mos6507

I've got a MASH cart I got at one of the CG Expos with the T-shirt still shrinkwrapped. The T-Shirt is wrapped around a square piece of cardboard, apparently, and the cart box is up against it.

I believe this is the type of unit that Doug Neubauer and the other programmers used at 20th Century Fox.

>> if it could offer richer experiences, no one every leveraged that power. << I'm not sure I'd go THAT far. I think Tower Toppler did a great deal with the 7800 hardware. Especially the submarine sequence with the parallax scrolling. Looks almost like a Genesis game there. But that's about all I've seen that's that impressive. I'm sure the 7800 could do more with more innovative programming and more memory. The 7800 really is optimized for low-color games with lots of small moving objects over a minimal background. I heard that the people who did the chipset also did the original Williams chipset, hence the excellent port of Robotron. That's not really the kind of game that people wanted to play in the mid to late 80s, but the 7800 can do a better job of it than the NES.

I don't think Randy can make superchip games like Elevator Action or Save Mary.

SID, to me, is optimized for music, and POKEY is optimized for sound effects. So it depends on what's more important to you in game sounds. I think the POKEY chip's rumbles and explosions are more convincing than the SID chip's sounds.

quote: Originally posted by Eckhard Stolberg: The 7800 can easiely display 24 colours (plus the background) in one scanline in different objects. And if you are talking about a pixel-by-pixel base without overlaying objects, you can still get 12 colours (plus the background) per scanline in the 160x4 mode. If 160x4 means 4 colors, then how do you get 12 colors on one scanline? I'd love to see a demonstration of this to see exactly how you build a colorful display. Most 7800 games that I've seen don't appear to display anywhere near that many colors per scanline.

The 7800 is effectively limited to 160x200 because that's the highest color mode (8 per scanline). Most games use this mode, which makes the games look a little too much like the Atari 8-bit. Remember, the 7800 was designed during the C=64 era. The C=64 was doing 320x200 with 16 colors (albeit garish hardcoded ones). There are some weird modes in 320x200 but I don't know how effectively they can increase the color count. There is only so much you can do with palette shifting on a scanline by scanline basis. Rainbow-stripe type games with vertical separation were pretty played out during the 2600/5200 era. The 7800 really should have supported at least 16 colors per scanline at 320x200--as the Amiga did. I don't know what the limiting factor was during the engineering phase, but the 7800 does only has 4K of RAM inside. That's less than the 5200 had! So that limits you. A lot of games don't even appear to use 8 colors per scanline even at the lower resolution.

How does the 7800 know when you have a 2-button joystick or not? Would it require that you press one of the buttons to reset the game perhaps?

>> Wow. Exidy really pushed the gore envelope, didn't they? First Death Derby and then this!<< You mean Death Race. Death Derby is the name of my port in progress. Chiller has some really cool audio also. Lots of cool reverb-laden squeals and cackles and things. I doubt the NES version has audio that matches the coinop.

quote: Originally posted by Matthew Vigor: If I ever get around to learning Assembler and making a homebrew project, it will have a label in the style of the original text labels. Let me know if you can find an affordable way to make those. They use some kind of laminated metal foil. I have yet to find a company who could even quote me on a job like that. If any homebrewer wants to use a label that will last--that's the type to use.

I still have all my original 2600 manuals from when I was a kid. I kept them in a comic book sleeve. I think the manuals are very important, and it is depressing how uncommon it is to see used carts with manuals--even more depressing that manuals are not seen as a more valuable commodity to collectors. [ 02-17-2002: Message edited by: Glenn Saunders ]

Thomas, what did you ultimately do to get the driving controller code to work in Sprintmaster?

How many people would like it if everyone and his brother took a classic movie that fell into the public domain like Metropolis or Night of the Living Dead, recut it or colorized it, and slapped their own credits on it? Is it an homage, a gag, or is it plagiarism? I think you cross the line when you take hacking so seriously that you put hacking on equal footing with new game creation. Sure, have fun with it, but at least give credit where credit is due. Otherwise years from now when the ROM image is all we have, nobody will know who made these games or what the original version is. "Hey look, it's Tron Light Cycles by Pyramid Studios"! "No, that's Surround by Al Miller from Atari." "Who is 'Otari'? The filename says TRONLC.BIN and the emulator database says it's by Pyramid Studios. They must have been some old game company from the 1970s."

That's more than Al Miller got when he programmed the original. A little unfair don't you think?

quote: Originally posted by King Atari: That's what I think. The picture label era began the more modern era, because the games became so much better graphically. So, Superman, Adventure, and Space Invaders do count. I don't think you can really include any 4K titles as "1st generation". Not only that, but some 2K titles are clearly 2nd or 3rd generation titles. The early Activision games were 2K titles, like Kaboom or Dragster, but were better looking and better playing than most 1st generation 2K titles. There really are more than two generations with the 2600.

This is a biggie, but when and if will AtariAge start dating cartridges by release date? Even just giving them a release year would be an improvement, although ultimately we should be able to set a season or month on them also. This would be really useful to be able to order the catalog by date to see the evolution over time.

Crane also helped out with River Raid, and probably more that we don't know about. Crane was probably the de facto 'lead producer' at Activision even though programmers had more autonomy in those days.

Most of these games are not 1st generation games. 1st generation games are the original launch titles. I don't have the list off the top of my head but they are CX2601 through 13 or so. This does not include stuff like Superman or Adventure or Space Invaders. With this in mind, I'd have to say Indy 500 is my fav. I didn't get it as a kid because of the extra cost of the extra controllers, but it's a pretty fun and unique game to play because of them, and definitely an inpspiration in making Death Derby.

Does Sprintmaster use Superchip RAM? If it doesn't, the hack could be coded to use it--then playable on emulators or Cuttle Cart. quote: Originally posted by Thomas Jentzsch:

CEC History If you believe this history, Nolan used the profits to seed his other startups which, combined with the overall downturn in the coinop business, led to the insolvency of the company. Only after it was bought out by his major competitor did the company stabilize. Nolan got a reputation for starting new companies and losing interest after a while and abandoning them when they still needed him. Atari was the first, although he was mostly a figurehead in the end as Chairman. The thrill for him is the startup phase, not the growing pains and ultimate corporate beaurocracy that follows. So some of his better ideas may have withered on the vine when he got distracted by the excitement of new projects. uWink is his attempt to discipline himself by keeping himself exclusively engaged with a company for the long-term. BTW, uWink (not so coincidentally) owns the re-appropriated intellectual property assets of Nolan's previous failed startup, PlayNet. PlayNet ended in a very messy manner as far as the participants getting out from under the various creditors... In parts of Stella at 20 you can see the Atari veterans tinkering with a PlayNet terminal in the background. [ 02-08-2002: Message edited by: Glenn Saunders ]

Mindlink measured skin resistance and fed it to the paddle lines. It was still measuring actual physical movement, however slight. This is closer to the mind-control of Firefox, although in that movie it seemed more like voice recognition.

Atari was his only big success in business and he lost control of it in the sale to Warner. You can bet Atari means a lot to him. He's tried to capture lightning in a bottle again ever since, from Axlon to Sente and so on. His current company is somewhat of an attempt to recreate the early days of Atari--it's a variation of a coinop company. Uwink I just wish the games were more action oriented...

Anyone see the COMBAT remake on the store shelves yet? I did. Anyone play it? Opinions?

A game that I never thought was possible on the 2600 was Star Wars: The Arcade Game, but it's a really excellent port. Barely any playfield is used in that game. That doesn't mean Tempest can be done, since the lines that have to be drawn aren't as simple as the 3d perspective lines of the trench et. al. (lines like those can be done with HMOVE on the missiles and ball) in SW:TAG, but I think that with flicker, it might have been possible to do a subset of the tempest tube backgrounds, maybe also if the sprites were interlaced so you had a dotted-line effect. But it would have probably taken a lot more ROM space. 16K at lest.

>>To develop a significantly good '2600 game should take 1-2 months. Few people have that amount of time to spare.<< I think you are the exception. For most of us it takes considerably longer than that.