Display hacks! The stuff that turns your Atari and TV into a sort of pretty lava lamp. Doing nothing really productive, but still showing off.
I suppose Looping demos would be on the list.


Maybe I should be concerned that I could stare at a lava lamp for minutes at a time, but I really like display hacks such as the clock, Boing, and some other demoscene stuff.

Anyone got any favorites? Have any of you thought of using some for a social event?

Since my first topic on this seemed to have destroyed itself (RIP), I decided to bring it up again.

Okay, First off, I love my Harmony cart to death. I play it on my new LCD TV that plays interlaced modes like a champ.

However, I decided to plug my VCS into my old Travel TV (color, RCA) and fire up some Enduro. I started to notice some really odd vertical lines around the road and oncoming cars.
Thinking it was my TV reception, I checked all connections (I use a straight adapter, no switch) and everything seemed just fine, signal was locked in great. But every once in a while, those blasted phantom lines showed up again. Sometimes they crawl, sometimes they don't. So to see if it was my Atari, I popped in my copy of enduro and... no lines.

So either this is a negligible problem caused by the current pull of the Harmony Cart, or my Atari VCS isn't firing on all cylinders.

Another weird thing that happens is if I don't play the thing for a while, green colors are more "Aqua" than they are supposed to be. not annoying, but the Harmony cart menu text is a marble green, so it really stands out. After a minute or so, everything is great.

The biggest problem still remains: Light blue colors are bleeding. A lot. A Photoshopped screenshot to show you what I mean:



It's actually a little worse than this, the black inner line in the O characters is almost gone. Every other color, however, seems to be okay.

What in the world is causing this?

Some other info I can give you:
This is a 4-switch woodgrain (with the 2 sprite TIA), purchased around 1982 or so for my cousin and I to play.  All of the "Problem games" work as intended on the unit. It had Combat as a pack-in.
The AC Adaptor is a stock Atari 2600 one that came with this unit.
The case has been opened, but only for a little while to clean the inside using gentle blasts of air. the case itself was cleaned in December last year. The Game Center piece was also cleaned up recently, though the cover is always off when the unit is powered up.

Any ideas?

I am a bit of a chiptune nut, and I've been wondering about the possibilities of a small DPC+ music module player.

From what I've read, the DPC+ is a 3-channel square wave sound generator, plus the two TIA sounds.

I have no idea how fast the DPC+ can be called to change sound pitches, but given the examples I have heard, it can be quite a fun music machine. So at the end of the day, 5 channels to mess with sounds pretty enticing to me.

Speccing a small module format wouldn't be difficult (Heck, the C64 had one) and most modules out there with no sample data (like for SID) are around 2-4K in size. I would be more than willing to assist with making specs for a module format.

Does anyone out there think this is possible? Or would it be more trouble than it's worth?

I am loving the Harmony cart so far. GREAT product. A few ideas for the menu though.

• A small color calibration chart somewhere. not a big deal, but just for convenience. Easy to see what colors are off, but I suppose loading up a diagnostic cart ROM would do that too. It's these new LED TVs that seem to be so OFF on the color. I had to pump up the color setting to max to get what I would get on a normal CRT set.

• Slow scrolling on the file names.  I know you can't fit all the text on there, but if it's possible to be scrolled (to the left, like a marquee) as is file is selected, I could see which version the ROM is. useful for those old ROM sets where the file names are ridiculously long.

• A back button function if using a Genesis game pad. Again, no big deal, but could help when dealing with a lot of nested directories. I know the  top . in the FAT directory goes back, but if I'm deep in the folder, I have to go all the way to the start to go back.

I love how the paddle can work the menu too. that's some amazing work. I was worried to death about how to play paddle games on the thing, but seeing that I could still navigate the menu with it helped a lot.

Here's an interesting one...
My dad was watching me play some of the Atari 2600 games I had cleaned up (Mostly the Activision ones) I was playing Spider Fighter at the time. And he said, "can't you use the paddle?"
I said, "Yeah, that would be a pretty cool idea."

Since that game moves so fast, a paddle would really fit for it, especially in maneuvering around the spiders.

Which games do you wish used the paddle or other controls? Or are you content with joystick controllers?