oracle_jedi

I think so, but I don't know as CoC was never cracked/dumped/made available to those of us who got into the Falcon late. I have a demo of it which is just a slideshow from memory and not much if anything playable. I havn't checked in a while so is it now possible to download a fully playable CoC?

I ordered from Brad this past Friday April 23. The package arrived in Seattle today. It was USPS Priority with tracking.

According to Wikipedia (which is never wrong): The 7800 marketing "was aided by a marketing campaign with a budget in the "low millions" according to Atari Corporation officials. This was substantially less than the $9 million dollars spent by Sega and the $16 million spent by Nintendo." Yeah imagine if, instead of blowing $40+ million on the Federated Stores debacle, Atari Corp had instead spent the money pushing the 7800, and maybe some new titles. I've never understood the attraction of SMB. I've played it a few times. And I have what I am told is an almost pixel perfect conversion on my C64. I get that it is an interesting game. But damn, it is dull compared to Boulderdash, or Dropzone, or Elektraglide, or Star Raiders. Am I missing something fundamental or is the lure of Mario as much marketing as it is substance?

Or maybe they felt Missile Command 2600 didn't stink, and it was good enough for the 7800? Yeah I know a lot of you guys love your 2600s, but I have to admit when I first saw Asteroids 2600 I though "what the *** is this crap!?" (actually I had a similar reaction to the Atari 400/800 version too). Donkey Kong and DKJr were also weak on the 2600, Ms. Pac Man was at least an improvement on Pac-Man, Joust was okay, and Missile Command actually looked quite good (IMHO). The odd one for me is Defender. Defender 2600 was another stinker, and could have benefitted greatly from the 7800s better hardware. Williams signed off on Robotron 2084 for the 7800, so why not a Defender or Stargate release? Wasn't Bob Decrescenzo working on a port or am I remembering that wrong?

As others have pointed out, the XEGS did not replace the 7800. Indeed from 1988 to 1992, Atari sold three 8-bit console architectures as the 2600 was also still being actively sold. The August 1988 Antic article that @pacman000 linked to earlier is almost as interesting for the questions that were not asked; namely "why another architecture?" when Atari already had two, one of which was at least somewhat competitive to the NES and Sega in terms of hardware (at least if you turned the TV volume down to zero). A review of Toys R Us catalogs from late 1988 shows the 7800 being positioned as cheaper ($80 vs $100) than the Sega or the NES in basic package form. That the executives quoted in the Antic article wanted the $150 games machine over the $80 "powerful" computer isn't surprising. The computer would likely create an expectation of post-sales support from technically challenged parents, whereas a simpler game console would not, and the game console would generate additional revenue from game cartridge sales, whereas a computer might not. But how to create a higher-margin deluxe 7800 package? Atari killed off the keyboard attachment and the XM expansion (or whatever it was going to be called) and had torched the relationship with GCC. Nintendo had their light gun and a dance pad. For the 7800 Atari had.... a sexy euro-style controller? In addition someone else pointed out in an earlier thread that I think bears repeating; Nintendo was locking up software publishers with exclusive deals for the NES, freezing out Sega and Atari. But these deals could not cover software that already existed. Atari struggled to launch new titles for the 7800, and much of what did come out was improved arcade conversions from the early 80s, but less so titles that were in the arcades at the time. But with the XEGS Atari was able to instantly bring to market a significant number of game cartridges of a higher quality than they would be able to quickly get ported to the 7800. The Tramels didn't care at all about their customers, they cared only that they were making a profit. I for one don't blame them for that, although it was ultimately short-sighted and self-defeating. What I find interesting is that they didn't kill of the 7800 in 1988, and that they did not tells me that either it was selling well enough to justify continuing supplying it, or that they had a warehouse full of unsold inventory that they were slowly draining. I don't know when the last 7800 production run was made and I would be interest to learn if anyone knows. But the XEGS totally made sense to me in retrospect. For almost no development cost they got a "new" console product with a software library that circumvented Nintendo's strangle hold and allowed them to position it as a more sensible alternative to the game-only NES. Of course that all makes sense in the abstract. In reality, the kids wanted Super Mario Bros, and even a face lifted Mario Bros on the XE just wasn't going to cut it.

Oh two more things... perhaps you already know.. You have a "Chicken Lips" keyboard. These are considered to be the best of the Amiga 500 keyboards and fetch quite a premium. It means your motherboard is probably a Rev 5. Your Agnus chip has a clip over it. It might be the 8370 version, which is hard coded to NTSC or PAL. If you're lucky its the 8372 which is PAL/NTSC switchable. The latter means the unit can soft-switch between 60hz mode and 50hz mode, allowing you play both American and European timing dependent software. A lot of the best Amiga games were written to the PAL standard, and won't play on a 8370 equipped Amiga. If you have the 8370, you can replace it with the 8372 - its a drop in replacement.

I believe Ray Carlsen still sells new Amiga PSUs. He does great work. Alternatively, the Meanwell RT50B is a good unit. They even sit perfectly in the original Amiga PSU housing. If this were mine; open that RAM expansion unit in the trap door and check if it was the battery backed clock version. There might be leaking battery in there that needs to be removed. Any damaged traces might be repairable. Do you have any floppy disks with this? The Amiga 500 has a kickstart ROM to boot the system but you'll need a Workbench disk to get to a usable desktop. If you power up the system without a disk the drive, you should hear periodic clicking from the disk drive as the system checks to see if you inserted a disk. Get yourself an RGB cable. The exact one will depend of course on what your display is, the Commodore 1084 was a great monitor, but they are getting hard to find these days. There are also HDMI options if you want to go that route. You might want to wait until you know the unit works before paying out for the RGB cable. Get a Gotek or a Lotharek device. Moving files from a PC or Mac to an Amiga is harder than it is for an ST. But a solid state disk drive makes it simpler - you can just download ADF images and load them onto an SD card. If you still want to be able to use the floppy disk, get yourself a boot switcher, so the external Gotek can be drive 0, and the floppy be drive 1. The external floppy can draw power from the external disk interface, which is a really nice feature and helps to cut down spaghetti. There's some good mods/expansions available. Assuming your RAM expansion is not damaged by battery acid, you should have 1MB of RAM. That's enough for most disk-based games, but limited for anything more. Luckily there are several good expansions available now, such as the Terrible Fire or the ACA500+. I have the ACA500+ which connects to the expansion port of the left, and brings your total RAM to 8MB, as well as providing two CF-card hard-disk interfaces, so you can use the WHD hard-disk based software options. Another expansion option is the Vampire, which gives you 68060 levels of performance with massive amounts of RAM, HDMI output etc. It really isn't an Amiga anymore at that point, but can be interesting if you want to explore some of the more demanding software for the machine. Playing Frontier on the Vampire is quite an entertaining experience. There are also PowerPC based expansion units, and there is even some software written to use it (Wipeout, Doom, Quake etc), but these seem to be very rare, so unless you are willing to spend a huge sum of money, you might want to leave these for the time being at least. These are great machines, especially if you enjoy playing 16-bit era games. Have fun and congrats on the acquisition!

I don't have a TIPI. I mostly use a Lotharek attached to a Corcomp CC9900 Micro-Expansion, but I also use a Tex'n Treasures 3.5 inch floppy disk. I also have a couple of CF7/A+ units, but I find the CF cards a bit cumbersome to use, especially as CF-card readers are not as common on the PC side as they were a few years back. In the past I've used a PEB with 5.25 inch drives, but I sold that monster off a long time ago. Pretty sure my TI cassette deck no longer functions either. I suspect the belts have stretched.

If you're still taking orders please put me down for: - Dragonfly basic version (without Pokey and YM2151), the set includes a memory card and a cartridge-console cable - 350PLN / $95 - As an additional option, Pokey Max - 160PLN / $43 - As an additional option YM2151 module - 100PLN / $27 This looks really amazing! Thanks

Likewise here. 20+ years and no problems. Brad's always been a great vendor. I would add, that Brad appreciates it if you use your customer number, if you have one. It will be on the shipping invoice of anything you buy from him.

Have you checked out any of the newer games for the 2600 in the Atari Age store? There's some real gems in there IMO, including Star Castle, Mappy, PacMan 8K, Super Cobra, Scramble and many more. I was 100% with you on the 2600. Didn't see any value in it as I had the Atari 8-bit computer, and a C64 as well as some other home computers. But I got a 7800 in the end as my son is into console gaming, and it gave me something Atari to do at PRGE and SRGE. The 7800 has some good games, albeit with often terrible sound, but some of the newer 2600 games have proven to be pretty cool too.

@eightbit has confirmed the user-port reset button allows the Atarisoft titles (Pole Position, Ms. Pac-Man, Moon Patrol) to start. I can confirm the RAM expansion reset-hack allows the same titles to start. That leaves several possibilities: The software files bluejay is loading are corrupt. They will never work. Bluejay's hardware design is wrong. It works on a real Commodore RAM expansion but not his. Bluejay's VIC20 is in someway different from the ones eightbit and I are using. Later VICs could not play Jelly Monsters due to initialization differences with earlier models. The RAM chip bluejay used is losing its contents upon reset. Some newer static RAM chips have an auto-power-down mode whereupon if the CE line goes low, it basically turns itself off, losing the contents. Load up any Commodore cartridge image and press the reset button. The game should start. Which ones? Pole Position, Ms. Pac-Man and Moon Patrol can be started with the reset button eightbit detailed.

Yes, it was grounding the RESET pin. The original VIC20 RAM expansion carts used HM6116P static RAM chips, so as long as they got power, the contents were not lost.

Like I said. There is a RAM cart mod that performs a non destructive reset, allowing the Atarisoft titles to start. Yes INCLUDING Pole Position.

Which games? Because Pole Position is not one of them.

There's a mod you can do on the RAM expansion to add a reset switch that does not wipe RAM. I don't know if this differs from the user-port reset switch mod. I think they are the same. Resetting the computer does not wipe memory unless you power cycle it. I modded a 16K board with a reset switch and also to sit in BLK3 and BLK5. I used to use it to play cartridge dumps before I got a Mega Cart. As @carlsson stated, there are not many carts that need it this switch. They were mostly Atarisoft titles. Probably your best option today is buy one of @brain UltiMEM carts, but if you're not enjoying what you're finding you might be better off just concentrating on what you do enjoy.

I did an internship at IBM in 1989/90, back when Big Blue was still big and mainly into HW. I used the phrase "assembly language" at the lunch table one day, and they all jumped on me. "It's not assembly language! It's ASSEMBLER!" Sure enough, at that time, every IBM-branded manual I could find labelled it ASSEMBLER. You wrote Assembler, and assembled into machine code with an assembler.

Hmm, okay. The PVM has RGB/Sync through four BNC jacks. And the monitor will report "NO SYNC" if it doesn't find a sync source, which isn't the case here. I think I may try replacing the patch lines from the RGBS pads on the board and see if that helps. I don't know if this is relevant but the PAL Sord units have a pretty dreadful composite video quality at the best of times with a lot of noise in the image. I can only assume the RF output hid a lot of that. I have two PAL Sord units and they both exhibit the same behavior. Thanks again for the insights.

I swapped the board for a second one, resoldered everything, and switched to a second cable. This is the output on a Sony PVM 14N6U. Something is seriously messed up with the way the Sord does things.

Roger that. I'll try to check all the connections again this weekend and hope it makes it look better. Otherwise I may have to try to add in the mod @ChildOfCv suggested, which looks challenging!

Okay, but the monitor does work with RGB/CSync inputs from my Camputers Lynx and Acorn Electron, and even the Amiga which did not use the HSYNC/VSYNC option on this display. What does "go through a buffer' look like in terms of components? Is that an easy mod? Thanks

It's this one: 319650 - Luma/Chroma in separate RCA connectors, or analog OR digital RGBI with separate sync in a DE9 connector, with a switch to decide on digital or analog The monitor has a DE9 for the RGB and a switch on the back to select between RGB or RGBI. There are also RCA jacks for Chroma/Luma, and another switch to use just Chroma as Composite. I just tried using RGBI mode but that looks even worse.

Seems a real shame that so many games released back in the 80s/90s didn't better exploit the Amiga's abilities. From what I have seen, I would even go so far as to say most games of the era looked pretty much identical on the Amiga and the ST. Thankfully they sounded so much better on the Amiga. I moved from the 400/800 machines to an ST, and was disappointed that the 16-bit machine was so bad at arcade games where scrolling was used. Having been spoilt by the silky smooth scrolling of Dropzone, Ballblazer, Elektraglide and so many others, the jerky scrolling of ST games seemed like a step backwards. A clear case in point was R-Type. On the ST version the scrolling was terrible. I expected the Amiga version would be smooth, knowing what the hardware can do, but in my opinion, the game looks no better than the ST version. My Amigas havn't been used recently. Just been busy with my weird 8-bits (Sord M5, Camputers Lynx), but I am going to have check out Pacmania when I get them powered up next. Any other games you guys would recommend as a showcase of what I know the Amiga can really do?

Hoping to get some educated opinions on how to fix the display from a Sord M5. I have both a PAL and NTSC unit. The PAL unit uses a TMS 9929A VDP. I installed the TMS-RGB adapter on the underside. But the display from my Commodore 1084 is pretty awful. The display is compressed at the top, and the left hand side of the display is underscanned, so some of the text is missing. The colors are also off as this is supposed to be green, but I figured I'd worry about that later. This the same unit using composite output (the monitor is NTSC/RGB so I lose the colors). And this is what we are supposed to see (NTSC unit output via Composite Video) I figured the CSYNC wasn't working, so I tried both the TTL and even just feeding the whole composite signal to the CSYNC line, which corrected the underscan, but did not improve the top of the picture where everything is compressed and unreadable. The Sord M5 is similar to an MSX or Colecovision as in that it uses a Z80 coupled to either a TMS9918A (NTSC) or TMS9929A (PAL). I've seen the install guide at tms-rgb which suggests removing the L9 Inductor, but I don't know if the Sord has this, and this is a PAL unit anyway. Hoping someone might have some suggestions on how what is causing the garbled display. Is it the CSYNC or something else? Any pointers on things to try?/ Thanks!

Really isn't complicated at all. Since you want to keep your current floppy drive, you're just plugging the Gotek in the floppy disk connector on the back of the Amiga as you would any other second floppy. The switch @NumbThumb linked you just allows you to then use the Gotek as your primary boot drive instead of the internal floppy. It's not required, but without out it, you would have to boot up of a real floppy and only use the Gotek as DF1. Most commercial games need to be booted off DF0 so obviously that would present a problem. The switch adapter installs into a socketed IC. No soldering required. Its relatively easy to carefully remove it, install the adapter, and then insert the chip you just removed into the adapter itself. Route the cable out the back of the Amiga and you are done. If you prefer, you can drill a small hole on the back of the machine to mount the switch. Now you can boot off the Gotek. There's a really handy menu disk that you can use to select which disk images you want to load, then you press F10, and the Amiga reboots and loads whatever you selected. Alternatively you can use the buttons on the Gotek itself to step through the list of ADF images, although once you have downloaded a bunch, that gets tedious. This is probably the easiest way to run Amiga software you download off the internet.