DanBoris

You can hear this album (and also one for Asteroids) on WGDG radio on Live365.com. Dan

I am not currently working on a new version, but after hearing some of the concerns here about the proto-games, I might go back to work on it. Dan

The state of the arcade industry is very sad. It's interesting to compare the home game and arcade industries. Home games took a major hit as we all know in the crash, but within a few years they recovered and are now a thriving industry (game quality aside). On the other hand the arcade industry was not hit as hard by the crash but's it's decline has continued until this day. I don't think arcades can compete with today's home systems. Back in the 70's and 80's arcade games where always well ahead of the technology curve compared to home systems, but today the home systems have really caught up to the arcade technology. The major exception being the "simulator" type games, (skiing simulators, driving sims, etc) which you can't get the same expience from in a home system. Unfortunetly these machines are so expensive it's hard to run them economically. Another interesting point is that in the 70's and 80's arcade where a major social hangout, especially for younger people, but I don't think this is any longer the case. So the question is, did the aracdes die because they stopped being a hangout, or did they stop being a hangout because they where dying? Dan

If you are having problems with the sound in VSS check out: http://www.ece.mcgill.ca/~vromas/vdmsound/ I get similar results to you when I run VSS under Windows XP, but when I use that program, I get nearly perfect sound. Dan

Classes (and object oriented programming) really confused me when I first learned them. I understood how they worked, but didn't understand how to use them effectivly to write a program. I have recently started doing much more object oriented programming and would now have a hard time going back to doing it the 'old way' Dan

Yes, it's true that Atari never had a blockbuster system other then the 2600, but some of thier other systems did ok, even though they weren't number one, the 8-bit computer line for example. And don't forget about Atari's arcade games, they had considerable success in this area, and kept coming up with inovative games well into the 80's. Dan

Whick proto's are you specifically having trouble with? I am pretty sure I have VSS working with most of the protos Dan

You can get it here: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/atari/ it's in the Utilities section. Dan

A bar above a signal on a schematic means that it is "active low". meaning that you set it low to perform it's function. So an active low reset means it would need to be pulled low to cause a reset. Dan

I don't think it's weird at all, it's called marketing! Remeber Atari conceived this idea in 1982 which was the peak of the video game craze. According to http://www.emuunlim.com/doteaters/: "In 1983, sales in videogames across the board have risen from 950 million dollars the previous year to $3.2 billion." Atari was probably taking a sizable chunk of that, so $150,000 for the prizes ($25,000 for each individual, $50,000 for the final) would have been a big problem for them. Even if the contest had totally tanked (which it ultimatly did), Atari could have sold off the prizes are recovered a good portion of that. Dan

It actually looks like the hex inverter is under the EPROM. Another interesting thing is the four copper jumper pads in front of the EPROM. These looks just like the jumper pads Atari used on the 7800 carts. Dan

They are also quite unique because Okie-Dokie was one of the first (if not the first) homebrew 2600 games to be sold to the public. I am the proud owner of #98 as well as an extremely rare Okie-Dokie prototype that Bob Colbert sent be because I helped him out when he was writing it. Dan

Yes, true Bit Rot only effects EPROMs, and most carts did not use EPROMs, they used mask programmed ROMS. But any electronic device is susceptible to deterioration. Dan

You can still grab it from the Internet Wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20011004162335/http://www.digiserve.com/e escape/atari/Atari-Timeline.html://http://web.archive.org/web/20011004...i-Timeline.html Dan

1. The flicker really doesn't have anything to do with scanlines, it has to do more with display objects. For examples in 2600 Adventure, when to many objects are on the screen at one time the game uses the 2 2600 sprites to display two objects on one video frame, then a different two objects on the next frame, thus the flicker. 2. This probably wouldn't work, at least not reliably. You could put a small piece of code into RAM which would be run when the switch happened (so the processor wouldn't be running code from the cart), but the 2600 carts where not designed to be inserted and removed while the system is on and doing this would probably screw up the code you had running in RAM. This also wouldn't be to good for the carts. Dan

It's technically possible to hack a version of Pac-man to change the way the ghosts behave, but it wouldn't be easy. You would have to disassemble the existing code, figure out how it works, replace the section for that handles the ghost movement, then re-assemble the code. The other (and larger) problem would be making the game playable with this sort of algorithm for the ghosts. It would be very easy to make all four ghosts move right for your position on the screen but this would result in you dying very quickly every time. The patterns that the real Pac-Man arcade game uses where probably picked very carefully to make the game challenging, but not impossible. Dan

My bad, it's talking about K bits, not K bytes. Dan

The 7800 programmers manual specifies jumper configurations for carts up to 1024K (1M) of ROM. Dan

For the record, I can't provide them because I don't know them Dan

I can't provide specifics, but it shouldn't be too hard to do the conversion, the pinouts of the ROMS used on the 7800 carts are very close to the pinouts of a standard EPROM. The jumpers on the boards are used to set the size of the ROM and RAM that is on the cart. Dan

You can get everything you need right here at Atari Age. For an emulator I would recommend Virtual Super System (which I wrote), or Atari800win, bit work and are good 5200 emulators. You can also download the bios ROM and games here. For legal reasons you will have a hard time finding a package with the emulator and roms all in one zip. The emulators are freely available, but the ROMS are all copyrighted so most emulator authors forbid them to be distributed together. Dan

This is correct. The 7800 is essentially two machines in the same box. The mess driver emulators the 7800 portion but not the 2600 portion. So the 7800 driver will not run 2600 games. Putting the 2600 into MESS is even more tricky then writing a standalone 2600 emulator. The structure of MESS makes all the tricky video timing very hard to do. Dan

I just finished reading High Score from cover to cover and have to say it's an excellent book and compliments the other videogame books that are out there. The one thing I got from High Score that I didn't get as much from other books was the coverage of computer games as opposed to console and arcade. It's not a replacement for the Digital Press Guide, since DPG is more of a collectors guide then a history book. Dan

I just ran the Diagnostic cart on MESS and it does run and get past the logo screen. The screen that comes up definitly doesn't look right, but I am not sure what it's supposed to look like. The test mode testings in CTRL are unrelated to the 2600/7800 mode which is controlled by another register entirely. Dan

The 7800 bios actually does a very comprehensive diagnostic of the system on startup, including testing the odd mirroring of the RAM and testing every 6502 instuction. I'll have to play around with the image a bit and see if I can get it running on the emulator. Dan