Channel 2

quote: Originally posted by NE146: By the way, I can't figure out why everyone likes Stella, because is it just me or is the sound in Stella totally off? I was using Stella to test beats, and it sounded like the timing was off, like the notes varied slightly in duration. And when I would use the engine noise and vary its pitch, it sounded like the polynomial counter was being reset with each change in frequency or volume. Does that happen on the actual VCS? [ 03-04-2002: Message edited by: Channel 2 ]

Hey Moycon, I know I was late in replying, and I don't mind if someone else gets the cartridges, but let me know what's going on. I feel like you're mad at me or something.

"!#?" [ 03-01-2002: Message edited by: Channel 2 ]

My collection is pretty small. However, its pathetic quality comes more from the fact that I go to garage sales and thrift stores and never find a thing. Well, twice I found some stuff -- the first sale I went to, there was a 4 switcher and six games, which they didn't even have out but I asked about it. I paid one dollar for them -- I tried to give them more but they refused. And there was a sale I was waiting months for, because at their previous sale they said they had some carts somewhere inside. There were about ten, with a set of paddles. Oh, and once in a Goodwill, I found a Basketball cartridge at the bottom of a bin of used floppies. I didn't buy it though. I almost got the Great Wall Street Fortune Hunt for Odyssey 2 in a nice looking box at a rummage sale, but just before I could plow through the crowd to the shelf, someone casually picked it up. I ended up getting Pachinko! and Bowling!/Basketball!. The first was two bucks, but the second was five. And I don't even have an Odyssey 2. My hardware isn't so good either. I have two 4 switchers, but I think I fried one of them. I think the only joystick I have that works 100% is the one that came with our Sega Master System. The paddles are dead or have incurable jitters. The power supply is made out of the plug and the base of two non-Atari ones, held together by masking tape. The RF switch came with an Apple IIc. My cartridges: Combat * 4 Asteroids * 3 Space Invaders * 3 Donkey Kong * 2 Pac-Man * 2 Basketball * 2 Dodge 'em Missile Command Ms. Pac-man Centipede Circus Atari Kangaroo Super Breakout Q*bert Bowling Mouse Trap Defender Frogger Pong Sports and an Airheart proto. Since I don't want to play games I haven't bought, emulation isn't much help either. I've wanted Adventure for years now. My first reason for collecting is so my brothers and I can play the games we loved, and the ones we never had (that's most of them), and Adventure is far and away our favorite. Of course I could buy off ebay, or elsewhere. But I have no money, and besides, it just doesn't feel the same. Is that pitiful enough? I'll take anything but adult games. And no bologna, it's unclean. [ 02-27-2002: Message edited by: Channel 2 ]

Never knew The Mask and Robot Monster were originally 3D... I've got to see that. I guess that would explain the bubble machine and the wierd gestures. Did Metalstorm: the Destruction of Jared-Syn use the polarized filters? It came out about that time, but when you see it on TV, some scenes look like cheap color seperated 3D.

quote: Originally posted by jahfish: marco still rules! What is that thing, anyway?

Actually, I hadn't thought of doing it myself. I don't know assembly, I don't know anything about how 2600 sound works, I'm hardly a programmer at all in fact. But if it were limited to editing beats, that wouldn't be too hard, and maybe that would be a good project to do while I'm studying Java. It would be sort of like Len's web-based tool. Making bin files should be trivial, just use one that's already compiled and change the data bytes. Emulating the sound would be the hard part. I'm looking at the docs I can find especially TiaSound, but it's daunting to a beginner. Just what is self-modifying code?

quote: Originally posted by -^Cro§Bow^-: So then they don't call it "Multiple Personality Disorder" anymore? I'm sure they still do, DID is just the term I've seen most often on the internet. Maybe it's replacing MPD, like ADHD replaced ADD. MPD is a more sensible term than DID, but then I've noticed that medical nomenclature is all messed up.

quote: Originally posted by moycon: Your schizophrenic? In actuality, schizophrenia has nothing to do with multiple personalities AKA Dissociative Identity Disorder. Just thought you should know.

quote: Originally posted by King Atari: There, it's fixed. And to show I can easily laugh at myself, I think the phrase "no cart beats you up quite like Xenophobe, it is the best cart to get beat up by." is a classic. In fact, I'm gonna make that my new quote! There, look at that! Strange, but when I read this thread the quote in your signature appeared in posts above where stan actually said it. Confusing.

I just had to say, there's a lot of excellent submissions on the contest page. I tried to give it a shot myself, so I know it's not as easy as it may seem. (It's a good thing I gave up -- the beats I was coming up with would give Cthulhu a headache.) By the way, does anyone else think it would be cool to have an Atari sound editor? Something with an easy to use interface that allows you to do anything you could do in assembly, a built in emulator so you don't have to wait to hear the results, and the ability to export wav and bin files.

quote Don't do that... if I ever got around to making a 2600 game, I was going to call it Ms. Adventure.

quote I did, when it first came out. It was a boring and repetitious task. We took a picture of my score but never sent it in to get the patch. Still, I earned the rank on the patch, so I use it as my special status.

Sancho Panda -- wasn't that Don Coyote's sidekick?

I notice that the moderators have six flashing stars under their names now. Am I nuts, or did it used to be five? Does this have something to do with Tempest approaching 1000 posts? Like, will he get six stars too? I guess we'll see in a matter of hours. And what's the deal with that guy who has no member number?

About the TIA -- If you had the actual schematics for it, would it be feasible to make new TIA chips rather than just emulate it? I don't think there would be any legal problem since the patents have run out by now.

I had the opposite reaction. I intended to never reach the limit for one star, which I thought was 20. But I can see that it has to be ten, if you have one at twelve posts. I wasted two of those ten seeing if I could put an image in my custom status line. The row of stars in my signature was what I tried to put there, and it would have appeared to be where the real stars go. UBB code doesn't work there, though.

In case you haven't seen it, here's something relevant from the May archive of the Stella mailing list ( http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ ): quote: On Thu, 17 May 2001, Joe Grand wrote: > At 04:25 PM 5/17/2001 -0400, Chris wrote: > > >Thesis: I have bare TIA dice (silicon chips) in hand, both with and > >without the top metal layer. Will hopefully get complete photographs > >and video next week. > > Very cool.. What is your thesis topic? Reverse engineering the TIA and reproducing it, probably in a FPGA. I hope to make the thing cheap and low power (NMOS sucks a lot of power). And maybe faster, but that is a story for another time. The other main goal is to get complete SCHEMATICS so we'll finally know how all the software tricks work...exactly.