Leaderboard

Over on the AtariAge Facebook group, Daniel C. Avina (sorry if you're out here; I don't know your AA forum handle!) posted some photos of what looked like a photocopy of the Star Raiders manual, with the statement: "This small piece of history was in a recent lot I purchased. Looks like we could always use “more stars”." Welp, it turns out it's a pre-production copy of the Star Raiders manual, passed around for review by various departments! It includes a number of edit mark-ups, many of which made it into the final manual. I asked Daniel if I could share his photos on my "Star Raiders Tribute" website (first created in 1996!), and he agreed, and sent some cleaner photos. He's hoping he can get out his flatbed scanner and do a proper scan of them, as well. So, I've posted them, along with some commentary: http://www.sonic.net/~nbs/star-raiders/preprod-manual/ I'm a bit too tired to do an exhaustive review of every single page of this, versus the final version, but I took the time to look at and talk about the individual mark-ups, and any obvious changes I saw. (The cover of the manual calls it "STAR RAIDER", not "STAR RAIDERS"! I know that 'typo' variation exists on the cartridge label, and in fact was given one by a friend a few years back. It's apparently not rare, and the ROM inside is identical. But now I'm wondering whether the game's name changed somewhere along the way. I sent Doug Neubauer a note asking about this, via his website.) And, when/if Daniel can get me some cleaner scans, I'll post them on my site. If anyone happens to notice anything else worthy of mentioning, or if you know who's scribbles are who's, let me know and I can update the text on the page. Thanks & enjoy! (?pew pew!)

Ten years has passed since the tragic passing of Radek Štěrba and today @Fandal published this beautiful photo. As I wrote on Facebook commenting a post by @pseudografx, unfortunately I didn't have the chance to know Radek but I was shocked by the tragic passing of this important member of our community. Not only it was a genius, but he was a good and helpful person too. At least it's good to see that he is always remembered in many productions.

I have spent months repairing my Aquarius2. Now that she is operational, I thought that I would look at creating some software that was specific to this platform, rather than just an Aquarius game. I have already written and published a couple of new games for the Aquarius (Aquariworm and Bomb Catcher 2), so I thought about adapting one of those rather than starting from scratch... Well! A historic moment! Welcome to the FIRST and ONLY game for the Aquarius2! ??? I have created a version of my Bomb Catcher 2 game that only runs on the Aquarius2, which I think is a world first! Granted.. the market is quite small ?

My package has arrived ?

Meanwhile, on a more positive subject, FAT32 file creation and writes are working. I'm not sure this has happened before on the A8 without an MCU and fatfs doing all the work.

Updated version 1.1 of UNO+ Fixes/changes: - gfx glitch on the card at game over; - crash at stats generation at game over; - you can now play a new game after stats; - typo error on stats; - better formatting on final stats, so all lines are readable; - you can use correctly upper/lower case letters on initial menu selection. @senior_falcon I'll send you an email for the crash issue and how it was fixed. [GAME] TI99 UNO+ V1.1 (2021)(Hloberg)[Compiled by TMOP].zip

I've been trying to create a "Western" themed game for many many years now. This is short video of where it is going, but it's long off from being completed. Atari 7800 Homebrew Teaser: Half-Past Sundown A Western Tale - YouTube Gameplay, if you can imagine this, would be somewhat like a western "moon patrol" but with a story attached. The proposed box art is an unused painting my grandfather did in the 1950's (he was men's "adventure" magazine illustrator). The "character art" (albeit, not optimized in any way) is based on cowboys drawings my dad did for me in 2006 before he got dementia. The game is programmed by myself. So here is the video of "Half Past Sun Down: A Western Tale", a game literally three generations in the making. Atari 7800 Homebrew Teaser: Half-Past Sundown A Western Tale - YouTube 7800cart1.pdn

Love the way this box turned out. Thanks Steve! Its a mix of Mattel and the black NES box design.

Shipped out all the Jaguar GameDrives! Made two trips to the post office yesterday, one in the morning and then another before the post office closed. First trip: Second trip: Hope everyone enjoys them when they arrive! ..Al

Lets have a bit of colour ? I really should be playing the game, rather than doodling ? @rra

Too young. Maybe this one...

Attention Pony fans! In August your wait will be over. Unlucky Pony's Adventures will be shipping. All materials are in-hand, minus circuit boards, which will be in-hand in the next week or so for final assembly. Shipping will be in August as well. Thanks to all you Bronys for the continued support.

Interesting logo! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XNTCLV5/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_4WT029CDDTR6PNHNCFBG

Carnival V1.1 update Fixes/changes: - now you can correctly hit all the objects on the top row; - timer fix for bonus screen. [GAME] Carnival V1.1 (1985)(Molinelli Roberto)[Compiled by TMOP].zip

Perhaps some of you have heard about the meeting of Atari fans called "Silly Venture" taking place in Poland. http://www.sillyventure.eu/en/ So far, no works on the A7800 (unlike the A2600) have been presented there. If you have a game, demo, music or graphics on the A7800, I invite you to participate in the competition. The only condition is that the work should not be published anywhere before. Applications can be sent to piter@atarifan.pl At the party, the works are presented on physical equipment, there will be a PAL console and a Dragonfly cartridge with PokeyMax and YM2151.

Never know how the tape is going to react. This one yet not perfect, came out pretty good. Still has inserts. System complete and nice also.

I have destroyed him ? nice game I also added it here with the compiled version by TMop https://www.ti99iuc.it/web/index.php?pageid=database_cerca&archivioid=769 thanks Vorticon

Also, as noted on the page, Daniel told me that he found this document in a lot he purchased, and the seller told him it came from an estate sale in the SF Bay Area. My morbid curiosity makes me wonder who passed away (and when) that had this in their collection...

Dreadnaught Factor - 2,487

I FIXED IT! Many thanks for the schematic. After a half hour of signal tracing and whatnot, I started to do some analog signal comparison using my scope. While the crude NMOS chips don't give nice clean signals like I'm used to seeing on newer CMOS stuff, it wasn't too bad. However, one thing was very clear: on the carts that worked, the data, address and RDY signals did what you would expect. They were busy and full of binary signaling. On the carts that did not work, they were dead. No activity. The oscillator was running, 3.5MHz into the TIA, and 1.1MHz on the Phase 1 line going into the CPU. The CPU was delivering 1.1MHz back out on Phase 2, so the CPU was doing the quadrature timing typical of the 6502-class CPUs. All good. However, nothing else was doing anything at all. That was pretty clear that the reset circuit was not allowing the CPU to go into a ready mode to start doing things. +5V on the RESET pin, which is active low, so that looked good. Then I saw that the 6532 chip had a reset pin as well, and it was +5 also, so that looked good. But, looking at the schematic, the +5 on both the CPU and the 6532 are fed (at least on the version 13 board that my 2600A has) through a 24k resistor to a capacitor. However, the cap value on both chips is different. On the 6532, it's a 1uF, and on the 6507, it's 4.7uF. That means that the 6532 should come out of reset first, since that cap charges to +5 quicker, and then the CPU should come out of reset and start working. However, on the scope, set to 20us sweep, I could see that the CPU came up to +5 instantly and the 6532 took a few milliseconds to come up, like it should. That meant that C201 was bad, having effectively 0.0uF of capacitance. I replaced that cap, and all carts work perfectly. Done. Hope this helps! --Justin

Congrats Kermit! Impressive season!! Favorite Games from Season 11 Solar Storm and Fireball (I love paddle games!) Most Surprising Games from Season 11 The End, Tower of Rubble, Robot City (each impressive in their own way) Worst Games from Season 11 A small few but these make us appreciate the games we do love even more! Thanks again @Vocelli for organizing a great season and your efforts keeping the scores up-to-date even with your busy schedule. Playing HSC let's me find games I wouldn't have tried on my own and finding a few gems that will play on my own after the season.

Nighr Rescue as I see it ! :). Quick sketch of fun.

Congrats to Kermit!!! As to the games... What did we play? Lol, I remember Pitfall 2 being good to me, but when I looked at the list of the games played this year, I'm scratching my head as to how I even wound up in the silver bracket, especially petering out like I did! Congrats to all, for sure, and Thanks as always to Vocelli, I know this is a lot of work for you!

@Songbird has done the work on the game manual, the result is looking great. A few more steps remaining on box, and label layout. Then we are hopfully ready for release of the first 2D, top-down RPG, and rougelike for the Atari Jaguar. Many years of waiting is over for the ones that were hoping for this to happen... ?

Here's the thing in slow-mo - noting the real-time calculation of the circular mask, so that gameplay can happen during the wipe/transition...

One of the Night Rescue 1941 and Night Rescue BASIC authors here.... These comments and the cover art concept are very nice to see! Night Rescue is a lot about strategy. Do you go through the cave to rescue more people, or fly above it for an easier route? The fine tune movement by pressing the fire button was necessary in the Basic version that had rough scrolling. In the new version, you only really need it to get to the landing base. There are some neat moves where you can sweep in a grab the 3 humans inside one of the early buildings. We incorporated the momentum movement controls 40 years ago and it is still frustrating and effective in this new version. I definitely got through the 5th level while playtesting! I'm not sure what my high score is, because testing was more about getting to the end of a level and less about picking up the humans.

Plus, I just hate it when they beg you to Like and Subscribe! As if we don't realize that's how it works. These days I almost never Like a video if they've wasted valuable time asking me to Like and Subscribe.

It was probably mid-2000s. PC games were disappearing from the stores and articles were written about how PC gaming was dying, but then as Steam got more popular it reinvigorated it. Before that, the PC game market was almost almost separate entity from console games. Lots of PC games never showed up on console (or if they did, they'd be cut down versions) and lots of console games never showed up on PC. Nowadays most games minus exclusives show up on both and they are virtually identical.

I can't image anyone would put their name on a public list for this so please list the address of the back alley where the exchange of product for cash will occur. It does look good though.

Phobos 151890 pts. Caverns of Mars II 128550 pts. Don't have access to Night rescue 1941 and Night rescue..?

Test of XB and RXB: 100 OPEN #1:"CLOCK" 110 INPUT #1:A$,B$,C$ 120 FOR X=1 TO 10000 130 CALL HCHAR(1,1,66,9999) 140 NEXT X 150 INPUT #1:X$,Y$,Z$ 160 PRINT A$,X$:B$,Y$:C$,Z$ RXB 2021 7 minutes 1 second XB gave up waiting after 2 hours.

Pony cart:

I agree, just there to tempt you especially when you are running out of fuel and get desperate ?. The ship may fit if you could drop straight down but because you cannot stop your forward movement I think it is not possible to fit. Soundsl like we have a top-secret special mission bonus challenge on our hands

Yeah, that's pretty much the idea. And like you said, maybe mix a couple different game styles.

I just learned that between 2012-2016, Sweden was ranked #30 in baseball which isn't particularly high, but better than the current rank at #72.

This is amazing! A full action game like moon patrol side scrolling with a storyline as you go. Maybe alternating levels like alien brigade style shooting cept out of the side of the wagon and then moon patrol with the horse running with the guy shooting with a pistol. The western artwork storyline between levels. I love westerns, western games, western artwork etc. My granny painted lots of western type of things and I would look at them as a kid until the artwork came alive. Well were burnin daylight..

Yes those Sector 4 ones! I think it should be possible but not managed it yet! Superb RT as usual Round 13 POLL OPEN

Course 2: 99!

I never liked using down + fire to bomb in games myself, so went for both fire and bombs with the trigger instead and supported the Genesis/Joy2B+ which is probably the best way to play.

I’ve been playing Skyward Sword a lot lately, on my Wii U. I’ve just gone through the Ancient Cistern and beat Koloktos. It took me 3-4 deaths to figure out the pattern to beating it, but it was one hell of a fight. Easily my favorite boss so far. Oh, and I think I’ve mastered reading and writing Sheikah text, now I’m learning Skyward Sword Hylian. The alphabet is tricky to write and there are a ton of duplicate characters that complicate things, but I’m getting there.

A game never played... Doesn't even boot up on my lto flash... Had to grab the original cart in the closet! Anyway... Course 1 105 secs

I really enjoyed watching the @ZeroPage Homebrew twitch stream today with James and Tanya. They reviewed "Wen Hop?" and it was a hoot. I particularly enjoyed the smirky reactions to the implicit innuendo... the relevant part starts at the 55 minute mark.. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1100209904 As I wrote to James... You'll notice I've animated the ship's "balldoges". Known in the industry as "the ship's balls", for short. These hold the dogecoin you collect, and feed them to the engine by shaking when in flight. SO when you're flying high, your (doge)balls are in action. These are actually implemented as separate sprites (the ship is 4 sprites - the base ship itself, the two balldoges, and the flag). The balldoges will change in size depending on how much dogecoin they're holding. So you will see your (doge)balls shrinking if you spend too much time goofing around. If your balls shrink to nothing, you're dead as a dodo. I'm thinking that you don't actually get true credit for the dogecoin you collect, until you actually return to the ship and fill the balldoges with your loot. So it will be a balance between "banking" coin and available time to complete a level. Of course like with everything, too much of a good thing and you might bust your (doge)balls. Haha. Great job James/Tanya - you did justice to the engine/demo... TY

Yeah I didn't have time to play in either section this week. I'm spending time converting my wife's DVD collection to mp4 (well, m4v I think as that saves chapter markers) as well as importing my cd collection.

One thing I personally notice in regards to other countries, you don't hear or read much about the majority of the former USSR nations since the fall. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia ,Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan....The two nations that are in the international news that is common to see or hear are Russia and Ukraine.. But not the others. I wonder why?

(Satan's Hollow) (ok, not a castle, but at least a bit spooky...) (Guild of the Thieves, in-game)

Thanks for another great season. *Favorite Games from Season 11 (Pitfall II and Moon Patrol, managed to set new personal best scores for both) *Most Surprising Game from Season 11 (The End and Robot City, homebrews continue to be innovative and high quality) *Worst Game from Season 11 (Donkey Kong Jr. & Congo Bongo, as much as we are told Coleco didn't sabotage the 2600 ports, the evidence seems to disagree)

Bosconian with Super Game Module 2

Favorite Game: Pitfall II, Dragonfire Most surprising: Tower of Rubble, Fireball Worst: Star Wars: ESB, Star Trek: SOS