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mos6507

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Posts posted by mos6507

  1. Posted

    Do you think there is a market for 1000 AtariVOXes, or can the PCBs be used for other purposes?

     

    No. I would have bought 500 but there was a big price break at 1,000.

  2. Posted · Edited by mos6507

    I think I'll bump this thread for now.

     

    I have almost all the parts and tools I need to start building AtariVoxes again.

     

    I just put in an order for 20 SpeakJet chips. I have to order these in small batches because they are like $24-25 a pop.

     

    But I have a TON of other components. 250+ black cases and 20 cream ones. I just put in an order for 1,000 PCBs. Black PCBs with red silkscreen like Stella Gets a New Brain. I already have 20 green PCBs here that Richard made.

     

    So this is coming along and more details will follow.

  3. Posted · Edited by mos6507

    I'm kind of surprised this hasn't been discussed earlier (or maybe it has).

     

    I would like to gather a list of games that people might like to see hacked for added AtariVox support. Games that already have (volatile) high score tables might be good candidates even if they don't necessarily cry out for voice. Games that use both ports at once are a problem (like Wizard of Wor) otherwise 2P games would have to be altered to both access the same controller.

     

    I'll start things off.

     

    Coinop ports that had voice but aren't 2P simultaneous:

    -------

    Berzerk (already bumped a separate thread)

    Gorf

    Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator

    Megamania could be hacked into Astro Blaster

    Star Wars: The Arcade Game

    Q-Bert

    Reactor

     

    Simulators that could have a chatty damage control computer:

    -------

    Starmaster

    Robot Tank

    Phaser Patrol

     

     

     

     

    Anyone who hacks a game in order to be able to fit in speech gets a free AtariVox. Well, I guess they would need one to be able to hack it, but they get the NEW combo one if they do it ;)

  4. Posted

    OK, time to bump this thread.

     

    I am throwing the gauntlet down for someone to add an AtariVox speech driver / high score table to Berzerk VE.

     

    I would be glad to script the speech for it, but I don't have the chops to code the drivers.

     

    I have heard the speech in Vectrex berzerk and I can definitely make it sound better than that.

  7. Posted

    You know that you can page using the fire button?

     

    When the cursor is in "moving" mode and I press the fire button it does weird things. Like skipping forward by 10 or more pages at a time. When the cursor is static, then I can load a game.

     

    I would not multiplex the paddle fire button that way. If anything, use both paddle buttons for different things. Maybe make them analogous to select and reset as I specced for the console switches. Maybe pull a Marble craze and use the 2nd paddle for paging forwards and back based on a center detente. There are many possibilities.

     

    There are a lot of different controllers. I'm assuming you didn't also write a driver for the rotary controllers or the keypads?

     

    How about always expecting the 2nd port to have a joystick in it? That way unless you had an Atarivox in there, you could always navigate with the 2nd joystick even for weird controllers in the main port. Good for single player sessions.

     

    I think as long as the joystick and console switch methods are rock solid then it's okay if the other ones are limited.

  8. Posted

    I like to page without having to be close to the console.

     

    But the way moving through selections is done currently with the paddles, it's not practical. You'd be wasting more time waiting for the cursor to slowly move down and to the next page vs. getting up and twiddling the console switches.

     

    You could either do that or handle all the paging with the console switches. Reset = page forward. Select = page back. Select and reset together = select game.

    Same here.

     

    Sorry, but so far, I am not convinced. :)

     

    If you have any more than a handful of games it's not very practical navigating with just the console switches as they are currently set up. The current console layout is forward-only and the only combo you have is popping back to page 0 when you first depress select and toggle reset, and even then it leaves the cursor where it was before rather than popping back to the top. Am I missing something?

     

    This will give you the whole enchilada (assuming a good debounce routine):

    --

    Reset = scroll down (on switch up)

    Select = scroll up (on switch up)

    Hold down select and flick reset = page forward (think of this like a shift click on a PC or Mac)

    Hold down reset and flick select = page back (think of this like a shift click on a PC or Mac)

    Hold down select and reset for one second = load game or navigate to subdir

  9. Posted

    I suppose you do not like how the cursor moves rather slowly up and down on the screen. It would be nicer, if you could directly position the cursor over a game, right?

     

    Yeah.

     

    But then we have a problem with the top and bottom of the list. There paging backwards and forward should happen, like when the joystick or DC reach the begin or end of the screen. Now imagine we have 12 paddle values to work with. 2..11 position the cursor over a game and 1 and 12 are used for paging. What happens after paging? The paddle is still at position 1 or 12, so it immediately will trigger paging again! Even a delay won't work well, since there is no visual feedback for the paddle (cursor) still being beyond the bounds.

     

    Then don't page by overrunning the top and bottom boundaries when in paddle mode. Have a -> and -< row and require a button press over it. Alternately, use both paddles and have one paddle trigger page forward and one paddle trigger page back. Then reset would need to be used to select a game. Since the paddle triggers already map to joystick left and right (do they not?) then that would be pretty simple. Sure, you have to be close to the console, but it's ok.

     

    You could either do that or handle all the paging with the console switches. Reset = page forward. Select = page back. Select and reset together = select game.

  10. Posted · Edited by mos6507

    since the whole "stall" code (Yin-Yang) has to fit into 128 bytes of RAM, it will not be easy to add this feature.

     

    How many bytes do you have left in the staller routine? It would only take a few to read the console register and poke it into the ARM.

     

    What you could also do is go to the menu, but on the credits page of the menu, if it detects reset, then attempt to run AUTORUN.BIN. That would be nearly as convenient.

  12. Posted · Edited by mos6507

    Save Mary is a 2600 proto that Video 61 repro'ed on 7800 cart boards, since it was cheaper than using 2600 cart boards.

    Klax and Pitfighter are 7800 protos that Video 61 is also selling repros of.

    The Monitor cart on the other hand is a licensed 7800 program.

     

    What I was told is that they are not technically repros as much as they are a heap of pre-production chips that Atari Corp produced before orphaning the 2600, which Lance bought off them. In other words, they would be free from any and all copyright issues, unlike most repros that just flew under the radar.

     

    I think this is the same rationalization that Best Electronics used, but the general feeling there is that Best whipped out the EPROM burner and made as many as they felt like.

  13. Posted

    I just (belatedly) updated the proto that batari sent me and am impressed as everyone else is.

     

    I do see some room for improvement in how menu navigation is done with the paddles, however, but I'm not privy to any limitations that the kernel may be imposing on paddle reads.

     

    One of the things we were going to do with Chimera was have a section where you could set a default game to load and decide whether the default boot behavior should be to load that game or go to the menu. Then depending on the console switches it would use that default behavior or the reverse. This would be similar to holding down OPTION to enable/disable the built-in cart on the Atari 8-bit systems. I know there is a way to load a game into the firmware but it would be nice to have a default game setting as well that will let you keep the multicart feature.

     

    Maybe if it were something as simple as an AUTORUN.BIN type file on the SD card it would work if it's too much hassle to have an onscreen settings page. So on powerup Harmony would poll the select switch. If it's not depressed, it would look for AUTORUN.BIN and if it's there, load the game. If it is depressed, it won't even bother checking for it and go straight to the menu.

  14. Posted

    I'm really happy to see PoP start up again. If you go back far enough, it was my hope that PoP would become a multiload Supercharger game, as it was begun when I was running the old aborted contest. Then it was my hope it would be the killer-app for Chimera. Now it looks like it will be the showcase for Harmony.

     

    If this is going to be a 1P game, I also hope it supports AtariVox as well, ala Juno First. I would be glad to script voices for it. Pretty soon I am going to have more AtariVox boards than I'll ever hope to sell.

     

    More to the point, I would also hope that the original PoP game is merely a springboard for a flexible game engine that could be extended. I would not be slavish to porting it 1:1. At least, provide some things that add variety to it.

     

    A PoP type engine could probably be adapted to generate many other games like it. I'm thinking about a non-scrolling non-parallax Rastan sort of game in particular.

  15. Posted

    I'm pissed off that A) it won't be available for Windows, and B) dio got kicked off because of Heaven and Hell's dispute with Sharon Osborne. How can you have Jack Black in a heavy metal videogame without Dio? It's inexcusable.

  17. Posted · Edited by mos6507

    Sweet! Do the little guys call out for help or what other types of speech is going on? Wave designation maybe?

     

    The obligatory stuff, but most importantly, it taunts you kind of like Sega Space Fury, but in a Family Guy pop-culture-reference style. I scripted (in some cases rescripted) the speech.

  18. Posted

    Did you get the black model? That's the one I'll go for next time around.

     

    That's all that was available at the time. The problem is it uses a standard tuneomatic bridge which was designed for regular guitar strings. Adjusting intonation on a bass string requires a wider range of saddle positions. So I could never get the low E to stay in tune up the neck with the other strings. For a Bass VI type instrument you really need custom hardware designed for that application. Regular guitar hardware is just insufficient. Similar problem with the tuners. You need special strings that taper properly to get around the regular guitar tuners.

     

    I kind of liked the pickups, though, because they had coil taps. Very versatile.

     

    There are other guitars out there like this of course, but they all probably suffer similar issues of using guitar hardware.

  19. Posted

    I wish I could find a PC keyboard that felt as good as the 1200XL (aside from the space bar that rattles too much). The problem is the Atari keyboards don't have enough keys for a full PC keyboard. It would be tricky. But I would probably like a 1200XL and numeric keypad combo to work if I could get used to the different keymap.

     

    But really, the better thing to do would be to follow some of that Atari history back to Japan (Mitsumi?) and see if it might be possible to make a new keyboard that felt like the original 800 or 1200XL with all the keys you need for a PC.

  22. Posted

    These games are insanely fun!

     

    I played Dungeon when I got home from the PRGE show and played it so much that I mapped out all the levels and beat it that evening. :D

     

    Good replayability though if you like that type of game. (and I do!) It reminds me of Telengard.

     

    Juno First is highly addictive too. Fast paced action and the use of the AtariVox is cool.

     

    Great job guys!

     

    I'm glad someone out there is using it with an AtariVox. I thought I was the only one. Now if I just get off my ass and start making more AtariVoxes...

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