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Time for another update! A bit later than I wanted, but have been focusing on building games! First, I now have all the pre-order 2600, 5200, and 7800 games tested and labeled. I have roughly 25 more Atari 8-bit games to make (some pre-order, some older), and about 40 Jaguar games to build, and will be working on those later today (the 8-bit games I'll definitely finish today, the Jaguar EPROMs have been programmed and I will solder those today, probably assemble/test/label tomorrow). Second, all the boxes have been glued and assembled, now they are just waiting for assembly of the games and manuals into the boxes. Will be working on that tomorrow, should go pretty quickly now that the boxes are finished and the games are labeled! These are going to take a huge amount of space once assembled, so I'll need to spend some time tomorrow morning clearing off shelves before I begin! Other tasks that remain include printing the parchment envelopes for Adventure II XE, Goo Goning another two bins of carts, finishing up the extra games for these orders (which will take a day), building 20 or so AtariVoxes, and a few other miscellaneous tasks. Very close now! Here are some photos... This first photo shows how many drawers I'm now using for these games. The check marks represent games that have been labeled (all of them!) Here are some of the cartridges, in no particular order: These represent just half the drawers with finished games in them, and this does not include any of the extra games for these orders (probably another 200 or so carts!) And here area all the glued and folded boxes! That's all for now, time to solder some Atari 8-bit boards! ..Al

Since I managed to finish the game I've been working on for the last 9 months, I can finally show you a little bit of what awaits you soon. I didn't write too much before, because I don't like to show off an unfinished product, but probably there were already some leaks, so I'll throw in some new spoilers Game Title: Flob Game Type: Arcade Adventure platformer. Size: ~400KB Media: cartridge Controls: Joystick / keyboard Requirements: Atari XL/XE (64KB), stereo as an option, works both on PAL and NTSC machines Written in Mad-Pascal/Mad Assembler. Idea/code/graphics/sfx: bocianu Music: LiSU, Miker, AceMan, PG, Zoltar X Hardware design and production: Mq In the game we move around Flob, a small pink blob that loses energy very quickly and we have to constantly replenish it by collecting drops of pink slime. Flob can only move left and right and cannot jump, but by using the slime, he can manipulate gravity and get into seemingly inaccessible places. He is very fragile and delicate, but with a supply of slime he can regenerate quickly. We need a lot of slime and we need to collect as much as possible, but that is not the aim of the game. The goal is to find the secret ingredients and the recipe needed to produce the aforementioned slime, achieve immortality and... rule the world There are 6 large, hand-drawn maps to visit, each of which consists of over 20 rooms and has a separate music track. Levels differ from each other in mood, puzzles and level of difficulty. Each of them has a few hidden rooms, the discovery of which will give us a big shot of slime. The game has a system of achievements, which are 84 and we gradually unlock them during the game. Game progress is automatically saved on a cartridge. I think it's a lot of fun, because when I play fast and know the maps well, it takes me about an hour to complete the whole game. For a person who doesn't know the maps, it will certainly be several hours of fun, not to mention how long it may take to complete all available achievements. The premiere of the game will take place at "LOST Party" in Lichen on July 10th - during The Game Compo. According to the compo rules, the game will be released on the day of the competition for FREE, but for all collectors and people who want to support the authors, a physical version of the game has been prepared. It will be available for purchase at the party and by mail after the party, and the price is 49USD + shipping cost. If you are interested in buying the game, leave a message in this thread. Shipping will start not earlier than the end of July after our well deserved vacations. The purchase of the original media entitles you to free, lifetime updates of the game, which perhaps will appear in case of discovering some errors, or adding new DLC content by the author Cover ART spoiler:

Long day. The longest!.... We call it Summer Solstice, The Snyder Cut...

Ok, here's something new. But old to me. It's a sector editor (single density) full ASM source code, that I wrote long ago, maybe in '84 or so. I wrote it because I didn't have a good one I liked, plus I submitted it to either Analog or Antic magazine, maybe both, and they both said they already had something similar in the works. It's almost totally CIO call based. I cleaned up the original MAC/65 code and it compiles cleanly with ATASM. Was written before XE/XL existed, but I think it should work on both. I also prettied up the code and it displays nicely formatted in Notepad++. I don't know if such a thing has a lot of practical use in this day and age, but I still use it sometimes. So I post it in case someone finds it useful. It could be expanded to do more, if someone were ambitious enough. Anyway, I don't know of any other such utility with full source code available, but maybe there is, who knows. Here it is anyways. SECTZAP.M65

Just got a job at an arcade.

It's HERE, despite all the joking, I stood by my stance of "I'll get it at retail to check it out". It arrived last night, unboxed this AM, running updates, and gonna eat tacos for lunch while playing with the VCS 800. The universe may fold in on itself.

A quick little cover of a nice little tune for some tests! Pinky Xmas Edition - Overworld 1 Atari PoKEY Cover For this one I used the 15khz clock, Croissant Sawtooth lead, Filter for the arps, and it was done in my patched version of RMT, then coverted with the RMT 1.28 patch 8 tables from RMT2LZSS. Everything worked perfectly Pinky - Xmas Edition - Overworld 1 Final.rmt Pinky - Xmas Edition - Overworld 1 Final.xex

Thanks! I did add some updated photos of the completed project, but I'm not sure what happened to them on here. Below are some photos of my completed project. Thank you to those that helped fill in some information. I am still going to be on the lookout for an original advertisement to mount in the right side acrylic although the poster size is slightly larger than the typical Atari poster I have seen at approximately 20" X 30" so the 'reach for the stars' poster also seems to be somewhat rare from what I've found. I did replace the acrylic doors on the front of the cabinet due to them being scratched and damaged beyond repair, but other than that, the cabinet is all original. A little degreaser cleaned up the filthy surfaces and a little black paint for touch ups on the base and inside the cabinet. The biggest challenge was reconnecting the right side panel that came loose from being hit by a car (that's what I was told). I also used some very fine sandpaper to clean up the brushed look of the aluminum channel and the plates on the doors that help secure the doors. I do have two extra shelves that are not in place right now. This was a fun project and I'm happy to bring it new life. My plan for the cabinet is to display any original boxed Atari items I can gather and keep it looking like a retail display. I am more than happy to share and help out with info if anyone is working on a similar project and have any questions. Photo after refurbishing Photo after refurbishing Photo after refurbishing. Photo after refurbishing Photo after refurbishing

Eclipse (Iron Soldier) worked on an impressive Starblade rail shooter as their first Jaguar project. But to their frustration Atari rejected it and they had to wait another 10-12 months before Atari finally figured it out and offered them the concept of Iron Soldier. Marc Rosocha said that their game could have been a launch title and a much more impressive showcase for the system than Cybermorph or .....Trevor Mcfur...cough cough..... But Atari was too shortsighted to realize that.

Another fun with electricity story: Years ago my wife and I were rehabbing the house we were living in. Thanfully I'm quite handy and we were able to do a lot of the work ourselves which saved us quite a bit of money. On this particular day I was installing a new circuit breaker in the electrical panel. It's a standard US 200 amp panel with maybe 20 slots for breakers. Of course since I'm "only" plugging in a breaker I do not flip the main off. Yes, I'm working in a hot box. It was a hot and humid day and I was sweating profusely. I tighten the screw holding the wire in the breaker, but dropped the screw driver. I bend down to pick it up and all I remember is seeing a blue flash and waking up on the moving boxes that were about 3 feet from the panel. I sat there for a few minutes and then got up and finished the job. My guess is that when I bent down to get the screw driver, my short, wet hair came close enough to, or even made contact with, the main bus in the panel and, well, I became a path to ground. I don't work in a hot box anymore. -Bob

Just posting a note here for others on some work I am doing. I am working on an ANSI driver for MDOS that would embed itself as an XOP into MDOS. I don't see it becoming embedded in MDOS at present as it is over 4K in size and MDOS does not presently have that much free memory without growing MDOS by another 8K page. Presently, it would have three opcode calls. Envision one opcode to reset, second opcode that configures MDOS for either text mode 80 ANSI or ANSI color 80 column, and the third call is for a string display similar to the TTYOUT routine for the Video XOP >0027 call. Would anyone have use for an ANSI driver for anything they may be writing? I should then be able to incorporate the Telnet command that was added to MDOS to use the driver if installed in either a text or graphics mode environment. Beery

Final Fantasy V for SNES - 140 minutes Super Mario Bros. for NES - 55 minutes Super Mario Bros. 2 for NES - 63 minutes Just grinding job levels in FF5. Did a no death run of Super Mario Bros. (both quests) and a no death run of Super Mario Bros. 2 using only Mario.

yeah, agree. no issues with Brad in 35 years. Despite what one person here says, I swear I have never kissed Brad's ass. Not once. DBM.

The 253 valid levels created with my current level-creation algorithm, but I'm not using all of them. I'm picking out the best ones for the game. the total of all level data required for 90 levels and 10 bosses right now stands at 200 bytes.

Minor point, but it would be as fast as a byte-code Forth. (which is kind of what it is, with no text interpreter, since it has 2 stacks) It would not be as fast as an indirect address threaded Forth, or a direct address threaded Forth, or a sub-routine threaded Forth, or a native code Forth. :) Sorry uber Forth nerd stuff.

how different is doing a cart on atari to doing easyflash? can u not "DIY"? having walked the IP tightrope with pretty much every project i have done on the c64 in 10 years i can say that I find issuing a sold traceable product a very dicey prospect for the amount on revenue u could expect to earn. the IP is vague, could be Jordan, could be Ubi, possibly even Disney have a stake as they did the film. if you ask, u appear a a blip on the radar and they will refuse you. they will always refuse you because thats always the first reaction of a big company to an IP request and u won't be offering financial incentive so they won't be arsed to even discuss it with their legal people. THEN if you release for free you will still appear on their radar because u put yourself there and so they will probably c&d you anyway. so the motto is "do not ask" release as a fait accompli. and guys can i just say advertising the fact you are doing this for 2 years is hardly going to help u go "under the radar" you know how much warning the c64 scene got? 2 weeks. prior to that only a handful of people knew it existed.

Every couple of years this same discussion happens, usually with a few minor variations. "You need to understand if you run a XB program exactly like Basic you are just purposely hobbled the reason for XB in the first place. Example Basic does not have :: to run multiple commands in a program so not using them is purposely rigging the contest for Basic to look better. The entire reason for one over the other is the advantages but you insist taking them away from one but not the other?" 99.4a percent of the time TI BASIC is slower than XB. Why is this? You stated that VDP access time is the main culprit. Perhaps that is true. Let's devise an experiment to try to find out. Run a program in BASIC where it runs from VDP ram and in XB with 32K where it runs from CPU ram and compare the speeds. Since the purpose of this test is to find out whether VDP access kills performance the way you say, we must run the same program in both BASICs, without giving an advantage to either. Surprisingly, it turns out that BASIC has a slight performance edge, showing that VDP access time is not a major problem. "Also XB has floating point math routines built into XB thus why Decimal slows XB down. Basic has 3 times less features as a result." This statement makes no sense. BASIC also uses floating point math routines. Plus, I would hazard the guess that BASIC has fewer features because is has 36K less "preprogrammed memory". "As stated if you use strings as my first example it is no contest which one is faster between XB and Basic." Your first example is definitely slower when run in TI BASIC. Since both BASIC and XB keep strings in VDP ram, how can this difference could be caused by VDP access time as you maintain. "And I want you to show me what same commands are not written in GPL for XB as for Basic. Please if you know something I do not show it to me? (I seem to have a pretty good grasp of GPL in both of these XB and Basic)" It is a fact that many commands are markedly faster in XB, even when running XB totally in VDP ram. It seems to me there are only two possible reasons: 1 - The programmers at TI got a lot smarter about using GPL and learned how to program it much more efficiently, or: 2 - Some of the GPL programming was replaced with assembly routines. Which of these seems most likely to you? "And I am working on making XB mostly Assembly using the additional ROMs in FinalGROM." Actions speak louder than words. You won't come out and admit that GPL is the major bottleneck, but if you really believed that VDP access time was a biggest problem you wouldn't be wasting your time with assembly. Instead you would work on moving all string access so it happened in SAMs or similar CPU memory. "I think the biggest pain in rear in XB is using Floating Point every single time it talks to a number of any kind, integer math would be speed up." This is tricky but it would be cool if you can do it.

A box of goodies from Clint has arrived this morning, I'll be contacting all people who showed an interest in obtaining a copy shortly.

I wanted to place an order from Best after hearing about Brad through this site, but at the same time I was nervous I would mess it up. I spent a week trying to decipher the website to figure out what to ask for so I sounded semi-intelligent. Then I spent a whole weekend typing, proof-reading, and revising a short email. When Brad replied back with instructions on how to order, I felt excited - like I got myself through the door of an exclusive club. Then I messed up with the instructions on how to send payment by not including the proper comment before submitting. I was really upset and was sure I had screwed the pooch right there. Banned for life. I sent an email apologizing about that. But Brad didn't seem to mind at all. After my order arrived, I thought I would push my luck and order from him a second time. This time it went off without a hitch and, after the second order arrived, I even politely asked him about a little problem I was having with one of the controllers I bought. He told me how to fix it myself, I thanked him, and that was that. As far as I'm concerned, the guy was a complete teddy bear. I'm certainly not used to being this careful about how I place an order with someone, but I thought why not just play by his rules so I can get what I need? When it's all over and you get your lovely box sealed in Atari-branded tape, it doesn't seem like it was that much of a compromise.

PC Solasta: Crown of the Magister (826 min) Oculus Quest Audio Trip (103 min) Beat Saber (365 min) Solasta is moving along, got gem five, gem six proved a bit problematic, I had to restart from a save before the mission started after nearly finishing it because I couldn't rest due to lack of food, and I was too weak to take on an elemental/undead encounter and was in a weird "mind realm" that I couldn't retreat from. Unskippable cutscenes kinda suck in that case, but I'm almost back to where I left off now. Found a new BS-like game that I actually like. Audio Trip is sort of like Synth Riders more than Beat Saber, but with way better music, mapping, and visuals.

Nermal being mailed to Abu Dhabi was Jim Davis's first choice. he spend hours looking at a world map to find the perfect mailing city for him. The reason he decided Abu Dhabi because the name made it sound so far away from the State of Indiana. However the very close second was going to be Tierra del Fuego. A province of Argentina at the very end of the country. The problem was that the name was too long, and would've been difficult to fill it in a weekly or Sunday strip.

After pasting your two programs into Classic99, neither one would run successfully for me. One of the problems is that you have commented some of the lines incorrectly. e.g.: 1151 DATA 96,0000000000000000000003FFFFFFFCC0000000000000030C30F0F0C0C0000000 PISTOLA 1 Another thing I noticed is the use of the double colon statement separator at the end of lines. e.g.: 1803 DISPLAY AT(12,3):"G A M E O V E R":: XB tolerates this, but it crashes the compiler. Here is another problem: 1730 CALL LINK("DELAY",5) :: DISPLAY ERASE ALL From the manual: "An XB trick to save memory is to use DISPLAY ERASE ALL to clear the screen. This crashes the compiler which expects DISPLAY to actually display something. Use CALL CLEAR if you just want to clear the screen."

Eep! Fixed, 20 minutes. And I snuck a couple games I forgot in there - 45 minutes for New Adventure Island (TG16), and 20 minutes for Battleship (Game Gear).

I was never allowed to have one. They thought I wouldn't learn math if I did.. have pity on me!! Might have learned it better - because cool things and 'tronics and futuristic.

Xbox Series X MLB The Show 21: 1,542 minutes Xbox One PUBG: 259 minutes iOS Pop! Blitz: 31 minutes SongPop Party: 157 minutes

ZeroPage Homebrew is playing the Exclusive World Premiere of new 7800 BIOS upgrade game KiloParsec on tomorrow's (Tue Jun 22, 2021) stream LIVE on Twitch at 6PM PT | 9PM ET | 1AM GMT+1Day! Hope everyone can watch! ZPH Twitch Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/zeropagehomebrew/ Games: KiloParsec (Exclusive World Premiere | 7800) by Bob DeCrescenzo @PacManPlus and Mike Saarna @RevEng Cosmic Canyon (2021) by Ric Pryor @KaeruYojimbo Words Game (2021 WIP) by Alberto @jab Dragon Defence (2015) by Tyler Frisbee @Tyler Frisbee

Hi, while hacking the skull sprite in LadyBug I encountered a funny easter egg in jzintv. On my mac I kept resetting with cmd-R, holding it longer, I got to a screen with static noise, on CH03, MUTE :) Maybe this is old news? Cheers, bataais

Pfft.. F*** Jordan Mechner's IP rights.. DOUBLE F*** Ubisoft, and TRIPLE f*** Disney.. heh.. Bunch of social justice virtue signalling box-office bait releasing, franchise ruining terds (Star Wars much?).. We all pirated the apple II version long before the source was released.. As far as I'm concerned, moving it to the ATARI (and thereby spreading it around even more) is just a further extension of that piracy. And that's a damn good thing.. For everyone.. Including the above mentioned "IP owners"... Whether they are smart enough to realize it or not..

New game in Mad Pascal http://www.atari.org.pl/forum/viewtopic.php?id=17694 and

A fun week for gaming this past week, with my times fairly evenly split between classic games and more modern offerings. My main focus this week was doing a playthrough of Doom 64 on the Switch, then after that was done I decided that I was going to play and actually beat the original Metroid on the NES for the very first time. It took most of the week (and the occasional references to a map along with tips from friends here and there) but I finally did it! Outside of Doom 64 and Metroid, I ended up picking up the Super Mario Bros. Game & Watch handheld that came out last holiday season on sale at Best Buy for $40 and put it to good use playing through and beating the original Super Mario Bros. for the first time in many years. I spent a fair bit of time playing the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2 (AKA The Lost Levels) on the Game & Watch as well, but holy heck is that game hard! Lastly, I picked up Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 on sale for $5 on the Switch eShop pretty much just to play the NES demake of Pac-Man Championship Edition. It's absolutely amazing how fast and frenetic this game plays for an NES title, and with zero sprite flicker at all! Not only is it a technical marvel, I'm pretty sure it's my favorite Pac-Man game I've ever played so you can expect to see me logging a lot more time with this one in the future. All in all a solid week for gaming, though finally beating Metroid after all these years was definitely the highlight of the week for me Ineligible Doom 64 (Nintendo Switch) - 735 minutes Arcade Dig Dug - 7 minutes Galaga - 18 minutes Phoenix - 41 minutes NES Metroid - 511 minutes Pac-Man Championship Edition - 72 minutes Super Mario Bros. - 183 minutes Super Mario Bros. 2 (Japanese Version, AKA The Lost Levels) - 111 minutes Super Nintendo Super Mario All-Stars - 7 minutes Total Video Game Play Time This Week 1,685 minutes (28 hours 5 minutes) [950 minutes eligible] Individual System Play Times This Week NES: 877 minutes Nintendo Switch: 735 minutes Arcade: 66 minutes Super Nintendo: 7 minutes

Improvements: Just recapped a busted Atari 400?

Hover Bovver: 5427 Equestrian (1/1): 6:02, 2:33.5, 34 Equestrian (2/2): 6:18, 2:16.5, 46

Improvements: Hazard Run (Walton Wood): 59,571 Hazard Run (Bryan's Pond): 74,486 Hazard Run (Hell's Canyon): 65,989

It will be fixed in the MegaPack.

What the pictures show, I can't grasp it. The mind boggles. So much work.

Oops! I was trying to reply on my Own Status Update! So...Editing... Hi Swami! How R ya?

Fair enough. My stance is that people are free buy whatever they think is best. If ripoff Everdrives are cheaper and perform just as good as genuine ones, I have no problem with buying them. However, I understand how it might seem "wrong" to people. The reason why I don't feel bad about buying a ripoff Everdrive is because I wouldn't have bought a genuine one anyways. I don't live near any of major distributors of Everdrives, and wherever I buy them it ends up being too expensive because of shipping. And really, fake Everdrives really aren't driving Krikzz out of business. Nobody complained about IBM PC clones.

Ever need a 'Come to Jesus meeting' of plastic lids to matching containers because half of each are missing? Yeah, first world problems. I just wanted to put some leftovers in the fridge and it took 3 tries.

I'll just say this and step away. This topic is in pretty poor taste. Everyone would (rightfully) flip out if someone posted asking if they should get a bootleg Jaguar GameDrive because it's "too expensive" and this is no different.

Hey guys, so I finished this up tonight, I successfully ported over the entire RMT 1.28 Patch8 into 1.30, with some tiny changes of my own. Other than that they should be functionally 100% identical Now I got the groundwork done for editing my own tables over it, so hopefully I can share something useful soon! any suggestions are welcome, for now I'm thinking about what to change and what to add rmt130p8.zip

"they even discussed the "Field Name lists", and it's makeup and a whole bunch of other good stuff." Also remember that there is not a standard way to make a Forth system so whatever they are talk about regarding internal details is interesting but may not be the same as your favourite system. The saying goes: "If you've seen one Forth, you've seen one Forth"

Here is my first adventure with this: before after

Let's say that a 5200 and a 7800 got really, Really, REALLY drunk one night and had a back-alley liaison that resulted in a single offspring being produced. Would the most logical name for said offspring be 13000 (5200 + 7800), or would it be 6500 ((5200 + 7800) / 2)? We need to figure this out, people. It's important.

In the early, wild-west-days of the Internet I used to send cash, money orders and cheques in envelopes all over the world to pages that looked like Best Electronics, so buying through Best was not a big deal. I just read and followed his instructions and got my goods with no problems. One time he limited an amount of one thing I could order once and I didn't complain, I adjusted the amount, paid and then got the items shortly after. I suppose people who are used to virtual shopping carts, one click buying and next day delivery would be in for quite a shock when they try to order from Best! - James

I'm sure I will offer this along with several others. I've done other BIOS swaps on the 7800 in the past (Not this exact one of course), but I would imagine the process will be the same as others. I'm sure @PacManPlus can elaborate on that more.

I, for one, would rather give my hard earned bucks to Albert than this entitled chick. She seems like she would make an excellent ex-wife.

Improvments: Whomper stomper: 55750 pts.

Thanks for the heads up! I love this community and the knowledge it possesses.

Later than I usually post, but then it's not really much... PS2 Suikoden 3 - 120 min (Time approximate. Just played long enough to finish a chapter and then didn't touch it the rest of the week.)

I've said this before, but he's basically the 'soup nazi' of the Atari world. He has great 'soup', and it's worth buying. But piss him off, fail to follow his completely nonsensical, arbitrary, uncommunicative and mood-driven rules... no soup for you. I've known people who have ordered from him for decades, been a decades long customer with a great rapport, and then they order one thing he doesn't want to ship... door slams, no soup for you. Ever. I also am friends with someone who has literally helped him physically organize his stock, and he pulled the same thing with him. Bradley isn't a bad guy, but he's a moody, unprofessional curmudgeon who arbitrarily decides when and if he will respond to an order or not. Pretending it's other than it is, is silly. If you've had good luck, awesome. Just realize, lots of other people have not... through no fault of their own.