Underball

I don't know exactly what it says, but when desoldering chips there a number of ways things can go wrong. The trace is one term used the copper circuit path on the board. The larger areas of copper around the pins where the soldering takes place are commonly called pads. When heating the area to melt the solder, too much heat can cause the copper trace to release/unbond/delaminate from the circuit board. When removing the chip, particularly on a two sided board, it's possible to pull the trace away from the board when extracting the chip. . . . not that I've ever done either of those things, mind you, but a friend tells me they can happen I've definitely caused that to happen a number of times when tinkering with stuff that needed to be soldered to a board. This is why I half jokingly/half seriously recommended selling teh 8-bit mod and doing the easy 7800 video mod we talked about in the other thread. It requires a bare minimum of soldering a few resistors together to build the circuit, and no removal of solder or chips from the board at all. you only need to cut a few resistors off, which you can do with a pair of small wire cutters or pinch-nose pliers. You solder to the prongs left behind that stick up from the board, and don't remove any solder joints.

Bob, this is fantastic. Now I can finally get my head around programming for the 7800. Questions: What do you use to edit the Character.dat and spritegr.dat? I opened them in Notepad and get gobbledy gook. I opened them in a Hex editor, and I get nothing taht makes any visible sense. Is there some sort of tool that helps graphically with these? also - audio editing - ? I dont' seen mush of anything explaining it.

Just updated one more time. ZX-81 (original coder) added better keyboard support and added a new function so the file requester will display the thumbnail of each rom that has a saved game in the viewer as you page through the rom list. so if you want, open each game, wait until it's title page comes up, and then press select to go back to the menu and save the game. Do this for each game, and then all the games will have an image in the file requester.

You could try selling that mod on ebay and doing the easy 7800 video mode described here for a lot less money and effort.

That is really cool.

You thought the game was "perfect" without the visual characteristic so distinctive to Space Invaders that it's been retained in every official sequel? WTF is wrong with you? No SI port can be perfect without that effect. this is why bob scrapped his first version and is going to start all over. he got tired of all the whiners like you.

I completely agree. I though the game was just perfect without it.

great. so because we disagree on principal as to how to distribute content, you start slinging insults. And I have moderators threatening ME for "bullying". that's rich.

http://www.atariage.com/7800/archives/inde...l?SystemID=7800 whole bunch of useful info here.

This was the one game from the screenshots on the back of the box, in catalogs, and on TV commercials that I desperately wanted. Do we know that it really even exists in some semi-playable format for the 7800?

Yeah! I think that a 50" 1080p Sony Plasma TV is really only worth about $75.

How about making a 100% arcade port and NOT putting it up for sale, but just releasing the rom for people to use in multicarts, emulators or homemade carts? I really never understood why so many people here at AA code games for their favorite old systems to make money. The risk of getting smacked down by the license holders doesn't seem to justify the meager/non-existent profit margin for games that are coded for systems that haven't been in production for 25 years. It seems to me that the only reason things get difficult for homebrew coders is when they try to sell something they don't have the rights to. If you code it and release it for all to enjoy, with no money expected in return, most license holders aren't going to chase you down over it. Myself, I've worked as a coder and tester on a number of emulators and homebrewed games for various platforms. I tend to follow the MAME train of logic, in that we do it for preservation of history, and future enjoyment, not for profit.

It's not getting creepy, this is the real life for the homebrewers that some gamers may have no clue about it, and it concerns more than just the coleco homebrew scene. So I see the point PKK is giving here, and it's a good advice. That's not what he was hinting at. Underball seems to think that ColecoVision-related posts are polluting the AtariAge homebrew forum. Considering the fact that he registered in January 2008 and has been an infrequent poster, I'd say his "perception" is not to be taken too seriously. ColecoVision homebrews have been announced, developed and released for many years on these AA forums, many of which have been sold in the AtariAge store. These forums have always welcomed CV homebrewers and their homebrews, and Underball's comment is in strict contrast with this fact. I never said any of that. NONE OF IT. I merely made a few sarcastic jokes, because there seemed to be a lot of heated CV conversations lately, none of which have I participated in. I've been a member here for years, just lost the password to my old account. Please don't put words in my mouth. I'd also like an apology.

They always do that. There are like 13 different dated iterations of Kenfused's 7800 Beef Drop on some of the public domain rom sites. god knows how they got there, or why they didn't just pick one, but it is what it is.

Wow. I work on a game for more than 4 months for people like you to enjoy, and you make fun of me for wanting credit for it. You are a jerk. You posted it as a free download on a website that doesn't require a paid subscription to join, expected no compensation for it, didn't manufacture carts for sale, and now you're kind of upset that people spread it around and it made it's way to some free rom sites. I appreciate your work on the game. It's great, and certainly worthy of credit and praise. But maybe you should take some remedial internets classes. Regardless of the "Legal" definition of public domain, the fact that people can download this rom for free without needing to compensate you means that it HAS become public domain, simply by you posting it here. You should have set up a registered/paid users only download site to host it if you wanted to control it's release into the wild.

So replacing R11 with a 100k potentiometer and adjusting it will remove halos/ghosting? Take a look at the track on Pole Position II and tell me if you still get the hard ghosting there. It's not terrible, but it's definitely noticeable.

My suggestion would be for all of the Colecovision fans to get a room. It's getting a little creepy in here.

Gotta long way before it catches the Vectrex... Or the Colecovision. I don't know, it seems like you have to have a direct line to God to manage to order a copy of a Coleco homebrew. Actually, it seems like there are a ton of Coleco Homebrews that are maybe 1/4 or 1/2 finished, or not even started yet but talked about for months, but very little you can actually order/download/use.

The hack scene really hasn't slowed down. Teh number of decent, viable hacks is about the same. and the 7800 scene is growing, it just takes a little longer to code decent 7800 games. the difference is, we don't see as many threads for bad horror movie themes, or redundant broken English laden "Can Star Wars Hack into Revenge of Sith" threads.

They separated out the systems in the hacks section, and it works great. I though that would be helpful here as well. I don't have any aversion to any particular system over another, I just think it would make stuff easier to find.

I don't know the intellectual property laws in Australia, but I think your interpretation of the term "public domain" is wrong. Public Domain means that no-one has any rights to the game and that therefore anyone could do what he likes with it - including distribution for profit. See wikipedia's entry on public domain for more details. Luckily simply posting a binary in a message board doesn't make it public domain. Infact it doesn't give anyone any rights at all (except maybe the right to download the binary). If you wanted to allow people to make copies of your game or even to play it on an emulator or a RAM cartridge, you'd have to include a license text which allows that. Otherwise no-one could legally do anything with your game. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg Even though this may be technically correct, there isn't a court in the world that would waste the time and resources of the court trying to enforce copyright laws on obscure and difficult to find Atari 2600 homebrewed games, 99.999% of which have NOT been properly submitted for copyright protection, in 2008. You would need to prove monetary damages. Pretty hard to prove you're losing money on something you've never sold, that other websites are giving out for free.

I found when doing mine that trying to solder to the expansion port spots on the mobo was extremely difficult. I have a "version 3" no expansion post/no hole in case as well. This is because they are just unused spots on the board. Flat, smooth. Cutting away the board connected to the back of the RF box, and soldering to the cut off pins from where the RF unit connected to the Mobo was much easier, as there was something sticking up, something tactile to solder to.

I'd be willing to bet this is the problem. TV tuner boxes tend to overscan and over-draw the image in many cases to fill in teh gaps with interlaced sources like composite video. Yes but as I said before, I also tried the 7800 on a flatscreen CRT and got the exact same result. The artifacting is so bad that small or white-colored text is practically unreadable. bad soldering? Try getting the video off the prong for the RF instead.

I'd be willing to bet this is the problem. TV tuner boxes tend to overscan and over-draw the image in many cases to fill in teh gaps with interlaced sources like composite video.

I hate to be a bummer, but I just updated it again... But I swear, this is the last time. Really. I mean it.