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Months ago i published in my website's database, lot of Intrigue Software games. Lately wrote me the original developer of Beneath the stars David J. Smith and after kindly words he wrote: "Once I saw Beneath the Stars on your web site, I downloaded it and checked out the emulators - in particular the Classic99. Reading the code brought back memories for sure, as I had never fully seen the source code in printed form. I did not have a printer back in 1984 - too expensive (as were all the TI-99 peripherals, disk drive, ROM cartridges etc..) and I was only able to "LIST" the code on my 14" portable TV screen back in 1984. To be able to review the code in "notepad" was amazing. After playing the game the first time in 34 years, I immediately saw what needed to be improved and bugs fixed. Your web site was most definitely an inspiration! Now i have completely updated Beneath the stars making the game much, much faster, easier to play and enhanced in many ways! The name is "Moonbase Alpha 2019) and can run in TI-BASIC but i also compiled in TI EXTENDED BASIC using ISABELLA. If you are old enough (like me ?), then you will recall Gerry and Sylvia Andersons Space 1999 in the 1970's, where the moon broke away from the Earth's Gravity and Drifted off into space. Moonbase Alpha was the name of the Base Station and the Inspiration for the original title of the game. If you would like to know more or publish "Moonbase Alpha 2019" on your website, please contact me." Well, I think you can all imagine how happy this message made me. Of course, now the game is online and downloadable. Is also present a Cartridge version for FlashGrom99/FlasRom99 or burn a real cart. (an official label is included in the .zip file of the cart version). so, hope you will Enjoy the game! Moonbase Alpha 2019 page + download (scroll down the page to find all files to Downloads)

51,000 members + one Albert = AtariAge Rocks!!!

Hopefully he shows his wife the YouTube videos of the prototype in a shoebox. That should fix this.

Here are the Stats from yesterday on r/AtariVCS

Are those ads you'd click on? ..Al

Galagon Atari 2600 by John W. Cheampeau, Nathan Strum, Ross Keenum, Dave Dries Pilot your star fighter and defend Earth against the attacking Galagon forces! Maneuver your ship to dodge missiles and incoming spacecraft and use your arsenal of weapons to destroy the enemy. Watch out for the tractor beam trying to capture your comrades; if they are taken hostage it will be up to you to rescue them so they can rejoin the battle and double your fire power! Stay sharp in between battles and practice your shooting skills in the unique challenge stages. One or two players can compete against each other to earn the rank of Galactic Hero, or team up against the enemy in the co-op mode! You can also take a break from the battle and become a sharp shooter in the Challenge Mode. Good luck! Options Galagon can be played by 1 or 2 players, alternating turns, or in a special co-operative mode where both players work together to achieve one high score. From the title screen, press SELECT to cycle through the available game modes: 1 PLAYER, 2 PLAYER or 2 PLAYER CO-OP. There are three skill levels for Galagon: NOVICE, STANDARD and ADVANCED. NOVICE skill level is the easiest and you will start with double ships. ADVANCED is like STANDARD except the game starts with faster enemies, more enemy missiles, etc. To cycle through the available skill levels, press the joystick left or right while on the title screen. Press RESET or the controller button to start the game. Gameplay When the game starts, your ship will be placed in the center of the screen and the incoming aliens will start their attack pattern before returning to formation. To move your ship to avoid the enemies or line up for a shot, press the joystick left or right to move your ship in that direction. To fire a missile, press the joystick button. Every so often, a Galagon flagship will leave formation and emit a tractor beam! You can either avoid the tractor beam, or move your ship to the tractor beam and it will be captured by the enemy. To rescue your comrade and earn double ships (and double fire power!), wait for the flagship and your captured ship to attack and shoot the flagship. Be careful not to shoot your captured ship, and also make sure you have ships in reserve before you get captured. If there is no one to rescue the captured ship, your game will end! After all enemies are destroyed, you will advance to the next stage. Every so often there is a special CHALLENGE STAGE where your goal is to try to shoot all the enemies and earn huge bonus points! The game ends when all reserve ships have been destroyed. GOOD LUCK! Galagon Discussion Thread

No kidding. Here's what it looks like right now: I'm betting that Atari SA didn't count on this happening in their own backyard. Love the Soulja Boy comparison, though.

Caught an update that was posted ~15 minutes ago: "FYI... the conversion of the XM to production SMD components is almost completed..."

Numb Thumb is typically from the side buttons more than the disc - at least for me

On one hand this feels like those made up "My 3 year old elucidated his/her thoughts to me on world politics today..." statements, but on the other hand, it's got enough details that could be legit. If the latter, then his wife is definitely more savvy than he is. But this line is just bizarre: "But how can I convince her to think like us and know?" Seriously, any of you VCShills need to listen to how you sound and get help. That isn't normal; it's insanity.

I need a button for when I go shopping that says "No I am not a rewards member of this establishment."

as expected, the seas are red(dit) with Atari VCS Official blood.

Hey everyone! I'm finally finished with the remodel and sale of my house and I'm in the process of moving and setting up a new electronics lab. Sorry I've been away so long!

Couldn't say it better than anyone else , LOL.

Greetings friends, I'm happy to report that my Atari 800XL is working again! It's now communicating with the peripherals, and I can confirm after replacing the POKEY chip that it was the problem. I want to thank all of you for the support and awesome advice - thank you kindly! Now that everything is talking to each other again I'm finding new issues and may need to start new threads for help. I'm hoping after 20+ years of storage that perhaps these issues can be resolved with some general cleaning and maintenance. We'll see. Right now my priority is to replace my "Ingot" power supply before I lose what I've gained. Thanks again for the tip guys! As mentioned, I have a 520ST power supply with matching XL style I plan to re-purpose. I've chosen to replace the ST connector (disabling +12V of course) rather than reuse the cord+connector from the existing XL power supply. Before wrapping it up, I though it might be helpful to summarize the issue I was having and steps to diagnose the bad POKEY chip for anyone who may stumble across this thread in the future: - Atari 800XL boots to READY prompt but unable to use peripherals (Two 810 drives, 1010 tape drive, and 1025 printer). Computer passes all self tests. - No response from either 810 drive when booting computer. Tried in pair and individually configured as D1. With computer off, both drives power lights come on, and busy lights momentarily on while hearing hub motor spin and stepper motor reset. - 1010 tape drive motor would respond to CLOAD/CSAVE commands, but confirmed using external audio tape player that drive would not record audio, or load previously recorded tapes - Error 138. - 1025 printer head would reset upon turning on computer. Would not respond to LPRINT command - Error 138. - Confirmed +5V power to computer. - Confirmed continuity from end of SIO cable to soldered socket pins on computer motherboard. - Removed all socket chips from the motherboard and cleaned everything before re-installing. It's probably worth noting that I also tried a new PIA chip ($1.95 USD) before replacing the POKEY ($20 USD), both purchased at the same time from Best Electronics. Cheers friends!

In case anyone else has fun sketching out stuff old-school style on actual paper, here's PDFs with the proper aspect ratio characters for the 4x8 pixel, 5 color text modes: ANTIC mode 4 (1 scan line resolution) and mode 5 (2 scan line). 16 chars per line, 24 or 12 lines on each page depending on mode. antic_mode_4--A4_graph_paper.pdf antic_mode_4--letter_graph_paper.pdf antic_mode_5--A4_graph_paper.pdf antic_mode_5--letter_graph_paper.pdf

Thanks for the help, Doc. I found a 2nd bad RAM chip. I would have sworn that the 7 remaining chips on the suspect board were good as I had placed a known good chip in the 8th socket during the initial troubleshooting and the board tested good at that time. All I can think is that I killed it somehow when I was swapping chips around. So, upside is that the original 16K board is working and installed in the 800 along with the 32K Mosaic board. I have a spare 16K board, 7 spare DRAM chips and 5 more on the way. I should be good on 400/800 DRAM chips pretty much forever now. /knock on wood Thanks again for the MB8116E suggestion. 47 cents a chip is hard to beat.

Yoda Contemplating. 66 colors. YodaContemplating.xex

This message is to give advance notice that I've decided to put advertising on AtariAge. It's not an easy decision, and I've always been against putting ads on AtariAge, but this policy is slowly putting me in the hole due to the increasing costs of hosting the site and it's time for me to turn that around. Anyone using the internet is no stranger to advertisements on just about any website that gets a reasonable amount of traffic (and many that get very little traffic at all). AtariAge has grown a fair bit since its early days in 2001 when the site initially launched. Back then, the site ran on a single server, and the costs were relatively benign. Fast forward to today and AtariAge now runs on three dedicated servers, one for the web server, one for the database server, and a third development server that also provides free hosting for a number of classic gaming sites (such as atariprotos.com, ataricollector.com, atarimac.com, videogamevariations.com, xegs8bit.com, and more.) Hosting alone for AtariAge is over $600 a month. There are various recurring software costs as well, such as for the Invision forum software (about $300 a year), store software, plugins and themes used for the forums, third-party services such as Cloudflare and CleanTalk.org (spam filtering service). And this doesn't even begin to speak to the huge amount of time I spend running the servers, making sure they are kept up to date, upgrading software, answering emails and PMs, and so forth. Initially the AtariAge Store was conceived as a means to help pay for the hosting. But the store is basically a job in its own right. It's very time consuming to build and ship games, and releasing batches of new games requires a large chunk of cash up front (I'm spending a small fortune at the moment preparing to release 10+ new games for PRGE). Given the time I spend working on building and shipping games, I'm certainly making a very low hourly rate. I feel the prices for games in the AtariAge Store is pretty reasonable given the quality of the games and printed materials and the time that goes into their production. I could always raise the price of games in the store, but I don't want to drive people away from homebrew games. I also spend a good amount of money and time preparing for any shows I attend, most notably the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. Even though there's a nice surge of sales due to release of new games at PRGE, I'd likely have those same sales in the online store without having to attend the show. But it's nice to get out there and introduce more people to AtariAge and the large homebrew scene across various consoles. And to see all the AtariAge members who attend the show and visit the booth. This is something I'd prefer to continue doing, even though it is a drain in resources (time and money). So, back to ads. I'm leaving a good chunk of change on the table by not having ads on the site. Forum subscriptions help a small amount, and I greatly appreciate everyone who's signed up for a subscription. But it's not a significant amount overall, especially relative to the hosting costs. Also, I spent roughly $3,000 total on the recent forum upgrade and server move, and this is outside the normal hosting costs. A good portion of that was having a fourth dedicated parallel server I was using for working on the forum/site upgrade, and it's that new server that became the current web server you're using to visit AtariAge (the old server was retired after the switch). But other costs included paying professional designers/developers to create the custom AtariAge theme for the forum, as well as various custom plugins to replace modifications I made to the previous version of the software (such as the ability to indefinitely edit posts in certain forums). Ads will be placed on the main website and the forums. I'm not going to place ads in the store, since it seems a bit overboard to have ads in a store where you're selling items (I'm looking at you, eBay!) Ads will appear below the header, mixed a few times with content on the page, and at the bottom of the page. More ads will be shown to guests than to those logged in. Subscribers will not see ads on the forum, but you'll still see them on the main site (there's no login associated with the main site, so no real way to filter those out). There will be no obnoxious pop-up ads, no ads that cover a good portion of your screen, no video ads, and no ads that autoplay audio. I will use revenue from the ads to help make AtariAge better in several ways. One of the first things I'd like to do is hire professional developers to revamp and expand the main games database. This is something I've wanted to do for some time, as that area of the site is woefully out of date and very much in need of updates. But I simply have not had the time to do so. I also want to upgrade the store to completely new software, and as part of that upgrade, allow digital purchases of homebrew games for authors that want to offer that as an option. I'd be able to hire developers to make improvements to the forum software beyond what's already done. This could also help finance projects such as getting new cartridge shells made for the 2600 and other systems. And this may allow me to setup an AtariAge booth at more shows across the country, versus just one or two shows a year as I've been doing for a while now. I wanted to give everyone a heads up that this was coming, rather than the appearance of ads being a surprise. I welcome any feedback on this issue and look forward to your thoughts. Thank you, ..Al

Just received an email letting me know Pro(c) Atari issue #14 is out now https://proc-atari.de/en/xt_new_products I think I am going to snag the magazine/shirt bundle

Minor update: 399.009 This fixes the default for F18A sprites-per-line, which I added support for in the last version. Without this fix, any software that enables the F18A but doesn't change the sprites-per-line register will get no sprites at all. This fix assumes you have the jumper set for 9918A mode. https://github.com/tursilion/classic99/blob/master/readme.md

Just received the second round of physical proofs for the Fantasy World Dizzy and Speedball 2 labels and they look great! I've authorized the printer to put these into production, so I will have them soon.

Please forward an 8x10 picture of your wife, her measurements and phone number where she can be reached when you're at work or dorking around in your basement. P.S. - I'm sure she won't leave you over your faith in Atari.

Yes, I received these PokeyONEs this week and will be using them to build ten copies each of Bentley Bear's Crystal Quest and Super Circus AtariAge for the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. Here's one I tested last week with all the POKEY-based games we sell in the store: I will buy more PokeyONEs after PRGE to make the POKEY-based games available without people having to send in Ballblazers or POKEY chips. I should be able to offer those games at a comparable price as I was when selling them with a POKEY chip. ..Al

I'd love to see them get bitten by their own practices and get sued for using other people's content for their faked screenshots and faked gameplay videos among other things.

Yikes. I don't know if the UberStrategist intern has gone into hiding or what, but that subreddit's devolved into Thunderdome.

"If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor"

If we instead look at what would return something for a reasonable amount of work, there are better targets. Leave BASIC as it is. It's easy to access and can do a lot, in the extended edtions, as long as you aren't in a hurry. If you are, you can stay with BASIC and learn how to include assembly support, perhaps to the extent that you build libraries with useful, and fast, functions. Or you can go Forth, which is already there and is much faster than BASIC will ever be. If you want to stay with a more conventional language, which is still very well developed on the 99/4A, you can go to Pascal. It's faster than BASIC and comparatively easy to support with assembly. Where Forth represents a slowdown, compared to assembly, of three times, Pascal is about five-six times slower. Both are stack based. In Forth, which is much closer to the hardware, that's obvious. In Pascal, it's more an under-the-hood thing. For the p-system, there are actually two possible projects, which are reasonably doable, and beneficiary. The first is to make a modern version of the p-code card, if not as an expansion box card, but at least as a side expansion "device". Today, 60 kbytes of memory and some logic for simulating GROM access to 48 of these isn't too difficult, if you are used to making hardware projects. Making a clone implies that you don't have to rewrite it, just re-package it. There may be copyright issues, although I doubt anyone would find it worth fighting. The reason for this is of course to make the p-system available to more people, since the original p-code card is pretty rare today. The second is to implement a native code generator, NCG. Many p-systems had that from the beginning, but not the one for the TI 99/4A. However, the PME does support the opcodes NAT and NAT-INFO. As far as I've been able to determine, it should be possible to run code that's been exposed to a NCG on a 99/4A too. The purpose of the NCG is to let it process an ordinary code file, produced by the compiler, and automatically replace p-code instructions by assembly equivalents. There are quite a few p-codes, that can be replaced by one, or a few, TMS 9900 instructions. You thus get rid of the PME overhead in interpreting these p-codes, and hence speed up that particular piece of code by a factor of five or so. The more complex p-code instructions, like Call global procedure or Call external intermediate, probably also Divide real, you simply let stay put as they are. They execute so many assembly instructions when they run, that the interpreter overhead is minimal. But simple things, like load constants, integer arithmetic, fetch/store local/global variables, they are translated to the NAT p-code instruction followed by the assembly code in line. I've never used any NCG myself, but I've read about that they typically don't convert an entire program, but you tell it which procedure(s) to convert, and there you do of course select those that run many times, and thus does the brunt of the work. There's no point in converting code that handles user input, or other things that aren't time critical. The beauty of the solution is of course that you write and debug your projects in Pascal, then just make a speed improvement on the selected parts, and that improvement is fully automatic.

I was writing something but Turbo Laser was faster and just read in my mind. So +1 on what he said As far as I'm concerned, I'm amazed by people who master the hardware but strangely enough, I have never been passionated with ASM myself. What I like is to create games, with cool ideas, nice gameplay, depth and fun, and I feel that the extra time needed to get that entirely with ASM is not worth the price. But I admire those who take this path! Ohh well this is probably why I ended up as a gameplay programmer and not an engine one ps: on a side note, it's kind of ironic but C++ is becoming even more complex than ASM nowaday ^^

And I for one seriously hope that people well also get into hardware details and value what the Lynx CAN do and not how anything can be done with the least effort possible.

At least it's virtual so that no one can be given that special Kool-Aid the next time a comet flies overhead.

lol- lemme tell ya folks, you aren't missing a bit in the Werner Bros.' echo chamber. Posted from the FB Atari VCS page:

Just put the whole site in comic sans font, and if you subscribe it goes back to the regular font. I'm sure that will bring in a gazillion new subscribers

Hi Matthew, Thanks for your thoughts regarding subscriptions, I appreciate it. You're right about higher price of the monthly subscription versus the $2.50/month if you pay for a year all at once. I did that to encourage people to buy the yearly subscription, and discounted it for two years to entice people to buy two years at $50 (which works out to just over $2 a month). I'm sure some people would be willing to pay more, but I didn't want the cost to be excessive. I don't feel subscriptions will bring in nearly the revenue that ads will, but I really won't know until the ads have been running on the site a few months to see what happens. The initial thought of subscriptions was to give people an optional way to help contribute monetarily to the site. And if ads should appear at some point, that subscribers would not have to see them (at least in the forums), so I've had that listed as a benefit ever since they were a thing (years ago). Creating multiple one-year subscription levels at different price levels is an interesting idea, and no idea how many would bite for a higher cost for the same amount of time. I'd prefer to encourage more people to buy the $30 subscription and get more people doing that, as opposed to higher prices that might result in less subscriptions. Once the ads are in place, I'll do a bit more to promote subscriptions as an alternative to seeing ads, so that will probably help drive some sales of subscriptions. This thread alone has done that. I had never thought about the joysticks as a reason someone might not want to purchase a subscription. I don't really want people to feel that people who have subscriptions are somehow "better" than those who have not, and generally they are low-key. You don't need a subscription to take full advantage of the forums, but they do give you some useful benefits (such as a larger PM inbox and a longer edit window). And that's something I won't change. ..Al

I used to stay up late every Friday night to watch Space 1999 and the first series to include Moonbase Alpha: UFO. In the first series it was one of several defensive points to protect Earth from some hostile aliens--and then it got blasted off into space along with the moon at the start of Space 1999. It was definitely an interesting science fiction series (or two).

Welcome to the group. The FAQ will definitely give you a lot of information to play with, but we're always here to help too.

Sure, but if we're talking Ataribollocks(tm), this makes more sense:

True. The disc shouldn’t cause any thumb issues. It’s the hard side buttons that do, especially with an Intellivision II.

I grew up with the Intellivision, but I never had a problem with the disc - then or now. To me they're way more ergonomic than the 5200, 7800 and CV controllers. They cause way less stress on your hands and wrists. The bigger problem with the Inty controllers is the side buttons, not the disc.

Hi Beery, For now I am just playing* with the assembly code in an attempt to better learn and understand some MDOS mysteries. Getting back into some programming has brought up thoughts of whether or not to migrate HW to ABASIC, and whether or not to change my mind about retiring the system this year. I would say it is too early for me to make any decisions and I'll just play by ear. (*My programming time is limited to at most one day a week due to job demands and the changes I'm making to further improve my health, like more cardio, etc.)

Just verified it with my real Geneve. The first picture shows four blocks of bytes: (1) the first 24 bytes in page >38, (2) the first 24 bytes in page >3B, (3) the first 24 bytes read via >9800 after setting GROM address >0000, (4) the first 24 bytes read via >9800 after setting GROM address >6000. As already stated above, the pages contain the GROM contents with an offset of 1, wrapping the last byte to the first position. The second picture shows what happens when you map the GROM pages into address area >C000->DFFF, which I actually did first. This is when you start getting doubts about your mental sanity, or whether you are just overworked. I did not know (or forgot about) the fact that page >03 must remain mapped to address >C000.

@digdugnate I really don't know how much more of that group I can take. The next comment down is basically saying whoever wrote that article is working for AtariAge. Like what crazy conspiracy do these nuts believe in?

You were right! Sent from my UL40 using Tapatalk

Issue resolved!!!!!! It was due to using the B variety chip! Got some AMD 29F040 non B’s to test and they work perfectly.

BTW... I was talking about AA and this thread on my Twitch Stream last night. The guy I was talking to thought it was a pretty cool idea. It didn't seem like he was familiar with the site as, at one point, he said he was googling Atariage. lol I wonder if he'll start an account and submit some times... probably not, but it'd be cool if he did. Thanks to everyone who contributes to these threads (the Classic and the Modern trackers). The numbers and comments are always a highlight of my week.

Contrary to Rich's assertation, a good programmer could write an all assembly XB that was fully compatible with programs written for the original TI XB. But you need a place to put it. You could probably put it in SAMS or one of the new super carts with a lot of RAM. But this is very tedious programming. Writing and testing, rewriting and retesting just to get it to duplicate what XB does. I can't imagine anyone actually doing this for the entire XB cartridge.

I found out the hard way that most of the Basic to Assembly stuff has not been well documented. I used trial and error to write the routines for Wizard's Doom; I even had to resort to using Classic99's debugger to figure out how to find values on the stack. The provided libraries are garbage; they're ridiculously huge (You use up most of the 8K to load it) and written for every generic case possible. You can find disassemblies of the code on the TI Tech pages, which is what I used to write my own specific routines. Once you get to a certain stage, using SYSTEX is also invaluable; that lets you embed the assembly code INTO an XB program directly and load things 1000% faster. (Albeit at the expense of flexibility; if your assembly code changes you have to remake the XB file from scratch.)

The news spreads. WhereThePDivides, you can pick up your free tacos at the front desk: https://www.pcgamesn.com/atari-vcs-update-2019

" Time to check in again on the Atari retro console… dear God, it’s actually got worse Pro tip: When you’re removed as a Reddit moderator, you may want to review your life choices By Kieren McCarthy in San Francisco 25th September 2019 05:02 GMT https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2019/09/25/atari_retro_console/?fbclid=IwAR18YAQFnSKUThz5mHz68AcjI3yOBavrDv4ubNRQRjjj6mn8wvuXc5x_j80