mos6507

River Raid Plus!

There are always methods of alerting the user besides a literal <<--Back or Next-->> row of text. It could be as simple as inverting the text of line 1 and 10, or designating a few blank scanlines that would toggle on and off.

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.

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. 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

Yeah. 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.

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.

You'll have to wait for the official announcement for details but it was Richard's intention to shift -Vox production and sales to me.

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.

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.

I think what bothers me the most is that desktop PC hardware still hasn't gotten the memo on power consumption. To me there shouldn't be a disconnect between desktop and laptop hardware. I know there is a growing number of people going with micro ITX/Nettops but the whole jet-engine fan overclocking thing seems really anachronistic to me. I had an Athlon 700 back in the day and that thing sounded like a hairdryer the fan was so loud. CPUs are getting more energy efficient but now GPUs are turning into monsters with active cooling, etc... A top gaming rig will pull over 500 watts. Now, a space heater maxes out a typical wall circuit at around 1,500 watts. As far as I'm concerned a PC should not pull down more than 100-120 watts these days. If it does, then it's a failure of R&D. Just think of all the fossil fuels used to power these things, and how you're typically going to leave the PC on idle while you mostly web-browse. All that power goes to waste just redrawing a 2D browser window.

I think one of the reasons I'm still into classic videogames is I've always stayed on the sidelines of the computer hardware treadmill. I had a Playstation 1 when it first came out, and then proceeded to get very few games for it. I had a PS2 as well and didn't buy many games for it. And don't get me started on PC games. My rig has never been where it should have been to facilitate cutting edge gaming, and so I keep procrastinating on getting into games. The most recent PC upgrade was a Pentium IV 2.4 GHZ system I put together a few years ago. I made the fatal mistake of buying into an PCI+AGP motherboard at the time when everything was shifting to the new PCI Express standard. And I had a graphics card without HDMI, hence no Blu-ray.I keep waiting for the upgrade cycle to slow down long enough for me to jump on board, but no matter what is current today, something better seems like it's just on the horizon. This paralyzes me from buying anything due to instant obsolescence.Like when Netbooks first came out, I thought, gee, great, except for the crappy integrated graphics. Now ION is coming out, but wait, ION2 is also on the horizon. Plus Intel has a new class of 32nm chips with 45nm integrated graphics that would work similar to Ion.And on the desktop front, I was going to rebuild my motherboard with an EFIX board in order to run OSX. So I was going to get a P45 motherboard. But then along comes Core i7 boards. And then comes Snow Leopard that obsoletes my unused EFIX dongle. I would have to use a new EFIX dongle to enable Snow Leopard.And talk about standards. USB is on its way to 3.0. SATA is already up to 3, right? Now they are talking about Light Peak (fiber optic).Anytime you get a new motherboard you are stuck with whatever ports are on it and the socket standard. But Intel changes the form-factor of its CPUs constantly. So the odds of doing a processor upgrade within the lifecycle of the motherbaord are slim to none.And take my daughter's computer. It's a Mac Mini. It's got the core2duo, but the integrated graphics, so when I tried installing Windows on it, games ran like crap. So that computer is effectively obsolete unless I share my rebuilt PC for her. The original Mac Mini I got for my mom is a G4 so that is EOL on the OS front.And what about my 24" 1080P display? It has dead pixels and the screen quality is not that good. Now these sorts of monitors are dirt cheap, but what do I do with my old monitor? Sell it on Ebay and deal with the hassle?At the end of the day I really do not like generating all this clutter and eventual ewaste. So even though I can currently afford to stay on the treadmill, my conscience can't deal with the stream of waste involved in doing so. I just don't relate to people who are constantly replacing their computer hardware like it's a new pair of shoes. But will there ever come a time when any of us can kind of settle down with some gear and say "this is good enough"? Every time I jump back on the treadmill, that's what I fool myself into thinking. But it never happens.And this is the result.

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.

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.

BTW, not to hijack this thread but I've now put in orders for parts to assemble new AtariVox boards. I will start a forum topic and/or blog post series about it with details within days.

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.

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.

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.

Funny. I still haven't gotten my order

If only Playaround had someone like you on their payroll back in the day. Just think of the service you could have provided to horny tweeners back in the day.

What a long road it's been to see Juno First get made. I can't wait to get my physical copy. I certainly hope to see more AtariVox games created.The big thing that distracted me from doing Atari stuff was the machinima site Xtranormal which uses speech synthesizers. You can't control them as deftly as you can the AtariVox, but they do sound more naturalistic. I just have to finally sit down and figure out how to make AtariVox boards so I can sell them again, now that JF is coming out.

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...

You can always get one of these later. I was disappointed in its intonation, though.

I guess I'll be the only one here to say this. ORIGINALS. Not based on a movie, a comic book, a TV show, or any other existing property. I appreciate stuff like Juno First or Ballblazer but there just aren't enough originals being written anymore, outside of stuff like the holiday carts.

My dad wants to buy a netbook and I keep telling him to wait for ION so he doesn't have buyer's remorse. Once Netbooks all have ION and HDMI out (instead of VGA--blech) they will have a much better bang for the buck.

Looks like a similar approach that was used on the Chimera title screen (sans queues of course). Stellar Track's main limitation is that every sprite has to have a blank column in it so it only works for text (7-bits each). A full 12-char is harder to do. The timing definitely is critical on that and I had to solicit help to get that to work right. Title support in batari basic is good. Having this mode as a Suicide-mission-like drawing canvas for Harmony similar to what I intended for Chimera would be even better.