yllawwally

The starpath version was sold on cassette, and required a supercharger to run. All starpath games were like this. You would connect a cassette player to the supercharger, and play frogger on the cassette player. The supercharger was a really nice gadget for the 2600. It was a ram cartridge that was loaded via sound from cassette tapes. This allowed the games to be significantly more complex.

The frequency is game dependent. Different games could have sightly different frequencies, based on the number of lines they choose to implement. However most are at 60 Hz. However, NTSC technically has a refresh rate of 59.94Hz.

I'd say it's worth 10 dollars.

On the USPS website they say that video games are specifically not allowed. Although it seems you can use library rate which is cheaper than priority if the sender or receiver has a college address. https://www.usps.com/ship/media-mail.htm

Take a look at these two games title Match Pro Wrestling, and Kung Fu Master. Then you can see what can be done on the 2600. There was even the older karate game for the 2600. However that one has low end graphics.

I think new molds for making cartridges would be the best. I'm not sure what you should give someone who pledges. I wouldn't want another hand held, the emulator on my phone is good enough, when not at home. Maybe new controllers. There are a lot of consoles out there. But controllers, get broken, and will probably dry up before consoles run out. Maybe a two button controller.

Sorry about the long wait, been pretty busy for a while. Did a whole bunch of internal changes. The player won't notice most of them. However they are required to get the larger bosses on the screen. A new crazy bug was added, when you touch the mummy, you're character sprite is garbled. It can be fixed by attacking a different creature. ;FUTURE FEATURES ;Need to add grappling ;differentiate levels more ;add more creatures ;maybe monsters shouldn't attack when on fire ;BUGS ;player has corruption on far right ;1 line of player is discolored ;snakes don't damage player ;tree doesn't damage player ;Mummy can split in half ;weird player graphic corruption, when touching mummy Tumulus_24.bin

Primarily bug fixes. Screen no longer adds extra line if touching an enemy or for moving left and swinging sword. Having trouble finding the cycles to do hit calcs, with the boss stuff added in. I think I can optimize a little more. Will need to move around all Enemies. Added the ability to actually specify each enemie's life. Before it was based on enemy number, which is why it took too many hits to kill will o wisp. Tumulus_23.bin

I always thought the holes were there, for assembly. There is a spring inside the cartidges that have the door. I assumed the little hole was there to let them move the pin during assembly.

Most of the games used proms that are not completely compatible to modern chips. You're going to need to put in hex invertors for most PCBs. Which would involve bending a couple pins and gluing the invertor to the pcb. Unless you really just want to reuse the old PCB, you should ask albert or maybe cpuwiz if they have any blank pcbs, that they could sell you. If you just want the experience of converting an old pcb. The older games are probably the best. The 2k and 4k are most likely to have chips, that can be removed. The later the game, the more likely it will have a blob, instead of a chip.

It took just shy of an hour. But I think I finally got the will o wisp breaking into 2 creatures fixed. It was related to the RNG. I was using 0 based RNGs, and 1 based lane numbers. Tumulus_22.bin

Can't you use a y cable, and have both plugged in simultaneously.

Is there a preorder list for the XM?

Added some more bug fixes. Added a few more bugs. There are actually 7 monster lanes now, last time there was only 6 visible, but monster could exist invisibly. Which caused you to be stuck. The only way to kill invisible monster is with potions. Not much was done in the past week. I know how to fix the snake and tree issue, it will take nearly an hour of work to fix however. ;FUTURE FEATURES ;make giant ogre as level 2 boss ;Need to add grappling ;need to differentiate levels, probably different colors ;maybe monsters shouldn't attack when on fire ;BUGS ;Moving and attacking causes an addition line to be added ;1 line of player is discolored ;will o wisp becomes 2 creatures ;snakes don't damage player ;tree doesn't damage player Tumulus_21.bin

Are we including flashbacks in the estimate of people playing ataris? With flashbacks, that number would be higher. According to Wiki, flashback 2 sold 860,000 units. In my department of 30 people, I know of one other person. So that's 2 out of 30 people. If we include everyone that has played an atari 2600 game in the last year on flashback or original hardware, I would guess 50k.

Just removed one of the lanes for the monsters. So now a max of 7 monsters on the screen at once, and 7 pits. However this frees up 5 bytes of RAM. But more importantly well let me shift the monsters on the field. I had originally thought, that having them in lanes would be best. But this style of game, really needs the monsters to be able to chase the player up and down, as well as left and right. Now I can shift the whole playfield. The only difference a player should see at this point, is that there is a safe area at the bottom of the screen, where no monsters will ever go. In future versions, this won't be a safe area. The monster will sometimes move down so that there is no safe area, no matter how many monsters are on the screen. No bug fixes in this version. There are still several outstanding bugs. Player color gets messed up. The will o wisp break into 2 monsters, not sure what causes that? No form of mandrake should ever hurt the player. Also the horse shouldn't damage the player. Tumulus_20.bin

As a kid, When I played against my brother, it was frogs and flies. Against my dad it was combat. And with my mom, it was Atlantis.

This system is made for small children. Two of my ds's had their hinges broken, by my kids dropping them. This well be more resistant to breakage, and honestly the 3d is mostly a gimmick anyway. This is the 10 and under model of the 3ds. Now they can remove the not for use by those under 6, warning. It doesn't need to be small, because little kids won't keep it in their pockets anyway.

That is too bad. I was hoping it would be easy to put the roms on the disk. With 3 disks we could have had the whole genesis library.

Can cartridge games be put on a cd, and ran on a cdx? Perhaps a menu system even?

I haven't worked on this for almost 3 weeks. But finally I've had a little time to get back to work. The will o wisp, bug was a simple one. I had the graphic crossing a page boundary. I think the sword bug is fixed now. Although I had to introduce a different bug to fix it. Now the color is off by one line, when on the right side of the screen. This is a good trade off for now. Always having the weapon work seems a little more important than keeping the color of his arm correct. Tumulus_19.bin

Why base a game on blair witch. It's a fairly generic style horror. The main thing to copy would be a jittery screen, and I don't think you should copy that.

Have non-hostile npcs face towards the screen, with smiles perhaps, while enemies face left or right. You could also make their hands empty. Only hostile npcs carry weapons.

Or you could fill it with 8 different games, and put some switches on it. That would get you a multicart. Some burner software can be setup to write on an already written chip. So that you could put a copy of your WIP on it. Then when you make a new version, write that to the next section, for a total of 8 versions. Then you only need to erase the chip once every 8 revisions.

Thanks for the encouragement Gateway. I've been busy at work the last couple weeks. So progress has been slow. However I'm getting back to my regular routine, and will be working on it again.