BigO

Very nice hack. I trust you retained the annoying, strutting, victory dance. I had momentarily considered hacking that game to be themed as dropping Oreos into a glass of milk, which seemed an appropriate sort of thing when considering a certain aspect of the original game. I realized that I didn't stand a chance of doing a reasonable representation of either the cookies or the milk. I have a really thrashed copy of that original game. Would be fun to burn a ROM and install the hack in the original cartridge.

Heh, that guy's pretty funny. I like some of the other games in the 8-tracks: "Kenny Rogers, The Gambler (1978) The man who gave us Dolly Parton duets and crispy fried chicken also gave us "The Gambler." Unlike other poker video games, this one was more limited in its options. Once the player was given his hand, he had to know when to hold them and know when to fold them. Once the hand was over, he had to know when to walk away and know when to run. This continued until the player chose incorrectly, got shot, and had the other poker players dance on his grave." Had I the time and had my 2600 programming skills up to speed, I'd try my hand at writing the Cow Tipping game.

Yeah, you know, the bee's knees.

When I power mine up, it plays a tune. When you hit reset to start the game, it plays the referee's whistle sound. Is that the one that should wrap or not wrap? Is the wraparound trivially easy to accomplish? I set control to the upper or lower player, offense or defense, and neither seem to want to leave the field.

Mine plays a tune at startup but I'll be darned if I can make a player wrap around to the other side of the field. Is it possibly only in a particular game variation? I've only played a couple of randomly chosen one player variations since I got the game a few days ago. It's interesting that the manual says something like "if you're using this feature" as if it were optional. It'd be hard to avoid popping over to the other side of the screen at least once in a while if the "feature" is always on. There isn't any mention of turning it on and off. Mine has the copyright 1983 label just like Atari Punk 78's.

I just use the pressurized can of electronic controls cleaner. My cleaned paddles work fine that way. There are enough holes in the pot to get sufficient spray strength in there to do the job, apparently. I've done three sets this way so far. Regarding the damping or smoothing or whatever goop in there: I didn't notice any difference in resistance to turning after cleaning my paddle controllers. But, they are all very easy to turn and I like them that way. So, I can't really guarantee the leave-it-assembled-and-spray-the-crap-out-of-it method won't cause unwanted effects in your controllers. I did have to wipe a slight film of lubricant out of the inside of the controller, but doubt it would be a problem if I had just left it there. This method of pot cleaning has served me sufficiently since my childhood days of tinkering with radios and tv's so I figure why change now.

Heck, how old must I be? My newest console is an Atari 2600 Jr.

While I have none and there are no modern consoles on my wishlist, I did find the Wii, specifically its controllers and game play interesting enough to play it. Beyond that, the "original" Nintendo (Duck hunt for the 2600 anyone?) is the only system I've even played since some of the 70's-80's stuff: RCA Studio II, Coleco Telstar, etc.

Seems like at the very least, violet is dropped in favor of gray. Here's the pin number / wire color correlation of a standard Atari 2600 DE-9 plug: 1 = white 2 = blue 3 = green 4 = brown 5 = red 6 = orange 7 = yellow 8 = black 9 = violet It looked gray to me. But, I do have trouble seeing certain colors. I wasn't aware of that being one of them, but I'll take it back apart to pin it out and have my wife double check me on the colors.

"The seller ended this listing early because the item was lost or broken."

Good job buddy. What a shame that this guy did that.... Yeah, I was thinking that he may well have tossed out the best part. With the cabinet, this thing might have been . . . uhm . . . less repulsive? Do you suppose those were the most flattering of the pictures he took?

I was kinda suspecting the same thing because I could sometimes make mine work when it was failing by pushing the cartridge fore and aft. I can't get a micrometer in there to measure various boards, but I'll check with a digital caliper to see if I can see any significant differences in board thickness. Heh, that is some consolation.

Just in case anyone's curious: These do have a 3 foot long 9 wire cord. (Brown, white, blue, gray, green, yellow, black, red, orange - haven't pinned out through to the DB9). The DB9 is a hard plastic with a rubber hood molded over it. The DB9 end does have the Atari logo molded (raised) on both sides along with the word "Taiwan" near where the cord exits the hood on one side and "GB 66" on the other side. Molded strain relief on the other end of the cable with about 2" of wire extending beyond the strain relief. They plug in to my 2600 console nicely and hold tight like you'd expect of any new controller. The 9cm x 14.5cm x 3cm plastic box itself could make a decent project case for some electronics gizmo with a thin panel laid over it to cover the holes.

Okay...do I hear $0.00 + shipping? Anyone? Anyone? I got these in a lot of 2 PC compatible and 2 Mac compatible. I got my money's worth out of the two PC compatible units. These two 1.5 Mac units will either go to you or to Goodwill very soon.

Throughout this discussion, the term "transconductance" keeps floating up in my memory of op-amp studies. I vaguely recall the transfer function and it strikes me as being close to what we're talking about on the dejittifier ciruits, but I've been hesitant to bring it up here for fear of proving to myself exactly how much I've forgotten! (Ah, yes, good old mhos. ) I hit a web search on transconductance amplifier and found a relevant Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transconductance I don't recall ever building or working through the transfer function for one of these but they also describe on that page a "transresistance" or "transimpedance" amplifier. I think the transconductance description actually sounds more like what we're after though the transresistance circuit description seems to sorta describe the ciruit supercat was proposing earlier. (Sorry I haven't been able to build and test anything. My electronics bits and pieces have become scattered and disjointed over the years and I'm only now trying to organize them into a useful state.)

The primary difference I see between the two approaches is bankswitching. In the "direct access" approach, the bankswitching logic would be in the physical cartridge. Pitfall II and other cartridges with additional memory, etc. would not be an issue either. In the "dumper" model, the emulator would have to recognize the cartridge somehow and look up the appropriate bankswitching scheme before it could read the ROM and it would have to emulate the additional hardware known to be in the cartridge. Since just about every game known to man has been dumped and emulated, it's mostly an academic point. But, as enthusiasts develop new bankswitching schemes and incorporate additional hardware onboard, the emulators have to be re-written. Anyway, the whole idea is practically just a pointless novelty unless you consider the possible teensy niche of newer games with intellectual property protection in force. I think I should be able to "legally" play my physical cart on a PC/emulator regardless of the protection of the IP for what's programmed and physically installed in the cartridge.

I happened to pick up Megamania today. It does work on my 6 switch console. However, it does fail to start up occasionally: ends up with a black screen and purplish-bluish bar on the left side of the screen. If I take it out and reinsert it, it will begin to work. The more times I did that, the harder it was to get it to fail, so cleaning will probably help.

Yeah, what does that mean?

Not sure why, but I've kinda wanted to play my cartridges directly on my PC via emulator, too. I guess a parallel port might work. I wasn't sure it would be fast enough, but never tried. I haven't built any PC peripheral hardware in the Windows/PCI era, but would it not be possible to build a card that would provide the interface between the PCI (or even ISA) bus and the cart and then have the emulator software read from the appropriate address range on the bus? I guess you'd have to send to the card's address what address you wanted to hit on the cart and have hardware on the card address the cart and retrieve the data. It'd take someone smarter than me to work out timing issues. It just occured to me while typing this that a digital IO / data acquisition type board could probably do this job (and be used as a cart reader) well enough if it had the proper number of channels and could output and read 5 volt signals. I imagine they have code libraries available that would make interfacing to the emulator software relatively easy. Choosing a "standard" board would be tough. Finding one as cheap as a parallel port...not gonna happen.

Atari 2600: Gorf Lock 'N' Chase Megamania Phoenix Star Voyager Frogger (unlabeled so I took a shot, thinking it probably was Frogger) for 75 cents each at a thrift store. They had 30+ more common games. The most I've seen in a thrift store. I also got some common 7800 games though I don't yet have a 7800: Donkey Kong Donkey Kong Junior Choplifter Pole Position II One-On-One

[EDIT]: Never mind --- answered my own question.

I spotted a VIC-20 for 8.00, 2 tape drives for it for $5.00 each, and a Ramax expansion board for $5.00. Not interested, but I don't see much of that kind of stuff in thrift stores around here. I keep thinking I'll post a "Spotted but not wanted" thread for things I'm willing to go back for if somebody else wants it. ...things like a C64/C128 boxed "World's Greatest Baseball" and a few other boxed C64 business/productivity apps, 5 Colecovision cartridges in the last few days, 10 or so Intellivision cartridges...

My PB Frogger works fine on my light 6-switch. Don't have Megamania to try.

That's great information. Thanks, A.J.

Pardon my dumb questions, I only wish I was as up on my electronics as you guys. Weak to start with on analog and very rusty to boot. The stock configuration essentially acts to variably limit the current to the cap to control how fast the cap charges, right? And you can't just hang a cap on it to filter out the noise because that would affect the total capacitance and screw up the charge timing. Here's the dumb(er) question part. Much hand-waving ensues: Could you could set up a current using the pot (in series with another resistor to create a voltage divider), isolated from the original charging circuit, filter the spikes/noise in that circuit and use the resulting cleaned up output from the voltage divider to drive the gate of a FET? The channel of the FET would then be used to control the current passing from the ~5 volt supply to the console's capacitor? I say FET because it's easier for me to visualize a FET as a variable resistance than a BJT or whatnot. Could such a circuit handle the capacitive load accurately? I admittedly don't quite know what I'm talking about here, but my general thought is to use a transistor to provide isolation between the pot/filtering circuitry and the cap charging circuit. Input filtered and isolated from output . . . I guess I'm talking about an amplifier?