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Yes! Is it garbage? It saw a lot of "Combat" cartridges, so I didn't get my hopes up. 😀😀 But man did they have a lot of cartridges when I was there. I figured if I did get a 2600+, at least those crates should provide all the basic classics.

Outstanding! Stuff like this is what really sells me on the VBXE. I'm not interested in getting Amiga- or VGA-level graphics from my Atari 8 bit, but pixel-perfect early 80s arcade ports? Sign me up!

Is it the one on Race Track? I've been through those crates.

It took significantly more tries to get SNAKE as in the video. This code works, but isn't perfect: 10 REM SNAKE 20 CALL CLEAR 30 X=10 40 Y=10 50 DX=1 60 DY=0 65 PX=X 66 PY=Y 70 CALL HCHAR(Y,X,64) 80 GOSUB 372 90 REM MOVE SNAKE 100 GOSUB 400 110 X=X+DX 120 Y=Y+DY 130 IF (X<1)+(X>28)+(Y<1)+(Y>12)THEN 380 140 CALL GCHAR(Y,X,C) 150 IF C<>ASC("O")THEN 160 151 GOSUB 372 160 CALL HCHAR(Y,X,64) 170 FOR DELAY=1 TO 50 180 NEXT DELAY 190 REM HANDLE KEYS 200 CALL KEY(0,K,S) 210 IF K=ASC("E")THEN 250 220 IF K=ASC("X")THEN 280 230 IF K=ASC("S")THEN 310 240 IF K=ASC("D")THEN 340 245 GOTO 100 250 DX=0 260 DY=-1 270 GOTO 100 280 DX=0 290 DY=1 300 GOTO 100 310 DX=-1 320 DY=0 330 GOTO 100 340 DX=1 350 DY=0 360 GOTO 100 370 REM GENERATE FOOD 372 FX=INT(RND*28)+1 374 FY=INT(RND*12)+1 376 IF (FX=X)*(FY=Y)THEN 372 378 CALL HCHAR(FY,FX,79) 379 RETURN 380 REM END GAME 382 PRINT "GAME OVER" 390 END 400 REM SNAKE TRAIL 410 CALL HCHAR(PY,PX,32) 420 PX=X 430 PY=Y 460 CALL HCHAR(PY,PX,45) 461 RETURN Importantly the trail is only a single character long, so you can never hit yourself and you never grow. It required significant coaxing to make the keyboard and food work, to remember the limitations of IF..THEN, and repeatedly I had to call out specific line numbers in its own code. BUT it did better than ChatGPT did and I didn't WRITE any of this code. (Oh, and for some reason it decided maximum row was 12... but that's good enough for today.)

… and I can only have my general sense a d opinion of what story-elements really brings to the table, and will respect that others may find new elements completely off-putting. My general view here, is that if you add elements that are close to inverting the story, - or twisting it beyond reasonble hinting in the outset -, or make the first parts meaningless or arbitrary, it usually wrecks the story-part. For a movie of book-franchise that’s a little (selfmade) doomsday right there, but for games you’ll have those who never cared (even half-a-dot) about the story.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who thought it would be neat. I'll post again if/when I can turn my full attention to it

I will check the power supply. Thank you.

I did research into it, but adding DMA isn't possible (at least nicely) with how I'm handling addresses. It may be possible to implement in a later version, but I can't find any public specifications on how the Drive turbo actually operates at a low level and I don't have one to test on, so for now I'm not worrying about DMA compatibility. Honestly if I could tinker with it I could probably write a custom driver for the drive turbo that would hopefully perform as well as DMA (theoretically an 8mhz block move instruction would be able to saturate the 1mhz expansion bus anyways at 7 cycles a byte). I'm also considering if it would be faster and simpler to add some sort of SD interface on the accelerator itself. TLDR I'm going to be looking into storage options more closely once the actual accelerator is up and running, but that's a project for another day. For now, it won't have any dma capability

I would agree the difficulty settings are just something that works itself out. From the factory (with default firmware), the difficulty switches were set so that the games registered a default difficulty of 'B' even though that didn't match the physical imprint on the back of the console. To be honest, I didn't even look at the back to see what the physical imprint 'A/B' was (my old eyes need a magnifying glass for that). I just played on oblivious to it all. It wasn't until I upgraded to the beta firmware that I noticed the reversal. I was playing Superman and unexpectedly Lex and henchmen were uber-fast and Lois didn't automatically appear when I got clocked by Kryptonite. I was able to deduce that the game now registered a difficulty switch setting of 'A' and only then messed with the switches.

Bump! I just added a lot more items, and have a large batch of Famicom / Sega games that will go up sometime this week! Until then, the boxed Ending Man Famiclones and brand new Magic More Famiclone might strike someone's fancy, same with the Bit Corp Creator machines. Sign up to the mailing list for a 10% off coupon, too! Thanks for checking us out.

Here's the little piece of TBXL code I wrote to figure out how that works again. It just reads and displays the first 4 bits of joystick port 0 register. It would probably be a faster routine if using bitwise operators; but it works well enough to see what's going on. 100 GRAPHICS 0 110 DIM A$(4):POKE 752,1 115 ------------------------------ 120 DO 130 X=PEEK(632) 140 A$="0000" 150 IF X>7 160 A$(1,1)="1" 170 X=X-8 180 ENDIF 190 IF X>3 200 A$(2,2)="1" 210 X=X-4 220 ENDIF 230 IF X>1 240 A$(3,3)="1" 250 X=X-2 260 ENDIF 270 IF X>0 280 A$(4,4)="1" 290 ENDIF 300 POSITION 10,10 310 PRINT A$ 320 LOOP

Don't know why it would not work for you. I just copied and pasted the code above and it works fine.

Still working away. I wasn't happy with the first prototype so now I'm working on the second one. I'll post when there's any major news

I am interested in playing Lunar Lander Beyond, and don't mind that they've expanded on that. It looks like it's a creative, interesting way to take something, although it's not like LL had much "lore" to begin with In the case of YR, like I said, I'm not big on retconning stuff as that more often sucks than ends up as better or more compelling, but maybe it'll be great and there's no reason for me to care. We'll see.

Here are the schematics of the 4000B card, in this thread. You can start running traces to see if something is not right in your build. @Ksarul's 4000B build is rock solid and he does a pretty good schematic too. Using the construction manual, these schematics, and the working card, you should be able to trouble shoot this issue. I believe it's a construction issue, solder joint, reversed diode, or something along that line. Just to check are you using this Ramdisk on a Geneve? or on a TI? Are you using the 32k upgrade at M32 on the Board or leaving that off and using a 32k card internal/external? Are you leaving the the IC at U11 off if you are not using the 32k otion on board? Do you have both transisitor mounted so that the flat side faces toward the bottoms of the board, or if using the can type transistor, being sure the tab is pointed toward the upper right corner of the baord?

Actually you are quite wrong on the bolded bits. This is just the mindset of a majority / dominant culture writing the history (i.e. American and Japanese gaming = good, unauthorized = garbage). Fortunately, some people are finally starting to realize that the less dominant and so-called fringe areas of gaming also deserve a voice, and have rich gaming cultures worthy of documentation and preservation. Asia (all regions outside of Japan), Central / Eastern Europe, South America, and even parts of the Middle East / Africa - these games are highly collectable, with prices that reflect the collectability of these games. There are a lot of bootleg games for Famicom worth over $100, a few that hit upwards to and sometimes over four figures, and even for the more common items, we are way beyond the days of $5 a game. $10 minimum for most games, generally somewhere between $10 - $25, with better and rarer games listed above that range. Clone machines, once again quite collectable. Boxed is king here though, starting price for an old boxed (not modern crap) clone machine is gonna be $100... I'm just throwing this out here not to get into an argument or anything, rather to inform. For the outsider, it is easy to assume that these types of items are worthless and not desirable, but that is quite far from the actual truth.

How funny! I never noticed that before. Looking at the code it is obvious it was done on purpose. It falls right in the middle of some DATA bytes.

See Mathy's page: https://www.mathyvannisselroy.nl/stm18bit.txt

Road Runner Returns.bin

Maybe some portable WAMP Stack that serves up a personal Plus Store? I'm just assuming the Plus Store is using web technologies.

Details on that mod please? I'd love to have a 2-button mouse solution for some stuff I am working on. I assume it use a resistor and gets read as a paddle input?

[April joke] When all your computers are turned into PAL, maybe you should change your TV norm to PAL also ? [April joke]

I don’t believe it would be a top priority for Atari and WayForward to make sure the lore hangs ‘tightly and logically together’, contra just making a game that may have broad appeal, yet still make new gamers aware of the Atari heritage. The Atari YouTube video has 16K views and the NintendoLife video has 54k views. This in quite short time. I’m unsure any other recent (2020+) new-game release, has gotten that much attention in so short time. I do hope they’ll stick to story-elements found within classic gaming, but whether or not this will be a obvious Yars’ spin-off game to get younger gamers interested in older, famous Atari IP, isn’t that important to me at least, as the game being quality. Of course I too have my many-layered preferences for how to deal with story-elements in video-games and ‘what they have to do there’, but it’s a least interesting they go for a more modern-type genre and use some anime-style in visuals (as they’ve chosen to do in Lunar Lander Beyond too). I don’t think faux-retro neon-vector graphics are wrong at all in gameworlds that are associated with or embedded in Tron-like or Matrix-like plots, but for many of the older IPs, rudimentary vector-graphics were the stuff they could use at all, - the only graphics available at this early time - for certain types of gameplay. That has shifted alot over the years, as almost all modern games are partly or fully using cpu-power to calculate some graphics from different angles etc, - just that everbody expects it to fully use massive numbers of polygons with textures with light and shading-effects and whatnot as the default standard. Ok, so Yars’ Revenge was 2600 ‘sprite’-based action-game with a series of single-screen objectives to perform in the correct order, while not being shot down. The renewed (and in my view highly improved) take on that, is Yars:Recharged. This does use more ‘minimalistic’ stylized graphics to show the action. Perhaps more on the functional rather than spectacular side of spectrum of graphics, but gameplay is top-notch and needs only a few parameters to be slightly changed to work in an Arcade Cabinet (but the some stuff may have to be done with the graphics too in order for it to shine ‘n sparkle a bit more as to attract bypassers). Now, Yars Rising seems to ‘want’ to be a different cake or take altogether, and yes, I think the difference in gameplay/genre under the same IP is deliberate. Meaning that it’s probably meant primarily for gamers who will never open or read a 2600-game comic book, but remember and associate the name ‘Yars’ with something they find fun. - - - I will readily admit I’m not the guy in the universe holding the strongest felt emotions to the originals plot-line. Back in 1990-1991(2?) - after Turrican for the Amiga had been introduced on the loading screen with sampled voice booming ‘Welcome to Turrican’ as the box and manual said it was the land of Turrican, me and my brother only laughed at the ‘subtle change’ in Turrican 2 - when it became the name for the robo-armor and thus the hero. Who cares…? Even if it was a epic game, one of the best for Amiga 500, it was after all just a stupid game after all. Ok, ok, - I hear someone saying ‘you wouldn’t like that very much-would-you- if the story revealed that The Machine was Turricans father… in Turrican 2…??!!’ And it would be a strange take in a video game, yet, something about it rings familiar… I think then that a return of the Turrican-suited hero, in the 3rd epis.. installment of the Sag… of the video-game franchise, would’ve have to take other turns to make the story’s circle complete. When that is said, if the 8th Yars game begins to feel like a Twilight-movie, just with humans and insectoids in Space… I’m gone… (I’ll buzz off) … and we may end up seeing 50000 Atari-fans signing a petition to make an alternative 8th installment…

Worth mentioning here too, is that a stock ST Mouse can only have it's left button read on the Atari 8-bit computers. There is a fairly simple mod for the ST Mouse that will allow the second button to be read, though.

I tried to fix the colors for a PAL60 build. Couldn't quite get them to match so I wound up tweaking the NTSC colors a bit too. Hope they aren't too garish. Originally I was shooting for a 80s neon look with colors from Berzerk (one of my all time faves). Now the pink has been replaced by some orange, which is a little less neon but I think I like it. vcsbeatbox-rc15-pal60.bin vcsbeatbox-rc15-ntsc.bin Also a note about the overall status. It's still WIP, but at this point I'm mainly just futzing with the auto-mod feature of the synth part (trying to make it more musically useful).