mos6507

Ray was ridiculed for this in Stella at 20. The implication was that Ray was more interested in style than substance.

Didn't feel too well, though. Those rubber keycaps were kind of ahead of their time in the sense that now all keyboards suck. It's just that people don't know any better.

Isn't Magicard pretty close to that?

The pesky surface-mount chip is a PIC. You'd want to ask Richard how the PIC actually enables the AtariVox to behave like a VecVox or a VecVoice.The PCB has barely enough space to do what it's doing here. That's why it's a SMD PIC instead of a DIP.

This is the first batch of 25 AtariVox boards earmarked for the 25th anniversary 7800 project.All the boards are assembled. They still need to be individually tested, and I am 4 Speakjets shy. Also, I'm troubleshooting a custom startup speech line.These are using the new PCB that Richard designed that I'm calling "AtariVox+" The + part is the ability to switch to VecVox or VecVoice mode. However, since these are meant to be installed internally in 7800s, I am hardwiring it for AtariVox.Once these are done, the real AtariVox boards will get built. The AtariVox+ boards will all be black. The green ones you see here were the initial run of 20 boards that Richard made before handing it over to me.More details to follow.

Speaking as someone who was working on Death Race for the 2600, I think that games have gotten too realistic and it really changes how the mind perceives the activity. Running over a small postage-stamp monochrome "gremlin" in Death Race resulting in a squealing-pig style sound effect and a tombstone sprite is far different from what you see today in games, where characters can get maimed, roll around on the floor in pain, etc... It's like the difference between Wiley Coyote and Reservoir Dogs.

Warrior is way overdue on the Vectrex for sure.

Yes, very soon.

Getting people upset about what's on or not on lists like these is a time-honored way of driving traffic to websites. The only way to win is not to play.

The Speakjet chip itself is $25 so I can't go any lower than that. I think the DB9 extension cable is going to be the biggest expense besides the Speakjet chip. If anyone knows where I can get those in bulk, let me know.

I hated the NES because of what it represented. It represented a cultural shift from american consoles to Japanese. I was really too old to be enthralled by Super Mario Brothers. So the whole side scroller fascination was kind of lost on me. All I knew was the consoles I associated with the home gaming universe were being swept aside and the NES and SMS were taking their place. The NES much more than the SMS felt Japanese, and I mean Japanese in a 1970s Datsun sort of way. And I just didn't go for it. I didn't like the color palette or the cutesiness or the joypads that emphasized the left thumb over the right hand. And I resented the fact that the Generation Y was falling for this stuff hook line and sinker. Nintendo Power magazine, The Glove, the emphasis on "megabits" and all the stuff that really signified the switch between classic gaming and the modern era of disposable, sequelitis gaming. So the NES to me was like rap/hip-hop in the music world, the dividing line on the generation gap.

How would this work with player missile graphics? Would it leave them untouched?

I emailed Alex the other day because the new AtariVox/VecVox combo is going to need a new driver to access the EEPROM and I never got a reply.

My hat's off to those who have stuck with Amiga. I wound up throwing in the towel back in 1998 when I got my first Windows PC, which was Windows 98 and aside from editing Stella at 20 on a Flyer I haven't looked back since. The Amiga was a good alternate platform back when Windows was still running a 16-bit kernel but once it went fully 32-bit with Windows 2000 and intel CPUs rocketed ahead, it was really hard to keep making a case for it. Then developers up to and including Newtek threw it under the bus and it was the end of the line. The classic Amiga has no memory protection and crashes at the drop of a hat. When I look back at my experience with the Amiga, I'm afraid to say that I remember the crashes more than I remember anything else. I wound up losing a ton of work to crashes back in the day. And it's the kind of thing that only used to make me paranoid about trying to look in futility for the root cause. These days the stuff I want to get done on my computer preclude me from having anything less than a modern CPU. I'm about to upgrade my hardware and this time around I want something which can play blu-ray and modern games. So that locks me into Wintel whether I like it or not.

Wow, quite a slam of the 2600 there. It seems to have been cut out of context. The moral of the 2600 is not that the architecture was a mistake. In Stella at 20, he did say that had Atari gone down an optimal, the 2600 would have been replaced with the A8 architecture and it wouldn't have HAD to last more than a few years. Nevertheless, the 2600 wound up making the most money for Atari long after it was (on paper) deemed obsolete. So it had a big leg up on more costly, complicated architectures like the Astrocade and the Intellivision. And the 2600 goes down as the single biggest success story of Nolan's career. You know, it's been a long time since I've read an interview of Nolan that doesn't bother me in one way or another... Like the one a while back where he rudely bashed Ralph Baer.

Then you'll just get sued by this guy.

Great. Now all you need is the PoP movie coming out to cause a cease and desist on this game. All the more reason to change the look and feel of the game, IMHO. It could turn into another Boulderdash dead-end.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect a steady stream of 2600 games in thrifts for eternity. The 2600 went through a period in the 90s where to the general public it was considered worthless. But then by the end of the 90s you had this rise of retro culminating in emulators, Jakks stuff, and Flashback. So most people who had 2600 stuff to get rid of, already have gotten rid of it. Those who don't have finally realized these things have some collector value to some people, so they put it on Ebay.

The other problem with older computers (at least PCs) is that the amount of computing per watt they do is poor. So if you are browsing the web or whatever, you might be pulling down a lot more watts doing that basic stuff with the old CPU cranked at 100% capacity than a modern CPU closer to idle. So an older computer has the benefit of not requiring any more energy to make it (stale embodied energy) it will suck down more energy than if it were just chucked for something more efficient. For instance, the Athlon 700 I used to have. It ran hot. Really hot. I don't know how many watts it pulled down but even though its total MIPS suck compared to today, the watts per MIP suck. So that's the one good thing about the treadmill. The problem of course is that all that extra computing tends to get used. Even for browsing, you've now got HULU and HD youtube clips that eat CPU like there's no tomorrow. I think that's why Atom/ION has gotten so much attention for being able to get reasonable performance (including 1080P) without much energy usage. What I haven't seen, though, are gaming-rig style systems that are able to speedstep their way down to Atom levels. In theory they could, but they just weren't designed to do it. You'd have to go the KVM route and keep the power rig off unless you really needed it. That's probably what I'll do. I'll use a dual-core Atom/ION system for basic stuff and only fire up the main box for bleeding edge games and content creation. I just don't like powering computers up and down all the time.

It's not really Death Race, but then I'm a stickler for detail.

500! I would have thought around 100 would more than cover the market for this. We're talking 45 cents per board. It's all good.

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

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.

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

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.