Malathion5

Eureka!! I fixed the thing! The dead inductor was the very last stop before the signal went into the RF box, so that narrowed it down a bit. Long story short, there is a DIP that has a handful of transistors, one of which was shorted. I dug up another one from my parts machine, soldered it in and now I'm knee deep in 4-bit glory. Thanks for the help.

BINGO! Thank you A.J. Franzman. That is the very item that is open/bad. I will look around for solder bridges and shorted componants downstream of the inductor. The person I got this from is the original owner and he says that it worked when he put it up, some 20-odd years ago, so I will have a look at things that might go bad when the unit may have been dropped or that would deteriorate over time. Dragnerok X: That is a great color band chart. I have needed one for reference so I'll print that one, but do you have a link to that pic file that I might get a larger copy?

Folks: I have a Sunnyvale 2600 built in 1977 that doesn't work. To see if the machine is at least thinking about working I installed an A/V mod, and it is working/thinking correctly. Something is killing the signal before it gets to the RF section. I was poking around with a VOM and found a componant that seems to be fried. I looks like, for lack of another word, a small burnt potato chip. It is brown and flat with two leads, three color stripes and a bump under the plastic on one side. I looks like it should be an electrolytic (sp?) capacitor, and shows an open when tested, just like a capacitor, but when I tested a similar item on other machines they all showed 3 ohms resistance, with no tapering off toward infinity/open. So, I replaced the potato chip with one from a parts-2600 and turned it on, and it started to smoke. I assume there is something shorted in, or near, the RF module, but I never did try it again with the RF removed. Does this sound familiar to anybody? I would really like to keep this unit as close to 'original', and I have other 2600's to rob parts from. If it is the RF, I can come up with another one that has the 3/4 switch, but not one for a 1977 Sunnyvale, which doesn't have the 3/4.

Don't hold back dude. Let us know how you really feel.

I am having trouble getting the Makewav program from Rob Colbert to work. I am DOS illiterate, but I want to turn .bin files into .wav files for my own personal use. No Stella Gets a New Brain here. I can pull up the dir of the program, but that's about all. I have no idea how to make the Makewav program choose a .bin file to convert, and I wouldn't know where to put it if I could. Any pointers?

PCAE, what does this mean or stand for? And how do you access it? I'm a little behind in the acronym department.

I just got z26 working and everything is peachy but I have some questions about the controls: 1. What is trace mode? 2. What does the screen capture do? 3. What do the command line switches do, and how do you use them? I am looking to get into the program code of the games I download and start hacking (eventually). Can I do this with z26?

Excellant post. I was having the same problem that Jacob was with the version 2.06 popping up when I hit the .EXE. I downloaded the DOS version and it works great! Thanks to evybody.

(OK, lets see if I can do this without double-posting again) Thanks for the help. I'll 'just do it' as it were and let you guys know if a 486 can handle it. Nukey, double thanks. I've been reading your instructions on how to download and open the .exe for an emulator in another post in the emulating forum. I downloaded z26 to my machine at home and had trouble opening it, but I think I know what the problem is.

The laptop is for the portability. I plan on working on this while at work. I guess I asked the wrong question. What I want to do is start learning the machine language for the 6502 processor, so what I thought would be a logical step would be to become familiar with BASIC then the machine language itself. Then start goofing around in some game code to see what it does. I'm not really interested in playing games on it, I want to get into the code and poke around, then be able to see the effect it has on the game. I have 68000 experience, so I think I'll be able to eventually figure it out (it works that way in my mind anyway). So, I need to know if an emulator like Z26 is what I need to get. That's my question. What program/emulator do I need to access the game code, and can it be done on an Intel 486?

The laptop is for the portability. I plan on working on this while at work. I guess I asked the wrong question. What I want to do is start learning the machine language for the 6502 processor, so what I thought would be a logical step would be to become familiar with BASIC then the machine language itself. Then start goofing around in some game code to see what it does. I'm not really interested in playing games on it, I want to get into the code and poke around, then be able to see the effect it has on the game. I have 68000 experience, so I think I'll be able to eventually figure it out (it works that way in my mind anyway). So, I need to know if an emulator like Z26 is what I need to get. That's my question. What program/emulator do I need to access the game code, and can it be done on an Intel 486?

What is the slowest processor I can get away with for emulating. I am looking into a 486 laptop, something cheap. I want to figure out if my (very) limited experience in programming can open the doors for programming the 65xx processors and I was planning on doing this at work during the lots of free time I have. Hence the laptop. I don't know if it's for me just yet, hence the cheap. I don't want to dump a lot of money into something I won't be able to do, and I don't know what I don't know just yet. I figure I need to dabble before I can decide acurately.

The Slik-Stik is nice and compact for small hands, it's my favorite. My kids play my Atari all the time and had the same problem handling the controller so I plugged in a controller from my Genesis and it works great! The button is on the opposite side (B button is fire and the other two are just dead buttons) but they can handle it much easier.

So it's a rarity 7. Good enough to me. Roll in a certain temperature range eh? I did have my white shoes on when I plugged it in, maybe that's what made it work. As for how to play it, you run into the guys moving back and forth to stun them. Then when the guy on top is above the stunned guy on the bottom you press fire and drop a log or something on the stunned guy to kill him. Something like that anyway. The html manual tells you how to play.

I bought this Obelix cart from a guy in France a while back. The auction was listed as a PAL cart, and when I got the cart the label was the NTSC version with no "P" on the end label. There was however a "P" sticker on the back of the cart so I just assumed that it was a PAL version as advertised. I plugged it in to see the rolling effect the other day and it didn't, roll that is. It played perfectly well. (Pretty fun game BTW) So, Do I have a PAL version (Rarity 7) or an NTSC version (Rarity 10!) I was reading up on the PAL / NTSC thing and apparently when you stick a PAL cart in an NTSC machine it will always roll. Any ideas here?