davidbrit2

I wired mine up tonight and it works beautifully. I played an assortment of C64 and Vic-20 stuff, and it was all flawless. I'm hoping it gets native .T64 support, because a LOT of games are archived that way, and it's a little tedious having to use something like DirMaster to extract the files. But it will load bare .PRG files right from the SD card, so you often don't have to worry about making a new disk image to hold the extracted files. Any C64 fans that are handy with a soldering iron have no reason not to do this. Well, unless you've already got a 1541 Ultimate or something.

I don't think it does currently, but the head-room should be there. It sounds like only 2 of the 4 cores are currently being used (one for USB/front-end handling, one for the drive emulation), so it might be able to handle another drive. Worst-case scenario, it could probably be made to only run whichever drive is currently active (so no independent disk-to-disk copy routines). However, if you're just after a large "disk" for storing files without any fastloader tricks, then leaving out real 1541 emulation and simply using the communication protocols to store files directly on the SD card would probably be a better approach. Can't wait until it gets open-sourced and improvements and new features can start trickling in.

I've got parts arriving in the mail tomorrow. Looks like it'll be a simple build; I'm just going to make a hat out of perf board and some 2x20 header, then scavenge the 6-pin serial connector from the X1541 cable I built but could never get to work, and wire that directly to the 5V side of the level shifter. And if all goes as planned, I'll be playing C64 and Vic-20 games all weekend.

I saw a bit of discussion about this on the DK forums when all of this started coming under more public scrutiny. There's something weird about the RGB feed from DK boards that requires more work to get to a usable NTSC signal compared to other arcade hardware. I think there's only like one guy with an actual DK direct feed setup that's been verified and accepted by TG, and it's definitely not Billy. There were a number of rather damning pieces of evidence from Billy's tapes: 1. Board transitions not matching arcade hardware. (MAME blits the whole frame buffer at once, as opposed to the arcade hardware continuously scanning the buffer even while the CPU is building the background tiles. Both create different rendering artifacts.) 2. Points awarded for smashing blue barrels (and other objects with variable point values) were way above what would be expected from a random distribution. This suggests there may have been some kind of RNG manipulation going on via emulator save states and rewinds. 3. The "1UP" flash irregularities, suggesting the use of some kind of video splicing. 4. It appears to be a direct-feed video, and nobody had a direct feed setup at the time (or at least Billy didn't).

How about Princess Rescue?

Here's a few odds-and-ends from my favorites list in GameBase64: Arnie - Overhead shooter, kind of like Commando. Bounce - A side-scrolling shooter where you control a bouncing ball. Catastrophe - Race to construct a building while dealing with assorted catastrophes. Caveman - Cool single-screen platformer/shooter. Crossroads II - The king of C64 shooters, as far as I'm concerned. Crown Quest - Clone of Adventure for 2600. Demon Stalkers - Gauntlet clone. Hot Pop - Clone of Nuts & Milk for Famicom. Kid Grid - Amidar clone. Legend of the Knucker Hole - Great side-scrolling game. Very different styles of play across the different levels. Mymmy's Tomb - Sort of a maze shooter. Reminds me of Tutankham mixed with Space Dungeon. Pesky Painter - Another Amidar clone. Pharaoh's Curse - Adventure platformer. A tiny bit similar to Montezuma's Revenge. Rollin - Yet another Amidar clone. Royal Rescue - Nice little platformer from Compute! magazine. Time Tunnel - Weird adventure puzzle game where you play as a time traveling gnome. Toy Bizarre - Single-screen platformer that's a little like Mario Bros.

I picked up a nice 4-switch Telegames over the weekend, and ran into an odd issue that I haven't seen when using the Harmony with other models. Often, when turning on the system, it will think paddles are connected, even though I'm just using a plain old Wico Ergostick. If I hold down the joystick button while powering on (like when this same thing happens with Genesis controllers), it works perfectly fine, and I can load and play games with no issues. When I got the console, I had to fix a loose solder joint on the left joystick port. Might there be other bad joints, or unintentionally bridged pins that would be making the Harmony think I have paddles connected?

Same. Even with that, you'll have plenty of room for multiple copies of the ROMs if you want to categorize them multiple ways (publisher, controller type, year, etc.).

Yeah, I used the Color Bar Generator ROM to calibrate the hue pot, and the color saturation looks okay (maybe even a little bit too saturated), but the picture overall just isn't very bright. My 7800 seems slightly brighter, though it's not a night-and-day difference.

I've got an NTSC Vader, and it's had a fairly dim picture since I got it. I bought a composite video mod kit from ebay (the basic kit with one transistor and three resistors), and it worked great - the picture is much cleaner now - but it's still pretty dim. Is there something I can do to adjust the brightness of the output at all? Are there perhaps some aging caps that need to be replaced?

No doubt. I could barely walk by the time we got back to our hotel room well after midnight on Saturday. Paradoxically, prices for import Nintendo stuff usually aren't too bad - I snagged Dragon Quest V and VI for SFC for around $6 each, and Itadaki Street 2 was like $3. PS2 also tends to be fairly reasonable, aside from a few of the rarities and high-demand stuff (mostly RPGs).

Yeah, it's tough to find decent deals, unless you're into really obscure shit that nobody else really cares about (but then the odds of somebody actually bringing them to the show drop considerably - I didn't see squat for Vic-20 this year). And it's not like I want to drive 5 hours one way and pay for a hotel just to be able to pay ebay prices for things. These days, I mostly go looking for weird stuff (got Mushi King Super Collection for DS, and some SFC imports this year), hanging out with people I know, and spending way too much time with whatever music games Star Worlds brings to the show. I've got my Everdrives and Harmony cart to deal with the problem of stupid cart prices.

I'll be shambling around the vendor hall and the Star Worlds room for most of tomorrow wearing a green Contra t-shirt.

My Aquarius site is just about ready to go.

Yeah, they're a pretty rare find at MGC. I think I've maybe found a couple of carts in the past, but not much. So if anybody's got a Robotron or Galaxian to sell...

I'll be there. Sell me some Vic-20 games!

I am 110% in favor of devaluing ROM hoarders' sacred prototypes. Awesome stuff; I'll have to try this on the Harmony.

Wow, this is an old thread. I'm a bit weird: I'd say my favorite is DK3, and the Vic-20 has my favorite version of the original DK. I've never cared for Donkey Kong Country at all. Take away the nice graphics, and they feel like very generic platformers.

Especially considering my Harmony cart has a 128 MB card with the entire library of retail, hacks, and homebrew, and still has about 90 MB to spare.

I'm not sure how much ROM/RAM space is available to tweak the bomb activation code, but I'd probably do something like this for the double press: 1. Press the fire button, and release it again within one quarter second. 2. Wait no more than one quarter second between presses. 3. Press the fire button again, and release it within one quarter second. So press, release, press and hold wouldn't trigger it. Likewise, pressing the button for a quick shot, waiting more than a quarter second, then firing quickly again wouldn't either.

Club Drive was fun, in a let's-see-how-bad-we-can-break-the-physics sort of way. Checkered Flag was just god damned awful.

Radar Lock uses the second joystick for weapon selection.

I'll have to try that out; don't know how I've overlooked it all these years. I'd love to see DPC+ pushed to the absolute limit, with the ARM running 99%+ of the game code, and the 6502 doing little more than bit banging the hell out of the TIA and polling inputs. Hell, if the Vic-20 can run a reasonable facsimile of Doom with just a RAM expansion, then the 2600 ought to be able to pull it off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm2yDM2Fou8 Maybe a trackball + keyboard/video touchpad FPS?

Marauder is way too easy... if you start on the default level. Choose game 4 and you will get your ass kicked in hard right from the first stage. Great game, and it gets a lot more intense than 2600 Berzerk. Also, the Miner 2049er games would be a lot better if it were possible to jump over enemies without dying,

Yeah, it was pretty wild. I think their original campaign goal was like $50,000. They smashed through that in about 2 days, and ended up well over a million. I believe the basic CHIP boards are in people's hands already, but the rest of the accessories (like PocketCHIP) are due out in May.