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Showing content with the highest reputation on 12/09/2021 in all areas

  1. I have written this statement to help clear up some confusion and misconception about removal of the Intellivision Amico forum on AtariAge several days ago. I removed the Amico forum as discussion around the Amico has been contentious at best, and it's just not worth the continued headaches to keep it around in its current form and and atmosphere surrounding the console. When the Amico actually ships, I'll create a new Amico forum so people can discuss the console and games. The decision to remove the Amico forum was entirely my own, although I have had input from various moderators, all of whom agreed removing the Amico forum was the best decision at this time. When I create a new Amico forum, it's possible at that point I will also put the old forum up as a read-only archive. Until that time, please do not start any new Amico threads on AtariAge. In August I started a private conversation with Tommy, warning him that I was likely to remove the Amico forum wholesale, as by that point the moderators and I had enough of the drama in the forum surrounding the console. I started this conversation on August 14, and the two of us went back and forth over a period of ten days, with the last message in the conversation August 24 from Tommy, which I did not respond to. There were only eight messages total in that conversation between the two of us. I was primarily focused on talking about removal of the Amico forum. We did also discuss the "Fun Amico Discussions" thread, as Tommy was hopeful that if the forum was removed, at least that thread could continue, or at the very least be saved so it could be restored once the Amico was released and a new forum was created. I can understand why Tommy would want that thread preserved, given how much time he (and others) had spent posting in it since its creation nearly three years ago. But my focus was about the forum as a whole, so I didn't comment much on doing anything with regards to that one thread. I did suggest to Tommy that Intellivision Entertainment should create their own Amico forum, and it seems Tommy began focusing more on the Amico Facebook group as a result of this. I didn't take any action as a result of that conversation. Earlier this week I had a conversation with Pat Contri where I stated Tommy and I only spoke once in 2021, and the conversation described above is what I was referring to. I was wrong about that being the only conversation I had with Tommy in 2021, though. In June, Tommy started a private conversation with me about some harassment he was receiving. That conversation didn't include any discussion at all about removing the forum or what to do with the long-running "Amico Fun" thread. When talking to Pat, I missed that conversation as when I searched for conversations with Tommy, I was only looking at conversations I started. That was my mistake. Also, just to be clear, Tommy Tallarico was not banned from the forum. After I locked all the "general" threads, I locked the "Fun Amico Conversations" thread as well. After I did this, Tommy reported a post from one member, and in that report he made it quite clear that he would no longer be posting on AtariAge. However, after a few days, Tommy did respond to a post in one Amico thread, and immediately after that he created a new topic. The new topic was mainly to promote his Amico Facebook group, and that group was mentioned in his earlier reply as well. What ultimately set me off, though, was taking a swing at the "haters" in both posts by stating no "ding-a-lings" would be allowed. Completely unnecessary, as I felt that would just further rile people up, and at that point I promptly removed the Amico forum. The Amico forum was created to give people a place to discuss an upcoming gaming console, one that certainly looked interesting given its use of the Intellivision name. We've created forums for other upcoming consoles in the past, so this was not unusual. Had I known it was going to be such a polarizing topic, I would have held off on creating the forum until after the console was released. Moderation of the forum could have been better, I'm not questioning that, and I take responsibility for that. Please keep in mind nobody is getting paid to help moderate the forums, everyone is doing it in their free time. Also, there are over 150 forums on AtariAge, the Amico forum was just one of them (albeit, a fairly busy one). To those of you stating that I received kickbacks or compensation from Tommy Tallarico or Intellivision Entertainment, that is patently false. No consideration was ever asked for or offered in any way to give the Amico forum or Tommy Tallarico favorable treatment. And to those who believe I didn't want to kill the Amico forum because of the traffic it drives to AtariAge, to date there have been no ads on the forum, so there would have been no benefit in keeping the Amico forum around due to ad revenue. Even if the Amico forum was bringing in ad revenue, that would not have influenced my decision to remove the forum. If you're using the Tapatalk mobile app to visit the forum, they do insert ads in their app, but I don't receive a penny from those ads being displayed. You will not see any ads if you use a web browser to visit the forum (whether on desktop or mobile). I have no ill will towards Tommy Tallarico or Intellivision Entertainment. I like the premise of the console, the unique controller that hearkens back to the original Intellivision controllers, and the promise of simpler games that are easy to learn and dive into. I'm certainly interested to see how the Amico is received once it arrives in customers' hands. Thank you for reading, ..Al
    12 points
  2. Hi. First the kinda bad news: I am scrapping A roach in Space 7800 (ARIS7800) because I was not happy with how the game was turning out and I am reorganizing some old projects. But the good news is that I am rescuing an old project and mixing it with some ARIS7800 assets to work in a new game. CANON IN D - D for Defense. It's a really simple shooter (based in Cannonica, a game that I was programming for NES and 2600 ) where you move your cannon left and right and destroy stuff. I have programmed the engine, some enemies and basic stuff, so I have a first demo rom, but since I still don't have a DF or such I have only tested it on A7800, so testing on actual hardware will be highly appreciated. The demo is pretty short, but I want to test the engine before add more enemies. CannonInD.a78 UPDATE: New Titlescreen and more levels. cannonInD-demo02.a78 <-- CURRENT ROM UPDATE - Cosmetic changes. - More enemies. - Internal tweaks. cannoninD-demo03.a78 <-- CURRENT ROM out-40.ogv out-40.ogv
    10 points
  3. Introducing my ATARI 800CX (Custom eXtended line), it needed body work and a paint job after failed retro-brite attempts, so I decided to do an homage to the mock-up IBM 'ATARI' PC that I fell in love with the look of the very first time I saw it. I have re-written my Atari 800 blog and there are more pictures there and more to come once I have it all hooked up and powered.
    9 points
  4. Just to tease you a little more:
    9 points
  5. Dear Micro Center, can you stop emailing me about writing a product review? I only bought a friggen SD card.
    7 points
  6. Will 2021 be the first year without an Artie the Atari comic strip? Will it?! WILL IT?!! Tune into the strip tomorrow to find out! Wait... I just gave it away. Anyway, new strip coming tomorrow. Clearly I'm out-of-practice with the PR stuff.
    7 points
  7. Garfield's adventure on getting the paper.
    6 points
  8. I'm new here, and here is mine working! I don't have much yet, but I was able to load Ti-Trek using audacity with the WAV that someone shared in some other thread, and the pins connections for the DB9 to be able to use the casette port (also from some other thread, thanks to all of you, this community is amazing). Your systems look awesome!
    5 points
  9. we already have a loading picture ? thanks Jose. The number of available scenarios at the start has increased to 12 (originally five).
    5 points
  10. Another commercial adventure: - In Search of the 4 Vedas. From ASD&D. Load/save only tested on Classic99. ------------------------------------ Total compiled games: 423. [GAME] In Search of the 4 Vedas (1982)(Scott Morgan)[Compiled by TMOP].zip
    5 points
  11. It finally seems like I’ll be able to ship mine out today, I’m very happy about that!
    5 points
  12. As a father of four kids that feels like a threat in some way.
    5 points
  13. "The rumor's of my death have been greatly exaggerated" Mark Twain I have not been posting because I have been distracted by a few things. In particular I am trying to create a VI style editor called VI99. It will run without using SAMS or disk base virtual memory. The design spec is something like: Runs on console with expansion RAM and disk. Ability to edit the largest files in my system. (~300 lines, >8K ) Leverages the Forth interpreter to replicate the command programmability of VI. Data is held in memory as single linked list using byte counted strings to save space. Camel99 kernel Update I have to do a release with changes but I have made to Camel99 but in the mean-time I have posted the kernel program here which has a few warts fixed. 1. A couple of words that I "improved" in ALC would not have worked correctly in a multi-tasking environment. (I forgot to use workspace relative addressing) DOH! 2. There was a bug in TYPE that would not work correctly if the length was 0. It would fail to DROP the address. Oops. 3. And as discussed programs from my cross-compiler didn't work on JS99er. This one does. CAMEL268.zip
    5 points
  14. I love Battlemorph. Why doesn't everybody? I got a Jaguar for Christmas 1993. I lived in San Francisco and was lucky enough to convince my parents to buy it for me. I got the only 2 games available - Cybermorph and Trevor McFur. I loved them both. I was blown away by Trevor McFur's prerendered graphics and had no idea that I should have been upset at no parallax scrolling. But Cybermorph really blew my mind. I never played a fully open 3d game before. Everything was slow and cryptic, but kind of beautiful and relaxing even though the game was quiet and annoying at times. Battlemorph was released 2 years later to a dead system on arrival. At the time, everyone hated it - it was compared to Cybermorph, it was belittled for not being as good as Ridge Racer and Warhawk, and was seen as irrelevant and lame. But play it now and tell me that. I dare ya. I finally after many years got a Jaguar CD broken and was able to fix it. I bought the reissue of Battlemorph and played it for the first time. Holy smokes it blew me away. First, the music is truly amazing. If you enjoy synthwave / techo / edm, you are gonna love this stuff. I really tripped when the music changed when I went from underwater to above ground. Second, the audio issues from Cybermorph are gone. No more" where did you learn to fly", no more grating audio, just beautiful sounds to the ear to enjoy. Go into the settings and turn music up, voice up, everything else down. Third, the texture mapping is beautiful, although a bit too limited. Fourth, the game is not confusing. All the cryptic nonsense of mid 90s games is gone. Everything is laid out but still fun to do. If you want to go back to cryptic times you can just ignore the hint boxes. Why isn't Battlemorph more beloved? I think it's because the original symbolized so much that was wrong with the Jaguar and the sequel didn't do enough to compete with the PSX and Saturn in 1995. But playing it now, the game friggin holds up. Maybe I'm nuts, but Battlemorph is a classic and an absolute gem. There isn't a better game on the Jaguar CD, period. Comparing it to the entire Jaguar library, I personally rank it third after Tempest 2000 and Raiden. Just my view but I think it needs to be heard.
    4 points
  15. A long time ago in a thread not all that far, far away I had a pretty sizable collection of games for a whole bunch of different systems, but due to a variety of life circumstances I ended up parting ways with all my collections over the past 3 years or so (you can find the full and rather lengthy story behind all that here if you're curious) and transitioned to playing all my games off EverDrives and optical drive replacement devices instead of original physical media. I've still got a real soft spot for Atari cartridges though, especially since the 2600 was the very first console I ever played growing up, and seeing as how the Atari 2600 is one of the very few systems that is still relatively affordable to collect for outside of a handful of pricier games I'd like (Pitfall II, H.E.R.O., Montezuma's Revenge, etc.) I've decided to start casually rebuilding my Atari 2600 collection to scratch that collecting itch and hopefully pick up some of the games that I wanted but never got back when I used to have my old collection while I'm at it! I won't be collecting for any other systems, just the Atari 2600, and I'm only going to be collecting games that I know I'll enjoy playing as well as the instruction manuals for them when I can find 'em affordably. I'm only buying cartridges with really nice condition labels (no rips, tears, deep scratches, or significant wear on the label edges but a bit of Actiplaque is alright) so they'll be enjoyable to both look at and play, and it should be fun watching watching the collection grow. My collecting budget is pretty meager, since I'm limiting myself to $60 a month on account of other hobbies I need to save funds for, but here's the games and manuals I have so far. As far as hardware goes, I've got a Light Sixer system with joysticks from an Atari Flashback 5 (the wired Flashback joysticks are definitely my favorite classic CX-40 style controllers) as well as some Best Electronics gold paddle controllers, Best Electronics light gun, a CX-80 Trak-Ball, and a QuickJoy foot pedal for those odd games like Stargate and Spy Hunter that require two controllers to be used at once. The foot pedal is super nice for those kind of games! Looking to the future I'm pretty happy with my hardware selection, though a few more joysticks and a spare Atari 2600 system or two certainly wouldn't hurt to have. A composite modded system to run through a RetroTINK for use on my modern TV would be nice, but I'm mainly going to be focusing on collecting games and manuals on a $60 a month budget. I'm all tapped out for December on account of a couple homebrew pickups currently on the way from the AtariAge store, but starting in January I'll be looking to acquire lots of common games to build my new collection! You can find my current wants list in the spoiler tag below
    4 points
  16. Hey folks, I just received a beautiful Atari 600xl with the 64k upgrade and composite video upgrade and I am stoked! I have never used an Atari computer before, I have had TI99/4a since the 80's and a few C64's over the years. I have a SDrive-max coming in the mail, should be here by this weekend if everything works out, fingers crossed. Is there any must read books for the new Atari computer user? What do you guys recommend for essential reading to get comfortable with a new to me machine? I have been reading a little about Turbobasic, seems like a good alternative than regular ATARI BASIC, kinda like how RXB is way better than the TI99's extended basic. I guess I am just reaching out ahead of time to get a clue about the cool stuff available for this machine. Any advise for a new and clueless beginner for the way of Atari is welcome. I am sure i will have follow up questions, thank you in advance. I like learning new things.
    4 points
  17. Hello, Some of you might possibly remember me. I was active in the Atari groups on USENET from 1989 till about 1997. I was an active Atari 800 XL owner. I got into a multi year argument with the developers of BattleSphere for the Atari Jaguar. That's untreated depression for you. I did go to a couple of the Toad Net days. For some reason I signed up 5 years ago and never posted on the forums. I thought I did. I thought I might have had an earlier account and was active. I had a massive heart attack in 2012 and my memory has been crap since. I've been playing video games since 1974 with the launch of the first Odyssey. Got the Atari VCS 2600 in 1978 or 79. Got the Atari 800xl shortly after Jack Tramel bought the company. I bought an Atari jaguar at launch as well as the CD unit. I tried to get an Atari falcon but my pre-order was stuck on a boat, and then never appeared. Last night December 8th, 2021, I bought an Atari VCS 800 mini pc and I thought about this place. So here I am again.
    4 points
  18. That experience is not complete until you accidentally type OLD CS1 instead of SAVE CS1 afterwards. (happened to me once, and IIRC Extended Basic w/o 32K drops the program immediately)
    4 points
  19. I increased the gap between the layers just one ChronoColour(TM) pixel, to make the cube less vertically squashed-looking. I think it's an improvement. Image shows side-by-side comparision, in Gopher on the left, and Stella on the right. Also a good comparision of the colour usage of the two emulators. Stella is a fair bit more saturated, it seems. cubiks20211210.bin
    4 points
  20. Plays with no issues on my Dragonfly cart, check out the video below. Another awesome game @vhzc! I was able to beat the boss in the second run and I'm looking forward to more enemies and bosses! - James (WATCH IN 1080P60 FOR BEST QUALITY)
    4 points
  21. Wow, it really has been a couple of years.... Yes, the project is a bit dormant. At some point I'll backport recent fixes from Altirra BASIC to Altirra Extended BASIC, at least.
    4 points
  22. It’s still pretty fun, but it’s also very stressful.
    4 points
  23. Ah yes I remember that well... But now I'm "Gaampa!" and it's so much fun.
    4 points
  24. Here are the schematics for all of the CorComp devices. The board you are looking for is one of them. . . CorComp Schematic Set.zip
    4 points
  25. Here is the hotline recording: The new cartridge is . Which is really exciting! It means @doctorclu is going to have to get an Evercade
    4 points
  26. NML Recently made a video showing the use of SNAC (native controller port) from this core with the atarivox+ peripheral:
    4 points
  27. Hi all I have recently finished my Atari Flashback Raspberry Pi conversion. I have based it on the look of the Atari 2600 Vader edition. This is an Atari Flashback 6 with a Raspberry Pi 3b+ inside with Retropie. I removed the Flashback buttons and replaced them with arcade style buttons. I used black snakeskin style vinyl wrap to cover the brown wood effect front panel. I removed the old Joystick ports and added USB ports. I cut a hole in the back to add an HDMI port. Another hole was cut to add a Micro SD card reader so I can easily remove the SD card without opening up the whole case. I wired the Pi board to the power button and a white power LED. Hot glue, super glue and lots of filing was used for the project. The Pi board is currently sitting loose in the case as not a lot of room to bolt it in, but it is very secure as it is. I have converted an Atari Flashback 7800 joystick to work via USB by using a convertor. Also connected, an 8Bitdo wireless controller. Just for effect......I messed around with a couple of "free" retro wallpaper backgrounds and stuck my Flashback in the middle, which came out well.
    3 points
  28. I recently discovered that my wife bought me an Atari VCS for Christmas. To say that I’m excited about receiving this console would be an understatement. Once I have the console in my hands, I need to decide on what games to buy for it, and there’s a good selection available. Any suggestions? Pedra! is already on my radar, so that is a no-brainer imho. Thanks in advance to those who respond!
    3 points
  29. 3 points
  30. Also, one more thing. The game play on the VCS off of Antstream is fantastic. That and the Recharged series have been a lot of my playing recently.
    3 points
  31. In a very special non-Garfield episode of Artie the Atari... https://atariage.com/forums/blogs/entry/17830-so-long-farewell-auf-wiedersehen-adieu/
    3 points
  32. Lots of good info in this thread for noobs
    3 points
  33. I used to have an entire Dreamcast collection, complete Jaguar and Lynx collection and about 700 2600 games, now only have the base hardware and a few loose games that I absolutely must have. Obviously no single person really has that much time to ever play the majority of games, most going unplayed outside of a quick test run. More is never a good thing in almost any situation and my mindset had changed from collector to user or player once I really realized it. I think the key is to keep the system or systems that you love but rid the rest. Now vs. then, my only real regret is the value of selling games 20 years ago vs. seeing them worth 20x more now than what I had sold them for but I suppose that's how the market works and fluctuates. Outside of that, letting go of tons of games you don't use or need is without question for the best. Focus on what you actually do want/need is key. As far as emulation, I always prefer the real thing. Which is why I say keep the base systems but rid the rest of what you don't really use or love. I ended up extending this to some hardware that I once loved but just didn't use anymore or have time for and let those go as a result as well. Sometimes I miss the idea of being able to access it all at any given time but doing so once or twice every few years doesn't warrant the space or need to have them.
    3 points
  34. Sidney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan is highly recommended!.
    3 points
  35. And all 3 PAL jedec's are on my 'PAL/GAL Jedec map files' topic page.
    3 points
  36. 3 points
  37. Here's another Argentine TI site. They have a lot of interesting TI data as well. The TI was manufactured in Argentina, using parts that were for the most part imported from the USA. The TI was only manufactured at two locations in Europe: Holland and Italy, with the majority of that production happening in Italy. The US also sent machines to Brazil and several other countries in South America, so PAL machines weren't a major issue (the motherboard was designed to be easily switched between PAL video chips and NTSC--and the rest of the chips were identical on both). The US also supplied several Pacific countries with both PAL and NTSC variants of the TI, so both were a bit widespread outside of the European PAL and SECAM units.
    3 points
  38. I'm excited to see it come out. I really like the looks of the speaker stand and think it would fit well in my office. You might talk to @digdugnate I think his kid has messed with some dev stuff.
    3 points
  39. Flash carts made it easy to stop collecting games. Every once in a while I'll get a new release but I have no desire to blow hundreds on a classic anymore.
    3 points
  40. I've agonized for years about bidding on one whenever they came up for sale, but simply could not justify the significant outlay for something that will be sitting on a shelf unused. And yet it calls for me still... I must resist!
    3 points
  41. The Technos cartridges (arcade and console games) are next on my to-get list. I plan to act while I can before they shut down production. I really look forward to what comes in 2022.
    3 points
  42. My wife is having twin girls. She's 12 weeks in. I'm so frickin' happy.
    3 points
  43. Alas! New release of Felix is out. And a bigger one, because it's glorious v0.5.0! So we are half way through ? New cool thing inside. Among others: Shiny GUI powered by Dear ImGui. Having user interface I could implement custom key remapping and add some configuration. There is preliminary gamepad support. Currently not configurable, but we will see how it behaves and what to do next with it. Some bugfixes permits few more games to work. Some debugging features, but it's not visual debugger yet (but hopefully soon). Please take a look and return with feedback! BTW. I can be reached from tomorrow till sunday in Gdańsk on Silly Venture demo party, so see you there.
    3 points
  44. I think my ST worked fine in my college days, it could dial-in and interact with the VAXes, but also exchange disks with the PCs since it used the FAT format. The PC labs were often crowded at crunch time, so I could write papers on my ST, and take them down to the lab for printing. Also in college my roommate became a very early adopter of Linux (early 90s). He installed it on his computer and suggested I wire my ST up as a 'terminal'. We did. I wasn't sure what to do with Linux at first, but then I got an idea. It had always annoyed me that my ST didn't have a battery-backed up clock, so it's time would always reset at boot. So I wrote a program that logged into his linux server, checked the time, and set the ST clock accordingly and had it run at boot. I think it annoyed him though, that his awesome linux machine was being used for such a trivial task :)
    3 points
  45. That would make sense, during the 80s we were in the middle of a Disctatorship, then in a weak democracy, so it's the perfect place to sell stuff not produced locally were people without access to travel abroad not even knows that exists. We probably got it around 92, and I had it until 2001 or 2002, that I was a teenager and dind't understand the concept of nostalgia or collectible, and ended up disassembling it "to see what is inside", and then throwing it away. Either way, I have found this site, in spanish, that has a few interesting things: http://www.compuclasico.com/site/museo/ti_trs I attach a few of the images here, because they are super interesting. One says: "La industria informatica Argentina sigue creciendo" - "The Argentine computer industry continues to grow" "Microcomputador TI 99/4A de Texas Instruments, ahora fabricado en el pais" - "Texas Instruments TI 99 / 4A Microcomputer, Now Made in the Country" Now this last phrase is super interesting. I know that Commodore 64 was assembled in Argentina by "Dean" with refurbished parts from other countries, and that the Spectrum was also assembled in the country using Portugal to import the parts, because the since the Dictatorship started a war on England, we were banned on importing from UK. (I actually still have one of those spectrums, but is stored in Argentina) More from the website: "This was one of the first computer families to arrive in the country, perhaps before the arrival of the Commodores and the Spectrum. It is very possible that they have not remained as the first in the preferences of Computer addicts first because in Spain they were not too widespread (almost nothing) and therefore in the magazines originating in that country (which had a lot of circulation here) it was impossible to find programs or news about her, only in national magazines (K-64, Popular Programming, etc ...). The TI-99 Users Club operated at Av. Pueyrredón 860 9th Floor." I didn't know that, and would explain why my father was able to get a used TI first, and a Spectrum later. The second attached image is great, wih better quality: "Tan facil de tener como de operar" - "As easy to have as to operate" The last bit of the long text says: "Por estar producido en la Argentina con toda la tecnologia de avanzada de Textas Instruments, este microcomputador cuenta con el maximo respaldo tecnico, un completo asesoramiento y el mejor service. Microcomputador personal TI-99/4A, de venta en todo el pais, convirtiendose en el lider del mercado Argentino." - "Because it is produced in Argentina with all the advanced technology from Texas Instruments, this microcomputer has the maximum technical support, complete advice and the best service. TI-99 / 4A personal microcomputer, sold throughout the country, becoming the leader in the Argentine market." Then at the end of the flyer is the manufacturer information: "Texas Instruments Argentina", in the city of "Don Torcuato", in the Province of Buenos Aires. The website makes a comment on the video output, saying that the USA ones had an incompatible NTSC DIN 5 output. It would make sense that the ones assembled in Argentina were actually from Spain, since Argentina uses PAL-N if I remember correctly, and also speaks spanish. The third image is the Argentina assembled beige model. ------ @HOME AUTOMATION Thank you! Gracias!
    3 points
  46. Can people just stop collecting but be happy with what they already have and keep that? I think it's possible. You don't have to have an all or nothing attitude toward collecting.
    3 points
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