DanBoris

I took a look through the code and don't see any obvious place where the ROM locations that contain the message could be accessed. It's possible that the program tried to hide the code that displays the message, but I am not sure why he would bother since anyone reviewing the code would spot the message very easily. Dan

Ok, I can't resist a mystery and since I am in the process of writing a 7800 graphics viewer I decided to tackle this one. I poked around in ROM with my graphics viewer and found the character graphics (which are not a full set a characters) and from that I managed to decode how the text in the game is stored. This lead me to this piece of text in the ROM: BYTHE "ALCHEMIST0F FUN"KEITHSAWYER Note that this is not stored in ASCII in the ROM so it won't show up when viewing the ROM. A quick Google of Keith Sawyer turned up that he worked at GCC and was the lead designer on Food Fight. So now the question is, was what the original poster saw just a glitch, or is there really some way to make this appear in the game. I will have to poke through the code of the game a bit more to figure out if it is truely an easter egg. Dan

Was it the same font as the big foodfight logo, or did it look more like the text that makes up the copyright notice and option selection? Dan

They built a school on top of a sacred Atari burial ground!?!? Now that just asking for trouble. Dan

Warshaw actually falls into both categories, ET as the failure, and Yars Revenge as the success. Dan

I just got this in the mail today and just had to scan and post it!

At some point Exidy got into redemption games and where actually still around up until a few years ago. Dan

You are correct the cartridges you mention don't have any ASCII text in them, but Magicard does contain all the 6502 opcodes in ASCII: ILLADCANDASLBCCBCSBEQBITBMIBNEBPLBVCBVSCMPCPXCPYDECEORINCJMPJSRLDALDXLDYLSRORAROLRORSBCSTASTXSTYASLBRKCLCCLDCLICLVDEXDEYINXINYLSRNOPPHAPHPPLAPLPROLRORRTIRTSSECSEDSEITAXTAYTSXTXATXSTYA I X) RZ ZXZY)Y() A X Y Dan

Actually, I missed Millipede, here's what in it: DAVE STAUGAS LOVES BEATRICE HABLIG Anyone know the story behind this?

You can find a list of the codes here: http://www.mameworld.net/easyemu/gtguide.htm Dan

I scanned every 2600 rom I had which is pretty much all of them, which the exception of a lot of hacks and alternate versions of games. Dan

There was a 2600 development system for the Apple called the Frob, maybe that was used to develop these games. Dan

I am sure someone has done this before, but I haven't seen a complete list anywhere on these boards, so I throught I'd post it. I thought it would be interesting to scan through all the 2600 ROM images looking for ASCII text. So I wrote a little program to do this automatically. I had it look for runs of 5 or more upper or lower case ascii characters in each ROM file. Even at 5 characters it turned up a lot of false positives, but it also came up with some very interesting things. Most where just copyrights or credits: big bird's egg catch (1983) (atari).a26 CHRISTOPHER H OMARZU blueprint (1983) (cbs electronics).a26 DIDOMENICO bmx air master (1989) (tnt games).a26 COPYRIGHT TNT GAMES DEVELOPED BY SCULPTURED SOFTWARE WRITTEN BY ADAM CLAYTON Bump 'N' Jump (1983) (Mattel) [b1].a26 Copyright Mattel Dave Akers Jeff Ratcliff Pat Dulong elk attack (1987) (atari).a26 ELK ATTACK Mark R Hahn gopher (1982) (us games).a26 COPYRIGHT US GAMES CORP james bond 007 (1983) (parker bros).a26 PJOE GAUCHER LOUIS MARBEL tutankham (1983) (parker bros).a26 PARKERBROS DAVEENGMAN Word Zapper (1982) (US Games) (PAL) [p1][!].a26 COPYRIGHT US GAMES CORP nGAME ZAPPER Mattel was a little posessive: star strike (1982) (mattel).a26 MATTEL MATTEL MATTEL MATTEL MATTEL These two roms had this same set of text in them. Sorta looks like some compiler commands or parameters: cosmic corridor (zimag).a26 space tunnel (bitcorp) (pal).a26 LINK 1.6 INIT TPLEN XMIN YMIN YMAX XMAX START CENT CC09 CC06 CC07 CC08 This one is very odd, looks like a chunck of disk commands and messages: parachute (homevision) (pal).a26 OPE APPEN RENAM CATALO MAXFILE BSAV BLOA AVAILABL RANGE ERRO WRITE PROTECTE END OF DAT FILE NOT FOUN VOLUME MISMATC ERRO DISK FUL FILE LOCKE SYNTAX ERRO NO BUFFERS These two actually have chuncks of source code left in them: pompeii (apollo) (prototype).a26 SCRLP1 STA STRTLINE NOP NOP STA WORK LDA (DNROCK1),Y STA BULLETR LDA MNT1,Y STA HIRESL lost luggage (1981) (apollo) [a1].a26 LSR A LSR A STA SNDTYPE LDA LDA #SUITCASE&255 STA INTL BCS CONTINUE TAX .BYTE 0,0,0,0,0,0 SUIT1 .BYT SUIT3 .BYTE $00,$18,$18,$3C,$24,$66,$42 .BYTE $00,$00,$00,$00,$00,$00,$00 SUIT4 .BYTE $00,$ BRIEF .BYTE $00,$00,$00,$00,$00,$18,$18 .BYTE $3C,$7E,$7E,$00,$00,$00,$00 SOCKS .BYTE $00,$44,$CC,$66,

This actually could have been done quite easily in Combat (and other games) on ther 2600. As someone else pointed out it really doesn't load seperate games for each variation, they are all available at one time from the cartridge. This is especially the case with Combat since it has one main game loop that runs every variation of the game, with a few branches in the code here and there to handle the variations. Pretty amazing piece of programming and all done in only 2K or ROM. Dan

The 2600 requires a DC power supply not an AC one like the one you are talking about. I have heard that the system will power up with an AC supply, but it's probably not a good idea to do that. Dan

I saw a listing on E-Bay for a Pong Battery Eliminator, part number 4-0033-2 with the same specs, so the one you have is probably for one of the early Atari Pong consoles. Dan

Pitfall works in Jum52 v0.8, but as you said it doesn't work in v1.0. It also works in the current version of VSS (http://danb.atarihq.com/) Dan

I was thinking about the problem of figuring out release dates recently. I think the only way to really figure this out is to create a database of "evidence" for the release date of each game. This evidence could include: - Copyright dates - Year of a catalog that it first appeared in - Info from old videogame magazine (e.g. "Activision plans to release a new game called Pitfall this Summer") - Apperences of ads in magazines etc. No one of these items can truely determine the date, but taken as a group it would allow you to narrow the date range down. Dan

I actually attempted this project "back in the day", but never completed it. The hard part of it is that the Armatron was controlled mechanically. It has a single continously running motor and a gear train that was manipulated by the joysticks. The only way to computer control this was to connect solenoids to the joysticks to pull them in the appropriate direction. Dan

It's definitly different from the 2600 power supply. The Odyssey takes a 12 Volts AC, 400 mA. An NES power supply actualy makes a good replacement. Dan

Could be a stuck address line going to the video memory. That would cause certain blocks of memory to be repeated because the state of the address line wouldn't change when it's supposed to. Dan

I personally think the first option is the best, and this is the way I have done it in my emulators. There are a couple problems with option 2: - The full range of motion of a joystick is a much close approximation of the fully range of motion of a paddle, so cutting that range in half would be awkward. - Unless the stick is carefully callibrated you are not going to know what the actual center value is. - If you did go this route, I would avoid using the other half for "something else" since it would be very easy to overshoot the center which may have undesirable results. I also like the idea of using a mouse to simulate a paddle. Dan

The bits in IRQST get set to 0 when the specific event occurs, not 1. So when the break key is pressed, bit 7 will be 0. Dan

As a member of the MAME development team I can tell you that there was never a time when someone on the team said "let's concentrate on Mahjong games and forget everything else". The MAME team is a large group of volunteer programmers that work on the games they want to work on. There is no leader on the team telling or even suggesting what games they should work on. The Mahjong games where probably added in such volume because the ROM images became available and it was easy to do. The problems with some of the existing games may be caused by very subtle problems with the emulation that can be very hard to find. This kind of troubleshooting work does not appeal to everyone. Fortunately there are people who like to hunt these obscure bugs and you do still see old games getting bug fixes in almost every release. If we were to wait for every bug in an existing game to get fixed before adding a new one, MAME would probably only support a few dozen games at this point! Dan

As the author of quite a few emulators (and someone who has violated a few of these principles), I thought I should comment on this.... By who's standards do we judge what are the "greatest games"? If there is a game that I loved to play, but no one else really cares about, it's still important to me to get it to work on the emulator. In some cases it may actually be more important to focus on the obscure games because they are the ones that are at a greater risk of being lost forever. I have seen this come up a few times in the MAME project. But what if my interests lay speicifically with achieving highly accurate emulation, and not with writing fancy GUIs? Should I be discouraged from writing a good emulator just becasue I don't want to develop a GUI? I personally can't think of any emulators that are released as source only. I think it's more important to encourage emu authors to release both the binary AND the source. (Note: I am being slightly hyprocritical here since I have not released the source for all my emulators ) Same argument here as I made about the GUIs. I would rather focus my time on good emulation, then on trying to support every different type of controller out there. I'll come back to nine in a second. This one I actually do agree with. An emu author should always try to avoid the temptation to patch a ROM just to make it work, or modify the behavior of the emulation based on which game is currently loaded. These are just a way around finding what the real problem with the emulation is. This point brings me to the one overriding comment I would like to make about all these Principles. Most of what is said here are good things, they do make emulators better, but a current or potential emulator author should not be discouraged to work on an emulator just because they don't follow these rules. Most emu authors do this is a hobby. They do it for the enjoyment, they do it for the challenge. If someone wants to write and release the seventy-sixth NES emulator, more power to them! Yes, this emulator may not constribute anything "new" to the emulation scene, but if it's rewarding for the author that's all that's important. Maybe this persons next emulator will be the killer app everyone is waiting for. The bottom line is, if you can, and want to follow these principles, great! But your emulation project should be no less special to you (and maybe others) if you don't. Dan