mos6507

If you want copy protection you need to prevent the BIN from being released in the first place. Once you have a BIN all you need to do is find the copy protection routine and hack it out. In theory you could create a new banking scheme that emulators don't support, which would work as long as Stella isn't updated to support it. Chimera native games were going to be hard to emulate just because Stella would have had to add an ARM emulator side by side with the VCS. So just the amount of work that would require would probably prevent it from happening anytime soon.

There were plenty of other good 2600 games in 1982 to maintain the console's reputation as a competent platform. It destroyed some of the trust that Atari had won with consumers (Space Invaders onward) that official Atari titles were the mark of quality, but I'm not sure how much it actually drove people away from the platform.

That might be true of someone like Bob Whitehead who appears to have a lot of bitter feelings about the industry in general and never wanted to be involved with any of the revivalism. It's more to do with the fact that when an engineer creates something they know it is ultimately limited by the context in which it was built. With technology always a moving target, the second you ship something, there is something else you could have added. So your focus shifts to the next big conquest. I definitely got that vibe from the Amiga convention talk that Jay Miner gave. The 2600 was just a compartmentalized piece of history to him and his attention was focused on the present and future tense. Joe Decuir, on the other hand, has enjoyed all of the renewed attention in the VCS. Someone like David Crane, however, seemed to be more sentimental about the 2600. There is no way you would put the amount of effort he did into the DPC for Pitfall II had he not wanted to keep the 2600 alive. Doug Neubauer was also certainly sentimental about the 2600 to develop Solaris on his own. I don't think he was living off of the proceeds from the three post-crash games he did. It was a paid hobby, basically. For those who have stayed in the industry, a certain amount of detachment with any particular era sets in so you can move ever onward. I got that vibe from Dennis Koble in particular. Even though he appeared in my documentary, when I was having trouble finishing it and soliciting for donations Dennis wrote me something kind of nasty. I don't remember the particulars but it was something along the lines of nobody should give a crap about the 2600 anymore and I should move on as everyone else has. David Crane took up my banner and spoke with some of the others until Joe Decuir ponied up the money to finish the documentary. So I take the tapes to the CG Expo and guess who is walking the floor but Dennis Koble! Talk about an awkward moment. Mea culpas were on order from him, since he didn't realize at the time that retrogaming was on the verge of mainstreaming, but the damage was done. I'll never get over that one. It's kind of the equivalent to Nimoy writing I Am Not Spock and then I Am Spock.

ET is okay. As a kid I saw it as the lesser cousin of Raiders which is one of my favorites. So back in the day ET used to get a fair amount of play time. But to an adolescent boy, ET just doesn't make the best protagonist. He's just too wimpy. I think Pac-Man is a bigger sin than ET. If Atari had just made fewer ET carts and not hyped it so much it would not have been the posterchild for Atari's downfall. Atari had other movie-based games that came and went without causing so much controversy, like Krull. I think the tendency of the industry to look to movies, TV, and other properties for inspiration for games is kind of sad. It's understandable, and perhaps unavoidable, but I much prefer original game ideas.

I did eat at the Bistro in Hollywood once for the sake of posterity. The games definitely don't appeal to classic gamers. No touchscreen game can, even if they had capacitive multitouch. You really need a joystick or a trackball for some genres. Really, technology has moved on. The novelty is not there anymore. Computing is already ubiquitous. If you want to play games in a restaurant you can whip out a Nintendo DS, iphone, or netbook and there is now free wifi at many restaurants. The only thing that would be cool would be a sort of experience where the whole table is an interactive display. Like one giant multitouch iPhone. Obviously that would cause some problems with actually eating on it, but still. Having the kiosk over to the side is just not the right placement.

Lightning rarely strikes twice.

Cool. Would very much like to see that on Youtube.

For one, it requires no soldering and so should be easily installed by the layman. It also has an Atarivox mixer circuit so you can just send the stereo outs to your amp without having to have a dedocated speaker for the Atarivox. And then there is the VGA version which is a first.

How did you do the music stuff? Delicon was going to try to use the PWMs. I don't know if the ARM you're using has those. I think it was discussed here, I dunno, about 5 years ago. There were a few concurrent attempts to do FPGA 2600s leading up to Flashback, some commercial, some open-source. That was one of them. I didn't see it in action, so it's hearsay. You do realize what you have to do next, don't you? Record Harmony running Pitfall II+ on real hardware!

Atari floundered because they lost their in-house R&D team so they had no direction anymore. If they had direction they wouldn't have to have contemplated warming over the old hardware to milk it a little more. They would have just leapfrogged over the competition. There was talent in the company, still, but not being applied in the right place. Just look at what the coinop division continued to do in the early 80s, culminating with stuff like the polygons in I Robot. Really, it's all about braintrust.

There is more to a game machine than the processor. The entire gfx architecture of the Intellivision is not that all it's cracked up to be. It had a smaller color palette, and based on my recollections, difficulty moving sprites around very fast. The games for the INTV played to its strengths and I admit some envy back in the day for things like AD&D or B-17 bomber, but the 2600 still had the lead in twitch-style action gaming.

So cool seeing Pitfall II run on the 2600 without the physical cart. That's something I never thought I'd see. Must have been a lot of work. I think the only other time that's been done was in an FPGA implementation of the 2600 (a flashback sort of thing) that kind of came and went without turning into anything. Is the DPC support generalizable or is it all hardwired for Pitfall II?

That's exactly what the A8 was, though. The designers took everything they learned from the 2600 and improved it with the A8. The only features that were dropped with the A8 was the sprite copies and mirroring. Otherwise it could do just about anything the 2600 could do as you can see with the near 1:1 ports of Activision 2600 titles to the A8/5200. In theory they could have made something like a 7800 architecture with the A8, so that it could play both 2600 games and A8 games. I think by and large hardware designers are not fans of backwards compatibility. It's out with the old, in with the new, and certainly the thinking at atari circa 1978 when the A8 was in R&D was that the 2600 wasn't going to build up such a huge following and catalog that such backwards compatibility would be desirable. That's something that only became evident after the 3rd party boom, which is what led to the 7800 project that Atari conspicuously said was guided by consumer feedback from the 5200 flopping. The problem in those early years was cost. In the early 80s it was Commodore that really innovated on the cost reduction front. The A8 and the Amiga after that were much more bleeding edge architectures compared to the 2600 and therefore the ability to package them at a console pricepoint was next to impossible.

That being said, the 2600 would have been as much of a footnote as the Channel F if not for Space Invaders and Activision blowing the doors open. Those first few years of the 2600 were nothing to write home about. It was only after 1980 that things really took off. I don't think any consoles ever languished that long before catching a 2nd wind. If you were to constrain the 2600 catalog to games prior to 1980 it would not have close to the reputation it does today. I mean, I do have a soft spot for some of the early titles but it's the stuff after 1980 that is really timeless.

I, like a lot of technologically naive people, used to think that there was magnetic tape underneath the dustcover. The way carts mated to the VCS meant you never really saw what was inside them. Kind of the light going off in the fridge syndrome... Many people called games "tapes" instead of carts, confusing them with 8-tracks or maybe mainframe reel to reels or early home computer cassette drives. Of course by the time Activision and others came around with no dustcovers on the edge connector it was obvious.

I felt that way more with the Swordquest games. I thought the Swordquest games would be kind of like Raiders and have some actual play value other than the puzzles you had to figure out with the comic and the lame minigames. (I mean, jeez, dodge rotating lines. How exciting.) The swordquest games were really a terrible waste of a good adventure/RPG style game engine. I'd love to see someone tear Earthworld or Fireworld apart and make a real game out of them.

I was almost fooled into thinking the Sears versions of Atari games were actually originals, something complicated further by the fact that they did have originals like Stellar Track, Steeplechase, and Submarine Commander.

"You press the keypad and the door hisses open, bringing you face to face with a pink, slavering demon! It's rotten breath courses over you as it snarls angrily in your face. Roll 1d20 for initiative." Didn't the babylonians have to deal with demons in real life anyway? You know, Nephilim and Cthulu and all those guys.

Yeah. That's a fringe benefit if it can be done. Of course, it's not a tragedy to have to swap controllers because that's what you have to do when you swap physical carts. It's just that you always need a convenient way to navigate through the menu system otherwise people are going to have to plug in a joystick all the time just to pick games. It might be cool for single players to just always keep a joystick connected to the other port for that purpose I suppose. It just seems like the best lowest common denominator is to really get a clean debounce routine going on the console switches and work out the combos and the "key repeat" delays etc... Maybe make it so that if you hold down both switches for over a second that constitutes "enter" kind of like when you hold your finger on the iPhone it brings up the context menu.

At least that provides some closure.

If you want to talk historically, it was a big leap at the time. I don't think anyone really knew you could manage to get RAM in a cart without the read/write lines back in '77. And based on what Larry Wagner said, I think the general thinking at the time was that banking hardware was going to be too tricky to implement until he came up with a way to do it with a "couple of ICs" as he said. So what seems obvious to us now required some technical breakthroughs.

They could have done that in 1980 or 81. That would have been a wise move, probably, however it would have alienated the original installed base of 2600 users. Remember that videogames were really just out of the starting gate by then. Even the 2600 was a big purchase decision. People were not really ready for the hardware upgrade treadmill which is so routine today. If they were going to offer a next gen system it was going to have to be truly next gen and we all know how that played out. The funny thing when interviewing the Atari guys is how many of them (thought not all) don't really have the same sentimental attitude towards the 2600 that we do. We look at the 2600 as an icon of success but to them it was also an icon of mismanagement. That's because they saw all the great stuff that was on the horizon that didn't come out. The 2600 wasn't supposed to be Atari's best foot forward in 1982 or 1983. It just wound up that way by default since Warners had no good strategy for how to follow it up. Companies like Activision and Imagic made lemons into lemonade which everyone else just surfed on.

Right, but ROM size can only do so much. If the GFX chip has fixed limits, it has fixed limits. For instance, you were never going to see something like a Solaris for the O^2.

Yup, like the Krokodile Cart does too. Hmm, how does it do this? Technically, the KrokCart doesn't autodetect the controller type; it looks up the info in a stella.pro file. I don't really consider this 'autodetection', since you still have to keep that properties file up-to-date. If you've found a way to autodetect controller type without a lookup table (ie, by inspecting the ROM code itself), I'd be very interested in adding it to Stella. I was really referring to the menu engine on powerup. It has to allow navigation through the menu regardless of which controller is hooked up. For Chimera we were intending to allow menu navigation solely through the select and reset switches in case you didn't have joysticks plugged in. We were going to trap the switches on up rather than on down so we could have combinations. Like hold down reset and then toggle select could be page back, or hold down select and toggle reset could be page forward. Once you select a game if it knows you don't have the right controller presumably it could have an interstitial warning message to prompt the user to put in whatever controller it needs.

I'm probably off on this but you aren't thinking about Rastan are you? For my quarter, the animations and artwork blow those other two games away. It was really slick for the late 80s.