KAZ

In my spreadsheet I actually needed to stick an "N" before the "user defined" space. So it would look like: N00000000 (8 0's) I'm having a rough time getting the formatting to stick for the hexadecimal. At first I thought this was working: N$00 Two letters works fine like this: $FF works as does $BB Also two numbers will work: $89 $05 But when you try a number and a letter combination, it will switch one to a number: $F3 will change to: $00 It is frustrating that the spreadsheet doesn't give me an option just to accept whatever I type into the columns. It is a "Corel Spreadsheet". I've used Excel before, and it is just fine...but I don't have that currently installed, because I don't have the installation disk to it. The reason I'm going to this trouble is because I want only the data that is most pertinent to me to be displayed, so that I can help myself figure out the numbering systems.

I know I've said it before, but Odyssey 2 has a strange "aura" about it. My friend says he used to play the system non-stop when he was in the 4th grade, playing countless games of Turtles, and Pick axe Pete. I had never ever seen the system, but since my friend was being intensely nostalgic, I decided to grab the emulator, so we could both play those games. It was ok, turtles is a pretty decent game. But here's the real deal. I was at The Midwest Classic on June 8th, and got to see an actual Odyssey 2 up close. It was simply a cool looking system, its design was just neat. It has a voice system thing, in the middle towards the left side is a button that looks "caved" in. That feature alone makes this a gem of an old system in my opinion!

I emailed you General Atarian. My Atari 2600 collection is at: 67 Unique titles.

Not to mention 10 nintendo consoles...all stacked up in that picture. It was funny how he described the terms of delivery... 5 HUGE boxes each day for a month, or something like that. rofl!

Does anyone have a really simple BASIC program I can try on this? The pinball program from a previous thread didn't work for me. The only thing that did work was: PRINT "HELLO" I tried this program, from Liquid Sky: 5 PRINT "Coin Flipper!" 10 PRINT : PRINT "How many flips?" : : INPUT N 20 IF N<1 THEN END 30 K=0 : PRINT And I completed the rest of it till the end...but then after I hit the last return, nothing happened?! After some lines I was given an error, and went back and corrected those-so that all lines were "valid".

Idea Revolutions: Have you played Mr. Roboto by Paul Slocum? It is a musical hack of the existing Berserk rom. You can play it on an emulator of course. This would give you some idea of the "potential" for music the Atari 2600 has. Maybe you can talk more about your synthcart technology Paul? That was a very excellent musical score in Mr. Roboto, almost a full 4 minutes worth of Styx music.

A store by the name of "Cedar Cliff Collectibles" is on the bidder list for this enormous, huge, lot! As you may have heard me say in the past, this awesome store is located about 15 miles from The Mall of America. I actually picked up my Spiderman, and a few other games from here. So if this lot does go to Cedar Cliff, that would be pretty cool. How did the seller have all this stuff at his residence? Amazing, how could he fit it all in?

Since trying to learn programming for the Atari 2600, I have a much better appreciation of the effort/knowledge it takes to make a video game (even the "bad" ones). In another thread, I heard people criticizing the sound effects in Atari 2600 games such as Pac-Man, Smurfs, ET, Freeway, or whatever. Fact is, I won't be criticizing ANY video games until I firmly understand what you need to know to program them, especially Atari 2600 games. How would I generate a sound effect like the opening tune in Atari 2600 Pac-Man? I frankly don't even know, but I hope to know sometime in the next few months, as I study more about assembly. Now there are several for-real programmers who are on these message boards. Thomas, Dan Boris, Nukey Shay, and NE146, and others... You guys have the right to criticize ANY of these games, because you probably have made better ones yourselves. For example, you could demonstrate, through principles in assembly, that the maker of the 4k Pac-Man for the 2600 could have easily done this or that to improve on their game, but took the "easy" way out just to release a game and make a profit. I'd say the same thing about movie critics, music critics, etc. etc.

Great! Thanks for the info. The custom numbering in Excel was perfect. That table was pretty useful too... The next book that I've been reading is much more "conversational" to read. He uses alot of analogies to how many memory locations there are. He uses BASIC throughout the book to demonstrate assembly language/machine language. This means that I pretty much have to download atari800win, and see if I can get BASIC working. I was hoping I'd be able to ignore BASIC entirely, since I won't be programming in its language anyway, but now it seems clear that I pretty much need to Programs actually written in BASIC would run alot slower than those written in assembly. I think it is because assembly is closer to machine language than BASIC is, or actually because BASIC needs an interpreter program before it is ready to be transformed into machine language.

It was mainly the music on Ryu Stage. That's where I seem to notice it the most for some reason. It doesn't seem to affect game play, but sometimes it does seem like the playstation is having a rough time accessing the disk. The introduction music to Tekken 2 was fine as far as I could tell. Thanks for all the suggestions, I'll be continuing to try to figure out what is the problem. The issue isn't having to get a new Street Fighter disk, but I am curious if it is the game (which I suspect it is the game just being plain overplayed, and the disk is "fried" or something). I looked closely at my playstation disk again, and there is only one tiny smudge near the middle of it, maybe a fingerprint. There is no "cloudyness" on it. It even looks pretty flat and not warped for what I can see. And as for the model of my playstation, how can I determine that?

Last question before I go to bed: Did the Atari 2600 use: the 6502 microprocessor or the 6507 microprocessor or both? I would assume that studying on 6502 assembly language is still appropriate, as I think I read that the 6507 is only slightly different...more address lines, and no interrupt (whatever that means).

What an impossible problem I'm having now... I'm trying to make a spreadsheet listing out binary numbers, hexadecimal numbers, and decimal numbers because this is the hardest problem I'm having, since I'm always staring at $A4 or $18 But it won't let me put in binary numbers like: 00000001 (7 0's) I even tried changing the format of the column to TEXT, but that doesn't work either. It allows me to put a custom format in, but I don't what to put in. If I write in: 00000001, the spreadsheet will turn this into just: 1

I take really good care of my video game stuff... My friend and I have logged literally thousands of hours in the past 3 or more years playing Street Fighter Collection 2 for the Sony Playstation. I notice that the sound is actually starting to sound glitchy. It sounds like it is going in and out sometimes. I don't see any fingerprints/dirt/grime on the playstation disk. It is in peak condition as far as I can tell. (I've seen "bad" disks from rental places that are just covered with fingerprints). I don't rent them usually because of this, or I clean them really well. Is it at all possible that I simply wore this game out from overplaying it? My other games seem to be doing fine. I just played Rage Racer, and yesterday I was playing Tekken 2. No sound problems with either of those two games. My friend's controller also took its last breath over the weekend. He's been playing with it for the last like 2 years, and it has gone through alot of abuse. (Those controllers can stand up to intense smashing, you wouldn't believe). I never abuse my controller. Anything like this happen to anyone else ever? After playing on a game for countless thousands of hours? There is a slight chance I suppose that this disk is a bit warped.....being put in and out of my playstation so much, I just don't know.

Did your Atari 2600 ever work for you, did this come on all of a sudden? What do you see on the screen?

The best part about this site is there's no popup windows... Except for the ocassional private message popup which is more than welcome to see.

I just noticed the cool new "buttons" on the pages, very nice. This site just gets better and better... I just noticed this poll...and just voted now. I assume that a person can't vote more than once? Is that coded in or something preventing people from doing this? The only thing is still the editing that takes about 2 minutes, which I know you will be fixing with the faster hardware soon.

It better have a watermark on it for security purposes! It most certainly should gradually taper in color from dark to light also! Keep up the good work, there has to be a fun way to make collecting even more pleasurable....I think you are on the right track. Like here's a far fetched idea... someone would start a website for collectors. Those who choose to join the website would have to demonstrate their "annual income level" or some such thing. And there would be a tier system....whereby certificates (like the one you made) would be given to people reaching different collecting levels. A person making $15,000 a year would not be in the same category as someone who makes $80,000 a year, as far as awarding certificates. And it would all be in good fun anyway, and the members would voluntarily devulge this information for the sake of having "bragging rights" when it came to collecting. Just an idea, nothing more

So I just spent the last two hours reading more of this book. So I read about the difference between JMP functions and Branch functions (BEQ for example) I read about "zeroing out binary numbers", and how to "multiply" and "divide" numbers in memory locations, by using Rotate Right or Left commands (ROR and ROL). And if this wasn't already intensely difficult to grasp, his next chapter "Addressing Modes" totally gave me a headache. If it wasn't "Indirect Indexed Addressing" it was "Indexed Indirect Addressing". Suffice to say I got absolutely nothing out of reading those 10 pages. He did start talking about using text editors and about the actual assembling of programs (right up my alley with dasm). Tho I'm not exactly finished reading this 100 page book, I'm moving on to my other two checked out books. Maybe I'll get through more chapters before becoming completely confused! Wish me luck!

The only way for it to end is if the moderators were to lock it. But ET would be left out in the cold...would you do this to him? He's was already buried in New Mexico, and had cement poured on him, so I don't think he could handle any more abuse! He's crying out for someone to save him....being buried in that rubble for the past 20 years. He was made to be played on the Atari 2600. Reminds me somewhat of that movie: AI That little boy was discarded, and it was a pretty sad ending overall. Oh ET, can you forgive mankind for imprisoning you in that cement tomb??

Thanks alot for the excellent answers, I do understand it pretty much completely now. Your explanations were really clear... These numbering systems, even tho I understand them theoretically, will take some getting used to. Hexadecimal (Base 16) is pretty straightforward: 0123456789ABCDEF then you would continue: 10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,1A,1B,1C,1D,1E,1F,20 I've actually had some "experience" with hexadecimal using things like Game Sharks and Game Genies for game systems. A Game shark for instance only uses these hexadecimal numbers for the code Sometimes a game will start glitching out if you use a code, and sometime you can actually see a number transform into a hexadecimal right on the video game screen. It is neat to have seen that, and now to learn why it happens. Well this programming stuff is hard to learn, but the rewards at the end should be worth it. I'm doing this as a hobby, and just for fun. I want to say that "I programmed game" sometime during my life. It looks like this stuff is so deep, that you really can't just learn it off a couple documents online, you really need a good book like I have now. Just reading the first couple chapters, and I'm further along in one night than I was in the last month. I just had to find the right reading material.

Here's where I was confused about binary: from the book: "If we counted the fingers of our two hands in binary, we would count like this: 1,10,11, 100, 101,110,111,1000,1001,1010" So 11 would be a decimal of 3 100 would be a decimal of 4 1001 would be a decimal of 9, etc. etc. But earlier on in the page he listed a binary number like this: 01011110 He says that it would translate into a decimal of 94! I don't get it. I didn't think that a binary could start with a "0", using the counting I just wrote. I DO know however, from earlier on, what a 1 and a 0 do in a microprocessor: Each signal in a microprocessor can take on two forms: A high voltage signal or a low voltage signal a "1" is a high voltage a "0" is a low voltage And that's where I'm at in my learning

So here's what I've learned so far... In the 6502 Microprocessor there are 6 registers: A, SR, X, Y, SP, and PC The first 5 have 8 bits (a bit being a series of 8 binary numbers) The last one (PC) has 16 bits There are commands in assembly language that can transfer (copy) the contents of one register into another Some of these are: TAX (transfer A to X) TXA TAY TYA Operation codes can go at the end of these commands (called op-codes) All arithmetic procedures are done in the "A" register Ok, but I have a question about binary...

How about limiting how much of Stan's posts are displayed? Like only the first 6 words, or the last 8 words are displayed. Or maybe every 4th word of his posts are displayed. I agree with Stan, his point was well thought out, and consise. It is an honor for my post to be viewed along side his on the same page!!

I seriously played this game on Friday night at about 11:30pm. I was showing a couple of my friends the game, since they said they remembered it. The theme music at the beginning was pretty much the only good thing about it, and after that the game started getting progressively more horrible each second I played it. The sounds of those footsteps of those guys chasing ET, that just pissed me off. Oh yeah, and this beloved thread must not be forgotton also!!

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