Andrew Davie

You're welcome. Please ask Al for a refund on my commission on the Qb cart. Happy Christmas. Cheers A

As a Christmas present just for you, because this is the first post I've read where someone has ordered Qb -- please ask Al for a refund of the 'royalty' I get for this particular Qb cartridge. Merry Christmas.

Now that would be naughty. I do have plans, however, to release the engine -- without ANY of the algorithms or logic related to Boulder Dash ® embedded. Basically a system that could be used to create any number of 'character graphics' style games. I'll seek FSS's approval on what I release first, just so there are no misunderstandings. Cheers A BTW the video on YouTube is a few years old. I've been playing with the code -- just cosmetics, really -- for the past few days and it looks a bit nicer now.

The levels are absolutely identical to the original.

Atari 2600 Boulder Dash ® in action. Damn that looks nice. Albert suggested I give away a free Boulder Dash ® with every 10 Qb sold (per individual!) in the Christmas Sale. Cheers A

Yes, Pitfall is running with 270% !!! What ever happend to this project ? I.G That was a crash project I did for a particular Activision guy I knew from these forums, to prove to his bosses that it was in fact possible to do a reasonable Atari 2600 emulator on GBA. I got it working with something like 20 Activision games installed and running at reasonable speed, and delivered it to this guy to show at an Activision meeting. I worked on this for weeks, busting my gut, and not only did he NOT even thank me for the work (of course I wasn't paid), the project was approved and given to another developer without me even being told. After that particular kick in the teeth, I dropped the project and lost all respect for the person in question. The bottom line is that yes, it is possible to do a pretty good Atari 2600 emulator on the GBA. I did it. It wasn't perfect, and it slowed down here and there... but I only spent a month or two on it and I'm confident it could have been optimised to achieve better speed. But it was pretty good, and pretty damn neat playing Atari 2600 on my handheld. Cheers A

First thing I suggest everyone do is change the spelling back to the way it was meant to be. Cheers A

Qb does not use ChronoColour. Qb just flashes two different sprites alternately, each with different colour. ChronoColour is a whole different and much more sophisticated kettle of fish, involving three frames, each of those interleaved with each other into red/green/blue scanlines, and generated as a 1-bit dithered version of the original. No comparison can be made between the techniques - it's like comparing a pushbike and a ferrari and saying they both have wheels so they're essentially the same.

Wasn't Atari Charles hundred dollar cart with a Tronman picture a demo of chronocolor interlacing? Did anyone here even get one of those? And didn't Andrew D. come up with that technique.......or was the first to utilize it to it's full potential? The Tronman cart was a rip-off using my original free public-domain code for the dancing baby demo and the Build Your Own Greeting Cart. Only the bankswitching method had been changed, and it was able to display 7 images, I think. The images in that cart were in my opinion very poor quality because the image conversion wasn't done correctly. ChronoColour carts such as the Christmas GreetingCart were much better visually. The ChronoColour technique came about when Thomas Jentzcsh and I became interested in colour display techniques, and we independantly worked on different systems, but were feeding off each others' ideas and work. Probably ChronoColour produced the best quality in the end, but there were definitely different techniques, all viable. ChronoColour multiplexes three single-bit dithered frames for the red/green/blue components of a colour image, which are interleaved with each other such that the three frames consist of alternating red scanline, green scanline, blue scanline (one from each frame). These interleaved frames are then played in sequence while at the same time changing the colour of each scanline to either red or green or blue both on a line-by-line basis and on a frame-by-frame basis. The colour on any line cycles red one frame, green the next, blue the next, and colours on successive lines within a frame are red, green, blue, red, green, blue, etc. Put all of that together and you get your ChronoColour images. There's a document at http://www.taswegian.com/greetingcart.html with an explanation.

This would be funny if you used "enlargement" instead of "extension".

I thought the televisor was set up for a scan rate of 384 lines/second. How did you make it display A2600 video which is at 15,750 lines/second? Scanlines are vertical in my televisor, and although there are only 32 scanlines, displayed at 12.5fps, each scanline has a higher resolution limited by the bandwidth of the source signal. It's hard to put a value on it, but say 50 pixels. In reality, we don't have discrete pixels on a line... just shades of grey merging into each other. The video is simply downconverted before playing on the televisor. Doesn't matter what the '2600 displays; the video is treated on a frame by frame basis and this frame is converted to the appropriate format (ie: a wav file). In other words, no, it's not live... yet.

No, there have been no discussions bewteen First Star Software and myself about this for a number of years. I am not about to release an unlicensed version, so it looks like the project is dead. The only way this could ever be released is if First Star Software gave their blessing. It might be unreleased, but at least *I* know that I managed to pull it off... and that's what counts to me. There's a version on cart that appears at the occasional show -- might be worth chasing up.

It's very difficult to get good-focus screenshots with my camera, but attached are my first effort. This shows my implementation of BoulderDash running on a '2600, as it looks when displayed on my mechanical Televisor. The televisor is mentioned in http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=105068 for those who blinked.

Yes, that was my work -- but there's a much much better all-colour version that came a few months after that one. See attached binary. This is from about June 2003, so it's quite old. ohno.zip

Interesting Freudian slip. Wrath of the wraith? Cheers A

I have a CreatiVision and a bunch of cartridges to suit for sale. Contact me privately. Cheers A

Call me a spoilsport, but you just can't appropriate others' intellectual property and release it for profit, like this. Come up with your own idea, or get permission from the copyright owners!!!!!

Only to point to the copyright notice on the code... ; Copyright ©2003 Andrew Davie - adavie@atari2600.org Cheers A

In the same way that photocopying an artist's paintings and selling two of them together as an "expanded work", this picture cart surpasses the initial design. I recommend that NOBODY buy this overpriced rip-off. I will be happy to produce, free of charge, a binary of any image anyone cares to send me. And the picture quality will be as good as I can get them -- and I have lots of experience so I know how to produce the best possible -- not like these seemingly amateurish efforts. The binary I deliver can be burned to a stock-standard 4K cart (Al will do that for you, on the cheap). I consider this particular effort a ripoff both in terms of money, quality, and especially in terms of ethics. At the very least I should have been consulted and/or asked or informed -- as requested in my initial "build your own" posting. The product could have been much better. So. DO NOT BUY THIS!

This is the first I've heard of this, and I'm definitely not "snailsoft". The sample binaries were probably done with my 'build your own' instructions/code as posted in these forums, though the quality of the images shown here is in my opinion very poor. There's a trick to getting good quality, and I was not asked/consulted as far as this cartridge goes. I very much disapprove of somebody making/selling this type of thing, if it uses my work.

To avoid this sort of variable clashing, I suggest you try the following... SEG.U variables ORG $80 ; define your variables here ; this is an uninitialised segment -- the assembler will calculate addresses, but create no actual data in the binary ; examples... GAME_STATUS ds 1 ; 1 byte for this var! PF1DATA ds 32 ; 32 for this one PF2DATA ds 32 ; and this ; this allows you to insert/remove variables at will, and resize, without having to recalculate! ; in other words, let the assembler calculate the locations of stuff, you just state how big they are! SEG code ORG $F000 ; rest of your program here

I predict it will be shipped to you in a bubble-wrapped envelope, and it will be one of the very few sealed, crushed, boxed video life known to exist. Cheers A

I have an Aussie (PAL) official Atari 2600 JR with the 4-position switch on the back, selecting one of 4 banks of games. That is, this is the Atari with inbuilt games only released in Australia (AFAIK). Any offers? Postage to USA will be a maximum of US$15, but I'll do it at cost if less than that.

Yes, there's a thriving underground market in Atari porn, you just don't know the right people to ask. Personally, I'm still doing very low resolution video stuff these days, only not with Atari. I'm building my own 1930s mechanical television. Really! see Narrow Band Television Association Forum

OK, so what you're basically asking is... do I think that it's worth buying something in cart form... something that I've not seen, that you can't give any information about, and which is planned to be released "soon". No.