mos6507

BTW, this is changing the topic a little, but I've been recently thinking about remastering Stella at 20 on DVD, given the increasingly lower costs of DVD mastering. I'm still on the fence because the VHS volumes didn't exactly fly off the shelves, so it might not be the best business decision, but I think it's definitely worth doing as having the DVD would allow for a lot more special features, not to mention a lot better audio/visual quality. If there is interest, please email me and I'll measure the response.

Doug did not work on anything for Atari other than Solaris pre-crash that I'm aware of, based on his interview. Radar Lock was commissioned by the Tramiels after Solaris was released. It was an attempt to make an Afterburner-type of game, a rather ambitious thing to do on the 2600.

Are the kids games the only Atari Inc titles that can get "Actiplaque"? Atari games were never known for that label problem.

Which makes you wonder about the inclusion of Demon Attack and Atlantis in stuff like Activision Classics.

Does the source of these ROM images have to remain nameless?

>> I don't think anything could've saved Atari at that point. The critical mistake by that time was when Kassar blew his lid when he saw the Coleco version of Donkey Kong. If only Kassar signed the Nintendo deal, Atari would've had an iron strong grip on the NES. But then again, if Kassar signed the deal, would Tramiel have taken control of Atari? And if so, considering his horrendous business practices, would the NES and Atari survived even then? << The NES hardware was no magic bullet. The NES only _seemed_ more advanced in retrospect because in the mid to late 80s it took full advantage of falling memory prices. Mario like games were going to arrive because of the new vistas opened up by larger capacity games and american game designers were fully capable of writing those kinds of games (just look at Pitfall II). Inside the NES there is little more advanced than a Colecovision. It's possible that any NES deal with Atari would have been detrimental to Nintendo when Atari went down the tubes. Exclusivity clauses might have made it wind up where the NES never made it onto our stores anyway. The end result might have been having the Sega Master System clean up instead of the NES, assuming Sega had enough faith to keep plugging along. Given the timing of the NES deal, I don't think the NES on store shelves circa 1984 would have been enough to dig Atari out of its fiscal mess even if it had become a big hit. Remember that Atari at the time was 3 divisions, consumer, home computer, and coinop. They had problems to address in all 3 realms.

Certainly from a software standpoint, losing the guys who would go on to form Activision and Imagic were the turningpoint. I think the turningpoint for Atari from a hardware standpoint was when Jay Miner and his team left the company after finishing the Atari 400/800. Atari Inc. should have at least placated the engineers by promising them a keyboardless 400 would be released as a game machine when economies allowed it (which would have been a couple years at least from when the 8-bit was initially released). (Atari Inc. had a point in doing what they did by positioning the 8-bit as a full home computer. It would have been at too high a pricepoint as just a game machine in 1979. They probably should have anticipated that from the get go so they wouldn't have had to scramble, but hindsight is 20/20.) Keeping that engineering team intact was critical in preserving the pipeline of new home machines going. The Amiga would then have been ready to go by 1983 instead of the 7800. Even the original Amiga Lorraine design (320x200 max graphics mode) would have been far more capable than the 7800 in the marketplace. It would have been about 5 years ahead of anything else out there, basically a Genesis-class machine. The problem with Jay's designs is that after the 2600 they were always too expensive to produce as game machines for the first couple years after the hardware was finalized. The Amiga had the same problem as the 400/800 in being shifted from a console over to a home computer platform, and when it eventually debuted it was at a high pricepoint even there. The only way for these machines to get onto the market soon enough was to have a tiered platform with an expandable console on the low end and a big box pc on the high end, which is pretty much what became of the Amiga, although all Amigas save the CDTV and CD32 shipped with keyboars of some sort. With the engineers gone, Atari was left trying to stretch their existing platforms beyond their useful lifespans. This was okay at first with the 2600 due to the explosion of the 3rd party market, but ultimately left Atari vulnerable from next-gen competition. The 10-bit system that was designed to replace the 2600 but which never even launched was the first R&D blunder on Atari's part that showed that they simply did not have the braintrust to come up with a successor. The 5200 was the quickie copout that followed, and the 7800 was too little too late when the 5200 failed. That Atari Inc. couldn't even bring a stripped down 8-bit to market as a console properly without botching the execution shows the depths to which Atari management had sabotaged the company. These things simply wouldn't have happened had management empowered the engineers to make more creative desicisions. Even the engineers who were still at Atari knew that the 5200's controls would kill the unit.

Specs are one thing, but you still have to look at the display. The GBA display looks like colored tinfoil. There is no contrast whatsoever. Front lighting just doesn't work well with a TFT display and Nintendo should have known better... I know I'm not going to get one until (or if) they offer a backlight version Then it will be up to the USER to determine whether to drain out his batteries or not. It shouldn't have been omitted from the design even if it would have made the unit more expensive. I don't know of any other color systems that lack backlighting. Only a company like Nintendo could get away with a design flaw like that.

I was reading through the Lynx documentation and it's chock full of stuff like this: "Well, we did screw something up after all." Is the Lynx really that buggy and incomplete (like the Jag) or are they being overly critical of their work?

I guess some people have plenty of free time. To me, the time it would take to make my own backups is worth a lot more than $5...

There is one VERY important fact that has not been revealed about these cart reissues.... Lance told me over the phone that he owns a great number of official pre-production EPROMs of these games which he acquired LEGALLY from Atari. So the idea was that these carts could be sold legally since they are NOT pirates. It's simply packaging up the old chips which he owns and has every right to resell--for profit. When the chips run out, the game is no longer going to be sold. This would be different from efforts by Lee and the CGE crew which are all technically pirates. Now, I have my doubts as to whether an unaltered superchip cart could run on a 7800 board. Assuming the game has to be altered, then new EPROMs are going to have to be burned, so I don't know what the actual truth is here, or how that would change the legalities. And of course, it might not mean anything to the consumer who just wants to play the games... Now, if you are doing hobby type projects you probably don't have to worry about copyright issues, but Video61 is a long-standing business and I don't think they would want to take any risks.

2D vs. 3D gaming is like the difference between an old black and white Popeye cartoon and a modern roller coaster ride blockbuster. Today, the former is considered an acquired taste at best. It's almost more than two different genres, it's almost two different media now.

"And I would agree that this was not made to please hard-core gamers." It's like the people in control behind this have absolutely no idea what's important in a product like this. They are almost going out of their way to make the worst possible decisions on how this thing is going to work. Nostalgia like this is meaningless if the experience is hollow and false. 2600 games are primitive as is, but one thing they were well known for is silky smooth gameplay (albeit flickery at times). We don't need stuff with off-colors, jerky framerates, butchered game mechanics, and bad control schemes representing what the 2600 was. It just reinforces the mindset in a lot of pop culture that the 2600 is a synonym for crappy games. We really need that 2600-on-a-chip project to amount to something that gets noticed and hopefully used in a mainstream product. Then at least we'll have something 100% compatible at the hardware level that can be used in a portable (hopefully with its own LCD screen).

Sounds to me like they ported the games rather than emulate them.

BTW, there are devices out there to convert PC mice/trackballs to be used on the Amiga (although they aren't cheap). I have one of those so I can use a logitech marble mouse (trackball) with the Amiga. If you used this with the amiga mouse version of MC then it would be pretty slick because you could use any PC mouse/trackball. The Logitech marble mouse is an optical unit. No mechanical parts other than ball-point rollers, so it's a lot smoother than a classic trackball.

I don't think anyone has perfected a Y/C mod yet, but overall I still like Chris Wilkson's approach best because it directly taps the TIA. I can't speak for other mods, but for one that I had done before there was an interference pattern introduced into the composite signal caused by stray signals in the motherboard. The only way to get a pristine image is to directly tap the TIA pins AND to trim off the pin(s) related to RF video. I believe that in Chris' approach the pin tapping and isolation is acheived by plugging the TIA into a socket on a daughtercard that then plugs into the motherboard.

It's been established that the 2600 is too slow to sample the trackball enough to be practical. Even with a 1D trackball (the driving controller), when the 2600 only samples the driving controller once every frame, it can get confused if you twist it too fast. This is even worse for a trackball which has a higher resolution (i.e. faster changes in the bits) than the driving controller. The reason you can get away with this on the Atari 8-bit is that there is more processor availability so you can feasibly sample the trackball using display list interrupt routines multiple times per screen. In arcade games and more modern hardware there is probably some kind of coprocessor that would be constantly polling the trackball and aggregating direction change data until the main cpu updates positions. The 8-bit has something like that in POKEY, but it constantly polls the keyboard and the POT lines.

I think it's possible but to support a 1-player mode you'd probably be hard pressed to do it in only 128 bytes of RAM. Also, with the video chess kernel, the characters aren't going to be very easy to make out on the board screen, but on the battle screen they'd not have to be striped. It would probably be a good candidate for a Supercharger game, I think.

The lines are blurring between PDAs and portable game systems just as they are between consoles and PCs. What I like about the GP32 spec is the larger screen that is more in tune with the native resolutions of classic systems. But it only has 8MB of RAM which makes it underpowered if you intend to do any kind of PDA-style programming on it. I don't know what they are trying to sell these for to see what the pricepoint is vs. a PDA. Personally, I'd rather have a PDA, although the battery life is probably worse than a GP32.

There was no single development system over the lifespan of the platform. Remember, the 2600 was on the market for a very long time. Atari went from using a timeshare system and sneakernetting cassettes around to using Atari STs with EPROM emulator boards under the Tramiel era. Atari 800s were used as development machines by 20th Century Fox and they were used as graphical workstations by Imagic. One thing is for sure, though, even when home computers were being used, it was a fairly long cycle to make code changes, so a lot of work had to be done in your head. Otherwise it could get very very time-consuming to make many incremental changes.

BTW, John Harris (Jawbreaker) was going to do Flesh Gordon on contract but the deal fell through.

"I'm actually quite familiar with the process. I just don't see why they went to the huge expense of making these beautiful glossy boxes and beautiful glossy cart labels and then stopped short by making B&W manuals. " Because the manual is INSIDE the box and people will buy based on the box. So the box has to look nice, and the cart if you demo the cart plugged into the VCS, but the manual can be a pleasant surprise, so to speak.

>> Sure, but can you circumvent it << Due to the nature of the internet and digital distribution, it only takes one capable person to crack a game once to enable the rest of the world to hack it. The best form of copy protection for the 2600 I can think of is proprietary hardware that serves a useful purpose beyond a mere dongle. It's not that hard to remove code that does dongle-checking (or checksum calculations) but if the game relies on the hardware almost line by line for the kernel, you can't take that out without completely killing the game. Of course, that's copy protection, not so much hack protection. Once you know how the hardware works you can certainly change the graphics and stuff. You just can't clone the physical game without finding a way to clone the hardware. The Cuttle Cart clones all known ROM banking schemes (including cart RAM solutions which are pretty tricky beasts!) but it doesn't clone the DPC chip.

For the record, here is a screenshot of Escape from Supercade: Add me to the list of those who were promised a cart. I gave her a copy of Stella at 20 in exchange for a cart. Actually, here is a picture of me talking to her. The last I heard from her she told me there was going to be this launch party for her book and I was invited and the cart was going to be officially released there. Never heard back. I sent off an email or two much later on and didn't receive a response. It's really strange that a few months after her book came out she would pretty much disappear. If she were pregnant, that would explain it. But she still had obligations to take care of. At the very least, we deserved a simple explanation. Becoming suddenly inaccessible to classic gamers while getting all groupie-like with the modern game industry movers and shakers (the way she used to get all groupie-like at the CGEs) makes me wonder whether she's really just into this stuff for the attention. I don't think that's the case, but without any clarification from her, we're left to speculate. In my case, no money lost, but others I guess aren't so lucky.

How fast is it really? Can it play Solaris at a full 60fps on today's Pocket PCs?