mos6507

That's what Chimera did. The original idea for Chimera was to do everything with the ARM. Delicon could not get that to work, but ultimately it turned out to be possible with the most recent NXP LPC chips and the right software, hence Harmony. But with a CPLD inbetween the ARM and the bus, it frees up the ARM to be more of a coprocessor instead of spending most of its CPU time acting as a ROMulator. The LPC chips are extremely feature-rich. Lots of peripheral potential, but servicing those peripherals takes processor time. How much Harmony will be able to do while still babysitting the bus I don't know. It's going to be uncharted territory but clearly the chip will be taxed to the limit trying to do much more than watch the bus. But at least the cart is gonna be released. That's what matters. I just know the Chimera design was optimized for ARM throughput. You have to ask what your objectives are. If you want good acceleration and peripherals then you need to have the ARM more decoupled from the bus and some kind of dual ported RAM arrangement. The complexity of the architecture goes up bigtime when you do this. That dual porting comprised the majority of Chimera R&D. There is no need to reinvent the wheel here. If any of the newcomers here want more info, please read through my blog postings here. High res image of the board. I'm already getting depressed thinking about this again So close yet so far away.

Yes, that was a big inspiration in the (now aborted) Chimera project.

Even if it doesn't work there is a hardware mod you can do to fix that.

So iPhone 3.0 OS is here, and I can finally cut, copy, and paste. Great. One of the things that annoyed me was replying to email messages. There was no way to get rid of the quoted text. So now you can select all and clear out the old message including the "sent from iphone" footer. It's about damn time. However, they added the tethering feature only to have AT&T keep it disabled. So I screw around with the hacks that supposedly enable this and was not able to get it going despite following all the steps. I could jailbreak my phone but I'm just, I dunno, I'm kind of burnt out on the hacking. The whole thing about Apple stuff is it's supposed to just work. Now what I'm really waiting on is true turn by turn navigation. The free Mapquest app looks pretty good because it at least gives you the turns, but I dont think it speaks them to you at the appropriate time the way a GPS does. I've always resisted getting a dedicated GPS because the thing is basically a locked down PDA and I just don't see a reason why it can't just converge into a smartphone like so many other functions have.

I didn't really know what was happening during the crash. I knew Atari was in trouble but I didn't really put two and two together as far as the glut of 3rd parties. I just treated the 99c carts like a gift from heaven. I knew most of the games were crap but I tried the best I could to separate the wheat from the chaff. I'm sure a lot of us probably added more games to our collection during the crash than all prior years combined. I also remember that some games were immune from the discounting. I had to pay top dollar for late-period games such as Pitfall II and Space Shuttle, but they were worth it.

IMHO, the NES succeeded because of the videogame crash opening up the market to any and all competitors and the generational transition between Gen X and Gen Y. Gen X moved on to home computers and didn't look back. Gen Y cut their teeth on the NES because that's all that was out there. The actual NES hardware was nothing special by mid 80s standards. The only reason it looked like a big upgrade vs. earlier systems was the lower cost of ROM at the time, enabling bigger banked ROM games.

Did the developer own the copyright to the game? I know sometimes it happens (think Jamie Fenton with Ms. Gorf, and that was put into the public domain anyway) but it's the rare exception, not the rule. Almost all these protos were works for hire and never should have left the lab. Only because of the turmoil surrounding the videogame crash and the subsequent layers of time and corporate bankruptcies and buyouts have these fallen into a legal no-man's land. I seriously doubt that, for instance, the Snow White repro was legit, as it tramples on both Atari's copyright and Disney's trademarks. These things just flew under the radar, that's all.

But isn't that the whole idea behind POKEY, to have the coprocessor poll the paddles and just report back a number between 0 and 227?

That looks like a great game. Gotta try it out.

Aren't all copies of Save the Whales pirates? It's not like any of the prototype repros were legit, were they? Just because they came in better packaging than Hozer doesn't make them any more legit.

I'm the one really holding this up. I put the Atari stuff on hold until my daughter finishes the school year which is like a week away. Then I will get cracking on this and AtariVox.

If you want extra controller inputs then you need a PIA as well. The POKEY will only allow pots and a keyboard, or maybe 5200 controllers

Is that the part that saves high scores? Yes. The AtarVox "half emulation" works really well. It's really worth the time to set up.

Even with an A/V mod?

In the Supercharger scheme, everything is RAM all of the time, 3 2K chunks. Two active at once and one 2K in reserve. The banking just determines which two are active and in which order. The only time ROM is used is when loading/multiloading which is faked on the emulators. But Supercharger RAM doesn't use read/write ports the way Superchip does. It uses that funky CMP/NOP structure on the last page of ROM to indirectly write to RAM. But for the purpose of the debugger there should be some way to scroll through and alter all 6K of RAM, not just the active 4K.

For me the true toystore icon was Child World. The one in Dedham, MA had an aircraft-hangar style arched roofline. What I liked about them is they used to keep a lot of old merchandise on the shelves. I was still getting Mego Star Trek/Superhero figures after they were discontinued. Major scoreage. The end of the Mego 8' line was a sad time for me as a kid. After the small Kenner Star Wars became a hit it was all downhill for full size clothed action figures. So I used to scope around for the remnants.

They are pretty much the holy grail for 800 enthusiasts. They cost a fortune when new.

Can you make the POKEY do I/O rather than just sound?

I'd very much like to see this.

Remember that the Atari 8-bit was in the can only 2 years after the VCS. If the hardware designers had their way, that would have been the next gen system and the VCS would have been put out to pasture before Space Invaders had even been released for it. So the success of the 2600 kind of owes itself to Atari fragmenting the marketplace into videogames vs. the home computer segment and not having a next gen console until they mutated the 8-bit into the 5200 quite late in the game, since Jay Miner and company had left. If they hadn't left, then Atari needn't have had any of their hardware on the market that long before the next leap was going to be ready. So the defections were kind of good and bad. The hardware defections were bad, but the software defections led to the creation of Activision which paved the way for a whole new era of advanced coding for the 2600. That kind of bought Atari time by restarted the 2600 as a reborn game system purely through coding techniques.

The original lineup of games were in development before the VCS even shipped. They weren't an afterthought. And some of the tricks were discovered right off the bat, like changing colors in mid-screen in Air-Sea battle, or doing playfield bitmaps like in Surround. So while it may not have been designed to do those tricks, the developers, feeling no constraints, started tinkering. So the "aha" moment happened while the hardware was still in the lab and the rest is history. It was said that Jay Miner wanted the timing of the TIA to sync up with the CPU whenever possible so he may have had some idea what might be possible. So I don't think it was all serendipity but we'll never know for sure. But once it became clear how useful on the fly changes were, it was definitely a deliberate goal in the hardware design of the 8-bit and Amiga to enable or even encourage this as standard coding practice.

One of the weirdest things about Combat is that it stores the top half of the rotation for the tanks and then either scans through it top to bottom or bottom to top to vertically flip it. The more logical thing to do would be to use the horizontal flip hardware feature and either store the right or half rotation or just the top 1/4 of rotation. I'm sure the hardware flip is used elsewhere but even in these 2K games there was some lack of optimization which is just shocking to me.

In the coinops I'd say 1980 was probably the single biggest leap in innovation. That's when Tempest came out (which I guess was real late in 1980) which is kind of the last word on twitch platform shooters that started with Space Invaders. The color, density of objects, and the 3D framerate in Tempest blows away games like Battlezone and Red Baron which were released only months earlier. The thing is, there really wasn't a time between 1979 and 1984 that you weren't consistently blown away by new releases. It was like being around to see all the classic 1950s cars or the late 1930s technicolor movies like Robin Hood, Wizard of Oz, and Gone with the Wind come out.

The 2700 is my favorite case. I love the way it handles the console switches. That's something I keep wishing could be repro'ed. The remote control sticks I could take or leave. It's the case with the LEDs that I like.

The repro needs the black lines between the color bands and inside the blue zone. Everytime I see this thing I think of Mork's rainbow suspenders. Rainbows were big in the late 70's, early 80s.