Lumpbucket

"Nebulus" (same game, different name) officially appeared on C64, Amstrad CPC, Spectrum, Atari ST, and Amiga. Tower Toppler was made by the same people, and has the same levels etc. Don't know why the name was changed... In fact, I play the ST version occasionally here at work using the SainT emulator.

Yeah, and IIRC it requires an audio out, so you'd have to mod your Atari anyway...

SNES must-haves: 1. Mario Kart 2. Super Mario World 3. Street Fighter II 4. Bomberman

So if you don't want an Atari 2600, 7800, Jag, Lynx or other old console, but want to want one, you can buy the desire to own one of those console! Aaargh! My head hurts!

Yes, I use a Logitech Optical Wheelmouse with my Amiga using one of these. They are available here: Eyetech (UK) Software Hut (USA) One thing I have noticed is that with these adaptors, the mouse isn't as "fast" as a real Amiga mouse, so I have to use more software acceleration. That said, it might just be because the mouse I used before I got this adaptor was a "Wizard 560dpi" mouse, which is supposed to be more responsive than a normal Amiga mouse...

Hey! I'll do what I damn well like with my own stuff, thanks very much. I've changed the BIOS on my 7800 (don't worry, I kept the original...) so that I can write new games for it. I think thats a good thing, because the console doesn't have many games, and if I write a few more, it means that all those people who bought a 7800 can get a few more games for their console! Also, the RF output from it is really crappy! Is it so wrong to want to play games on the original hardware, AND have a nice quality picture?

A lot of software engineers and programmers are taught Java and Visual BASIC then let out into the wide world. Very few actually understand what goes on "under the hood". I'm a software engineer, but i've always been interested in electronics and system architecture. I know what makes computers tick and I know how to program machines in assembly. In the old days, all software engineers knew this stuff, but a lot of the people writing the software of tomorrow are getting further and further away from the hardware guys. A good thing or a bad thing? Well, we'll see

Considering that the VCS was on sale and manufactured for over a decade, I find it hard to believe that the NES or Playstation have beaten it. On a similar note, the C64 is still the biggest selling computer model of all time (22 million units sold). While there may be more x86 clones out there than C64's, no single model of x86 clone has sold that many, or is ever likely to.

At work we use Hex Workshop, which is pretty good. Hex Workshop download page

I have an F14 Tomcat with a label different to the one on AtariAge. It is a very cheap cartridge; the plastic is very thin, and its all one moulded piece that folds down the back. It has a very plain label, and the cart itself has "Activision" moulded into the back of it. It has no back label (the plastic hinges on the back, so a label would not sit properly). The ROM is slightly different to the AtariAge one, but i think thats because its PAL. (the scan isn't skewed, the label is at an angle on the cart ) ROM dump

Its easily done.. Yep. It would be a very nice base for a handheld! Bear in mind though that the TV Boy is going to have some sort of banking hardware built in that you'll have to bypass or remove. If its built into the chipset, well, you're kind of stuffed... or at the very least stuck with 4Kb games. (probably) I have absolutely no idea Indeed! Keep us posted!

Hmmm... its going to be another £10 or so for postage on that, I would imagine... if you lived nearer I'd come along and pick it up Hmm.. I might be interested, it would really depend on the games. I just bought a working 7800, with 9 games, from ebay which was £20 including postage...

Note that most non-banked atari games are 4 kilobyte. The 27512 (and C variety) are 512 kilobit, or 64 kilobyte, so not capable of holding 127 4KB games... The 27C4001 is a 512KB EPROM, but it has more pins than a 27512 (32). What might be interesting is if we could figure out what the pins are for the epoxy blob, you might be able to dump the contents of the TV Boy ROM and make an Atari cart from it

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27544.html

How much do you want for the 7800 stuff, including postage to Bath? How much extra would it be for the philips monitor as well?

Well, a plain vanilla 7805 which I nabbed from work, but yes Thats a good idea, but I want to keep RF as an option, so I think i'll just add an S-Video out port to the back of the 7800.

My (PAL) Atari 7800 had a really bad picture, but I seem to have fixed it... I was poking about inside to install DevOS 0.2, and i managed to smack the 5v regulator behind the cartridge port and smash it in half (Oooops ). I replaced it with a new one, and suddenly I have a much sharper image. Its not perfect (RF signals are evil, i'm still going to do the S-Video mod ), but it IS much better. So, if you have crap video from your 7800, theres something to try.

#3 = Worm War I ?

Or, such is the mighty power of capacitors

I looked at the diagram and went "Huh!?", but then I opened up the 7800 (the shielding put up a bit of a fight, and when it finally came off i almost acidentally bent off the power regulator! phew! ), and it is actually good enough to figure out what you meant Another question: the BIOS chip is a 27128, and the spare EPROM i had handy happens to be a 27128, SO, am I right in thinking that if i blow a 27128 with DevOS 0.2 it should just pop in and work without me having to do any soldering of jumpers etc.?

Hmmm... well, the games are great, but the picture quality is DIRE! I've found the S-Video mod on the Atari 7800 modification page, and it looks ideal (the TV card in my miggy has S-Video in), but I wondered if anyones done it on a PAL 7800? Are all the signals in the same place?! Now, I'm confident enough with a soldering iron to follow a step-by-step build, but not to design my own circuits or figure out if a mod is going to work on a PAL board, so does anyone know? I really want to get a nice picture from the 7800, because developing games on it with the awful picture i currently get is not going to be fun

YEAAAH! Got my Atari 7800 today! Can't wait to go home and play some of the games I got with it (it came with Fight Night, Dig Dug, Mean 18, Motor Psycho, Planet Smashers, Fatal Run, Xenophobe, Jinks, and Basketbrawl). As for converting it to the devbox, i've started to gather some of the bits Even though we don't use anything smaller than 27512s here at work, I managed to dig up a 27128 for the DevOS BIOS, so now i'm keeping my eyes out for an old 486 motherboard to salvage cache RAM for a RAM cart... Just got to wait till 6pm (BST) so I can go home and play with my new toy

Yes, but that $10 doesn't include any license fees for the copyright owners, etc. etc.

Yars Revenge is currently in my VCS.

I had a quick flick through the X-Box thread, but I'm not going to give reasons why I didn't buy an X-Box (heck, I didn't buy a Playstation, Gamecube, SNES, Megadrive, Saturn, Dreamcast, or N64 either...), but I can give more reason to hate Microsoft than "They suck". Before I get the nitty gritty, Microsoft have done SOME good. The BASICs they supplied to the manufacturors of 8-bit computers in the early 80s were usually very good, for example. Anyway... 1: Dodgy business practices Right from the start Microsoft tried nasty tactics to get their way. One of the reasons MS-DOS became so powerful is that Microsoft created a license that basically said "If you sell a PC with MS-DOS, you can't sell a PC with anything else". A resulting lawsuit succesfully stopped this practice, but after the damage was done. Competing DOS compatible operating systems; often with superior features, died because they couldn't get the distribution. Want to sell a dual boot PC with Windows on it? Fine, as long as the other OS is also a Microsoft OS, otherwise Microsoft will eat you for breafast. Be, Inc. found themselves at the sharp end of this deal... Some other interesting licensing issues: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archi...hive/26517.html http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/25956.html Interestingly, when Microsoft created Excel, they were rumoured to put updates into MS-DOS that caused the current industry standard, Lotus 1-2-3, to fail. 2: Microsoft and "standards" Microsoft trumpets its dominance in the market as being good for consumers! "If everyone uses microsoft, everyone has access to the same files and standards!", which is nice, as long you don't invent some new technology which Microsoft want to license and ruin. Take Java, for example. Sun created a system where one binary can run on many operating systems through a translation layer called a "JVM"! Thats nice, thought Microsoft, and created a nice Microsoft Java standard that runs on... err.... Microsoft JVMs only. They happily plastered "Sun JAVA compatible" all over it.. Of course, Sun sued. http://java.sun.com/lawsuit/ 3: Security Microsoft Windows is programmed by a massive team of programmers, and tested by an even bigger team, yet security holes of frightening severity make it into all their major products. If this wasn't bad enough, they then drag their feet about fixing them! Its often not until theres an exploit out there that they even admit them! There are lots more, but these are the some of the most important ones...