awhite2600

Any costs associated with the promotion such as the $100 discount, storage and disposal fees would likely be rolled up under something like Promotions or Advertising when reporting financials publicly. I can't see any detail being reported other than internally.

Not me, but my son was freaked out by Dino Crisis on the PS1. Granted, he was probably only about 6 years old and shouldn't have been playing games like that.

There is a 20% buyers premium on this auction. That brings the actual cost of a $280,000 bid to $336,000. Most auction houses also tack on a sellers premium which takes a percentage from the amount paid to the seller.

My parents bought a Pong clone in the late '70s. I think my parents played it a few times, but it quickly became the domain of my brother and I. A few years later I got a VIC-20. My Dad showed no interest, thinking that games were a waste of time. He liked pinball, so I convinced him to try a very poorly written pinball game. Dad would nudge the sides of the machine, not realizing that this bevavior would have no influence on the ball. At one point the game failed with a BASIC error. My Dad walked away in disgust, saying that the computer was defective. I don't think he has ever touched a video game since, other than Windows Solitare, if that counts. My mother bought an Intellivision for our family. We had hoped that my Dad would play Poker / Blackjack as he liked both of those games in real life. He had no interest. My mom would sometimes play Triple Action with my brother and I - but she quickly lost interest and the Intellivision became mine and my brother's property. That said, my Mom is very comfortable with computers. She's had internet access in about 1996. She loves her iPad, iPhone and laptop.

Thanks for the reply Allan. I'll likely go with the Kryoflux. I still have one or two 5¼" PC drives. They have been sitting on a shelf for years, so I hope that they still work. I believe that you need to use a high density drive, even when reading double density disks. Do you happen to know if the Kryoflux software can identify the disk format, either before or after it has been copied? I ask because I have quite a few disks that aren't labeled. 5¼" disks could be Commodore or PC. 3½" disks could be Amiga, PC, Mac or Commodore 1581.

I hate to bump, but I started this post last summer and didn't get any feedback. Can anyone offer their option? Experience with the various products? I've narrowed down my choice between the KryoFlux and the SuperCard Pro (which is currently out of stock).

That's funny. I thought the same thing when I read your first post in this thread. Running the game logic on the ARM would, if nothing else, make the computer "think" faster. I think that what you're doing here is very cool. It's certainly an interesting tech demo of making the 2600 do something that it was never intended to do. The display reminds me a bit of the HAM mode on the Amiga. HAM allowed lots of color but with limitations where some colors were based on the colors of the pixels to the left. This created a similar "blurry" effect that when used creatively could create some amazing images. Keep up the great work!

I think that all of the Zellers games were copies. What makes this so interesting is that Zellers was a large department store chain with stores across Canada.

Are there any plans to release the original or "corrected" source code? They could prove interesting from a historical / preservation perspective.

Commodore 8-bit computers do perform a simple memory test on startup. The purpose is to set the memory areas for BASIC. That is why, for example, a C64 with bad RAM might boot up to something like 24,576 BASIC Bytes Free instead of the usual 38,911. This test is not an exhaustive diagnostic of every byte. I recall that the boot sequence checks every 256th byte via a simple read / write. When an address is found that fails the test that location is used to set the limit for BASIC. Using different RAM expanders on a VIC do shuffle certain memory areas around. However the first 1 kilobytes of RAM - used by the kernal and BASIC - is always in the same spot and always uses the on board RAM chips. If swapping the ROMs for known, good chips doesn't help then you likely have bad on board RAM in the first 1K space.

The lack of an ending and other gameplay elements may have simply been a factor of ROM size. I believe that Empire is a 4K game. That doesn't leave much room for extras.

The VIC did organize the memory map differently between unexpanded, 3K expanded and 8K or more expanded. That still didn't alter the placement of the built in RAM, especially the fist few kilobytes used by BASIC. I'd agree with swapping socketed ROMS first as that is pretty simple. Failing that, you'd need to unsolder and swap RAM chips.

I too was thinking ROM or RAM. A bad BASIC or Kernal ROM could cause the normal startup sequence to fail. Even one bad bit could cause the instructions to go in the wrong direction. Equally likely is bad RAM used by the initialization routines. If the startup sequence uses a RAM location for something like a counter, and that location is bad, then the process could get stuck in a loop. Adding RAM expansion may not help as that increases program RAM. It does not alter the built in RAM used by BASIC and the Kernal. As carlsson mentioned, a game may appear normal if it doesn't use that "bad" bit of RAM.

This is absolutely amazing. I can't believe how much gameplay you were able to squeeze into such a small program. Thanks for sharing.

Wow. This thread has taken me back to Commodore 8-bit BASIC optimization techniques that I haven't thought about in a very long time. Commodore BASIC limits you to 80 "typeable" characters per line. (2 x 40 character lines on a 40 column machine.) One way to increase this is to use shortforms for the BASIC keywords. PRINT can be abbreviated as ?. Other commands can be entered by typing their first character followed by a shifted version of their second character, which will appear as a graphics symbol. As an example, FOR can be entered as F shifted-O. NEXT would be N shifted-E. This will expand to a line larger than 80 characters that will still execute correctly. The only downside is that you will need to reenter the entire line if you want to change it because the expanded line will be too long to edit. For variables, Commodore BASIC only cares about the first two characters. While you can use a variable such as SCORE%, BASIC only cares about the first two characters. Use SC% to save space. (If you want to mess with people reading your code you can use things like SCORE%, SCAB% and SCROLL%. BASIC will consider them all to be the same and the names can be used interchangeably.) When dimming arrays remember that they start at element 0, not 1. If memory is tight, creating one less element can help. So in carlsson's example above you can use DIM A%(19):FOR I=0 TO 19:A%(I)=0:NEXT I would also remove as many spaces from the code as possible to save bytes. Unfortunately this can make your code very difficult to read.