Underball

Because the profit margin is slim to none, from their point of view. Atariage would sell maybe what - 200-300 copies of a game like PMC, max? The profit reaped wouldn't equal the court costs for Namco to chase it down. It's not worth their time or money spent pursuing it.

That is correct. I had the Bottom One (earlier) as a kid. It had the expansion port on the side.

I thought that until I made my joystick panel just for fun. My scores are much higher now and my hand does not cramp. My body does not recover like a 10 year old anymore. I have a big XArcade Stick set up that I have modded for use with every system I have too...It's great for MAME. Not so great for the 7800 though. I guess I go for the authenticity thing...

am I the only one who doesn't mind the Pro-Lines? they really aren't that bad, and using more ergonomically pleasing aftermarket/modded controllers has never made my scores any better....

I've no interest in this machine at all. Its games library sucks, its graphics architecture sucks, its music architecture sucks. It's one of histories dead branches I've no interest to revive. And it holds zero nostalgia value for me - I thankfully never owned one back in the day. That was harsh! But true. I really can't believe that people here would stoop this low and insult the homebrew and hacks coders who've created some great games on the 7800 who post here. Blah, I for one tinkered with the 7800 around aswell, and Maria is just that: an odd piece of junk. Unlike the TIA it's not even fun to write code for. Nobody insulted homebrewers or hack coders. Read it how you want. Cybergoth is a moderator here, and just last week he put my account on moderator preview for saying basically the SAME EXACT thing in a Colecovision thread here. I made a couple of jokes about all the arguing over homebrew CV games and the coders getting all biting with each other, and he said I was "Bullying" people and took away my ability to post without his approval first. He's a hypocrite.

You're free to read into my posts whatever you want. If it makes you happy, just feel insulted. Well, I'd try to express an opinion, but you'd probably just put me on moderator preview again. I guess pointed, insulting opinions are only reserved for the special people.

I've no interest in this machine at all. Its games library sucks, its graphics architecture sucks, its music architecture sucks. It's one of histories dead branches I've no interest to revive. And it holds zero nostalgia value for me - I thankfully never owned one back in the day. Wow. That's pretty heavy handed opinion. Good catch. It really is an opinion. Mine. Regarding a piece of hardware. Not an insult. Especially not insulting fellow homebrewing friends. In fact none here was even talking about existing 7800 homebrews. Or about the brave souls struggling with that ugly hardware. Actually Tom wrote a 7800 homebrew himself. I consider the 7800 Homebrews part of it's games library. Especially since I've worked on some, and emulation of the 7800 to a large extent. You said it's games library sucked. You said it's a "dead branch" of history, even though it's seen more than it's fair share of activity in the last few months/years. I took your comments as a direct insult considering the work I've put in.

I've no interest in this machine at all. Its games library sucks, its graphics architecture sucks, its music architecture sucks. It's one of histories dead branches I've no interest to revive. And it holds zero nostalgia value for me - I thankfully never owned one back in the day. That was harsh! But true. I really can't believe that people here would stoop this low and insult the homebrew and hacks coders who've created some great games on the 7800 who post here.

It wasn't due to being ripped-off on occasion. It's widely due to complaints from pressure groups that arcades increase delinquency and/or truancy. Nah. It was just that the quality of home video games, both graphickly and story-wise, quickly equaled and then surpassed that of Arcade games in the 1990's. The Sega Genesis/SNES era started the downfall of the arcades, and The Playstation/N64 era just plain killed them altogther. Who wants to go drop $1.00 per game in Afterburner at an arcade, when you can plug the cart into your Genesis and hit reset as many times as you like?

I've no interest in this machine at all. Its games library sucks, its graphics architecture sucks, its music architecture sucks. It's one of histories dead branches I've no interest to revive. And it holds zero nostalgia value for me - I thankfully never owned one back in the day. Wow. That's pretty heavy handed opinion.

Unfortunately, I will no longer be able to update this emu/color palette here, as the moderators have decided to take my posting priviledges away. I love this site, and it's a great resource for Atari info and a great homebrew/coding scene, but the moderation of the board leaves a ton to be desired. Hypocrites.

I understand... but I think the chances for bricking is overstated to keep homebrew developers from being held responsible by the end users. I know over a dozen people who have successfully hacked their PSPs. The only exception was an acquaintance who bricked his because it wasn't plugged in to the power adapter while rewriting the firmware, something warned about repeatedly in all instructions for hacking a PSP. He didn't follow the step-by-step directions so he bricked his PSP. Cause and effect. Non-reading man showed up at my door whining about his bricked PSP. I sat down with him, used the exact same battery and stick he made, plugged his PSP into the AC adapter which he neglected to do, and his PSP was both unbricked and hacked within 5 minutes. After that he managed to hack several more PSPs all by himself because he realized the value of following directions. A bricked PSP is no reason to get panties in a bunch. Calm down and figure out what went wrong. Re-read the instructions and try it again, because the process used to hack a PSP is the exact same process used to unbrick it One option is to pick up a used PSP for less $$$ so that the threat of bricking it won't be as intimidating. Or buy one already hacked, often found for $80-100 on Craigslist. Most of the Downgrade procedures pre-Pandora battery had no brick relief. Teh New PSPs with the TA-088 Motherboard are Pandora-proof, meaning they can't be hacked, yet. Definitely go with a used one.

I too would recommend a PSP for convenient and portable emulation. I have two 4GB Memory Sticks dedicated to emulation. One is dedicated to gpsp (a GBA emulator) along with GBA ROMs. The other stick has emulators and ROMs for Atari 2600 (PSP 2600), Colecovision (colempsp), Atari 7800 (PSP 7800), NES (NesterJ), SMS & Game Gear (smsppsp), Genesis (DGEN), Atari Lynx (handypsp), and SNES (snes9xTYL). PSP 2600 works great, there aren't many games I've had problems with. I've found DGEN and SNES9X to be the least reliable emulators on the PSP, but they still work with at least 90% of the games I've tested them with. If you're a collector of PSX games, there are several utilities for converting your disks to PSP-compatible images along with PSX-PSP guides. The only game system I haven't tried emulating on the PSP yet is the N64, mainly because the ROM sizes require it to have a dedicated memory stick and I haven't gotten around to buying another. There are also many computer emulators available on the PSP that I haven't used. The emulator I find lacking on the PSP is MAME. The most recent is a port of the GP2X port (yes, that's right -- a port of a port). <EDIT> In early 2006 there was PSP MAME which used 0.97 ROMs -- and worked pretty well for the less graphics intensive games of the 80s -- but I haven't been able to get it to run on any custom firmwares released over the last few years. PSP MAME hasn't been updated for a long time. </EDIT> I didn't find installing custom firmware to be that difficult, only time consuming the first time I tried. These days there is very little chance of bricking your PSP if you setup the battery and stick properly, since if the PSP bricks you just reuse the battery and stick to unbrick it. DGEN sucks. Look for PicoDrive PSP ver 1.51. It runs ALL Genesis games at full speed and Even runs all Sega CD games at fullspeed. There is a newer version of Mame4all PSP that is based on Mame .35 that runs excellent.

LAst update. Gradation was wrong in the browns. Subtle change, but now better....

NES fall out of the sky, they are so common. Prices, I dunno - maybe $10-$15 for a toaster, much more ($50?) for a top-loader. http://www.retrousb.com/index.php?productID=133 Alright, now that's just plain cool. Those guys make a retro-usb-atari cable for plugging standard atari controllers into your PC as well.

I don't really care that I'm in the minority. I'm not trying to win anything or prove anything. I'm just stating my opinion. I come here to this forum to read about and talk about ATARI games. I know that everyone here are fans of many, many game systems. That's great. But at the end of the day, it's an ATARI website. This is how I feel. I'm an Atari Fan first, Sega fan second, Sony Fan Third. I'm not a fan of any other brands. I'm just not. There are many, many reasons why. And I'm not going to detail them all so that someone who is a devout Nintendo fan can pick them apart and justify why my opinion is Wrong - even though it's just an opinion. No amount of yakity yak about how great Nintendo and Microsoft are is going to change my opinion.

I would argue that this is to the NES' detriment. Too much shovelware. You'd rather a library of only 20 good games and the rest is so-so to bad over a library with a 100+ good games with the rest being crap? I know it takes more effort to sort through the crap in the NES catalog but in the end I think there's just more games worth playing than the 7800. You and I simply disagree on what constitutes good games. My Personal Opinion is that the NES has terrible, poorly colored and flickery graphics, even in the so-called "good games". and simply not enough games that I like to play. And I'd argue that the Sega Master System is better than either of them.

I would argue that this is to the NES' detriment. Too much shovelware.

I don't get it.

Mostly due to the fact that up until I fixed it two weeks ago, none of the current or past 7800 emulators had anywhere near the correct color palette, so the colors were wrong all over the place, and most cameras -digital or otherwise - aren't capable of capturing a complete NTSC 60hz frame in a single shot, without flicker or interference, especially if the source is coming into the TV trough an RF unit.

For the simple fact that the NES was the first video game system in my memory to up and die on people in massive numbers (blinking led, no carts work) I never wanted a NES. In all my years of owning a Coleco Gemini, 2 7800's, a Sega Master System, Genesis Model 1, Sega CD, 32X, PS1, 3d0, PS2, and a PSP, I've never had a system up and die on me. Not once. Sure, a few carts here or there got fubared or CD's scratched, but not a whole system, nevermind the fact that nearly every kid I knew who had a NES had gone through several of them due to them dying so often. It just always seemed like a cheap piece of junk with terrible flickering graphics and cutesy little kids games to me.

both. after I made a bunch of updates, ZX-81 released a new version with my updates incorporated, and some of his own. Basically, I made a customized version for myself, and figured I'd share it here, and dropped the updated sources on ZX's forum. a couple of weeks later he incorporated the palette and sound changes into his version, and added the thumbnail in file requester bit too.

Any chance of taking a crack at the Window's port? the code is all for the PSP video side of things. The Windows API is completely different, and far more complicated. I don't know jack about Direct X. The PSP is pretty simple to code for. Windows has to take into account all kinds of varying hardware and such...

Thanks, Mitch! Using the 128K overdumps for those 64K games worked like a charm. I sure hope Greg does update ProSystem. This issue along with updating the palette per Underdog's information, and a couple of other items (Full screen Triple Buffering or/and VSync for example) would be real nice to see in ProSystem 1.3 or a 2.0 release. -Trebor Ball. UnderBALL. And yeah - the PSP7800 port of Prosystem I've worked on has VSync as an option, and it fixes a ton of problems.

It is compatible with the 2600 Trak-ball - when it's in joystick mode, just like it is with every other joystick game. It's not compatible when the Trak-Ball is in TB mode. The only games that are compatible with teh 2600 in TB mode are hacks - Tom J.'s 2600 Missile Command TB, and Kenfused's 7800 Centipede TB. Atari never produced any games taht were compatible with it. And who boasts about being great at 7800 Pole Position II? It's hands down the easiest game for the system.