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e1will

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Everything posted by e1will

  1. I bought my first 7800 cartridge today, and it plays great on the 2600+. I had never played a 7800 game on an actual console before; back in the day none of my friends had a 7800. Their post-2600 consoles of choice were Colecos and Nintendos. Now I’m kicking myself for not taking advantage of the “last chance sale” and picking up B*nq, the other 7800 game now on my wishlist.
  2. I happened to see this in the Hardware thread (great find, @Blinky) and tested it out. I'm having trouble getting it to work with the paddles so far, but it works great with the joystick. I've got my laptop hooked up to the HDMI1 input of my monitor and the 2600+ hooked up to HDMI2, and the 2600+ powered by one of my laptop's USB ports, so it's a couple of quick button presses to switch from playing from a cartridge in the 2600+ to using the same joystick(s) to play a game via Stella if I want to run something I don't have a cartridge for, or the cartridge doesn't (yet) work on the 2600+.
  3. I haven't tested it out with RetroArch, but it seems to do what it's supposed to under Stella 6.7. Whether Stella gives $FFs and the game code zeros them, or Stella gives $00s, I don't remember, and unfortunately I don't have my source code handy at the moment to check. @Thomas Jentzsch, do you know what values Stella sends the game code when emulating a SaveKey and the game tries to read from it? I do know my game lets the player clear the high score table, and once that's done everything works normally, but of course the cleared values are reset to the random ones once the game session ends since the 2600+ doesn't actually save them.
  4. Interesting... when I was testing out Duck Attack it "saw" that the 2600+ had a SaveKey/AtariVox, so it pulled the high score data from the expected address and displayed it, resulting in a glitchy high score screen, since the data that was retrieved was not valid. I thought that maybe there was a bug in the Duck Attack code*, but it sounds like the fact that the game "saw" that a SaveKey was there might be Stella's doing? And it might be possible for the 2600+ to save and load high scores and game states from homebrew games that support that, with some tweaks? That would be really cool. Not to mention that any future titles could use that functionality. Might want to zero out those bytes first, though! (*I suppose there is a bug in the game code in the sense that it expects the SaveKey data it retrieves to be either zeros or a valid BCD-encoded score, and it should probably have checked for that. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to affect gameplay in any way.)
  5. You’re welcome! I’m glad you enjoyed it!
  6. I wrote up some thoughts about the 2600+ on my website; perhaps some here will find it of interest. Cheers. Unboxing the Atari 2600+ – WillNicholes.com
  7. @Thomas Jentzsch, @Ben from Plaion Makes sense, thanks. I haven’t tried hot-swapping yet… never did that back in the day and old habits die hard!
  8. Does the dumper start doing its thing as soon as the power is switched on, or are there separate processes that take time to initialize first? I’ve noticed it doesn’t take too much longer to load a 32k game (~17 seconds) than a 4k game (~14 seconds.)
  9. I'm happy with my new 2600+ and plan to post my own unboxing notes later, but one thing I was curious about... Is it just mine, or does everyone else's 2600+ take about 14 seconds to load a game? That's pretty pokey compared to the 0-second load time of the original system, so I was surprised that no one in this thread has mentioned it (apologies if I missed it.) I understand why it would be slower (cartridge dumping, etc.) but I haven't seen anyone commenting on it, so I was wondering if mine was slower than other folks'.
  10. Wow, this is an excellent game! Very addictive. Great job, Chris.
  11. Where does Stella get the manufacturer and rarity information? Is that hard-coded, or in a data file that could be imported and filtered?
  12. I saw this game mentioned in one of the Atari 2600+ threads and decided to check it out. What a wonderful game this is! I played through to the end (that is a very tough level) and enjoyed it every step of the way. I love the music and the gameplay and the amazing graphics. Well done!
  13. Thomas, do you know if there a list someplace of the games (both old-school and homebrew) that have been released with dumper-incompatible components such as ARM code or DPC chips?
  14. Oh, and I can hear the Kate Bush, but the percussion also has a Led Zeppelin “Immigrant Song” feel to it, at least to my ears.
  15. Thomas, this is a great game. I’ve not tried out all the PRGE games yet, but so far this is my favorite. Very fun to play, and a bit addictive!
  16. When I first read this thread a few years ago I forgot to leave a note saying how cool this project was, so I'll fix that now: this is really neat. I love these menus. I especially like the Space Invaders menu (a huge timesaver vs selecting through 112 games), Asteroids (ditto 66 games), and Warlords (those graphics are great and give the game a lot of character.)
  17. I apologize if this has been mentioned already elsewhere, but does anyone know if the Harmony cart will work with the 2600+ if its SD card has a single game on it? (I understand it won't work if there are multiple games on the card.) Being able to use the Harmony cart to test WIP games for 2600+ compatibility would sure be handy.
  18. Congratulations, Al! I haven’t read all the details yet but it sounds like this is something you’re excited about, so I’m excited for you.
  19. I can add a data point to this discussion. My game has long been available as a ROM you can buy, and people do indeed willingly pay $20 for it. Not a ton, obviously, since it's an original title (not much built-in nostalgia) and it is the Atari 2600 we're talking about. But definitely non-zero! And I'm happy to pay $20 for ROMs myself (depending on the game, of course.) My most recent purchase was Qyx from Champ Games and it's been worth every penny and then some. It's a great game with some really cool enhancements that the original arcade version didn't have. So my answer to "Does anyone actually pay $20 for ROMs?" is... yep, sometimes!
  20. This is a bummer, but I suppose it was inevitable. But kudos to Al for giving everyone a chance to get a copy of them first! Many times in life you don't get a heads-up that something cool is going away, it just disappears, so I'm glad there's at least a grace period for getting these. A lot of these ports were just brilliantly done, and you could really see the love of the originals from the effort put into them.
  21. Yeah, sorry about that... looong story with the website but I hope to get it back up in the not-too-distant future. Thanks for the assist!
  22. I am liking the additional maze capability. In maze 2 you can trap the bugs in various corners, which is fun. One interesting quirk I noticed was that occasionally the vegetables in the special round are all eggplants. I've never seen it do that with a different kind of vegetable, although I have seen half eggplants, half carrots.
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