mos6507

The whole idea of doing this is multicasting. Unless you have a lot of 2600 users in a given radius, and a major radio network doing the broadcast, it hardly makes sense. Now, in the late 90s there were many projects to use leftover bandwidth for digital data transmission. Larry Wagner had a company pushing emails and other IP type traffic via the VBI on TV signals. I worked for a startup that was using the WebTV for Windows specification (for things like the ATI all in wonder cards, not necessarily the standalone WebTV boxes, Windows terminology can be confusing). With analog it's a pain to do this. Now with digital TV this kind of thing I think is built into the spec. Program guide material and probably CC goes through at least.

ist that the same bill that won the first atari national space invaders competition in 1980? Yes, and the same one that had a sex change operation recently.

And Charlie Brown.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to start a thread like this, but when the 2600 went from the 6-switch model to the 4-switch model back in the day, my first reaction was that it was a chintzy move on the part of Atari. The difficulty switches moved to the back of the unit didn't really seem very intuitive, or aesthetic. It smacked of cost reduction. Over time I got rather used to it, but to this day I much prefer the six switch model. I was wondering how many others had the same reaction back in the day, let alone the reaction to the loss of woodgrain in the Vader model?

Bill Heineman also claims to have worked on a similar device that got data streamed in through cable TV. I have yet to see a proto of that.

Here is the interlace demo I worked on. Don't know how "to spec" it is. bin00016.bin

And why Chris and I are doing another one. Ask around if you want any anecdotes about ordering from me (Cyberpunks) back in the day. I don't think you'll find any complaints.

Thank you. Yes, there is a buffer. I'm not sure what the proper technical term would be. I would say "double buffering". On a line-by-line basis, not a whole field or frame. Each line coming out of the Atari is drawn twice on the VGA display. So at any given time, the display could be at most 1 scanline behind the Atari. The horizontal sync frequency is twice whatever the Atari is doing. So it should be a fixed 31.4 kHz. For every game. I also chose to not make a predetermined vertical resolution. It vsyncs with the Atari, so it's whatever the Atari draws times two. Usually that's 524 lines for NTSC games (59.9 Hz). With ~384 active lines. But leaving it open ended allows it to work with any number of lines as long as your monitor can sync vertically. So it will work with a PAL cartridge in an NTSC console. (tested with the PAL version of Space Treat - VSYNC = 50.3 Hz) What happens with a program that attempts true interlace?

You guys see this yet? Pretty cool, huh?

There are so many critical inflection points in the history of Atari that predicting what would have happened had things gone another way is kind of futile. Once you start thinking of alternate history, it's tempting to roll back farther. What if Atari had released the 7800 earlier? What if they had held onto Jay Miner's team and didn't need to even develop the 7800? What if the original programmers hadn't left to form Activision? What if Nolan hadn't sold out to Warners buttried to do an IPO? And that's just Warner era Atari, let alone Tramiels. The alternatives histories are endless.

He hasn't been gone that long. Time will tell if the excitement will continue with Apple. People were somewhat underwhelmed at their "brick" laptop project, and they weren't really that wowed by the ultra-thin laptop before it. There are still many products people are clamoring for from Apple that they have yet to deliver. They do the usual bashing of the product niche or segment until they finally do it anyway (retconning away any prior denials). Time is ripe for some kind of tablet/netbook and it's long long LOOONG overdue for an entry level tower Mac, an ideal product for this economic climate. So Apple can not in any way shape or form rest on its laurels.

I'll have to contact the Funspot owners about tapping the a/v out of that. I was waiting for Chris to finish up his restoration of the Death Race I gave him and he may still do that before California Extreme, but Funspot is now one state over so nothing beats the convenience of that. I really want to get some high quality video footage put online for people to see.

Still one of my favs too. Always gets overshadowed by Adventure, but it has its own charms and is of course is also such fertile ground for hacks.

Part of Jobs' business strategy to rebuilding apple was to sell himself as the face of Apple. He's his own corporate pitchman, kind of like Walt Disney or Lee Iacocca with Chrysler back in the day. If he wanted to be a recluse like Howard Hughes then he shouldn't have held all those carefully choreographed keynotes where the world held on his every utterance of "merely mortal". From the moment he became that figurehead he really should have expected the public and the shareholders to treat his welfare as almost synonymous with the fate of the company. People now firmly believe, rightly or wrongly, that the only thing holding up the company is Steve Jobs. They probably think a million turtelneck-clad Steve Jobs' are running the assembly line for iPods and iPhones in China like the scene in Being John Malkovich where he goes inside his own head and . This is the monster that he's created, IMHO.

I think Steve Jobs is not long for this earth. He seems to want to ignore or be in denial of his medical problems, and I wonder whether this hasn't just magnified his medical problems rather than taking time off earlier for treatment. The case of Jim Henson's hesitation to seek treatment for pneumonia comes to mind. I really think Jobs' attitude towards his own health will be his undoing, and the company's privacy shield around him only further enables this dysfunction.

Do you think they were using a Xerox computer at the newspaper? Or an Apple Lisa?

Yes they did. Perhaps their only truly critical contribution to Atari history was supporting the thing until it really broke through with Space Invaders.

There is supposedly something called the Magna RAM Cart. I believe it's supposed to go all the way up to 1 megabyte. I've never seen one.

The most recent version only had one CPLD. The earlier protos used two as a cost-cutting measure but it turned out to be a kludge and not worth the added complexity or precious board real estate. We passed a few thresholds of bumping up the cost in order to actually get it to do what we needed it to do. We changed the ARM chip a few times and went from a 2-layer to a 4-layer board. The last board was almost perfect, and used up every mm of space to boot. The only thing we really needed to change was some of the pin layout for the peripherals. But other than that the hardware was pretty clean without some of the prior video noise problems. The firmware wasn't close to done, though. The demos we posted were kind of half-truths. The queues were still sometimes glitching out. But I was certain we could work those issues out. It was pretty much all a software issue. (To this day despite sending my final email to Delicon I still haven't gotten a reply. I suspect one day months from now I'll get an irate email from him.) When Chimera runs a regular 4K game the ARM can be completely idle after it loads the SRAM chip. Things get more complicated with queue memory since that is a form of indirection handled by the ARM. Under Harmony, every byte of code has to be served to the 2600 on the fly. I don't dispute the cost advantage. We're talking about two different pieces of hardware optimized for two different objectives. That is something I'll be interested in seeing. What Chimera could do is actually true multiprocessing. It could work on a problem while letting the VCS continue to run game code without a trainwreck. There was going to be three forms of processing on Chimera, the realtime hotspot event handling (like queues), the background peripheral service routines, and special function calls. The VCS was always free to do what it liked other than perhaps calling another function while the ARM was still busy finishing the last one. One of the interesting things here is the text rendering to the queue memory could overflow VBLANK. There was no restriction on when the rendering had to finish although in theory you could get some tearing issues. But you could read from the queues while the renderer was writing to the queues. The rendering task would get paused by the hotspot interrupt and then go back to doing what it was doing. Also, since we didn't finish an on screen menu, we had the ARM run an ASCII BBS like terminal program through a serial port. So the ARM would keep the VCS in a holding pattern and run that thing. When the game was loaded into the SRAM then it would release the VCS to start the game. But the ARM BBS code would still be running side by side if you were talking about a legacy game. There is one hardware-flow-control UART on the 2368. That's probably true of the part you're using as well. the other UARTs need hardware flow control simulated by watching the port. Some of the other peripherals required more realtime babysitting than others. We ran some calculations and it didn't look like we'd be able to maintain high speed I/O without some of that processing happening in mid screen. Of course, how much a VCS game could really make use of in reality, I don't know. So much of this stuff was going to remain an unknown until the thing went into beta and people started pushing it. We were using a small CPLD to save money so in order to support all banking schemes, so they were spread out across 2-3 core files and it would have to reprogram them if it tried to load a game the current core didn't support. So having the ARM do bank simulation would perhaps allow us to roll the few schemes that needed the CPLD (like Chimera Native or the big 3F dancing baby demos) all onto one core file. I don't think he ever got to the point of testing that concept with me. True, but to relate to the original post, if the Chimera featureset is something he wants to see, I'm just letting him know about it in case he wanted to try his hand at it. The notes in my blog and elsewhere should come in handy. If it sounds like I'm being critical of Harmony, it's just a recognition that it isn't Chimera and with that project's demise I have had to resist the temptation to pester you about adding this or that to move it in a Chimera direction when that was never the intent. After all these years I'd very much like to see something derived from the R&D actually released. So I don't want to jinx it.

You could use an AtariVox/Savekey if you had the interface to hook it up to a PC and the tools to read and write to it.

Nice demo. Any chance of using it in a game, like a horizontal shooter?

Like we needed another reason to hate Vista.

Cool. The only problem I had was the option key in macs is the ALT key on a PC keyboard instead of the windows key. I am now posting this through my laptop tethering on the iphone via USB. Awesome. TNX. In vista the new network automatically shows up in a popup window almost like it's a physical NIC. Pretty simple. Now I just have to see if I get retroactively billed by those AT&T jerks. They'll probably be watching the UserAgent strings on HTTP requests. BTW, it looks like the iPhone will work as a WIFI bridge as well, because when it is gaining its internet via wifi then whatever is tethered to it is using WIFI instead of 3G. So if you take your laptop to Starbucks you might be able to scarf free WIFI by having the iPhone authenticate. I'll have to try that next!

Someone should save some of those vintage coinops before the country is levelled for pulling the suicide-by-cop routine.