riffraff

I never did any hacking in my youth, but as for phreaking.. well, um, I *cough* don't remember!! Not with Atari8, but with commodore-64. I had a 1660 300-baud modem, which was radically different than the 1650 which most people bought before, so I had to write all the software for it to do anything interesting. Programs I wrote: Mach-Term, a terminal program (a BASIC version at first, then a 100% assembly one later) Cee-net BBS (a bad imitation of the very popular C-NET BBS software made for the 1650) 1660 War Dialer 1660 Fag Dialer Prank Dialer (would dial a number at a certain time and play a sampled (digitized) pre-recorded message. This one was kind of fun to use on friends when I'd go over to their house and catch their reaction to it face-to-face. One thing about the 1660.. it allowed direct output of the SID (sound) chip though the modem. This was extremely advantagous for phreaking, as certain tones would allow specific controls for phone systems etc. 2600 hz tone, for example, could be used to "hang up" on someone patched in to a conference call on certain systems.. and it had many other uses as well. Being able to produce any 3-tone sound and patch it through the modem was a pretty nifty thing, and it was also how the modem dialed another computer.

Cool, one other thing I'll mention.. the only threads it tagged as non-read just now were all ones with a "last post" of today sometime. Not sure if that helps or not.

I just had it "reflag" posts as being unread.. and I did not log off or anything, just was doing something else for a while outside the browser.

I wanted to get something for my $60 (besides $25 towards another game) before trading it in. I really wanted to like it, and tried to give it a chance, and at the end I was just forcing myself to play it for those reasons. I still have the stupid strat guide too, which I am going to give to a friend.

I've hit both links here, marking all messages as read and deleting the cookies, but same thing happens to me. Threads continue to show up as unread even when they're up do date. Dunno.

I don't think I really did anything to transcend limitations. I wrote some custom display routines to speed up gameplay when 4 fireballs were on the screen at once. The resources at at Bally Alley were invaluable and the Bally yahoo group guys were great at answering questions. But really the Astrocade is very easy to program, that's the bottom line.

I got my watch in the mail yesterday and it's not bad. The quality seems good, with a nice leather band and nothing seems flimsy about it at all. The original price tag was $125, so for $25 it feels like a good deal =) I didn't find it too cumbersome. The display needed a good amount of light to be able to see the "scene" and there is no kind of backlight or anything, which it would have been nice. All-in-all it seems like a good watch for a classic gaming fan and as long as you don't have really small wrists it doesn't appear clown-sized big like I feared it would.

Gorf seems like an obvious choice for the Bally. I beleive Galaxian on the Bally is one of the best ports of the game ever, and is a 4k cart, so if most of that game's code could just be included, that would leave 4k for the other games. Sound could be arcade-perfect, except for the voice - Space Cadet, etc. It could be done, and is one of the games I'd want to make in the future.

Thx Spice! I decided with warlords as the first game mostly because it was something I understood, seemed to work well with the Bally's bitmap-graphic display, and could be played 4-player. With only an 8k cart, I could not fit the bells & whistles that MM has in terms of different game modes (team play etc) or the spiffy end-round animations. Used only 2 frames of a 4-color dragon, and no special menus etc. I think a lot of the original bally games were light on a lot of this kind of stuff so it doesn't stand out too much that these features aren't there. In the beginning of the project I was thinking "wow I could probably fit a couple of these kind of games into 8k the way it's going". At the end of the game it was "Crap, get rid of the difficulty setting idea for cpu because we need a couple hundred more bytes to fit in a critical feature".

worth a shot.

Well after seeing how big this monster is by looking at these posts and Zwackery's old thread, I'm already a little dissapointed. I knew that the game was only a demo but it looked nice in the pictures and I'm a sucker for gadget watches. Maybe I'll end up keeping it in it's box, putting it on a mantle somewhere.

Thanks! There are basic sounds, noises for shield collision, wall collision, and player-death-explosion. Sound is really my weakest area but I plan for some really cool music and sound for the next project. edit: Also, I'm new at doing this movie stuff, so I don't know why sounds weren't included. I'm using camstudio thanks to Random Terrain giving me the link to this freeware product.

Bally War - First Look I'm putting the finishing touches on my first homebrew game, War for the Bally Astrocade. I've included a movie to get a good idea of how it plays, although the movie's frame-rate is a bit slower than the actual game. I am hoping to have this finished by the end of November. I need to make some labels and possibly a manual. Homebrew comes to the Bally Astrocade!

Adam, you know me there and I re-posted the question to the newsgroup.

I'm writing some Astrocade homebrews. The first one is done although I should probably add one last feature, if I can fit it into the last 100 bytes. Crazy Climber is high on the list of the next one to do, but I don't think I'd want to use a 1-joystick control scheme like the 2600.

None exist yet.

the $11 shipping estimate would cover anything up to 1 pound. I'm sure the 5 boxes would fall into that category.

I was wondering if anyone had ideas or knew how hard it would be to make an inexpensive joystick coupler (to hold 2 joysticks in place for simultanous usasge) for the Astrocade controllers. Here is my first attempt Ok I got the "cheap and easy" part down but it doesn't work very well. First of all moving the joysticks around makes the rubber bands stretch a bit and the joysticks themselves start to move. The other problem is the tops of the joysticks are pointed at each other at an angle, and if you wanted to point the left joystick right at the same time as pointing the right joystick left, they bump into each other. It's a very sloppy control and would not be acceptable for a game like Robotron or Crazy Climber, or any other game that would be made for simultaneous 2-joystick usage. Ideas off the top of my head.. 2 styrofoam bricks. One with holes for the top part of the joystick to slide through and would rest around the trigger area. The other would fit under the bottom of the joysticks with places for the base of each to rest snug. This seems like it would work but might wear out after a while of fitting/removing the styrofoam. The other idea would be to make some kind of plastic holder, but I don't have a clue of the costs of such a thing. Making plastic molds sounds really expensive and not worth it. Anyone have any thoughts about this?

These boxes are taken, thanks If anyone wants these, let me know. Most (or maybe all?) of them have the manuals for the games as well. I just ask for shipping costs, and if overseas, cost to buy a box for them too. Jumbo Jet Pilot, Galaxian, Star Raiders II, David's Midnight Magic, Food Fight, Fraction Fever. I wish I had found these back when I did my atari-8 auction here. I also found a couple common cartridges, Pac-Man and Centipede which I can throw in for a couple bucks.

When I opened my 2600 Crazy Climber box, which isn't much different than the 5200 ones, I used a pen-knife, you know one of those things specificly designed for precision cutting. The result? A still-mostly-mangled top flop of the box. I don't know what to do about these flaps.. they are over-glued and I really have no idea how to open them right without causing some damage.

Fossil Asteroids Watch I found a discussion about this listing on the handheldmuseum.com forums. It looked like a cool watch so I bought one from the guy. Apparently he still has over 700 of these. He's accepting $25 (+ $13 shipping). I'll let you know how good it is once it arrives.

I relisted and put the pak up for $135 which I think is a good deal. I had several offers on the previous listing but they all were a bit low. Mine's better, no nicks on the joystick hehe... I don't think it was ever taken out of the box before I did it for photos.

10 angry men?

If you ship them in a box, should be around $11. The box will probably cost $4 or so.

Trust me I would if I could I wrote him once and he responded personally. I thought that was really cool! Of course it wasn't about trying to sell an atari 2600 game