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Well, at #191 it's doing better than Activision Tennis, at least. --Will

I apologize if someone already posted this, but I came across this and found it interesting. It's a list of Atari 2600 games, ranked by how many views their Wikipedia article gets: http://top-topics.thefullwiki.org/Atari_2600_games I don't know how often it's updated but as of now the top 10 are: 1. Mario Bros. 2. Donkey Kong 3. Space Invaders 4. Custer's Revenge 5. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 6. Double Dragon 7. Frogger 8. Asteroids 9. Ms. Pac-Man 10. Chase the Chuck Wagon Some homebrews were on there too: 50. Halo 2600 95. Thrust 117. Duck Attack! 182. Juno First --Will

Mapping it out is also helpful if you want to find the Easter Egg. Agreed on the awesome label art!

If there are only 8 non-duplicatable sprites, how is something like Space Armada handled? Are the aliens not actually sprites? --Will

Ah, thanks! I've got my copy, now all I need to do is learn French so I can read it! --Will

Shocking sound in Berzerk: AUDF0: 00 for two frames, 01 for two frames, repeat AUDC0: 08 AUDV0: 0E --Will

Welcome. You can indeed add more RAM and ROM to the cartridge. One of the recent homebrews, Cave In, uses an extra 128 bytes of RAM and a total of 32k of ROM, if I recall correctly. --Will

Very impressive artwork there. --Will

Yeah, I'm still trying to get the hang of the new version of Stella. The disassembler/debugger doesn't seem to want to let me edit the "data" bytes as easily as the opcode arguments, and I was too lazy to pull the bin up in another editor. Those burgers do look real unappetizing this way. Just consider it "Burgertime: Mad Cow Edition." --Will

Here's a half-assed PAL-60 version. The hot dogs are red, and the playfield is yellow, but the lettuce is blue. Maybe someone can hack the other five or so bytes to take care of that: they're at F7E8 in bank 4. --Will btimep60.bin

Still working on it, but not much to report. My main "achievement" this month is getting the AtariVox pages reserved for it, so I guess that's something! --Will

That's a one-byte change: change byte FCF4 in bank 6 from $22 to $24. --Will

It's definitely timing related. STA HMOVE is the actual command that causes the black line to appear, and there are reams of info and discussion to be found about how it works and how to get it to do neat tricks. Ed Fries recently talked about it a little bit here, which is probably a decent introduction. --Will

Yep. There are ways to hide it, but most of the early games didn't bother to. Activision did horizontal repositioning on every line whether the sprite needed repositioning it or not, so instead of a bunch of individual lines there was one black bar: Screenshot --Will

You mean the black ones on the left side of the screen? Those are there whenever an object has been horizontally repositioned. In Berzerk, for example, each time the program draws a new robot, it has to reposition the sprite it uses to draw the robot. So there will be a black line between each robot. --Will

I remember being surprised the first time I played a game in B/W mode on a color TV and it didn't switch entirely to grayscale; some of the bits remained in color. I didn't know if it was a bug, or an Easter egg, or what. I know Video Pinball still shows the "tilt" bar in red even in B/W mode, and Adventure shows colors during the victory flash even in B/W mode... I wonder what was the first game that didn't go exclusively grayscale in B/W mode? --Will ETA: Dodge 'Em does this too; Player 2's car stays green in B/W mode while the rest of the screen goes grayscale.

If you own the cartridge, putting the ROM on a Harmony cart is perfectly legal. The most relevant legal precedent in the US is probably when the RIAA tried to stop people from putting mp3s of songs they owned on their Rio mp3 players. The court said that consumers were within their rights to "format-shift" the data from their CDs to their mp3 players, which is why iTunes will allow you to rip a CD you own and put it on your iPod. I'm not a lawyer, but I can't imagine how using a Harmony in this way wouldn't fall under that precedent. --Will

You posted your boxes in three different threads in this forum and somehow didn't manage to see the Halo 2600 Boxes Available post? That seems... peculiar. --Will

Yes, 4 pixels is correct, if you're using the playfield (which most games do.) --Will

Good point; now that you've clarified that, I'm sure a rephrasing will follow in the relevant articles. --Will

Thanks, everyone! Those screenshots really enhance the article, I think. (And for the record, the "including Duck Attack!" bit was not my idea, although I'll admit it was really cool to see that.) --Will

The arcade version works the same way. Why it's that way, I don't know. Presumably, they're "sleeping" at that point. --Will

Very nice. I'm a big fan of those maps. --Will

Thanks Chris! --Will

Thanks Darrell! --will