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awhite2600

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Posts posted by awhite2600

  1. Posted

    Well, if a third copy of Red Sea Crossing surfaces and you start a fundraising campaign to acquire it, I'll contribute. Or perhaps you could start fundraising now to go after one of the 2 known copies. :ponder:

     

    The Personal Computer Museum is a non-profit charity. We can't afford to pay high collector prices for rare items. Any fundraising that we do is used to support ongoing museum operations and day to day costs - electricity, heat, insurance, etc. All of our staff are volunteers.

     

    Now if someone would like to donate a copy to the museum we would be happy to accept it.

  3. Posted

    I agree that they perform a valuable service to the community but I don't see how dumping a ROM would prevent them from continuing their service. People simultaneously release ROMs of homebrews and sell them on carts. People dump old era ROMs and people still buy old era carts. I don't see why it couldn't work with reproductions of old era carts. They can do both.

     

    ... Games are meant to be played. There are gamers who would like to be able to play it and can't because it hasn't been dumped. ...

    I have a big problem with the people that hoard games - especially games that they did not create themselves. Some of the original big game companies still want to protect their old 2600 property (Atari, Activision, etc) and release compilations and "emulators" for newer consoles. Most of the smaller game producers don't care. In many cases the company doesn't even exist any longer.

     

    I think Sydric, myself and The Personal Computer Museum took the best approach when we obtained Extra Terrestrials. We tracked down the original owners and got permission to distribute the game. We made a limited run of reproductions to support the museum, a registered charity. Once the reproductions were sold we freely released the ROM for everyone to enjoy. It was a winning combination for everyone. Serious collectors got a nice, boxed game. A charity made some money. Atari enthusiasts everywhere get to play a long lost game - for free.

     

    Personally, I would love to try out games like Red Sea Crossing, Good Luck Charlie Brown and The Pink Panther. Come on hoarders. Share with your fellow Atari fans. Please.

    • Like 9

  4. Posted

    My computer experience started with the Commodore PET in 1980. My high school had about 6 of them. The teacher that ran the after school computer club was extremely knowledgeable and helpful. The first program that I ever wrote was a dice rolling simulation on a PET. I even used the PET graphics symbols to draw the dice. Programming the PETs in BASIC lead to experimenting in assembler. This experience came in handy when I got a VIC-20 and then a C64 for home use.

     

    I am also the proud owner of a PET computer. I picked it up at a surplus store for $5.00 about 15 years ago. The PET has some switches hacked inside of it that allows you to run it as either 40 or 80 columns.

     

    I've worked with computers professionally since 1987. I have the PET to thank for my career in IT.

    • Like 1

  6. Posted

    I grabbed a PSP Go for $70 when BlockBuster when out of business in Canada in June 2011. Installing CFW was a snap. I loaded up a few emulators. None of them are great, but most of them are okay. I haven't played them lately. i recall that a SNES emulator was very glitchy. I did get MAME to work. Most of the older games ran fine. Some of the more complex games required a reduced framerate and/or a boost to the CPU speed.

  10. Posted

    Good we need to find a place for that stuff, All I could find online was the manual

     

    I have a small book of type in programs that is specific to the PC-1. Like a lot of my "stuff", the book is packed away in boxes in my basement. If I can find the book I will gladly scan it for a preservation project.

  11. Posted

    I would enjoy some of the tape files (or mp3). I can't find any tapes or type in's. Info on the PC-1 is scarce.

     

    Somewhere I still have a paper listing for a Hammurabi game that I managed to port to the PC-1. I think I took a version for another computer and adapted it to the PC-1's unique dialect of BASIC. The PC-1 didn't have a built in random number generator function, so I used one from a book and implemented it as a subroutine. The randomness was an integral part of the game.

     

    I didn't own the printer interface. I took my PC-1 into a Radio Shack with the intention of purchasing new batteries. I convinced the clerk at the store to let me use their printer so that my program wouldn't be lost when the batteries were changed. Years later I picked up the printer for something like $25 when they were clearing them out.

     

    The listing is printed on paper similar to an adding machine tape. I know that it's safely stored in a film can in a box in my basement. The trick is going to be finding a way to scan it.

  12. Posted

    I had a PC-1 as my first computer. It was all I could afford as a 14 year old in 1981. I made that little computer do all sorts of crazy things.

     

    The BASIC is very limited. There is no string manipulation. Regular string variables are limited to 7 characters. You can't calculate a text string and then print it. There are a total of 1424 "steps" available for your program code. BASIC commands consume one step as do any other characters in your program code.

     

    The one thing that might help when creating interactive fiction is the use of calculated GOTOs. You can perform an integer calculation such as X=100+A. You can then use the statement GOTO X to jump to the calculated line number.

  13. Posted

    You can download the 1994 and 1995 releases of "A Down Home Christmas" from The Personal Computer Museum. These are two Christmas themed Amiga disks that I worked on at Legendary Design Technologies. I wrote the games "Christmas Concentration" and "Santa's Christmas Catch" (a Kaboom style game).

     

    http://pcmuseum.ca/details.asp?id=39381&type=Software 1994 Edition with Christmas Concentration

    http://pcmuseum.ca/details.asp?id=39382&type=Software 1995 Edition with Santa's Christmas Catch

     

    Both disk images work perfectly on Amiga emulators on on original hardware.

    • Like 1

  14. Posted

    Although the system was never released in North America I found six boxed carts at a Value Village in Canada several years ago. Astro Pinball, Auto Chase, Planet Defender, Police Jump, Sonic Invader and Tennis.

     

    I initially grabbed the carts because I thought that they might be rare 2600 carts that I had never seen before. It was only after I got home and did some research that I figured out what I had found. There wasn't a system at the store - I always look for stuff like that.

  17. Posted

    I have had one since the mid 90's. Haven't used it in quite a while. My UFO drive had limited RAM, so a few of the larger ROMS (> 2 Megabyte ?) would not work. The passthrough connector was also incomplete so any of the games with extra chips would not work unless you removed the drive.

     

    Overall the drive was very workable, especially back in the day. Games were a bit slow to load from floppies.

     

    I'd say grab one if it's cheap enough. Otherwise you might be better off with an SD based cart.

  18. Posted

    I know that the old cricut machines did not allow you to cutout arbitrary shapes. You could only cut out shapes from their overpriced font cartridges. Someone hacked the USB port and released software that would allow you to cut out from TrueType fonts, Illustrator, etc.

     

    I don't know if there is any software to allow newer models to be computer controlled. I kind of doubt it as Cricut makes their money from the font cartridges.

  20. Posted

    I love this demo. Quadrun did sampled speech "back in the day". This demo takes things to a whole new level.

     

     

    Do you have any demos that use non chiptune/techno samples, like something with conventional instruments and human voice?

    No, but I almost went with this: http://www.acc.umu.s.../vcs_roll'd.ogg (uses older, crappier version of the encoder)

     

     

    A 2600 Rickroll would be a great joke... "Here, try this great new game on your Harmony cart."

  21. Posted · Edited by awhite2600

    The big question is -- why did the programer choose to program the game this way? Lack of experience? Unfirmilarly with the Atari and how it operated? Lack of time? Just picking the quick and easy way to do it?

     

    I spent a bit of time speaking to the programmer. I guess I can answer with "all of the above". Herman wrote the game in 1983/84 - long before the Internet and other 2600 resources were available. He had to reverse engineer everything himself. He managed to dump a few commercial games and used brute force to write Extra Terrestrials. Time was a factor too as the original plan was to release the game in time for the 1983 Christmas season. Programming took longer than expected (partly because Herman became hooked on River Raid) and they missed Christmas. This is the reason the game is virtually unknown. By the time it was finished in early 1984 the 2600 market had crashed. The game was only distributed locally via a few door-to-door sales to retailers.

     

    I get weird collision detection errors on my CC2 as well. I assume I'm not suppose to hit invisible walls in the middle of the play field unless I'm just using the wrong bankswitch file.

     

    The walls are sometimes a bit "off" but generally should work correctly. There is no bankswitching required. The game is only 4K.

  25. Posted · Edited by awhite2600

    Thanks to all that liked the packaging, DVD, etc. Sydric and I worked pretty hard to turn out a product that everyone would like.

     

    It's interesting to hear from PFL that the game runs in black and white on a PAL system. I suspect that the line count might be inconsistent. When I spoke to the original programmer he indicated that he reverse engineered several other games to figure out how to program the 2600. Remember, this was done long before the Internet. He admitted that he really didn't know how everything worked. I haven't checked with an emulator to see what the line count is.

     

    And my apologies to your girlfriend PFL. Mine feels the same way. I made her sit through the DVD too. She's also sick of me talking about the game all the time.

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