable any cheats (if they exist) and you will have to power-cycle to return to the game menu, but the game will be glitch free. To disable break, press right trigger on a standard controller or B on a Mega7800 controller and press left / right where it says BREAK ENABLED to change this to BREAK DISABLED. Move down and hit START.

Considering the fact that all the Atari games were designed back when the standard tv was 4:3 there is no way, on any of the Flashbacks, to strech the video out to the size of modern tv's. The picture would probably look pretty horrible if you take into account the pixelated look of the games in 4:3.

Nice to see some more competition! I like the concept of your game, didn't know it before.

The chips I ordered were 4164B so should be fine. I'm beginning to suspect the Pokey chip though...

I made the Visicom dumper a few years ago when we realized only two of the six carts had been dumped. I sent it to @stupus who dumped CAS-130, 141 and 160, and hoping he would come across CAS-190 sooner than I would. It's a simple Arduino-based (so modern) system that writes the ROM contents to an SD cart. I know Ed Keefe made a similar system for the RCA carts, though his was a bit more polished than my kludge version FliP

Tune into my new podcast episode airing tomorrow night 10PM-12AM Pst(and also airing this Monday night on KPCR at the same time slot)with special guest Howard Scott Warshaw!! Just spoke to him just now and he's gonna be sharin' some of his views on the new VCS console,and also what he's been programming lately on it. Something you shouldn't miss! Also about to hear more of my VCS in action on live radio. Interview transcription also coming soon online. Any questions you got for HSW lemme know here too thx!

i sometimes have this with the taiwanese bootlegs. i use abbrasive to make it fit more but still it is a pain in the a** sometimes to get it fit properly

They are very different chips, as @Rybags said, the 41464 is a 4 bit * 64K chip, the address pins are very different (and others) to the 4164 which is a 1 bit * 64K chip. I don't know if the 800XL had a model with 2 chips, but yours has 8 so it has the be the 4164 variant I know that some 65XE, 130XE have either chip, but they are not interchangeable i.e. 2 or 4 for 65XE and 8 or 16 chip for 130XE I believe that the XEGS also uses the 41464 2 chip memory.

You probably meant Xbox Series S, not Xbox One S, and that doesn't even make sense, since every game that works on Xbox Series S works on Series X as well, so you should just say Xbox Series. And in my articles, I also tend to just put "Xbox" since, except the recent AAA blockbusters I seldomly write about, games work on both Xbox One and Xbox Series. It's less true for PlayStation, so I either write PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, or just PlayStation when it works for both.

Hi, Imagine you have the line counter in y register and the y position of a missile in ram (e.g. missile1_y at $80), what is you favorite code to display a two pixel high missile ? I haven't found a solution I am proud of yet and need to concentrate on other things Edit : I say "favorite" because I do not have need for shorter code nor faster code for now, just wondering what solutions you find interesting / beautiful.

Mega ST's - you can't just put in TOS 2.xx ROMS like for like without some extra jiggery pokery. There are some boards available from worldwide sellers to enable this for you.

In USA, very cheap on eBay ($30-$40), but perhaps not many people are shipping overseas, and shipping costs can be a bit much, but you can check. I think we've tried to stretch this product to be kind of a poor man's retro pi for mostly 70s to early 90s game systems, but it certainly has it's limitations. I don't recall any internal pictures showing the presence of any heatsinks. I haven't taken mine apart.

Unrelated: that is shocking! My localish retro arcade has it! Related: Why was I looking for Supervisions on ebay yesterday!! Quite a few with battery corrosion issues where I guess people have left old batteries in. Maybe worth a gamble to clean up, depends how far the acid went...

I need some more advice on this! I ordered replacement DRAM and sockets but only the sockets have arrived so far. I also ordered a Super Salt diagnostic cart. Diagnostic cart boots fine. It shows 32K RAM and no errors on the main screen. However.. the keyboard does not appear to be doing anything now - only the reset button appears to work so I can't press ? for instance to get to the help menu. Any suggestions or do I just wait and proceed with DRAM replacement when it arrives? Dunno if that would stop the keyboard working or not. Edit: I tell a lie - I set the cart to CPS diagnostic and can run the tests using the silver keys (option, start etc) - RAM passes, ROM passes. Keyboard doesn't work but it did do before the blue screen white cursor issue..

Hi Ben, I could respond with some snark to your snobbish response, but that would likely lead nowhere, so I'd rather try to make you a bit more informed, as this is likely an area that I am more knowledgeable of than you. I'm not trying to be arrogant when saying that, but I am one of the world's foremost of third and fourth generation unauthorized video games / gaming. I'll address your points one-by-one. No, there was nothing particularly wrong about your sentence aside from the erroneous nature of its contents. Another member of this forum showed me the contents of this set of cartridges, and aside from a few of the titles in the lot, most of these are not dime-a-dozen bootlegs, rather it is just the perception that you hold as someone that does not collect or research these things. That GeGeGe no Kitarou cartridge? I've never seen that before. The Wrecking Crew next to it? I have no idea what region in the world used that sort of shell design, a design that is missing from my 144+ page book on Famiclone cartridge shells and their evolution. The NTDEC Super Mario Bros. 3? Again that's quite a banger. Only Baseball and B-Wings are what would be considered dime-a-dozen junk. Heck, I'd buy a set of games with that composition and wouldn't even care if they didn't play. People aren't buying these bootleg games to play, at least a lot of us aren't. Well that's quite odd, as the majority of Famicom collectors online are collecting bootlegs, aside from the Japanese. Some Americans or Westerners might dip their toes into it by picking up a few games here and there, and they'll take official cartridges, but they don't generally go for collecting huge swaths of games and full sets and all of that stuff, in Famicom format. It's generally just picking up favorites or titles like Lickle (Little Samson), which got stupid expensive in the West. This is a very complex topic and I agree with you on one point, which is that copyright holders will not get the revenue from the copied games. Here's the rub though: copyright holders wouldn't have gotten the revenue anyway, even if licensed games were being sold. We see this situation in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and India in Asia. We also see this situation in South Africa and in Poland, just to name a few regions. Nintendo marketed official games in all of these regions. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and India even got their own official gaming machines (Famicom or NES) released there. Official software was also sold in these regions, and also in places such as Thailand. It did horribly and didn't sell, and Nintendo likely backed away from some of these regions afterwards. Why? Was it because of greedy thieving bootleggers? No! It was because the average person was poor and couldn't afford to purchase such luxuries, unlike us. If we flashforward to today though we will see something very interesting has occurred. Aside from places like Aliexpress, bootlegs just aren't prevalent anymore. Taiwanese, for example, go to normal game shops and purchase legitimate Nintendo Switch games. They buy new entries in their favorite series' such as new Mario games, Castlevanias, Pokemon, etc. Why? Brand loyalty. Since these people grew up with these games, they love the characters and also have a fondness to support the companies that make the games that they love. Why aren't these people buying bootlegs anymore? It's the same reason we had the natural progression of downloading music via Napster to downloading and paying for it, to streaming services, etc. In the end as these markets matured and people then had money, piracy just disappeared too. To contrast things, Microsoft threw tons of money at the Xbox market in Taiwan, even advertising Halo in a music video from one of the popular local bands. It was a much harder sell to convince people to go for such a machine as there was no brand loyalty - no familiar characters or franchises. I heard that in Japan the X-box really didn't do well at all. Sure, they weren't a hotbed for piracy in the 80s and 90s, but my point is that it's a hard sell when there is no brand loyalty, and that can't be built up if people can't afford the products. Microsoft themselves even recognize this. This is the reason they turned a blind eye when their Windows products kept getting copied and bootlegged in China during the 90s and early 2000s. When the time came that people could afford the software and pay for it, they would. And they'd choose something they were familiar with over something new that they weren't used to using. There's nothing wrong with holding a different opinion, but at least try to see the forest instead of the trees. A few more points to wrap things up: 1. There's a ton of Atari homebrew that uses IP that the developers didn't have the rights to use. Unauthorized = garbage, right? Those authors are just vile bootlegging thieves perhaps? 2. Konami and some other companies were selling their PCBs in bootleg shells, likely to tap into the market and develop brand loyalty, as they knew most in those regions couldn't afford to purchase the official copies anyways. So much for your argument about revenues and criminals. 3. Dumping and distributing ROMs is illegal. It is bootlegging. What is your stance on those so-called video game preservationists that were responsible for things such as dumping and releasing the unreleased NES Sim City game? Unauthorized = garbage? Criminals? Lock em up and throw away the key? I don't want to start an argument, but I think having an informed discussion is quite useful. -Dave Edit: Also thought I should mention that I am the author / developer of about eight different Famicom games. Someone did dump and "preserve" a few of them without my permission, and my feelings on that are quite mixed. That being said, the above is written from someone who actually had his product ripped off...mind blown?