leech

So my gathering of info seems correct that the UAV/SCCC changes the artifacts to a different color than the standard 800, so that it is more XL like. Wonder how many games were messed up due to this, and how difficult it would be to patch them.

So I think it was decided that maybe it's the UAV circuit that is changing the color palette to XL type vs 800? That's kind of what it looks like to me. Ultima IV comes with a built in color swap, to change green/blue around. Which seems to work on the XLs if your POT is adjusted right. Ultima III as far as we know does not. Ha, maybe I can have some luck with Disk Wizard.

Ha, yeah I skipped doing the cable out the back, and wired up the SCCC to the original monitor port. Seems much neater that way.

Yeah so the my XE probably needs adjusting, but it's Blue / Orange vs Cyan / Red. my unmodified 800 looks like yours, Blue / Green. But my 800 with SCCC and Incognito looks more like the XL line. Kind of seems to me that we just need to find the games such as these and create a patch. My 800XLs all seem to have the swapped colors (Green borders / Blue title). Not sure where to do the color inversion on those. So does the UAV / SCCC actually change the NTSC artifacting palettes somehow? That's the only reason I can think of the modified 800 is doing that. Fun side note, I bought Ultima III and IV on cartridge from the atarimax store, and neither of them will run on 48k, so I can't actually test those on the unmodified 800, only on the SCCC/Incognito equipped one.

Makes sense. I still can't seem to find the right tool for like say the 800xl to be able to adjust the pot from the bottom of the case, only seems to work after taking it apart and adjusting through the shield.

Well here's something fun. I've tested multiple copies of Ultima III and IV on multiple systems. 800 with SCCC and Incognito, 800 Stock, and three different 800XLs (three different keyboards), and one of my 1200xls. Only the Stock 800 presents the correct colors, and that was only after fiddling with the POT so that the blue with white cursor became purple. But the fun thing with that one is I tweaked it back and the correct colors remained, and the blue memo pad screen came back. This may legit be due to the old girl needing some warm up time. On that note, it sadly did something weird where it wouldn't turn on until I put it all back together, but when it did, it will no longer power the Fujinet by itself, or the SDrive Max Will have to figure that one out later. I've messed with the POT on two of the 800XLs and couldn't get the correct color mix. @tf_hh Curious, when you designed the SCCC (awesome card!) was there a particular design reason why you didn't put the POT for adjustment in the whole where the 800 has a spot for it already? It was super convenient for messing with it without taking the whole thing apart again!

Ha, only 3 800xls... I didn't want to list the 2x 1200xls, 2x 800s, 3x 130xes, 2 600xls... i think the only ones I don't have are 400s or like 65 XEs... don't really see the point in those. Then I don't have a wife either, so don't need to hide them, just need a spot to hook them up!

What are you waiting for? (I have 3 now. You leave some 8bits in a room and they seem to multiply somehow. Should have never programmed the Birds and Bees into them.)

Can you please share the images you are using for these? When I originally played Ultima III on the 8bit, the water was red, never understood why back then. I can only get all of my machines, including the 800 with SCCC to show like my screenshots at best, or the colirs flip if I change the pot the other way.

So here's the fun thing about Ultima III. It was created on the Apple II, like the rest of Ultima 1-5. I have no idea why they chose the 4 colors that they did for U3, but the EXODUS title is the same color as the trees, basically you're stuck with either blue water and red trees (maybe it's permanently in Fall?) or you get red water / blue trees. I found on my 800xl, that there is a slight area on the pot between complete lack of color, and very bright / vibrant blue outline / red Exodus title. Then if I turn it just slightly more, it dims more. This results in this;

Yeah ,I went ahead and ordered another of each.

Ah, sad. Seems to only be for Ultima IV.

@Krenath DId pressing Control-X a bunch as it loads give you a color selection screen?

Try pressing Control-X on bootup to change color pallette. It works for Ultima IV, not sure about 3. I specifically refuse to use S-Video for most things due to lack of artifacting. What we need to get over this limitation is for some mega skilled coders to rebuild the games using better graphic modes somehow. Usually they have been bad Apple II ports that cause this. At least from my understanding, as the Atari can definitely display more colors without it. Though I have a VBXE so really would love an upgraded version ha

I am used to Gnome, or KDE. LXDE for me has always felt clunky, so maybe that is why I feel the Pi isn't great as a desktop PC. But then it is still more usable than Win95. 😀

Ha, did everyone click on the reset password link? Tge 'follow me' link is broken.

https://hackaday.com/2021/01/01/a-fresh-linux-for-the-most-unexpected-platform-the-nintendo-64/

You can put Linux on an N64 now.

Well, it is possible to turn off, but AtariOS won't load. My suggestion started with the idea of being able basically to 'put up or shut up' for the people bashing Atari. Basically a 'let's see you do better'. Also the idea of other companies to have an ability to sell a USB key that you can boit to a game / emulator. Like the olden days when you would put in a floppy disk and boot straight up. I may have a play with the seed list to make a Debian liveusb for such a thing.

Ha, yeah been waiting for a board. I may even put it in my Atari Arcade setup.

I still want to know MAME performance levels on a RISC-V. Was actually thinking as the community SBC build that a RISC-V board may be an interesting target!

By the way... https://github.com/stilett0/mame

Ha, that's my problem with everything these days. When you have scores of retro stuff, and even close to 3k games on steam, you end up sitting there thinking 'I want to play a game' and then not being able to decide what game you want to play, or even what kind... and then end up watching something on Netflix

Ha, yeah. Like it's more a blob/front end that then uses all the little bits and pieces to emulate stuff. So you can update say the z80.c file and it'll effect whatever systems use the z80, but not things that use m68k emulation. Ha ha, yeah a large majority of the games are unplayable unless you use a keyboard, or somehow have one of those weird mahjongg controllers. There are various forks out there that I think do clean all that stuff out. The beauty of open source! What would be nice is a modification to the build system so it works like the modern one for the Linux kernel. So you could for example include just Atari games, or Atari games from 1977 to 1995. Select which non-arcade systems too, etc. I mean there definitely is a separation between say Space Invaders and the Simpson's Arcade, but like Space Invaders and... something else I can't remember at the moment, share the same hardware. But all of that gets built into the binary making it bigger. An approach like RetroArch where you can install individual cores is more along the lines of what you're asking. There are advantages to both methods, along with disadvantages.

Yeah, MAME is at it's core, simply a set of drivers for different chips. It's not even an emulator in the traditional meaning of the word. Like it doesn't emulate a single system/board. It has various drivers for each 'chip' or sometimes they bundle system boards together. Like the aforementioned Congo Bongo issue is because they updated the Zaxxon board, which uses the same setup, but it broke the music of Congo Bongo. Crazy how big of a project MAME is. Getting a nice setup of MESS was always a pain, still sort of is, but MAME at least now has a decent native front end, before it was a CLI program and everyone else made front ends for it. So that might also be where the 'bloat' is from.