Mikebloke

Hi all, managed to spend 3 hours on doing some updates to the Ball game, e5frog suggested some changes to graphics including the number display, feet and some colour ideas. I've done nearly all his suggested changes, and you can now play in either black and white or colour with the new features. There is leg movement, and ball crashing graphics now included. I might still make some minor graphical changes, but it should be largely superficial and this should be the final major change (no gameplay changes in this one, just graphics). https://mikebloke.itch.io/game-no-watch-ball-channel-f

I've had my own topic of coming to terms with whether to keep up with physical hardware, on an update to that I've recently decided I'd rather just use original controllers on a beefed up emulation pc. My consoles are slowly failing one way or another, I think my Fairchild, Saturn, CDI, CDTV, mega drive, and probably a number of other consoles have "issues" now that I'm just not competent enough to deal with. I got a Saturn controller pc adapter this month, and the D9 atari dapter which works with the Channel F controller and a load of other stuff (oh boy, been having fun with that!) which is even getting me to the point where I don't even care about getting the systems out with the romcarts. Some of it will be time and energy. I'm running out of steam to want the trouble, when I know I can download it in 3 seconds and not have to plug any additional wires in (controller adapters aside). The work thing is definitely a thing though, I'm dropping hours and a number of my colleagues are moving on or retiring, or just leaving. There is a lost sense of worth of anything we do, which is made worse when we know others make far more money (we recently had our chancellor, the guy in charge of money, say £100,000 was not a huge amount of money for an annual salary. The average earnings is between £27,000 and £34,000 depending on form of average used). If you can barely pay for living costs, it makes sense that you won't be able to afford retro stuff as a casual interest, however I think there is exceptions for this. Don't discount the possibility that someone is prepared to go into a lot of debt for something they can't afford because their desire to own or win it beats common sense. I'm selling some of my games on eBay and have been for awhile, I'm quite happy to drop the price if it doesn't sell, if it goes for £1 it goes for £1.

I'm any programmer and I endorse this message. One of the fun things about trying to code (never got a game fully working to date on 2600) is how easy it is to change colours on the 2600 due to the scan line feature to generate images like that. In comparison the Fairchild channel F that came out prior did have video ram but you basically splat data into it, there is no objects as such, everytime something moves you have to be mindful of what you want the pixel just moved is going to be, having one colour for the background makes this easier. 2600 has some objects though (two for players, two for bullets, one for background) which makes moving or editing these much more viable, and ultimately later consoles kept that which keeps everyone a little bit more sane. Some of us just like to make it hard for ourselves though.

Generally the answer is no. This is because the pass through via RF, composite or scart (you'll presumably be connecting by composite or RF) is literally intended as a pass through. Sometimes SECAM might be included, I've played SECAM signal through mine before. If you can find documentation online for your VCR, it might have it mentioned somewhere. You'll be surprised what documents have been scanned for the internet.

5 Amstrad GX4000 4 sega mega drive, but especially model 1 with mega CD attached 3 Atari 2600 heavy sixer 2 Magnavox Odyssey 1 Fairchild channel F Woodgrain belongs on everything metal. I like the dinkyness of the GX4000 which is funny given how many port holes are on it.

Thanks! E5frog has given me some ideas to expand on it, I'll look to do that before I start anything else new. Maybe 🙃. Oh man I would have potentially jumped on that price a few years ago. Hope the person who ended up with my collection is still enjoying it, it's the one game I didn't have (though I only had cart / cart + instructions for the US only games). Still looking for a new console as it's more likely to happen than fixing mine with my capabilities. Shame there is no similar controllers available for pc. Might have to get into hardware after all and create an adapter.

I only ever had chef personally, which is from a technical gameplay perspective a variation of ball with an easier difficulty in the sense that the "balls" in terms of food items only ever went up and down which was easier to manage mentally with one potentially being "held in place" by a cat with a fork to upset your rhythm. After the game and watch series sega did jump on it a bit with their own variation of games which felt like it had a higher pace, things like after burner, sonic the hedgehog and shinobi is the ones I had, but of course doesn't compare to a true hand held like a game boy or game gear. I would probably struggle to capture the pace of after burner on the channel F but might have a go one day! I had a number of pinball games like this as well, and the Tetris style lots-of games-in-one was very common at the time too. Game and watch gallery was a thing that ran from game boy to gba (with a ds version too on limited release) with a number of game and watch games converted over and most with a "modern" graphical variant with mario characters and sometimes new rules (fire for example had different characters that fell at different speeds). If quick and simple games on handheld is your thing, then it's worth checking those out.

Check out https://mikebloke.itch.io/game-no-watch-ball-channel-f for the latest release. I've done most of the intended changes, attract mode now works, 3 ball points work as intended (10 each catch compared to 2 ball 1 point). I've tidied the arm graphics up. This is something of an accomplishment for me, although it's taken me across 5 days instead of my usual 3 to get to the place I usually do with these ports it's the first time I haven't had to reference the F8 assembly manual. I usually have to make constant references to the manual to work out how exactly some assembly opcodes work, whereas this time I've just gone for it and thankfully it has worked. However the code is an absolute mess, I know for sure there is code duplication and I can probably knock out a few hundred lines of code (currently sits at 2037 lines) if I wanted. Branching is an absolute pain and optimising where procedures is could probably help avoid having to branch to a third label just to jmp back so often. I'm a programmer, a games developer, but not an efficient one! Hope people have fun with this one, it's very playable I think. Let me know if there is any other games I should port over, game and watch or not.

Really gutted I didn't get to necro this topic in time, on Monday I started work on a new game, Ball, based on the Game and Watch series. Was due to finish it yesterday but had other stuff to do. https://mikebloke.itch.io/game-no-watch-ball-channel-f Gameplay is done, I just need to tidy up the graphics but essentially it is done. Hoping to finish it tomorrow. Check the page above for instructions on how to play and more details on what I need to finish. Game and watch series is a nice one to work on as placement of objects can nicely go into a look up table rather than worrying about how it moves on the screen to player or other input. The screens also came with red green and blue overlays at times on the LCD panel which means it's a great way of adding to the Fairchild channel F. I'm likely to do a few more of these, open to requests or I might just go in release order. Nintendo please don't cancel me.

Sorry only just seen this it's just the Wikipedia list that I took days to edit into the right format for excel to sort, and then colour coded for region. I would need to find it as I lost interest in my own project but if you were really curious I could send it to you.

Apologies haven't been on the forum as of late, so your mentions went unnoticed, really sorry! Gutted to miss out on that one as I actually knew a few...

Thank you I appreciate your attempts to alleviate fears and attempting to understand. At 35 I'm probably well below the average age of the users on this site, but I'm thinking when I do get to the age of many original atari enjoyers, will I be asking similar questions to them about the history of video game preservation but no longer having the first hand accounts that they had initially preserved here. There is a lot of non-atari related content, research, information and more here because we have congregated here out of habit. Other sites like reddit where you think this stuff might be instead is actually extremely dead and there is more active users talking about certain non atari systems here than anywhere else in the rest of the internet. I have a 2600, 7800 and a jaguar, but 99% of my posts here have nothing to do with atari at all and I only saw this because of a YouTube channel I am subscribed to. This isn't an acquisition specific issue, in fact it's possibly more preserved now than if it wasn't. But it did make me stop and think "is this information anywhere else other than this forum!" The more I think of it, it's probably a thing for concerned users like me to deal with than bothering Albert with an extensive archive save, try not to delete too much for the next decade or so 😛

Not a homebrew for the PC-50X but I'm thinking of other discussions that may relate to systems. There is one (is it the arcadia?) about the manufacturing of boards in Taiwan and franchising the system for sale in different countries from one of the original staff members. Yes a lot of this stuff is possibly elsewhere too but some of it is probably only here. I'm not talking about preserving things like the fact that I had to use my foot to bend a PC-50X cartridge board so I could capture game footage no one else had ever uploaded before, or the taco thread, but things that might be important enough for people interested in 50-100 years time who might be curious.

It's fine, I don't expect you to seriously know what atari as a company might do with this forum in 20 years time, but the thing is, many of us will still "be here". There is going to be a lot of gutted people in the future when eventual chopping does happen. I don't honestly expect Albert to give us a data dump of the entire forums either, I think I'll start a thread elsewhere of threads to be preserved off site.

Thanks for the replies. In relation to number 2, I'm thinking more about systems like the 1292, vectrex, PC-50X, and of course other systems such as the Magnavox odyssey, fairchild channel f, bally astrocade etc. I think it's going to have to be a case of individuals like myself copy pasting everything into an archive system but an official copy dump would have been nice and much easier (for everyone but you) I guess. 3) well atari doesn't own the fairchild channel f yet, and some other copyright upstart has now taken it on in the US (though I don't think anyone has bothered to take it seriously given the 6 of us who probably still have a system and develop for it is all here). 😛