Atari related thesis?

[Ze_ro]

Okay, so next year I'll have to do my thesis for electrical engineering. Unfortunately, I haven't a clue what kind of topic I'll choose, but I'm hoping that it can involve Atari in some way (Maybe I can make this fun). A year or so back, I was considering making a handheld 2600 as a thesis... but then the VCSp came out, and I dropped the idea (I want it to be as original as possible). So my question is:

 

Can anyone recommend a good idea to base a thesis on that involves an Atari in some way?

 

To get the ball rolling, here's some stuff I thought of:

 

1. Portable Atari built from scratch (scrapped)

 

2. Atari emulation on another system (preferably a console system, as PC emulation has been done to death)... Atari-on-a-chip?

 

3. Something programmed for an Atari... for example, a robot that could be controlled via the joystick and switches.

 

I should probably point out that my electrical engineering degree has a significant amount of programming (mostly assembly) as well as hardware design, so my thesis should reflect both sides of this... so, unfortunately, programming a video game would not suffice.

 

... and yes... I'm mostly just trying to find a way to justify playing Atari games all day when I'm supposed to be working on a thesis (Yeah, yeah... I'm doing research!)

 

--Zero

[berzerk]

buy a VCSp. Hand it in as thesis. Best 300 bucks you ever spent, plus get to play it. haha

[Eckhard Stolberg]

On the 7800 board Chad Schell asked about a Cuttle Cart like development cartridge for the 7800. It would involve getting the hardware done to support all the different 7800 bankswitching formats. Also you would have to write the communication software for the 7800 and the PC. The 7800 side would probably have to be done in assembler. I'm not sure if that would be big enough a project for your thesis, or if you would consider doing something for the 7800 at all, but it might be worth some thoughts.

 

 

Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

[atari70s]

Oh good someone i can live my dream though i got the perfect thing a system with the ability to run any atari game ever made. a 7800( to play 2600 also) slot 5200 slot for 8 bits. if you want to you nca do one also for jaguar and lynx . all in one handy system . you want original you dont get more original than that. adda pull out keyboard from the front and you got it all the ULTIMATE atari system . what do you think all ( besides im a nut )

[Nateo]

I'VE GOT IT!!!!

Do a thieses on a multiplayer joystick port! Ya' know, so you can have four player games using joysticks (Gauntlet) and Driving Controllers (Indy 500 with 4 players!)

[Osbo]

quote:

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Originally posted by Ze_ro:

Okay, so next year I'll have to do my thesis for electrical engineering.

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I got no clue man... I never went to college

[ATARIPITBULL]

How about making a new system, and you could give it a whole new atari name, that can play the 2600, 5200, 7800, lynx, and jaguar games all in one body, including the CD games for the jag. It sounds crazy, but if you did do it, you would now have a reason to buy all the atari games you could get your hands on. Or you could at least find me a good doctor for my Atari problems.

[atari70s]

quote:

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Originally posted by atari70s:

Oh good someone i can live my dream though i got the perfect thing a system with the ability to run any atari game ever made. a 7800( to play 2600 also) slot 5200 slot for 8 bits. if you want to you nca do one also for jaguar and lynx . all in one handy system . you want original you dont get more original than that. adda pull out keyboard from the front and you got it all the ULTIMATE atari system . what do you think all ( besides im a nut )

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ATARIBULL

 

i suggested it with an 8 bit included with roll out keyboard. but i still think its the best idea id pay like 200 for it

[ATARIPITBULL]

(Atari70s) I'm with you brother, but if he did make a system with all of those items, I think you and I might be willing to pay a little more than just $200 for a mega system like that.

I would be willing to sell my two red nose pitbulls, my wife, grandmother and grandfather, and my Pam & Tommy lee video tape for such a machine.

[atari70s]

ya know now someone is gonna do that now jsut for that purpose. lol . nah seriously man id go 200 or 300 for that over a VCSP unit. more useful . u get that in teh saze of a laptop use like the sides for all teh cart ports teh sides and one for the top withthe keybaord built in man that might be like a VCSP

[mos6507]

The 7800 is good uncharted territory. A Cuttle-Cart like device would be much appreciated by the community.

 

If you do that, I would make it as high-capacity as possible to support more expansive, NES-like future games. I would not just limit it to the max size that the 7800 catalog uses.

 

BTW, you should also put a POKEY on board so all new homebrews can have decent sound, and maybe some additional RAM, or just make the entire space read/write throughout since the 7800 cart port has rw lines and requires no funky tricks. The 7800 is still pretty constrained in the RAM department. And if that's not enough, you could throw in the functionality of the high score cartridge too!

 

In addition, there should be more interfacing options on the 7800 because it uses a faster full-fledged 6502 with interrupt support.

 

Curt Vendel intends to produce the 7800 keyboard but I don't know how far along he's gotten with it. You could help out with that.

 

Maybe a 7800 keyboard to ethernet bridge and a TCP/IP stack??

[Scott Stilphen]

quote:

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Originally posted by Nateo:

I'VE GOT IT!!!!

Do a thieses on a multiplayer joystick port! Ya' know, so you can have four player games using joysticks (Gauntlet) and Driving Controllers (Indy 500 with 4 players!)

---

 

The Ebivision guys mentioned doing this as one of their future projects. Since the keypad controllers have 12 buttons each, wouldn't it simply be a matter of hacking a keypad controller and "reassigning" the buttons in programming?

[Ze_ro]

I could actually see making a combined Atari system fairly easily by simply de-soldering the cartridge ports to place them elsewhere, using a splitter to combine all the video leads into one, and using various small power limiting circuits so that each system could use a single power supply... and then just mount all 3 boards in a single box. Though I'm sure you meant that it should be something made from scratch. It's an interesting idea, but would it actually be legal to make one of these? Merging the 5200 with a 7800 wouldn't be extremely difficult, since they share some of the same circuitry I believe... but fitting the Jaguar in there would be a problem since it doesn't use *any* hardware that could be shared with the other systems.

 

Oh, and throwing Lynx compatibility in there would be nasty hard... you'd definitely need extra circuitry to convert the screen signal into something that resembles RF. There is a hardware hack that can do this, but it's expensive (Plus, it doesn't have the originality that I want my thesis to have)

 

Incidentally, a friend and I once came up with the idea for a system that would play any cartridge from any system. It included a spinning cylinder that all the cartridge ports were mounted on, and it was appropriately named the "Solar System". Naturally, we didn't design any of the actual circuitry

 

quote:

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Originally posted by Scott Stilphen:

The Ebivision guys mentioned doing this as one of their future projects. Since the keypad controllers have 12 buttons each, wouldn't it simply be a matter of hacking a keypad controller and "reassigning" the buttons in programming?

---

 

Well, it's not quite that simple. You see, the keypad only uses 7 wires on the joystick port. 3 are meant for when a button in a specific column is pressed, and 4 are used for rows... this means that it's possible (in a keypad-intensive game) that some keypresses will be entirely missed by the Atari if you have to press two (or more) keys at once. Since hacking one of these into a joystick would likely hit on a lot of these problems, I'm not sure it would work at all.

 

To hook up four controllers to the VCS, you would need a total of 21 pins. This is 5 pins for each joystick (up, down, left, right, button), plus one more for a +5 volts or ground (I'm not sure which the Atari uses offhand). I think the only way to make the Atari work with four joysticks simultaneously would require internal modifications (If you wired up some of the difficulty switches and the game select, you should be able to achieve this).

 

Alternatively, if you didn't require ALL the connections to the joystick, you should be able to make it work. For example, if you were making a 4 player driving game, and all you needed was for each joystick to be able to move left, right, and up (or button... for accelerate), then you'd only need 16 pins, which would work fine. Of course, this method is a lot less useful for future games.

 

I'm less knowledgable about driving controllers, but I'd imagine that they use enough pins that you wouldn't be able to get four of them in without modifications either... otherwise they probably would have made pairs of them too I'd imagine.

 

--Zero