Atarius Maximus

I’ve picked up two games myself so far.

All the new releases!

The Champ Games booth.

Ran into James not that long ago.

I thought I’d share a few pics of the AA booth as I walked in this morning. It’s packed here!

I just missed you, left not too long ago. I’ll be there all day tomorrow!

Maybe a little late now, but I’ll be there around 4PM today. Let me know if you still need help.

I'm planning on stopping by. See you all there!

I'd love one for myself and my wife, Al. Steve Engelhardt "Atarius Maximus" St. Louis, Missouri Regina Engelhardt St. Louis, Missouri

Here's the Windows x64 executable I compiled using Visual Studio 2022, for anyone that might have difficulty creating it themselves. It's unofficial of course, and download/use at your own risk, however my laptop is virus-free as far as I know. I found from my own Maximus78 project that Visual Studio binaries are often incorrectly flagged as viruses by Windows 10/11, so that very well might happen here too. That just happened to me when I downloaded RevEng's latest 0.29 7800basic as well. Downloading it with Tor gave me enough time to extract it before Windows quarantined it, Edge & Chrome didn't allow the download in the first place. 7800cmd.zip

Just in case this helps someone out I thought I'd share my no-solder cable build and the Amazon links for the items I purchased for $26.27 USD (+tax). There are cheaper options out there (I ended up with a lot of extra, unneeded plugs & wires, and I paid extra for a serial adapter that was already in a plastic case), but this was the easiest and cleanest solution for me personally. I already had some leftover heat-shrink tubing, but something like this would work. I bought the dupont jumper wires just to easily make the resulting cable a little bit longer, they were unnecessary. 20 Sets Mini Micro Jst 2.0 Ph 3 Pin Connector Plug Male With 150mm Cable & Female by daier ($8.29 USD) GenBasic 40 Piece Male to Female 4 Inch Solderless Ribbon Dupont-Compatible Jumper Wires for Breadboard Prototyping ($5.49 USD) DSD TECH SH-U09C USB to TTL Serial Adapter with FTDI FT232RL Chip Compatible with Windows 11, 10, 7 and Mac OS ($12.49 USD) It works perfectly! It's so incredibly convenient and easy compared to using the Cuttle Cart 2 for development in the past.

Lol! My master plan would be foiled! 😆 I also had the back of the t-shirt printed like a sports jersey, with "atarius maximus" along the top and the number 78 underneath. It was $30ish at uberprints.com, not too bad.

I ordered a T-Shirt just for the event. I should be pretty easy to spot!

I've got the Super 78 and the Super CV Arcade, kind of makes me wish I'd sprung for the 78 twin when I got mine a few years back. They are fantastic controllers!

Me too, I also used a small screwdriver to push the micro-sd card in. It's offset just enough that just using my fingernail isn't quite enough to push it in. Slightly inconvenient but not that big of a deal.

I got my 7800GD from Al today, and it's fantastic! I guess my old CC2 is finally obsolete. I also picked up a new 7800 console this week that was recapped, av modded, and had new button switches installed. I'm ready to go for many more years to come now... and I can finally play (and work on) Drone Patrol on real hardware.

I thought I'd put this here in case anyone searches for this again and stumbles upon this thread. It's all of the default keyboard mappings for A7800, taken from the Maximus78 front end help window.

Thanks Eagle. I just completed a membership request on that site, I'll see if I can reach him that way. I won't be keeping that tune in the final version of the game either way, but it would be nice to let him know and make sure it's ok that I posted this with his song in it. I'll remove the attachment from the post if he asks me to. Edit: I just read the forum thread that caused Al to ban him. Ouch. This was just a random song selection, I didn't realize he was a banned member here. It's not likely he'll be thrilled with my question. Edit #2: I sent a request to emkay at atarionline.pl asking permission to use it in the sample ROM I already posted. I'll remove it if he requests that and find a different sample to include later.

@RevEng recently added RMT support to 7800basic, so I've been playing around with adding music to the title screen of Drone Patrol. Many thanks to him for adding in this functionality to 7800basic! I didn't originally write the code with music in mind so adding it now is a little challenging (I don't have any RAM space available for music playback), but I do have space for about a 45 second loop on the main menu screen. I could create some more space with some additional time spent optimizing code, probably up to 2 minutes of music or so. I have zero skills in music creation, but it was fun browsing through the ASMA archive to test this out. I selected a file that I liked that was small enough to fit in my code and it works well. The title screen now plays a tune named "Alloy" by Emkay. This is just a demo using a random song from the public archive, I did not reach out to the author of the song nor am I exactly sure how I would do that. Edit: This song will not be included in any final release of the game, this is just a sample to show that I'm able to add music. Edit #2: A quick update to the binary so the music stops playing when you start the game. I simply forgot to add the 'stoprmt' command in before the game starts. Version number is the same, I just replaced the attachment to this post. drone_patrol_v54.a78

...and I ordered one. Thank you Al!

I've been checking the web site almost hourly for the last week, and saw the email from them at about 12:06 today by chance. I was just a few minutes too late!

I checked at 7 minutes past the hour, and it still says "Notify Me"... I guess they sold out that quickly? I'd love to get my hands on one for development purposes, as I can't test my recent game (Drone Patrol) on real hardware. I guess I'll just have to be patient.

David knocked it out of the park with the artwork! Thanks Al! I'll be at PRGE for the first time this year, super excited to be going and to be there for this release.

Nice! Thanks! I haven't attempted a z-modem download in nearly 30 years! It was pretty fun getting the BBS up to where it is now. There are hundreds of additional doors I could add, but getting some of them to work on a modern system is challenging, and it's also impossible to register nearly all of them now. BBS door games are part of gaming history that doesn't seem to be very well preserved. I still had my original registration info and documentation stored for a few things, which proved to be handy. I may make some file download areas dedicated to Atari, you've given me a good start. I could make my future game releases only available on the BBS!