After a very late night on Delicon's part, we managed to get queues functional again on the revision 10.0 boards. In order to make the timing work, you need to toggle a read/write mode hotspot but I don't think that will be a big limitation. When writing, you also have to leave at least two cycles between writing again. This would normally not be an issue unless you are writing the same value successively.
At the tail end we were able to add a very important feature. You can now have var
I put my daughter's Mini into her room and I didn't have a long enough ethernet cable for it so I had a case to use the draft-n wifi on the Airport Extreme. So far I'm very impressed with it. It was very easy to get the Mini connected to the router, much easier than wireless on XP. My Cingular 8125 also connects to it perfectly. I haven't tried printing yet but I could connect back to the shares I had on XP just as well as on ethernet. I'm hoping the printer somehow identifies itself throug
First off, I'd like to get some terminology established which I intend to put into the manual. In discussions with Delicon I've used the term "chimera native" to represent games which use the new chimera features. I'd like to find a better term for this but all the acronyms conflict (Chimera Game Environment = CGE and Chimera Environment = CE). Chimera Native will have to do for now.
Anyway, the first idea for this was to build directly on top of the Supercharger foundation. Games would
In recent discussions with Delicon we started to revisit the Chimera API I found the hotspot memory map we came up with to be somewhat lacking. Really the big problem is there are too many things for Chimera to do and not enough addresses in the last page of ROM(RAM) to hold them. The most efficient way to handle things is via an instruction language. The VCS would push a stream of bytes into an instruction hotspot. Either the length of the instruction would be encoded in the message, in whi
After a fair amount of testing it's become clear that there will need to be at least one more revision to the Chimera board before it is ready for primetime. At first Delicon only saw one flaw requiring him to solder a jumper wire across the arm. Then we had the power issue related to SD access. This requires a change to the board layout to handle the larger voltage regulator. Now we have noise issues that are severe enough to cause a visible slowly-rolling bands on my A/V modded 2600, which
Delicon successfully implemented CPLD autoswitching in combination with a simple "staller" program I wrote that copies itself into zero-page and runs a simple rainbow kernel for a fixed number of seconds. The CPLD appears to take only about 7 seconds to program, but we're giving it some extra buffer before it jumps out just in case.
So the way it works is there are three CPLD core files. The most common schemes are available in all of them. The ARM autodetects the banking scheme of the ga
Delicon is still using RF with his 6-switch and it is particularly bad RF at that. He noticed that Chimera caused a lot of interference. For those with Cuttle Carts, that's not unexpected. But he wasn't happy with it. One thing we noticed is that when he put a resistor pack on the cart lines, it eliminated most of the interference. The problem is that the resistor pack has to also enable the magic write feature. For a while it didn't seem like we could both reduce interference AND enable m
I'm definitely jumping the gun here but I'll make a brief update about Chimera progress since we're at a reasonably significant milestone.
Over the weekend I got my version 10.0 cart. The board design has proven to work well so far, with only one jumper wire required. I have now tested a sample game of every banking scheme successfully on Chimera. The games currently load off of microSD in response to a serial terminal-style interface. One interesting aspect of the loader is it has the c
For some reason my Linksys Wireless-G router stopped working a while back. I originally thought it was my ISP but when I connected straight through to the DSL modem everything worked. I fiddled with it, put on newer firmware, but could not get domains to resolve. Since I had gotten my daughter a Mac Mini, I read about the Airport Express upgrade to gig ethernet. I got a lot of mileage out of my Linksys and it looked like the AE would be pretty futureproof, which is a big deal with me. I don
A couple years back got my first glimpse of the Force FX sabers. At the time I got a case of sticker shock and put it down but deep inside I knew one day I would throw caution to the wind and get them. It's all part of me feeling the need to fulfill my past childhood wishes. The Force FX would have been a dream come true for me in 1977. It's taken that long for technology to enable such a wonder. I got an Obi-Wan saber and will probably get a Yoda for my daughter. (Yeah, the cover story is
I was hoping to keep this to myself until some time later if there was something more concrete to show, but I can't resist throwing this out there. At this time, I'm not offering any explanations nor promises for the future, but here is what I've been shown:
I bought my mom a 1st gen Mini when they first came out and I've spent enough time with it when she visits me to make me want to eventually ditch windows. I was waiting eagerly to hear what would become of the Mini after Steve Jobs' keynote and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it got a stay of execution since I was counting on buying one as my daughter's first computer. We've been sharing the main computer until now and it was starting to turn into more of a tug of war sometimes. The
I have a hard time getting the layout to look right in a post, so I've included a chimera parts list in a txt file (which is really a csv file meant for a spreadsheet).
Please consult the associated gallery for the PCB layout.
It's been a long time since I've really really been involved in a single game. I think the last time was circa 2000 when I had 5 coinop machines. I was putting a LOT of time into playing Star Castle and Rastan. (BTW, when is someone going to finally find a way to emulate the sound on Cinematronics games??) Anyway, I think I've blogged about Warblade before, but it's my favorite overall game of all time. The reason I like it so much is that it takes every possible aspect from a shootemup and
Another dubious milestone today. My certified get-well card to Delicon came back to me unclaimed after 2 notices sent. The date it started coming back was may 24th, 4 days before I reached his sister. So it's possible he just wasn't (or was unable to) check his mail up to that point. I find it hard to believe he would purposefully ignore these notices. Anyway, I think I've done about all I can to regain contact with him. The ball is in his court. My yahoo email isn't going anywhere. For
I managed to track down Delicon's sister by using online people search. (Luckily his real name is pretty unusual) I just got off the phone with her and apparently he's okay but has gone through some undisclosed life changes. She will be passing on my contact information. It's a safe bet to assume that he's not going to finish this project but I need to find some closure given how abruptly our communications ceased.
It's now been a good two weeks since I sent the certified letter to Delicon. I realize he's on the east coast and it would take a while to get the green notification card back, but given that his last email from him indicated that he had been in the hospital, I am very concerned.
I got a GP2X to keep my daughter busy when I am at the gym room in my apartment. I am really impressed with the Stella emulator for GP2X. It's very smooth and, of course, 1:1 pixel accurate. I have only a handful of games running on Mame but I'm downloading a dedicated GP2X pack and will try it again. The rotation feature on vertically oriented games is cool, but I wish you could do 180 rotation so I could use the stick with my right hand. It should wind up working pretty well for the coi
I've posted a link soliciting engineers to complete the Chimera cartridge. I'm crossing my fingers someone will volunteer as there was so much potential there. If Delicon does return, then maybe some of the work could be merged together. I just think enough time has gone by that it's worth a shot opening this up to others.
http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=106388
I just got in the Ark II DVDs. I was disappointed with the picture quality. It looks like maybe they shot this in 16mm and transferred it from a print instead of going back to the original negatives. But considering how obscure this show is to most, the treatment here is more than anyone could expect. The packaging in particular is great. A lot of nice touches. The inside of the slipcase is printed with a panorama of the interior of the Ark II. Unfortunately the packaging was mired by an
Certainly printing on a thin sheet has its limitations, but this still sounds like a really great technology for homebrew hardware.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns...line-news_rss20
If you've noticed, Delicon hasn't been on AtariAge since mid December. I don't really have all the details. The last email he sent me on February 6th indicated that he still wanted to get back to the project, but did not followup since, nor respond to my solicitation to collaborate over this 3 day weekend. Since Chimera development is contingent upon his active involvement, please consider it on hiatus until further notice. In the meantime I will no longer evangelize it in the AA forum.
I just stumbled across the fact that Ark II and Space Academy have just been released on DVD!
http://www.amazon.com/Ark-II-Complete-2/dp...5812593-4520967
http://www.amazon.com/Space-Academy-Comple...5812593-4520967
The mid 70s were a golden age of live-action Saturday morning fare. Sid and Marty Kroftt's stuff (like Land of the Lost) has been out on DVD for some time now. The ownership of Filmation properties was an issue, but with Fat Albert and Star Trek: TAS getting released, i
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