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TrogdarRobusto: > Just wanted to let the community know that we (Atari, Plaion & Retro Games) are seeing and collecting all the reports of issues and questions related to the joystick and passing them on to the product team. ------------------------------ Which is great and really appreciated. However, most of all, I certainly do hope You guys also are seeing and collecting all the reports of issues and questions related to the Atari 400 Mini firmware and passing them on to the product team. They are here exactly: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/364674-firmware-update-suggestions The machine gives me a lot of fun and been awaited impatiently but there are after all several bothering issues (most probably easy to resolve in future updates) like global config for the computer, full resolution the Atari accessible from the carousel menu (display_start_line = 0; display_height = 240; display_width = 350 )- and some other things. Regards & good luck. Y

You can say that again Shane. Amazing read this is. Anthony...

Since I only discovered Champ Games a month ago, I've been playing Robotwar: 2684, Turbo and the demo of Tutankhamn. Also been addicted to Fallpit.

Nomad

That's a little too rich for my Intellivision blood but I did manage to snag this ticket for face value when Ohtani comes to Pittsburgh in June!

Oh I hadn't heard about that, but if he's alone, he probably works from home these days (unless Atari still has an office in Paris).

Looks very cool - please do a PAL version. 😃

Hi guys, I made a container version for x86 of TNFS server that support TCP. In case that anyone (besides me) want to use it on home lab server or NAS appliance. It's small - around 6MB container. https://hub.docker.com/r/zaqu/tnfs-tcp

Also. The lower case set (004A) has 7 bytes allocated per character, but it could have done with only 6 bytes. I think the lower case set (004A) was designed to be true lower case, but at the last moment someone at TI wanted tiny capital letters (otherwise it was going to look too professional). Doh.

Juno (1 B/A): 110,950

The Atari VCS 800 is worth every penny and often goes on sale so can be picked up for next to nothing if you live in the states and considering it doubles as a very capable mini PC that can be easily upgraded you get a good deal for not much expense. Your comment seems.. almost troll like, and pretty ignorant towards the Atari VCS and its users. If you don't think Lunar Lander Beyond is worth the price tag well you could have easily waited for the game to go on sale on either the Atari VCS store or Steam etc no one forced you to buy the game to support the Atari VCS 🙂. I'm personally good with the price of Lunar Lander Beyond i think its very very fair, your getting a lot of game here for the money. I've purchased it on the Atari VCS, Steam, Switch and I'm currently playing it portable on my Lenovo Legion Go today but its also installed on my Steam Deck and ROG Ally to check out later.

15 watts / 3A is absolute enough!

Pinhead: 24,090

yes (but) and yes. A longer answer if you are interested : The 2600, like most computers, is basically RAM, CPU, peripherals, buses, clock and programs: - Peripherals in the 2600 would be the IO ports (used for joysticks / joypads / buttons on the console) and the TIA (graphic chip of the 2600). Since we speak about offscreen cpu controled cars, peripherals are not concerned (more on that in the end of the post) - Bus in the 2600 (and most computers until the late 90) is wiring that connect the cpu to ram / peripheral / cartridge ports / ... So that let us three possible limitations: cpu, ram and program. For programs, there could be one limitation that is the quantity of ROM to store it (plus its data) on the cartridge. That is a limitation, but only if you want to implement complex and long algorithms, smaller one can probably be fit on the cartridge. So RAM and CPU are indeed the two possible limitation left. About the RAM, we would have to handle several things for each player. The position of course, the speed and maybe more (gear ratio, what the car "wants" to do if we do not want to recalculate this information at each frame, is it drifting or not... ?) One byte of data allows to store 256 different possible values. if we store the position of the car using just one byte (how much it advanced on the track), that would do 256 possible value and if this position changes at each frame, the longer possible track at 60 frame per second would be about 4 seconds. too short. We probably need to use two bytes for "how far on the track the car is", but we also want to know if the car is on the left or the right of the track. We may not need a full byte for it : screen is 160px wide, so maybe we can live with 128 different positions of the car, which can be stored on 7 bit and doesn't require the 8 bits of a byte. Maybe we can also save a few bits from the two other byte to store the other information we need, but we have a good enough estimation : we need 3 or 4 bytes per car for a simple behaviour. The 2600 has 128 bytes of memory but you probably need a few byte for the game (e.g. timer, score, calculating physics, ...) but we might be able to handle 20 - 40 cars in the RAM. That is without using ram extension on the cartridge, where you could get an addition 1k or ram and then CPU would probably be the limitation, not the RAM. About the CPU : thought it can be done, calculating things while the screen is rendering on the 2600 is not really great because you need the CPU to generate each line while the screen is displaying it, and even if you have a few spare time, switching from drawing the screen to calculation takes time and need to be done in precise timing. So lets assume you only want to calculate the cars action / behaviour / physics during the non visible part of the screen: that 70/262 of the available time. (a frame contains 192 lines, and there there is a duration of 70 lines where nothing is drawn by the TV, this is where we do all our calculation). A line duration is 228 pixel clock signal duration on the 2600 (a line is 160 pixel but there is a delay between each line), so we have the duration of 15960 pixels, and the cpu runs at 1/3 the frequency of the TIA to our code must run in 5320 cpu clocks. All the code won't be dedicated to the cars only, so we can round this about 5000 cpu cycle available for us. For a rough estimation, let's say we need to add to two byte of the position for each car, plus the left/right position of the car, increment / decrement speed... that would be about 10 instructions per car, and an instruction needs at least two cycles, that is 20 cycles per instructions. But then we need to more complicated things : taking decision (does the car turns left/rigt ? accelerate / brake ?) probably about 100-200 cycles per car. But this estimation of code duration until now only take into account several isolated cars. If we want some interaction between cars (e.g. detecting collisions or having the cars taking the other cars into consideration to take action), the problem becomes way harder because it evolve not linearly with the number of cars, but maybe something like the square of the number of cars. So a new answer is : we can guess (hard to say without actually programming and testing) that the CPU will be the limit, not the ram, if you want any interesting behavior of the cars. Now another point to take into consideration: if the cars have existence off the screen, they probably need to also be able to reach the screen. If it is only one or two car that is not a problem, but displaying more that 2 or 4 cars at the same screen height would be a problem on the 2600. So we probably need to cheat and have car that exist offscreen but stay away from each other, not something like mario kart manages to do. Then if we have this we would have very less interaction between the cars and maybe save some CPU... so maybe the CPU wont be the limit in the end.

Ah yours is a stock ntsc, fair enough All I meant was rf is inferior to av composite, which in turn is inferior to svideo. However, without modding and or one of the many video upgrades, you currently only have and rf output. The difference between rf and svideo on these is night and day. Either way, glad you are happy with your setup.. The 600xl is one of my fav a8s.

Do you have one of the first models? In that case, that could be the reason why you do not get the QR code. That happens to me.

I picked this up for $29.99 USD to make sure I support releases on the VCS. Much like the VCS itself Lunar Lander Beyond is too expensive for what you get. While the cinematics and story do take the game to a level beyond the Recharged series games, the game play itself seems very much like it could be Lunar Lander Recharged.

ROS does contain a character set that is referenced by MENU but if it was corrupted, both the inverted chars and the standard chars should have been corrupted. It isn't clear to me how a ROS reload fixed the problem, as I would have guessed a MENU problem. Even if you had mixed and matched the ROS, I don't think that would cause the issue. MENU is stored as a file on the Ramdisk. ROS is primarily stored in the 8k/32k ram, and is only 'user accessible' via CFG.

Nice!

Behold! I am VERY pleased.

So my console and games arrived yesterday and I have never seen my son so excited - not even on Christmas. This morning, I go to the lounge to find this: The funny thing is he hasn't shown a massive interest in games until now. He does like to play whatever I'm playing (which is kind of annoying, lol) but this is the first time he's actively booted up a console to have a go himself. LOVES Mr. Run & Jump!

If you're talking about the noise in Pitfall, it was solved in 1.1x-r2. There's nothing wrong with roms, but you give less fucks about the games when you use roms. There's a value to having the carts, having to slot them in, the way it looks, holding the cart later, enjoying the art on the cart that you don't get with roms. That may not matter to you, but it does have a value. IMO.

Old topic, but I used to love UNO on the 360. Microsoft really tried to bring gamers together back in the day. Online was where it was at in 2006 (Almost 20 years ago!) and this was always a relaxing, nostalgic good time. Apparently, lots of things were broke when they brought it to the One, including online play. I saw an article from March of this year that said there was an update that fixed the online issues, maybe they also fixed the AI problem?

Oh man, I hope Atari rereleases this. I'm only collecting new carts as I'm too poor to buy boxed games and I'm super anal when it comes to condition. LOL. I played the C64 version as a kid - Nebulus. Great game!

Sorry if this has been answered (I did scan quickly) but I just got a 2600+ with paddles - overall very happy with them BUT the second paddle doesn't work in Breakout for some odd reason. It works fine in Video Olympics. What could cause this?