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Not much to tell really, we had a two hour conversation and he went through the source code with me... Nothing too deep, but he told me how he did some things, and I told him how I was going to 'time slice' the off screen enemies. He thought that was a good idea. He told me the story of how they burned the chips the night before Defender was to be introduced... They kind of hand-assembled some last minute changes, and had to remember what they did so they can change it in the source code. It was very pleasant speaking with him, and he gave me some insight. I hope to speak to him again at some point (most likely as I get closer to finishing this port). A couple of times he couldn't remember why certain things were done, and I remember joking with him saying, "it's not like it was 40 years ago or anything"

Check out these amazing keychains made by Tanya that will be going to this year's Atari Homebrew Award winners as a bonus! The awards, certificates and these amazing ZPH gifts are already on their way to all the incredible Atari game developers! Which one is your favourite? Mine is the top right one in the second photo. Congratulations again to all the winners! - James

I've already changed the splash screen:

I am really happy you had that experience. So cool.

Hell yes! Well there are some settings that do actually work really well for the Distortion C basses, so we'll see what gives As far as I could tell, it's becoming really nice, and just as I wished, it was only a matter of time before this turned into a feature! Absolutely! I also have been rewriting the entire Export code, and greatly simplified the process, in fact it has become a lot easier to customise, which is precisely why it was so uncomfortable back when I only had x86 disassembly of the code. It turns out that the very function used to load binaries in memory worked perfectly, it was the code in charge of saving data that caused all my problems! So in short, all I had to do to overcome it was not to work around all the export construction, but rather take a smarter approach. That means, I literally could load in memory a complete export player (minus the .rmt module) built from my currently in progress ASM code for the RMT Driver/VUPlayer, and assign a bunch of memory addresses, then write all the sections in 1 batch, and maintain compatibility with ALL possible variations! It really felt like a Eurêka to me, because as far as I remember, the original export construction was NOT at all built with customisations in mind, and as such, it truly was a pain in the ass to maintain with my driver updates, which in return made them a lot less frequent since it involved a LOT of handmade HEX editing for each of the parts I needed to load in memory to then re-construct a binary! So as things are currently, the demo I posted yesterday used the latest revision I posted on my Github, and it will still get more soon considering that I'm far from the most optimised builds I want to make possible. The pieces of interest there so far are rmtplayr.a65 (driver), rmt_feat.a65 (work in progress set of features for conditional assembly for all the changes I did), and most importantly, dasmplayer.asm (originally the re-creation of the XEX export code, but it first gained a lot of improvements, and now it turned into its own thing, VUPlayer, also WIP). Things there are obviously not finished, I know that, but still, the latest version of everything in there was the exact same I have used yesterday, and, with the simplified construction code I have designed in the meantime, compatibility with more customisation will become a real treat later. So yes, support with all of this is my long term goal right now. Thank you very much! I will do my best to not disappoint you. Right now I believe I finally have solved the biggest problem related to the music production: tuning. From this point onward, handling as many combinations as they could possibly be made should become a lot easier, now that I got a major obstacle out of the way. If you have any ideas or suggestions for things you think I could do better, I would like to hear them! I'm aware I am not a very experienced programmer in the first place, and might not be able to do certain things yet, but like they say, nothing is impossible until you're tried at least once! Anyway, I'm back to work on my Ratio tuning code, I had some unrelated things to do in the meantime, so I haven't actually made much progress since my last message here.

New VCS game announced, End's Reach! The developer has announced it will be coming to the VCS first, so it will be a timed exclusive. Let me know your thoughts. https://fb.watch/bNbI3Y6aax/

Right, several carts are on backorder from the distributor until April at this point, including the new Renovation and Gremlin releases. Thus looking at mid-April for my next restock.

TImes (UK) #15 Jan 1987 (Complete) Ready to print. TImes (UK) #15 Jan1987 (Complete).pdf

That is sooooooo awesome!!!! You got to speak to the legend himself!!! still looking forward to seeing DEFENDER on the 7800.

Here's a picture of my rig setup on my workbench in the shed. No room in the house at the moment . I purchased a console from the US recently without covers and a couple of controllers that did not work very well. Thus the steel plate covers and homemade controllers. It was fun getting the system working. The rest of my 5200 stuff is packed away in boxes at the moment. P.S. i'm more of a Deep Purple fan :-)

The Status Updates created by @Albert is really cool. But poor Jon not getting a date, uncool.

The National Video Game Museum just north of Dallas (Frisco, TX) had the joysticks connected in this manner on the day I visited. It was somewhat striking to me how they presented the system so poorly when its genesis took place in North Texas? PEB not hooked up, joysticks plugged into the cassette port, etc. The entire museum was a little disappointing IMHO. Very little depth beyond a large collection of consoles and 8-bit computers.

Thank you Carlsson! Between getting 4 hours of sleep 2 nights in a row and having to build and furnish enclosures for nine tarantulas on Monday I've been totally exhausted and completely spaced off the weekly tracker post! I just remembered it now though, so here's my times for the week: Browser Based Wordle - 20 minutes Nintendo Switch Night in the Woods - 260 minutes

Is it my imagination or have the Namco carts become unavailable in North America? I know they are losing the license soon but other than something like Amazon, the North American retailers are no longer carrying the Namco collections. On a fun note... that Renovation collection is starting to hit with the reviewers and comes out in a couple of weeks. I'm going to be grabbing this collection for some shoot em up action. Other games on there will be a bonus! I'm passing on the Gremlin cart though... nothing on that cart that interests me... well that one Utopia game is pretty cool, but the rest is a pass. Now that Intellivision collection 2 is an instant buy! Oh an that Morphcat looks like it will be a lot of fun!

Xenophobe is one of those Lynx games that I really need to sink some time into. I've played it for a half hour or so. I'm aware that it has some big fans and that it's generally well regarded. And I'm a massive fan of the Alien franchise. But I didn't have Xenophobe when I was a kid, when I had more time for gaming. I do really want to explore Xenophobe, but for whatever reason I've never gotten around to giving it the time it deserves.

this SonicDash is rather for the road drawing engine by this time the Saint was almost finished... I'm already looking forward to getting my hands on his sprite engine.

I'll handle these stats Thursday evening, so in case anyone yet hasn't posted (for times up until last Sunday), there will still be some time.

Here's the summary for Week 10, running from Mar 7 - 13. We logged 7847 minutes of eligible play, playing 103 games on a total of 25 systems. Top 10: 1. Tetris (NES/Famicom) - 1460 min. (#3) 2. Zero Hour (CoCo 3) - 1350 min. 3. Phantasy Star IV (Genesis) - 610 min. (#2) 4. Metroid (Famicom Disk System) - 503 min. 5. Gex 64: Enter the Gecko (N64) - 440 min. 6. Slap Fight MD (Genesis) - 418 min. 7. Metroid X [Metroid ROM hack] (NES/Famicom) - 235 min. 8. Donkey Kong Land 2 (Game Boy) - 170 min. 9. Starflight (Genesis) - 150 min. 9. Unseen (Atari Lynx) - 150 min. Pre-NES top 10: 1. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 134 min. (PN#6) 2. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 132 min. (PN#5) 3. Raptor (Atari 2600) - 73 min. 4. Air-Sea Battle (Atari 2600) - 60 min. 4. Zoom 909 (SG-1000) - 60 min. 6. Midnight Mutants (Atari 7800) - 55 min. (PN#9) 7. Chez Maxime (Sinclair ZX Spectrum) - 47 min. 8. Champion Billiards (SG-1000) - 45 min. 9. Centipede (Atari 2600) - 40 min. 9. Skyway (CoCo 1 & 2) - 40 min. Top 10 systems: 1. NES/Famicom - 1908 min. (#2) 2. Genesis - 1392 min. (#5) 3. CoCo 3 - 1350 min. 4. Atari 2600 - 617 min. (#3) 5. Famicom Disk System - 504 min. 6. N64 - 493 min. 7. Neo Geo AES/MVS - 225 min. (#7) 8. C64 - 222 min. (#4) 9. Atari Lynx - 202 min. (#6) 10. Game Boy - 198 min. (#1) This week it is a two game race between (Nintendo's) Tetris on the NES/Famicom and Zero Hour on the CoCo 3. None of the overall top 10 games qualify for the pre-NES list, which instead is headed by the two evergreen 2600 games Solar Fox right ahead of Kaboom! Systems wise the Genesis gets into the race, but nothing can stop the NES/Famicom becoming the most played system, even without help from the Famicom Disk System. Two new entries to the 1000 Minute Club: #481 Zero Hour (CoCo 3) - 1350 min. #482 Slap Fight MD (Genesis) - 1158 min. Also Phantasy Star IV (Genesis) enters the 5000 Minute Club with a total of 5221 min.

This is Dead Planets, a minimalist 288 screen arcade adventure that fits in 4k. It's my second bAtari Basic project. Dead Planets is my sort of homage to the multi-screen/flip-screen ZX Spectrum arcade adventures of my youth, games like Jet Set Willy, Sabre Wulf, Wizard's Lair, Starquake, Robin of the Wood, Firelord, Atic Atac, Auf Wiedershen Monty etc. mixed with the time attack 2600 games like Barnstorming and the empty, quiet feel of Metroid. It's also a homage to the lost art of mapping out these sort of games on graph paper as we used to have to do in the 1980s and you'll probably have to revisit that skill to get anywhere. Rest assured, this is a deliberate feature not a bug. You play DEWI (DEad Worlds Investigation Probe) searching for the lost Tiptonite crystals of wisdom hidden in the caverns of six dead worlds of the collapsed ZX82 civilization. Press up/down to pick one of the six worlds to explore and fire button to start. Find the three crystals in each world, return to the start room and hit the exit warp to finish game. Do it as fast as you can, the only score is your time, try and set personal best i.e. time attack game like Barnstorming. Old School game mapping on graph paper will help you. Walls kill you. Worlds are 8x6 screens with wraparound on all four edges - so 288 screens in 4k with space left over. Control has some cheap momentum (looks choppy on the video, makes more sense when/if you play it) and this gets more pronounced on later worlds. There are six colour coded worlds, selectable by moving joystick U/D on the start screen Press Fire to start, and to restart after a Game Over. World 1 - ABYSSIUM World 2 - BRIMSTONE World 3 - LILACIUM World 4 - DUNEBALL World 5 - RAINGOD World 6 - CHROMIUM Dead Planets.bin Dead Planets.bas

Glad this video was saved!

The poly9 counter has a period of 511 cycles, while the TIA timer periods are spaced by 57 cycles. The prime factors of 511 are 7 and 73, so the divisors that are going to give you problems are the ones divisible by 7 (after taking the -1 into account in the register value). For the poly4 counter, I fixed this by changing the POKEY divisors to always be N*15+1, so it was guaranteed to sample the poly9 counter one value ahead in the sequence each time like the TIA does. That probably isn't viable here since you'd need to round the period to a multiple of 511, which is a much bigger pitch change. Probably just applying a +/-1 to the table entries for the TIA divisor values of 6, 13, and 20 is enough to get comparable timbre.

Update 3/16/22: game coming together very fast . Hope to have a playable beta in the next few weeks . Only a few screens still need designing . Want to wait until there is at least a close to final draft for all screens . I will stop posting screen shots since that is probably annoying with no game to play . Game will be a very true adaptation of original with only a few minor differences. For example , the riddle of keys will not have to be guessed but can be discovered . I am excited to share something in the near future .

all i have right now is 2 xe prototypes and 3 xl ones any production runs are postponed till noone knows when since the situation on component maket - there is absolutly lack of any CPLD/FPGA chips that would be usable I was cosidering even a board redesign just to address the issue, but there is nothing i could change current CPLD to (in comparable price range)

I noticed on Songbird that some of the cartridges like the arcade collections, the Intellivision Collection 1, etc. are backordered. I'm not surprised. But it's just as well that I wait - I have other financial obligations right now. Probably later this year, I plan to grab the Atari & Gaelco arcade collections along with both Intellivision cartridges.

------ Joke of the Day ------ What did James Bond’s mom say after she gave birth? I’ve been expecting you, Mr. Bond. ------------------------------ #joke #jokes

Some of the poly stuff on 2600 vs computer is very different - there are notes that would likely be completely not reproducable. Also I'm fairly sure all the 2600 notes are "stable" in that you get a constant predictable result regardless of when the stores occur vs the computer where esp distortion C can vary and even be silent depending on when you store in relation to the AUDF counter cycle. I've been meaning to produce a driver which has various emulation levels - for the stuff we can't do in hardware, it can be done by Pokey Timers in software - ie forced volume toggling between 0 and your desired volume setting to produce those unreproducable poly sounds. Generally the stuff that's hard would be low-mid frequencies anyway, the high frequency stuff you could probably kludge it and barely notice the difference. But what I have lacking is the knowledge of how the polys work exactly - it's all shifting and XOR I'm fairly sure but not sure on how to do it properly.

Here for you to read, print, ocr, pdf, add to whtech or any other archive... Part 3 of 3 - zip of high res TIF images scanned from the UK TI-99/4a User Group magazine TI*MES Issue No 15, published January 1987. Together with a detailed pdf contents list, a disk of programs from the issue (as one cannot be typed in I have done it for you...), and a note on the disk programs in text format... Next for a change will be a Chicago magazine followed by a return to the UK mags. TIMES 15 disk note.txt times_no15.dsk times uk no15 Jan1987 contents.pdf times uk no15 Jan1987_pt3.zip

Just to add some detail on that, the RPKs seem to enjoy some longer life than expected, since they were promoted from the TI-only access to a general MAME access (they moved up the tree). ? In MAME, the ZIP cartridges only contain the dumps, but the metadata are stored in a XML file which is distributed with MAME. (The reason is obviously that after more than 10 years, no one came up with a reasonable extension of the ZIP format to homebrew cartridges.) So I'd like to introduce another wording: The RPKs are not deprecated anymore, but the ZIP files are recommended for standard cartridges (not homebrew).

It's OK. He drilled a hole in his own case.

That would also explain why the original bundle featured Atari Collection 1 in the US, but Namco Collection 1 in Europe (at least that's what I got). I had assumed it was just to fit the taste of each continent.

New feature to RXB2022 all written in Assembly so way faster than PRINT: CALL SCROLLUP or CALL SCROLLUP(1,"") both do exactly same thing but faster one is without the (values) needed for 1 like up. Also SCROLLDOWN, SCROLLLEFT, and SCROLLRIGHT too. Of course you can include a string: CALL SCROLLUP(4," THIS IS A TEST") would be the same as: PRINT : : : : "THIS IS A TEST" Timed 10,000 loop: TI Basic 14 minutes 16 seconds XB PRINT 13 minutes 9 seconds XB 2.7 13 minutes 9 seconds XB3 9 minutes 7 seconds RXB SCROLLUP 8 minutes 25 seconds

See, everyone knows wholla!

"My God... it's full of carts!"

touché ?

This is exactly what I was thinking about earlier tonight. Dist C obviously won't play nice, but dist A, 16-bit, "filters", etc... will work with just tuning, or any other ratio. Another question I had was if exporting a file with defined/undefined features is still possible and your 6502 player supports that? That is very important for demo stuff and games. I have moved vibrato stuff to other parts of the instrument in the past (+/-1 frequency in the envelope), just to avoid the extra code needed for vibrato. That was Procrastinate, IIRC. I'm really looking forward to using your new stuff for a new production. Aimed at SV2K22 So we have lots of time to fix things if there are problems

No classic gaming time for me this past week, but that's alright since I missed the cutoff anyway. Thank you once again for running the tracker Carlsson, and I hope I didn't keep you waiting on my account

This game is infuriating. You can move pretty fast, but it kind of demands you go really slow. I don't know, the controls aren't bad, you can kind of get to know the levels... it feels like I lose my lives really fast. There isn't a lot of chance to play if that makes sense. Not bad, there are some cool elements, but I think this is about all I'm going to do. World 1-2... slightly better... 14,625 I like killing mice But I really hate those tires So many cheap deaths

Tuning by ratio is coming soon. I'm in the process to design a new dialog box where a handful of parameters can be set, such as the base note intended for tuning, the notes ratio, if 12TET or 12Ratio is desirable, and possibly more if I get the idea how to do it. For now, I have got the code for the calculations by ratio to work, so I hope I could demonstrate some of it later tonight if I get most things to work as expected.

Found out yesterday that I won't have to mow the yard at the new house we're renting. The owner pays somebody to do it. No yard work is nothing to sneeze at.

At this point I feel that Dell owes me some sales commission

What a sweet group of photos these are Atari_Bill. You have a bunch of 40 & 50-ish year old dudes drooling at these pics like it was that topless Samantha Fox poster from 1987 lol...... It is funny......My eyes immediately gazed towards those H.E.R.O carts too. While I prefer the better-looking C-64 and Colecovision versions of this fantastic game I still appreciate where it started from. Best of luck on your future sales....buy with confidence as Atari_Bill is a fantastic AA member

I have added the ability to save a compiled program as a cartridge. (Thanks to Tursi for an update to Classic99 that makes this possible) First the program must be loaded. This can be either via the usual loading process in the compiler package, or via OLD DSK1.PROGRAM-X as I do in the video. CALL LOAD(-31868,0,0,0,0) RUN "DSK1.MAKECART" Enter the name for the cartridge menu and the filename to save under. The cartridge is created. The new JUWEL package will be released in the next couple of days.

I will release the tools required to convert the BupChip audio into the streamed format required by the 7800, also. So any future BupSystem games will also be playable on the 7800GD.

Click on the stream. Then look for the small red icon to the right of the stream name. Click on that, confirm the popup, and the stream will be deleted. ..Al

Stratovox hi 32150

I think you should go ahead and use 128k. There's plenty of options to upgrade, and nearly everyone has +RAM or, if not, there's always altirra. I know you are probably thinking along the lines of a re-usable sprite library for 8Bit Unity, but you could have a 128k version (fast) and a 64k version(slow). Use this game to develop the fast one, and then see if there is really a need for a 64k version.

I'm sticking to facts but I'll reply with the same tone the other party's using. The bottom line is: If you care about running your project on stock machines and need as much memory as possible, XBios is the only solution available. It's been used on several projects. In PoP's case, the final disk release has 1700+ downloads and no complaint about the game not loading. So XBios has proven useful and reliable. Anyone claiming the opposite should back it up with proof or deserves to be called a troll. For those who enjoyed the game on disk, they should be grateful because having this tool means no compromise had to be made (half resolution on all animation frames like the BBC). Loading speed is a minor annoyance in that regard.

Very cool, no idea this project existed. I found out from the ZPH thread!

Here's a progress update on Robotron 2084. The video capture program I used seems a little off so the action looks a little faster than it actually is, so just tweak the playback speed. I managed to get 18 enemies, 6 humans, 4 enemy shots, a spheriod, 4 player shots, and the player all moving around the playfield at the same time with a good animation rate and just under 1K. The last bit that needs work is quarks spawning the tanks, scoring, and sound and then it's bug fixing and polishing. In my battle with beating the refresh I've learned a lot about generating optimal assembler and I'm going to share my findings in a separate post. Robotron 2084 Demo