Leaderboard

While we finish up the demo ROM for Lady Bug Arcade (expected to be posted in the upcoming week), here are a few teaser screenshots from the progress we've made: Enhanced title screen. Lady Bug Arcade will have 4 skill levels and support 1 or 2 players, plus we're planning on adding in a special 2 player versus mode where each player will take turns controlling the lady bug or the insects! Full animated instructions, just like the arcade! Support for multiple mazes! Choose from the arcade maze or five new mazes, or choose to play with all six in a game (either in rotation or random): Start level screen, now featuring multi-colored veggies (in game too), plus up to six skulls! In-game action with new maze graphics that use a new method to alternate and mix colors to produce 3 color maze/dots with virtually no flicker: (you will still be able to select the option to have separate colors per line with NO flicker) Enhanced extra ladybug screen when you spell out EXTRA with yellow letters: Arcade-like high score entry with no flicker! (thanks @Omegamatrix - I finally used those kernels you wrote for me about 8 years ago. although I took a few creative liberties to get it to work within the existing LBA kernels ). Special thanks to @Nathan Strum for re-doing all of the graphics to fit the new screen height (and thanks again for doing the original sprites back in 2006! ). Also thanks to @McCallister for game testing and feedback! Thanks, John

Ok, I have the Flagship point values correct, and displaying on the screen. I'm not going to post a BIN, however, until I get the sounds corrected. So what I have left: - Complete sounds - Tweak Enemy Shots, Diving, and overall difficulty ramp - If a Flagship attacks the player alone (no escorts) and makes it past the player off the bottom of the screen, it has 'escaped' the level and shows up on the next one. - Modify the sound driver to check a specific sound index (the background drone). If equal, check the number of aliens left in the flock. Use that number for the number of frames for each sound of the drone. This way, the drone will get automatically faster with the number of aliens left without making a bunch of separate speed sounds. If zero, no drone. Possibly divide by 2 (or 4) if too long. - Level indicator My goal is to have this one be the quickest I've ever had a game done (current record is 1 month - Astro Fighter)

sheddy_graveyard_car.xex sheddy_graveyard_car_cropped.xex sheddy_peeking_racoon.xex

Just re strung my electric guitar and tuned it. Took me about an hour because I haven't played it in over 15 years. Getting a new amp next week so I can be cool again.?

IntelliClub A new club for Intellivision enthusiasts by IntellivisionRevolution. www.IntellivisionRevolution.com/IntelliClub (Coming soon) Games, Roms, goodies, merchandise, exclusive offers, and more! Membership fee: $0.00usd Full details coming soon

I saw a bee yesterday! Flying around the mostly melted snow drifts. The high was 59, but I didn't expect to see a bee flying around outside in the middle of Winter!

It's snowing! here in north central Maryland. It started about 1 hour ago but it is still snowing lightly.

Beamrider-32,080 This is it for me, I'm pretty sure, didn't expect to even get the bonus, but yay!!!

I wrote a dedicated a page in my DB for this nice game soon the TMOP's compiled version will be updated also! https://www.ti99iuc.it/web/index.php?pageid=database_cerca&archivioid=339

New version 0.89 - Replaced the old sound fx with new sound fx created by @Synthpopalooza - Added the new tune to the Pony Select screen (Cutie Mark Crusaders Go Crusading). - Other changes to sound code so NTSC/PAL versions play at the same speed. - Changes to scoring. If you can beat the game with a Pony without losing any lives, get a bonus 9000 points for "PERFECT GAME". ----- Find it here ---- advponies.0.89.xex advponies.0.89.atr

Beamrider-28,276 Well, crap. Now I know I can get 30K, so I suppose I have to... Lol, waaaaay better than I expected, no doubt, am already very pleased with this!!!

Okay, will do that tomorrow, supposed to be raining here tomorrow, so no outdoor work. As a side note, I repaired the said Corcomp Ramdisk, been slowly removing old chips, socketing, and putting in new chips. Finally found the blown one, a 74ls00.

IMO the "Killer app" for > 128KB was always ramdisk. That's what we used it for back in the day most often, and it's still useful in specific circumstances. There are a few scattered games that take advantage of it (some great ones even) but they are all very recent in the life of 8bits and came long after the memory was available in hardware. Taking a quick look, there are 14 games in the Homesoft collection that use 320K - many didn't originally, but are adaptations to prevent disk swaps. It sounds as if you are rejecting replies that were made as not good enough for you. This is why the thread quickly escalated into unproductive slinging. People are volunteering opinions, and when someone invalidates a personal opinion in strong terms, that can easily lead to being upset. Also, don't discount the desire of people to do things just because of the tinker and "can it be done" aspect. I have one 800 that has just about everything you can put in it installed. I rarely use any of that capability (I mostly use my 1088XEL), but I like that I have it. It doesn't have to be rational or practical for me to enjoy it.

Rybags is right there are some amazing wallpapers. Sometimes, somehow, they still can maintain some of their glory with Atari limitations. Not sure if the rockpools was for Mac or not but the original photo (hopefully not photoshopped colours) is stunning sheddy_rockpools.xex sheddy_handsfull.xex

I have "QuadGames" -- a single game rom with 5 small simple 4-player games: joust, tanks, bomb defense, indy racing, and surround. It's not yet available on cartridge, but I'm sending out a rom to anyone who purchases the QuadTari. I will have this page available about it, but it's a bit out of date right now. With any luck I'll get it polished up and we'll make it available on cart from the AA store, but we'll see how that goes.

Hello all! Champ Games is happy to announce that the QuadTari is now available for pre-order over at the Bite The Chili Productions webpage! For those who don't know, the QuadTari is an adapter developed by Nathan Tolbert ( @gauauu ) and Champ Games that allows you to connect up to 4 joysticks to your Atari 2600 (for QuadTari compatible games)! You can also use to to hook up 2 joysticks to 1 port, freeing up the other port for an AtariVox or Savekey. Wizard of Wor Arcade supports the QuadTari and allows you to do just this; connect two joysticks to the left joystick port and an AtariVox to the right port for 2 player co-op with voice! There are other Champ Games that support or will support the QuadTari, as well as Nathan T's own "QuadGames": Available now: Wizard of Wor Aracde: supports 2 joysticks with AtariVox/Savekey for 2 player co-op with voice and high score saves. Galagon: supports 2 joysticks and Atarivox/Savekey for 2 player alternating and co-op and high score saves. Zoo Keeper: supports 2 joysticks and Atarivox/Savekey for 2 player alternating and high score saves. Available in 2021: RobotWar:2684: supports 2 joysticks and AtariVox/Savekey for 1 player with 2 joysticks (1 to move and 1 to fire), plus high score saves. supports 4 joysticks for 2 player co-op, each with 2 joysticks (1 to move, 1 to fire) Gorf Arcade: supports 2 joysticks and Atarivox/Savekey for 2 player alternating and high score saves. Lady Bug Arcade: supports 2 joysticks and Atarivox/Savekey for 2 player alternating and vs. mode plus high score saves. Other games: Champ Sports Baseball will support 4 player (2 players on each team), plus 2 player with high score saves. If you're interested, head on over to BTC and check it out!

Colorful piece of art I ran across with a search (hard to see, but she has an Atari tattoo in the illustration on the raised arm) that I felt would get along with the a8 palette. Rasta image is built for PAL, because it's still the case that NTSC palettes fail me almost every time. rtrogirl.xex

Ah, the old Ship of Theseus argument (Google it, kids ...). So long as it uses SALLY, ANTIC, GTIA, POKEY and PIA, it's an Atari 8-bit to me. I'll even go further and say you can replace some of the bits with CPLD/FPGA work-alikes and enhancements so long as the original functionality and its quirks/exploits remain intact. YMMV and it's no use arguing anyone's opinion because it won't change anyone's mind.

Weekly update - revamped enemy data structure under the hood, added new AI & collision parameters - not a lot of noticeable difference yet, though, just trying to get things working with the new code - I did introduce a bug w/ mummies - sometimes I've seen them just take off in a random direction and move really fast... not sure what's up with that though, it's like they're at chase velocity, but nowhere near the player and not moving towards the player. Weird. - new levels have different palettes, I have a better understanding of how that works now - some new interior wall layouts - added "tentacle" enemy type and more interesting mummy sprites - scoring and control tweaks - added a logo to the background, and reorganized the layout of tiles behind the scenes Next up on my radar - more interior room wall layouts - different tiles for different levels - new enemy sprites May or may not post an update later today, depends how it goes w/ the family today. I need to get my eyes off of screens for a bit. PS - I made some good progress this morning. Probably due to listening to Tony Martin-era Black Sabbath while programming. I had a flash back moment to sitting in my basement, listening to Sabbath's first album while playing Pool of Radiance on the c64. One of those impactful little life moments that stuck with me for some reason. wizarddungeon_wip.bas.a78

Now I just need 1 more themed level and i'll be complete. I need to Work on the enemy behaviors a bit more too. https://rumble.com/vdfyo9-level004-snow-level-christmas-theme-mr-turtle-intellivision-2021.html

Not sure what happened to the pic?

I love the monitor riser ?

I'm sure we could afford the Trevor McFur IP and rebrand Odynexus into Trevor II. The jag community is waiting for that I'm sure of it

Nothing would be exciting about it today. If you want Intel core I-9 and GTX 3080 GTX level stuff, then perhaps you should leave a forum devoted to 1978 era hardware. If you are not excited by the modern era stuff we can do such as: VBXE2 for 80 column 640*240 pixel screens, or 320*240*256 colour out of a 21-bit palette, then I can't help you. If you don't think it's amazing to do word processing on this machine with 80 column screen, 160kB single file, or 10 16kB documents, then again, leave. We have a DOS that offers 16 32MB partitions, nearly 90kB/sec R/W speeds, full batch processing.

If all you do is play games, then no. There is nothing for you. If you are an app coder, or use the machine as a content creator rather than a content consumer, then you wouldn't even ask this. Go back to playing Combat on the 2600. 2kB is all you need.

What are you looking for? Porn movies? Did you have one of these machines in the 80s? Going from16kB machine to 128kB and then above was a major event.

I was searching completed eBay a bit and stumbled across the sell. I didn’t buy it but whoever did got an amazing deal. Besides having the original sleeve (which is unbelievably rare) check out what’s stuck to picture 6! This is one incredible pickup! https://www.ebay.com/itm/ATARI-Star-Ship-Game-Program-Cartridge-CX-2603-TESTED/154201344086?hash=item23e71dc856:g:zLEAAOSw0Z1ftU23

I have one I've been working on off and on, but it has been a backburner project. I need to make a couple of test boards using my laest layout to see if the changes I've made cleared the bugs in my first iteration test boards.

You're right, there where also a "pizza box" ? It was for the very first TIny-99/4A, the version 1: Or maybe this variant? http://www.ti99.com/ti/data/images/tiny994a/tiny994a_interne.mp4 This model, while functioning, is abandoned, it has one expansion slot, has no SAMS expansion and no RTC embedded. It has also no GROM 0,1,2 simulator too. For it, I made a 90 degrees 2 slots riser. Although the version 2 (and 3) has 3 integrated expansion slots, it is also possible to install this 90 degrees 2 slots riser permitting to use a smaller case.

I have not done any new design work in a while. Here is the SD card interface. I had put a single SD card ability on the CRU card-it has 1 PMOD connector that can accept an SD reader, provided it is 5V safe. This design is for the front panel. This PCB screws in to the front panel where there are card insertion slots. It has 2 regular size SD modules underneath, and 1 micro-SD slot on top. It connect to the CRU card by 2x8 ribbon cable. One of the wires is the CRU base decoded--that's determined by the PLD on the CRU card. I'm situating it at 1600. I'm reserving the bit at 1600 for the ROM enable in a future 4A or Geneve 9640 version of the PCB. I imagine device names SDC1, SDC2, SDC3, though there's no barrier to coding it for DSK1, DSK2, DSK3 or HDS or WDS. The control register has 8 bits in, 8 bits out, but I'm only using 3 of them. I imagined having Card Detect or Write Protect sense, but those aren't on the cheap SD modules. CRU Map 1600 DSR ROM Enable (reserved) 1602 Card Select, LSBit (0 none) 1604 Card Select, MSBit (0 none) 1610 Alias of 1600 1620-163E SPI transfer, MSBit first (backwards from 9900!) 1640-16FE Ignored As far as software plans, the format will be FAT32, just as they come from PC formatting. This is what I developed on my FPGA board in Forth. The DSR will decode a few extensions. TFI is expected to have a TIFILES header, with the file type info and a 10-char filename inside. Just like xdm99.py writes when you extract using -t. TXT will look like a DV80 file. Anything else will be treated as a DF128 file. Files without TFI headers will have 8-char filenames on the TI side (and unfortunately you will see the mangled-to-8-char kind with a ~ inside.) Newly created files will always be TFI. I should probably think about: supporting DSK or HDS image files, but that's like a whole nuther DSR. It would be easier to have an external program that extracts files from a DSK. emulating the catalog file direct file access (level 2) and what that means--the TIFILES header is hidden? whether any existing disk manager software is going to be a good fit. This will probably require a rewrite, of say DM1000 (like the NanoPEB has.) As usual, all the files are open source. See https://gitlab.com/FarmerPotato/geneve2020/-/tree/master/kicad/sdc

Here's an experiment on my light sixer to see if the misbehaving I'm seeing onscreen in my PlusCart's menu is caused by heat. So, first we see normal letter spacing (look at the spacing in the word ROMs, for example). Now I briefly apply heat (via hairdryer) to TIA.... spacing is now wrong. Next I apply some squirts of relatively pure (99%+) IPA... and we can see the TIA cooling down. This experiment is the proof I needed that glitches on the 32 character display are heat-related issues causing changes in TIA operation.

I found a neat game for TI (and other platforms) on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/projectWormMaze/posts/1331868543652318

That's possible, but I remember discussing this with some others many years ago. I'm not sure that anyone has ever seen a Blue Max rank with anything other than Class 4: The manual *IS* wrong in a few ways. For example, I've seen a rank called "Squadron Leader" that isn't mentioned in the manual. Also, it says that you can't bomb the tall buildings in the city level, but you can. You have to climb to 80+ feet and they don't collapse, you just see a small explosion on the roof and get 30 points. The thread above also has some good tips and tricks in it. Blue Max: 3,610 (Class 2, Air Cadet) The gravity really throws off my normal strategy, which is to fly at 20-25 feet about 95% of the time and strafe ground targets, only rising to shoot down a plane or bomb something. With the gravity on, that's too dangerous. And flying at higher altitudes means I'm more vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire. Going to need some practice on this one. ?

There's something from FHMC too. But I'll add a menu to select game mode (classic, funky, crazy). And there's (and will be more) from neither Q*bert nor FHMC Q*Bert but from my inspiration.

NECRO ALERT: I spoke to Bob Polin about this, but he had no knowledge or involvement whatsoever about how the art was created for Blue Max.

Yes, lately it seems mind-changing is a lost art.

After I published my interview with Suzanne Ciani, she found an unpublished Atari song in her archives. It's a tune titled "My Atari". She sent it to me and allowed me to share it. It's really good, worth a listen. Hear it at https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-special-episode-my-atari-by-suzanne-ciani or -Kay

Thanks Steve! I'll post it here sometime before Friday. Thanks! Having the original port to work off of has greatly sped up development, and it was quite interesting going back and try to decipher my own assembly code from 15 years ago! Thanks TJ! The screen height has changed from 200 to 208 (most modern Champ Games have a height of 208). This allows me to have 12 lines for the top status , 6 lines for the timer (top and bottom), 179 lines for the maze (including the outside borders) and 11 for the bottom score/veggie display. The vertical height of the tunnels in the maze was reduced from 14 to 13 so that's why Nathan re-did the graphics for all the insects and lady bug, plus he wanted to re-visit his own work from 2006. Thanks Jeff! I think my original plan back when I reached out to you for assistance was to expand the assembly-only 2006 version to 32K and add a few bells and whistles, but that was pre-ARM and I couldn't resist the dark side and doing a complete re-write with major improvements like the arcade accurate maze and asymmetrical doors which would not be possible in an assembly-only version (at least not without extra RAM). To get the spacing right with the high score screen, I couldn't find enough cycles to change the text color 3 times so I opted to have it just do it twice and put CLR/END/RUB on the right side, but it works pretty well. Thanks - yes I think it looks pretty well! The maze drawing probably isn't anything too ingenious as it's just alternating colors and the PF values per color each frame so the entire maze flickers at 30hz and doesn't have to blend the pink and the green colors. However, since it's alternating every other line per frame (it draws both pink and green every frame but on alternating lines using interlacing, flipped each frame), the flicker is barely noticeable. A nice coincidence is that pink and green, which happen to be the arcade colors, blend perfectly to create white for the dots (which don't flicker at all). The 2006 version of Lady Bug didn't have the advantage of the ARM to dynamically create the PF colors and values every frame so for that version I had to blend the pink and the green (which created more of a dark pink for the maze) and have the green part flicker at 30hz with no blending which flickers much worse (but still not too bad IMO). For those who don't want any flickering for the maze, you can flip the right difficulty switch to A and get the alternating PF color per line (no blending, no interlacing), but the walls won't appear solid. Well, that's probably more than you wanted to know but hopefully some of it was useful! PS I'm thinking I can use the same technique on Qix to have the different colors solid and blend to create a white border.

I will go ahead and post 7 minutes earlier than I normally do. Not much to say this time. Genesis/MD Castlevania Bloodlines - 12 Contra The Hard Corps - 5 (estimate) Sonic 3 & Knuckles - 347 Xeno Crisis - 22 Neo Geo AES/MVS Fatal Fury Special - 11 The King of Fighters '98 - 25 Magician Lord - 10 Neo Turf Masters - 9 Real Bout Fatal Fury - 27

1/24 - 1/30 Times for me. Haven't submitted in a bit. Just been lazy. Loved the year end stats as always and always wonder how much I influenced them. I think I may have helped the number of games played stat a good bit for those weeks when I had like 60 games or whatever. SNES Arcana - 60 min (Didn't even know this existed until I did a stream where I played a bunch of SNES games. It's a dungeon crawler that reminds me a lot of Shining in the Darkness for the Genesis. Almost exact same setup for towns and such... but this one has a map! It automaps your dungeons as you explore them! I played it for about three hours last week, but only for about an hour this week. Should be putting more time into it next week.) TurboGrafx-16 The Legendary Axe - 60 min (Was going to stream this, but it just didn't seem to be working out for me. I kept making stupid mistakes and dying and such. I was playing it through one of those Hyperkin HDMI adapters on my flatscreen so, maybe there was some lag that was hitting me or something. Anyway, I was getting frustrated so I changed to a different game.)

I think with the more pronounced indie games and the powerful and straight forward tools that allow their development certainly makes the more recent pretty great. PC gaming is back to being great, as long as you use GOG. VR is more accessable and has very creative implementations, something I want to get into the near future. The Dreamcast, PS2, Xbox, and GameCube generation might be what I personally consider the last great one. There was just enough balance between creativity and budget. That was also back when Rockstar Games released things more frequently but still polished and Konami was good. The earlier generation stuff had starting to go up a bit in recent years because of the vile "nerd culture", but there are some nice deals once in awhile. For instance I got a non powering, complete in box Japanese Model 1 Sega Saturn for $59 from a US seller. I repaired it just by recapping the power supply, which is more rewarding than those "learn to solder" dice kits.

Well, don't come in here and say that all we need is 16kB. Don't come in and ask why do we need extra RAM and then get pissy when I give examples.

With SDX, the machine becomes like an early generation PC. Hi-mem, relocatable device drivers. Last Word can open 10 documents at once, or 10 different 16kB documents. It's damn impressive working on a 160kB document on this machine.

Nibbler: 418,340 (level 28 - NTSC) One last score... I thought I was done, but finally cracked 400k. At about level 27, the game literally starts to feel out of control. Like I'm not steering the snake anymore, I'm just hanging onto the stick and hoping I grab some dots. ? (This score brought to you by Diet Mountain Dew.)

Just test. I'm completely not happy about colour palette ;( No vertical scrolling..... yet? ? https://raz0red.github.io/js7800/?cart=https://atariage.com/forums/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=807037 MultiRPG.a78

Just put a Sophia 2 in my (PAL modded) 1200 XL. By accident (Home office) there is a 4K-Samsung, so I used a DVI -> HDMI adaptor to connect the Atari to it. The images should speak for themselves. I´m more than happy.

Just got my LTO and just finished populating it with games Works great Everything worked properly under LINUX after I worked out a few kinks with the computer seeing the LTO

Eh sometimes too much is a problem too. I think that the pace stuff really arrived around the 1986-1996 period was really more than enough. Solid pacing, solid choices, good options all about, and it still gave you time to reflect, enjoy and revisit game without being blown away with the distraction level overkill of now. Also back then piracy was almost impossible, good for select few, so that whole added tier of just ripping stuff with emulators and Pi garbage wasn't a choice.

Thanks for trusting me to be your hands and eyes on the other side of the world to get this to you. Once I started unpacking and sorting through things to strategize how to best pack everything, it became apparent how special and one-of-a-kind this collection is. This was/is a substantial investment in software. I saw many titles I recognized but this was dwarfed by many more I didn't (some of them new in original shrink wrap, completely unaware they were now in the 21st century), as well as an extravaganza of cassettes. It was truly like stepping into a time machine and being transported back to that golden era. There are some real gems in this lot. On a comical note, this shipment of four boxes made quite a commotion at the UPS store. Apparently the clerk normally only deals with small domestic packages and packing up cable modems to ship back to their providers. This was the most expensive international shipment that he had ever handled and was affirmed with gasps of astonishment and curiosity from the other patrons behind me at the total cost (this weighed a little over 160 lbs) and the contents of these boxes that would warrant such an expense. While working my way through the stack of customs forms and singing away, it was reminiscent of applying for a large loan. The best was the amusingly sardonic exchange with the clerk that went something like this through out this long process: UPS Clerk: OK, I need to know... No. Sorry. CUSTOMS needs to know what is in these boxes Me: Old computer stuff UPS Clerk: Old computers? They don't have old computers in France?!? Me: This is a special collection that is 30-40 years old. UPS Clerk: No idea why someone would want to use a computer that old today, but we will make sure it gets to France; sign and initial here. Lesson learned: If you're shipping something UPS, especially internationally, beware of using their website to estimate the cost. I had exact dimensions and weight and it still provided a rather under-valued total when done in person.

Reboot Swag Incoming! Super cool, thanks so much guys, love it!