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Hey all, Doctor Clu here! hope all you Bubsy fans have had a great year so far! Not bad here! Wrapped up some projects for some friends, and with that done, here we are! I heard from our old pal Spongefox who had some great pictures for the Easter season... Love the Bugs Bunny feel to the first one. Also had the fortune of talking to B!ockbubster who is a big Bubsy fan and sent me these pictures... Love the last one! Whatever blows your hair back! Also here is what inspired me to get a post out, not later, but RIGHT NOW!! Chris Ytps on YouTube, otherwise known as "I do a lil trolling" on the Bubsy Discord found the Bubsy commercial that was over in Japan and did some sub titles for it! Now that truly is pawsome! Hope you've been well, and hope to send another entry out on here soon-ish. -Bubsy Bobcat Fan Blog Originally posted here: https://forums.atariage.com/blogs/entry/18912-cruizin-the-interwebs-japan-bubsy-commercial-march-2024/

I thought the boss screen in Flying Hamburgers looked rather sparse, so I decided to attempt to put some clouds in there. That was easy, but then I discovered the shots and the burger were going behind them. A whole bunch of sprite address rearranging then occurred and then I finally got the result I was looking for. It's amazing what adding just four sprite tiles does to the look of a game. I also fixed the blackness (or sometimes whiteness) that appeared to the strawberry milkshake. That was due to the number of colors in the palette. The light pink used to highlight the shake was in pos. #2 in the palette, but so was also the numbers. I changed the color on the fly to color the score and lives counter. Fortunately, I only had 14 of a possible 16 colors in that palette (for the sprites), so I added a 15th color. I have one left in case I wanted to add something else, but I don't see a need to right now. I also worked pretty hard on Intellivision Pac-Line but nobody seems to care any more. I saw that Brian's Man Cave had put a version of Paku Paku in the contest, which made me sad. But who knows? Perhaps he thought of it and started working on his before I did mine. Which is what led me to resume work on Flying Hamburgers.

I've installed the FM upgrade board 4 times now into a few different SMS NTSC consoles now and something that I tend to always forget, is that the official instructions for installing the board has a few mistakes in it. One of those mistakes is a pretty big one that I've mentioned to Tim Worthington a few times but it never seems to get fixed in his guide. That step is regarding the process for getting the region switch working on NTSC consoles. Now the steps listed I'm sure are accurate for PAL versions of the console, but 3 different model 1 and one model 2 unit I've installed the kit into all required the same thing to get it working. The specific step to install the region switch wire states to solder a wire from the IORQ pin off the FM board and to isolate and solder the same signal pin on the 2516 IC chip in the console. This chip is the IO Gate array IC btw. The docs state this is pin 19 on that IC and that is a correct statement. However, removing this pin from circuit on the NTSC consoles will prevent the SMS from booting at all. Just a black screen when powering on the console. Attaching the region switch wire to that pin while isolate does nothing. The pin you want to attach to instead on that IC is actually Pin 23. It is listed as the KillGa pin and I assume has something to do with a halt or reset. In some models of the SMS pin 23 isn't attached to anything. But on the NTSC systems it is part of the circuit. So, you have to either cut the trace to this pin or lift the pin from the board to isolate it and then install the IORQ wire from the FM board to pin 23. This will correctly allow switching the region on the SMS. The region switch isn't dynamic so you have to either reset the game after switching, or power the SMS off and then back on for the region switch setting to take effect. Here is a picture of the wire I'm talking about attached to a lifted pin23 off the IC I did the other night as an example. Here is the IORQ pad the other end of the wire attaches to on the current and latest version of the FM board upgrades. Depending on the version of the FM you have, this pad has changed places but it is always labeled the same. In the pic below is the yellow wire soldered on the upper left section. So if you ever install one of these or possibly have one installed and hadn't gotten the region switching working on your NTSC console, now you know why and how to correct for it. BTW the switch is advised because it allows you to select between US/PSG audio, US/FM audio, and JPN/FM audio settings. There are 2 games known that require the JPN/FM setting in order for them to work with the main one being Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap here in the US (Wonder Boy II in JPN). View the full article

I'll be doing a stream tonight at about 9:15-9:30 EDT in honor of @Charlie Cat's Neo Geo thread having it's 10th anniversary! I'll just play random Neo Geo games casually. Requests welcome!

Awhile back, I had this idea of a grand Odyssey 1 project called "I Need to Escape the Aliens." Then I forgot about it. Until last night. I woke up at about 4 a.m. with a fully fledged idea for an Odyssey 1 game. But I was too tired to get up, so I went back to sleep. I woke up at around noon. A few hours later, I decided to try to flesh out the idea to see what is possible and if I could add anything to it. The second (or perhaps third?) game doesn't need an overlay, but I think I'll make one for it anyway. So anyway, back to this idea. Later I'll design an overlay. It will consist of squares, like the six² project I released last year. And another one for the second game. And then I'll need to think of a third part to conclude the game. This will be a game that uses multiple cartridges (like, say, Football). And I'll try to not forget instructions, print them out instead of having them be downloaded. It does seem kind of odd to have a video game console still having games released for it 53 years after it is released!

Recently, I was looking into improving the sprite flicker management of Chaotic Grill. I took the following notes to give myself a general idea of the timing of this routine/process (6507 code). This is just a list of timestamps and some basic notes / calculations for handling 5 sprites. Overall, this is probably not that useful without the code or more context, but it might be interesting to some people. --------- Start on cycle 768 (scanline 10, cycle 29) 768 - Start of call 812 - Start sort initialization at cycle 842 - Start of sort 1022 - Done with sort 1038 - Call find split function 1130 - Done with finding split (2 sprites at top) 1216 - noSprite1: 1240 - SavePlayerMetaDPC 1385 - jump doneLoadZone1 1423 - SaveMetaDPC_split 1567 - done with SaveMetaDPC_split 1654 - loadSpriteGraphics 1668 - loadSprite0Graphics 1748 - done with loadSprite0Graphics 1764 - loadSprite1Graphics 1844 - done with loadSprite1Graphics 1910 - done with PrepPepper 1923 - DONE 1923 - 768 = 1155 = ~15 scanlines for the entire thing 1022 - 842 = 180 = ~2.5 scanlines for sorting 5 sprites —— Basic breakdown 1130 - 768 = 362 = ~4.7 scanlines for all prep work (sort + find split) 1654 - 1130 = 524 = ~6.9 scanlines for prepping mid-screen sprites 1923 - 1654 = 269 = ~3.5 scanlines for loading first two sprites Outside of prep work, it takes approximately 2 scanlines per sprite.

(click here for ridiculously-oversized version) 413 < PreviousIndexNext >

I finally compiled all the different Eagle parts I had drawn over the last year into a single Eagle library and adjusted them to be more or less uniform in look. While I was at it, I also added all missing chips and connectors. Currently, it contains the following parts: 74LS08 74LS14 74LS51 74LS74 74LS138 74LS158 74LS375 4050 4051 4164 6502C/Sally 6520A/PIA 27128/OS PROM ANTIC BASIC ROM Cartridge Cartridge Socket EP8212 GTIA Joystick Port Keyboard Socket LM358 MMU Monitor Jack Parallel Bus Interface Parallel Bus Interface Device POKEY Power Jack RF Modulator SIO Jack Basically, it's everything you find on an 800XL motherboard. Update 2014-04-29: added conversion to Eagle 6.5.0 (XML file format). atari.lbr.gz eagle-6.5.0-atari.lbr.gz