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Version 3.90 of my emulator Altirra is out: http://www.virtualdub.org/altirra.html Thanks for everyone's continuing support, whether it be bug reports, feature requests, discussion, trying out the helper programs on real hardware, etc. 3.90 final is essentially the same as 3.90-test34, except for release changes. Although previous versions tended to be about six months apart, it's almost been a year since 3.20, so I figured I'd better hurry up. Highlights of the 3.90 release: Accuracy: 800 System Reset timing fixed, undocumented RMW and WSYNC timing fixes, several fixes to 65C816 direct page wrapping and Veronica, many fixes to FDC/RIOT/6809 for full disk drive emulation, improved POKEY two-tone mode emulation, more accurate power-up hardware state. Debugger: Improved disassembly window with automatic block separation and inline call target preview, more disassembly options, better loop detection in the history window, Alt+Shift+click to jump to history for a pixel. Disk drives: 810 Turbo, Amdek, and Percom AT-88 full emulation; easier file import/export in the Disk Explorer. Display: Improved PAL artifacting and color defaults, gamma-corrected frame blending, color setting import/export, PERITEL and monochrome monitor emulation, fixes to color correction logic (esp. with VBXE). Firmware: Updated AltirraOS 3.26 for improved compatibility with hardware addons and software, improved autodetection for custom OS ROMs. Tape: Faster emulation especially in warp mode, audio filter compensation for better turbo decoding, and enhanced debugging for tape issues. Video recording: Aspect ratio correction, scaling, and direct H.264/WMV compression support through Media Foundation. UI: Dark theme, improved audio monitor/scope, improved timing for slightly reduced latency. With 3.90 done, it's now time to start the 4.00 test series: http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.00-test1.zip http://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.00-test1-src.zip First, there are a couple of breaking changes in 4.00: End of support for Windows XP SP3 and Vista. The new minimum operating system requirement is Windows 7 SP1. End of support for DirectDraw, which has not been native since Vista, and OpenGL, of which only old versions were used anyway (and was not enabled by default). New features and fixes: Palette solver: Matching color palettes in Altirra has been a long-standing issue, since it is unable to take .pal/.act files due to needing the generation parameters for the palette rather than the final colors for various features, and matching colors from real hardware is a difficult task. Pretty much everyone has their opinion on what "true colors" should be. Well, in 4.00-test1 there is now a solver to guess the parameters for you: You can either give it a PAL/ACT file, or you can give it a picture -- and although the picture needs to be a good one, it doesn't have to be perfectly straight as you can align it to compensate for projection by dragging the corner dots. It's compatible with any show-palette tool for the Atari that does 16 lumas across and 16 hues down. Click Match, and it'll start grinding on the parameters to try to get as close as possible, and tell you how good the match is. Or, you can have it overlay the current palette as dots over the picture to check the palette while manually tuning it. Debugger: On-screen watches now update continuously while stepping and the 'wx' command has options for hex formatting, bank-sensitive debugging is now supported for SpartaDOS X cartridges, improved handling of subdirectories when looking for source files, and the console output window is faster when flooded with output. Oh, and the Memory window has been improved with scrolling and more display options: Display: Added pure white monochrome mode, and fixed a bug in the high artifacting engine where chroma artifacts moved in the wrong direction for ascending hues. XEP-80: Fixed an emulation bug in the way that scrolling occurs, and added a couple of new toys to the Additions disk: an XEPVHOLD.COM tool to reprogram the XEP80's timing chain for a shorter display that's less likely to roll on modern displays, and a new ultra-speed ALTXEP8U.SYS driver that runs at symmetric 31.5Kbaud instead of 15.7K or 31.5K send / 15.7K receive. Tape: Added support for KSO Turbo 2000. Disks: Added emulation for the Percom AT88-SPD, and added 1791/1795 FDC selection for the AT-88. Fixed support for virtual SpartaDOS disks with directories and files whose names start with periods. Added a polling workaround option for virtual disks for environments where file change notifications don't work (some Wine environments). Audio: More accurate emulation of uneven volume bits, and rewrote cycle-level filtering emulation for improved high frequency aliasing rejection during downsampling. UI: Dark mode now has reskinned buttons. Added support for auto-hiding the menu bar. Fixed mouse wheel scrolling when the OS page-at-a-time option is on. H: device: Lifted 16MB limit for binary (untranslated) access, and fixed errors not being returned properly during burst I/O accesses. AltirraOS 3.27: Fixes to the printer handler for EOL handling, particularly for the Atari 1025, and improved compatibility of variable usage to work with Monkey Wrench II. Custom Devices: More scripting language constructs like break, while/do-while loops, and forward declaration of functions, better threading support, and more scripting methods for manipulating memory. Custom devices can now raise Parallel Bus Interface IRQs. Custom video outputs can now be created with either text or graphical output, and even support text select/copy like the emulator's built in ANTIC and XEP-80 video outputs. New sample custom devices: Bit-3 80 column, 1090 80-column, and a PBI-based metronome.

today I found in my inbox.

With XM: Without XM:

Really wish I had time to play more than a handful of tries this week ? Crackpots - 84,460

I recently purchased a Retroflag GPi Case (http://retroflag.com/GPi-CASE.html). It's a GameBoy-like case for the Raspberry Pi Zero, with a 2.8 inch IPS screen. The Pi is placed in a cart that you connect to the case similarly to a console's cart. With RetroPie on the Pi you can create a portable retro-gaming machine. The GPi is good product in general, the buttons and the D-pad are responsive and the screen looks fine, no tearing or lags. I have installed/configured with RetroPie all these systems (that runs fine on the Pi 0): Atari 2600, 7800, Genesis/Megadrive, Master System, NES, PC Engine, Vectrex, SG 1000, Game & Watch, Game Gear, Game Boy, Lynx, Famicom Disk System, Coleco, Intellivision, lr-MAME 2000, VideoPac/Odyssey 2, ZX Spectrum, MSX/MSX2, C64 and of course the TI99/4A! The GPi Case has a D-Pad and 8 buttons: A, B, X, Y, Start, Select and RB, LB on the back of the case. These are enough for all the consoles. With Colecovision, Intellivision, Spectrum and C64 it's possible to have virtual keyboards/keypad overlays so you can start all the games without having to hook up a Bluetooth keyboard. Really comfortable! Guess what? Only the TI 99 emulator needs a keyboard to start the games! ? The only emulator that can run on the Pi Zero is TI-99/Sim created by Marc Rousseau (https://www.mrousseau.org/programs/ti99sim/). It's a nice emulator, with good compatibility and speech support. It's not at MAME's level, but it's enough to play most games in this TI99 handheld. Unfortunately, the joystick config is hardcode and doesn't fit well with RetroPie/EmulationStation ecosystem. You need a keyboard to pass from TI99 initial screen to the game and play with the joypad. Moreover, the GPi Case is configured by default with the D-pad in Hat mode and the emulator is only using Axes mode. It's possible to change mode pressing Star+Up for 5 second, but then you need to reconfigure EmulationStation for using the menu. Looking at TI-99/Sim I've seen a new 0.16.0 version (released after last RetroPie distribution) and in the changelog there is a comforting note: "Changes to better support RetroPie setup & joystick usage", but no additional infos in the docs. I've contacted Marc asking for additional information. He explained that has ported the code to SDL2.0 and managed to get the keyboard emulation working properly. Basically, the joypad buttons can also simulate the pression of keys 1 to 9, so allowing to pass from title/option screen to the game. That sounds good, so I've compiled and tested this new version. It's now possible to move to the game screen, hovewer when testing Parsec I realized that it does not allows to change the speed for the refuel section. All the buttons acts as Fire button! ? Moreover, I cannot play Donkey Kong (it asks for Enter key...) and other Atarisoft games. The same for Alpiner, Big Foot, etc. Finally, to select a new game it's necessary to exit from the emulator pressing ESC on keyboard. I need also to press FCTN-REDO at game over to play again... Since I do not want to use a keyboard nor uninstall the emulator, I decided to have a look at the source code to "patch" it. I've added the Hat support and now it's possible to play most of the games without a keyboard. ? Most of the joypads have at least 8 buttons, so a minimal set of needed keys/combination of keys needs to be identified to run confortably most of the games. The ideal number of keys to have would be: 0 to 9, Enter, Space, +, FCTN+QUIT, FCTN+REDO, FCTN+BACK, FCTN+AID. Total is 17, plus the "Fire" button and "ESC" to exit from the emulator, for a total of 19 keys. This number must be reduced, since normally there are less button available. For example, the Xbox One controller has 10 buttons + 2 triggers, the 8bitdo SF30 has 12 buttons + 2 triggers. For my Retroflag's GPi Case 8 buttons layout, the selected keys are: Fire, 1, 2, 3, ESC, FCTN+QUIT, FCTN+REDO and Enter. With a joypad with 2 additional buttons it's possible to have also "+" and FCTN+REDO. Finally, with a 12 buttons joypad , it's possible to have also Space and 0. Summer is approaching and I know that there are guys here that needs to play some Parsec and MunchMan under beach umbrella, so in attachment the "patched" executable and the .cpp source if someone want to improve/made its customisation. Also a couple of images and videos (not edited, just raw recording, sorry for the poor production...). If you need .ctg games tested and ready to run, just check at the end of the article on the TI99 emulation with Raspberry on TI99IUC site (http://www.ti99iuc.it/web/index.php?pageid=homepage&artid=203#.XuZAoG5uKUk). Try this TI99 handheld, it's really fun! ? DKong.mp4 Parsec.mp4 Menu.mp4 ti99sim-0.16.0-Joypad_Patch.zip

Hi there! As we all know, world is going through some difficult times right now. COVID-19, social unrest, unemployment, political polarization, a lot of bad things going on. Most of us are under increased stress levels, new work and family routines, etc, myself included. Due to that, I had to make some hard decisions. After 4 years of intense work, I have decided to suspend work on OMNI and SGM2 for an indefinite period of time. I don't think this is the best time to keep investing money and effort in new propositions considering the current circumstances. Instead, I have decided to go back to the basics.... Not all is lost though. As part of the OMNI/SGM2 effort, I developed new tools for porting arcade games, and those tools can now help me reduce development time of SGM1 arcade ports from months to weeks. First game using the tools is done, Moon Cresta/Eagle. It took me 3 weeks to get the game running with all graphics and all but 2 sound FX done. I am now working on those final sound FX. Game is fully playable, rock solid, and runs at 60Hz locked. It is also "arcade perfect" in terms of gameplay, where each nuance is perfectly emulated, and I am compensating for the shorter ColecoVision vertical screen resolution precisely. But that is just one of the many other game I have planned. Next I hope to do Time Pilot, hopefully get the game done in a couple of months, start to finish. Also in my short list are Lady Bug, Frogger, Popeye, and Pengo. I hope to get those done or at least started in the first half of 2021. Yes, sounds crazy, but I think the tools are up to the task from my experience so far. And finally, we have a few games long due for the SGM coming this year, namely DKA (which is now taking advantage of the new sound tools), and Pac-man DX, which has been waiting in the shelf for years now, printed boxes and all. We are also re-releasing Gradius. So for 2020 the release plan is: DKA (receiving some final sound improvements), Pac-Man DX (ready for beta, boxes printed), Gradius (re-release, boxes are printing in China), and Moon Cresta (Grazi is working on premium packaging, to go for printing soon). All but DKA are premium line games, with our deluxe packaging (the same we used for Gradius). Unfortunately DKA can only be offered as a PCB due to some recent legal issues. All of that said, we have started the process for a 5th run of the SGM. Printing is underway in China, and we are about to place orders for the assembled PCBs. We will post very soon about how to pre-order. But wait, there is more! We plan to have all our Color line games back in stock soon. Our Super Game Controller is entering alpha testing soon, and we should be able to show you a physical prototype in just a few weeks. We are getting a new cartridge tooling that is exclusive to Opcode. Conceptualized by renowned designer Ted Mayer, the new tooling will free us of 3rd party sources (since I sold my original tooling years ago) and at the same time will give us an exclusive cartridge with a distinctive look. There is one more thing to announce, but I will do that in a separate post. Hope you like the news. In the meantime, stay safe and healthy and let's play some ColecoVision!

Thought I'd share our collection after a major reorganization. My son and I have been 125 Platinum for years...however we keep going down upgrade rabbit holes and variants. "The Wavier Wire" are things available to trade only. We don't want to sell those. We may have other games we don't consider part of our collection...I hope you enjoy. https://www.flickr.com/photos/13839114@N00/albums/with/72157714428838177

Expect 2 or 3 Intellivision games from this Season 12, showing another appearence for Season 13. ? Clue: They are of Non-Coleco origins. ?

Here's the version they played on the show... paranoid_zph_wip.bin

Hey gang. We still need to find and digitize Dorsett Educational Systems cassettes. Most are sets of 8 tapes. Fl - fluid power systems CL - great classics Mf - Math/Fractions 4-8 got it https://archive.org/details/DorsettAtariFractions Vm - vocational math AdP - adult phonics (this one is TWO sets of 8 tapes) En - Energy and environment (this was “to be released” so who knows, might not have actually been released.) If you have any of these, please speak up. -Kay

Oh, I underestimated the ability of Intellivision gamers! One more week of competitive Pinball - I’m going to put in a lot more games on this one.?

My times for the week: CoCo 1/2: Downland - 53 min. NES: Marble Madness - 20 min. SkyKid - 20 min. Atari Jaguar: Cybermorph - 763 min. Started out the week by beating Marble Madness, but I needed a change of pace after spending a lot of time on the NES over the past few months. So, first I beat the old CoCo game Downland, which I'd been meaning to do for ages; and second, I decided to take on Cybermorph, and completed the first 4 of the game's 5 levels. Not a bad little game, despite its reputation.

Squeezed in a few more games tonight. This is actually pretty fun. I'd never played it before this round. Game 2: 48,700

Intellivision: Beauty and the Beast - 15 minutes Spiker! Super Pro Volleyball - 12 minutes Miner 2049er - 32 minutes Atari 2600: Space Cactus Canyon - 20 minutes

101,030

CRACKPOTS : 66,680

Power Strike (Aleste) (Sega Master System) 69 mins

Ralph sent me the full collection. VERY appreciated!!! I even had a great phone call with him. They have been scanned and made available at: http://intellivision.us/intylines.php These have been made available with his permission and should not be copied an posted on other sites.

Here are my times for this past week (June 8th through 14th)... Amiga 500: Thundercats - 154 min. in 8 sessions. This week I got a bit better at Thundercats. I now often beat the 4th stage and then lose all my lives at the next one. Other than that I'm trying to figure out how to get as many games as possible into my gaming schedule.

Made one more change; the 'XM ENHANCED' logo on the splash screen will not appear if the XM is not detected. This will be a quick way to tell if the XM is there or not.

Northern Lights with buck 27 colors I'm not a big fan of dither, but I just had to use knoll dither with ciede predistance once On an eight core 3.5GHz AMD64 it took thirteen(!) minutes just to dither and render the destination picture. And all cores were in use! I suppose it could take hours on lesser CPUs. Tip: if you ever use knoll dither, immediately save the output.png-dst.png file somewhere else. If you use it later as input, be sure to disable dither in your new run and set both /predistance and /distance to yuv. The line artifacts in the deer luckily resolved. Sadly, there are still some in the darker areas. What dither did BTW is introduce some blues! Without dither, it was all green bands. Edit: white speck is not en error BTW. It's a celestial body ivop_northern-lights.xex

The next guy I'm working on to interview is the Video Game Critic. I bet he has alot to say

https://alienbill.com/2600/atari-sound-forger/ I might be reinventing the wheel here, but I was craving a tool to make it easier to experiment with Atari sounds in a real time way, so I made one, and am about halfway to my ambition. There have been various tool to find good frequencies (including on real hardware) but I hadn't seen much encouraging real time play, treating the computer keyboard like a musical instrument. And some of the powerful off-atari tools are pretty hard for a duffer musician to understand. there are mappings sets (that you can configure and store locally) that let you map any computer key to any Voice/Frequency combination, and optionally display those mappings on a piano keyboard. I think it's fun and maybe a little useful as it is, but I'd like to be able to record tracks in real time - not sure if a browser based tool will be quite precise enough, but worth a shot. And the take the recordings and generate code, starting with batari BASIC. For now the plan is for a simple "voice is on, voice is off" approach. It might be interesting to try some sounds that have ADSR type properties, or blend voices. I'm aiming for simple (and fun to bang around on) but powerful.

Finally had a decent game on this. Got up to the third screen a couple of times, but didn't stay there long! 112,500

Not me! I'm on overlay pack duty.

Unofficial standings after Popeye (HIGH SCORES) 1. 55,700 gezkc [+11] 2. 52,900 BiffMan [+10] 3. 48,700 JasonlikesINTV [+9] 4. 48,100 cmadruga [+7] 5. 40,600 Player One [+6] 6. 39,300 fakecortex [+5] 7. 36,700 Mangia-Boy [+4] 8. 23,700 wolfy62 [+3] 9. 22,800 gar0u [+2] 10. 20,900 JacobZu7zu7 [+1] 11. 14,700 roadrunner [+1] 12. 13,600 jblenkle [+1] Rankings (through game 15) 1. BiffMan [+119] 2. gezkc [+116] 3. cmadruga [+94] 4. JasonlikesINTV [+81] 5. IntyFanMatt [+71] 6. JacobZu7zu7 [+68] 7. Ace24 [+64] 8. wolfy62 [+48] 9. mr_me [+46] 10. fakecortex [+39] 11. Player One [+32] 12. cparsely [+31] 13. dpisicane [+28] 14. Intelligentleman [+23] 15. jblenkle [+22] 16. ed1475 [+16] 16. Mangia-Boy [+16] 18. roadrunner [+15] 19. m-crew [+13] 20. Intellfan [+10] 21. hoosierdadee78 [+7] 22. S.BAZ [+4] 23. t0spmad [+2] 23. Mister-VCS [+2] 23. gar0u [+2] 26. DarthCloud [+1] Games Won 4 - BiffMan (Atlantis - Demon Attack - Mission X - Auto Racing) 4 - gezkc (Burgertime - Auto Racing - Happy Trails - Popeye) 3 - mr_me (Lock 'N Chase - Tron Deadly Discs - Space Hawk) 2 - IntyFanMatt (Frogger - Carnival) 1 - cmadruga (Tron Deadly Discs speed 1 - Beamrider) 1 - cparsley (Mouse Trap) 1 - ed1475 (Space Armada)

Apple II Sabotage - 156 minutes Just one game. Always loved Sabotage, first non-Sierra game I got shown on the Apple when I was given it by family and the best paddle game I own. It's a bit rough to play at times due to the Monitor /// ghosting like mad and my paddles definitely need cleaning yet it stays being tons of fun. I got my serial card in, a CCS 7710 (I wouldn't put a nice SSC in a II+ because half the software I see taking advantage of the SSC won't run anyways due to not having a 65C02) which the seller had also bundled with a 7720 Parallel card (having RAM instead of ROMs but notably sharing the same driver as the 7710) and a homemade clone of the ALF MC1, which was all of $16 and some change on eBay. Loaded up ADTPro and it turns out whenever I use the generic Serial driver made for the 7710 it just goes to a black screen so I guess that was a bust, the serial does work amazingly for a VT52 emulator to my PDP-8 though and the thread about using the A2 as a VT100 emulator has me interested as maybe I could interface it to the 11/23+, so I just went back to loading stuff over audio for now. Depending on how the day goes I may go grab a new game, I saw the shop has Wolf3D for the Jaguar which I heard was quite good and has some unique bits to it, and I'll definitely be trying to load more random Apple bits. I want to find more games that use these paddles, they're a fair bit fun, but I just don't know many titles that aren't RPGs or text adventures so that'll take some time.

I've pretty much settled on the technicals now. There will be two "planes" for anything that's drawn as a bitmap overlay. Plane #1 is a mask, and its job is to remove pixels from the board. So, it will be just 1-bits for pixels to keep on the board and 0-bits for pixels to remove. So the first part of the draw is to AND the mask with the board graphics; think of this as "carving out" a black area for the bitmap to be drawn into. The second part is to OR the new bitmap onto the board. This means that I can simply create two layers in an image - the bottom layer being the mask (pixels to remove) and the top layer being new pixels to place on. I've already checked there's sufficient time to do this, so now to the tool. I've discovered that GIMP - the image editor I use - outputs ".ora" files, which are zip files with each layer saved as a .png image. This might be the easiest way to go, in terms of usage/modification/tool. I expect this will take me a couple of days to get running - but the nice thing is that I won't ever have to worry about clashing with whatever is already on the screen - I can simply mask that out, irregular shapes and all - and I expect it will look nice enough.

I wasn't expecting my household to have much gaming time to contribute this week, on account of having a friend visiting and staying with us since last Tuesday, but he ended up bringing along his Nintendo Switch so we actually did quite a bit of gaming together! At first we just played a bunch of Animal Crossing, checking out each other's islands and trading stuff, then after he went to bed I got in an hour or so of Resident Evil on my Switch every night. Halfway through the trip though I introduced him to New Super Lucky's Tale, which he absolutely adored and played every day until he finally beat it last night. We also played a ton of Monopoly on the Switch, which was on sale for $10 on the Switch eShop this week so we both purchased and downloaded it on our respective systems and played a game or two together every night for the past few nights. Even the misses got in on the fun and played a couple games of Monopoly with us, and it ended up being a great time for everyone and well worth the $10 price of admission. Lastly, since so many games were on sale on the eShop this past week I also downloaded the Castlevania Anniversary Collection on my Switch and put a little time into the original Castlevania, but I think I'll be moving on to either the new English language localization of Kid Dracula included in the collection or just playing through Super Castlevania IV once I finish up my game of Resident Evil. That's all for this week though! Ineligible (All Nintendo Switch) Animal Crossing: New Horizons - 205 minutes New Super Lucky's Tale - 590 minutes Monopoly - 335 minutes Resident Evil - 350 minutes NES Castlevania (Played on Castlevania Anniversary Collection for Nintendo Switch) - 25 minutes Total Video Game Play Time This Week 1,505 minutes (25 hours 5 minutes) [25 minutes eligible] Individual System Play Times This Week Nintendo Switch: 1,480 minutes NES: 25 minutes

Usually a month or a few weeks after the last one. Hope to see you there.

thanks to an Intellivision buddy I found a copy last year at PRGE. I don't remember if it was Hankster or Jason who made me notice that LV Poker & Blackjack that nobody wanted although quite special

I didn't know you were building E/A 5 images. For those images, the first word must be an executable statement, but in your case, it's >0000. Funny that it's doing anything at all. Maybe it's just skipping the 0, and then it tries to execute your '.X'/'X.', which of course would do different things. '.X' is XOP *r8, r9, and 'X.' is SZCB @>0000(R14), @>0000 (since there 0's following). As suggested, move your text further down (not necessarily the end of the program), and make sure START is the first word in your program (it could well be a JMP or B). Whew! ? EDIT: Just tested it: The CPU will indeed just skip over >0000. The next question would be if >1000 or >0000 is faster ... ?

It would have been some other year. 2004 was in San Jose. I thought that wasn't quite true. IIRC, it's Manchester encoded, so you get a half-cycle of 1.5kHz if there's no bit-change, and full cycle of 3kHz if there is. (Differential Manchester has the property you described.) Or am I mis-remembering? There is a digital track recorded next to the prerecorded audio track that contains an odd, semi-repeating pattern. Frank and I hypothesize it's a time-code of sorts, used to keep animations in sync with pre-recorded audio. It does not fit the same encoding scheme as the 37 x 15 data chunks. I never quite isolated that part of the 6502 EXEC, but Frank might have. For everyone else's benefit: Digital data is encoded in chunks of 15 words holding 37 bits, with a small leader before each chunk. The header is four 32-bit words containing a cute V pattern in the bitmap: 00000000 00000000 00000000 01111110 00000000 00000000 00000000 10111101 00000000 00000000 00000000 11011011 00000000 00000000 00000000 11100111 Within the chunk itself, as @Lathe26 states, each 37 bit line consists of 5 framing bits and 32 payload bits. The 5 bits are framing bits have a fixed value (11101). The remaining 32 bits form one bit-plane of 15-bit data. That is, one word corresponds to "bit 14" for the 32 words, the next for "bit 13", etc. (I believe they're sent MSB first.) The 15-bit words contain 5 bits of SECDED code (not classic Hamming, but isomorphic to it), and 10 bits of data payload. The bit-plane encoding spreads dropout errors across multiple ECC words. (Side note: The SECDED code was apparently designed by Dean Inada. (I forget who told us that.) It uses three sets of rotated 5-bit values, each with 3 ones and 2 zeros, to represent the syndromes for each of the 15 bits. It's actually slightly better than SECDED, because the error-correct code will try to fix 2-bit errors by taking positions where we saw Manchester violations/carrier loss into account and trying again.) Here is an excerpt from some tape data Frank and I analyzed (mostly Frank): 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000001111110 00000000000000000000000010111101 00000000000000000000000011011011 00000000000000000000000011100111 ['1110100000000010000000000000000000000'] ['1110110000000100000000000000000000000'] ['1110110100000100000000000000000000001'] ['1110100000000110000000000000000000000'] ['1110110000000110000000000000000000001'] ['1110100000000000000000000000000000001'] ['1110100000000000000000000000000000000'] ['1110100000000100000000000000000000000'] ['1110100000000000000000000000000000000'] ['1110100000000100000000000000000000001'] ['1110100000000100000000000000000000000'] ['1110100100000110000000000000000000000'] ['1110100100000110000000000000000000001'] ['1110100100000100000000000000000000001'] ['1110110000000010000000000000000000000'] ['1110111110111111011111100100100111010'] ['1110101101110101110101011011000000101'] ['1110111101001110101010101101100111011'] ['1110101111110100111001010011000010100'] ['1110110111111001010000110111110011101'] ['1110100000000001001110001001001100010'] ['1110101100000110000000010010010000100'] ['1110100001010000111110001000001100000'] ['1110101000100100000100010011000000100'] ['1110101001100100001110011010000100100'] ['1110101101000110001110011010010100100'] ['1110100011000010001010001001010100000'] ['1110110111111010011000111110100001100'] ['1110100001100000001001000001001010000'] ['1110100010000000000110000000001110011'] ['1110111110111111011111100100100111010'] ['1110101101110101110101011011000000101'] ['1110111101001110101010101101100111011'] ['1110101111110100111001010011000010100'] ['1110110111111001010000110111110011101'] ['1110100000000001001110001001001100010'] ['1110101100000110000000010010010000100'] ['1110100001010000111110001000001100000'] ['1110101000100100000100010011000000100'] ['1110101001100100001110011010000100100'] ['1110101101000110001110011010010100100'] ['1110100011000010001010001001010100000'] ['1110110111111010011000111110100001100'] ['1110100001100000001001000001001010000'] ['1110100010000000000110000000001110011'] Data that's predominately 8 bits will have two 37-bit frames (or lines, as @Lathe26 calls them) that are all zeros except for the 5-bit sync. @Lathe26 hinted at this, but didn't draw the connection between bits 8/9 being zero and two whole frames/lines being zero. ASCII data will have three such lines, like this: ['1110101010101001000010010100100001000'] ['1110101000100000101011100110000100010'] ['1110110000100100010010010111000010001'] ['1110111000011101101011010110100101001'] ['1110101110110000000001010100101111010'] ['1110100000000000000000000000000000000'] ['1110100000000000000000000000000000000'] ['1110100000000000000000000000000000000'] ['1110111110111101111011110111001110011'] ['1110100000000000000000000000100001000'] ['1110110010000100010011010001000100011'] ['1110101100010000000000010010001000000'] ['1110100000011001010010100111000010010'] ['1110111000110100000011100010000110001'] ['1110111100000100101000010110001010011'] And, in fact, the block above contains ASCII: SKIP\0 BNDS\0 DATA\0 VRFY\0 EOT\0 IRG\0 US (The \0 are literal zero bytes, ASCII NUL.) There's also a different kind of block that appears during pre-recorded audio tracks: Timing code blocks. The timing-code data retains the 37-bit framing, but doesn't seem to encode the data the same. Instead, it has a repeating 8-record pattern that almost forms a sort of Gray code. Here are some notes I took many years ago, while Frank and I were actively picking apart one of his dumps: Timing blocks are repeating 8-record patterns involving the following 8 bit patterns: a. 11111011 b. 01111011 c. 10110101 d. 10110100 e. 01001010 f. 01001000 g. 00000100 Interestingly, each bit pattern has one more 0 in it than the previous pattern. The 32-bit word divides up into several fields: sync g e c a ? f d b ['11101, 000, 010, 000, 111, 101, 0, 1000000, 000, 111, 001'] ['11101, 000, 000, 110, 001, 111, 0, 0000000, 100, 001, 111'] ['11101, 000, 000, 001, 110, 111, 0, 1000000, 001, 100, 111'] ['11101, 000, 001, 000, 111, 110, 0, 1000000, 000, 111, 100'] ['11101, 000, 000, 111, 000, 111, 0, 1000000, 110, 000, 111'] ['11101, 000, 100, 000, 111, 011, 0, 1000000, 000, 110, 011'] ['11101, 000, 000, 100, 011, 111, 0, 1000000, 000, 011, 110'] ['11101, 000, 000, 011, 100, 111, 0, 1000000, 011, 000, 111'] In each column, the corresponding bit pattern appears, rotated through three different rotations: 0, +3, +6. The pattern starts out with 16 37 word records of all zeros (except the sync word). Then, bit pattern trio 'a' shows up. 16 records later, pattern 'b' gets added. 16 records after that, pattern 'c' gets added, and so on. Once pattern 'g' is added, there's no further changes. New patterns arriving correspond to the '0' in the column marked with a '?'. Rotations of the bit patterns, given in hex: a. 11111011 FB F7 EF DF BF 7F FE FD b. 01111011 7D F6 ED DB B7 6F DE BD c. 10110101 D5 6B D6 AD 5B B6 6D DA d. 10110100 B4 69 D2 A5 4B 96 2D 5A e. 01001010 4A 94 29 52 A4 49 92 25 f. 01001000 48 90 21 42 84 09 12 24 g. 00000100 04 08 10 20 40 80 01 02 Are the codes rotations of each other with just another bit removed? a. 11111011 b. 01111011 c. 01101011 d. 01101001 e. 00101001 f. 00001001 g. 00000001 I know Frank spent a lot more time on this after where my notes leave off, and he did share more of his progress with me. I haven't had the time to dig through and internalize it all yet.

Crackpots: 26,430

A little late, but here you go: 61060

Finally starting to get a groove back on this. Only real bugaboo at this point are some of the unavoidable center drains on the 1st table bumper ejects. While it's possible to nudge and avoid those, a nudge can also turn a good eject into a center drain, and I can't react quickly enough once I know good from bad. 91,870

40600

I was replacing the battery in a MiniMemory cartridge tonight and experienced something I had never before. I clipped the leads from the original battery leaving just short pieces of lead on the board. As I was flowing the old solder with new and preparing to knock or pull the remaining lead out, the damn thing exploded. This sent solder flying, I still have not found the left-over lead, there is a skid mark on my soldering mat, but no damage to the circuit board. The lead hole was completely voided of solder which, while a bit of a plus, I have found little tiny bits of everywhere across my desk, on the face of my soldering station, and on my shirt. I am very happy that nothing went into my eyes. First time for everything.

My thumb's about to fall off. The patch will have to wait I'm happy with my improvement over the week, but I'm still a bit peeved that I got so close yet so far. 69,960

14310. not very good. trying to score better before mid nite. Dang green spiders.....

1-800-OKI-DATA is still Oki Data customer support. You should call and ask if they can send you a new disk on the printer you just opened.

3 new libraries were added to my blibs, all related to new #FujiNet interface: SIO - Serial Input/Ouput interface library. FN_SIO - SIO library for #FujiNet interface. FN_TCP - #FujiNet interface TCP communication library. and two new examples how to use it here. I hope you will find it useful.

ATARI 2600: Crackpots (for HSC) - 50 minutes Dolphin (for HSC) - 30 minutes Megamania - 20 minutes Squish 'Em - 46 minutes Stampede - 22 minutes Stargate - 10 minutes ATARI 7800: Baby Pac-Man [homebrew] (for HSC) - 35 minutes Pac-Man Collection - 45 minutes Pac-Man Collection XM Enhanced - 95 minutes

My initial aim is to recreate the arcade machine on the Atari 800 as closely as possible. After that, I'd like to throw in a few bonus modes. The great thing about asembler is you're just playing around with bytes. I changed gr.8 to gr.15 and it still plays the same (with garbled graphics), so all I need to do to get those nice graphics from MrFish is do a new graphic set, and maybe adjust collision detection a bit.

This Covid 19 is terrible. But, the lock down did give me the time to pull out my first disk drive, the Indus GT, and get it fixed. It's been in the attic for over 11 yrs. Paul Alhart performed a miracle. Now I have a perfect GT again. It looks and performs wonderfully. Thanks Paul!

NO MAN'S SKY (PC - Steam), ~500 minutes in the last 7 days.

Just one for me again... XBox 360 Fallout: New Vegas - 1961 min (Up to level 29 now. Going around with two companions, the only enemies I really have to watch out for are the Deathclaws. Still haven't really dove into the actual New Vegas part of the game, still doing a lot of sidequests and wandering/exploring. Really enjoying the game, obviously. I wouldn't play a game that I didn't like this long. lol)

NES: Baby Boomer: 2 minutes Contra (US Version): 3 minutes Atari 2600: Space invaders: 5 to 6 minutes Gremlins: 5 1/2 minutes Taz: 3 minutes Berzerk Voice enhanced: 40 seconds Ms. Pacman: 4 minutes

Because having integrity and keeping my word is important to me.