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The system has only been out for 4 months, and it's had 4 different updates released already. You will see it, but they are working to make sure the next update includes big things, not just one thing here or there like the previous ones.

Another bluetooth dongle that works is the Unijoysticle. I've been using it with an xbox one controller and even with the Atari VCS controllers. Neat thing is you can use one xbox controller as 2 joysticks.. so that playing Robotron is easy. There's a list of what wireless controllers will work with it. https://github.com/ricardoquesada/unijoysticle2/blob/main/docs/user_guide.md

Little update, been working hard on the last pieces- Got River Raid 2 today(already had the faux-patch), and got Pitfall 2 and the patch for it a week or so ago! Only missing Beamrider, Cosmic Commuter, and Ghostbusters CIB, plus a handful of patches-a couple here are repro's, Private Eye, Space Shuttle, but 99% is real deal.

That must have really been eating away at you!

(Responding to the title because I'm not going to try to read that.) Because they weren't thinking about collectors 40 years in the future? 🤷‍♂️ The thought must have been that the box/packaging would suffice in telling consumers which version to buy for their system. I guess I don't know what else to suggest, other than to educate yourself. The differences are on the subtle side, but easily recognizable when you're familiar: Atari 2600 - Silver-ish label Atari 5200 - Blue-ish label; cart is more square-shaped than rectangular Intellivision - Narrow/elongated dimensions; squared/rectangular gold label (vs. usual trapezoid cut); end of cart is angled sharply Coleco - Gold-ish label; cart sides are angled along entire edge (vs. only halfway); trapezoidal profile; back of cart has a bracketed relief for storing controller overlays Atari 400/800 - End of cart is flat (vs. angled); cutaway on front bottom edge of cart shell; gold-ish label Commodore 64 - End of cart is angled; no cutaway; label only extends about halfway down the face of the cart; Silver-gray label Commodore VIC-20 - Very wide dimensions; gold label; title on end label is left-justified (vs. centered) TI-99/4a - Wide dimension; shallow teal label with title only; blocky protrusion around sides and face of cartridge; no title on end label; easily distinct from every other Parker Bros. cart Odyssey 2 (Brazil, Europe) - If you can't tell it's an Odyssey/Videopac game, that's on you 😜 Full disclosure: early in my collecting days, I made the rookie mistake of buying a Parker Bros. cartridge (Star Wars: The Arcade Game) for my Atari 2600, becoming very confused about why it wouldn't fit in my system, and later figuring out that it was the Coleco version. 🙃

Got these today...

I found more to the story. University of Arkansas did produce all the barcodes folks wanted. TIGER finished out a book of 1000 phrases. Texas Instruments did sell to TIGER 300 or so Magic wand units out of its warehouse. (Sears was gobbling them up to sell on clearance.)

Doggone It (1 B/B): 32,939

I misspoke. Both of my RAM boards have the D9Ks in them and I replaced it with a spare D9K. Sorry for the incorrect naming of the device.

Yeah, and he even struggles with Master System and Mega Drive. Many of those games are too hard for him to get his head around. The Atari may have tough-as-nails games but they're simpler. He was teaching himself how to play Mr. Run and Jump and got to level two on his own

I only have one joystick! I shall rectify this STAT.

This website was out of my radar! Thank you very much, sir.

I played a full game of 301 and figured out the controls halfway through. I couldn't get a screenshot of the score in time, but it took me 11 rounds. \ And I have no idea what's going on with BINGO, but hey, I started it up...

Going live with retail listings for pre-order this week / next week. Launching May 24th

89 Colours - DubaAtNight Stephen_DubaiAtNight.xex

https://madteam.atari8.info/index.php?prod=vbxe

Doggone It! 39,543

Note that if you have just one 1N34A in there, it will be installed with the band opposite the direction of the D9Ks. . .I usually run the D9Ks through an ohmmeter to verify the polarity, as that way I'm not forgetting what I'm doing during the installation.

Welcome to the dark side little man. That's the thing about Atari, especially 2600, most games are pick up and play. Kind of reminds me of modern cellphone stuff, there's a reason its popular.

Glad you came here to share that. Was there anything you did like about the Jaguar?

I'll take it! Of course I'm pitching for new product on a daily basis, but hey you got to kiss a lot of frogs till a princess appears.

Absolutely not. In fact I've been quiet recently on AA cause I've got confidence it whats happining with software and generally with product pipeline for the 2600+. Its just that at launch and shortly thereafter I was hectic in posting on AA cause there was so many fires to put out. But now taking stock, its been a success and all parties involved are planning software updates and new products. Think about it, my bosses want me to outperform the 2600+ launch in FY23 next year, and only way to do that is to present product to market that you guys actually want to buy. All of your three bullets points are things we have been working on. As soon as the software devs are comfortable with a software build I'll release it. Same with new product, soon as the deals are done and the assets are made, we'll announce. I wish I could do it all tomorrow but it rarely works out like that.

This is exactly it. With Atari and most games you can just pick up and run with it. Good for both young folk and old folk.

Okay, it's time for me to upload my contest entry. Pensate A turn-based strategy game for 1 player. Walk across a chessboard without colliding with other objects. No peripherals or additional cartridge features are used: ECS, Intellivoice, JLP, or any Tutorvision hardware features such as extra RAM, extra GRAM, or REx. However, the game autodetects which GROM you're using, so the arrows are consistent in shape. See the illustrations below. Instructions: The only controls are: up, down, left, right, and any action button (hereafter referred to as "the button"). At the start of each level, enemies randomly populate onto the chessboard. There are 5 enemies on the first level. No more than one enemy will appear in the bottom row. Move left/right to select your starting position in the bottom row, and press the button to begin play. Move up/down/left/right to an adjacent space on the chessboard. Every time you move, each enemy will also move, one at a time. A legend on the left side of the screen illustrates how each enemy moves according to your move. Enemies can wrap around the chessboard (but you cannot), but if an enemy tries to move into a space occupied by another enemy, it will return to its original position. If you move into an enemy, or an enemy moves into you, the game is over. Press the button to start a new game. If you reach the top row of the chessboard, you earn points. The number of points earned is based on your number of moves and time taken to make moves. Press the button to start the next level. With each subsequent level, one additional enemy comes into play. Start again from anywhere within the bottom row. You win if you complete 10 levels. Notes: This was originally a Commodore 64 game, written in 1983 by Penguin Software. I originally played the Windows 3.1 port, and based the legend on the table in the Windows Help file. With my port, I added a chessboard theme and put in some pretty harp arpeggiations for music. There is still about 1K of addressable ROM space available. I might post another version to add a nice endgame tune. One more thing: I livestreamed development of this game on my Twitch channel, if you care to watch its development from the ground up. pensate.bin pensate.cfg

Bought this bundle days ago and today it came in and I eventually got it all working on my VIZIO Smart TV. It’s a milestone because it’s my next old console and my next Atari one. This is the 80s Darth Vader model that makes sense and contrasts with my woodgrain modern VCS. The visuals look like a grainy videotape having come from the 80s. I look forward to collecting more games and peripherals for it too.

Juno 1st (1BA) 25550 Doggone It! 21226 Meooow! 2 3430

Can't win them all. 😜

No, you're not seeing things. There are Blue and Black (and one white) key switches. I'm using PETG - doesn't snap break like the PLA- and m3 nylon screws in the inserts. Currently printing all new adapters for the keys. The originals jus wouldn't stay on after a few dozen strokes. Almost like they wore down or the Kailh switch stretched. PLA adapters just never would fit right, either too big or too small. Maybe it's the hardness of the PLA that wouldn't give enough to snap in. The wires are some silicone multistrand jumpers I had around. I though "Flexibility" might be called for here. My next one will have a rainbow ribbon that I removed from the Frankenine version one keyboard. OBTW, after I took the picture I put some black tape on the wires where they cross the brace. The braces have a strip of Kapton tape on the back to insulate them from the PCB.

I thought I wrote a DISKIMAGE tool for ForceCommand... https://github.com/jedimatt42/fcmd/wiki/diskimage <- oh, I did! I would expect a lot of the legacy sector copy programs to not know how to cope with subprogram >10 in a DSR at a non->1100 crubase. Or, they'd just use crubase >1100 directly and fail to see the TIPI as a destination... This is probably why I wrote my diskimage tool...

Agreed! GameGuide ST and Lynx covered much more than games, it covered history, hardware, resources and had interviews as well as other great content. I'm doing the same again for the Jaguar, and the book is for old and new players too.

Gotta respect the classics! And if there's one thing we can all agree on it's that no one here can agree on a fucking thing, so the discussion will never end. Long live Supercross 3D!

Off topic for this thread, but yeah, scanning a page in grayscale at 600dpi TIFF will make each pdf page 33 MB. 400 dpi about 15 MB. Black-and-white scanning mode fails if the text is faded, esp from dot matrix printer. So I scan in grayscale, then run a Threshold filter to get acceptable B&W text out. That turns unreadable text into crisp text, permits compressed TIFF, and gets it to ~250K. Still 400dpi. Finally OCR, which has been working fairly.

Making legally-distinct versions of popular songs is a true artform, and it's rampant in pro wrestling. Nobody does it better than Jimmy Hart, who wrote a few songs for the WWF but is best known for cranking out tunes for WCW in the 90s. The funniest thing about it is, these songs are owned by the lead musician and/or the company that commissioned it. So when a wrestler leaves and joins a different company, the new company's music guy makes a legally-distinct cover of a legally-distinct cover! Here's a YT playlist of 2 of the most egregious examples coming to mind, DDP & Shane Douglas. I'd imagine most will recognize the songs being ripped off immediately but if not, click the spoiler: When a riff is consists of just 4 power chords, they'll rearrange them in different orders until they run out of options haha. Sometimes they'd also license production music for certain wrestlers, generally for the undercard guys but sometimes the stars too- Chris Jericho's WCW theme comes to mind. My brother had a book on music law many years ago when I was a young teen insomniac with no internet in my room. I spent a lot of time reading it to better understand how the law attempts to interpret a subjective thing like "how similar is too similar?" in an objective way. But unfortunately it's one of those things were too much time has passed, I don't recall any of it... but I'm still amused by this topic!

Well, if you like to preserve using good quality and preserving also the original layout of the pages (not only a simple TXT), it is not unreasonable. Some Magazines in PDFs with many pages, images, and colors, for example, cannot occupy little disk space in terms of Mb. For the Books, the PDF can be lighter of course but it depends on what you want to preserve. I have seen some smaller PDFs of books that have a bad quality and it is especially discovered when when you zoom in on the page. With low-quality text and serrated font graphics. You have to think about preservation in the future as well because maybe what you see on the screen today might be acceptable enough even at low quality, but as the years go by and technology advances with more and more defined screens, a low-quality scan today might be completely inadequate in a few years. My thought is that it is better to try to preserve as best you can today, also because today there is not this problem of not having storage space available as there used to be in the past. Then who knows if maybe what takes up so much today because it is qualitatively superior may not take up less space in the future because new, more efficient, lossless compression algorithms will be invented but at least most of the work is already done.

It took me a few moments to digest this news I am truly sorry for your loss, Kevin. It is a great loss to the whole community as well. I used to exchange messages with your dad from time to time because he was always doing and writing very interesting things, he had a great archive of things that he was able to share by enhancing them and that's what I like to do so much too, that's why I used to follow him closely. In these last months, I hoped and prayed that I could see one of his posts appear on this board again, to know that cancer has won the fight is a strong sorrow instead. I will pray for him and also want to believe, like you, that your dad is now in peace and achieved eternal serenity. I also like to think that he has met with the other 99ers enthusiasts and they are regrouping as best they can with their TI-99/4As among the stars. A big hug. Ciro

Sadly, the masked roms with the 4a unit never got cleaned up much, basically you can hear the recording click of mic being turned off and extra silence for no reason as well. We need to make new ROMs for the 4a that been cleaned up better. One thing that never been done make a speech rom emulator to SD card adapter thingy that would be cool like the finalgrom99 but for speech. One project I clearly have mapped out to do using the original system for expansion that never fully got used on the unit after the addon module part was scrapped.

It sounds nuts, especially since 30+ games = lots of $$$. Thanks again for providing the community with this opportunity.🙂

That's what happens when you remove so many games from the store at once... I'm just glad people had an opportunity to buy them, but, damn, the number of games sold was just nuts, far exceeding what I was expecting! I'll go into some details soon about the various things I'm actively working on to greatly reduce the amount of time it takes me to get orders out. That's not really going to help with the Last Chance orderes, but as I mentioned above, the goal by this time next year (or earlier, really) is to ship 95% of orders within a week's time. ..Al

One area where Atari computers seemed more accessible than others that I tried at the time was BASIC and the editing capabilities. A new user could start writing BASIC programs with straight-forward access to the sound and graphics capabilities. Could also incorporate machine language subroutines. Editing programs was easier than on some of the other platforms, you would not need to re-enter lines, you could just edit existing lines and update. I'm not saying all other computers at the time had these issues, but definitely at least a couple did.

I am going to leave this thread pinned for a week to make sure people see it and can pay their respects should they wish*. The FP will be updated to include a link to the thread. * Not having done so in the past, I feel, is an oversight and I wish to do this going forward for our comrades when we lose them. Preferably, not frequently.

@Atari2600PAL I have backed up about 7000-8000 floppies of both formats, 5.25 and 3.5, and about 1500 cassette tapes. for the Floppy disks, if you have the possibility, I can only suggest using the TI99 + PEB + Gotek (or similar) solution. I have also tried firsthand other newer peripherals such as Greaseweasel or previously even Kryoflux and have not had the same results with the certainty of operation. These cards pass over any read errors often creating backups that may not work, maybe you see the files in the disk images but then, you could discover they are to be corrupted (all or partially). This also happens because the floppies are often old and dirty and after a few reads (but if the floppy is very dirty even one read is enough) the heads get dirty and the reads give more errors all the time, the heads need to be cleaned often. By making the copy using the actual PEB with a Gotek or HxC SD instead, indeed, it takes longer but in the end, you are sure that if the disk was copied it means that the read was successful and therefore the copy is working. By the way, when the floppies give errors and I can't back up I have procedures that I follow. First of all, I use a head cleaning kit right away at the first errors and then I try the reading again. In some cases, the head may also have become very dirty, and the drive may no longer read any disk and the cleaning disk may not be sufficient. At that point, I act directly on the floppy drive head using a cotton swab (gently). If it still doesn't go I put the floppy disk aside because then I will try it on other drives floppy models (I have about ten different ones) because often the mechanics and the alignment of the head or the different stepper motor can also give different results. If even this last try fails, before I give up at all on the floppy with error, just as a last resort, I use a special floppy drive (built by a friend of mine), which allows me to clean the magnetic surface of the disk as it spins. With all these steps I have recovered quite a few floppies, and only by making the copy with the actual hardware do I have the confidence that everything works. I also checked other backups released over the years by other users who had used Kryoflux and half of the images, often were corrupted Just my two cents to explain my experience of doing this kind of thing. Then everyone does as they can

From This is Pete: Hunter's Moon: multidirectional shoot 'em up Armalyte: horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up Hawkeye: run and gun platformer Snare: top-down action puzzle... thing Retrograde: part horizontal scrolling Defender-esque shooter, part platformer Creatures: Platformer with puzzles Summer Camp: Collectathon platformer Heatseeker: technically a platformer, but one of the weirdest games you'll ever play Creatures II: More platform puzzles with a few more minigames Winter Camp: Multi-genre action/puzzle thing Nobby the Aardvark: Platformer with some levels that play from different perspectives https://evercade.co.uk/cartridges/thalamus-collection-1/ Sounds like a good mix! Looking forward to it.

Thanks for your feedback and I am happy that the carts are arriving that quickly... Attention: There's an easter egg hidden track hidden inside! Did you already manage to activate it? Hint: use the second controller and press.... some button... in order to unlock a further banging acid techno tune.

Second that. I built ought on a wire wrap perf board once I had the Geneve2020 CPU module ready to plug in. Memory, 9901, 9902 and sundry went in wire wrap first. Im tempted to go back, or a combination of PCB with next steps in WW. So much trouble soldering my latest boards. Along the way, I learned some history of wire wrap. It is a superior technology! Connections, physically, are superior. Breadboard doesn't compare. . The standard Radio Shack WW hand tool is still reliable. (1980s). Got the parts to a Jonard electric tool, but still the hand tool is second nature.

No, not really. I would like to, but the chips I'm using are a PITA to put on a breadboard, and sometimes the parts are only available in SMD, and the frequencies are too high (100MHz access to an SRAM or SPI Flash is not really going to work on a breadboard). Digital logic is pretty straight forward, the hardest parts are the analog bits, and of course noise (which is only worse on a breadboard). But it depends on what you are doing, so sometimes it makes sense (to prototype on a breadboard), sometimes not. For the F18A, I developed initially using an FPGA devboard that had the FPGA I was going to use, and I made a cable to plug into the 9918A socket on the host computer (99/4A in this case, see photos). Once it was mostly working, I went directly to a custom PCB, and it took three revisions to work out the electronic problems. You can use simulation these days too, to great effect, especially for digital stuff. You can also use HDLs (VHDL, Verilog, etc.) to write simulations, test them, see the timing diagrams, and use that to prove you circuits that you build with discrete logic. HDL is not just for programmable logic. Photos are of F18A early days of development.

There's some excellent info in there. It's nice to see the pinout.

You might want to take a look at this document I found on WHT. . .lots of TI-74 technical data in here. TI74 technical data manual.pdf

Been a little while since I made a new ColecoVision controller, but I bought a new enclosure recently to try out for a 7800 controller that I was building...and what do you know...its just big enough for a 4-button ColecoVision controller. So presenting my: ColecoVision - Super Joystick Controller Details of the build: ** Serpac (191i,BK), two-piece, molded ABS enclosure (9.5" x 6.35" x 1.5") ** (1) VVG / iL PSM-30, microswitch joystick w/ Cherry (ZF) D44X microswitches, w/ 35mm Sanwa ball knob (vermillion, almost a perfect color match to the original SAC knobs) ** (1) VVG ColecoVision PCB w/ Keypad, w/ C&K D6R key-switch buttons, (12 black) ** (4) Sanwa OBSF-24 pushbuttons, w/ A.S. Classic Concave Caps (because arcade pushbuttons should be concave, not convex) (1 black/yellow, 1 black/orange, 1 black/violet, 1 black/royal blue) (the violet pushbutton is little bit lighter than those used on the original SACs) ** Custom Super Action Controller inspired CPO artwork ** 10' Super flexible, custom crimped cable So nothing too radical or fancy, just a simple, sleek, small-ish, inexpensive-ish (4) SAC buttoned arcade controller...for the ColecoVision, ADAM, Phoenix...and any other compatible console. This enclosure is also available in Almond (and Grey), so an ADAM colored variant could be an alternate option...because why not?!? As assembled, with just the enclosure and the hardware, the controller weighs in around 1 lb., and is a little bit on the light side for my preference. So I machined 2 steel bars, which are mechanically fastened to the lower half of the enclosure, which bumps up the overall weight to approximately 1.75 lbs., to give it a sturdier feel, and some much needed ballast. Enjoy!