Carpenter

Thomas, every single piece of material used is brand new, including the white case that was manufactured (injected) exclusively for us. It has the classic shape of some cartridge cases manufactured during the 80's in Brazil and it resembles the Xänte style. (even the cover screws are new :-)

Hi Lauren! I know that this may be frustrating but it is not technically possible to run the ROM in emulators. I encourage you to watch the gameplay video on YouTube to see it for yourself. We have been distributing the game in Brazil since last Christmas (Dec 15) and we are getting good reviews, for both the game and printed materials!

You are welcome :-) Right. Good suggestion. Sure we gonna contact these folks in the case of releasing, but that's not planned for now for several reasons. Think of a super-mega-extended tribute with great value added :-) Technically yes, but you'd ruin the gameplay. I have discussed this BS technique somewhere else in the forum. Thanks! This have been a four hands hard work for at least two years. Actually all the graphics were designed by HSW3ET who is IMHO extremely talented. This TV set was released in Brazil some years ago as a limited edition. It even contains the designer's signature! I Like it :-)

Thanks for the purchase, Kosmic Stardust! The ATARI VCS2600 scene really appreciates your business! :-) You are right, the game cartridge saves the planet selected for a certain period of time while the power is off! A counter is in charge of changing them!

Yes, you can think of separate planets being on the same game engine. The Manual is in Portuguese, as the game was intended to be released in the brazilian market, but there is an English guide to the user manual that translates every single information provided, so you won't be left in the dark. Check our website for complete information, once it has an English version too.

Sure, Thomas! The full game is composed actually by four copies that are selected during console on/off cycles, each copy being a different planet. The original game is 4k but this version was expanded to 16k on each planet. It uses a bankswitching scheme that is triggered by HW states, not SW instructions, so it will not work properly on emulators unless they are patched to simulate this behavior. VCS2600 console is the only way to have complete gameplay it at this moment. No assembly and no bB where used to make this game, only bit twiddling by direct manipulation of binaries. Talking about gameplay, you can find it in the video posted above by Marcus and in our YouTube channel. Please note that you can select up to 4 different levels of difficulty on each planet so you can make the game harder to play than it is shown, if you want. The printed material can be checked at our website. There is a lot of pictures and non-technical information there. Thanks for asking! :-)

Hi folks I have been working on a hack, along with my friend HSW3ET (Leandro Camara), called "A New Marauder". It is a tribute to 1982 Tiger Vision's Marauder, a game that always caught our attention and we thought it could have been a more fun and challenger game. We spent some (a lot of) time developing new graphics and gameplay, according to our vision, polishing it and designing printed materials that we hope to be of interest to collectors and other players like us. A New Marauder is the first release of a series and it would be a pleasure to partner up with other game developers who have created quality VCS2600 games and would like to release them in the brazilian market with our help. If you want to know more about the game and our initiative (which we call More Work Games), please visit us in the following website: www.morework.com.br We hope you enjoy! Carpenter (Darcio Prestes)

This technique uses data feedback to keep states mapped by different areas of the memory space and it is well known in the digital world, specially by the old timers. No news here. I implemented this kind of circuit to run F6 and F8 schemes and it worked fine. You only have to use fast memories, lets say 45 ns, to cope with instability, with a size twice or four times the 6507 ROM space (aka 8 or 16 kb) to store the states (or banks). You can even remove the A12 line inverter chip (7404) because you can do this inversion in the data stored in the BS eprom. By doing this your cart basically will only have two components: the eproms. At the time the VCs was designed, silicon space was expensive (memories and micro controllers/processors mainly) so all the bankswitching logic was implemented with discrete ICs in order to make the cart cheap to be manufactured. In the present days you can find eproms very cheap or source them from electronic junk, so its cost doesn't matter anymore. This makes very convenient the use of an extra eprom memory to store the BS logic for VCS carts.

A-M-A-Z-I-N-G I wonder how much the very first uncovered cart will cost on ebay!

Pictures of Harmony package and a happy customer!

That happened to me too. It took several weeks (USA-Brazil USPS shipping usually it takes 7-10 days) to get harmony in my hands.

Hey folks! Thank you very much for taking the time and the effort to bring Harmony to live. Sure the community splits (at least I think it will be seen this way in the future) in BH (before harmony) and AH (after harmony). Great job, well done!

My console has separated audio channels outputs and the TV set it was hooked in a given occasion had only one audio input. The channel that left unused was the one that plays the countdown when it is dawning in Enduro. Without that sound to stress me I could perform a lot better. I tried other games without sound and the results were the same: better performance (I think at least). So I would like to hear from you what is your experience (if any) while playing games with sound muted.

Jesus Christ. You guys are crossing the line. This is a HOBBY BUSINESS, something that is done during SPARE TIME. It is not a REGULAR SHOP!. Come on, Parker will ship your AV mod, just sit and relax, for god sake. Bullshit! It doesn't matter if it is a regular shop or not, these people were ripped off and they deserve their product. If someone sells a legally obtained item to another person, they are legally obligated to provide said item. If I screwed you and a bunch of others over to the tune of $40, wouldn't you get angry? If you tried to message me, and I just ignored it and carried on with my business, wouldn't you be fumed? I sure as hell would. Personally, I applaud Doyman. He's the first guy to actually do something about this ONGOING problem. Agreed. By the way I would like to make clear that I do not support Parkers' behavior. Even though I have ordered and received the mod it's clear there are people unsatisfied with the situation so why not ask for a refund?

Jesus Christ. You guys are crossing the line. This is a HOBBY BUSINESS, something that is done during SPARE TIME. It is not a REGULAR SHOP!. Come on, Parker will ship your AV mod, just sit and relax, for god sake.

I fell like a child

I wish someday we will have TIA and RIOT available in low power chips. We could build something really portable. Again, great project, Parker. As I said in the past, you have the spirit of a real engineer. If you need help, shout out! Yah the chips are NMOS (N gate type) I think instead of modern CMOS. You could FPGA the whole thing. The 6502 FPGA is pretty much perfect. The TIA and RIOT..I don't know if someone has done a 100% accurate one but I bet you could. There are tools that can translate C code to VHDL. I have used them to implement digital AGC in HW for a high end comm system (HDTV demodulator) and in that time (2006) they did a quite good job. They are not perfect tools but I believe it is possible, for example, to adapt Stella emulator code to compile on Impulse or Celoxica suites. The VHDL code generated is not optmized, of course, and timming issues would have to be debbuged but it would be a proof of concept. Once working fine, all code could be rewritten (or not) to fit in a smaller programmable device. Just a thought

I wish someday we will have TIA and RIOT available in low power chips. We could build something really portable. Again, great project, Parker. As I said in the past, you have the spirit of a real engineer. If you need help, shout out!

Nevermind! I've just installed Win7 on my computer.

Hey guys. Taking the opportunity of having you all here in this thread I would like to consult with you. Stella doesn't start anymore on my computer (WinXP). When I launch Stella I can see some hard disk activity then it stops. Already tried reinstalling and downgrading without success. Any clue? Thanks and sorry for the off-topic

Parabéns Trucco, excelente trabalho! Where do live in Brazil?

It was my post. here you go: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/145697-pitfall-end/ It's a really funny picture

Lord almighty! I've never seen posts that long before! RH, that movie is great!

from here.

And here, Part IV!