Jump to content

alex_79

Members
  • Posts

    2,166
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

Everything posted by alex_79

  1. I'm happy for Al, and grateful for running the site in all these years and hosting this great community. And I wish him all the best for the future, But the site being owned by a corporate is incompatible with my idea of this community, and I think after 17 years this is the right time for me to move on. It's been a ride!
  2. I didn't imagine it a few hours ago, but I guess it's a bit ironic that I posted that on this particular day...😶
  3. The mod also provides a way to install an "extra" switch on the controller (instead of the "palette" one on the console). For that there's a 7 wires ribbon cable that you solder to some pins of the left controller port, as well to pins connected to the RESET and SELECT switch (see the diagram). If you installed that ribbon cable, independently from the fact that you actually put the extra switch on the joystick, note that it will cause issues with some controllers (e.g. trackballs) and also with games that use the ports as output. E.g. "Track & Field" is unplayable with those extra wires installed. The solution is to either do not install those extra wires put a toggle switch between pin 3 (or pin 4) of the left controller port and the mod board. With the switch open, you disable the extra functionality and you can use the problematic games and/or controllers.
  4. The RGB mod bypasses the TIA color generation and supports both PAL and NTSC palettes. It will autodetect which one to use based on the game framerate. If the game is in PAL60 format, it will be detected as NTSC and have wrong colors, but you can always manually change the colors using the "palette" switch of the mod. Best way to figure it out is to contact them directly and see if it can be arranged.
  5. I agree with all that. I think that it's mostly aimed to collectors who also buy the new cart releases form Atari. Compatibility isn't much of an issue in that case, as often both the carts and the console will end staying on a shelf. Sealed, to keep their value. I'm not interested in the 2600+ either. I know exactly what it is and I didn't thought it would have been anything different the very moment I heard about it. I have zero attachment to the Atari brand itself, or any company that owns that brand (or any past company that owned it), and whether this product is a success or a failure doesn't affect me in any way. I'm interested in this community that shares knowledge and creates new games and hardware for an old console I had as a kid. And because I care about this community, and I know that those who are not into the technical things don't understand the limitations of this device, and will keep hoping that a firmware update will defy the laws of physics and turn the 2600+ into a real console compatible with everything, I think it's important to keep pointing out those limitations. Over and over. Because an informed customer can make an informed choice. People who just like the fact that this thing has an Atari logo on it, and that is an "official" release could just stop reading these threads (what for? they'll buy it anyway), instead of complaining.
  6. The Harmony can already do that. There are two ways: Put a rom in the root directory of the SD card named AUTORUN.bin (firmware up to 1.05) or AUTOROM.bin (firmware 1.06). Then the cart will load automatically that rom when you power on the console. Anyway, loading the rom happens after the 2600 is powered on, and you'll see the spinning "ying yang" logo animation while loading. That won't work with a cart dumper. Use the Harmony software and flash the cartridge in single image mode through usb, which overwrites the normal firmware. In this case the cart behaves like a standalone one and, as long as the cart type is among those supported by the dumper, it could work with it (timing differences compared to a real console might be an issue, though). I used that method to test my 2600 cart dumper with bankswitching types for which I don't own any physical cart. And it worked. The dumper must be coded to recognize and dump that type of multicart, which is difficult. And the emulator must be coded to then emulate that too. Consider that such multicart should likely lock the bankswitch once a game is loaded, to avoid that the game code itself triggers an hotspot of the multicart bankswitch scheme. So the dumper's hardware would have to be designed so that it can power cycle the cartridge. And autodetection would be even more difficult and slow in that case.
  7. I think that to trigger FE you do something like this: put $01FE on address bus set bit 5 of the data bus: 1 = bank 0, 0 = bank 1 (*). The other bits are not relevant. change address bus (but keep the value on the data bus) to trigger the bankswitch Not sure if the last step is all you need to latch the bank number, or if you have to closely match the timing of a real console for it to work. ------------- (*) the order of banks in the "standard" FE rom used by emulators and flashcarts is reversed compared to the logical order they have according to the patent. The scheme also allowed up to 8 banks, but no game ever used more than 2.
  8. Please! The list of games marked with "pass" includes lots of extremely rare or even never released ones. They obviously never tested all those games. And anyone who knows a bit about Atari 2600 bankswitching schemes can easily see a pattern that indicates exactly what games the cart port can dump or not (also those that are not on that list).
  9. They could have used an existing "F6" board design, but with an 8k eprom(or rom) instead of a 16K one (same pinout, except for the A13 pin which is unused on a 8k memory). Then all four hotspots would work: $fff6 and $fff8 would both select the 1st bank and $fff7 and $fff9 would both select the second one. It would just be up to the programmer's preference which ones to use in the code. Now I'm curious to see the board too!
  10. I only have limited knowledge about the 7800 and its cartridge types. You have to search what scheme each game in the list uses to have an idea about what is supported. For the 2600 side, as already said, currently the dumper software seems to be as capable as the R77 one (which isn't much).
  11. The problem is the cartridge dumper, not the emulator. Obtaining a correct rom trying to autodetect the cartridge type is difficult and prone to errors. And if you don't get a proper rom, even if you have the most accurate emulator in the world, you won't be able to play the game.
  12. Correction: that would be 312. Because of how a PAL TIA generates the signal, PAL 2600 games must have an even number of scanlines, else they cause color issues on many PAL TVs (I think the phase ends up being wrong on every other frame). On CRTs you typically get either a B&W image ("PAL color loss") or wrong colors in the upper area of the screen, depending on the age of the TV. Newer digital TVs might not be affected by this, but I don't have much experience in running 2600 consoles with those. Again, this only applies to 2600 games. PAL Maria always outputs 313 scanlines and has no color issues. EDIT. And the color issues would only happens on RF, composite and s-video. RGB is not PAL anymore, and there's no "phase" of the color carrier that matters in that case.
  13. I built the adapter cable back then and I remember that auto-detection worked well and I could dump my original carts correctly with it. (link)
  14. Not all carts have both gnd pins connected. The Retron 77 relies on that and as a result fails to detect some carts that in theory it could dump.
  15. The Retron 77, with the community build, can play everything that Stella can play (so, almost any known game) through the sd card. The 2600+ ships with the latest Stella, so it would do the same if it could load roms (and if there was a way to access the emulator settings that you might need to tweak in some cases). But it doesn't offer that possibility out of the box. The cart port is the issue and the R77 one is no better than the one on the 2600+ by looking at the compatibility list they provided. The 2600+ cart dumper is apparently upgradable, so there's the possibility that things might improve a bit. But do not expect it to work with everything. It's just not possible. That's an inherent contraddiction. Cannot happen. It has been repeated basically on every page of this and the other 2600+ threads and also on the R77 ones: emulators don't play cartridges. Not hard. Impossible. As long as the emulators are mantained (to add support for new cart types and controllers/accessories) and you keep updating them, they'll play basically every rom. But the 2600+ pretends to play cartridges. That's the problem.
  16. There's no setting. the Harmony does NOT sort the files, but read them in the order they appear on the card. You need to use a program on a PC to sort the files. There are several of them for every operating system.
  17. I don't have a R77, but if you can select the "Event Mappings" tab of the input settings, you'll find another "Defaults" button there that might fix your issues.
  18. That's something we will discover after the units start shipping, I guess. Unless there's some way to physically detect the extra pins (like a mechanical switch, or an optical sensor), I imagine you'll have to try to read some areas where a 7800 cart can be mapped but a 2600 cannot (with A12 LOW). That would be easier if the dumper has the pull-up resistors mentioned earlier in this thread, so that when the cart does not drive the bus you get a constant, known value.
  19. Another aspect that needs to be considered is that the dumper in the 2600+ is shared for 7800 games too. And it has to detect those as well!
  20. I imagine another issue are overdumps: 2k games will most likely result in a 4k rom with the data repeated twice. Stella should detect those as well and recalculate the checksum for 2k. (or the dumper has to detect them, but it's probably better to leave all the non strictly necessary calculations to Stella to avoid too much slowdown)
  21. Yup. An option button would have been much more useful IMO. (the aspect ratio could have been just one of the options you could access...) The console switches are just generic inputs that can be read by the processor. It's the game that determines their function. And as time passed, and their original function wasn't needed anymore (on screen menus were used instead of difficulty and select switches, and B&W TVs were less common) they were often reused for other purposes, including pausing the game. So they need to stay generic inputs that the emulated game can read. If they're removed or repurposed for something else, you'll break compatibility. --------------------------- E.g. When the Flashback 2 plug'n'play console was released, it had 5 big push buttons on the front panel (the retro gaming scene was much smaller back then, and the product had to also appeal kids too) The TV Type switch wasn't one of them, as B&W TVs were a thing of the past, and customers would probably have just considered it weird. But Curt Vendel knew that the switch might have been needed (especially if the cartridge mod was performed), so he still included it on the back of the console. With the Flashback 3 AtGames took over Curt Vendel's company to design the console and they switched to an emulator based device. They mostly copied the case design, including the big colored switches, but they had the brilliant idea to remove the TV Type switch ("who needs that?"). The result was that "Secret Quest", a game that was included in the Flashback 3 console was unplayable, as it requires the TV Type switch for gameplay (it's used to access the weapon selection screen and to display the code for the current level so that you don't have to start from the beginning each time). Modifying the case and PCB is expensive, and in subsequent versions they just added a key-combo to simulate the TV-Type switch, which is less than ideal but at least allowed the game to be played. With the Flashback X, after the success of retro-consoles like the NES classic, they finally redesigned the case to more faithfully mimic the original 2600 and.... WTF! ------------------------------ So, long story short (too late!), to get good compatibility you need all the console switches just like a real console, and a separate way to access the emulator settings. If only there was a place where people who are interested about these old consoles reunite and discuss and share knowledge about them, and where companies could ask for advice and suggestions before putting these devices into production...🙄
  22. They are all definitely NTSC only so far. They work fine on the 2600+ but they will display in PAL60 with wrong colors (or no colors, if the scanline count is odd/unstable) on a real PAL 2600 console. I'd be extremely surprised if Atari would release PAL cartridges, honestly. And multiregion Atari 2600 games cannot exist. The max you can do is to have a game that is switchable between PAL and NTSC using, for example, a console switch(*), but that is to be handled by the game code. Hacking existing/classic games is difficult and requires skills and it's easy to introduce bugs in the process. Another way is just to make every cartridge a "2in1" multicart with both versions selectable by an external switch. Easier to do, but it's not gonna happen (and it would be a cheap solution), IMO. Stella supports NTSC, PAL and PAL60 (and SECAM😄), and the HDMI output works with all region TVs. So there doesn't need to be a specific European version of the 2600+. And I bet there isn't. Stella autodetects the format of the game by looking at the framerate (which on a 2600 is coded in the game itself, as the vertical synchronization is under software control) and defaults to NTSC if the game is 60Hz and to PAL if it's 50Hz. So NTSC and PAL cartridges will work fine on a 2600+. (if they can be dumped, that is) The problem is with PAL60. PAL60 cannot be autodetected reliably and Stella will default to NTSC (So you'll play the game with wrong colors, because of the different palette between PAL and NTSC TIAs). On the PC version of Stella, for existing games there are properties in the internal database. For new games it is possible to - include a property file with the rom itself (they can be in a zip archive together with the rom and you don't need to unpack it to play the game) - Include the string "PAL60", "PAL-60" and variants in the rom filename. In case the above fails, after starting the game you just hit "TAB", change the format to PAL60 yourself, and the emulator will remember that settings every time you play that game. On the 2600+, the hash of the game might change in some cases (if the cartridge has ram, for example), which will prevent from recognizing the (existing) game in the internal database. And by dumping the cart, assuming that the dump succeed, you don't get a filename (nor a property file, of course). So you need a way to access the emulator settings, and it doesn't seem that they included a button to bring up a menu on the console (it would ruin the illusion 😉) For the 7800 side, I guess you also need a way to tell the emulator that you want to emulate a PAL machine in order to play PAL 7800 cartridges. So, again, you'd need a way to access the settings. Or maybe there's a way to tell if a cart is PAL or NTSC from the dump? (I have very limited knowledge/experience with the 7800). ---------------------------------- (*) By including a timer in the cartridge, you can measure the clock frequency of the console and tell if it's PAL and NTSC. This is done in some ARM games (the ARM has its own clock independent from the 2600 one) to automatically switch to the correct format. Of course that doesn't work with a dumper.
  23. Video Olympics has 4-players variations for each of the games. QuadraPong is actually 4-players only.
×
×
  • Create New...