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I volunteered, and was not paid. I was a backer of the Atari Game and and offered to help there... And when the Atari Box was gearing up I jumped over. I do that a lot. I also run unofficial reddit communities for Arcade1Up, AtGames Legends Ultimate, as well as the one for the VCS. I tend to run communities that allow criticism because I believe that you cannot improve if you do not know what is wrong. And fixing the issues should be public too. Far to often employees take these issues personally or see them as a personal attacks and will remove the posts and/or ban the user. This makes it look like the company is trying to hide something or just not address the issue. Addressing the issues publicly shows everyone that you are aware and working to improve. I would not trust a company that tries to hide genuine user complaints, even if the language they use to talk about the issue is "colorful". Ultimately the user is on the company's side, they want things to be better... And that's good for everybody. Putting away my soapbox now...

I am never buying another new videogame console. Feels good to be off the rollercoaster. Launch day? Don't care.

^ Someone please hook this man up with a Concerto! And right after you do that, please PM me if you have a second one. Happy 50th birthday @darryl1970! And thanks for the port that's helping us relive some great memories!

Some more progress on reviving the tape deck on @Ron The Cat's K/C. I felt it probably deserved its own thread this time: Still not certain what is wrong or why it's improving (I'm primarily focused on documenting the tape drive behaviour at the moment), but when the result is that we get to see and hear Jack after 40 years, who cares As you can see things are still not great as the options following the introduction fail with "BAD TAPE". So thankfully my and Ron's state of unfitness will remain for the moment and we're not obliged to "kick yourself in the backside every day".

So it seems like everybody and their mothers are making Atari 2600 and/or 7800 “arcade joystick” controllers these days. And why not, they can greatly improve your game-play experience, and they’re beyond simple to wire for those attempting their first custom controller builds. The ones I most often come across are either built with 1 button as a 2600 controller, or with 2 buttons…usually for 7800 compatibility (while still maintaining 2600 1-button compatibility). But as 2600 fans are of course aware, several vintage games have now been hacked, and new homebrew games are being programmed…to make use of 2 “2600” buttons…which are wired very differently from their “7800” counterparts. But what surprises me, and what I’ve not yet seen, is anybody building a custom joystick controller that offers both, 2600 and 7800, 2-button compatibility in one controller. So I decided to take it upon myself to make this happen, "for the greater good": I originally built this controller about a year ago, as a 2-button, 7800-wired joystick controller…for use mainly with my 2600 & XEGS. As I grew up with a 2600 in the early 80s, I decided to “theme” the controller with aesthetics inspired by the CX2600 console, and the CX-40 joystick…hence the wood grain CPO, the orange segmented ring surrounding the joystick, and the black-body w/ orange plunger concave push-buttons. At the time I built it, I’ll admit, I wasn’t really aware of these new-fangled 2-button 2600 games, as I honestly don’t pay much attention to any of the new 2600 stuff. I mostly concentrate on and around, the original 2600 games I grew up with, and the ColecoVision. But then some months after I built this, I built my buddy and me, each, new dedicated 7800 controllers; and then I re-wired this one, for use with 2-button 2600 games. But that got me thinking…why does it only have to work for the 2600 or the 7800? Why not simply make it work both ways? So I re-wired it once again, and added a side-mounted push-button switch with a mechanical indicating cap, that allows me to simply press the switch for 2600 2-button games…and press it again for 7800 2-button games: As originally assembled, the controller was built into a Hori HSS-09 donor controller. The donor was completely gutted of its original components, and it required minor modification to some of its internal structure, as well as machining the top steel plate for installation of the new components. From there I chose a Seimitsu LS-32 joystick (which allows for 8-way square/round/octagon, 4-way clover, and 2-way horizontal/vertical gates), and 2 Ultimarc GoldLeaf push-buttons. I installed new, stiffer than standard, Cherry micro-switches into the joystick to firm up its throw and feel, as well as significantly quiet down the audible “clicking.” The new push-button switch on the controller's right side that “re-wires” the buttons, is a simple multi-pole switch that allows me to change all of the necessary lines in and out of the buttons, from one wiring scheme to another…all without the use of any magic, witchcraft, or powered components. So there you have it…proof that both 2-button, 2600 & 7800 compatibility, can be achieved in 1 controller, with 1 set of buttons, with 1 controller cable, and no active electronics. This may be a world's first. W.F.S.T.Y.A.M.A.

Adam Is Me - gameplay:

The great hall shortage of 2020!

I don't think there are very many spare ones lying around, but the good news is that @batari has said that he will make the first batch of the new ones available to developers first.

You can use the small memory model of 64K until you need more. When you need more, you could implement overlays. It's a lot like SAMS. There's no 8086-style segment registers in the hardware. The TMS9900/9995 doesn't make separate code and data segments possible. The TMS99105 does--I'm reluctant to use it. Geneve has an external memory mapper with 8 8-bit page registers. A memory mapper is an external chip (see 74LS612 from TI. It's in SAMS). In the Geneve, it's a set of 8 registers, each holding 8 bit page number. Each mapper register governs 8K of the 64K logical address space. (TI prefers 16x4K pages, Geneve implements 8x8K pages.) The external memory mapper in the Geneve works by taking the top 3 address bits (of 16). It gets the 8 bit page number from one of the 8 registers, which replaces those 3 bits on the wider bus. So the 16-bit logical address has become a 16-3+8=21 bit address for 2MB of address reach. Or, 256*8K. The Geneve sends those 21 address lines across the Pbox backplane (after using them onboard, to address its own chips). That's the physical address side. In the Geneve, there are 256 physical pages. In the MDOS task model, each task has a table of 256 virtual pages. Physical page numbers are allocated into there starting at 0. The 8 mapper registers are populated with the physical page numbers. Either by direct write to the register, or an XOP call. It's up to the task to decide, when to move a physical page number from its virtual map, into a mapper register. But certain XOP calls (DSR) accept 24-bit addresses -- these are translated to physical page numbers by looking at the task's virtual page table. That's just software. When DSR needs to read or write data for the calling task, it looks up the task's physical page page and maps it in. This would be better with some illustrations Example A task initially had 1 page or 8K of memory. The OS loaded it in physical page >99. So its virtual map is just [99,...] The task asks for 15 more pages, to reserve 128K of memory in all. Suppose it is handed physical pages >31 to >3F. (they need not be consecutive--fragmentation.) The OS puts them in the task's virtual table, which is now [99,31,32,33...3F] It's up to the task to move the physical page numbers into mapper registers. It could copy the first 8 into the eight mapper registers (page 0 must never change) That's a flat 64K memory model. Or say you want to split it into 32K of always-present, and 32K of paged pages. The task would move 4 physical page numbers from the first 4 virtual pages into the first 4 mapper registers. Then it could fool around with the next four. It could use the top four banks to have up to 32K of its other 96K mapped in at one time. Now it can ask the DSR to read in a whole file. It can ask the DSR to grab 96K of the file and put it at virtual address >8000. Or it could ask the DSR to go get 32K of some other file and put it at virtual address >18000. The task doesn't need to map this in. The DSR figures out how to get it done, and cleans up after itself. Once the task resumes, it fiddles with its mapper registers to bring some of that virtual buffer space into some of that upper 32K. * It's not really a 24-bit address, just because it fills 3 bytes. There are really only 21 bits of address possible.

I want to live in a world where A Flock Of Seagulls is still relevant.

So glad that "The Curse of Oak Island" managed to put together a new season this year. I'm hopelessly addicted to that show. (Overly-dramatic narrator: "A rock? With a scratch in it? Could this be the proof that time-traveling space aliens buried a secret treasure in the Money Pit three-thousand years ago?")

HAHA - it works! Go to DOS in the included ATR, and binary load drawer.obj. test.atr

They need to know where to send the... This is a hard letter to write.... ?? It will be nice to see them finally ship something.

Ask them to lower the price. And include a game.

Thank you for all the kind comments. I can't believe it's been more than 10 years. Best regards! -EdF

It was a looong night last night. Getting there. Only about 20 remain that are not reserved

That was actually based on a real animal

I'm 64 years old, and will be 65 this coming February. I would have loved to have done all of this BITD, but limited money, resources, and lack of cheap large capacity SRAM as well as small microcontrollers got in the way .

Thank you for the suggestions @ivop I do plan to change align() to __align()in a future release. Most of the other non-standard modifiers already use the __ prefix. https://gitlab.com/camelot/kickc/-/issues/572 I also have a plan for better support for "empty" data structures, which currently generates zeros into the binary file. https://gitlab.com/camelot/kickc/-/issues/545 The Atari 8bit-platform XEX-format is unique in supporting multiple memory segments in a single binary file. It is currently possible to write your own linker definition in KickC, and by doing that and using #pragma data_seg() / #pragma code_seg() you can generate XEX-files with multiple segments. Maybe I could find a way for the compiler to automatically generate the linker configuration needed for creating a XEX-file with multiple segments. However, I have not currently planned that feature, since I am unsure how I can find a good general solution for adding it. /Jesper

JMP START The jumpstart as the first line, tells a story of wanting to be run as an E/A5 binary. Could add DEF START.

mazeatron 100400 maze speed 2-medium mame, intellivision controller

Updated Maze Shoot: 47

Thanks for the link! There are no 16k*8 DRAM chips. I suppose the closest would be to use two 64k*4 DRAM chips (4464 DRAMs). This would provide 64K of VRAM, of which 16K would be used, the highest address line would need to be a constant. I am not 100% if the DRAM refresh would work in this case though. I've seen the circuit you referred to before, for example here is something similar: https://www.tindie.com/products/mfkamprath/tms9918a-video-card-kit-for-rc2014/ It could be simplified by integrating all the logic into one CPLD, for example XC9572XL could do the job, then you'd have the 9918, CPLD and SRAM. The whole VDP+VRAM can be contained also in one FPGA, like I have done for example in my ICY99 project. But if one wants to retain the original TMS9918 (or TMS9928) then I think the lowest chip count is with the CPLD+SRAM solution. Thinking about it, if one wanted to use the original TMS9918 and TMS9995 - and it would be acceptable to use a CPLD, I think the Jr could be reduced five chips: TMS9995, TMS9918, SRAM for VRAM, ROM and a CPLD for everything else. hmmm... this would be a fun project to do! Although I would add one more SRAM to provide RAM for the TMS9995. And I do have all of this chips already at hand. hmmmm....

A little late but it's here and came with a free gift

Fuck whatever this Adventure 16bit thing is, I want someone to make another game with this cat in it.

Sorry, I had to.

The wayward writes were probably the cause of the glitches in Concerto. The problem was that some areas of memory weren’t protected from writes. Once I disabled writes to all cartridge space it worked.

Alright people. It's not "marshal law." Nor is it "marshall law." It's "martial law."

It comes with 100 games packed in! What more do people need? That's a great value and like means the console is like only $100. ?

Wow 10 yrs! Congratulations on the anniversary. Thank you for signing my copy of Halo 2600 at PRGE 2017 and more importantly, thank you for signing two more copies for my sons at the Houston Area Arcade Expo.

mazetron 34500 maze speed 2-medium intellivision hardware

Beat the third gate!!! 63,971! Well, heck, this is a lot better than I thought I could do on this game, not sure it's enough to advance, but may be all I got.

No problem. 99% of the work was done by whoever gave me the ATR with the listing. I just burned my eyes out and had the wife wondering WTF all the random numbers were as I sat here talking to myself I'll work on translating the magazine text if you like. Apologies for the very rough translation - should be close enough to get you started: In graphics 15, only 4 colours can be displayed simultaneously. By an interupt management process, it is possible to display 128 colours on the screen. This system manages the 192 lines of the drawing with the possibility of displaying 4 different colours per scanline. The screen is divided into three bands: The top band, called test pattern, indicates the 4 colours hidden by the cursor. The area representing the drawing sheet The band on which all the control operations are indicated To change the command in the window, just press the letter corresponding to the first letter of each keyword. Colour: Choice of one of the four colour registers which you can change the content with the Colour function Function: Allows you to select the instrument you will be working with. Brush: You can draw with the joystick by pressing the button. You have to your your layout four brushes that you choose with the Tool key Tool: A point, a small circle, a small rectangle, and a slash Magnifier: Magnifies a small part of the drawing and allows point by point modification of the drawing Ruler: Allows you to draw lines. There are three types of rule: Broken: Makes a segment Suivi: Segments are linked end to end Escape: Segments converge to a point Letter: allows to write. RETURN allows to exit from write mode. Fill: identical to the rule except according to the value of Scolor, this function fills the empty zones corresponding color Scolor: selects one of the four registers for Fill Color: two arrows indicate the line you want to work on. The color change is controlled with the joystick. Choose the register you want to change (R) . The numerical value (in hexadecimal) is displayed on the last line of the control strip. To change a color, press the button. The joystick pointing up or down changes the color, to the left or to the right, the luminance. If you have several lines to color in the same way, use the B key. Clear: when you press the joystick button the program is reset. Diskette: allows you to load (C) or save (S) your drawings. For a cassette player type ? then RETURN. A floppy drive: D1:DESSIN.PIC then RETURN.

L'Atari: "We can totally do that! Of course, it'll mean delaying until 2024."

200 PCB's going to a few different places -- last bits of fine tuning for production. Following runs will be larger.

I struggled with where to post this, unsure if it should be in Classic Gaming General, or Homebrew. Seems like Homebrew (under programming) is best suited for conversation during the creation of the game, so I chose Classic Gaming General. If the mods feel that it’s best suited for the Homebrew section, please feel free to move it. Anyhow… Introducing Oof McBrewster’s Haunted House Adventure – new Homebrew game for the Nintendo Entertainment System What started as a summer project to introduce my kids to game design eventually evolved into a finished game. oofmbrewster.com < I created a pretty barebones website just to get something up n’ running, with game info, and for something to play with in the days to come. Sell Thread in the AA Marketplace < got this started in case anyone is interested and wants a copy. Oof, If you’re reading this, I’m dead. Oof McBrewster receives a letter receives a letter from his recently departed, dear old Uncle Crodie telling him of a treasure in the center of a mansion worth a “friggin’ fortune.” However, supernatural forces (with perfectly normal, human levels of greed) are hard at work stealing it for themselves. Oof needs to navigate the mansion to collect the scattered pages which contain the vault’s combination, while avoiding (or defeating) the enemies to remain properly alive. That’s the setup, in a nutshell. I’ll post a bit more info later, starting with some gameplay bits. In the meantime, here are a few pics n’ videos. Screenshots captured using Mesen – high accuracy NES Emulator – running on Windows, no filter A neat little teaser trailer. Found a guy on Fiverr and thought "this could be fun" Title Screen video. Footage captured via Mesen. Gameplay footage featuring the intro levels. Footage captured via Mesen. Finally, here's a demo rom featuring a handful of levels for those who may want a "hands on" with the game. Tested on Mesen. May work with other emulators as well, but no others have been properly tested and confirmed at this time.

Complicated usually comes into play if you need a lot of overlaps and such. Most of us don't get into the complicated addressing, I should have prefaced my comment by stating for most programs, it is pretty simple once your memory map is set up. DSR operations in the Geneve OS are much simpler IMHO, as you can can use CPU RAM for any device, work with the PAB in CPU RAM, and point the OS to it. No DSRLNK or other complications.

I have a lot of respect for your approach.

And I am sitting here watching Season 1, Episode 3 of NEXT where an AI is learning and expanding it's reach...............

So from this I could load my 8k micro kernel at >400 and then TAKE OVER THE WORLD! ? Thanks Beery

Any chance of finishing up Rally-X?

Tim, Did some more testing. With MDOS 7.00 in Rompage mode, with DM2K I can copy two directories deep from WDS2 to DSK0 no issue. With MDOS 7.00 in normal mode, with DM2K I can NOT copy the first file under the the marked directory (with subdirectories --- aka MDOS source). It chokes on the first file, as the MDOS directory is not made so it can't copy the file to the TIPI. This sounds like a limitation of the master DSR in GPL mode. At least now, there is a way to backup hard drive files on spinning devices out over to the TIPI versus using floppy disks. Beery

All joysticks for the Atari 8-bit are digital and just close contacts for the selected direction, the only pulsing involved is the trigger on those that have an auto-fire option. The Atari 5200 joysticks are analog and use 2 potentiometers to give variable signals for up/down and left/right.

I must admit that I foolishly thought this would not be the issue since I completely changed out the red coil for another, so I didn't even bother trying. But, since you've suggested it, I decided to try it and bam, it worked. Thanks man.

I did pick up one of Bruce's (B&C, MyAtari) $149.00 Lynx II. It is in really good shape, the screen is good, and the buttons are fresh. I knew I could trust Bruce. Always a fair seller.

MUNCH Adventure Compendiums I have uploaded the MUNCH Compendiums I & II as an historical interest. They were excellent collections for their time. For some reason the file TWENTY:8 is missing from Compendium I in some archives (Dragons of Hong Kong) so you might want to check your own. Unpack files with Fred's TIDir. AdvComp_I.zip AdvComp_II.zip

Here's a Huge, Ever Growing, Pulsating Brain at the Center of the Ultraworld: Along with some Little Fluffy Clouds: Enjoy these two classics from The Orb.

T56/TL866II software updated to Vn 10.50 11/11/2020. More chips added. T56 Support List.txt TL866II Support List.txt

Awesome, I can't wait to play them! It's always good to browse your site - makes me feel like a kid on Christmas again.