mos6507

I think it's just 160x100. Great for an Intellivision or Astrocade on a chip, but not a 2600.

What I want to know is whether the sourcecode was on that TT as well. If it was, then somebody should just finish the game. I think commercially releasing unfinished protos is a lazy thing to do--especially if the sourcecode is available for it (which isn't often the case). Finished protos, yes, but unfinished protos, no. An unfinished proto is really more of a curiosity than a product. A finished proto is a full game that stands on its own. Of course finished is a relative term. A game can appear done but not be completely "tuned" (which is something you might, at best, feel, not see). But if there are obvious things missing (like sound) then it's without a doubt unfinished.

160x100 would be a portrait mode, correct? In that way you wouldn't even be using the full width of the screen, and you'd be dropping out or merging every other scanline in the process. That might look fine for Combat but any game that features single scanline graphics like Atlantis or Thrust is going to be in trouble. And I don't know how you'd go about mapping the video output of the 2600 on a chip to the GBA. You'd almost be writing an emulator just to take the video signal, do some kind of A to D sampling and drive the GBA display from it. It's a lot easier to use an LCD that's natively 320x200 and supports direct analog video input right from the start. That is, assuming the LCD's pixels line up with the 2600's active display area (it may not).

Combat was coded with stereo in mind.

Didn't the catbox cost more than $100? I realize it was nigh on a decade ago and it had an all metal case, but still, for what these things do, I think it's a reasonable cost. It's a comparable pricepoint to other specialized hardware like the Atari 2600's Cuttle Cart. There really should be some discounting if you buy multiple units, however. I know it's hard because economy of scale really won't help you because overall sales will still be small, but even a symbolic discount would help.

Someone should really make a full-out manual using this information.

What people keep forgetting about the GBA is that it's LCD screen is smaller than the 2600's native resolution. It's only 240x180 as I recall. Everyone does know what graphics look like when it has to scale at anything less than an even multiple? Crap. I have a Sharp LCD monitor at home and when I set my computer to run at anything other than the default 1024x760 of the screen I get bad artefacts. It's going to look even worse on a lower res screen. You'd need to use a 320x200 screen, like what's used on most PDAs. This thing really cries out for a custom solution. Any attempt to make it an add-on to portables that feature smaller res LCD screens is going to suck.

Probably fewer than there will be 2600s still working after another 20 years when the VCS will be pushing 50.

--Keystone Kapers II Now that is the first I've heard about this. I'd love to see this one.

When I did the initial Starpath CD I held onto the checks until I did the manufacturing run. I don't think it's ethical to take people's money and not deliver in a timely manner. What you want to do in a preorder situation is to gather up the money, and as long as it's checks, not money orders or cash, then you can always either send their check back or tell them to void the check in a worst case scenario.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, but for any 4K homebrew game, you could make it a simple F8 bankswitched game and have a 4K bank devoted to a title screen that comes up on powerup. For instance, for existing games like Space Invaders, you could scan/resize/crop the box art and turn it into an 8K game and when the game boots up, it displays the box art with a title caption above or beneath it. Then if you press the fire button or hit reset, it switches to the main game. For homebrews, you could have a scan of the author, a title graphic, or a scan of the person buying the game. If you make it a 16K game you'd have room for 3 images plus the main 4K game bank. Then you can cycle through them with select or something, or just have it do a slideshow (with Paul Slocum's music in the background of course). That way if you bought a homebrew it would always be one of a kind, not just by inserting a text caption, but by inserting any image you want. That way if you ever traded it down the road it would have a "message in a bottle" effect! I think this would be a great way to release a homebrwe, and a great added value to owning a physical cart over a ROM image, since you'd have to order the cart to get the personalized version.

I personally am anxious to see this! If you do it, try to make it so you can load in a DASM source listing and use that as you scroll through the disassembly rather than the raw ML. Imagine being able to step-debug through your own fully-commented sourcecode!

Which of these solutions support paddles also? The Amiga 4-player adapter looks like it only supports digital signals.

Let's get this stuff (i.e. ROM images and screenshots) added to AA's database.

It looks like the Bit Corp section really needs to get fleshed out more. At least for the games that do have ROM images, they need screenshots.

The number of games known to exist but not in circulation are growing small. That's why I closed down my VGAM egroups. Here is the remaining list (from memory). Snow Plow Pink Panther Good Luck Charlier Brown Pleiades (will be dumped by AA) Cat Trax (will be dumped by AA) 2 Activision protos (dumped) I think the 2600 well is beginning to run dry, but there are still some very exciting protos for other classic platforms still to be circulated. Like we still haven't gotten Mail Plane or Batter Up for the Vectrex, for instance.

There are two types of games, sport games and interactive fiction. Just about every game on the planet falls under one of these categories. Sports require rules. Rules involve limits on what you can do and where you can go, and when. This was partly a byproduct of the technology, but also it made sense in the classic era to create games that only featured a single non-scrolling screen, a 2D perspective, timers, lives, and so on. By removing the technical constraints on the hardware, the temptation is to ALWAYS do a 3D perspective and ALWAYS have lots of levels and other hard-coded data spooling off the CD. There is that drive for realism and depth and narrative. It's like if you take Chess and turn it into Starcraft at some point it's just not the same game anymore. These genres transform themselves when you change the perspective and make things more realistic. That's not to say no new games are good, but I don't feel the market can accept, let's say, a modern flat-out 2D Robotron or Defender. People think it's cheap. It's like if in Basketball people expected the players to be getting equipment upgrades to the point where they'd be fighting in mechanical suits today. Some classic game concepts just don't need updating. But it's hard to convince that to game publishers who need a steady stream of new product to sell gamers. If they were content with their existing games forever, they'd never be able to sell them something new. I really do think the industry has slowly convinced gamers to accept planned obsolescence using the excuse of technological progress.

Maybe it's time to hack the game so that you just need the ball in the air when time runs out. Thomas?

Am I the only one who feels particularly bitter at this time of poor international relations that Atari Inc's assets found their way into a FRENCH company?

For those with a steady supply of replacement plastic internals, the original sticks aren't so bad, it's just that I don't really like designs where the internal components rely on the flexibility of plastic. Plastic will ultimately snap. It was obviously an economic issue that led to the design of the 2600 sticks. If you look at arcade hardware, that's how you design stuff to last. I prefer metal leaf switches. Yes, these can break too, but only after a lot more use. My Wico joystick is still going strong after about 20 years of off and on use. Unfortunately, metal leaf switch joysticks are few and far between these days. I'm not big on those noisy microswitch joysticks that pass for high-end sticks for consoles.

Doesn't this story remind you of the debate over the legality of prototypes and the profiteering therein? http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/15/...4927854532.html

just copy and paste the text.

Anyone notice how out of date the CGE site is? http://www.cgexpo.com/recap.html This is a recap for CGE 2001. It's two years old!

Someone should add the Intellivision version's mothership level to 2600 Demon Attack and make it an 8K game.

PCAtari has known issues. It was written in Borland Pascal or something else that doesn't integrate well with windows. It's very buggy. I think the graphics are all GDI based, not DirectX, so it's pretty slow. I can't get the fullscreen mode to work at all. Unfortunately it's the only 2600 emulator with a halfway decent interactive debugger so I need to use it. On my PII350 running Win2K it actually runs well enough for debugging purposes. Cyberstella really needs that debugger added to it.