All Activity

Doing great work as always, Oscar.

Atari 2600 Kaboom 45 for HSC. Atarian7 wrapped this up already with a week left with a monster score. So far a very distant second place for me. Congrats on that score Atarian7. Solar Fox 77 mins

Yep. Got one also for a game I bought 11 years ago (In a lot of several but it only askd for one lol). I went from elation to disappointment in a heartbeat, I initially though my store order was finally on the way. Then I realized (or thought) it was spam or an error. 😟

I've made a 3rd revision of my Sophia 2 HDMI PCB and I think it is good enough to share now. You can find the KiCad project at Github: https://github.com/aeberbach/Sophia2-HDMI You can find the HDMI version (with the other two versions) of the Atari 800 side plate on Printables: https://www.printables.com/model/787308-atari-800-side-io-plate I hope someone finds this useful 😁

Hi everyone, so some of you know I have my 2600 MCP that's available now, but I'm learning of variations of the original that I never owned or have come across. Does anyone here happen to own one of these? I just want to test to see if it fits right. I had good luck with the first version with the light sixer, vader, and 7800.. but then I discovered the Coleco Gemini which totally didn't and I had to revise it accordingly. Thanks, Caleb

Juno 1st (1 B/A): 151,500 Meooow! 2 (1 B/B): 10,940 Although had 3 weeks to play these I did not have enough time! Some improvements.

Amazing - I am interested!

thanks I'm glad it worked well for you too!

man, all the odd ball things you've covered makes me think I should make a video on the Philips in2it, even if no one watches , I think a record of the existence of the odd thing wouldn't harm anyone

Absolutely! I'm quite willing to ship to Europe if you can cover the cost And thank you, lots of work was done on it. Send me a DM so we can talk more

Improvement on Juno First: 88500 Improvement on Doggone it! 25958 first score for Meooow 2: 6720

I received my copy of this version and have to say it's a solid upgrade. Well done and highly recommended!!

The format is easy to understand. For CVBasic it would be easy to generate a long list of SOUND statements with WAIT intermixed, but instead, I preferred to write a utility that creates files ready to play along the game, instead of stopping it. The format of this utility is: sfxconvert -h beep.sfx beep.bas sound_beep Where the first argument is -h if you want the core code for playing this sound (you only need to do sound_effect = 1: sound_state = 0) Then follows the source effect file, the target CVBasic file, and the label for the sound (you should have a different label for each sound in order to add it to the ON sound_effect GOSUB list created with the -h argument) sfxconvert.zip

Juno First - 180750 (improved score)

It was cheap at $24.99 relative to any other homebrew cartridge I've bought in the past 5 years, and still less than pretty much anything else I've seen other than repro carts made in China. So no big deal. How do we pay you the additional $5?

This one has no fold.

The RTO is a fantastic product for someone who wants to roll their own Intellivision flash cart. Anyone who sells one here or uses this forum to promote the sale of them on another site should do so only if they're fully confident it is functional and willing to back that up with comprehensive support and/or a full refund when something goes wrong. Even a person considering "buy at your own risk" before purchasing would still be justified in expecting a reasonable level of functionality in exchange for their hard earned cash. I got financially burned when I took that risk. I just hope nobody else does.

P.S. Based on the document Installing and Using a Hard Disk with the ATR-8000 Hardware Installation, does anyone out there have the files HARDDISK.SYS and SET.BAS? Also there should be files with your initials and the .SET extension (e.g. PC2.SET). These files should be on the "boot disk you received with your Hard Disk Interface". I'll need these to achieve my goal. Thanks!

yes, seems there is some confusing on which opcodes and level we talking about. I guess the manual doesn't mention both versions, depending on the level being used. i need to print it out, i hate reading pages of pdf on the monitor screen. So to be clear, low-level operations, disk read/write by sectors, etc. it is the most msbit >8x set. But for normal file operations, open/read/write/close files, it is the second msbit >4x set. ************************** * DSK./DSKx. ENTRY POINT * ************************** DSTRT0 BL @WNUMB INIT THE DRIVE BL @PADLP Pad the name, and write it! CLR R1 Make sure below calcs work! MOVB @PAB,R1 Get the DSR OPCODE CLR @VDPCPU Assume VDP transfers COC @ST1,R1 Check if second MSBit SET JNE DSTRT1 Nope, so use VDP transfer mode SETO @VDPCPU Yep, so switch to CPU transfers SZCB @ST1,R1 Clear the flag from the OPCODE DSTRT1 SRL R1,7 Make it a word and * 2 CI R1,>C*2 If OPCODE higher than >C JGT NOTFND Then switch to the next card! MOV @OCODE(R1),R11 Else get address of OPCODE program RT EXECUTE THE OPCODE

Big news! I finally was able to devote some time to this Mini ATR-8000 project and I am seeing signs of life. After finding/fixing a couple of mistakes I made on the PCB, I am now able to communicate with the Mini ATR-8000. I intentionally left off the parts for the WD179X until I was able to get to this point. So, this means clocks are working, dynamic RAM is working, CTC is working, and Z80 is working. Thanks to warerat I am also able to compile the assembler code for the ATR-8000 ROM at U17. That means I could replace the M command with the D command and see what is does differently. Next I have to finish my 82S123 programmer. For the programmer I have the PCBs and I have some working code (PIC18 driving chips that operate MOSFETs that will hopefully properly program the chips). I also have quite a few AM27S19 ICs (an equivalent) that I can use to test the programmer. After that I can finish populating the ICs for the FDC and start testing disk drive functionality. I haven't connected it to an Atari yet, but there should be no issues with that. As I mentioned before, my goal is to get the SASI hard drive working on this thing. _The Doctor_ has some real world experience with this setup and user cwilbar has mentioned access to a Z-tec 1000 so I would like to pursue the path of getting a hard disk working. I have been building SD based SCSI drives recently and I have a lot of SCSI gear (bins full of 5.25" drives, ACB-4000A's, JVC 3.5 inch drives with SCSI controllers, Macs with SCSI drives, cables, terminators, etc., etc. - I've collected WAY too much of this stuff over the years). So, stay tuned to the hopefully swift progress. Back to work....

Thanks all. I tried my TV's USB port and got no response on the back Type C plug. I've been attempting Samsung cellphone charger plugs (5V) and Apple cellphone charger plugs. I've tried 3 different power supplies. Is there another power supply plug you suggest I use?

Additional Improvements (for all but DoggonIt!) 164,400 - Juno 1st 15,040 - Meoow!2

Please add me to the list, Thanks.

Heh. It recent days, hit-or-miss. People are probably curious, but quickly realize it takes a real amount of time and effort to learn enough to make a program, and probably decide they would rather do something else. You can speculate about that all day long. However, back in the day you didn't just buy the E/A Module (cartridge), that was mostly useless on its own. You needed a 32K memory expansion, a disk controller, and disk drive; and that usually meant a PEB, but could also have been a collection of side-cars. That is a pretty significant monetary investment, so people were probably a lot more careful about the decision and maybe knew more about what they were getting into? However I knew nothing in 1983 (13yo) other than a vague idea of what assembly language was, and apparently my dad had more money than sense that day (or really believed in me?) when he bought the PEB package (TI was blowing them out by then, but it still cost about $400). I had many many frustrating days and nights, sometimes ending in tears, trying to figure out assembly from the E/A manual and the Tombstone City source code[1]. But I am stubborn as hell, infinitely curious, I must know how things work, I pay attention to detail, and most importantly I knew all coin-op video games were written in assembly. BASIC is sooo slow on the 99/4A (as we all know), and that was also a very strong motivator. So, the choices were, 1. play marginal games, 2. program in slow BASIC / XB, 3. learn assembly and own the machine with all the power and speed in the world! Muhaaa!! I furiously typed in the E/A examples, some worked, some did not (as we now know, there are errors). The first assembly program I tried to write was clearing the screen, trying to start simple, you know, like CALL CLEAR. I wrote this: `CLR R1`. I did not know what this "register" thing was that the "CLR" instruction needed, but that was the closest things to "CLS" that I could find, since that must be assembly for clear screen... (other BASIC dialects have CLS, so...) It assembled! It loaded! It RAN! It did *not* clear the screen. It was not until I got the Lottrup book, which does start with simple programs like clearing the screen and animating the `@` symbol, that things really started to click for me. Having to write a space character to every location on the screen was probably the first algorithm I was every directly exposed to, and it made so much sense. I don't really recommend the book these days (for reasons explained in the early pages of this thread), but it absolutely opened the door to assembly and low-level computer programming to me BITD. I still remember being so giddy about moving the `@` symbol across the top of the screen, and that I had to SLOW IT DOWN with a delay loop just to see it! Oh assembly language, you are soooo cool! I had to "slow it down!", something you would *never* have to do in BASIC where you spent your time screaming for it to go FASTER! I bragged about that program, to anyone who would listen, for weeks. I had many firsts on the 99/4A, and this was one of them. Giving up was never an option that entered my conscious. I do question my choice sometimes though, these days, as I scream at modern computers for entirely different reasons... [1] (The Tombstone City source came with the E/A manual, and was a really cool move on TI's part, IMO. Giving away source code to one of their commercial titles?! It really contradicts TI's stinginess of wanting to have all developers pay them for a license to publish software for the 99/4A).

I did buy about ten years ago a similar Sony monitor. But a never model and bigger one for about 3 Euro... But CRT was running out, it got blueish image... I used it till it worked. A nice buy.