leech

March 17

1 minute ago, BDW said:

Seek professional help

Ha, no kidding. What is wrong with this dude? He calls out the 8bit guy for being a jerk, acts like a total turd himself, and then blocks anyone for calling him out on it. Kind of sounds like the 8bit guy may have reacted to him in the same way we have, and were called jerks for it and blocked.

Some people have too much self-worth, apparently.

March 17

2 hours ago, Arnuphis said:

Pure gold. Complains about 8-bit guy being pompous and arrogant, then acts in a pompous and arrogant manner when asked to elaborate...

I was going to say the exact same thing. I want to be in the cool kids group and get ignored by this guy too! That way he will be left without seeing my amazing quips.

March 16

8 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

True, but if the PCB is already designed and can use off-the-shelf components, there's no reason not to.

Having said that: I'm not in total disagreement with what you're proposing, and can see some definite advantages to it. However, there is an opportunity here to recreate something that Atari never released for sale but that was getting close to being ready to market. This is where I see the expansion cards as being beneficial: if people want to build Z80, 80-column, etc. cards, they can - but it also leaves room for a FujiNet-style approach where modern hardware interfaces with the machine using its stock expansion slots and bus.

Note that I'm saying this as someone looking right at both a FujiNet and a Concerto sitting on his desk, so I'm in no way opposed to modern hardware being used with 8-bit machines

I still need to get a Concerto... also an 80 column display for my 800 or 1200xl... or maybe one of the 800xls, can't decide which I want to type on..

March 16

1 minute ago, danwinslow said:

i don't know that I personally would want an EXACT copy. Seems like we could do it better/faster/cheaper with at least some modern tech and still preserve the essential 8 bit nature. Easier to source parts, as well.

Yeah, I mean the ones I would be interested in is the memory and the 80 column display card!

March 15

Who else has the capabilities to help finish this up? Would be pretty sweet to get the 1090XL after all these years...

March 14

2 hours ago, mos6507 said:

Hahaha, I have seen this video. It was epic fail. We've all done something stupid before (I ruined our 1050 when I was young by opening it up and pulling out the happy chip, ti see what it looked like, then when I put it in, I didn't notice the pins were offset by one row... we had to send it off for repair, and we never saw it again...

March 12

1 hour ago, Stephen said:

Gorgeous! What a shame we couldn't have had our Zelda clone back in the mid 80s. The hardware definitely could have supported it, there was just no time and money to be spent creating it.

100% I mean this looks amazing. And just goes to show how truly capable the old GTIA/ANTIC really is.

March 12

39 minutes ago, CyranoJ said:

It was the Turbo button for +2 numberwang.

I once was able to find a +3 numberwang, but it had the curse of having more wang than number, so I left it behind for a hobbit.

March 12

2 minutes ago, sirlynxalot said:

I think it was the 64bit mode button that applied high res textures to every 3d model and upped the framerate. It was part of the original Flare design but the Tramiels took it off so they could sell it as an add on part, like the AV cable.

It is the hidden button on the inside of the controller that was going to launch Battlewheels, but they forgot about it until Hasbro found it in the plans, and then decided not to release that one random gem.

March 11

On 3/9/2021 at 12:14 AM, CyranoJ said:

That isn't a combo button. It's done in software and 100% optional.

Ha, I was saying it as tongue in cheek. Was there a button 18 that was removed later?

March 11

6 minutes ago, Albert said:

Time for another update!

I received the manuals last Saturday! 19 boxes worth of manuals (for 32 different games, most new, but some old as well) and they all look fantastic! Although it was painful going back and forth, resulting in five sets of physical proofs, it paid off since all the manuals came out great. The only missing piece now is the label order. Last week I received a full set of label proofs, and everything looked perfect except for four of the Atari 2600 end labels (an issue with the black on those). More proofs for just those labels were sent out yesterday and I should have them on Saturday. Assuming those look good, that entire label order will go into production.

In the meantime, I continue to solder and build games.

I'll post some photos of the label proofs later.

..Al

It will soon be upon us!

March 9

51 minutes ago, Lynxpro said:

Because Warner decided to retain Atari Coin/Games since it was profitable at the time. They later sold it to Namco when it ended up owing them some money.

The consoles would've done better had they ended up in the hands of Atari Games instead of Tramiel's Atari Corp. But then without the rights to the "Atari" name in the consumer field, I guess they would've been known as the "Tengen 2600" and the "Tengen 7800" assuming they couldn't have persuaded Jack to license them the name for the home or go in on a joint-venture partnership. The 7800 certainly would've done better against the NES had they had the Atari Games library available even if the other 3rd Party companies were still restricted by Nintendo.

Not what I had always read. Pretty much it has been said that they offered Atari Games to Tramiel fir dirt cheap and he wasn't interested in coin ops at all. So they later sold it off (I thought Williams got it for some reason, but it probably was Namco)

March 8

6 minutes ago, andymanone said:

Yes, I know this😎!
Thatswhy i made this ambiguous joke 😉

I always expext him to pop in and do quotes.

But...

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

March 8

53 minutes ago, andymanone said:

Trust us, we are professional scientists 😎

@DrVenkman

March 8

14 minutes ago, Lynxpro said:

And that is famously a myth that Curt Vendel and Marty Goldberg debunked years ago. The 7800 was delayed because it wasn't part of the sale of Atari Inc's Consumer Division assets to Tramel Technologies/Atari Corp. GCC didn't want to be paid by Jack Tramiel but by Warner, Jack Tramiel wanted Warner to pay GCC, and Warner wanted Jack Tramiel to pay GCC. The negotiations went on until August 1985 which is why the 7800 was widely released in early 1986 instead of Christmas 1984 as originally intended. It wasn't because Jack didn't want to sell video games. He always intended for his Atari to sell games...

Huh, why didn't he also buy Atari Games then? Seems he could have had the whole enchilada.

March 8

On 3/3/2021 at 11:22 AM, Mockduck said:

I received my new Atari joysticks today and noticed that the return address had Atari in California. Sure, this is public info, but I am not going to be the one to spread the exact address, so feel free to get that somewhere else. However, here's a Google Street View pic of it.

My - guess - is that this is the office headquarters of Atari Gamebox LLC, which is the core development and related support team behind the VCS. So, I suspect most of the rank and file people working on the VCS are based in the US, although I could totally be wrong. This may also be the "warehouse" that they have referenced, although it appears to be an office complex in a typical edge of suburbia style office park.

I was going to look up the address and do this very thing a while back, but got distracted by things. It's not terribly far from Sunnyvale.

March 8

Or a plethora of emulators.

March 8

9 minutes ago, CyranoJ said:

If everyone stops making games for the Jaguar and we get one release announced and delivered 10 years later... job done right? Perfect Genesis emulation.

Ha! Yeah with my post I preceded it by a 'Ha' for that very reason. Just because a chip is the same, doesn't mean a whole lot. You kind of perfected the method of porting ST games, but the Genesis is a bit different of a beast!

March 7

38 minutes ago, larrylaffer said:

Hello.

I came across a jaguar cart with no labels and it appears to be "Tiny Toons". I did a bit of a search on the internet, but the real experts are here. Any pointers to what this game is? It didn't feel fully baked for sure: no sound and when I pressed Option on my controller my character stopped animating but I could get them through walls. Possibly a dump download from atarimania and burnt into these eproms?

Thanks!

Ah, one of the games that were on the box, but never released, along with Battlewheels.

March 7

On 3/2/2021 at 8:28 PM, sirlynxalot said:

5:20 - discussing the Jaguar's technical specs, they remark it was 64 bits but then say in actuality it used the same 68000 cpu used in the megadrive to dismiss its capabilities (no discussion of the other processors)

Ha, so it should be easy to create a Megadrive / Genesis emulator on the Jaguar, right??

March 7

16 hours ago, sirlynxalot said:

Ok guys I think I've actually figured out this 18 button thing... Doing a close re-read, the paragraph says "Now with a total of 18 buttons, the Atari Jaguar system offers more gameplay options..." 17 buttons on the controller plus 1 power button on the console itself = 18 buttons to use with your Jaguar system.

Pretty sure button 18 is the combo button of * and # for reset, right?

March 5

2 hours ago, Stephen said:

Man - that's a rather sexy bit of kit right there!

It is pretty sweet. I was trying to not build the whole thing in one go, but then regretted it and went ahead and purchased the rest of the drives. In the end, 32gb of RAM, 2x 1tb nvme drives for cache, and 8x6tb of drives.

March 5

2 minutes ago, Gunstar said:

LOL! That's actually for the Starmaster joystick sitting on top of it; it has suction cups for one-handed pistol-grip action! It, and the Genesis controller next to it have both been converted to Joy2B controllers. I use both depending on the type of game and which works for me better with a particular game.

That's a great idea! I should have set up something similar when I had the Saitek X52 set up on my computer. Now I have a Thrustmaster warthog, which has the weight it needs to not move around on it's own.

March 5

1 hour ago, Gunstar said:

I made a stand the same height as the 1200XL, for the disk drives out of wood and painted it to match the XL white, just like the stand the 1020 is sitting on in one picture. I actually posted a picture of it recently in another thread, I think one of the threads about 80-columns got derailed shortly with pictures of monitor stands. I have a stand now for my 800 too, not in the picture there (I'm always re-arranging and improving). Here's the latest pic of my 800 below (which now has Incognito, PokeyMax Quad+Covox, Sophia 2 and a PBI out the back with Turbo Freezer 2011 and port mods underneath and Fujinet!). My 1200XL is still set-up the same

except the disk drive and 1020/1020 are now on opposite sides.