DanBoris

Not sure about this one, but most of these are machines loaded with MAME. A lot of these are illegal since them come bundled with copyrighted games that have not been properly licensed, not to mention the fact the this a violation of MAME's license. The MAME team is very unhappy with this sort of thing. The fear is that if this happends to much, game companies may just decide to go after MAME itself instead of going after each company selling the illegal products. Dan

If you are looking for parts check out: http://www.marcospecialties.com/MODERN/ http://www.pbresource.com http://www.centsibleamusements.com/ Lamps generally run on 6volts AC and solenoids runs at around 24-30 volts AC. Note that this is not universal and may vary between different lamps/coils in a specific machine. The best way to find out the actual votages is to get the schematics for the machine, which you can probably get from one of the sources listed above. If you can't get the scheamtics, you can pull out the lamps and check the part number to find out the voltage. You can probably also find out the coil voltage based on thier part numbers but I am not sure of a reference for this. As for wiring up just the playfield. There are certain parts that this will work with. If you power up the pop bumpers properly they should work when hit. There may be funtions on the playfield that are controlled through the game "logic" that would not work without some re-wiring. Dan

Nope... never happened..... nothing to see here... move along, move along.

I am assuming there is a typo in the comment, or am I missing something... According to the 7800 Software Guide the palette registers are Read/Write, and this is how MESS emulates it. Are they really write-only? Dan

I usually goto the Cherry Hill auctions, but I am not sure if I am going to this one. There is a Pinball convention in Allentown this weekend also which I may goto instread. Dan

Don't forget to put some blank scanlines at the top of the screen. Most games put 24 blank lines at the start to be sure the top of the display does not get cut off. Also don't forget the Jump and Wait for Sync instruction at the end of the display list. If I remeber right, there is an address you should Poke to stop the ANTIC chip from doing DMA before you change the display list pointer. The you can Poke again to restart Antic once the addres is set. Dan

You are right, it's very odd that it would be damaged that selectively. If the game had a Pokey sound chip on the cart, then this would be more likely, but Winter Games doesn't use the Pokey. Do other games work ok in your system? Have your tried cleaning the cartidge? Dan

The Studio II has already been emulated and all the games dumped, you can get the emulator and games here: http://www.classicgaming.com/studio2/ Microvision has not been emulated. The problem with the Microvision is that no one has figured out how, of if it's even possible, to dump the carts. This system was unique in that the processor was in the cartridges not in the base system. The game ROM was then burned into the processor. Since the ROM data does not have to leave the chip to be executed there doesn't necessarily have to be a way to read it out. Don't really know about the Video Brain. Dan

The trigger inputs are read only. They go through the GTIA chip and are read at addresses $d010,$d011. Dan

I believe most machines use the stock Pokey chip that's in the 5200/computers, the machine just doesn't use the extra features. There are a couple Atari machines (I-Robot) for example that use a Quad Pokey which is 4 Pokey chips in one package. Dan

You can find some more info on these here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/3881 These where board games produced by FASA. Looks like they also did tie-in games for Star Trek. Not sure what their monetary value would be, but they make for cool collectibles.

It was a nice design decision by Atari to bring the entire address bus out to the cartridge slot so you can map cartridge functions into any address in memory. Dan

He is not trying to claim rights to MAME itself, but he is trying to register the name MAME and the MAME logo as a trademark. You can read some of the details in this Slashdot posting: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0...3&tid=17&tid=10 I am a member of the MAME development team, and I can tell you that the team (and other people in the emulation community) are not to happy about this, and plan to fight it. Dan[/url]

7800 cartridges can have a couple extra "features" in them that make them Supergames, extra bankswitch ROM, extra RAM, or the Pokey sound chip. Note that Atari applied the Super Game designation pretty inconsistently (see my post about this in another thread on the board). The largest 7800 games had 144K of ROM, but theoretically you could go larger. The only really praticle language to program the 7800 in at this point is assembly, although you probably could rig up a 6502 C compiler to work with the 7800. Dan

Atari seems to have applied the "Super Game Cartridge" designation very inconsistently. Ballblazer for example could qualify since it has a Pokey sound chip in it. Winter/Summer games have extra RAM and ROM in the cartridge. Desert Falcon on the other hand is just a plain 48K cartridge. There are also cartridges with the extra features that don't carry the "Super Game" designation on the label. Dan

A few years ago someone gave me an Access database the contained a list of most 2600 cartridges along with the cartridges for many other classic system. It's a few year old, so it's not complete but it's a good starting point. You can get it here: http://home.comcast.net/~dboris/vidgames.zip Dan

MULE is my favorite Atari-8bit game, used to play it a lot 'back in the day.' It's great even as a single player game, but nothing beats the fun of playing it with 4 live players. I personally feel MULE is one of the best video/computer games ever written. Dan

The keypad is implemented as a scanning matrix so with the right software you should be able to detected any combination of multiple key presses. Using bankswitching there is really not limit to the size cart you can implement. It's just a matter of coming up with the appropriate bank switching logic. Dan

The Maria probably wouldn't have been involved in the Laserdisc playback. The expansion port has a video input pin which gets mixed with the video from the Maria chip, so the Maria graphics would just overlay the Laserdisc playback. I personally think the real power of Maria is it's flexibility. Other consoles locked you into specific types of graphics, fixed size sprites, tile mapped backgrounds, etc. With Maria you had the flexibility to design whatever type of graphics engine you wanted. Dan

... and http://www.usamusement.com/ as a few coming up soon also. I am going to be selling a old Williams Pinball I refurbished at the Cherry Hill auction on the 4th. Dan

According to Mapping the Atari, if you put 0 in memory location $41 it will turn the loading sound off. Dan

The equipment you have should be sufficient, so the problem may be with your technique. Here are a few tips to help you out: 1. Keep you iron clean. Each time you plug it in to work, once it warms up wipe of the tip on a sponge, and if that doesn't clean it use a little bit of steel wool or emery cloth. While soldering preiodically wipe it off on the sponge. 2. Keep your iron "tinned". Each time you clean the tip, melt a little solder onto the tip, this helps conduct the heat. 3. Make sure the parts you are soldering are clean. If it's a freshly stripped wire it should be ok, if not clean it off with some emery cloth. 4. Make sure the joint is held together "mechanically" before you solder. Once you remove the iron from the joint it needs to stay together until the solder cools. If the joint opens up while the solder is still liquid you will get a bad joint. 5. Touch the iron to the joint you are soldering and let it heat up, then touch the solder to the join, NOT to the iron. Doing it this way the solder will be drawn into the joint by the heat of the iron. When you have enough solder applied, remove the solder first, hold the iron on for a few more seconds, then remove the iron. Dan

I opened up the Activision one a while back and that is exactly what I found. It actually has two epoxy blobs, the switch inputs clearly goto the one blob and the video and audio comes from the other. It's possible that one contains the audio/video hardware and the other contain processor, ROM and IO. Dan

When developing my 5200 emulator I discovered that Activision actually did this to some extent on Kaboom (and maybe others). On the 2600 sprite data is written to the TIA line by line. On the 5200 this is handled automatically by the ANTIC chip via DMA, but the registers to directly write the data are still there and Kaboom uses them instead of the DMA. Dan

BTW, if you want to see a good example of how to use character mode to do a large number of moving objects, check out Shamus by Synapse. Dan