Ian Primus

Hehe. And the thing of it was, that it was so far down at the bottom, I honestly believed it to be part of the .a78 header/file format! I saw that, and thought that it had to have been added by the dumper - just like the first 128 bytes were. I was so convinced that it was real I didn't want to believe otherwise Excellent work man. The game plays really well. And I especially liked the comments you made, wishing that you had the code so you could see how the scrolling was done Really looking forward to the final version of this. Can't wait to see those intermissions. -Ian

Really? You didn't like the April Fool's joke? I thought it was hilarious. A very well thought out, well executed prank. I had suspicions when the ROM was posted and I found the copyright date in the binary... but I dismissed it because I was fooled well enough to actually believe it was a real proto. It wasn't until someone else noticed it too that I went back and double-checked the offset. The joke probably would have lasted much longer if PMP had been more careful with his code But all in all... good work guys. That was a lot of fun. -Ian

It does sound like a bad solder joint at the power socket - if jiggling it sometimes results in sound/picture. Try gently rocking the connector back and forth in the socket, see if you can find a spot where it works, and hold it there - if you can get it to stay working, then you've found your culprit. Similarly, with the power switch, by pressing in and fiddling with it, slowly moving it around, you should be able to get it to work for a bit. I've seen relatively few very dirty power switches on the 2600's - and none causing a totally dead condition, ususally they just require a bit of jiggling to work. Not like the Colecovision, with it's extremely failure prone switch. Start by resoldering the switch and power socket, it's easy and can't hurt. If you can get the Atari to stay on when rocking the connector in the socket, and you've already resoldered it, then it could very well be a faulty power socket. Again, not particularly common on the 2600 - bad solder joints are far more likely - but it's possible. The best way to check would be to measure voltages inside the Atari - do you have, or have access to, a voltmeter? If you can't get it to work for more than a second, and the power connector/switch is not a problem, then you could have a bad voltage regulator. If you have a voltmeter, you can check this very easily. Let us know how you make out - and if you can get ahold of a meter, I can walk you through testing some things. -Ian

Yeah, that's real easy to do - just wire up the existing toggle switch to switch all the power in the cabinet. The problem is that many computers don't power on when plugged in, you still have to press another button. Some machines have a BIOS option for that, many older ones didn't. So, you had to flip the switch to turn on all the power, then press the button for the computer. If you have a computer that can come on when power is restored - that's probably the best/simplest option. I've never seen a monitor that didn't remember it's power on state. Of course, I've not worked with many newer (i.e. LCD) monitors - many of which lack the traditional hard power switches of the older CRT monitors. But even the newer CRT's I have seen with soft power switches will remember wether they were on or off when plugged in. -Ian

I would avoid using an LCD monitor in an arcade cabinet at all costs. It won't look nearly as nice or authentic as a CRT would. But, as for your question about the power button - you just leave the monitor on all the time, and turn it on and off with a power switch like the rest of the devices (PC, lights, amplifier) in the cabinet. Actually, I built a neat little device for controlling the power of a MAME cabinet. It's just a hacked up power strip with the switch removed and replaced with a couple of relays scavenged from broken computer monitors. The first socket is unswitched, and on all the time. This is where you plug the computer in. The rest of the sockets are switched - you plug the monitor, marquee light, amplifier, etc into this. Then, there's a cable the comes out the side and plugs into one of the molex connectors on the computer's power supply. This connects the 12vdc from the computer's power supply to the relay coils (two relays are in parallel for current handling). Then, for a cabinet power switch, a momentary contact pushbutton is mounted somewhere on the cabinet and connected to the computer's motherboard power switch connector. Thus, when the computer is turned on with this single button, the relays click on and turn everything else on. When you shut the computer down, everything automatically turns off with the computer. -Ian

Drive around on trash night. I've found a couple nice ones accidentally like this. Check craigslist or your local freecycle lists. People are dumping computer monitors right and left these days. -Ian So, you are not referring to an actual VGA Arcade Monitor that I have been finding for $200+ but a typical VGA desktop monitor? I thought you had struck gold! Yeah. Your regular everyday computer monitor will work just fine, if not better than the real arcade VGA monitors for the purposes of a MAME cabinet. If you want to mount it more solidly, you can take the monitor apart, make a bracket to mount the picture tube, and mount the chassis seperately. A simple wooden frame wouldn't be too hard to build. Or, bolt things directly to the housing - just check inside to make sure you're not going to hit anything with your screws. And if you want a vertical monitor, just turn it on it's side, and degauss it. On the same token, if you want to play a joke on a co-worker, simply go into their cube when they're away, and turn their comptuer monitor sideways. The colors will get all screwed up. Degauss it, fixing the messed up colors. Then put it right way up again - screwing up the colors. Leave. If they don't know what happened, and/or don't know about the degauss button, they'll be really confused when they get back to a psychadelic desktop! -Ian

Sounds like you're not getting power. You've already ruled out the power supply itself, so it's time to rule out two other real simple problems. And I'm sure you've already tried both positions for the channel selector on the Atari. Take the console apart (if it's not still apart), and look at the back of the circuit board where the power socket is mounted. Ensure that the solder connections are good, and aren't cracked or loose from the board. Resolder these if necessary. Then, look where the power switch is soldered to it's board - and check it's solder pads carefully. I've fixed more than one 2600 by simply resoldering these points. With no game inserted, you should ALWAYS get something on the screen when you turn it on. It should be either a solid black screen (with a faint grey line down the left), or a screen with vertical lines of color. If you get this, then the power supply is working. Clean the game cartridge slot. Look at where the game plugs in. There are two tabs, one on either side, and two small holes, and the long slot in the center. Using a small screwdriver or similar tool, insert it into one of the small holes - this opens the cartridge slot. You should see the pins inside. Get a piece of computer paper and fold it over a couple times until it's the thickness of the circuit board in the Atari. Cut it to the same width as the cartridge circuit board slot. Gently insert the folded edge into the opened cartridge slot, and firmly press it in, then pull it out. You should see a bunch of little dark lines on the paper. Repeat with a clean bit of paper until you don't see any more dirt coming off. Clean a cartridge. Using the same small tool, open the door on the cartridge and push it back. Dip a q-tip in isopropyl alcohol and clean the gold contacts you've just exposed. Scrub good and hard, you can't hurt it with a q-tip. Repeat until the black crud stops coming off. Once it's dry, plug it in and try it out, and let me know what you get. -Ian

Drive around on trash night. I've found a couple nice ones accidentally like this. Check craigslist or your local freecycle lists. People are dumping computer monitors right and left these days. -Ian

The most accurate picture would be from an actual arcade monitor. But, this comes with an extra layer of complications and expense. A TV provides the equivilent 'feel', but the resolution suffers because of the input method - you're not going to get as clear of a picture through S-Video as you would through RGB on an arcade monitor. Arcade cabinets of the 80's used 19" monitors. These were very little more than TV sets with less parts. They use the same picture tubes as TV sets do. They can produce a clearer, more stable picture because they use direct RGB video signals, rather than a tuner or any color decoding circuitry. A computer monitor is an obvious choice for a sharp, clear picture and ease of connection to the computer. When I built my arcade cabinet, many years ago, I went the computer monitor route. It's actually only a 17" monitor, but it does OK. (At the time, a used 17" monitor was over $100, and bigger monitors were much more expensive, and out of my price range). I've been meaning to upgrade it to a 21" monitor, seeming as though you can get those for free these days. One option is to just try it with the computer monitor, and see how you like it. You could always shove the TV back in there. -Ian

Now, what I always wondered, is how is it we know the game is even called Air Raid? There is no text of any kind on the label on the cartridge, and the only text in the game itself is Men-A-Vision. So, how did "Air Raid" get applied to this game? Either someone just made that up at some point, or there was a manual or box for it somewhere along the way. -Ian

The truth comes out! Well, you really did have us going there. That was one elaborate prank... what I don't get is why the ROM image is so huge, but has great big gaping holes in it. Everything from $7F to $1887F (or $0 - $18800, without the header) is just zeroes. -Ian

I found that too, at offset $1FF81. I just assumed this was part of the .A78 rom image format, since the first 128 bytes of the file are header data, I figured that the tail end of the file could be something similar as well. But, looking again, the entire file is 0x2007F bytes long, and minus the first 128 bytes, it comes out to a nice even 0x20000 bytes... What I don't understand is why it crashes at the end of one level here, but not on the video Al made. If this is an April Fool's joke, then you'd think they'd have started with a good dump. -Ian

Pictures in signatures are a huge problem. They're annoying, they take a while to load, and they're distracting. On Usenet, a standard sig block was four lines. Four lines, 80 columns wide isn't a lot - but it's enough to announce a web page, have a cute little quote, or something similar. Some other video game forums (I won't name names) are almost completely unreadable _because_ of the sigs. Pictures, animated gifs, boldface text, it's annoying. Why on earth do you need to put a picture file of any kind at the end of every single post you make? Images are sorely over-used these days on the internet. And in many cases they add nothing. I'd actually forgotten I had a signature - my single little one-line thing. I think I only entered it because when I signed up many years ago, there was a field for "signature". I should probably change it. So yeah, put me in the category of useless sigs - but at least it's not annoying or large. I'm all for allowing sig blocks. But three or four lines of text, no huge fonts or annoying colors, please! Remember when the internet was mostly text? All that glorious information, simple to navigate pages, fast loading even on 28.8kbps. No flash, no Javascript, no cutesy animated menus or annoying, poorly supported code... It was nice. I miss those days.... -Ian

I think it's just a bad dump. I opened this in a hex editor, and at least the first half of the ROM is blank - full of 00's. Which, is odd, since blank on an EPROM is FF. I'd try dumping it again. -Ian

Awesome! This is great. Thank you so much! It worked fine here in (on the PC at work) on the Prosystem emulator. I only played a quick game... shouldn't really be playing games at work... but it seems to work fine. Thanks again! -Ian

$50 seems a bit high, but might be justified seeming as though it has the original box and manuals. I agree with Underball - the console by itself, with controller and power cable, would be about $30. For $50, with the box and everything would be fair to me if it came with a couple games, and both controllers were the 7800 controllers, not just 2600 sticks. -Ian

Hehe -Ian

For a 7800 ROM? Don'tcha mean MESS, or something similar? <grin> There's more info here: http://www.atariage.com/7800/emulation/ind...l?SystemID=7800 You will also need the OS ROM to use the emulator - available at the link above. -Ian

Your computer monitor can't display from PAL inputs - or NTSC inputs for that matter. The refresh rate might be able to be set at 50 or 60 hz, but the scan rates will be totally different. The 15.75khz NTSC scan rate is half what VGA is (31.5khz). This is why it's such a pain to use modern VGA monitors on old computers (like the Amiga). And that doesn't even begin to address the problem of the fact that the output from a game machine isn't usually seperate RGB. If you want to display PAL video on the cheap, check out electronic surplus places and look for an old Sony professional video monitor. I've got a couple, and they display anything. I found mine at an electronics scrap yard. The power cables were cut off, but after attaching new cables and cleaning them up, they all worked fine. They'll display NTSC, PAL, SECAM, and accept composite, S-Video, and RGB. I have a couple of 15 inch models, and a 21 incher (heavy as lead). Also, occasionally you'll find a multistandard/foreign TV. I have one I got from a local Freecycle list - it's a German set, and while the tuner is useless over here, the composite video inputs accept NTSC and PAL. -Ian

Spider Fighter

Yeah - I was initially skeptical about this as well, being so close to April Fool's and what with the wonderful AtariAge history of prank releases. But, now I'm convinced that the game exists. Wether it's a proto or a homebrew... I don't know. Either way, if it does turn out to be a hoax, it's a very well done one. Much better than that lame "Red Sea Crossing" hoax a couple years ago. -Ian

Again with the misplaced buttons... Ugh. I still want one, but man, what a disappointment. You'd think that the positioning of the buttons would be a no brainer - dump the turbo buttons and put two buttons on there in the right order. -Ian

The CRT or the LCD model? They've made a few with that name. -Ian The small LCD ones they made about 5-8 years ago that would go with a G4. Did they make thin CRT versions? I wouldn't say no to one of those if they weren't huge. Tempest They're huge. Bigger than most CRT monitors. The plastic casing is large and curved, with a large curved base, and the Trinitron picture tube makes them weigh a ton. But they certainally do have a nice picture -Ian

The CRT or the LCD model? They've made a few with that name. -Ian

Congrats Joe! I had loved watching Prototype This, but never knew it was _our_ Joe Grand until I saw this thread. I should have connected the dots sooner, but... -Ian