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I won't argue with the fact that Wolfenstein 3D looks awesome on the Jaguar. I had two games on my Jaguar, Wolfenstein 3D which I liked and Cybermorph which was garbage. My problem with the Jaguar is not as such the specs of the system but the lack of third party support for the console. Also from the few games that actually made it to the system almost none of them took advantage of the claimed 64 bit power. Games on the Playstation and Saturn, both 32 bit albeit released after the Jaguar look better. Heck, most Jaguar games don't look much better than similar games on the 16 bit SNES. So no matter what the hardware can do, without decent 3rd party support its bound to fail. Same with the Atari Lynx, a portable which holds very dear to me because it was my first handheld. It was technically superior to the pea green Gameboy or even the Game Gear and had a few great games which I already mentioned, it also has a lot of crappy games. I don't care for the recycled old Atari arcade ports they made for it just because it lacked support from publishers. Honestly, I am not an Atari basher. So much so that my first ever computer was a 65XE and I have fond memories of playing games like Henry's House, Pac Man, Mario Bros, Pitfall etc.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to have third parties develop your games, but you get the quality that you are willing to pay for. A lot of XEGS games were disk games ported to cart.. cheap! Even today a lot of exclusives are developed by third parties, and sometimes those studios are bought by the platform holder if they do good work. Atari today has been doing that, but back then I don't recall Atari buying any game studio back then. Epyx would have been a good purchase and fit for them, certainly better than the money Atari wasted buying Federated or Abaq (the Transputer workstation)

Hello, I have a few screens embedded in my code. Those are array's of bytes. I would like to switch between the array's on graphics 0 and not copy the data to screenram but point screenram to the begin of the array. array1 ... array2 .... p:^înteger; InitGraph(0); p:=@array1; I did try dpoke(88,array1), dpoke(88,pointer(array1)) and dpoke(88,^array1) and dpoke(88,p) maybe its just syntax but whats the way to do this ?

I'm going to wrap up my repairs with one final saga. I was always seeing diagonal noise in the RF output no matter what I tried to cut out interference (cables, power, room location, thoughts and prayer, ...) . This lead me to rigging up a simple composite mode (the few resistors + cap + 2n3904). Composite has significantly less random noise, but the diagonal banding persisted and because of the cleaner picture the banding, in my opinion, was much worse. In the end, looks like I have a very noisy TIA, and specifically the Tsync from Pin 2. 1) First problem is that when playing 7800 games the Tsync line would only decrease in amplitude to about 0.8V, which is right at the cusp of TTL logic and may causing problems with U3. So I added a resister to drop the peak-to-peak down to 0.4 V, but still keep a valid Tsync range for 2600 games. 2) Second problem was a ~0.5Mhz ripple on Tsync when the signal is high and was polluting the 74LS32 (U3) signal. After some experimentation, I found that tying a 10 nF cermanic cap to ground from Pin 3 of U3 filtered out a large portion of the noise. It was definitely a journey, but I'm quite happy with the result. There is still some minor (very minor) flicker left that I'll likely tune out with additional caps (looking at Pins 6, 8 and 11 on U3). This 7800 definitely has it's own character but I believe it's been tamed.

I've managed to get my ASR733 system working and extracted quite a few 99/4a files that may be of interest - in particular the DSR descriptions mentioned above some time back. https://www.blunham.com/Misc/Texas/Mine/index.html Colin Hinson.

😎 102 550 Should’ve been a much better score, had three lives and over 100k going into the meteors and it was brutal, no way through on the first life, dead before making it down the screen on the second and two close calls and death shortly after. I started a couple of games resuming that level afterwards and made it through there clean every time! My controller is getting worse too, stuttering and more wild movements, like taming a stallion!

“I hate asparagus, but I don’t talk about it on asparagus.com.” - Shawn Drover

I don't believe it, tell him to put up or STFU!!!

I remember early 1984 as the time when 2600 carts underwent a dramatic price drop. I guess this was the result of what we later referred to as the "'83 crash". I remember in early '84 being very sick with strep throat. On way home from doctors, went to a toy store and parents bought me fully boxed Super Breakout for $5. Probably at the same time a year earlier, that game was probably at least $15-$20.

Hey, just wanted to let you know that ti99iuc and I finished up the user manual for Atlantis in case you wanted to add it to the 'Shelf. The PDFs for the manual and cartridge lable can be download on GitHub here: https://github.com/CheungChang7/TI99_HOMEBREW/tree/main/ATLANTIS/DOCS Or you can grab them below. ATLMAN.pdf Atlantis Cart Label with cut lines.pdf

@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!