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Zeviouz for the Atari 2600 was unveiled today on Zero Page Homebrew channel - I highly recommend watching the show if you have not seen it already! Here is the binary version for everyone to playtest - it is around 80% complete, with the following features missing: Andor-Genesis Motherships. PAL60 support. High-score table. Atarivox support (not sure about including speech?). Attract mode. Two-Player Support (turn-based, not simultaneous). The game is a direct port from the 7800 source code, with lots of optimizations and tweaks to make it work on the 2600. The main differences from the 7800 version are: The scrolling background uses the playfield instead of tiles. The sprites (by Nathan Strum) are based on the arcade version. The ground enemies are animated, e.g. buildings open-up to fire. The level layouts are modified to reduce flicker. Note that it is a CDFJ/ARM game and will only work on a recent version of Stella or a real Atari 2600 with a Harmony cart. Let me know if you find any bugs, or have any suggestions! Chris zeviouz00_NTSC.bin

Wanted to let people know that I had a mold made for the Atari 7800 cartridge shells and can now offer them to anyone that needs them. Details 1) Made in USA. 2) You can choose the color. I can make them in a variety of colors. Any of the Nintendo 64 console colors and most of the GameBoy console colors. 3) The shells have been re-designed to remove the locking tabs. This allows for much easier opening and closing of the shells without fear of breaking the locking tabs on the inside. The shell is held together by the central screw, which is included with the shell. 4) Price is $3.50 each plus shipping. Once I have a list of initial interest I will have them made up. I also have an Atari Jaguar shell mold nearly finished and will be offering them as well shortly. I also have Sega Genesis shells available as well if anyone is interested.

Sure, no problem. There's an outer Y loop and and inner X loop, where I run through each character position, and do a bunch of sine addition for the index at that particular location. Between frames the sines advance. The vertical component is 2 waves that are out of phase. The vertical component on it's own looks like this: vertical plasma component, via JS7800 online emulator The horizontal component is also 2 (different) waves that are out of phase. On it's own it looks like this: horizontal plasma component, via JS7800 online emulator When the components are added together, the interference of both vertical and horizontal waves is what makes a basic dull plasma. Think of this as a height map. To liven up the dull plasma, I take the height map value and use it in a sine table lookup to get the actual shade of grey. (the shades are just dithered characters running from dark->light->dark) If your sine table is 256 bytes long, this has the added advantage that you don't need to worry much about values that go past 255, when you're adding the sine components together. Similarly, you can intentionally overflow 255, and get a plasma display that's more stripey. There's a pretty good overview at this site. (it uses javascript, but the concepts are well illustrated) I'll eventually release the source for the plasma, but I need to clean it up and comment it out a bit. plasma-y-only.a78 plasma-x-only.a78

you can play now. please do not redistribute this version. in the near future I will be looking for a person with experience who would like to create levels for the game (a dedicated level editor is available - it works in a windows environment) h2demo.atr

Here's an expensive Activision promo item.

Finally had a chance to play Beta 10 through. A little shy of 14 and 1/2 minutes - not too shabby. The snail falls nicely between Donkey Kong's ancestor and the Octopus in difficulty. A much welcomed challenge and addition. Very well done. I like it a lot. Though, believe it or not, for me, the shinning stars in this release are the updated projectiles. It is amazing to me how a little touch and polish to something as 'simple' as those projectiles, being splashed with some blue and red color, makes a world of difference. It is one of the things I really look forward to, if not the thing I look forward to with every release, the refinements and updates. Sure, they could have been left as is, and yes the game would still be great. Updates to spikes, projectiles, the status area, castle walls, castle floors, platforms...the list goes on and on. Those kind of touches are what make such a professional looking product and 'finished feeling' game.

I haven't found any undocumented ones, but I haven't tried either. All of the games I've looked at have built in-handling to wrap around from the highest game variation back to the lowest, and none so far had 255 game variations. Some games don't use binary bits of the game number as options, and some do. There are certainly game variations that don't appear in the matrix at the back of the game manual such as the difficulty switches, and there is usually a Color/BW variation as well. I'm not sure if anyone noticed but the Combat, Indy 500, Warlords, Hangman, and Championship Soccer menus have a built in a BW menu screen. I didn't think of adding a BW screen when I did Video Olympics. The Space Invaders Menu though is mostly black and white already so that is okay. The rest of the menu games are color only so they didn't get a BW menu. Maze Craze is a game I've thought about but never started. Maybe one day. I have started another menu game already (no hints), but I've currently paused that as something far more interesting has come up.

7th Entry - Looks like I need to keep up with the Joneses... ? 240,300

Finally starting to wrap my brain around this version... It's kind of the anti-Pac-Man... Avoid killing ghosts. Weird. 180,520

Definitely an odd time to kill the thread. Victories and healthy servings of humble pie are going to be dished out in quantity in just a few weeks.

The internal webpage is now responsive and a little bit prettier. It's also about half the size of the old one.

Hello, thought I contribute.. I enjoy looking at the promos. I don’t think this has been up yet.

Work in progress, try and spot all the games.

I've a feeling that the only "hard core" this VCS is ever likely to see is the rubble that goes in to the landfill on top of it.

Thanks for featuring Zeviouz on your show today! I really enjoyed watching the big reveal, and seeing you and Arelan having fun with the game. This is the reason that I write these games, so that others can enjoy playing them! Cheers, Chris

Here is a screenshot of the game - note the 4 color Playfield and awesome sprites by Nathan. Chris

Between the RIOT investigations and refining the 7800basic rotational controls once again, I've been in a very technical headspace lately. As a... uh... break... I decided to work on a little plasma demo yesterday. For now it's just single color 320A mode, though it does use one of the composite artifacting colors. The plasma code is just a simple collision between 2 vertical sine waves, and 2 horizontal sine waves, so it's pretty basic and periodic. I'm going to look at adding another component to perturb the regularity, and possibly a higher color mode change, when I get back to... uh... slacking. Anyway, enjoy if you will... Plasma Demo, via the excellent online JS7800 emulator plasmatest.bas.a78 plasmatest.bas.bin ...all glory to the hypnotoad!

It's a good thing most people will never need to remove the SD card from their PEB-TIPI unit, because doing so is kind of a pain in the neck. First you have to pull out that huge P-Box, open the lid, remove the card, get some tweezers or needle nose pliers and remove the card, then reverse the whole procedure to put it all back together again. After I got my portable TIPI unit, I figured it would simpler to swap the same card back and forth so I did not have to maintain two separate configurations... as long as it could be removed as easily as on the portable unit. Well, I've been using the SD card extender for a while now and it does a great job. Another benefit is that I did not have to map two more TIPI locations to my network as the mapping is to the individual RPi, not the SD card, so a quick swap is all it takes. Oh yeah... this lets you use any full size SD cards you may have lying around as well, so you can use your newer, smaller and faster ones on other equipment.

Hi, everything has been printed and mailed to me but seems to be stuck in the limbo that is the current postal system, the overlays were mailed to me from Chicago over 3 weeks ago and the boxes from Germany over 2 weeks ago but so far neither have arrived and tracking apps seem to lose track of them once they left their country of origin. Normally these arrive in a week but I guess these days nothing is normal anymore. I’m as frustrated with this as you and probably more so, sorry. Fingers crossed they arrive soon.

So I was just going through some old disk boxes, and I came across this gadget that I had made back in the early 80s. It would get slipped over the edge of the disk while it was in the drive to prevent the disk from getting written to, either accidentally or by particularly cruel copy protection code (which, at times, misbehaved on 1050 drives on some older titles). Obviously, if you are done with the disk image, you could put a permanent tab over the notch, but if you are still tweaking the code on the disk.... Later on, I added toggle switches to the front of my drives to switch between Writeable-Protected-Normal. But anyway, I thought you guys might get a kick out of the innovation from my teenage years. (The tape I used back then did not age well)

Wow, I’ve loved all of these but that might be my favorite! So cool!

I've been looking at old Atariage threads and damn they are funny. People chatting about $1 C64c bundles, $50 Apple //e bundle with RGB monitor, and the for sale subforum is very interesting: boxed Jaguar for $35, Atari 800 bundle for $10 shipped. God stuff sold for nothing back then! And then there are people who dont seem to have any etiquette at all, demanding for cheap c64 parts, and then there are people using the good old formal and polite tone all the time. I also recognized a few usernames I still see from time to time; in threads nearly 20 years old. Also, what used to fill the "Modern Gaming" section back in the day now belongs in Classic Gaming General. Musta been fun back then.

I’m comin’ for ya Sparty ? 180,671

Espial - 13.420 Rescue Terra - 86.350 Condor Attack - 95.854

Awesome score, but I think you should be tested for performance enhancing drugs. No PEDs allowed on this site..... ?

You know these are not games, right?

Just love the game (possibly my single favorite) and love figuring out how to math the shit out of it.

A Miracle game !!! Every single turn that I took, I guessed right !!! I'll never get close to this score again LOL. Mr. Matt-Man - you're the man on Pac-Man !!! I took every single turn correct, and I still only have half your score LOL.

11,730 ? First Pac-Man score!

First post on Atari Age I had a 2600 and a VIC20 back in the day but got rid of them in the late 80's as I graduated college. I've had another 2600 for about 15 years stashed in a closet and bring it out every few years to see if it still works. I started playing with vintage Computers when the Pandemic hit. I got several Commodore variants and have been enjoying cleaning and restoring them. I also ended up with a working 800XL and a 1050 drive and have only mildly tinkered with it as most of my time as been on the Commodores. I took my kids by a Video Game store over the weekend and spotted an XEGS in a cabinet for sale. It was complete with Keyboard, Lightgun, Grey Joystick, and both original cartridges. I did't know what it was. I researched the crap out of it when I got home and decided I 'needed' it I went back and tested it in the store and it worked. Its in good shape but very dirty. I need to take it apart and clean it. I also need to build another power supply as I won't trust the brick-of-death. I'll get an SD based storage device. I also want S-Video as it is SO good on the Commodores compared to Composite. The light Gun also needs some repro stickers made. Here it is currently in my office. I'll post back when I get it all cleaned up and working properly Scott

The problem is not in the arrangemend of the disk, that i good news My program looks for the disksize to the amount of sectors in block 0. For the disk made by Fred Kaal it says 720 sectors, even when it are 1440 sectors. In the 'Save as' commando, i count the real amount of sectors. The 'Crunch' command does not go beyond the disksize, so the sectors above 720 do not move, but the addresses to those files in the FDR have changed. When i use the real amount in the 'Crunch' command, everything was working again. I will make a new version of this program (V3.0) and i will change the disksize for new P-code disks to 1440 sectors or 720 blocks.

2nd Entry for Utopia - We are still just talking about a participation point here, but atleast there's been some improvement. +152 points over the 1st Entry... ? 2,129 - 30T / 45S

Improved a bit, but somehow took a rebel in this one. I’ll hafta work on that. Also, I wish the unspent cash was added to your score at the end! That would make it interesting. 2,510 30/45

I also found a couple of "letters"... SEAQUEST: SPIDER FIGHTER: I wonder how many games have these.

Seeing the Special Edition of Activisions above (with the Greatest American Hero contest) reminded me of another promo item. As detailed in that issue, Activision ran a contest called the Starmaster Challenge. Aside from the grand prize, Greatest American Hero t-shirts were also awarded. Here's Mr. Activision wearing one.

Thanks for posting the Activisions newsletters. Well, the first one you posted was a Special Edition, which is actually one of the rarer Activisions newsletters. Below is a scan of the cover page for Volume 1. And to answer your other question, Volume 7 was the final issue. And there were also two "UPDATE" issues, for which I'm attaching the cover pages; these two are pretty rare as well.

Do we actually know that the Factory is producing VCS’s at all ... I really thought we would have seen more pictures of packaging, pallets and shipping containers by now?

Rescue...97,925 Espial...17,140 and I totally suck at condor attack..any hints on this one???

At the end of each round it will display your points for that round. Experiment with different things: 1. Factory and house? 2. House, school, and one crop 3. House and two crops 4. House, fishing boat, and one crop See what gives you the most points. Just reset after turn 1. Long term, see what gives you the best increase and where you "max out" and your score does not improve after buying more of it. Accounting for population and your peoples' happiness. You might even try plotting income, population, and score with number of houses, schools, factories, and hospitals if you have time. The analysis is a lot of the fun for me. Googling "utopia" not so much...

I thought this thread was over but I found a couple of things that I thought people might like to see. Here's my collection of Activisions newsletters... I'm not sure if this is considered Volume #1 or if I'm missing #1 Volume #2 Volume #3 Volume #4 Volume #5 Volume #6 Volume #7 Anyone know if there's a volume 8 or beyond?

Rescue Terra I: 111850 - Not bad for my literal first and only play! Favorite of the 3. Condor Attack: 2798 - Least favorite of the 3! Espial: 12150 - This one grew on me on repeated plays.

Hello, I've written up a summary article for the contest so feel free to share that around. We deff need to get more people to rate the games! https://atarigamer.com/articles/let-s-take-a-look-at-these-6-new-homebrew-games-for-atari-lynx

C? ARM? Chris you big fat cheater. I love it! Great job. It's fantastic.

Record IO, particularly variable length records with more than one record per sector, can benefit from a shortcut approach. Time saved will depend on total records read, the number of cards preceding the target device's CRU and the number of device or subroutine entries the DSRLNK needs to search through before it finds the target. And in the case of DSRs like the Horizon ramdisk ROS, DSRLNK must search the devices AND subroutines due to how the tables are linked for special operations. One method is to save the CRU address and the dsr device/subprogram entry point within the main DSRLNK and then leverage those values elsewhere to turn on the card, BL to the correct address, and perform usual DSRLNK error reporting steps. If you are using a subprogram call like >14 (direct input file read) you would call the subprogram once with the standard DSRLNK and then switch to the shortcut version until the operation is complete. You can also implement a shortcut as a separate routine or in-line with your IO routine. To read a file you would open with BLWP @DSRLNK and then for all remaining record IO your loop would include setting the workspace to GPLWS, set any environment addresses like 8356, R12, etc. , execute the call, restore your local WS and read/report the error.

Hi guys, Back with Adam Koralik. This time we see him discussing the Neo-Geo and the NGCD. Thank you Adam. Awesome material for sure. From the description, "This is a discussion topic video about the fourth generation of videogame consoles. This will be part seven of my nine part mini-series. Here we will discuss the SNK Neo Geo AES (and briefly the Neo Geo CD), the fourth entry in to the fourth generation of game consoles." Anthony..

This is what I get by using 52 gram. I could animate a few things by redefining background cards: - bubbles on the right tube - what appears on computer screens - those green buttons could blink/change colors. Too crappy? Does it look like something worth playing? Please be honest.

Somewhat unnoticed, release 0.223 of MAME was issued on August 06, 2020. (Usually, there is a message on the MAME forum, but not this time.) You can download pre-built binaries from our WHTech server: https://ftp.whtech.com/emulators/MAME/full/windows/ https://ftp.whtech.com/emulators/MAME/ti99/linux/ https://ftp.whtech.com/emulators/MAME/ti99/raspbian/ Interesting changes: In the debugger, writing to addresses in the Peripheral box works again. This was broken since release 0.173 (more than 4 years ago). The TI-99/2 now has an Expansion Port (-expport), and currently the only choice is "ram32k".

Everything is working thx everyone. We still need to adjust the POTs to the correct image, I am getting everything setup for it right now. I am happy to have a working Atari, a 400 was my first computer.

Rebooteroids is excellent. Definitely highly recommended. ?

Don't send it anywhere, nothing wrong with it, just measured my 800 PSU, it's 10.48V AC off load. and you can't fix these unless there's no output voltage, all it is , is a step down transformer. No it's not, this is the RMS AC voltage before rectification and regulation, the regulators are 7805 and 7812 both can take an input voltage of 35V max, the dc voltage from the rectifiers will be around 13.4Vdc before regulation, well within spec of the regulators. I would be looking to check the regulated DC voltages after regulation inside the 400. Check the 2 +5VDC (A and B), the +12VDC and the -5VDC