mos6507

It's not the best. It only does composite video and mono audio. Chris Wilkson's mod does switchable composite or Y/C and dual mono (i.e. stereo) audio. Chris' mod also taps the TIA chip directly rather than relying on any points on the motherboard, and cleans up the signal on the daughtercard itself. When you tap the VCS motherboard you pick up a lot of stray interference.

I haven't shipped the material to Randy yet so he can't process any orders. I'll get it off to him as soon as I can, though probably not everything I have all at once.

>> Heh forgot about Video Olympics, but then we should also probably mention a lot of the early 2600 games like Outlaw, Canyon Bomber, Indy 500, Surround, Space War (well.. maybe not Space War), Breakout, Basketball, etc. in the same breath as games that had nearly IDENTICAL graphics and gameplay to the arcade games that inspired them, and thus just as good if not better than the arcade. << You'd be surprised to know that even the early Atari coinop games tended to feature higher resolution (probably 320x200 vs. 160x200) sprites than the 2600. Canyon Bomber, for instance, has the point values of the bricks in the graphics, and the bricks are rounded.

quote: Originally posted by Cafeman: Glenn the 5200 man ... is that Glenn Saunders? Tell us more about him & his exploits. Not me. At the time I was barely starting with AtariBasic.

Pyramid Studios, eh? Do we really want to commercialize hacks and pass them off as if they are new games?

Homebrewing isn't a novelty on the Atari 8-bit if you consider disk-based software. There are thousands of user-written games for the 8-bit as files rather than cartridges.

It's close but not perfect. The framerate/animation seems a bit more jerky than the 2600, and when you jump you can move when in mid air (like Mario). The barrel sprites also are 2-color rather than 1-color with transparent holes in them. But a valiant effort, of course.

I think it's really silly to think that the success of the NES was exclusively due to some sort of huge hardware advantage over Atari. The NES was also a 6502-based machine, and with mostly off-the shelf components that were not particularly groundbreaking. The 7800 was indeed a contender with the NES, especially had Atari standardized on sticking a POKEY in it or create some pass-through-cart. It's that with the changing of the guard from Warner Atari to Tramiel Atari, there was a final loss of vision in the game development department. Maybe Warner Atari was too busy re-porting its coinop titles to the 7800, but at least they were doing something. The Tramiels de-emphasized their gaming division entirely and only re-entered it after Nintendo claimed the marketplace for itself. The NES deal would have been beneficial to Tramiel Atari insofar as allowing Nintendo to revitalize the market through Atari instead of competing against Atari. But if Warner Atari looked at the NES purely on the merits of its hardware rather than the Nintendo game designers, I would definitely understand why they wouldn't see it as a worthwhile venture in lieu of the 7800. The worst that can be said for the 7800s video is its lack of video RAM. It only has 4K of video RAM. I believe this limits how well you can utilize its 320x200 graphics mode), and when you were in 320x200 you couldn't get many colors on a line. Most games only use the 160x200 mode, which looks chunky compared to the NES' default 256x200 mode or even the C=64s 16-color 320x200 mode. That's why the system shines so well doing Williams-style games like Robotron with few colors, solid backgrounds, and a lot of fast movement. But doing colorful platformers isn't as easy.

Defender did quite a lot given the 2600's hardware, but with more space available and more collective experience about the hardware, Stargate trashes it. Defender was a much more challenging game to port than Pac Man, so its failings are a bit easier to overlook. All of the compromises made in Defender made sense other than the way hyperspace and smart bombs were triggered. Had they gone with a 2-joystick approach like Stargate then it would have meant it could only be a 1 player game as Stargate is. The flicker used in Defender is "intelligent flicker" rather than the constant flicker in Pac Man. The blocky city was done with playfield in order to maximize the use of the available sprites. The graphics, color, and sound were more faithful to the arcade than Pac Man was, at least you could tell there was an effort there.

quote: Originally posted by Ze_ro: So... uh... a few questions: R castle, there's also a B and H castle --Zero These stand for towns I'm sure, namely Hobitton, Bree, and Rivendell, respectively. There must be a way to check the map/health screen after the game starts via a toggle (color/BW??)?? When you say it doesn't look like any objects effect you, I would bet it changes your wound count.

Check out the background at the top and the tree screen (with the shading on the left half of the leaves). That's some of the most detailed 2600 graphics I've ever seen. The Parker Brothers guys were definitely underrated...

quote: Originally posted by StanJr: [QB]I wanna know who has been sitting on this gem this long.... [QB] Ditto

quote: Originally posted by Ze_ro: Keep in mind that the idea of "contemporary hardware" back then in '92 wasn't what it is now. Hell, I can hardly run a 2600 emulator on my mom's P90, and that's a lot more than they had back then. Of course, 30 years from now, we'll look back and wonder why we even bothered emulating the Xbox.... It's strange that the Atari is actually a very difficult system to emulate. --Zero That guy posted from SGI too. So you know he had access to fast hardware.

>> Tape image support would be novel, but pratically useless. << Tape images would allow emulators to play the educational tables that had the analog audio track embedded. There were also some tape programs that didn't have a disk equivalent. I don't know if these have been converted to BINs somehow or not.

Great to hear that you will have sold out your 2nd run. Specialized hardware like this is always a risky thing to produce.

>> Has Tod actually confirmed that he was working on a Ballblazer for the 2600? << Yes, in Stella at 20: Volume 2. I think he was doing it just as a proof of concept. Maybe not an official project, although had he finished it, it might have become official. That's how it seemed from the context of his discussion about it. As for Save Mary, the powerups are key to playing the game effectively. Without it, the game may seem way too hard. It's really a pretty good game when you know what everything does and you apply that knowledge to your technique. It's by far Tod's best 2600 effort and it's a shame it wasn't released. Had it been finished earlier, it might have gotten released. Tod worked on the game for Axlon seemingly forever, like 2 years or something. Part of the problem was a good amount of micromanagement that forced him to change the kernel at least once (i.e. "can you make the sides of the canyon smoother?") but I suspect the other part was that Tod must have been only working on it part-time. I'm pretty sure all the Axlon games were contracted like that.

These are pre-crash boxes in the sense that they are Atari Inc. boxes. I remember seeing these in 1984 or so, before the Tramiels took over. I think as Atari Inc. was losing money bigtime, this was one of their cost-cutting measures, probably one of the only ones they implemented before they were gone.

If you want to talk about floppy drives, the Atari had a similar problem. The 800 system wasn't originally designed to talk to floppy drives through the serial port but they wound up doing that for cost reasons, I guess. By the time the XLs were coming out, Atari had designed a parallel disk system for the 1400, 1450XL(d) machines. These would have been really fast. Never came out. But Atari could have also started offering disk drives that hooked up to the PBI port. They never did that. Wonder how fast it might have been?? The datarate speed of floppy drives hooked up to the CSS Black Box Floppy Board is almost as fast as hard drive datarates! Of course the main bottleneck is CPU speed. Even ramdisks on the 8-bit are slower than hard drive datarates on modern PCs, but as far as the theoretical maximum datarates on the platform, PBI hard drives are a joy to use.

If someone can make a business out of the 2600, then I think that's a good thing because it's created a mini rebirth of the platform within a sustainable niche. This is probably one of the early signs of a cascading effect of all the homebrew activity going on, for someone to come forward to offer these kinds of services. Where there is a demand, there will be someone stepping forward to meet that demand. That's something any Atari fan should appreciate. Not everyone is going to do stuff purely for non-profit hobby reasons as Hozer does. There is a limit to how quickly Randy can work, and how many carts he can push out. If we have a flood of homebrews, each of which selling into the hundreds, Randy simply can not meet demand in a Just In Time model. Not everyone has the time or resources to do the manufacturing and packaging themselves, so it makes sense for a service like this to come around.

<< So if I was able to create games with full-color on all the labels and manual (everything cut to Atari size) and the game was in a new box cut to Atari size and style shrink wrapped for $25 - $35 would that be something you would buy? The $25 - $35 price is a rough estimate with a added possiable author profit "royalty". >> I'd like to see fancier packaging. It remains to be seen how affordable this can be, though. I also think every homebrewer has their own idea as to what style of packaging they'd like. In my case, I'd like to have a recreation of the 1st gen Atari foil labels, so if you come up with a fancy solution, you are likely only going to offer one variety of labels and box. It would be hard to offer something custom for each homebrewer.

The female naming convention on chips and systems was a trait of the Engineering manager, Jay Miner. He continued this practice into the Amiga (originally the Lorraine), which has chips like Denise, Paula, and Agnus. Even after he left, there were Amiga chips with female names like Alice and Akiko. [ 12-04-2001: Message edited by: Glenn Saunders ]

While the RF modulator differs in PAL vs. NTSC, there is only one TIA chip. Maybe it's clocked slightly slower on PAL, but the way the TIA itself generates colors is no different for NTSC, PAL, or SECAM. That's why the unfortunate result is that fewer colors are visible on PAL, and only 8 garish ones in SECAM. If there had been a true PAL TIA, then you wouldn't lose colors like that.

I had a 155MB drive hooked up to my 8-bit through a Black Box and it was wonderful. There was no way I would ever fill up that much space. The problem with 8-bit DOSs is that they only support up to 16MB partitions. The only DOSs that will work effectively with hard drives are those that support subdirectories. That pretty much means only MYDOS and SPARTADOS. Of those, MYDOS doesn't support true random access, it's a seek and find file system. SPARTA has a true file bitmap and therefore file operations tend to be faster with SPARTADOS than MYDOS. The BB has a virtual floppy system which is pretty cool also. You can copy your floppies to the HD and then boot off them as if they were floppies. Great with games and other protected programs that will only run off of a floppy.

Why not see if Activision still has their molds?? Maybe a deal can be cut with them, or Infogrames? I would find it very surprising if it were not possible to track down the molds to at least one Atari 2600 publisher. It will take some detective work, but there has to be at least one mold left that we could use.

Atari was still small in 1977, but they were subsidized by their parent company, Warner Communications. While the early text labels were bland, they were also rather exotic insofar as they were not merely paper labels. they were made from a foil backing with multiple layers to black-mask and colorize it. The best part is that they are extremely durable. You won't see an Atari text label cart suffer from actiplaque, frayed edges, water damage or other stains. An old text label cart, unless it's been written-on with a sharpie, is going to stay in close to mint condition pretty much forever. The adhesive can wear off depending on how it's stored, but that's about it.