I Ordered My Card Yesterday

[Ed Cheek]

Hi to all,

 

I pulled out my Atari 2600 and cartridges on Friday for the first time in several years. I found the Harmony card online Saturday while doing a little reasearch game manual scans. I ordered it yesterday and I am really looking forward to receiving it. Has anyone found any problems or quirks that would be helpful for me to know about? It looks pretty straight forward and intuitive from what I have seen online.

 

Are there any good resources for programming the Atari? I would like to try my hand at that. Do any of you guys program Atari? What editor assembler do you use? Do you know of any resources for EPROM's and cartridge parts?

 

I really hope this forum is active and I hope to hear from some of you. This has potential to be a fun hobby.

 

Thank you,

 

Ed

[accousticguitar]

I killed the bios in my Harmony cart by trying to select a game with a paddle controller instead of a joystick. I no longer do that.

[accousticguitar]

This forum is fairly active for programming and there are a lot of resources for Atari 2600 programming. You can use Batari Basic, assembly language, or a combination of the two. Check out the appropriate sub-forums for more info. Dasm is a popular assembler when using assembly language.

[Algus]

The way you load ROMs onto the SD card you use with your harmony cart is the way they'll be listed in the firmware. I definitely recommend organizing and preparing your ROMs ahead of time instead of just copying them to the card. It supports directory structures so you can sort things that way.

 

If you got the deluxe, the included SD card is already set up with a lot of stuff so it takes out some of the work for you.

 

Once you load a game from the cartridge, you have to power the console off and back on in order to select a new game. So no point in pulling the reset switch a million times. It won't work

[Thomas Jentzsch]

I killed the bios in my Harmony cart by trying to select a game with a paddle controller instead of a joystick. I no longer do that.

I don't think that was the reason. At least you are so far the only one reporting that.

 

And I have selected tons of games with my paddle.

[AtariBrian]

I killed the bios in my Harmony cart by trying to select a game with a paddle controller instead of a joystick. I no longer do that.

Im (almost positive) thats the same thing that happened to me now that Im thinking back about it .

[accousticguitar]

I don't think that was the reason. At least you are so far the only one reporting that.

 

And I have selected tons of games with my paddle.

If that wasn't the reason it was quite the coincidence since my Harmony cart quit working the instant I tried to select a game with my paddle controllers. It did not start working again until Batari reflashed the bios on it. After that I quit using the paddle controllers to select games and I have not had any trouble whatsoever with the Harmony cart.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

If that wasn't the reason it was quite the coincidence since my Harmony cart quit working the instant I tried to select a game with my paddle controllers. It did not start working again until Batari reflashed the bios on it.

What did Batari say about the problem?

[+batari]

I just reflashed the BIOS and sent it back, I didn't examine the flash to see how it was corrupted.

 

It is possible to corrupt the BIOS under certain conditions, though - if you load a 32k game, the Harmony needs to use some flash space in the same sector as the bootloader. It needs to erase this sector and write it again. This takes a fraction of a second, but if power is interrupted or something crashes during this time, the bootloader will not get rewritten and thus the BIOS will need to be reloaded.

 

I don't know what would cause a paddle to help this along except maybe if the paddle went haywire and the menu screen went wild, then selected a random game the user didn't want to play, so the user shut off the console at just the wrong time.

[OBO]

No issues with these Joystick/paddle combos by SEARS ? Just got 2 of them recently. ( sorry to derail the topic)

[accousticguitar]

I just reflashed the BIOS and sent it back, I didn't examine the flash to see how it was corrupted.

 

It is possible to corrupt the BIOS under certain conditions, though - if you load a 32k game, the Harmony needs to use some flash space in the same sector as the bootloader. It needs to erase this sector and write it again. This takes a fraction of a second, but if power is interrupted or something crashes during this time, the bootloader will not get rewritten and thus the BIOS will need to be reloaded.

 

I don't know what would cause a paddle to help this along except maybe if the paddle went haywire and the menu screen went wild, then selected a random game the user didn't want to play, so the user shut off the console at just the wrong time.

It's been quite a while now since it happened so I can't remember the details, unfortunately.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

So it can only happen with 32k carts, right? Which would exclude all original single games. Besides Marble Craze, does any other paddle game with 32k exist at all?

 

Maybe paddles influence the power level more than other controllers? Then, if the level is on the edge already (old or weak power supply), this little extra power required then makes the difference.

 

Just a wild guess...

[accousticguitar]

I seem to remember having difficulty selecting the correct game with the paddle controllers so it's possible it selected a random 32k game, it wasn't necessarily the 32k paddle game that caused the problem.