solidcorp

I just shipped the last of the Kickstarter orders. Here are the last eight at the post office

One did indeed to go a Mr. Batty in San Diego, CA last night.

You happened to be the very first one in the batch I shipped yesterday. You should receive it very soon. There are only 8 orders left and I'll be getting more shells tomorrow, they will ship next week. Then I'll switch to the next phase of production. Thanks for hangin' in there.

Thumb on top! I used to have a ring shaped blister on my right thumb and I've worn the rubber off the top of one stick. It popped off like a popcap and then it really hurt to use.

Warm fuzzy nostalgia... not that I could sell that to anyone under 35yo. Atari's like red LED wristwatches, or 45 rpm record inserts, or a dot matrix printer, or the little plastic whirlygig you put on the bottom of your phone so the cord won't get tangled, or a new modem or BBS, or like returning glass Coke bottles for the deposit, or a gas station that only sells leaded gas...

After this conversation today, are you sure you can trust my recollection of my time there? LOL I'm not planning on going to MGC but if you would like to chat PM me any time.

Heh, typical Marty, with his knowlege, and information, and facts, and corroborating web links. It's okay, we all know that you belittle our Atari stock certificates because envy them so much. No need to deny it, we understand.

True, I had forgotten about Atari Games Corp. Yet, Atari Corporation was making games and consoles for all the consumer products at the time I worked there which was my point. It wasn't any of the many successors that merely inherited the intellectual properties and didn't manufacture games, computers, and consoles. Interestingly, I can't find a single image of an Atari Inc. stock certificate. Was the company entirely owned by Warner? was there ever Atari Inc. stock? ...even if they were not publicly traded. There must have been if Atari was Incorporated.

I understand what you are saying but that's not entirely fair. At the time I worked for Atari - 1987-1991, Atari Inc. was only making arcade machines and Atari Corporation, then run by the Tramiels, was producing all Atari consumer products including 2600, 5200, 7800, 400/800/XE, Lynx, Panther, Jaguar, Portfolio, ST, STe, and TT at least. I even remember using an Atari made 286 based PC there - I can't even find a picture of it online now :-).

Thanks! They're not expensive, anyone who wants one can get one: Atari Stock Certificates on eBay It probably won't have your name on it though

I'd love to see these illegals in a computer generated solution: 60+yy nzc--v RRA op ROR+ADC op=op RCR 1 // A=A+op+cy 6B nn nzc--v 2 ARR #nn AND+ROR A=(A AND nn), V=Overflow(A+A), A=A/2+C*80h, C=A.Bit6 They sort of do the work that we know needs to be done but then they do other "organic" stuff which could also be unpredictably useful.

You don't really need a full emulator just the ability to do a small set of integer operations on a small number of registers - you could do that with shader subroutines if the shader truly supports branching. As a matter of fact I bet you could represent all the operations using texture operation on 8 bit colors (though the carry bit would be trickier to handle). That way you could use CUDA or Direct Compute to attack the problem. There is still a lot of ground to cover and each test needs to test 256 values and compare to a set of correct answers. Interesting problem, I wish there was someone who wished to contract this out for work. I think the genetic algorithms may have promise, though I have not really worked in this area. The results that come out of those optimization methods are ten times more complex than optimized assembly code, doing often unpredictable and apparently meaningless things to achieve a 100% correct result. I'd expect that for a 20 byte solution it would probably spit out a few pieces of code that look familiar but there may be some bizarre outliers that completely work.

20 bytes is 8*20 or 160 bits which can be combined in 2^160 combinations. (i.e. 4 bits = 2^4=16 values, or 8 bits is 2^8=256 values) Either way the number is intractably large on my machines Of course that would include unwanted opcodes like NOP and KIL, and there are illegal opcodes that have duplicate functions. If you limited the opcodes to some number n, then there would be be n^20 combinations. Crosschecking: If n=256, all possible byte values, then there would be 256^20 combinations which is the same as (2 ^ 8 ) ^ 20 or 2^(8*20) or 2^160. So, how many unique opcodes are there for the Atari 2600's 6507? (Thomas, you would be the first one I would ask this question)

This may seem absurd but with ROMs as large as they are now and cycles being a scarce as ever, this old technique may be merited in some circumstances. ; 259 bytes, 4 cycles (5 if table crosses page boundary) lda DivXBy5,x .align 256 DivxBy5: .byte 0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,2,2,2,2,2 .byte 3,3,3,3,3,4,4,4,4,4,5,5,5,5,5,6 .byte 6,6,6,6,7,7,7,7,7,8,8,8,8,8,9,9 .byte 9,9,9,10,10,10,10,10,11,11,11,11,11,12,12,12 .byte 12,12,13,13,13,13,13,14,14,14,14,14,15,15,15,15 .byte 15,16,16,16,16,16,17,17,17,17,17,18,18,18,18,18 .byte 19,19,19,19,19,20,20,20,20,20,21,21,21,21,21,22 .byte 22,22,22,22,23,23,23,23,23,24,24,24,24,24,25,25 .byte 25,25,25,26,26,26,26,26,27,27,27,27,27,28,28,28 .byte 28,28,29,29,29,29,29,30,30,30,30,30,31,31,31,31 .byte 31,32,32,32,32,32,33,33,33,33,33,34,34,34,34,34 .byte 35,35,35,35,35,36,36,36,36,36,37,37,37,37,37,38 .byte 38,38,38,38,39,39,39,39,39,40,40,40,40,40,41,41 .byte 41,41,41,42,42,42,42,42,43,43,43,43,43,44,44,44 .byte 44,44,45,45,45,45,45,46,46,46,46,46,47,47,47,47 .byte 47,48,48,48,48,48,49,49,49,49,49,50,50,50,50,50 Also, in many circumstances you don't need 100% accuracy. For example if dividing velocity or measuring distance, some error is allowable. In those cases I would multiply by 1/5 in fixed point. which is the same as multiplying by (256/5) / 256 - which is the same as multiplying by 256/5 and just looking at the high byte which is what most of the routines above do. The errors are coming from integer math, i.e. 256/5 being 51.2 and not just 51, so just using the upper 8 bits for the shift and add multiplication is not always exactly correct but is rarely wrong and not wrong by more than one and is always near the correct answer. Another example: For division by 7 I would use 256/7 which is 36.5714.... when just multiplying by 36 (by shifting and adding for 00100100b) the errors encountered in the result were due to the missing .5714. The very clever addition of 4 plus carry at the right time above would appear to resolve the error for integers ranging from 0 to 255. If I needed more precision I would add more bits like this: 1024/7 = 146 (10010010b), Since the first 1 bit is in the high bit, this has 8 bits of precision and would probably yield the correct answer - unfortunately I don't have time to write a test routine to demonstrate. I love this thread. P.S. Here is the crummy little Ruby script I whipped up to generate the table: #!/usr/bin/env ruby for i in 0..256 val = (i/5).to_i if i==0 line = "DivBy:\t.byte\t" elsif i%16 == 15 puts line line = "\t.byte\t" else line << "," end line <<"#{val}" end

The routines are so short, I wonder how long a brute force attack would take? Current code is 20 bytes - just combining random bytes, it is one of 2^(160) combinations: 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976 That's kind of a lot, even on hundreds or thousands of PC's. A genetic algorithm may be able to find a solution in a human lifetime. It would be cool to see the code optimized for size and optimized for space.

( I absolutely LOVE this thread )

That Disney stock certificate is cool. It looks like you used to be able to get Atari Stock certificates on eBay for under $10, the ones on there now are climbing in price capitalizing on the recent news no doubt. My one share is still worth way more to me.

They're dog treats and I knew I should have cropped that picture.

I already own enough Atari

Hey, look what I found! I bought some Atari stock when I worked there and sold all but one share in 1993 after I left the company. I had them send me a stock certificate as a souvenir. I dug it out of the archives (catacombs, crawl space, whatever...) last night.

Seconded!

From same article I quoted earlier: "But its financial position has not improved markedly thanks to its debts to London-based BlueBay Asset Management, and it now needs $5.25 million of financing to keep running." That's just to continue operating, not pay off its debts or bring new or old products to market.

It doesn't look like Atari US is closing but rather looking to split from Infogrames. As the Huffington Post article suggests "It is thought the company could now be sold to an outside buyer, or a team of backers led by CEO Jim Wilson."

When I'm done there may be some extra manuals and boxes but not many. I ordered only a handful of extras to cover unanticipated problems so I won't know how many I will have until all the cartridges have shipped.

Where did you hear that? Never heard such a thing? The history of Madden Football is pretty interesting... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madden_NFL#1980s:_Creation Paraphrasing: Trip Hawkins did approach Atari about making his football game idea between 1982 and 1984 but wanted to use his childhood hero Joe Montana. It's not clear whether he was looking to make an arcade or home game. Madden was actually his third choice and wasn't approached until 1984. The first Madden was released on the Apple ][ in 1988, so it would be doubtful that there was any real chance of a 2600 or 5200 version of the property we know as Madden today.