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Recent Status Updates
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Premiering over 50 years ago, this Sesame Street segment with the five dancing ladies has to be my personal favorite bit of all time from Sesame Street. This was filmed in 1973 during the last days of the Chicago tour of No No Nanette. Apparently, a lot of little boys watching this short on Sesame Street (me included) had crushes on these dancers!
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Now playing at the Colecovision HSC: Q*Berts Qubes, Tarzan & 2010. Join in on some CV action, it's finger blisterin good!
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Recent Posts
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By matthew180 · Posted
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). -
By GravityWorm · Posted
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. -
All the credit goes to Mystery Man. Fun fact: He actually analyzed the ROM of the arcade version of Asteroids to help him figure out how to best reproduce the "glide physics" of the player's ship in the ColecoVision version. -
By InsaneMultitasker · Posted
Looks like the conversation is conflating the opcodes and the level 2 subprograms. The code snip from ROS is level 2. -
Yeah, but the HFDC manual said the MSB. I think Gary's following post confirms it was a typo. -
By SlidellMan · Posted
Planet Joker: One game from Naxat Soft that few people have heard of. -
By gamegurus0 · Posted
I've never tried this before, but working with @Crazy Climber's theory that it was meant to be backlit, here is a photo I took with a light directly behind the "poster," and another I took right after without the light behind it. The pictures don't really do it justice, and I do not have a powerful light box like what might have been used at a trade show to really illuminate it well, but I can say that yes, light is definitely able to be passed through the plastic material. -
By Gary from OPA · Posted
There also the original 4 pre 4a monitor which was a tv minus the tuner control. -
I'm sure some people are frustrated, but it has taken this long to ship pre-order games before. I'm not saying that's a great thing, mind you, but while it sometimes takes a long time to get orders out, everyone has always gotten what they paid for. I just looked through my emails, and I haven't seen a single email from you since you placed your order. I also checked my PMs, and same thing there, I don't see any PMs from you regarding this. It's possible you sent me something and I didn't see it, perhaps using another email address or via some other way. I also searched for the order number and the only email I see referencing it is the original order email. If you think I am showing contempt for customers, you obviously do not know me very well. I spend an incredible amount of my time building games for orders. I'm currently doing virtually everything myself, which includes building games and shipping them out to customers. And even when I am buried in orders, I won't take shortcuts to sacrifice quality in production of the games, nor will I take shortcuts in taking care to package games to make sure they arrive safely. Yes, I can do better in sending out more updates, and I definitely need to send one out regarding pre-orders, and I will do that this week. And, yes, in the future I intend to hire someone to help with physical production and shipping (see below). That's unlikely to change, however, I am working on making the following improvements to the store, so this time next year I should be able to get 95% of orders out within a week. 1. Move to Flash-based boards for most 2600, 7800, and Jaguar games. The Lynx boards we have are already flash-based, so no need to do anything there. Basically, these flash boards will arrive completely assembled, and all I have to do to use them is plug them into a fixture and program the game onto them. Versus what I typically have to do now: Program EPROM Program PLD (for a large percentage of 2600 and 7800 games) Populate boards (with anywhere from 2-4 chips, one or more caps and resistors, and sometimes other parts) Solder boards (which sometimes takes multiple steps, as some boards have parts on BOTH sides, and you can only work on one side at a time) Assemble boards into shells The goal is to have these boards already assembled into blank cartridge shells, so the above tasks will be replaced by this simple step: Plug cartridge into fixture and program That's it! This alone will save an enormous amount of time. We are going to put our 2600 Aria board into mass production soon, which will suffice for most bankswitching schemes and cover 90% of the 2600 games sold in the store. Most of the remaining 2600 games use our more advanced Melody board, which we will also manufacture in larger quantities than we do now. We've developed several new 7800 flash boards that I'm actively testing, and I will soon have a Jaguar flash board to test. Longer term we'll do flash boards for the 5200 and Atari 8-bit computers as well. 2. I'm having boxes, manuals, and labels printed for slower selling games, so I don't have to spend time printing these materials myself. This is normally a time consuming step when working on large batches of orders. Two weeks ago I submitted a large manual order for 18 different games, which includes several manuals I've never had professionally printed before. These arrived on Friday. I will continue doing this over time. 3. We're currently working on moving the AtariAge Store to Shopify. Once this is complete, I will have access to MUCH better reporting options, which will, again, save me significant time when I'm working on orders. The current store is greatly lacking in this department. When I begin work on a new batch of orders, I have to manually go through all the pending orders and put the games I need to build into a spreadsheet (including important details such as whether a game is NTSC or PAL, if an optional box is included, etc.) With the new store, I'll be able to generate this detailed report trivially. Additionally, I'll also be able to more easily see when a customer has several outstanding orders, so I can be sure to ship them together, which also saves time (rather than shipping, say, three orders separately). 4. I will be moving soon, and one of the goals with this move will be to setup a more formal AtariAge production facility, either on-site or in commercial space nearby. Once this is in place, I will be able to hire someone to assist with production and shipping, which will be a big step in making sure the vast majority of orders go out within days, instead of weeks or months. 5. I'm going to find and buy bubble wrap bags that perfectly fit boxed games. Right now, I'm using 1' x 2' sections of bubble wrap that I then wrap around boxed games and assemble using scotch tape. This may seem like a trivial thing, but it's very time consuming when you're shipping hundreds of boxed games at a time, so this will be a big time saver when shipping. 6. We're also working on brand new 2600/7800 shells, and I received the first CAD drawings recently, we've made some changes, and I'll have prototypes soon. These shells will not have the problematic moving dust cover pieces or spring, and they will firmly hold the circuit boards in place so there's no play or wobble with them (which can cause issues where a game isn't always easy to insert into a system). Right now, the 7800 shells I'm using are not the greatest, so I'm very much looking forward to having our own shells that don't have the compromises I often see with third-party shells. The new shells will also not have those big holes in the corner that 7800 shells often have. These are the shells I will be able to use with the flash boards mentioned above so I can have hundreds (if not thousands) of carts ready at any given time that I can simply flash program, test, label, and ship games as orders arrive. 7. Finally, we're looking into making plastic inserts for boxes, rather than the cardboard ones I'm using now. These will better hold the game cartridge in place, and will also better protect the box from deformation. And, in terms of efficiency, these are much faster to use, as I won't have to fold eight flaps for every boxed game that I assemble. You've made two previous large orders and received those fine. I've shipped many thousands of orders over the years. Why would I start scamming people now? If that's what I wanted to do, I'm sure there's much easier ways to about it. What has greatly slowed me down with the pre-order games is that I am still working on getting Last Chance games built and shipped. I am making good progress on that front, but it's very time consuming as I sold more games in that sale in a month than I normally sell in a year. And I thought I would be done with those by the end of 2023, but obviously that didn't happen. I'm also working on shipping regular orders as well. Having said that, I will start shipping pre-order games in a week (not this upcoming week, but after that). So, your order (and others' orders) will ship soon. ..Al -
By horizon2374 · Posted
I had that beige monitor once, from an eBay auction many years ago. It was a bit bulky with low resolution for it being 13”. Did not like it. The TI monitor is far better, from picture quality to quality and design. Too bad the beige TI monitor never made it, although it started to be featured in some promo ads and was on the front cover of the entertainment value pack.
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