Propane13

A lot of these contests are trick questions. My guess is that there are zero cartridges.

To be honest, well.... this kind of disturbs me. A lot. For about 8 months now, I knew that Lance at Video 61 was creating 3 Atari 2600 SuperCart titles. Problem was, that a suitable 2600 board and hardware could not be found, so they were placed on a 7800 board. The "extra graphics" I don't think are anything at all. Lance had mentioned that if you put the ROMs on a 7800 board, the graphics "cleaned themselves up automatically". Being a programmer, this didn't make any sense whatsoever to me. Todd Frye's genius for Save Mary (very redeeming after Pac-Man) in my opinion should not be tampered with by people wishing to "clean up" his work, and my guess is that no one did. Anyhoo, the 3 titles were Save Mary, Shootin Arcade, and Klax 2600. It looks like Klax 2600 isn't out yet. Why re-release *New* Klax and Sentinel 7800? This is taking away from those who have already put in gobs of effort to do this. I know that Tizoc and Lee Kreuger worked really really hard to make these. Lee's price = $40 (http://home.earthlink.net/~resqsoft/products.htm) There was a lot of effort and love for the 7800 demosntrated in these productions. And, they're cheaper than the $45. My advice is to buy from them. The prices on Atari7800.com have always been astronomical, and I don't think are a deal. They look to be ripping off people who don't know that they could do any better with a little bit of extra looking, as they can get the same thing for 1/4 the price. A mindlink game? Who's going to play that? AFAIK, the mindlink sucked as a peripheral. In my mind, keeping everything a secret until now has been detrimental. I'm just glad that I didn't produce any carts of my Impossible Mission bugfix, as I'd probably be screwed in selling them now. And why didn't you inform me? That's just gonna piss me off. Jindroush, have you created any copies? If so, you're probably pissed as well. Of course, since no one bothered to check with me, there's no reason I can't release the same thing independently for 5 dollars less (hell, I envision it could be done for $30 or even $20, depending on HW costs) just because I love the hobby and want people to experience the 7800 for what it is. I'm not a business. Sorry for the negative attitude, but this information looks like a lot of people are getting screwed, both out of money and out of their efforts because of some secret stuff done "in the background". Note that I will be posting my Impossible Mission bugfix ROM info later today, so people can play it on emulators. I was planning to save it until I did some publishing, but now... what's the point? Thanks, -John K. Harvey

One of the weird things about th test cartridge was the fact that to put it into 2600 mode, it put the mode into TEST MODE A, which according to the manual is "something you're not supposed to do, ever". So, further on, it may be testing some interesting writes to CTRL, or doing some other bizarre behavior outside of the scope of the manual. These potential oddities that come up during the ROM's execution may be what's causing it to fail. I do know that it takes awhile for the actual diagnostics to occur. Have we waited a sufficient amount of time to see if it actually does work? Maybe support is already there, but we're stopping the cart before it's finished... If TEST MODE A dumps the 7800 into 2600 mode, then I wonder what TEST MODE B does? -John K. Harvey

Hmm.. is the DMA (i.e. MARIA) on the 7800 smart enough to pull the RDY line low while the 6502 is in phase 1, or is it not necessarily smart enough to do this? Just a curious thought. Thanks, -John K. Harvey

Do you have this posted somewhere? I think I'd like to do the "start-from-scratch" method, and wipe out all bad files from the beginning. Thanks, -John K. Harvey

I wouldn't expect the diagnostic cart to work-- it basically tests the limitations of the 6502 hardware, and then if there is something funny happening, it goes into "Atari 2600 mode" to display a yuk face. I've got a partial disassembly of it, but it's not very exciting. If you have a hacked Atari 7800 or can find a way to put the 7800 cart in your 2600 cart, the yuk face will come up, as proof that it's running 2600 routines. It basically does a write to RAM at $2000, re-reads it, and if it's different from what was written there, it goes into 2060 mode. Likewise, any further errors dump it into 2600 mode. So, support of this cart is probably quite useless, and may entail a bunch of work. -John K. Harvey

Just an idea: Would it be possible to put the all working files into a big zip file somewhere? Otherwise, I'd have to download each version and do a file-compare against the version I have to get up-to-date. Of course, this requires some space... -John K. Harvey

If you don't have a hacked BIOS, then it should do the Atari screen, fail the encryption check, and just become a blank screen. My guess is the cart's hosed somewhere. Just a guess. Does the screen go black, or are there some Alien Brigade characters showing up in places? -John K. Harvey

I never got a Title Match-- hmm... now that I think about it, I only assumed it to be worth about $30. How much do they usually go for on ebay? I guess my lack of paying attention may be costing me. How much did they cost other people? Thanks, -John K. Harvey

I was wondering-- does the 6502 experience any erratic behavior if you HALT the processor during a complicated multi-cycle instruction (i.e. a post-indexed indirect Load instruction)? Basically, if in the middle of processing this instruction, wil a HALT followed by stopping the HALT have the processor act as normal, or will some of the instruction fetch's get messed up, or is there some sort of dependency on the data bus? I'm not a hardware guy, so I hope I phrased this right. Let me know if you need more clarification. Hopefully, I asked it correctly. Thanks, -John K. Harvey

What brand of hard drive? -John K. Harvey

me too. But, I don't have the heart to open it up in order to have a version that's playable on actual hardware Gotta love those Froggo guys--- -John K. Harvey

hmm... on their website, you've got the following: Alfred Challenge (ebi01) Merlin's Wall (ebi02) Pesco (ebi03) Allia Quest (ebi06) Power Off ! (ebi07) I can assume that the Pac-Man fix is ebi04 or ebi05. But I wonder what the other one is... Thanks, -John K. Harvey

I've seen unboxed ones go for $85 plus. Shoulda been watching last week, apparently. -John K. Harvey

Using Trey's tool, "Pitfall 2" seems to be a solution (best game ever, man) -John K. Harvey

yeah, but we saw the actual case! -John K. Harvey

I tried Marble Craze at the expo, and that sealed the deal. I've now currently got an order going through Hozer. There's some neat stuff in the game. Definitely worth looking at, at the very least. And, it's got some neat programming tricks that had me saying "umm--- how'd ya do that?" Worth a peek at the least, if not a tiny investment if you can push a bit further. -John K. Harvey

Has anyone tried emailing him, or is he not answering that anymore either? It'll be quite hard to dump a game or get video footage when all you really have is doctored pictures. I wonder what would have been put on ebay; most likely a Combat Cart, opened up, with the ROM either damaged, or removed with a replacement EPROM in place that has some random data on it. Then you could claim that "ooh, well, it worked when I sent it to you. Screenshots are evidence. Buyer beware." Thanks, -John K. Harvey BTW, this was the most interesting thread I've read EVER. This is one for history

On reading my post again, I'll clarify: I'm not charging for people to motivate me to talk to the copyright owner-- I'm talking about the cart price being cheap (end product) Ahh, it's great to post some vague gibberish in the mornings. -John K. Harvey

Yeah, I have created a working NTSC version. I believe someone else (Jindroush or Jahfish perhaps?) has created one that works as well. Problem is, I need to negociate (negotiate? I never spell that right...)releasing the fix with the current owner of the copyright. So, someone needs to get me motivated to do that. I would probably only charge cost of development, plus a coupla bucks for effort, so I hope it would be pretty cheap. Would people be interested in actually buying something like this? I know that 7800 fans are a limited target group. Thanks, -John K. Harvey

http://www.dragonsword.com/airworld/ Guess I got here too late. Anyone save a copy of the page? It would be neat to see the images, even if they are not legit. Thanks, -John K. Harvey

As a kid, many years ago, I was always freaked out by Star Raiders late at night, with the lights off. When in that last battle, and your ship gets destroyed, I always freaked out. Horrible feeling. Those 3 lone tones always made me uneasy. -John K. Harvey

Hmm.. if it's failing on actual hardware (by Cuttle cart), then it could be working or failing because of system used (I know some 6502 derivatives eliminated illegal op-codes). What real hardware has this been verified on? Thanks, -John K. Harvey

As a footnote, I've got a theory that the initial configuration of Impossible Mission is based on a the state of a RAM location on the cartridge itself (inside the 8K). I've noticed that my powerup screens tend to stay the same on different 7800s for the same copy of the game, but differ when I swap out the RAM for a different one, or if I use a different cartridge with a different powerup map. Can anyone else with multiple 7800s and multiple copies of Impossible Mission verify? Thanks, -John K. Harvey

Hmm... well, Pressure Gauge II got stopped because I hit some walls, and didn't know where to go from here. I wasn't sure how to make less than 4-player option games. I suppose I could have written some AI, but I didn't really get the chance to do that. The other option was to blank out the other players, but that would still reduce it to at least 2 players. That, and I couldn't come up with a more exciting opening screen, and a way to really end the game. I got hit with a lot of design constraints There are currently no plans to pick it up, but I suppose if I got interested again, I could put it in a simple finalized state, and make it available through Hozer. -John K. Harvey