BigO

I was building an add-on for the 5200 Trak-Ball (lets you use it as a 2600 trackball) which appears, as a final product, to be just a simple cable. But, fabrication time including cutting and stripping cables, soldering itty bitty short wires to a DB connector and stuffing two cables' worth of wires into a hood designed for one cable and doing some really fiddly fitting and soldering wires onto IC sockets turns out to be fairly time intensive. Add to that the cost of parts and it's not terribly profitable. I sold a few @ $30 then $25, but it's just barely worth it. The very niche market seemed to saturate pretty quickly. I had thought if it turned out to be even slightly popular, I'd turn over the assembly work (and all of the profit, basically) to a friend's 12 year old son. Child labor makes everything cheaper. So, yeah, unless you're making 10 zillion of a product, it's tough to do it cheap and turn a profit or break even.

Does the Gameline have extended memory or any other special features that would make a Gameline specific game a thing? As best I can tell, it ran standard, otherwise available cartridge games licensed from game producers.

I think so. I've had them so long I don't remember exactly where they came from. They're probably good for nothing but scavenging parts at this point. A guy never knows when he might need a bunch of DIP switches.

It might be bad form to cross post this, but the folks in the Classic Computing forum are likely the only ones to have any interest whatsoever in a couple of old Multi-Tech modems that I'm giving away. http://atariage.com/forums/topic/174200-spreading-the-love-with-free-games-and-more-edicion-cinco/?p=3934627 They'll soon be relegated to the "circuit boards I keep for parts" box or donated elsewhere. I'm tired of looking at them.

Per the title, I'm guessing the op is looking for Centipede. That was my second guess, though. I originally posted a link to MC in the store,too. The construction of the post is confusing to me.

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/243453-atari-2600-trak-ball-games/

That'll probably fit on a 256MB SD card in the Harmony.

Scrapped. 2 old modems: 1 dial-up, 1 leased line 1 power supply Recipient to pay shipping. Continental US. Note: these will be dumped very soon if there are no takers.

I never acquire stuff I don't really need. On a completely unrelated note, would any of you be interested in an HIS IceQX HD 6790 video card?

Atari 2600. Or maybe 7800 since it plays 2600 games and I might some day get a hankerin' to play some of them there modern games.

I get the distinct impression that you are well past these steps but, just in case, I'll go ahead ask the dumb questions... Is it actually connected to an RF input on the TV, not plugged directly into an RCA video input? Is the TV tuned to the correct channel? Is it connected to the TV through a switch box that might be defective or set to the wrong position?

Circles? They look like hexagons to me. Hexagons, like the cross section of a 2600 controller handle. Therefore, you have to use that patterned side.

Which platform is that hack for? I have discussed this a couple of times here and there in the context of enhancing an add-on I built for the 5200 trackball that lets it hook up to the 2600 as a trackball (also tested and proven on XEGS) but I hadn't seen a hacked version of Missile Command to tinker with. I don't want to hack holes in my CX-53 so I had thought it might be cool to make a "sidecar" type of enclosure to hang the extra button on the outside of the controller, next to the built in two buttons, or maybe put three arcade buttons in a separate enclosure to keep the buttons consistent. One should be able to do an external set of buttons that just plugs in between the controller and the console. Let us know how it works out.

Funny, when I saw that movie title a couple of weeks ago, my reaction that I posted in a status update was that it should be a 2600 game. Hopefully this means that someone is actually doing or has already done it: BigO"Santa Claus Conquers the Martians". Now that's a movie title worthy of being made into an Atari 2600 game if I ever heard one. Dec 11 2017 9:05 PM · Delete · Lock BigOhttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058548/ Dec 11 2017 9:05 PM · Delete Nathan StrumAtariAge Holiday Cart 2027. Dec 11 2017 9:44 PM · Delete jaybird3rdIt's a great title, except that it gives away the ending. Dec 11 2017 9:46 PM · Delete GoldLeaderUnless it's one of those titles like John Dies At the End... Dec 11 2017 11:19 PM · Delete atari2600landYou spell it S-a-n-t-a C-l-a-u-s hooray for Santy Claus! Dec 11 2017 11:31 PM · Delete jaybird3rd"They sing it 'Santy', but they spell it 'Santa' ..." Dec 11 2017 11:35 PM · Delete frankodragonIt's better when the Batman theme is dubbed over the fight sequence of the two aliens. Dec 12 2017 1:33 AM · Delete Add A Comment...

Very interesting means of decoding the signals. Thanks. I'm fairly certain that I'd never have come up with that scheme. So far, I've played a little bit with running Gray code through it. In analyzing only a single bit for motion and detecting motion only with a bit change from 0 to 1, that would mean it could detect only one motion event per cycle, rather than the maximum possible four motion events per cycle. That would also mean that it would have the same resolution for both protocols. One could see that as a downside if trying to wring out maximum resolution of movement, but it works favorably here.

One discussion on the subject: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/184034-question-digitized-sound-on-atari-2600/?hl=%2Bquadrun&do=findComment&comment=2341279 Seems like that might give you a pretty good start toward understanding the subject. (I found that by searching this forum for "Quadrun" which is a game that produces human speech sounds natively on the 2600 hardware.) There's a device called Atarivox if you're interested in an external device to produce speech.

Interesting. It would be rather surprising to find out that no intentional action was taken originally to support both protocols. There's a significant difference in how the two bits per axis are interpreted into direction and motion. In one protocol, the relative phase angles between the two bits is interpreted into direction and motion and the other protocol directly sees direction on one bit and motion on the other (I think of it as a partially decoded form of the former). It would be quite the happy accident for code to just handle both methods. Though, I'm not saying it didn't happen that way because I clearly don't know. By 0-9 keys, I assume we're talking about keyboard input, not controller port input as I don't think a single controller port could easily support a full keypad and a trackball at the same time. Maybe one of these days I'll look at the source code if available or a disassembly to see what's what. Do you happen to know specifics about the code?

He just kinda dropped off the radar. Several months ago, I tried reaching him via PM and by an email address I had from an old transaction. Nothing. I hope he's just moved on to more interesting pastures.

Yep. That's the easiest thing for me to spot.

From that angle, the easiest thing for me to spot is the trim that runs up the sides, front to back. On this one, that piece is about 1/8 inch-ish and on a heavy sixer it's more like 3/8 of an inch.

Just tested. Cool, the XEGS built in MC works with the CX22 protocol or the ST Mouse protocol.

I don't know that it happened, but the programmer could have included support for standard quadrature encoded control signals. That wasn't invented with the ST mouse. It's very likely to be the protocol used in the arcade game. So, purely theoretically, it isn't impossible for it to happen particularly if the programmer had arcade programming knowledge. The protocol used by the CX22/CX80 (direction+clock) is not exclusive or proprietary to that generation of trackball either. I haven't found any material the dates its creation to a particular period of time, but it's found in industrial applications. I'm curious now to see if MC built in to the XEGS will support the "ST Mouse". Supporting both protocols would mean some sort of automatic detection scheme. Having said that, hooking up the ST Mouse to something expecting the CX22 style protocol could still result in cursor movement, erratic and virtually uncontrollable though it would be.

Dan Kramer is also active on a (members only) Facebook group about his hardware. https://www.facebook.com/groups/trakbombers/ If I recall correctly (and I often don't), he didn't design the CX80. He designed the CX53 and CX22.

Did you pick the signals directly off the optical encoders of the 5200 trackball? If so, it may be worth trying to pick them off of the LM339 outputs. That op amp squares up the signal and boosts the current drive capability. I have done that and tested with the 2600 programs with great results. I tested my mod with MC on the XEGS but using the same protocol as the CX22. If I dig out the XEGS any time soon I'll try testing with the straight Gray code (ST Mouse) mode.