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A MASSIVE thank you to Neil Bockus who just 4 minutes ago donated $189 to put us exactly at our $1000 fundraising goal for the Stella-thon!! His comment attached to the donation is: "Stella is an amazing program which helps the Atari VCS live on well beyond its years. You all help me to keep my childhood alive and I appreciate it!" THANK YOU SO MUCH NEIL!!

Hallo, I would like to introduce my new CD called Angel Zero. https://poison6502.bandcamp.com/album/angel-zero There are 20 tracks and full time lenght is 57 minutes Enjoy!

Because people love the C64 conversions Stephen_FlatCountry_C64.xex

Omnivore 2 is still in heavy development, but finally warrants a public alpha. There are some features that are missing compared to Omnivore 1; my priority here was emulation and debugging with an eye on creating Jumpman levels with custom code. The ATasm MAC/65-compatible assembler is embedded, and Omnivore will notice file changes and automatically assemble your source code when you save it in your favorite editor. The atari800 emulator core is also embedded, and currently you can step through the code and go back and forward in time (by frame) to compare the state of emulation. You can step by instruction and step to the start of the VBI or start of a frame, but that's about it for now. This week I am going to start dogfooding and creating some new Jumpman levels, and will be adding new debugging features as I go. I hope to eventually be able to step backward by instruction. I don't have binaries available yet; for the moment you'll have to install from a command line. I realize this is a large barrier to entry, but it is only temporary. On the plus side, linux users do not any special prerequisite libraries or anything. You just have to have a working C compiler. On Linux, Windows and MacOS the instructions are the same: you'll need python 3.6 or 3.7 (a Framework build on Mac, or use brew), then: pip install numpy pathlib2 wxpython pip install "omnivore==2.0a8"

This came to mind what PowerPigeon posted....

When I look at a screenshot like the attached, I start dreaming about doing a Sokoban once again. I first started playing with Sokoban using playfield graphics back in about 1998... I've noticed there are a couple of Sokoban efforts on AtariAge, but perhaps it's time to do one using the tile engine used for Boulder Dash. Look at the image below and think about walls, boxes, and a man. Not far off already.... Here's an animation of one version, giving the basic concept...

That's really fantastic! Between the $1,000 in the GoFundMe and the $1,590.04 from the eBay auctions, it was only $10 shy of hitting $2,600! ..Al

AND........ it's OVER! Wow, an amazing number of donations and bids for the Stella-thon! Thank you to everyone who donated and bid and a huge thank you to all the incredible people who donated the super successful auction items! EBay Auction Total: $2074.51 (CAD) Donations Total: $1000.00 (CAD) TOTAL: $3075.51 (CAD) WOW! This blew away all expectations! Thank you to the whole community for such massive support for Stella! This unbelievable amount of donations will help immensely with the continued development of this amazing emulator and tool that we all use! THANK YOU SO MUCH!

I was banned from the AtariVCS Supporters group. Was it something I said?

Words are from here Photos are from here

He just tried creating a new account...

Version 2.06 is now available for download. I added the check that the second character after the command must be <space> or <valid drive-id>. Fixing potentially mayhem when, still in DUP, any user-input starting with a valid command-letter giving undesired results.... Also I added a small executable that can turn LiteDOS disks in automatically load/run BASIC-programs. SMALL: uses only 2k RAM, 4k more free memory, even (XL/XE-64k) 8k more when using Turbo Basic ! EFFICIENT: 1016 FreeSectors on a MD disk or 700 FreeSectors on a SD disk ! FAST: boots in 2-3 seconds. SIMPLE: load/copy files wasn't this easy. COMPATIBLE: reads Atari DOS 2.0 2.5 MyDOS and other compatible disks. The file-format of a LiteDOS-disk is readable by DOS 2.0/2.5/MyDOS and clones. http://www.mr-atari.com/Mr.Atari/LiteDOS/

Well, I got blocked by the Atarivcs Twitter account. They made a post about their "Kevlar" model, and I replied with an @ to Dupont.?. Must be a rough Monday for the intern.

It'll end up like the small portion of fandom that defends the Last Jedi from it's many, obvious plot holes and flaws. Star Wars land: "Hey, Vice Admiral Purple Hair's "plan" makes no sense, and..." "IT'S THE FORCE, SHUT UP" Atari VCS land: "Hey, this doesn't work and how come the VCS Store is so barren with interesting content?" "SANDBOX, SHUT UP & BANNED"

Yup, how do you have a frequently asked questions section when the answers are always: Fortunately, I've spent the last few years building up an immunity to AtariBox bullshit.

tick tock tick tock tick tick... less than 6 hours remaining! https://www.ebay.com/sch/rantradio/m.html

Good news my friends!! A new Carrot Kingdom™ teaser is here! I just finished implementing the music player and it turned out nicely! If you look closely you can see a few other teasy changes as well. ;3 I am feeling well, and it is progressing more smoothly than the last few months. :3 Thanks for hanging with me! ❤️

That's getting me excited.

This is a really good point. If you want to know how Atari SA can handle projects, just look at the mess they've made of anything that tries to be major in recent years. Asteroids Outpost: Laughable to have called that a beta for a final release. Abandoned Haunted House: Cryptic Graves: Same situation as Asteroids. Unfinished abandonware Minimum: Playable and innovative because it was handled by Human Head, but Atari didn't have the money to finish paying the devs, so it ended up as abandonware. This was made worse by it being an online only game, so fans had to scramble together to run servers (for a while, you simply couldn't play the game though). Eventually handed off to someone else, but a lot of the planned content for it never materialized. RollerCoaster Tycoon World: This is supposed to be their main IP at this point, but they can't get that right. Same issue that goes on behind the scenes that you don't hear about unless you know a dev - they don't have the money or interest to present a working product. Years after release, RTW still is a buggy mess. Night Driver: It garnered some fanfare on the release, but was quickly forgotten. Currently sitting at 2.6 stars on the Google Play store, most reviews complain about the craptastic controls. I'm using a Windows PC, and looking on the Apple app store, there's no mention of the game, just a few things like Breakout and RollerCoaster Tycoon. Main website still says "Coming Soon," no links to the actual game on either App Store, so that tells you how much they care about anything that doesn't instantly become a hit. Yes, they do have some bright spots, although getting the Atari Vault and Tempest 4000 wrong would be quite a feat, since they didn't really have to do anything there. Flashback 9 is probably the best thing they can refer to at this point, but again, that was AtGames. All Atari had to do was give the thumbs up and cash the licensing fee checks. So what does all of the evidence point to - that even if the VCS does get out the door, the track record of the parent company in supporting it in the aftermarket is not something to hold any faith in. I also think that's why they are acting like the sandbox mode is going to be a huge deal, as they can easily tell people that it's their fault if they can't get Linux to run right, or will just throw out a "we can't guarantee compatibility" on anything that doesn't want to work out of the box.

No Mr Wiener. We're discussing this "platform" ......... and waiting for said "platform" to possibly collapse under the weight of many bread-laden pigeons. But trust me. If Team Unconsole delivers their Tacoberry Pi, and it works in some form or other, I'll be the first one to eat my speaker-less hat. No bah-humbug. No crying. No losing sleep. I .. and the others .. will simply move on and continue to enjoy our interactions and discussions at the real home of Atari. And you know where that is. ?

Just a different colour scheme, which I like better, and a faster "solve". I'm procrastinating. Bit of glitching there; I'll have to revisit the timings of the engine. sokoban_vid4.mp4

Here's a "solve" of that first level. Just remember the four pulsing dots are where the boxes need to go. The dots should be visible when there's not a box there but they don't stay around when something else moves over them at the moment (to be fixed). At the point I get the four boxes onto the four dot positions, that's that level solved. sokoban_vid3.mp4

Ok, time for a update, version 2.06 is now online. I saw a youtube video of a happy LiteDOS user and watched him type ENTER"D:PROG.LST" while still in DUP. Effectively erasing his file, since the "command" starts with "E" and the filename is decoded after ":" ? We surely do not want this to happen. Potentially any user-input starting with a valid command-letter could give undesired results or mayhem... I had some bytes left, so I added the check that the second character after the command must be <space> or <valid drive-id>. Fixing this issue. Later!

@CPUWIZ Mike has worked his magic and we have removed the extra RAM requirement ?

Who cares about specs on non-existent hardware? Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and PC are real and here today. Look to those platforms for gaming. And then there's emulation or used hardware on ebay if you want retrogaming. What I'm saying is don't bother waiting for this ataribox thing. Get something you can enjoy today!

Only one modern game for me this week... GameBoy Advance Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap - 317 min (Saturday stream. Got most of the random stuff wrapped up I think... don't have everything, I'm sure. Not going for 100% or anything, but I think I'm in pretty good shape for the last dungeon. Hope to be finishing this game up this Saturday, making it only the third Zelda game I've ever beaten, but we'll see.)

STELLA-THON UPDATE! I will be doing a complete Stella-thon wrap up summary on this Wednesday's show but here's what's been happening since the stream on Friday: AUCTION: The auction item totals keep going up higher and higher! There's only 17 hours of bidding time left on all twelve amazing donations so remember to get your bid in before NOON PT on Monday July 15th! DONATIONS: Thank you so much to everyone so far who donated that I announced live during the event and the donations are still coming in! The donation page will also stay open until Monday July 15th at noon, after that time you can always donate directly to Stella. I want to thank the following people who sent in their donations after the stream was over: - John Champeau ($50) - Neil Bockus ($200) STELLA-THON DONATION PAGE (GoFundMe): https://www.gofundme.com/zeropagehomebrew-stellafundraiser2019 STELLA-THON AUCTION LIST (EBay): https://www.ebay.ca/sch/rantradio/m.html

I reckon I could have a working playable version in under a week

Sunday morning: I just woke up and read the single dumbest thing I'm going to see for the rest of the month. That's a pretty amazing accomplishment for Dubs. Coming soon from Apple: the Newton 2020 personal digital assistant, back from the dead for all the retro handheld fans. Put your money up front, no refunds, no software, long development cycle, holistic ecosystem, no raw edges, we really want this to happen. Serious question: he's just trying to wind people up with his stupid trolling, right?

I've been banned from posting on the AtacoVCS page.

This also means, you have an extra 16K of ROM @ $4000. Although, I did write code for the PLD, to handle your case, earlier.

It's been a long time... This week is my vacation from work, my first since getting my job almost 18 months ago. I have been slowly working on this project when I have the chance, but I am going to be spending a lot of time on it this week. I didn't feel the need to post an update until now. I have finished the music engine for the game, as well as the intro music. I took a lot of time to make sure the tempo was correct, and it works in both 50Hz and 60Hz. Holding Game Reset on startup will force 50Hz mode, and the COLOR/BW switch selects the color palette. This will allow for both PAL50 and PAL60. (I cut the size to 4K for this demo, so if you press Game Select, it restarts. Stella doesn't seem to be auto-detecting PAL properly, but the timing works on a real system.) I only need minor tweaks from here, such as syncing the animation to the music. And allowing to mute the sound with the difficulty switches. The plan is to have the animated stars scrolling past until you press fire, which is when the game detects if you are using a joystick or paddle. Initially, the game title will be displayed above the cat, and after a game is played, score information will be displayed instead. Below the cat will be a scrolling menu, with 3 lines visible at a time. I have already finished the code for displaying the text, I just need to make it do what I want... ? nyancat.bin

Thank you all for your work on Stella! Glad I could contribute.

Final Star Force (arcade) 10 mins Daioh (arcade) 45 mins turns out Gekioh: Shooting King is related (a port?) to this game. This version does seem a bit harder but I still like it. Sorcer Striker (arcade) 75 mins I love this game. I always play as Miyamoto (the dragon). Mega Bomberman (Genesis) 25 min Amazing game! One weird thing though is that the music slows down when you use the minecart. Ultimate Doom (PC (DOS)) 45 mins

Well, it's pretty much PDP week here and it's going to stay that way for a bit. PDP-11 Barmen - 20 minutes Dungeon - 74 minutes Tetris - 104 minutes Super Star Trek - 55 minutes VIC-20 Omega Race - 22 minutes So, after a bunch of digging around I found that some of the old classics - Zork and Tetris - had some amount of start in the PDP-7 and PDP-11s, neat-o. Barmen is Tapper except I can't figure out how to actually get it to play... it started working somehow but I still have no idea, maybe another time? Dungeon is pre-Infocom Zork and neat at that, my build is from '78 anyways and plays just nicely under RT-11 - I couldn't get it to run for the longest time, turns out I just needed to go back from v5.7 of the OS to v5.3 as it takes up less RAM, whoops. Tetris is Tetris, I never knew but the Electronika 60 that it was made on is just a Soviet clone of either a LSI-11/03 or -11/23 down to even running RT-11, so yeah it just worked fine for me as I'm using a -11/23+ with RT-11 as my only operating system. I pulled up Super Star Trek, I'm just starting to get the game but it's definitely fun even if I don't get it half the time. Reminds me of the Compucolor version, probably the same game with some changes, but I'd have to take the Compucolor out to actually tell if that's any true. Finally the VIC comes up with Omega Race which is just fun so I don't have much else to say on it. So yeah, as I said above, basically just a PDP week for me - I should be getting a disk controller in the mail tomorrow which could run something like four floppy drives and another four MFM hard drives once I get the breakout board for it. I'd love to have actual hard disk storage so I could start trying things like UNIX - at the moment I'm using an emulated serial-based tape drive, but with this thing using old Winchester disks I'm a bit weary about buying in as the price seems insane on most of these Seagates - so I need to look into drive emulators soon here. Expect some X68000 for next week as I'm getting three more in that I found super cheap to fix up, one will be a birthday gift for a coworker who's wanted one and the other two will probably be sold to fund my new thing for minicomputers as I already own more than enough 68Ks and should honestly be cutting down on them instead of getting more.

Awesome - sent you a PM

And in the interlace 160A mode, should we end up doing that in the NTSC retool ... you can have either 4 (if you only use 2 red shades), or the full 6 if you use three red shades plus the BG. We can get that cool two or 3 level shading on the bg as well.

Just one with any time to speak of this week... TurboGrafx-16 Neutopia - 89 min (This was another stream. Started a new game and did the first two dungeons. Didn't play much longer after that as it was getting late. Probably going to play more of it this week. We'll see.)

mksmith, meanwhile, if it could be useful... 7800 Arkanoid_DOH graphic_160B_6 colors and 160A_3 colors.bmp

Just a little correction: the player is called 3 times per frame (as is stated in the song description at soundcloud), not 4 times.

ATARI 2600: Draconian - 40 minutes Mappy - 105 minutes Squish 'Em - 7 minutes ATARI 7800: Pac-Man Collection - 73 minutes EVIDENCES OF THE WEEK: 1) My Mappy gameplay footage recorded via camera (final video for 2019 Harmony Games) 2) My Pac-Man Collection gameplay footage recorded via camera (Pac-Man, Plus OFF, Fast ON, 3 lives and Cherries)

I am just asking, because the 7800 is a bitch and I have had to buy shitloads of different kind of narrow SRAM chips and had some issues with using the full address range.

Rile him up more. Ask for an exact weight of the cart.

Because, POKEY!

Its been a couple years, i should probably post a pic of this legit 1 again for reference.

Update: I've just added the new joystick/joypad option outlined above and it works pretty well on first go. Will be in the next release ?

You rub this stuff on your eyebrows? One tough son-of-a-bitch!

OK - here we go. Thread promise is "you won't laugh"! 1050 drive - 1984 - I did not ever remember getting the drive when I was 9 years old and still using a 9" B&W TV. Here we have a 13" Capehart colour TV This is xmas 1988 - I got the 130XE and my brother got a killer boombox!

Time for a new hot sauce, this stuff has tons of flavor and makes your eyebrows sweat. ? "More than simply an ingredient, Crime (Luckyy Bastard Ale with freshly harvested peppers added and then barrel-aged) provides the incendiary backbone for this hot sauce as well as entree into Arrogant Consortia's seedy underbelly, sentencing all samplers to time served in pepper-induced purgatory."

Q: Where are the games?? A: Did you preorder yet? Q: Why haven't you shown anything yet? A: Hey, look at the neat old mug! Q: Why are you not answering any questions about this thing you want us to buy? A: Who liked ET? AmIright? Q: What the hell is wrong with you people? A: Here's a picture of Jack Black for some reason.