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BigO

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Posts posted by BigO

  1. Posted

    3 hours ago, ivop said:

    As for the Light Module, I googled for it and I only found the manual of the cartridge, and no schematic of the sensor. But I'm fairly sure it's just a light dependent resistor. But, of which value?

    The Atari paddle has a 0 to 1 Megohm potentiometer so that doesn't narrow down the options very much.

  2. Posted

    24 minutes ago, ivop said:

    Could you also make a photo of the other side?

    As you wish. (More of my handwriting on this side. If meaningful, I could probably dig up a board that doesn't have my handwritten additions.)

     

    24 minutes ago, ivop said:

    Edit: BTW this Dickinson College?

    Maybe this will help: http://archives.dickinson.edu/artifacts/atari-lab-computer-start-kit-c1980

    Digging through the site a little bit, they say they're in Carlisle, Pennsylvania which matches the State and City of your Wikipedia linked Dickinson College. So, I'd say yes.

  3. Posted · Edited by BigO
    Added pics

    I dug out one of my boards.

     

    It does have the same copyright info. But where the board in the link is marked "01-M8325", mine is marked "01-M8325-01" and where the linked board is marked "CH5", mine is marked "CH5 94V-0"

     

    I'll post a picture shortly. It looks like I marked it up with a Sharpie to trace which color wire went where.

     

    (Aside: I know that I used one of the cables to fix/mod a WICO trackball controller and another to build a custom Vectrex controller from a NES controller. I think I used another to build a mod to let me play 2600 games with a 5200 trak-ball controller. I think I paid $1.00 each for the units. I vaguely recall posting something on AtariAge trying to figure out what they were).

     

     

    20190708_150342.jpg

     

    Looks to be a pretty significant revision.

    20190708_160042.jpg

  4. Posted

    I like the ability to view replies "inline" in Recent Status Updates without having to go to the poster's profile. (Assuming that functionality is part of this skin).

     

    Would it be possible, when convenient, to also expand the original status update when displaying the replies? If a longer original status update is truncated for space, it remains that way even when the replies are expanded.

    (Win10 Version 1809, Chrome Version 75.0.3770.100)

  5. Posted

    I have several of these boards laying around somewhere. I bought them surplus many years ago and used the enclosures and cables for something else.

     

    I don't recall them having "corrections" on them. I also don't recall them having a college name on them as in the linked images. I'll have to take a look next time I'm in that storage area.


    I've wondered if they had an overlay but hadn't seen one until looking at the OP's link.

  8. Posted

    16 minutes ago, Mike_2000 said:

    The "Bit War" metric was always a marketing thing. NEC and Sega wanted to show that their consoles were more powerful than than the NES, so they heavily marketed themselves as "16 bit" on opposition to Nintendo's "8 bit". Then, Nintendo got in on the action with the SNES, and then Sega and Sont started pushing 32 bit Consoles. Atari had their "do the math" campaign with the Jaguar. Nintendo eventually released the N64, which was so eager to advertise it's bit count that it's right there in the name. Then the Dreamcast came out, and I don't think I ever heard bits being used in marketing again.

     

    Nowadays I tend to hear bits used as a way of describing pixel graphics. "8 bit" means NES style and "16 bit" means SNES/Genesis/GBA style, even if the game is running on the PS4 Pro and we are 3 decades removed from the first 16-bit console. Although I've never heard people comparing their modern 3D graphics to 32-bit or 64-bit, probably because early 3D games haven't aged nearly as well.

    Yeah, from a technical perspective, the claim about "x bits" never was any more of an apples-to-apples comparison than the clock speed claims in the PC world.

  9. Posted

    5 hours ago, Flojomojo said:

    "4-bit"

    🙄🙄🙄🙄

    To be fair, I can see how that mistake could be made looking backward through time and seeing the console bittedness going back through the generations of 64-bit, 32-bit, 16-bit, 8-bit...4-bit would be a natural assumption in the regression of the series to an earlier time in history.  Current day Atari is even contributing to that flawed thought process. I mean, look how they are exploiting the "retro" concept to arrive at this 2-bit offering.

    • Like 3
    • Haha 4

  15. Posted

    On 6/20/2019 at 10:54 AM, Mr Robot said:

    Have you played Tempest Elite with a driving controller at all? I've not tried it but in my testing for one of the Multifire boards I hooked up a driving controller and was quite surprised at how bad it was as a controller at all. For a lot of rapid steering left and right it's quite good, but holding a turn for any prolonged time, like on a long corner would feel really bad.

      

    As long as you keep rotating the controller it registers a direction, as soon as you stop rotating it resets to centre. It doesn't feel like a steering wheel or Pot at all. I was really surprised. It's quite hard to keep rotating for the length of time it would take to do a loop of a tempest tube, I could never do it if I were holding the driving controller knob like I'd hold the same knob on a paddle. Maybe with one finger on the top it would work OK

    The described behavior is a property of the game and/or emulator software. If the software keeps track of the last (calculated) position it can hold that position until it gets more input from the controller. It is true that the driving controller doesn't output a discrete value indicative of a position or steering angle. It outputs signals on two pins. Those two signals only change when the rotary controller position changes. And, to determine a direction of motion, the software would need to keep track of the previous reading. Only one of these two signals/bits can change at a time.

     

    Holding a turn on a long corner could be a matter of just not turning the controller. But, if the software decides to self-center after some amount of time, that would be the software author's choice. That's not like a real steering wheel, but they could choose to do that. On the other hand, a real steering wheel's position does correlate to a physical turn angle (more like a potentiometer) whereas any meaning in the rotary driving controller's position is derived from comparing the current output state to the previous output state.

     

    I have a prototype controller on my bench that tracks relative rotary controller (quadrature encoder) input and outputs an absolute value. For a particular mode, my software will return the output to "center" after a time, but for another mode I will have it hold the value until more input is received from the encoder. It's a matter of implementation.

     

    The "badness", if any, of the driving controller is the low resolution: only 16 state changes (four full quadrature cycles) per 360 degrees. For comparison, the encoder I'm currently using provides 1440 state changes (360 full quadrature cycles) per rotation.

     

    • Like 3

  16. Posted

    Your saying that "I know that pressing play on the tape can send signal to joy1down" doesn't sound quite right to me.

     

    I would expect that pressing play prepares the tape to play by mechanically engaging the playback head with the tape. Sending a signal from the console to the tape player allows the tape to motor to run, thus playing the tape which in turn sends a pattern of signals to the console and the software interprets what the tape is playing. Some pattern means "end of tape", some other pattern may mean "song playing" some other pattern probably means "end of song".

     

    But, I wouldn't expect that pressing the "Play" button on the deck directly sends any signal to the console. The software controls the tape deck by sending a run/no-run signal to the deck (which can only send signals back to the game software when the game software allows the tape motor to run).

     

    The music coming out of the audible channel really would have nothing to do with the control methodology but this is where you would record your voices.

     

    Each of the cassette deck/game console signals is probably one way only:

    • output from the console = discrete on/off signal to stop/start tape motor
    • output from the deck to the console = encoded digital messages telling the game software what's happening with the tape (beginning of audible message/song, end of audible message/song, beginning of tape, end of tape, etc.)

    I think it's the library of messages and the encoding scheme of the messages that need to be deciphered and documented.

     

    Bear in mind that I'm speculating based on bits and pieces of information gathered from experience and reading information on the internet.

  18. Posted

    Unfortunately, the chips don't appear to be socketed, based on the few internet pictures I've seen. That makes it a much tougher job to repair if the problem is a bad chip.

    • Like 1

  19. Posted

    1994-2004: Amass everything I could get my hands on

     

    2005-2011: Buy very specific things I didn't already own and/or really wanted, but only if the price was right

     

    2012+: Rarely buy anything except a couple homebrews every year

    The dates might not be exactly the same, but within a year or two, this.

  20. Posted

    I never did write my name on my games because they weren't "my" games. I had three brothers. And, I knew only one other person with the same console and they the same games I had and then some. I wonder, was it an "only child" thing to write first or full names on a game cartridge? Or maybe other kids didn't didn't have to share. We didn't have that kind of money.

     

    I kind of like getting 2600 cartridges with personal identification on them. I have one somewhere that has a sticker with a doctor's office information. I can kind of now share in the memory of "that doctor's office that had the Atari in the waiting room when we were kids".

    • Like 1

  21. Posted

    The description sounds like what would happen if you're using TB mode on a game that wasn't built for trackball input.

     

    The trackball output uses the same pins as a joystick. But, when you're rotating a trackball like this one in TB mode, one pin (per axis) toggles between on and off depending on the direction being rolled and the other pin on that axis toggles between on and off as the ball rolls a given amount so that the game can see how fast/far the ball is rolling.

     

    (The above described motion encoding scheme is commonly referred to as "Up/Down Clock". Other trackballs may output a count sequence known as "Gray Code", from which can be decoded direction and speed/distance the ball is rolled. This can provide greater resolution than Up/Down Clock but is a bit more complex to interpret.)

     

    In TB mode, pins are turned on and off in patterns that won't be meaningful to joystick game software. In addition to the signals not representing the 4 cardinal directions, the TB mode will set both pins of an axis to active at the same time which is an "impossible" condition for a joystick to produce. How a particular joystick game handles that condition would just be a side effect of how that game program was written.

     

    It doesn't really sound definitively like your trackball is defective, unless you're actually testing TB mode with a game specifically built to be compatible the signals output in TB mode. You didn't clearly say this, which leads me to infer that you are testing TB mode using a joystick only game. If that's not the case then it's still possible that your trackball is defective.

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