mos6507
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Posts posted by mos6507
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Great to hear that you will have sold out your 2nd run. Specialized hardware like this is always a risky thing to produce.
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Has Tod actually confirmed that he was working on a Ballblazer for the 2600?
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Yes, in Stella at 20: Volume 2.
I think he was doing it just as a proof of concept. Maybe not an official project, although had he finished it, it might have become official. That's how it seemed from the context of his discussion about it.
As for Save Mary, the powerups are key to playing the game effectively. Without it, the game may seem way too hard. It's really a pretty good game when you know what everything does and you apply that knowledge to your technique. It's by far Tod's best 2600 effort and it's a shame it wasn't released.
Had it been finished earlier, it might have gotten released. Tod worked on the game for Axlon seemingly forever, like 2 years or something. Part of the problem was a good amount of micromanagement that forced him to change the kernel at least once (i.e. "can you make the sides of the canyon smoother?") but I suspect the other part was that Tod must have been only working on it part-time. I'm pretty sure all the Axlon games were contracted like that.
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These are pre-crash boxes in the sense that they are Atari Inc. boxes. I remember seeing these in 1984 or so, before the Tramiels took over.
I think as Atari Inc. was losing money bigtime, this was one of their cost-cutting measures, probably one of the only ones they implemented before they were gone.
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If you want to talk about floppy drives, the Atari had a similar problem.
The 800 system wasn't originally designed to talk to floppy drives through the serial port but they wound up doing that for cost reasons, I guess.
By the time the XLs were coming out, Atari had designed a parallel disk system for the 1400, 1450XL(d) machines. These would have been really fast. Never came out.
But Atari could have also started offering disk drives that hooked up to the PBI port. They never did that.
Wonder how fast it might have been??
The datarate speed of floppy drives hooked up to the CSS Black Box Floppy Board is almost as fast as hard drive datarates! Of course the main bottleneck is CPU speed. Even ramdisks on the 8-bit are slower than hard drive datarates on modern PCs, but as far as the theoretical maximum datarates on the platform, PBI hard drives are a joy to use.
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If someone can make a business out of the 2600, then I think that's a good thing because it's created a mini rebirth of the platform within a sustainable niche. This is probably one of the early signs of a cascading effect of all the homebrew activity going on, for someone to come forward to offer these kinds of services. Where there is a demand, there will be someone stepping forward to meet that demand. That's something any Atari fan should appreciate.
Not everyone is going to do stuff purely for non-profit hobby reasons as Hozer does. There is a limit to how quickly Randy can work, and how many carts he can push out. If we have a flood of homebrews, each of which selling into the hundreds, Randy simply can not meet demand in a Just In Time model. Not everyone has the time or resources to do the manufacturing and packaging themselves, so it makes sense for a service like this to come around.
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So if I was able to create games with full-color on all the labels and manual (everything cut to Atari size) and the game was in a new box cut to Atari size and style shrink wrapped for $25 - $35 would that be something you would buy? The $25 - $35 price is a rough estimate with a added possiable author profit "royalty".
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I'd like to see fancier packaging. It remains to be seen how affordable this can be, though.
I also think every homebrewer has their own idea as to what style of packaging they'd like. In my case, I'd like to have a recreation of the 1st gen Atari foil labels, so if you come up with a fancy solution, you are likely only going to offer one variety of labels and box. It would be hard to offer something custom for each homebrewer.
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The female naming convention on chips and systems was a trait of the Engineering manager, Jay Miner.
He continued this practice into the Amiga (originally the Lorraine), which has chips like Denise, Paula, and Agnus. Even after he left, there were Amiga chips with female names like Alice and Akiko.
[ 12-04-2001: Message edited by: Glenn Saunders ]
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While the RF modulator differs in PAL vs. NTSC, there is only one TIA chip. Maybe it's clocked slightly slower on PAL, but the way the TIA itself generates colors is no different for NTSC, PAL, or SECAM. That's why the unfortunate result is that fewer colors are visible on PAL, and only 8 garish ones in SECAM.
If there had been a true PAL TIA, then you wouldn't lose colors like that.
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I had a 155MB drive hooked up to my 8-bit through a Black Box and it was wonderful. There was no way I would ever fill up that much space.
The problem with 8-bit DOSs is that they only support up to 16MB partitions. The only DOSs that will work effectively with hard drives are those that support subdirectories.
That pretty much means only MYDOS and SPARTADOS. Of those, MYDOS doesn't support true random access, it's a seek and find file system. SPARTA has a true file bitmap and therefore file operations tend to be faster with SPARTADOS than MYDOS.
The BB has a virtual floppy system which is pretty cool also. You can copy your floppies to the HD and then boot off them as if they were floppies. Great with games and other protected programs that will only run off of a floppy.
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Why not see if Activision still has their molds?? Maybe a deal can be cut with them, or Infogrames?
I would find it very surprising if it were not possible to track down the molds to at least one Atari 2600 publisher.
It will take some detective work, but there has to be at least one mold left that we could use.
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Atari was still small in 1977, but they were subsidized by their parent company, Warner Communications.
While the early text labels were bland, they were also rather exotic insofar as they were not merely paper labels. they were made from a foil backing with multiple layers to black-mask and colorize it.
The best part is that they are extremely durable. You won't see an Atari text label cart suffer from actiplaque, frayed edges, water damage or other stains.
An old text label cart, unless it's been written-on with a sharpie, is going to stay in close to mint condition pretty much forever. The adhesive can wear off depending on how it's stored, but that's about it.
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If you read in another thread you know I plan to provide a complete publishing service for Homebrew gamers.
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Any details on the type of labels/box that you will be going with?
I'd like to be able to duplicate 1st gen Atari packaging with the matte black labels with the foil underneath and the colored translucent layer in the middle but so far I haven't found any companies who can do that.
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Tom Hunt's CGS was a really cool system. It allowed for a kind of X-windows like access to the Atari 8-bit's graphics to draw images in a programmatic way (draw line, fill, etc...).
It's too bad it came around too late in the 8 bit bbs era.
It would have been great for online games.
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New hardware without software to support it is useless. Any new games coming out to take advantage of the Hercules card? NO. What do I need 3 printer ports for? It all just seems a waste of time to me...
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Obsolute computers are mainly hacker's devices. In other words, roll your own software, period. That's why old game machines are really only useful anymore as game machines, because an old game doesn't age as badly as, let's say, an old non-WYSIWYG word processor.
It's far easier to build new hardware than it is to build a software base for the new hardware, that's for sure.
I think that's why a lot of old platforms are looking for ways to run LINUX, because it opens the door to porting lots of pre-existing applications. TCP/IP applications would be something interesting to see the 8-bit platforms be able to do.
There is a project called LUNIX for the C=64/128 and I think what the 8-bit needs more than anything else is a port of that.
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Pretty cool. Too bad it didn't come out in the mid 80s.
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Whoever picked the color palette for the Disney games for the 5200 was color blind.
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The style of a movie like The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca is markedly different from the types of films produced in the swinging 60s or the R-rated 70s.
Every era is marked by a different style of media, and videogames are no exception. (Whether this will hold true for the future since technology has reached such a plateau in 3D graphics, I don't know. Aside from the eventual critical-mass of broadband multiplayer networking on consoles I don't see a next big shift in game design anytime soon.)
For those of us who really like the '77-'84 style of gaming, I'd consider that classic in the same way that the output of Hollywood reached a creative zenith between 1937-41.
To follow the movie analogy even more, when TV entered the scene, the prominence of movies as the dominant form of entertainment diminished.
Similarly, the erosion of the arcade industry in the last few years (which gave birth to videogames) is symptomatic of the ever increasing shift of videogames away from "twitch" and more towards a more computer-game virtual-reality approach.
So to say that all videogame eras are created equal really isn't true. Big changes have occured and while there have been surface-level improvements, there are game concepts which have also been almost completely abandoned for the sake of "progress".
Just as nobody will every be able to recreate the idealistic 3-strip technicolor world of The Wizard of Oz, nobody will ever release a truly new minimalistic style game ala Pitfall or Kaboom (unless it's a remake or rerelease). And all 2D games in general are almost dead aside from the portable niche. Old styles are accepted within their historical context, and cherished by some such as us, but are pretty much confined to the past in favor of a new aesthetic.
So I really think it has less to do with pure nostalgia keyed to a person's generation and more to do with the fact that styles change. By and large you can not get an equivalent gaming experience from a modern game as you can from a classic just as you can't get the aura of classic Hollywood from a crass modern ride movie like Titanic.
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Did the Colecovision or Intellivision 2600 adapters have these glitches? If companies were able to clone the 2600 20 years ago don't you think if this were an attempt at a gate-level 2600 clone it would be a bit more accurate?
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Too much greed on the part of Infogrames if you ask me.
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I'm sure it has more to do with Digital Eclipse wanting to milk their emulation cash-cow as long as humanly possible.
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I think you could implement a paddle-like device in miniature using something like a the thumbwheel on mice going horizontally, without the detentes.
Or you could do a miniature trackball.
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The develovpment system was actually sold as a product. i believe Ed Salvo did this a year after apollo folded.
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Hmm. This is the READS 2600 system? Is there any more information on that?
I remember something for the Apple II called "THE FROB" that would hook up to a 2600, like a ROMulator thingy.
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I don't know why they stopped offering consumer controllers. They were the best, bar none. And there hasn't been anything that good ever since for any platform really. Talk about a wasted opportunity!
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I doubt that Asteroids especially will look any good on a low res LCD display.
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Analog or nothing, real analog, not the messed up way analog sticks were handled in Hasbro's Breakout.
The world DOES NOT need another paddle-based classic game converted to a modern console without a paddle-like device available.
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Tape Images!
in Atari 8-Bit Computers
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Tape image support would be novel, but pratically useless.
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Tape images would allow emulators to play the educational tables that had the analog audio track embedded.
There were also some tape programs that didn't have a disk equivalent. I don't know if these have been converted to BINs somehow or not.