mos6507

But I don't want to speak for him, but it seemed to me that he wasn't making that much money per unit, so it just wasn't worth it anymore as an efficient use of his time. It was more of a good-will gesture to the classic community. I mean, $100 is a pretty high pricepoint. He was really on the fence about making it at all because of the costs involved, but he graciously went through with it and was probably surprised to see it do well enough to justify the 2nd run. I think the best chance of having more made would be for some entrepreneur to license the hardware and agree to assume all manufacturing and fulfillment duties, merely sending Chad a check. I don't see why he wouldn't agree to that if the terms were in his favor. The problem with this is, naturally, with the additional middle-man involved that you'd have to price it higher than $100 if you intend to make any profit whatsoever. However, if demand is high enough, pricepoint might not matter. I don't know how many Battlesphere Golds have been sold, but I guess enough to continue justify making them. The same could be the case with Cuttle Carts. I do think it's a wonderful piece of work, perhaps the single best investment a 2600 fan could make next to a Supercharger. I'm not sure the Flash cart in development is going to support all the banking schemes the CC does (like Starpath, Superchip, or Ram+). Even if you are not a developer, there is a huge freedom that comes from being able to play arbitrary ROM images on the real-thing. People who just enjoy playing 2600 games can, for instance, subscribe to Stellalist and sample the test/beta code as it's being developed without waiting for physical ROM releases. Emulators are good but a lot of today's homebrews throw them for a loop, especially StellaX (for those on Win2K/XP). I do think that if by some miracle the Atari On a Chip project becomes a mass produced item (grey market or what have you) that the CC should definitely be integrated into the design!!

It took a while before the project was officially approved, though. And as far as I know, Ken had nothing to do with Activision Classics--Bryant Bustamante was the 'producer' who went through the motions on that abomination.

This opinion must create some conflict between you and other(s) who shall remain nameless at Digital Press, then.

I'd like to see the 8-bit section go up with whatever they have done so far, just to see what it's going to be like. It's always going to be a work in progress. There is no need to wait until it's "done".

Any chance to have it support more RAM, like 128K or more? Some XEGS games use up to 128K of banked ROM. I don't know what the limit is on cart banking. Is it 256 8KB banks? The cool thing about this is if it is complete read/write, you could use it as an expanded RAM system just like the XEs have (only through the cart address range instead) and it could be used for RAMDISKS or custom application code/data storage rather than merely emulating existing ROM carts. Normally the cart address space is a black hole that you can't use for anything but ROM, but having it filled with RAM like this could really open up some interesting things.

The problem with the Astrocade besides overheating was that it was dumbed down arcade hardware that underexploited the graphics chip. The chip inside of it was as capable of high-resolution as an arcade Gorf or Wizard of Wor, but the way it was interfaced into the board you couldn't get it to kick into high-res even with additional memory on the expansion bus. It's like owning a GeForce3 card that you can only do 640x400 res. They went to the bother of designing a powerful graphics chip and seemingly to save a few pennies, crippled it in its console implementation rather than at least making it expandable into a NEO-GEO like system. (Imagine if you could play 90% authentic [no voice let's say] WOW or GORF ROMs on your Bally instead of half-res ports.) As much as it has a lot of RAM vs. the 2600, it was still strapped for RAM. You actually had to blank out visible scanlines to use for scratchpad RAM storage for your game since the only RAM in the Bally (4K, seems like a lot) was shared with video RAM. Unless you wanted to completely letterbox your game, you were left with little more usable RAM than the 2600. There are also problems with hardware systems like the Bally that don't separate hardware sprites from playfield. The Bally did indeed have a display-list-interrupt like system where you could change the color palette on each line. However, since the sprites were all software-driven (albeit abstracted by various OS library routines that sought to simplify things), they had to share the palette of the playfield. What this meant was you couldn't easily change the entire background palette without screwing up the sprite graphics as well, whereas with the 2600 and the Atari 8-bit the color registers are mostly independent (the ball on the 2600 is the same as the playfield which is why the dot in Adventure is always changing color from room to room). So while the Bally has an enormous 256 color palette, most Bally games never bothered changing the palettes in mid screen which resulted in fewer colors per screen. The Astrocade is really more like a primordial Intellivision, I think, where the best sort of games you could write would feature slower animation and more playfield-driven gameplay. But with 4 controllers with both a stick and a paddle on them, there was a lot of wasted potential there for some cool party games.

You know, most people didn't buy 2600s when they first came out. The pricepoint of the 2600 around the time Space Invaders came out I think was around $120 which isn't too bad.

The book "Phoenix" has some numbers on post-crash Atari console sales. As I recall, they did manage to sell over a million units for at least a couple years, which is a remarkable feat. I'm talking about sell, not just manufacture. Historians sometimes make it seem like the 2600 didn't even exist after 1984 where the Tramiels' efforts with the Jr were completely useless, but I'm positive they sold more Jr's and maybe even more XEGSs than they ever sold Atari Jaguars or all the Atari STs combined. They also sold a very respectable number of Solaris cartridges. Doug N. told me he made a decent amount in royalties on that game. The NES market rejuvenated the game business and at the same time alienated what would become us classic gamers such that the 2600 hung onto a respectable niche for a while.

The funny thing is that both Hasbro and Infogrames appear to have no interest in 2600 emulation releases, even though they were/are in a perfect position to do so. I do concede that there is probably no market anymore for this sort of thing on the PC because of the widespread ROM trading that's gone on for so long.

The Tramiels were guilty of a multitude of sins. There is no way to reduce it down to one or two missteps. There were countless missed opportunities. But I think the first mistake was thinking that the game business was a dead-end. It obviously wasn't. And the other thing is that software sells hardware. Without great games, you can't develop a userbase. By 1984, the Atari 8-bit might have been a distant 3rd in userbase behind the C=64 and the Apple II, but it still had a significant userbase. In fact that was Atari's ONLY home computer userbase. The Tramiels chose not to cultivate that userbase, instead trying to ram the ST down their throats while letting the 8-bit mostly wither on the vine. It really didn't matter whether or not the 8-bit was "obsolete". The C=64s most popular days were post-crash, for instance, and the 2600's best years were when it was technically obsolete. There was an overlap period until the early 90s when 8-bit computing coexisted with 16-bit computing as a respectable low-pricepoint niche. What was missing was A-list internal software development. Since the Tramiels never had any respect for videogames, they never rebuilt the team.

Wow. Kirk right under Khan. What a coincidence.

People don't give Radar Lock any credit because they think it's a cheap knockoff of Solaris but it's actually very different gameplay. In solaris the ship slid back and forth at the bottom of the screen like in River Raid. It was more of a slanted 2D perspective like Juno First without the perspective lines. With Radar Lock the ship is stationary so it's more of a true 3D feel, more of an attempt to port Sega's Afterburner. A pretty ballsy thing to do. Okay, so it doesn't have colorful stars and planets wizzing by, but it does have a great attention to detail nonetheless. If you look at the shots you'll see how Doug very carefully scales the bullets and compensates for inertia. Wherever possible he's using single-scanline res and lots of color gradients, and his flicker algorithm is very smart so objects stay relatively solid even with a lot of action on the screen. Plus the enemies get very tough in the higher waves! The only goofy thing is the way he did the clouds and how there is a slight delay when you bank and the clouds shift.

OK, semantical argument... The illusion of intelligence within the confines of a limited game is sufficient to classify said behavior as "AI" in my book. In other words, if the computer can play in a manner that is consistent with a real opponent, then I'd consider that AI. We're not talking about having a HAL-like communication with the 2600 here, you know. The interactions involved are limited to say the least. You'd be surprised how a combination of simple rules mixed with a dose of randomization can do. Given that, I think there are many games that give the superficial illusion of some kind of thought process going on. Adventure has to be #1 on that list for obvious reasons. The movements in Demon Attack are also very organic, albeit more pattern-based.

Isn't there a way to hack a 2600 joystick to a PC _without_ rewiring the joystick itself, so you could still use it with the 2600?

Paddle games on the 2600 require a more minimal display because you have to read the paddle several times during the active screen, the section of the code that you really need in order to do meaningful graphics. (I mean, there is a reason Kaboom is mostly a green backgroud with a LOT of space between the vertically separated sprites...) On the 8-bit/5200 the Pokey chip takes care of this for you so you can just get the paddle value directly during vertical blank. So at least for the 2600, you'd want to avoid paddle control unless you absolutely need it.

The reason those are positive reviews is because the 7800 hardware was optimized to do games equivalent to Williams arcade hardware (lots of small sprites over a minimal background with a small number of colors per screen). When it tried to do NES style games the limitations of the hardware became more apparent.

The reason bitrot isn't important in homebrew games is that we have the ROM images which we can store on other media (CD-R, etc...). So if your EPROM goes bad you can always burn another one (albeit ruining the label in the process. The bitrot problem involves protos which some people may be holding onto but are unwilling to dump to a ROM image. When the bits only exist in one fragile EPROM that's over 20 years old, I'd say there is cause for concern. I'd say there would even be cause for concern if the only ROM image exists only on one guy's hard drive because hard drives are more unstable than EPROMs. So the ROM being known to have been "dumped" doesn't really guarantee the game will be preserved. The ROM image has to be spread around a bit for redundancy purposes.

?? I used to use an ICD R-Time 8 cart when I was running a BBS. Into an Atari 800XL I had a SpartaDOS X cart, R-Time 8 cart, and Atari BASIC Rev. C cart. I had to be careful, as if you accidently hit this tower of carts, you could very likely crash the machine. << And wait like all of 10 seconds or so that it took to reboot the BBS off a hard drive

Does this mean the 8-bit section of AA is going to be launched soon?

The CD^32 used a 680EC20 chip which is just a 68000 with a 32-bit address bus instead of the 24-bit address bus of the 68000 and a few new features (I think it has some additional caching functions). The EC means it has no MMU. So I'm not sure what you need in the CPU for it to be considered 32-bit. The 68000 has always had 32-bit registers internally, has it not? Wouldn't the Genesis be the first 32-bit system then?

With all the homebrewing going on and all the attention that homebrewers get for their completed efforts, I really was hoping that this environment would eventually convince one of the original programmers to write a new game or at least a token amount of new lines of code. This would be especially memorable if the person who wrote it was otherwise not involved much in the game industry anymore (which appears to be the case with all too many of them, like Carl Shaw, Larry Wagner, Larry Kaplan, and Rob). Even for those who are still in the biz, like Al Miller, David Crane (who could probably still write a 2600 game in his sleep), Tod Frye (who said he'd do 2600 work again in my interview) would get a unique experience if they coded a game today. The prospects of being one of an elite number of current 2600 coders servicing a small but fanatical niche might be enough to get them to do something... The ironic thing right now is you've got guys on Stellalist who have become so familiar with the 2600 that they are actually able to find flaws and inefficiencies in the disassembled source-code of the masters. It would be really exciting to see one of the veterans come in and show his mettle.

Rob, With the increasing number of high-quality homebrews being released, I think there is going to be less and less interest in paying top dollar for reproduction prototypes if the final game isn't complete or is lacking in some key way. CGE Services still hasn't sold out all their releases from the last convention, for instance, which I attribute to "competition" from the homebrews for classic gamers' dollars. I think it was a mistake on their part to release games like Elevator Action and Snow White in an incomplete form when we have somebody of the calibre of Thomas who can disassemble and modify these games. This wasn't the case years ago, but it is now and we should take advantage of it. Are you aware that Thomas squeezed the Atari 400/800 version of River Raid's balloons into 2600 River Raid?http://www.atariage.com/hack_page.html?Sys...ftwareHackID=68 That's not easy considering that most 2600 games are released with no bits to spare and with highly optimized (i.e. spaghetti-looking) code. An unfinished game is historical, yes, but it doesn't have as much lure to game players as a polished final product. It's like when the Beatles put together Free as a Bird and Real Love they didn't just stamp out Lennon's dusty demo tape as is. They got together with George Martin and created something new and polished out of what they had to work with. Given that no original 2600 coder has (to date) written any 2600 code in the modern era, I think that having Thomas present you with a commented disassembly and having you finish the last 10% of the game yourself (with assistance from Thomas or others as needed) would be a HUGE selling point. You'd then be able to justify a much higher price to cover the development time. Packaging and autographs might work, but if you have pride in your work, you really want to focus on the bits on the EPROM.

I believe chips wear out mostly due to heat effects eventually burning the traces out. The simpler the chip, the longer it's going to last. The traces are bigger, it runs slower and cooler, etc... Remember that even the Astrocade required a heatsink in its day. The 2600 was a simple system even then, let alone now when the PS2 requires a fan to keep it cool. Now electrolytics and mechanical switches do wear out. I suspect that if you replaced the switches, caps and resistors and otherwise left the chips alone that the 2600 could last at least another 20-25 years before one of the chips failed. So even if there were no replacement parts for the RIOT, 6507, or TIA, you'd still be able to keep your 2600 going for as long as you need it assuming you didn't screw up the motherboard when you desolder/resolder components. The simplest of parts can all be replaced probably forever. It's like if you took a Computer Space arcade board set from 1971, as unique as it is as a unit, it's still nothing but standard caps, resistors, and TTL chips. You could take a bare board and completely repopulate it to revive it if need be. It's the discontinued custom chips that cause problems when they go bad.

The guys are mostly static, and are completely symmetrical other than the guns, and therefore you can fill them in with playfield, a wide missile or two, or "shear" the sprite like in Stampede to simulate more bits to paint with. Combining all of this with color register changes I'm sure you could make better looking guys than the Astrocade version. You'd probably just use two missiles for the guns, but use opposite missiles and change the color in mid screen ala Gunfight so they don't appear to match their player color necessarily. The setup is a lot like fishing derby but vertically reversed, but I'm sure it can be done to look better.

Another approach is the "stipple" graphics or dithered look of Suicide Mission, which pretty much requires Starpath RAM to pull off, but has the advantage of spanning the entire width of the screen. The late Jim Nitchals thought he could compress a few seconds of full motion video downconverted into 1-bit graphics using the Suicide Mission graphics method.