Hornpipe2

Do you plan to name ROMs descriptively? E.g. Astroblast (Paddle) (1982) (M Network, Hal Finney) (MT5666) [a].bin is an older buggy version of Astroblast and Astroblast (Paddle) (1982) (M Network, Hal Finney) (MT5666).bin is the 'fixed' one. Would you want to include an explanation on the differences in ROMs or simply leave them as [a]?

The tool reports only files that contain exactly the same data as another file, but repeated. For example, if one file has ABCD then a file containing exactly ABCDABCD will be reported. (Incidentally it will also report an improperly-sized file containing e.g. ABCDAB but I don't think that is an issue with the collection). However other combinations fail the test and aren't shown. Also note that I ran the tool after removing exact duplicates from the directory - so if e.g. roms A and B are 1:1 identical, and C is an overdump of A, it may be reported as an overdump of B. No big deal as it's redundant in either case.

On a whim I used Duplicate Finder to check across your hacks+homebrews and old era collections and found: Fade Out (2004) prototype is in the old era collection (!) Dukes of Hazzard (1983) (Atari, Mark R. Hahn) (CX2678) [a].bin from the old era collection is actually Better Dukes of Hazzard (Dukes of Hazzard Hack) (2003) (James Francis) from hacks+homebrews Deadly Duck (1982) (20th Century Fox Video Games - Sirius Software, Ed Hodapp) (11004) [a].bin from the old era is actually Deadly Duck Supercharger Edition (Deadly Duck Hack) (2004) (Kurt Howe).bin from hacks+homebrews You should probably remove those three to keep your collections clean. I may try Overdump.exe on the combined directories later but that is over 3000 files to check... : )

Attached is a list of overdumps (ROMs whose data is simply multiple copies of another ROM). Also attached is the tool I used to generate the list. Simply drop the .exe in your roms folder and run it, and it will report any overdumps (NOT dupes, though that can be easily changed!) to log.txt. Note that it searches *every* file, not just .a26 or .bin or whatever. EDIT: Looks like some good info in this list - take a look. OVERDUMP FOUND: Fishing Derby (Unknown) (PAL) (4K).bin is a dupe of Angeln I (AKA Fishing Derby) (Videospielkassette - Ariola) (PGP237) (PAL).bin OVERDUMP FOUND: Cosmic Swarm (Unknown) (PAL) (4K).bin is a dupe of Ant Party (AKA Cosmic Swarm) (32 in 1) (1988) (Atari) (CX26163P) (PAL).bin OVERDUMP FOUND: Casino (Unknown) (PAL).bin is a dupe of Blackjack (Gambling) (Paddle) (1977) (Atari, Bob Whitehead) (CX2651) (PAL).bin etc. log.txt overdump.zip

Full list of 1:1 identical ROMs attached. Note that you shouldn't just blindly delete both - keep one from each group! A few (unknown) ROMs are paired up here, so maybe that clears up some mysteries? EDIT: Anyone interested in deleting these, do yourself a favor and get Easy Duplicate Finder. It will track all this down for you and can move or delete files automatically. Freeware too. EDIT2: Notepad replaced the accented e in Pele's Soccer with a , so note that above. EDIT3: It's just an attachment now. dupes.txt

If you absolutely have a need for three more bits of RAM maybe you'd be interested in this: http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?s...5226&st=375 I'm not a hardware guru but these bits are not used by either console. You can use them for RAM if you would like. Before doing so though you must set the bits data direction. lda #%00110100 sta SWBCNT

Ever tried the Escape Velocity series from Ambrosia Software? It looks a lot like this. The latest and greatest iteration, Escape Velocity: Nova, is excellent. You play as a tiny ship trying to scape up enough cash to survive while some large intragalactic wars are going on around you. Eventually you can power up enough to take entire planets under your control. It's a lot of fun, and has multiple storylines to play along. I wonder if something like this could be pulled off on the 2600? One nice thing about space is that it's a black background, which makes the graphics pretty simple : )

Yep. Next one (V3) will hopefully be online in januari 2009. What are your feelings regarding multiple ROMs that are exactly identical? I use the program "Easy Duplicate Finder" to locate duplicate files, and it's found 112 files that appear to be redundant. I suppose you may want to leave the dupes in as they still provide historical information - e.g. "BMX Air Master (1990) (Atari) (CX26190).bin" and "BMX Air Master (1989) (TNT Games, Adam Clayton) (26192).bin" are identical in file content but still document two separate releases. Perhaps you could remove all the dupes and add a single text file documenting which games are total re-releases? Do you want a list of the duplicates it found? PS THIS COLLECTION IS AWESOME and huge thanks for putting this all together and then sharing it with us for free. : )

You can do the inversion with an N-channel MOSFET and a single resistor, which wouldn't be too hard to hack on, though you do need to cut a trace. I'd rather go with a deadbug 7404 secured with superglue, but from experience, I know lots of people would have trouble getting either one right. I have a stash of 7404s, it shouldn't be a problem.

Huge thanks, this thread has proven incredibly informative. Now all I need is a 4k cart : ) Anyone got a spare that they could send me instead of throwing it away? I'd reimburse shipping...

New round of questions: * What's actually inside a 2600 cart? I've never opened one up. I had imagined that inside an 8k cart is a ROM and a set of bankswitch logic, such that I could pop off the ROM and add my own (re-using the existing logic). Is that really the case? * Do 2k carts have all the necessary traces for a 4k multicart? Or are they missing one since they don't have the top address line?

How do I ban users from bidding? eBay couldn't possibly make this option more difficult to find.

I came up with a little 16k bankswitch template (posted over in 2600 Programming forum) that I have now copied all my original code into. It's working great - I put a dummy 'Atari Rainbow' title screen that then skips to the main game when you hit the Reset button, and my sprite drawing routine has been shuffled off into banks 2 and 3. No screenshots though as it looks exactly like it used to - but that's a good thing!

1) Yes, 30hz. 2) I have approx. 7850 bytes available for gfx data once the drawing subroutines and bankswitching overhead are taken into account (so far - could probably be optimized further). With ideal packing, that is 1308 lines available split between all animations. If each character is on average 32 scanlines tall (and these are double-height scanlines), that still leaves around 40 frames available to cover all the animations. I expect the real amount will be somewhat less. On bank 0 is an 'animation lookup table' that describes what frames are used in each 'move' and many will be re-used. For example, walking forward or backward uses the same frames, jumping up or up+back is the same frames, flying kick is just a jump with an extra kick frame.

I need at least 16k for my current game, and so I hacked up Paul Slocum's 8k template from the '2600 Advanced Programming Guide' to support F6 switching instead. I don't know much about how efficient it is, but it works for my needs. Somehow I think my scanlines are off by 1 but I haven't bothered to investigate very far - this is just a demo. Anyway, each color in the PF is set by a different bank. Enjoy! 16kbank.asm.txt 16kbank.bin

I too am starting a fighting game for 2600, hope to cram it all into 16k. http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...38&eid=4401

I've seen a few people post about wanting to attempt a 2600 fighting game, but the only BINs to surface (that I've found) are a few demos of Andrew Davie's Fu Kung! and a 'Kung Fu Sprite Demo 2'. Well, I'm officially throwing my hat into the ring on this. I'm working on a 16k fighting game, quite similar to the classic International Karate, for one or two players. So far I've modified the bigmove source and instead of a 48-pixel sprite, I'm going with a 40-pixel multicolor one. Hopefully the fighters will still be large enough and colorful to boot. As soon as I can figure out a 16k bankswitch template I'll put that in. I'm thinking 4k for game, playfield and sound effects, 4k for title screen, music and settings, and 8k for player sprite data. Expect more soon. Many thanks to Cybergoth for helping me get this far with his quite handy code from Seawolf (an excellent piece of homebrew in itself if you ask me...)

EDIT: I was having problems using that code but now it's fixed - needed a CLC somewhere around LDA XPosition,X or else everything was getting shifted right 1 pixel when movement happened. New source and binary attached. This looks like it will be exactly what I need, thanks! EDIT2: Is there a good way to generate DelayPTR on-the-fly? I think it's just 'divide XPosition by 3, store #JNDelay+36-quotient in DelayPTR'? Who knows a fast divide-by-3? bigmove3.asm.txt bigmove3.bin

You should really try one of the ROM auditing programs like clrmamepro or RomCenter - they can help you track down problems with missing samples, ROMs, artwork, etc. Perhaps a new version of the samples is out or something.

I would realy like to go pick up the golf cabinet but seeing as I'm in the military and move around alot I think that having two cabinets would be a huge pain in the butt. This suck because I could do alot with it seeing as it has a track ball in the cabinet. You may want to alert people on www.arcadecontrols.com forums about the find, there are always people there in search of cabs to either restore or install MAME on.

Can anyone answer if Atari's new financial troubles are going to cause further delays or cancellation of the FB2P product?

This seems ideal to me, and has worked on a number of other forums that I've been on. You can delete any post that hasn't been replied to, but once it has that option goes away. That way you can fix your own double posts or stupid questions, but you can't go on a mass-delete rampage. EDIT: Omegamatrix posted a good idea in http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?s...c=86687&hl=

bigmove.asm is a great bit of code but unfortunately I had problems with it: it uses 'lazy' horizontal positioning code to move the sprite left and right. That makes it pretty much useless for anything I wanted. I was having problems pasting bigmove.asm code into my existing kernel, so I thought I should just update bigmove to use 'normal' positioning and then graft my existing kernel onto a known-working example. So, here is bigmove3.asm, which has been rewritten slightly to use a couple extra RAM bytes and do the usual dynamic positioning during VBLANK. Hopefully someone can find a use for it - I know I have... Optimizations abound of course, since P1 is always locked 8 pixels behind P0. I thought perhaps I should hit RESP1 immediately after RESP0 and then HMOVE one pixel to the left, skipping the loop and saving one byte of RAM - but every 16th pixel will cause overflow problems and I hadn't found an elegant way around that. I suppose one way is to just burn an extra scanline with ... Jiggle dey bpl Jiggle sta RESP0 sta RESP1 sta WSYNC sta HMOVE ; no changing HM regs within 24 cycles of HMOVE! jsr Ret jsr Ret lda #$10 ; let's move P1 sprite left 1 pixel! sta HMCLR ; does HMOVE reset HM regs to 0? sta HMP1 sta WSYNC sta HMOVE JMP VblankLoop Ret rts Anyway, have at it! bigmove3.asm.txt bigmove3.bin

Let me make sure I have this right. NTSC: 262 scanlines (3 vsync, 37 vblank, 192 picture, 30 overscan) PAL60: 262 scanlines (3 vsync, 37 vblank, 192 picture, 30 overscan - same as NTSC) PAL50: 312 scanlines (3 vsync, 37 vblank, 242 picture, 30 overscan) Color chart: http://www.qotile.net/minidig/docs/tia_color.html So by careful selection of colors, it would be possible to make an NTSC/PAL60-compatible cart with no other changes? Also, is there an easy way to check if I have the 'right' number of vblank, overscan and picture lines? I get my linecounts from Stella's debugger and I use VERTICAL_SYNC macro so I assume that's right, but I don't know for certain if I'm turning off and on the vblank at the right times. What rules do you follow?

All you have to do is post a high score at any time and you're entered.