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It's not a "true" Infocom game but it sure hits a lot of the same buttons. As discussed on the most recent Retrocomputing Roundtable show, a new interactive fiction game was just recently released by developer Stephan Vogt, Hibernated-1 (Director's Cut), is now available as a pay-what-you-want titled on itch.io: https://8bitgames.itch.io/hibernated1 The suggested amount is only £4, which comes to a few cents over $5 at today's exchange rate. The game has been released for a ton of retro-systems, from 8-bit Atari, Apple and Commodore systems to Speccy's and classic Macs. Even more impressively, the download ZIP archive contains disk images for all the supported systems. The Atari version is a 130K ED format ATR and loads and plays great on real hardware via my FujiNets and from the built-in CF card interfaces on my XEL/XLD and Incognito machines. A boxed physical release styled after Infocom titles of old is being prepped for later this summer.

Match the sames tiles until all tiles have been removed. Season tiles are interchangeable with each other as are the flower tiles. Left button to select and match tiles. Right button to show tiles blocked from view. Can you clear all the tiles? Mahjong-COL-1.00.zip

I think they priced themselves out of a potentially larger success. This seems like it should be a $99 device to be more of an impulse buy rather than $179 (not counting shipping). At that price, it's going to a "super niche" product rather than a regular old niche product. It's more tech toy than gaming system all things considered. It reminds me a bit of the Pico-8 concept mashed together with early smart displays. The black and white display is kind of annoying on its own in this day and age (although the early Mac look of the visuals does appeal to me), but the lack of a backlight is really odd, especially considering some of its potential uses if it had one. With my "complaints" aside, I may still get one, but I'm obviously part of that "super niche" who buys ultimately stupid stuff like this to mess around with.

Here's a batch of approximately 160 Atari 2600 carts drying after I used Goo Gone to clean the exterior of the carts (in particular, the two label surfaces to remove any label residue to ensure they are nice and smooth). Half of these have already been used to build games, the remainder today, and there are many more carts elsewhere. ..Al

Hi Hans and all, Yesterday I installed the F18A board in my TI system. The result is impressive! Image with 9929 and PHA2030 Image with F18A Image with 9929 and PHA2030 Image with F18A Here are a few pictures of the installation process: 1. Test the system with the 9929 video processor 2. Open the housing and test again 3. Prepare the upper part of the housing for the VGA connector 4. Prepare the upper shielding plate and swap the video processor 9929 with the F18A board 5. Test the system with the built-in F18A 6. Put everything back together in the case 7. Final test after everything is reassembled. Installation is very easy and the result is a great picture!

Just got my first 13” crt television since I was a kid (With wood grain!). Can’t wait to hook the Atari up to it, but I threw my back out lol, can barely walk or sit up. Might be a few days.

Just wanted to share some fun I had with the atari800 emulator in the last few weeks. The idea is that we have per-game programmatic extensions in the emulator, that can e.g. make the games faster or look differently. But there's no limit, we could e.g. easily add additional levels to games, change logic, etc. You can see the results in this video (in Polish, but with English subtitles). More info in my repo on github, also all the code is there. I will try to polish it a bit and consider merging into the official atari800 repository. Curious what folks think... P.S. Cross-linking the polish AtariArea discussion

12:00 UTC+02 Ok - the world premiere of the game will take place with the participation of the portal http://www.retronagazie.eu/ on the Larka channel "Gramy na Gazie" on Saturday, June 19, 2021, from 12:00 UTC+02. Link to the event: On behalf of the authors of the game, I would like to invite you. All will be probably in Polish language, but on chat you can use (as usualy) English language too. Day or two later will be open list for collector's edition (i'll write before it).

Same here for the 'super niche'- I feel like it's an extension in a way of the old Radio Shack electronic kits I had as a kid. I'm curious about details on their SDK so I figured I could learn enough LUA or additional C to put my eye out and do something dorky on it. Maybe I can get a competition setup between my oldest kid and I to bang out a quick-and-dirty game. Could I get something much cheaper to dork around with? Sure, but I also have disposable income AND no self-control so in a way that makes me the best customer in the world. ?

An XB game from John M. Phillips, now compiled: - The Game Of Duck. Description on TI99IUC site (The Game of Duck); ------------------------------------ Total compiled games: 323. [GAME] The Game Of Duck (1982)(John M. Phillips)[Compiled by TMOP].zip

Speaking of pricing, I got the Xtron Pro from their Kickstarter maybe 3 or 4 months back (didn't open it yet!) and it's presently listed at $89 and seems to have the same spirit. No crank, though: https://www.ovobot.cc/en/product/detail/xtron-pro/

Not a recent buy, but something I found in the bottom of a box of Apple II stuff I bought probably 25 years ago. Just got around to unpacking it after a recent move. Near as I can tell, Creative Computing sold an Apple II disk of Spacewar back in 1980 so this shirt probably dates from around then. It's kid size so I'll never wear it, but in surprisingly good shape for 40 years old.

Two UK user group magazines, as zipped collections of tif images. Returning to TI-LINES from Peter Brooks in Oxford, these are also quite rare and contain interesting content. I followed Peter's exploration of module calls when I was exploring the Advertizer module calls. Today here is TI-LINES (UK) V1 N4 July 1984 and TI-LINES (UK) V1 N5 August 1984. (post script to yesterdays post- I heard from Barnard Falkin, he has not touched his TI since 1989- sigh!) ti-lines v1 n4 July 1984.zip ti-lines_v1_n5_Aug84.zip

Told the GF I was gonna break out the paddles; She said Cool!, put on something slinky, got on the bed, gave me a seductive look...And wondered why I was just playing Kaboom!

A short story: A few years back I was browsing r/speedrun when I stumbled on the Dragster drama. Someone looked at the assembly of Dragster and created a sim in an attempt to figure out if a certain someone's world record time was actually achievable. Having done quite a bit reverse engineering of Ocarina of Time, and dabbled for a day or so reversing The Legend of Zelda for the NES to figure out the heart container glitch, I figured I'd might try my own hand at it despite never having played an Atari game in my life before. Though I never got too far into understanding the code, I was amazed at how you can print the entire game on only a few pages of paper, and finally understood how it was possible to do animated sprites with so little ram. Fast forward to this year. I'd just replayed The Legend of Zelda on the switch (both quests of course), and I got it in my head that I wanted to make an Atari 2600 port. So here's how far I've gotten: The game is written in 6502 assembly. To create the sprites I use a GCS program called MegaZeux, which has a pretty nice built-in 1 bit sprite editor. I also coded my world editor in MegaZeux, using it's "robotic" language. "Robotic" can be fairly esoteric at times, but it's the first programming language I ever learned and it was the easiest thing I could think of to use without rolling my own rendering code. I also use Python 3 for data manipulation purposes. For example, in order to save rom space I use a superstring algorithm to pack the sprite data for the text kernel tighter. Additionally, the music sequence data is completely generated by Python, so that I could write music using proper notes instead of numbers. I can't say for sure that I will continue working on it, as I hit a bit of a wall and decided to switch gears to a different thing I'm working on. But I don't think I'll stop working on it for good just yet.

I'll get these pulled. ..Al

Yup. They even are saying a season 2 of games will depend on attach rate. It isn't like they are saying it is the second coming of the Game Boy. If they were making dumb promises like that I would be way more concerned. Since they are up front with what it is, I'd be way more comfortable buying one. I at least know what I'm getting and not being promised the moon or something they can't deliver. It's refreshing to have a company up front that way.

Ok, sorry for slightly hijacking this thread, but here is a "Star Raiders" that I'm happy with at least. It's phaeron's FAST-DIV code, with a new font including replacing the built-in numbers and letters, and the centering bug fixed. I'm pretty sure it's solid. Star Raiders (Phaeron+ Font).xex

I have come up with these, I believe I've figured out a viable solution for the black keypad controllers.

SOLD, ty.

100% agree.

Yeah totally get that. I would like to see more before I drop $180 on it. An Arduboy at $59 is an easier impulse even if i find it less interesting.

Game dev seems to be a growing trend. I know the Switch is getting a game that allows for (supposedly) fairly simple game creation. This is in addition to what the Play Date, Aruboy, and Pico-8 (to some degree) have. Definitely it will be interesting to see what the Play Date has for sure.

The $179 plus shipping is a little too much imo. Also, you could be right regarding the screen as the guys over at the Completely Unnecessary podcast explained, what they are trying to do with the screen should be good enough "in theory". Still, while I am a little bit interested, I need a lot more information and/or videos first before I would seriously consider it.

Yeah, the screen size of the Arduboy FX is damn small. But, gotta admit it is kind cool, especially at $59 with shipping.

Yes, I deleted it. Because working on many updates in last week - iTOS self, game menu PRG, and most time consuming - updates of game adaptations self. When all quality games (and I started with such ones, I think) which are not up to today standards (state saves, easy start) will be updated, I will upload now compilation, still 1 GB . Size matters - in my case that must not mean that more/bigger is better. You know, parking with smaller car is usually easier - just want to point that everything is context sensitive ?

Never heard of this before now. Definitely seems to be in the same wheelhouse as what the Play Date is going forward, but at a more reasonable price point. Also, there is the Aruboy FX (https://arduboy.com/fx/) out there as well, not to mention the Evercade handheld. Lots of options, that's for sure. Still, I will still keep myself up to speed on the Playdate for further information and/or details as it does seem cool to some degree, but $179 plus shipping is a little steep for a pretty niche product. But, then again, style and/or niche things are not always inexpensive.

For testing we grafted in an old AJM that had been removed from Cleggy's machine when we changed to relay switching. It had already had the clock pulled from it and re-used on his new one, so we just tidied that up a little and chopped the board down a little. It's here bodged in with an s-video jack and phono jack (for audio). The following are all pics taken of it plugged into a 14" PVM via S-Video. This CRT does have a dark patch on it on the left anyhow (you can see it on the grey and yellow), otherwise it's super difficult not to catch it scanning as it seems to be running at near as damnit the same speed as the camera CCD. I took a lot of photos just to get these! Just bear in mind it looks way, way better in the flesh and the colours might be a little out due to it's CCD not being a human eyeball. 2600 NTSC colour bars 7800 NTSC colour palette I was pretty shocked just how good this actually turned out with just a little tweaking of the pots. The picture is surprisingly good. There's a little shadowing visible on some colours on the right hand side on the 7800, but it's not bad. Likewise there are very mild jailbars on the 2600 side, but you have to shove your face very close to the screen to even see them. From a normal playing distance it looks bloody good. Way better than I expected. It also doesn't do the colour rolling thing that the PAL systems do that you can't get rid of. Indeed the picture quality of the NTSC machine is leagues ahead of the PAL machine. To the point I'm sure a UAV on it's own is more than enough to score a brilliant picture out of one. For those who haven't experienced it, I cannot emphasise enough just how bad the PAL 7800 is as standard. the black line through the sun is the camera catching the scanning and is invisible to the human eye likewise the fat shadowy bar in the middle 2/3 of this capture Being unused to the NTSC colour palette set up the colours with the test card and assumed they were correct. Again they look way better in person and certainly seem to be in the right sort of area. an example of the shadowing you get on certain colours. We've seen this before, and I'm not greatly bothered by it So, what's next...? The problem we now have (thank Brexit) is that a UAV was £35 here, now it'll have further costs. When you're looking at potentially £45-50 for one ($67 or there abouts) it becomes a pricey bit of kit. I suspect it will give a better picture, certainly with our chroma switching added, but it isn't going to be masssively better than this, and certainly not the cost of an RGB mod for a 2600 good. Had it been bad with our old mod I'd have bitten the bullet and more testing would have occurred. However now, I think the pair of us see that as a bit of a waste of money given just how good it is right now. So the plan as of today is to fit the s-video and phono sockets to it on Saturday. I prefer the phono for the audio as it's the wiring I'll be using and it also means the machine will be way easier to pull from the case with only 2 additional screws for the S-Video jack to remove. It'll probably stay like that for the time being. It'll certainly get an Atarivox inside when our next order goes in with AA (I have a list, just waiting for the next batch to be completed/announced). Otherwise the next update is likely to be it completed. I'm a very happy chappy today with how things have turned out.

Agree Bill. At $99 this would be an easy purchase for a lot of people. However, at $179 that seems to be a bit too much, especially when there are other products (such as the Switch lite) near that price range. Also, not having the display blacklit is a little perplexing as well. After all, we are pretty well removed from 1990s, early 2000s handheld gaming at this point. Still, it is an intriguing handheld and I will be paying attention to further updates and information.

I just discovered OpenEmu. It's pretty great!

Holy cow- you mean there is such a thing!? How long would it likely take the entire residual world population of C64's to find a single bitcoin, and how much electricity would it consume, I wonder? Seems I'm not the only one wondering- Bitcoin Mining With C64 TLDR: way too long & way too much money ? Now the Atari 8-bit, that's a different matter. By turning off DMA, you can die staring at a blank screen instead while awaiting your first bitcoin ?

JAG-U-ARE. And now the fight has truly started, I'll go stand in the corner and film it in portrait mode.....

SIDE3 features not present on SIDE2: Cartridge emulation (up to 1MB images, most known banking schemes supported) SD card usage (instead of CF cards) 8MB ROM for firmware (instead of 512KB) 2MB SRAM (SIDE2 has no RAM) Limited stand-alone (i.e. without U1MB) ATR support (SIDE2 provides no stand-alone support for disk images) 1,024 filenames per FAT directory in the SIDE3 loader (SIDE loader limited to 250 per 'paged chunk' of directory) DMA engine (used to load cartridge images; transfers 1.7MB/s of data off the SD card. Usable by future software) Loader has built-in 'PDM' (FujiConvert) player, supporting mono 44KHz, stereo 22KHz and Covox playback. Mounted cartridges are usable alongside ATRs, XEXs, APT partitions (with U1MB), and all media types are managed from the same loader To be added (to SIDE3 loader): Read/write FAT access (currently read-only) Support for more media formats (including video) Auto-mounting media (carts, disk images, etc.

Exactly! It's *not* a console and shouldn't be compared to one. It's a neat tech 'toy', regardless of the cost.

i split up my main asm file (it was 2.7k lines) and it's helped me get out of my funk:

after maximum simplification, the generation of speech takes 768 bytes (3 memory pages), two of which are tables, i.e. the generation of speech itself fit into 256 bytes. in the attachment a comparative test on the same settings for S.A.M. and SFXEngine (spoken text includes intonation - Polish pronunciation) sam.mp3 sfxengine.mp3

2000 messages. In two years. I send 4 times that on a single day on discord.

The pen holder and bespoke pen push the boundaries of my tolerance for Portlandiania, but the games look pretty fun and I’m excited about the diverse perspectives and game ideas at work. I like the docking station for charging but it seems like it would be awkward for playing games in stereo. Do you just hold the whole cube?

I have some made. I’d be happy to sell them for $5 each plus $5.00 shipping. Combined Ofcourse. I have 3 different designs now. I’ll have to check and see how many of each one I have available. I’ll update this thread tonight with some pictures.

45,176 I thought I would go ahead and start things off, even though it has been about a month since I last played it. I was a little rusty, as this is about 9,000 off of my personal best. And I believe this was the first time I ever ended the game on level 1. As you can see, I was just a few steps away from delivering the last package. Doggone It! @Dan Iacovelli, thanks for organizing the Harmony Games and I wish everyone luck delivering your packages. It's getting late for me tonight, but I will try to post some hints and suggestions in the next couple of days.

Got 3 things in the mail today ? Switch-a-roo RGB scart cable for my CoCo3 Mega Everdrive X5 Turbo Everdrive v2.5

I'm curious about the website dev stuff too. Personally I like how they aren't trying to make this something it isn't. They know it is quirky and niche. The video was well put together and showed a diverse team. The video got me excited to see more and the wife thought it looked interesting.

This looks pretty neat. I may pre-order one if I can sell my copy of Dokapon Kingdom soon.

Here's the summary for Week 22, running from May 31 - June 6. We logged 3112 minutes of eligible play, playing 85 games on a total of 23 systems. Top 10: 1. Whip Rush (Genesis) - 220 min. 2. Hyper Lode Runner (Game Boy) - 181 min. (#8) 3. Final Fantasy V (SNES) - 180 min. (#1) 4. Aldynes (SuperGrafx) - 158 min. 5. Earthquake (TRS-80 MC-10) - 139 min. 6. An Adventure in Jerusalem (TRS-80 MC-10) - 114 min. 7. reBOOTed (Atari Jaguar) - 90 min. 8. Out of This World (Genesis) - 89 min. 9. King of Dragons, The (Arcade) - 87 min. 10. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 85 min. (#3) Pre-NES top 10: 1. Earthquake (TRS-80 MC-10) - 139 min. 2. An Adventure in Jerusalem (TRS-80 MC-10) - 114 min. 3. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 85 min. (PN#1) 4. Pac-Man Collection (Atari 7800) - 75 min. 5. Dig Dug (Arcade) - 49 min. 6. Eggomania (Atari 2600) - 47 min. (PN#3) 7. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 44 min. (PN#6) 8. End, The (Atari 2600) - 43 min. 9. Blackjack (Atari 2600) - 36 min. 10. Millipede (Arcade) - 30 min. (PN#7) Top 10 systems: 1. Atari 2600 (391) (#2) 2. Genesis (385) (#5) 3. Game Gear (335) 4. Arcade (316) (#3) 5. TRS-80 MC-10 (253) 6. Game Boy (201) (#4) 7. SuperGrafx (193) 8. SNES (180) (#1) 9. Neo Geo AES/MVS (152) 10. Atari 8-bit (109) The 1990 shooter Whip Rush becomes the most played game in a week with relatively many games and times shared evenly across them. Hyper Lode Runner is one minute ahed of Final Fantasy V for second and third places. On the pre-NES list, something quite unusual happens as it is headed by not one but two MC-10 games: Earthquake ahead of the Adventure in Jerusalem, with trusty old Solar Fox in third place, almost 30 minutes behind. While the Atari 2600 doesn't get any individual titles this week, as a team effort it takes #1 on the systems list, 6 minutes ahead of the Genesis and the other 21 systems present this week. No new entries to the 1000, 5000 or 10000 Minute Clubs, but the tracker hits 100K minutes for the season.

Today was the Ghosts' first visit to the Bombers, and it was one of the CRAZIEST GAMES IN LEAGUE HISTORY!!! The Bombers took a 1-0 lead in the first inning, the Ghosts tied it in the 4th. The Bombers crushed a home run in the 5th to take the lead 4-1. The Ghosts hit a GRAND SLAM in the top of the 9th to take the lead 5-4. The Bombers WON 6-5 on a walk off single in the bottom of the 9th inning!!!!! A grand slam is rare enough, but to LOSE the game afterwards? Both closers just didn't have it today.

Yes! I'd love to see the look on everyone's faces as they open their package. You're gonna love the games.

While cleaning up my hard drive I stumbled over this dump and the one found by @GeoHolub in Don Maslin's Disk Image Archive. Out of curiosity I compared them and found out three things: SlowPokey's dump contains a customization file (which is only interesting for hardcore archivists). The dumps are from different releases and differ by exactly one byte. Side B of the disk contains the (most probably complete) source code of the disassembler. SlowPokey's version contains an off-by-one bug in a routine to clear memory which has been fixed in the other dump. ; correct version from v2 46B9: A9 00 LDA #$00 46BB: A2 59 LDX #$59 ; LDX #$5A in v1 46BD: 9D 41 52 STA $5241,X ; label SECMAP below 46C0: CA DEX 46C1: 10 FA BPL $46BD 46C3: 60 RTS ; source code on side B ; Miscellaneous tables & buffers ; KBBUF DS 32 SECMAP DS 90 ; 90 = $5A NUMBUF DS 6 ; $5241+$5A is the first byte of NUMBUF Meanwhile a second dump of the fixed version was found which contains the B side as well. For convenience both sides of that disk. When downloading, please remember that the disk does not boot. Instead you need to copy the binary to a DOS formatted disk as stated on page 1-1 of the user manual. Ultra Disassembler_v2 sideA.atr Ultra Disassembler_v2 sideB.atr