SmileyDude

Nice -- I will admit that I have used an Apple II once or twice... ok a lot. But, honestly, I don't know how someone could say that the graphics capabilities of the Apple II are better than the Atari or the C-64 (as much as I despise that machine, I have to give it credit where its due). The Apple II's advantages were expandability and durability. There was very little you could do to those things that would harm then, and you certainly can't beat having direct access to the CPU bus for expandability. Once Apple started invading the schools, it's collection of educational software became another advantage. Now, on a personal level, I like the Apple IIs, but I don't consider them in the same league as the Atari. They both have their uses -- for example, I don't think that the Atari is as good at tasks like word processing as the Apple II -- the 80 column cards for the Apple II along with those monochrome displays made the Apple II superior for that purpose. But, now that we all have PCs (or Macs) with really high resolution displays, we all use that for our word processing needs. This basically reduces the uses for an Apple II these days. On the other hand, there is definetly something to be said about hooking up the old Atari 800XL to the TV, and playing some of the old classic games. Sure, you can use an emulator, but it's just not authentic. So, in that regard, the Atari still has some purpose these days. So, even though I used both back in my younger days, and I enjoyed both, it's the Atari that still gets used, while the Apple IIs sit, gathering dust. Maybe it's because the Apple II is the logical parent to the PC, and we've all moved on to better PCs... while the Atari 8-bit lead to the Amiga which died a horrible death. There is no real equivalent to that style of hardware design these days, unless you count some of the consoles (the GBA comes close, IMO... but still not as flexible as the Atari gear). It's sad, but powerful hardware lost out to commodity hardware, and we're all stuck with it today.

"So, where do you plug in the video card at on this thing? I want to play Quake..." while looking at a 2600

Something seems very very wrong with the last part of that quote... is that a line from Beat 'em and Eat 'em?

"Just 2 more carts, and I'll cross the 10,000 mark for Combat carts, oh boy!" erm, wait, I guess that is possible...

Our beloved Atari 8-bits have SAM for them as well... my first introduction to SAM was at school -- we had a lab of Atari 800s with 810s, and one of the activities dealt with playing a game using SAM. This was before I understood much about the Atari, and I ended up spending that night trying to get my little Atari 400 to talk But, hey, it isn't as bad as it sounds -- we had a TI-99/4A with the speech module, so I didn't think it was out of the ordinary that the much better Atari could talk without anything extra. Of course, I figured out quickly what happened

I do GBA programming in my spare time -- very fun stuff. I'm also looking into doing some GameCube deving as well. In the past, I've played a bit with the TI-99/4A and Apple IIs as well.

I'll like whichever label is on the cart that I end up getting... Of course, I somehow have to convince my wife that spending $200 on Atari stuff is a "good thing" And I'm not even including the MMC card and reader, and the 7800 that I'm gonna have to buy to use it

Yeah -- those are causing me a serious headache... I'll have to spend some serious thought on those... Enemies? The only "enemy" that I recall was the missiles that randomly got fired at Jumpman... at least in the early levels... gonna have to spend some more time with the Atari 800XL and my Jumpman Jr cart tonight I was actually thinking of doing the up ropes with the playfield, and using the missiles for the down ropes... well, multiplexing one missile for the down ropes, and the other for, well, the missiles And, the ball is pretty much a given for the bombs... I can't see getting around that one I am definetly going to have sit down and figure out how to setup the kernel for this one... very tight timing requirements here. I'm just hoping that I don't have to write a custom kernel for each level Heh -- I'm not discouraged yet -- if anything was gonna do it, it would've been the lowly specs of the 2600... but, since that didn't do it, this could prove very interesting.

Yes -- it's Jumpman Jr. -- ironically, I've never played the original Jumpman... must've had something to do with the fact that I had an Atari 400 with 410... so, I stuck to playing cart games mostly Later on, when I upgraded to a 1200XL with 1050, I didn't get a chance to play the original... I finally got to try out the original in an emulator, but since I'm really familiar with Jr., that's what I'm gonna work on

I'm sorting out some email issues at the moment... as soon as I do that, I'll probably sign up

I'll definetly keep you in mind -- I know I'll have a few technical hurdles, and having someone to help out will be great I actually hadn't thought of that, but now that I know, that makes it that much better LOL -- too early Let me get the complete board up on the screen first I've got to re-write the kernel before that can happen -- I've been spending the last 6 hours of sleep and showering thinking about how to implement this. I'm sure before this project is over, I'll be writing the kernel code in my sleep too

Ok, so I just spent tonight trying out an idea -- I still don't know if it's gonna pan out, but I've only just started For those who are curious as to what I have choosen to persue, I've attached a screenshot -- I'm sure someone will be able to guess as to what game it's supposed to be As for the other ideas, I'm gonna hold onto them. Especially considering that I don't know how well this idea is gonna pan out. One sad thing -- if I continue along with this game, it's definetly gonna blow out the 4k limit I set for myself

I just attached an updated version -- the only changes are the ones suggested by DEBRO. BTW, how did you determine that I was only displaying 259 scan lines, DEBRO? I'm assuming that you used an emulator -- if so, which one?

A Cuttle cart for the 8-bits would be kinda nice, but I think that something that plugged into the SIO port would be better. Or maybe the expansion port on the XL or XE. Using today's hardware, you could easily have a small device that could simulate a 810/1050 and allow you to play disc based games. It would basically be a mini-hard drive for the Atari. The good thing is that it would probably be about the size of a cart, and there wouldn't be any incompatibility issues -- i.e, if the game plays off a disc, it should play off this device. For the truely ambitious, it could be made to emulate a 410 as well -- for those classic tape based games I still remember the music that played when loading "States and Capitals"... so 70's

I got mine with DK64 -- didn't seem to add anything to the price of the game, so for all intents and purposes, I got my expansion pack for free. Remember, the N64 uses Rambus, not normal SDRAM -- so, at the time the N64 was hitting the market, it might've caused the system to cost another $50 or so (I dunno -- just tossing a figure out). And now they're just charging more for the expansion pack due to supply and demand. I think I'd have to disagree with the statement that Nintendo is not customer friendly -- while it is true that they have to earn a profit, they seem more customer friendly than Microsoft or Sony in some ways... I'd be surprised if you can somehow order a replacement battery cover for a Sony Walkman that was sold back in 1989. On the other hand, I can easily purchase a replacement battery cover for the original GB (and if I'm not mistaken, you can also get the link port cover that used to come standard on the original). Same goes for Microsoft -- try ordering the manual for Windows 3.0 from them sometime... but, on the other hand, you can get the manuals for old GB games from Nintendo -- as long as they made the game. I still think Nintendo takes waaaay too much flak for all that they have done. I'm not trying to say that they are perfect, but I think people tend to have zero tollerance with Nintendo when they are willing to take any turd that comes out of Sony or Microsoft and call it gold Sorry for the rant I'm gonna go back to playing Advance Wars 2 again...

pry it out -- it's in there tight, but it does come out. Luckily, you only have to do this once

wow -- they really crank these releases out I think I'll just settle for .70 for right now especially since I picked up one of the 3 DVD sets from the MAME burners group

I bet they could've pulled off a 16-bit version of the XLs just as fast, and had a better product -- similar to the Apple IIgs. They might've had a good chance at surviving if they had concentrated on upgrading their existing customers to newer, backwards compatible gear, but the insisted with breaking away from the past. I imagine part of the reason why they did this was because of Apple -- the Atari 8-bit -> 16-bit transition looks alot like the Apple 8-bit -> 16-bit transistion. But I think what Atari didnt see is that it was only going to be a 2 horse race, and Apple already had the jump on the second horse. Another factor is that due to the price difference between an Apple II and the Atari 8-bits, the existing Atari customers probably didn't have the money to upgrade to an entirely new system (I know I didn't ), so they stuck with what they had, or traded it for something else (C-64, NES, etc). Meanwhile, the ST was stuck with trying to get new customers. BTW, it's pretty easy to blame the Trammels for all of Atari's problems in the 80's and 90s, but to be fair, some of the blame has to go to Warner. If they would've been more aggressive with moving Atari forward, they wouldn't have fire saled Atari to the Trammels. There is absolutely no reason why the 400/800 line couldn't have had some more impressive upgrades over the years... 3 case changes and more RAM about sums it up (sadly enough) -- oh, and progressively making the keyboard worse Yet, years later, people are upgrading their machines with dual-POKEYs for stereo sound -- why didn't Atari do something like this? That would've been a good marketing point -- 8-channels of stereo sound -- take that, C-64 fanboys Oh well, it's too late now to fix that... but it is frustrating to see now what Atari could've been after living through what it became.

Ironic, huh? As far as my recolection goes, I honestly wasn't aware of the crash until a few years after it happened. But, then again, we weren't exactly contributing to the crash -- we bought the 2600, 5200, 7800, and Vectrex when they were new In fact, because of the 2600 adaptor for the 5200, we bought both a 2 port and 4 port 5200. On the computer side, we had a couple of 400s, a 1200XL, and finally a 65XE. Some were new, some were pass me downs, but we kept buying software for all of the machines. Sadly, we sold off most of the 2600 stuff and the 1200XL... but, between myself and my dad, we still have most of everything else -- he has the Vectrex, the 7800, and at least one of the 5200s... most of the games are with him, but some are scattered about at my house. I have most of the computer stuff. I think the only way the crash effected me was that we didn't get an NES -- 7800 games were just too cheap to pass up at the time, and by the time we had moved on, the GameBoy had just came out, and I moved to the GB for my new gaming needs. So, the irony in my story is that the crash probably hurt Nintendo more than Atari in my house

That's to be expected... IMO, by the time you get to lesson 19, you're no longer a beginner... anybody that can get the 2600 to display anything is not a beginner anymore. They're not experts or anything remotely approaching the talent of people like yourself or Andrew, but definetly worthy of having discussions such as this Hiding complexity doesn't do any good, especially in a subject such as this -- eventually, they have to learn it anyway.

While I'm thinking of it, I thought I might explain a bit of the magic I'm only using two colors per line -- the background color and the playfield color. I have a table of colors stored in RAM (eek ) that I use in the kernel to set the registers. I cheat a bit, and set the background color with the low bit set -- since the TIA only displays 128 colors, it ignores this bit. But, I can simply do an INX and get the next luminance for the playfield color So, after it sets the colors, it simply sets the PFx registers. I was extremely lazy on this point, so for each line, I have the values for each of the PFx registers in the table. For the text that I'm displaying, this is extremely wasteful. But, someone could use the extra vertical resolution if they wanted to with no code modifications. Offscreen, I simply update the positions of all the bars and 'redraw' the bars by setting the colors in the RAM table. I sort the bars first, so that the bar that's on top get's 'drawn' last. There are two tables for the rotation -- a depth table that says how big each bar will be drawn -- and a position table that has the top line of the bar. These are both indexed off the angle, and for simplicity, I made the index go from 0-255. Makes it really easy to rotate, since all I have to do is keep doing a INC for the angle on each bar I wanted to use the other parts of the screen for something else, but considering that I've used up most of the RAM right now, I would have to seriously think about how to reduce some of that usage. I still might try my hand at putting some music in there... Now that I've explained it, the mystique will probably be gone -- but I did put the source in there, so it's not like I was trying to hide it I would love to see someone take this and make something really cool with it -- I just don't have the time to work on a full-blown 2600 project at this time. I would love to do it, but as we all know, 2600 programming doesn't put food on the table

Besides Atari??? Heh, yes -- it's fairly easy to replace the graphics. There are 6 tables at the end of the cart that contain the values for PF0, PF1, and PF2 for both the left and right side of the screen. All that would need to be done is to generate some new values for the tables Should be possible, but it would require a big kernel redesign. It would also likely require some changes to the way I calculate bar-colors and positions as well... I have some ideas on how to change this, but I'll have to play with it to see if I can pull them off Thank you for the suggestions... as soon as I get the chance, I'll implement the changes Speaking of showing on the TV, did anyone try this on a real 2600? I don't have the necessary equipment, so everything was done with Stella (and later tested with z26)... I'd be real interested in seeing in on the real thing

Dunno if this is the right spot, but I'm posting a little demo I wrote for the 2600 It's a fairly basic rotating copper bar demo. In fact, it's an adaptation of a program that I played around with on the GBA. This is my first 2600 program of any substance, so please be gentle I mainly wanted to release it so it doesn't just rot away on my hard drive Hopefully, someone can get some use out of it... Binary and source are included -- enjoy 3dcopper.zip

You know, the idea might seem dumb, but it actually has some merit -- you are still able to plug your cart into any Atari 2600 out there, and play a game that would've been impossible without any outside assistance. This is another variation along the lines of Andrew's ChronoColor demo -- it's something that just would not have been possible to pull off back when the 2600 was in it's heyday, but now with the powerful PCs we have for development, emulators for debugging, and the ability to build carts with virtually unlimited amounts of storage, we can do so much more with it. BTW, Andrew, I'm not trying to trivialize your effort -- there is obviously a lot of skill and thought that goes into your code. And, from what I understand of tearex's idea, someone would still need that skill to do anything worthwhile on this. Personally, I would love to be able to have a cart that had a modern CPU in it (ARM based? ) that could feed the 2600... that would be pretty neat to play with. You still have to deal with limitations of the 2600, so it's not like you're going to be able to have really modern looking games, but it does give you some more power to do some neat stuff with the 2600. Heck, I would settle for another 6502 that could work in tandem with the CPU -- maybe have some dedicated RAM/ROM for the cart 6502, and then some RAM that would be available for code to run on the 6507 in the 2600. At least this way, it would satisfy the purists, because everything on the cart was at least out when the 2600 was being produced

Nice -- I was actually contemplating a GBA port of GTA awhile back. I'm too busy right now to actually take it up, but having something like this might spur me to start working on it For a first pass, I was thinking of doing pretty much a straight port, with the original graphics. The second pass would be to update the graphics, sounds, menus, etc, for the GBA I spent sooo much time playing GTA as a kid... that and Jumpman Junior. Mostly because those were both cart based, and my lowly 400 with the 410 was just too slow Ahh, those were the days