yllawwally

Working on graphics, added a few, made some fixes. End boss Monster no longer splits. ;BUGS ;1 line of player is discolored ;tree doesn't damage player ;make dragon not move ;make dragon fire move ;when you kill a monster on lane 3, the screen flickers for a moment ;Skyline is messed up, when monsters on screen, need to adjust color palette ;fire potion doesn't kill only brings them down to zero(artificially say they are hit to kill?) ;Using potion sometimes messes up creature, perhaps only on last lane ;Rat is miscolored ;FIXED ;Minor Graphics fixes ;added some new enemy graphics ;bottom part of boss no longer changes direction when hit. Tumulus_30.bin

Some minor fixes. Just thought I'd post, to show, the game is not dead. Just very slow moving. Looking into why the monster splits. I think I'm narrowing it down, and might get that fixed soon. ;BUGS ;1 line of player is discolored ;snakes don't damage player ;tree doesn't damage player ;make dragon not move ;make dragon fire move ;bottom part of boss changes direction when hit. ;Sometimes when you kill a monster, the screen flickers for a moment.When I lose horse? Or maybe only on that lane ;Skyline is messed up, when monsters on screen, need to adjust color palette ;FIXED ;Seems like everything on lane one is harder to kill : Not sure why I was resetting the hitpoints ;ghost doesn't stay on screen: it's not a ghost, it's a treasue without a graphic change. Tumulus_29.bin

What where the first games to use each of the different bank switching schemes?

You can find one on ebay pretty inexpensively. Where are you located, maybe someone from here is close by, and can dump the chips for you.

Do you have an eprom reader? You should probably dump them to make sure they aren't proto's. If they aren't prototypes, then there value is only the value of the hardware, maybe a couple dollars a chip.

Andrew did up a build your own cart tool a long time ago. Is this what your thinking of? http://atariage.com/forums/topic/22242-build-your-own-greeting-cart-can-you-type-make/

They are probably bootleg copies of the games. You would need a pcb designed to hold 2 2k chips. If you have a eprom reader you can then run them in an emulator, and compare them to the released versions. What other titles are listed?

I don't believe you need to use any special switches for 3f. I compiled the 3f demo from http://atariage.com/forums/topic/141764-bankswitching-demostemplates/ without a problem. I used dasm 3f.asm -f3 -o3f.bin .

I've worked on several games, that never got good enough to show anyone. Tumulus is not quite finished, but is coming along. Although very slowly due to kids, wife, job, etc. My paying job is doing quality assurance for a slot machine manufacturer.

Working on adding several more enemies. Still need to find 3 spots with 16 bytes each for the last 3 sets of sprites I need. Lots of minor moving to save space. Didn't really get anything fixed, only added bugs . 5 levels, with 5 bosses, seems to be what I'll be able to get. Each level is really only going to be different by the color. No places to jump or get around. I just don't have the room in the ROM for that much extra. ;BUGS ;1 line of player is discolored ;snakes don't damage player ;tree doesn't damage player, did I want to tree to hurt player or only chase snake away. ;ghost doesn't stay on screen ;make dragon not move ;make dragon fire move ;bottom part of boss changes direction when hit. ;Sometimes when you kill a monster, the screen flickers for a moment.When I lose horse? Or maybe only on that lane ;Seems like everything on lane one is harder to kill ;Skyline is messed up, when monsters on screen, need to adjust color palette Version 28 : Tumulus_28.bin

Riddle of the Sphinx was one of my favorites. Pretty complex, and the graphics are pretty nice.

Sorry about that. I'm not sure what what happened. I'll upload it again. Tumulus_27.bin

I'm re-aligning all the monster tables. This will make it easier to setup the new bosses. It will also make my messy code a little cleaner. I'm trying to have 5 bosses. Right now we have 3, Will O Wisp, Mummy, and Dragon head. I want to add a few more minor bad guys as well, such as bats. ;BUGS ;1 line of player is discolored ;snakes don't damage player ;tree doesn't damage player, did I want to tree to hurt player or only chase snake away. ;ghost doesn't stay on screen ;make dragon not move ;make dragon fire move ;bottom part of boss changes direction when hit. ;FIXED ;Scoring fixed, had inadvertantly stopped clearing score temp variable ;weird player graphic corruption, when touching mummy, caused by missing ldy, which gave an invalid horse pointer ;bottom part of boss doesn't get damaged Tumulus 27 :Tumulus_27.bin

Pushing on the rf connector with force, causes the picture to improve. That sounds like a bad connector. Try attaching wires from the back of the connector, to the cable, and see if that helps.

A modern well designed DC power plug would be more efficient than the old DC one. However not be a lot. No matter which one you use there is loss, because the atari is a DC device, and simply has an internal regulator to convert to 5v. These external power supplies are never great at efficiency, they are made to be cheap. Few people care if it wastes 20% vs 50% power, when talking about an amp. At most the difference in cost to run with a super efficient power supply versus, the cheap one they had is 2 pennies an hour, but most likely the difference is less than a penny an hour. Unless your sears arcade is different than the standard 2600, I would think 9v AC, will eventually damage the system.

I've been pretty busy for a while. Finally got some time lately. This version has a couple of fixes. ;BUGS ;1 line of player is discolored ;snakes don't damage player ;tree doesn't damage player ;ghost doesn't stay on screen ;weird player graphic corruption, when touching mummy ;make dragon not move ;make dragon fire move ;bottom part of boss doesn't get damaged ;score is being incremented when it shouldn't be ;FIXED ;Fixed scanlines going to 263 and 264 ;Fixed player getting messed up too far down on screen, and too far right, by limiting play area. ;Can change mouth color a little more easily now Tumulus_26.bin

A couple small tweaks. Still having trouble with how the bosses should work. Tumulus_25.bin

The toroid was a choke, to remove remove spurious signals. However I believe they were mainly to stop the machine from broadcasting. If you had rabbit ears on your tv, and you don't have the choke, you could pick up the signal over the air. This was especially true of the later machines such as the NES. The FCC was pretty strict on devices not interfering with other things, especially TV and Radio signals. So a cheap fix was for the manufacturer to simply put a toroid on the wire, to stop it from acting as an antenna. It does help stop incoming signals, but it's true purpose was to comply with FCC rules.

They seem like they would work well for missile command.

You could make a double-ender. One side 2600, and an enhanced 7800 side.

You should put two ports on the machine, so you can still plug in external controllers. With the way the atari wired controllers, having two connected simultaneously won't hurt it. That way you can play 2 player games, does the fb2 support paddles, I don't remember. Space Invaders, pitfall, and ms pac-man, would be my votes for games to include.

Does anyone have a schematic of the 2800? If it did have 4 separate joysticks, I curious how it worked.

Each port could support 7 bits of data. Which would translate into Up/Down/Left/Right, One button and 1 Analogue stick. For a custom controller, on a game expecting it, you could also get an analogue stick, with 5 buttons.

Are people actually getting the 250 dollars. I just looked on ebay and there is a 85 system buy it now with free shipping. There is a complete in box one for 75 + 15 shipping. I think the expensive jags are simply wishful thinking on the part of the sellers. It seems the system is not quite double, what it went for 10 years ago.

You would need a video overlay circuit such as https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9168 The tellymate is more of video card for a microcontroller.