DanBoris

At lot of very interesting things went on on behind the scenes in the videogame industry back in the day. I would recommend the book Phoenuix: The Fall & Rise of Videogames if you want to read more about it. One of the interesting things about Atari that I didn't know until recently was that Nintendo originally want Atari to sell the NES outside of of Japan, but (obviously) the deal eventually fell through. Dan

You could pick up a clock off the 6507 processor at either pins 27 or 28, these are both are 1.19Mhz. Also pin 11 of the TIA chip is the clock input which is approximatly 2.6Mhz. Dan

Your best bet is to get the part online: http://www.digikey.com/ http://www.mcmelectronics.com/welcome.jhtml http://www.mouser.com/ http://www.jdr.com/interact/default.asp All these companies are very reputable. If you really need to walk into a store, the only decent one I know of in NJ is Active Electronics on Rt70 in Cherry Hill. Dan

This is exactly how you do it. To scroll from left to right, increment HSCROL, if it's > 15, set it to 0 and increment the LMS To scroll from right to left, decrement HSCROL, if it's < 0, set it to 15 and decremenet the LMS Dan

If the schematics on my web site are correct then that is a very important capacitor. It's in the power regulator section and you probably won't get the correct voltage to the system without it. Dan

A few of the programmers are listed on the Giant List of Classic Videogame Programmers: http://www.dadgum.com/giantlist/list.html Dan

On Mapquest put in: 1265 Borregas Ave Sunnyvale, CA That will get you right in the center of the area. Then just click the Aerial Photo tab to see the photo. You can compare against the map here: http://www.atari-history.com/archives/pape...rk/1978map.html to identify the buildings. Dan

Actually, you do have the paddle schemaitcs online. Just goto the 2600 schematics section of the archives and look at the Accessories sheet: http://www.atariage.com/2600/archives/sche...tics/index.html Dan

It's traditional in binary to pad binary numbers out to an "even" number of bits. Since 1 byte is 8-bits, it's common to pad out to 8-digits. So 3 in decimal becomes 00000011. It's also common to see binary numbers padded to 4 digits which is called a nibble. The nice thing about breaking numbers into blocks of four digits is that it makes conversion to hexdecimal easier, because each group of four bits becomes 1 hex digit: 1111010000111000 1111 0100 0011 1000 F 4 3 8 $F438 in hex Dan

There was only ever one 5200 cart that used bankswitching, Bounty Bob Strikes Back. You could probably come up with your own bankswitching scheme quite easily, and there is plenty of space inside a 5200 cart to implement it. Dan

Unfortunetly, this is not at all true. Actually the reverse is far more correct, if it runs on the real hardware, it should run well on the emulator. The reason for this is that there are certain things that aren't necesarry to emulate to get existing games to work. For example, on a real 5200 if you don't enable the keyboard scanning you won't be able to read the key pads or controllers. On my 5200 emulator, I never emulated this behavior because there was never a time when a game needed to have the scanning disabled, so reading the controllers works on the emulator whether you enable keyboard scanning or not. This tripped up a few 5200 programmers who where developing using just the emulator. This is just one example, there are many others. Dan

I would recommend an APE interface: http://www.atarimax.com/ This cable and software allows you to hook you Atari 8-bit to a PC and use the PC like a giant disk drive. This will allow you to easily access your files on both the Atari and your PC. As for a language to use, Atari Basic is a good choice to get your started. It was actually quite powerful and was even used for a number of comercial games back in the day. The only problem is that you won't be able to use it to make a cartridge based game, for that you will need assembly language. There are at least 2 assembly language carts that I know of. The first was the Atari Assembler, and the other was Mac65 by OSS (which also comes in a disk version). From what I can remeber Mac65 was the assembler of choice for the Atari, much more capable then the Atari Assembler. Another option is to write your code on a PC and use a cross assembler (an assembler that runs on the PC but in this case produces 6502 binary code). You could then run the game on an emulator and/or the real system via the APE interface i mentioned above. Hope this helps Dan Boris

The moral of the story is, never trust emulators when you are developing games. They are great for thier debugging abilities, but they are no replacement for the real hardware. Going back and forth between the two (emulation and real hardware) gives you the best of both world. Dan

I wouldn't recommend doing this. Although they are the same voltage (9V) the NES adapter out is AC then 7800's is DC. It guess it works, but it's not good for the system. The specs on the 7800 adaptor are: Input: 120VAC 60Hz 15W Output: 9VDC 1Amp A replacement with these specs is not hard to find (I belive you can get them at Radio Shack), the problem is the connector. The connectors are hard to find but I have heard that they are used on some portable phone batteries. The other option is to modify your 7800 to put in a more standard power jack. Dan

Here is another interesting view of the buildings. It's an ariel view from Map quest. If you compare it with the map on Atari-History.com you can pick out most of the buildings. http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?mapdata=xU4YXd Dan

Of all the consoles I have studied, I would say that the Gameboy is probably one of the easiest to program. It has a really nice, simple, yet power graphics controller that really makes getting stuff on the screen easy. There are is also a lot of good tech info and development tools out there for it. Dan

http://www.atari-history.com/archives/pape...rk/1978map.html

We had SpacePort arcades in Southern New Jersey also, they must have been a chain. We also had one called Funway Freeway which was done with black carpeting on the floors and walls, and decorated with road signs. Very cool arcade! I remeber back when arcades where really big, my local shopping mall actually had 3 seperate arcades opertating at the same time! Those where the days! Dan

Yes, it all has to do with the graphics modes your use. Antic modes 2-7 are character modes where the background is made up of individual graphic "tiles". Modes 8 and up are graphics modes and can display fully bitmapped graphics. Modes D and E are nice for a high resolution 4-color graphics, and for real high resolution there is mode F, but that is only 2 colors. You will find that a lot of games use the character modes because they take less memory, and you can update the graphics a lot faster since you don't need to do as many write to the video memory as you would with bitmapped modes. Dan

The expansion port mainly has audio/video connections on it. For example there is a composite output, and video outputs directly from the Maria chip. What's interesting is the EXTMEM and RDY signals which are related to the processor. There signals are pretty useless on thier own so I have to assume that the idea was to in some cases use this expansion port along with the cart slot which provides the full data and address bus from the processor. Dan

You may also want to check out Machine Code Tutor for the Atari 8-bit computers. You can get it at: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/atari/utils.html and run it on an emulator. I checked it out last night and it's a pretty good intereactive tutorial. Dan

Prior to the Pokey I believe all the Atari games generated thier sounds with a variety of custom digital/analog circuits. You would generally see a different circuit for each sound the system had to generate which allowed you to have multiple sounds simultaneously. Taking the game SuperBug as an example, it had a circuit for the engine sound, a curcuit for the tire screech sound, and a circuit for the crash sound. The engine sound circuit was built around a 555 timer (very common in sound circuits) the frequency of which could be controlled by the processor to give the impression of the engine running faster or slower. The output of the timer went into a counter circuit that generated a pseudo-random sound for the engine noise. You can get manuals and schematics for a lot of the old Atari games at www.spies.com/arcade. You may also want to check out the Video Game Logic Handbook Volume 1, which can be found in the Bronze Age section of that site. It has a couple pages on sound generation. Dan [ 06-03-2002: Message edited by: Dan Boris ]

One reason is that there are a few games that don't work on all 7800, but of course will work on a 2600. The other reason is for reasons of collectability. Some people just like to have the original systems as collectibles even if they don't actually need them to play games. Dan

quote: Originally posted by StanJr: I don't think they can touch you if you give it away. Am I right? By this same logic, if I were to burn copies of Microsoft Office and hand them out at a flea-market for free, Microsoft couldn't touch me? Whether you get money for them or not, it's still copyright/trademark infringement. (Insert obiligatory "I am not a lawyer" disclaimer here) Dan

I have read the book and highly recommend it, it's packed with great information on the history of video games. I do have to agree with the last poster that the writing style can be a little awkward at times (sorry Leonard), but the content more the makes up for it. I also recommend "The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon--The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World" by Steven Kent (this was originally published as "The First Quarter") It's another good book on videogame history and make's a nice compliment to Phoenix. Dan