mos6507

When does the init address get called other than the start address? How is this typically used when one of these doesn't point to the ORG address? I'm assuming the cart flag indicates whether or not the OS is going to be enabled, right? If you set it as a diagnostic cart then the OS won't switch on when the machine cold boots, right?

The cool thing about putting a POKEY on one of those things is that POKEY (and the 6502C) itself might be able to drive the serial interface. The reason you might want to do this is that then new games could use the serial interface for bidirectional communication with a PC or a 2nd 7800! So the POKEY kills two birds with one stone, better audio AND a fully accessible RS232 port. The limitation, of course, would be that POKEY in an Atari 8-bit can barely clock up to 56K baud, and that's probably while turning off certain error checking routines. You wouldn't be able to do 115K baud the way a modern UART can.

>> None of the original library, but homebrews like Thrust & QB do. << Are you SURE no original 2600 titles used undocumented opcodes?

I was wondering if there were any 8-bit cartridge disassemblies available anywhere? I'd like to know what the differences are in assembling a game meant to run as a ROM cartridge vs. an executable that runs out of RAM. It would be nice if there were a simple "HELLO WORLD" type program available with conditional assembly that could build itself into a cart-ready ROM image or executable, like the equivalent of "How to Draw a Playfield" for the 2600.

This was my first videogame system. This was one of the last pong systems before the 2600 wiped the floor with them. It took a while to convince my parents to get a 2600 so I made do with this thing as long as I could stand it. The gun was probably the best part of it.

SID is for music lovers, but POKEY is a chip optimized for sound effects, and hence I think it's a better overall chip for games unless you play games primarily for the background or title music. Engine noises, explosions, crowd white noise, etc.... POKEY does these very well.

The first hard drive solution was for the Atari 800 by Corvus. They offered a 10MB drive that hooked up to the joystick ports. This was of course a specialty item, as hard drives back then in the early 80s were exotically expensive, but it was available. There was also a bare-bones interface made by Supra. I think that was the first interface for the XLs. Then the ICD MIO, and lastly the CSS Black Box. I consider all of these "commercial" although I guess if the units appeared after the official end of support from Atari Corp (like the Black Box) you could consider them hacks.

Another bit of trivia about the CX-2000... Take alook at your 9v Atari power supply sometimes. Some of them say they work with the CX-2000. I looked at the transformer many years ago and wondered what a CX-2000 was. By the numbering I thought it was a pre-2600 system like Video Pinball. So at some point Atari must have been pretty serious about selling these things if they are referenced by Atari power supplies.

Tracking people down to do interviews' date=' etc. would have been costly and so was not on the agenda. Say, that's a terrific outfit you have on. What is it? Whale fox? You are aware that interview footage already exists, don't you? And barring that, how hard would it possibly be to include text-based interviews and trivia?

I'm actually rather disappointed with the way this looks like it turned out. I see no mention so far of any sort of interview or history section. Having a history section is the _standard_ way to do emulation CDs as established by Digital Eclipse (last example being the Bushnell interview on Atari Arcade Hits 1). This kind of stuff was sorely missed in Activision Classics, and some reviews of that title did point that out at the time. Sure, you get the manual scans and then commercials and the patches, but that's about it, right? That's like releasing a boxed set without liner notes. I thought Ken was going to do something special in this area, but apparently not. Given the amount of time and research he put into preparing this, I'm really surprised this did not translate into anything more than the games, manuals, patches, and a few digitized commercials. No anecdotes about the game's creation? No articles about certain games' importance to history (like Pitfall)? Is this stuff just not being mentioned or is it just not there at all? I guess we'll always have AtariAge's database...

While it's true that bugs in modern software may be par for the course, it wasn't always that way. 2600 games rarely have bugs that could be easily reproduced or could crash the game session for a lot of reasons. The codebase is small enough that there is little excuse for not finding these bugs during development and QA. The games are simple enough that most possible interactions with the program will be exercised during development. If something can happen, odds are you are going to know about it. I'm not talking about benign easter eggs here or frying behaviors or games where the TV loses sync every now and then. I'm talking about showstopper bugs. I can't think of any 2600 game releases that had bugs that "crashed" the game if you did the wrong thing. Beyond the size issue, there is also the issue of cost and reputation. A company is not going to spring for the cost of making a masked ROM of a game that isn't completely tested. Unlike PC software that can issue patches online, and unlike console software that is so ephemeral that the bugs can be forgiven with the sequel, classic game software had to be right at day one. Many 2600 games were offered to the public for years and were meant to be be permanent fixtures of entertainment, not rentals you "finish". Hence most of the revisions in released games were cosmetic alone (Asteroids copyright screen, Stargate -> Defender II title screen).

2600 homebrewing has been going on fairly consistently over the last half a decade. In fact I'd say it's picked up in the last couple years as new blood came onto the scene in Stellalist. Originally it was just rec.games.video.classic on usenet, but now I think the driving forces bringing in new recruits for retrogaming right now are the classic gaming conventions and Atari Age. So while we have seen developers write a few games, then move to the sidelines, others have come forward to replace them to make sure there is still a healthy trickle of new releases each year. If interest is highly generational I don't know how long it can be sustained, but 5 years is pretty good so far. I do think that providing a 2600-on-a-chip is important to extending interest beyond the next 10 years or so, when attrition is likely to claim a lot of original consoles. 2600s are highly durable because they run cool and there aren't a lot of components that could go bad on the motherboard, but nothing can last forever. Emulations are good on some levels but I think the die-hard retrogamer by and large doesn't play on emulators to get their fix, and certainly doesn't buy homebrew carts just to play the ROM image on emulators...

I thought there was a bug in Super Pac where you could get into situations where you could not unlock all the barriers, hence a dead-end in the game. I know I got stuck along those lines when I last played it. Maybe I just sucked?

I'm referring to the interface used to allow one to hook up Atari sticks to a PC parallel port for use in emulators as supported by Atari800Win. I need that in order to be able to program for the driving controllers as Atari800Win has no emulation for that via the mouse.

Can someone point me towards a URL for how to build a Multijoy4 interface?

>> Doesn't Atari still have the rights to Q*Bert? Seeing as the recent remake had the Atari logo I'd say yes. This would have been on MY list. << Hasbro bought out both Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley, both of which would still own the IP to their 2600 games. Don't know if Infogrames would inherit the right to present these games. I doubt it, though.

>> I am wondering if roadblock to doing this is the intelectual propery rights to the 6502 processor. Western Design Center owns the IP rights to the 6502 technology, and it's possible that they don't license the rights at a low enough price to make this economically feasible. << Then how do they do the NES-inside-gamepad things? Emulating the 6502 in software with some medium-speed embedded RISC processor isn't that big of a deal. (And embedded 65C02 cores are probably affordable enough for a mass produced unit like this.) Emulating the TIA as well is a different story. (Remember that even on the Playstation 1, Activision couldn't achieve full framerate and that's a 32-bit 33mhz RISC processor.) I'm not even sure today's PocketPCs can even reach 100% throughput. I haven't heard any proof they can, and they use 200mhz processors.) So even today it makes sense to recreate the TIA at the hardware level rather than software emulation because doing a 100% software emulation would be too expensive for a system at this pricepoint. These things coming out sound like they straddle inbetween hardware and software emulation, probably with some degree of porting or recoding of the sources, not really doing the final job properly. If these things had to do a more conventional architecture like the Colecovision I'm sure they'd come out more authentic.

The lag between the maturation of PC online gaming and console online gaming is truly baffling to me. The console manufactures have repeatedly misplayed the rollout of online hardware and software has been too slow to catch up. Maybe part of this has to do with the link between online play and hard drives. MMORPGs and the like really cry out for a lot of save-game storage. I don't know what the excuse is.

The problem with the 2600-on-a-chip is that it was not created in a clean-room reverse engineering environment. It was made possible only due to Curt's TIA schematics. That's the only way it would have been possible to really get to 100% authentic compatibility. This limits commercial potential for this device unless it were licensed back to Infogrames. Even then, I don't know whether Infogrames would even have to pay for something that is technically a patent violation. They could probably confiscate the work for free and resell it. None of this may matter if it's possible to make a unit in small enough quantities to be below the radar, or to go grey and do it overseas like the TV Boy, but whatever is done, I think it's clear that the missing link is the LCD screen. We've already had our share of portable 2600s in one shape or another, but none of the attempts have included a screen. I'm not including the VCSps, just units that are all 100% new parts... Nevertheless, the only way to keep costs down with something like that is to mass produce so it would be hard to do something like this at a hobby level.

This was Bob Smith's (Imagic) last 2600 game and no doubt he used all his prior experience, although his games aren't generally known for their use of flicker.

I have to admit that when Manuel first announced he wanted to do this game I had my doubts that he'd be able to pull it off... This is the type of game that you hear a lot of first-time homebrewers say they are going to do, stuff that is usually on the edge of feasibility for the console in question. It's usually a case of reaching beyond your grasp. This was before he even wrote Gunfight, but the process of writing that game was a real learning experience for him. It was clear after watching the progress of Gunfight that Manuel had developed the chops to take on this challenge. It looks like it's headed to becoming another technical tour de fource ala Thomas' Thrust! I'm really thrilled that 2600 homebrew development is still going strong after half a decade of Stellalist. There were some slow periods along the way where I thought maybe interest had waned, but today's crop of homebrewers are really doing some wonderful things. [/i]

Yeah, but I was going after the DVD burner cost :-), and how much could a blank betamax tape really cost... I mean common :-) Less than $2 I would imagine. :-) As for a professional DVD, remember you have to write the software for the flashy menus too :-) There are other factors too, like the time it would take to burn each DVD to order, and if each volume requires two DVD-Rs, that's going to take a long time to burn per order. It's not like CDRs that you can burn in less than 3 minutes these days. It depends on how many people would want something like this... If enough people preordered I'd have to get it made professionally. There is this grey area inbetween one-off and a production run where the one-offs will take too much time and the production run would cost too high (no economy of scale). There are other possibilities, though. A growing number of people are able to access SVCD and DivX CDs. So that might be one way to go. With DivX I could just offer it for download and not bother trying to sell it.

A stock supercharger can play a great many 2 and 4K ROM images without modification. There must be a list somewhere of games that require the modification, but it still leaves a lot of playable games, as well as homebrews you write yourself of course.

I think one of the big problems with using DVD-Rs is that DVD-Rs are all single-sided single-layer and can therefore only store about an hour of video. Each volume of Stella at 20 is about 90 minutes. If I were to make a DVD I'd probably go to a mastering house with a disk image on a hard drive and make a real DVD out of it, which can't be that expensive anymore. I haven't really looked into it seriously yet. As for the extra footage, I don't think DVDs store that much more (timewise) of video than VHS is capable of storing, at least not without going double-sided. There is probably about an hour or so of material I didn't include that might be worth putting in. A lot of stuff was too far removed from the main topic of the 2600 to put in, or had technical problems that I couldn't easily mask (swinging camera moves, bad lighting, bad audio, etc...) But I'd be more interested in fleshing out the data portion.

>> The only problem with a backlit GBA is that the cost would have been sufficiently more if Nintendo would have developed the backlight. The Afterburner is cool.... but I have heard some pretty bad reports on them from other people. Nintendo also stated with the higher cost, it would have cut out some of their market...... and the battery life would have been shot....... IT would have been comparable to the Turbo Express and Lynx... which do not bode favorable battery lives. << You obviously listen too much to Nintendo's excuses. Given the monopoly in the portable gaming space, why can't Nintendo offer a deluxe model w/backlight at a higher pricepoint? It's not like Nintendo could only sell one unit in the market at a time. (Look at how they were selling regular GBs and GBColors at the same time.) They'd still have MORE than enough economy of scale to keep costs reasonable Nintendo is notorious for making bad strategic hardware decisions (i.e. N64 cart vs. CD). This is just another example.