Hatta

Wow, trackball for Robotron 2084 is a great idea. I actually have 2 trak balls and Robotron 2084. It would beat trying to hold a controller in each hand for sure. Though I may just end up bolting a couple joysticks to a piece of wood, in lieu of a coupler.

I agree, the FMV genre does have it's charm. It would be interesting to see some new FMV games with modern technology. I'm glad someone mentioned The Beast Within. I don't think a better FMV game has been made. I can't recommend A Puzzle of Flesh though. Star Trek: Klingon and Star Trek: Borg were both pretty good too. I was not really a fan of the Night Trap style, pseudo action FMV games. BTW, I thought Novastorm was a pretty good rail shooter. But I only played the PC version.

Wasteland had everything you could want, except ammo. WTF.

Yeah, I haven't found much worth playing on the Mac that I can't play on the IIgs with color and better sound. Continuum does look pretty cool though, I've always been a fan of the gravity based shooters. Some of the World Builder games piqued my interest, but they'll have to wait for a while. Did a little googling right now, and I'm going to have to check out The Colony right away.

Yeah, that's the one I was going to mention. I have their genesis flash cart (the neo myth MD) and it's great. Dunno when we can expect to see production though.

How well does a trackball emulate a spinner? They both freewheel and have a bit of inertia.

I thought as much. Really leaves you high and dry if you have a virgin Mac. Shame there's nothing quite like ADTPro for Macs. I should really write a floppy with Binhex & Stuffit (and a terminal emulator) in case I ever need to reinstall this thing.

Wow, lots of nebraskans here. I'm in Omaha myself. I've got the Pinball breakaway, and a Super-pong. For non-atari pong machines I've got the Odyssey 300 and an APF-TV fun. Unfortunately I have no AC adaptor for the APF-TV fun. Anyone know what that thing takes?

The real bitch with these old macs is dealing with the resource fork. I was lucky that the Classic I picked up already had ClarisWorks on it, which can do xmodem transfers and macbinary decompression. Without that I don't know what I'd have done. I used one of these cables, FWIW. If you're going to use zip drives or floppies to transfer from a PC to a classic mac, how does that handle the resource fork? Will executables copied to the zip disk show up as executables on the Mac? Or do you have to use macbinary or something to get it across? What about netatalk? If you had a classic mac with a virgin system 6 install, could you use netatalk to serve files to it? Will it work over a serial cable like the one I have, or would you need ethernet? I was going to try out TCP/IP on this mac, which is in a Classic II case, but is actually a Classic inside. At half the CPU speed and less than half the RAM, I'm not sure that's worthwhile. Still works great as a network drive for my IIgs which was the main reason I got it. I can even run IIgs Wolf3d over the localtalk share.

Floppy disks are nice, but media is getting harder to come by. When I got my first retro computer (an IIgs) I spent more on the floppies for it than for the computer itself. At close to $1/disk, a flash drive is really a pretty good investment in comparison. Floppies are only going to get more scarce. The uIEC sounds like a really good solution. I have no problem seeking out cracked images to play with. Googling around a bit and I'm a little confused, what's the difference between the uIEC and sd2IEC?

You're kidding, right?

About a tenth of that.

Check this completed eBay auction out: http://cgi.ebay.com/commodore-64-1541-computer-system-w-all-cables-games_W0QQitemZ300349697088QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item45ee3cac40&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14 Am I off base here, or did that go for *way* more than that lot is worth? What would motivate someone to bid so high on that lot instead of just waiting for the next one? I don't see anything special about it.

This is fantastic news! Great price too. Thanks so much for doing this. I can't wait!

Thanks for the heads up, I got some too. Turns out a lot of .atr files won't work with an SIO2SD on a stock 600XL with only 16k of ram, even if the program only uses 8k (e.g. Star Raiders). 64k should make this thing a lot more useful. -Hatta

I have a 600XL, and 2 copies of Missile Command (CXL4012). When I try to run these carts, I get sent to the Self Test screen. Also, I have a copy of LodeRunner. I can't figure out how to get past the startup screen. "Start" doesn't seem to do anything. I have cleaned all these carts, so that's not the problem. Any thoughts? The Lode Runner is for the XEGS btw, but my other XEGS carts work, so I'd guess this one should too.

Nice. For the longest time I had about 70 carts, then I hopped right over 100 and 200 by buying a big lot off of Craigslist. I stand at a little more than 280 unique carts. Probably 50 dupes. I could keep going, but it's hard to stay motivated when there's a 99% chance I already have whatever I find.

kjmann, thanks for the diagram, that looks pretty easy to do. Can you help me out in selecting the components? There are 3 pages of 1N4001 diodes on mouser.com. How do I know which one I need? Does it even matter? Same for the capacitors and resistors, how do I know what power/voltage rating I need?

I opened up the 600xl, and it is the right configuration for the s-video mod. And bonus, the chips are socketed. Anyway, if you'll forgive my ignorance, I could use some help selecting the right components for the s-video mod. The mod as written only tells me, for instance, that I need a 100pF ceramic capacitor. But 100pF ceramic capacitors come in all sorts of variations. Does it matter whether it's disc capacitor or a multilayer? What voltage do I need? Tolerance? And the 2N3904, if I look those up on Mouser, there are 19 different ones to choose from. How do I know which one I need?

Awesome, that doesn't sound too hard at all. Thanks.

I'm interested in putting an S-video port on my 600XL. I found a mod, but it lacks a source of chrominance. Is there another mod that includes this, or is using composite video for chrominance really sufficient? Also, I've seen that some people have 600XLs with "internal 64k", but I haven't seen how this is done. Was that a commercial option back in the day, or does it take some hardware hacking?