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If your getting 4.64v from the 7805, something is not right. 7805 are very good regulators, and voltage should always be nearly 5v. If you check the incoming voltage leg of the 7805 while on, it probably will show the voltage as 6v or less. The atari does use almost all of the 500mA.

You can use Voltages other than 9v. You can use about 7 to 18 volts. Any excess power from the power supply is absorbed by the 7805. The type of power supply you have, will determine how important the current rating is. Putting up to an 1000mA would probably be OK. If it's an inexpensive power supply the voltage will be higher, if you don't use all the current. Which is why the atari 9v adapter, gives out 13v. When you draw the current the atari needs, the voltage will drop closer to 9v. Putting excessive power into the atari, will destroy the 7805.

Since nothing can plug into it and considering it's age, I would guess it's a loop back, or security dongle. If it was modern, then it could be something like a savekey. It probably wouldn't hurt the atari by plugging it in. However since it wouldn't do anything useful by using it, no sense trying it.

What's on the orange end?

If you look in the forums other people have fixed fuzzy picture problems. I think the solder joints sometimes need to be touched up. The connections might have come loose over the years. There is also a video mod, that will make the video quality significantly better, and provide composite output. They pulled the sockets out to save money. They saved a dollar or 2 per unit. Which adds up to a lot when you consider how many units were made, and odds were that few people would be repairing the units. Almost nothing made today uses sockets in home electronics. It's faster, cheaper, and easier to solder directly to the board.

I have a junior. I remember going to KB and buying it, when my vader died. It was 50 dollars, back then. I also got a wireless joystick at the same time. I returned the joystick and exchanged for mario bros. Those joysticks were worthless. I loved the look of the Jr, and it was great that it was small.

Which ROM chips are you referring to? The atari has 3 chips, 6507, Riot, and TIA. I believe the 2600 Jr, doesn't use sockets they are all soldered, which would make them difficult to replace. The RIOT(6532) was an off the shelf chip, that could be found in other things. I think the 6507 was only used by atari, not just for the 2600. The TIA was completely custom, and can only come from a 2600 or 7800. I'm not sure if you could modify an off the shelf 6502 and put it in an atari.

If you set $FFFC to $00, and $FFFD to $08. Would that start you in the same position every time the game started up, and then not require anything special in the first bank?

Why does the 3F bank switching scheme leave the second 2k of the rom fixed, and allow the first 2k to be swapped, instead of the other way around? It seems that if you left the first 2k fixed, then it wouldn't matter which bank started up first.

The consoles are the same, except perhaps the power adapter. The difference is in the games themselves.

I believe running through the whole set while make sure no sounds are going sprites are empty, etc. There's not much you can do to mess up a 2600. So clearing everything is quick and easy, so practically everyone does it. Programming is very different on the 2600. It's not exactly true that there is no graphics buffer. It's just set up in an unusual way. Both players have a 1 byte buffer. This is displayed at a specific location on a line. However the system doesn't know what line it's on, so you must enable and disable the sprite on each line. If you wanted to create a pong game there is relatively little you must do. The system will tell you if there is a collision, you simply have to poll an address. If your player is a 1 by 8 picture, you don't have much work to do on the graphics either. The racing the beam comes in when you try to cheat the system. If you want to have more than two different sprites on one line you need to start using tricks. Or if you want to re position a sprite between different lines then you need to pay close attention to where you are on an individual line. But these things are only necessary if you want the system to do more than the original designers intended, which 95% of the games did. An excellent way to start is in the newbie section there are tutorials by andrew.

Do all the bank switching schemes require you to have executable code in all the banks? For example if I wrote a small game that took up only 1.5k, however it needed access to 60k of space, for images. Like a video player type of application. Looking at the 3f version, it seems that there would need to be code in each bank.

Here is an older topic about this http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/156826-games-and-games-development/?do=findComment&comment=1924466

The NES and TG16 had a lot in common. The NES ran at 1.79MHz, while the TG16 could ran at 1.79 or up to 7.16MHz, 4 times faster than NES. Most NES games were under 1 meg, so they could easily fit on the HuCard. The processors were nearly identical. So the changes would be to the graphics and sound. Which was still easier than the changes that they would need to make for the 2600. Each game had to be reprogrammed to work on the TG16, not enough time to emulate much. The NES uses 5.37MHz for graphics, which the TG16 supports as it's lowest quality setting. Making a nes game run faster doesn't always ruin the graphics, unlike the 2600 which can't be sped up, because the whole system is synced to the TV. However pretty much every system after has a dedicated chip that is synced to the TV, and a graphics ram buffer. The graphics unit must run at the same frequency, but the rest of the system is independent. After disassembling the game rom, every place where information is stored into the graphics or sound chips, changes are made. The locations of these are different, and the format is usually different. Both systems had sound channels, 6 on TG16, and 5 on NES, so sound is relatively easy to convert, for the most part simply writing it to a different port. Most of the changes are to the graphics. The nes has 8x8 and 8x16 sprites.The TG16 supported 16x16 sprites as the smallest sprite, so transparent pixels would have to be appended to convert between the two sizes, but positioning info wouldn't change because the upper left location would still be the same position. They also both supported the same amount of sprites, 64. It would be a lot of work, but would be possible for most of the games to be ported to the TG16 from the NES. Here is a link to the blog for the megaman development that haroldoop mentioned http://pcedev.wordpress.com/category/megaman/

Any released 2600 game could be ported to the TG16, and include graphics enhancements as well. There is plenty of space on a Hu-Card, about 2.5 MB, to hold probably a dozen titles. The cd could be used to hold a ported version of every game that come out for the Atari. This is different than the approach used for the anthology games. I believe they wrote an emulator and loaded roms for the classic version of each of those games. I have a TG16, but have not yet tackled programming for it. However you might try http://pcenginefx.com/main/hucengine.html. They will have the information you need to develop on it. But please post any progress here as well, I would be interested in 2600 games on the TG16.

How do you get frantic to run in stella. I get the main screen but it won't play.

Maybe you could use text? Make it a combination of a choose your own adventure/ dragons lair. That would allow you to save space. Another way might be to use the supercharger. It can load an unlimited amount of info. Each time a player chooses, you would have to load the data from a CD. Perhaps the CD can be played all the time, each time there is user input there is a time limit, so just force the player to wait that amount of time. Then when they choose display the winning or losing picture. The game would last no more than the length of time a cd plays( which is 70 minutes I think), but that might be a way to do it.

The best harmony can do is 32k rom, with 128k rom on an upgraded harmony. Sounds is probably about 4k per second, and video I would think is about 20k per second(a very rough estimate). These are forums with demo code http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/163495-harmony-dpc-programming/ http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/163834-harmony-dpc-arm-programming/

You would need to use something like andrew's chronocolour, with a resolution of 96x128. Digitized sound can be played, for example in the upgraded berzerk. I'm not sure if you can do sound and picture at the same time. And the size of the cart would quickly become a limiting factor, even the harmony has limits.

I tend to say no. The processor in the TG16 is very similar, being based on the 6502. However it would be difficult to create an emulator. You would need to emulate the TIA and the RIOT. The TG16 CPU was about 6 times faster, which isn't enough time to be able to emulate these functions. The only way I can imagine getting a 2600 emulator running, is to put some hardware into the hucard, to take some of the load of the CPU.

Did Atari ever consider a 2 button joystick? Clearly the 2600 was capable of it. The booster grip was available for omega race in I think 1984. In my mind it certainly was major problem for converting games to the system. I think they could have done 3 buttons by using both pot wires.

You can find a dissasembly at http://www.qotile.net/minidig/

You can look at the dissasembly yourself to see how they did it. http://www.bjars.com/disassemblies.html There is some empty space in the rom. They probably tried to keep it 4k. Once he went past 4k, it didn't matter if he used the space efficiently, as long as he kept it under 8k. A 4,1k game uses the same hardware as a 8k game. Asteroids came out pretty early, before many of the tricks were learned. This was one of the first arcade ports, and was very early in the atari lifetime. It's amazing that it was so close to the arcade. The game plays well. Most arcade ports are easier than the original version. I suspect the arcade version would of had colors if they were available, on the type of monitor they were working with. I played this game alot when I was young.

A selector box is probably the easiest way to go. They are cheap, here's one on amazon, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000T0EL6U/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=atariage&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000T0EL6U . This has 4 rca inputs. But you have to convert each of the consoles to rca. I used a couple of these, I had 8 different systems on one tv. It even has one of the inputs on the front so you easily add another system temporarily.

Tron, dark cavern, stamped, atlantis, are some of my favorites I think ET and pacman are both decent games, and have played both quite often. Both swordquest games were certainly some of the worst games.