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Probably not. While you raise some good points, the real problem with this thread is that over the course of 20 years only 400 people have voted so the sample size is too small to be meaningful anyway.

I agree, Roc n Rope PAL is one of the worst. I think the game is OK, quite different and fun when you get to grips with it's clunkiness.

The small glass capacitors are of the ceramic type which do not leak, so it is not the capacitors that have leaked in your 800XL. The electrolytic capacitors in Atari 800XL computers do not tend to leak either.

Pretty certain I was the largest consumer of my school's graph paper.

I still have a folder with sheets and sheets of graph paper for games I was designing when I had no access to hardware. Graph paper was my most precious commodity back then - I /still/ treat it as a limited resource despite having tons of it laying around now.

My view is if something can be improved and you have the opportunity to do so, you should. But it's complex, as any fundamental change to the 2600+ brings up complications like ensuring multiple variations need to be catered for when dealing with say cartridge compatibility or update process. What's being looked at is the IO board, that's the PCB that deals with levers, db9 ports, cartridge socket etc. The two chips that control the inputs and cartridge socket may be changed to one chip, additionally a revision to the cartridge socket is being tested. Current thinking is that the main board PCB, the levers, the CX40+ joystick, the consoles outer casing will not change for any future manufacture runs of the stock 2600+, just some tweaks to the IO PCB.

I get why the sprite ID jumps in increments of four (each sprite consists of 4 blocks of 8x8 graphic data), but I don't get why the X and Y coordinates are reversed in the SPRITE command. Isn't it common to specify horizontal, then vertical coordinates?

well deserved!!

It's like trying to do smooth scaling on the Sega Genesis... you just can't do it. But you can fake it! There are games with subtle tricks that will make you THINK you're getting fast, smooth scrolling out of the machine. Imagic's Nova Strike is a great example. Only a small portion of the screen scrolls... most everything else is static, giving you a convincing illusion of movement and a convincing illusion of parallax to boot! It's all about fooling the eye with these old game systems. What they can't do, you replace with sleight of hand. See also the waterfalls on Sonic 2 for the Genesis, which LOOK for all the world like they're transparent, except they're not... every other pixel of the fall is drawn, giving you the impression on a CRT screen that the waterfall is in fact transparent. Playing the game on a LCD screen pulls the curtain back and reveals how the trick is done, but it still looks pretty sharp regardless.

"I" for I am locking this.

When playing Blue Lightning it freezes after playing a full level and same after completing the pilot training. Does that mean the rip itself is bad?

No because it showed the stats info with the save before. But I didn't use the console for a while. Perhaps the info doesn't stay up to date. Once I played the game from the cart and saved again, then the stats showed the save count. I'm trying to explain it as best I can. Sorry for any confusion.

kaboom - 9411 - I suppose it was time for a 'new' set of paddles... after like 25 years.

Hello programmers! You have two players, two missiles and a ball. How to explain Star Wars The Arcade Game? Your valuable incites, please!

Yup, but that's only a very vague guess.

I'd like to buy a vowel.

As a TG16 Military Madness fan, here's a game I've been waiting for years for a translation. Earth Light English | Fully Playable | SNES The game has always been slightly too cutesy/cartoony for my tastes but I've always wanted to give it a go and make it into the further levels which got hard when you had to deal with multiple units in later stages. Anyway.. looking forward to giving it another chance

I was surfing the Atari sites last night and Atarionline.pl had a review of the New version of Rastaconverter and they posted a lot of my converted pictures I was blow'n away .. Thanks to the guy's that posted them it made me feel realy good to see them there. Link: https://www.atarionline.pl/v01/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1713912425&archive=&start_from=0&ucat=1&ct=nowinki&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3HsOP5Kem0JaoK_DYKMijLun_8Aw3DlTOqAjjL3yb8SJZOg5ZCqRwnlWg_aem_AW_6JxClaXrIp_2vpJEEguYjXEWvNEaaEbqzLJv6PR_F74KAZ3P55Xw_XE07THcWilzcy8cgu6gqSDbYoeroXcM5

Yep, maybe now someone will make a small PIO board or adapter for the open-source Covox devices, and update the source code to support SAMS, or I will myself at some point, but now its all there to play with, hopefully someone finds it useful!

I wish I had a program when I did the TOD editor almost 40 years ago LOL! I think I had so much graph paper all over my bedroom floor covered with graphics as I decoded each and every graphic on that damn module by hand. I swear that is when I started wearing glasses LOL. What is kinda funny or sad is that I eventually put a graphic (very crude) editor into the program so others would not have to use graph paper but as amazing as that sounds, I did that last when I should have done it first so I could use it.

… not thought about that - but I don’t think so. Will try to get a better score in game 2-5 and see what happens… Do you mean with „faulty EEPROM“ my SaveKey? 😢

5200 port here, thanks for the opportunity to do this

Nifty. These exist in the Amiga world, as well, with some more recent ones supporting MP3, AAC, and Ogg.

Thank you for yours feedbacks. I wiil try to add some sounds but the remain ROM space is so little .... r