RevEng

February 26

No idea about the blue screen. Maybe you put the subroutine in the code flow?

Here's the integrated routine. You're subtracting more than 1 in another area, so I updated it to only look at the top 4 score digits.

Steamboat_VS_Red_Button_FAST.bas

February 26

For some reason some weird underscore characters got added to my post, for those dim statements. I've edited my post now to remove them.

If you have them in your source, remove them and try again.

February 25

30 minutes ago, GabeShack said:

Not sure if this was asked, has anyone tried the 7800GD with the 2600+ and any version of the firmware beta or not?

SainT advised to not bother. 7800GD interacts with the 7800 console boot, and won't work in any capacity in a dumper.

February 25

The first part of this is to break out the score into 3 different variables...

   dim sc1 = score
   dim sc2 = score+1
   dim sc3 = score+2

Then you can do one of two things...

1. you can test if the score is zero prior to subtraction

scorepenatyroutine
  if sc1=0 && sc2=0 && sc3=0 then return
  score=score-1
  return

2. you can bump any negative scores back to zero

checknegativescore
  if sc1=$99 && sc2=$99 && sc3=$99 then score=0
  return

If there are penalties greater than -1, you'll need to adjust how you handle sc3 for values less than -100, or sc3+sc2 for values less than -10000.

If my reason for using hex numbers in the example isn't clear, check out the docs on BCD numbers.

February 24

9 minutes ago, LS650 said:

We have seen firmware Beta 1.1 Rev 1, Beta 1.1 Rev 2, and this version which folks just seem to call 'experimental'.

Do I have that right..?

Correct

February 21

February 19

3 hours ago, shane857 said:

This is the first time for me playing Atari 7800 games. Are these sounds normal in crossbow? 🤔 And also 7800 games look really pixelated and ugly...lol. Maybe a decent/optional scanline filter could be added in a future update? It doesn't really matter with 2600 games.

Hur hur hur :roll:

There's a known issue with dumping 7800 Crossbow with certain carts, where 16k of data isn't able to dump. This is what that Crossbow screen normally looks like...

Crossbow_7800.png.bb062684d1e77d9de2b7bb115be91a16.png

February 19

21 minutes ago, Plumbob said:

Ok. That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation! What do you think might be the issue with my Hero2 cart, which consistently shows a blank screen and about 43FPS each time I try it?

You're welcome. I'm not 100% sure what's going wrong with Hero2, because I don't know what format the game is actually in, since there wasn't a public rom release.

February 19

11 hours ago, Plumbob said:

This seems very strange to me, when I first tried to play Atari Donkey Kong 2600 (red cart), the screen came up blank like this:

then I tried 3 times to reload the cart and got the red message Loading Game Failed. Then on the 4th try it worked just fine:

I wasn’t really expecting to get different results from repeated tries so when this happened it surprised me.

The console is having difficulty reading the cart, and you got lucky on one dump. Cleaning the cart may or may not help

12 hours ago, John Stamos Mullet said:

I noticed that the speed ramped between 59.55ish and 59.96ish, Never showed 60+ FPS. Not sure if that's the game itself or something else.

[...]

yet Curiously, another demanding game - California Games never dipped below 60.00 FPS.

2600 games actually vary in framerate, depending on how many scanlines they use for the display.

If you run H.E.R.O in stella and hit Alt-L you'll see the game is 263 scanlines, which causes the game to run at 59.8 Hz. If you do the same with California Games, it's 262 lines and 60Hz. The occasional blip you're seeing with games that aren't 60Hz is due to HDMI not having a corresponding 59.8 Hz mode, so a frame needs to be dropped somewhere to match. (in this case, 0.3 % of frames) Leading up to the drop the FPS will be a little above the target FPS value, and after the drop it will be a little below the target FPS value.

February 15

Yep, that's pretty much it. One bit is the direction, the other is the clock. If either changes, you can add/subtract 1 from the coordinate. You need to do many reads per frame for a decent speed.

February 15

There's your problem.

That's the thing about NMI on the 7800... they get less timely the more stuff you throw up on the screen.

You might want to look at dma masking as an alternative to modifying charbase in an nmi, in addition to paring things down a bit.

February 14

Awesome tunes @H3xaFli6ht !!! :music:

February 14

5 hours ago, -^CrossBow^- said:

The Beta FW I have on my 2600+ is able to play the physical cartridge just fine with full audio. So yes...they have this working.

Hmmm... not quite. The halt line is floating on a 2600+, so it can't read Maria's bankset banks like a 7800 could.

Petscii Robots works in the 2600+ emulation if you load it via a flash cart as a plain 256k supergame, or if you have a test image that has the Petscii Maria bank embedded... we can't do the latter for an official release. (It was just done to test the emulator)

February 14

Are you sure the object in that last zone is in the right mode, and has a proper terminator?

February 13

45 minutes ago, bikeguychicago said:

@RevEng Is there a possibility for a release of the game on the Atari VCS? I would think that the Modern Controller for the system would be more than capable of providing the necessary input needed for the game.

I'd love to see that happen. I'm pretty sure Atari is aware of the games sold in the AA store, given they now own AA, but nobody has approached me or @mksmith about it.

February 10

5 hours ago, Hakogame 箱亀 said:

Mario isn't the bad guy.

You, the player is the bad guy who smashed all the koopas. Mario did exactly what you made him do.

Oh sure. He was "just following orders". But the sadist had a big old smile on his face as he did each horrible thing.

February 9

18 minutes ago, Karl G said:

The new strcpy is working well for me! One question though: is there any way to sneak in a single quote inside the string if I'm using "alphachars ASCII"? I'm guessing not, but also figured it couldn't hurt to ask. 🙂

Not presently. When I get a chance I'll look at adding an escape character... getting the preparser to go along with it may take some doing.

February 9

Thanks for that guys, and you're welcome Karl!

5 minutes ago, Karl G said:

And wow ... ten years! So when is the actual day for the decade anniversary? Is it the anniversary of the first public release, or when you started the project?

I'm going by the first public 0.1 beta release, which was February 28th, 2014. The first post in this thread was on that day (though it was updated a bit when 7800basic moved to github) I also have an old blog entry about it too.

February 9

There's a new v0.33 7800basic release at github. Changes include:

feature: auto-dimensioning of variables added
feature: alphadata statements can now also contain literal values
feature: strcpy added for quick population of ram with text strings
feature: PLOTSPRITE/PLOTSPRITE4 commands can now use variable arguments
fix: compressed files didn't previously work in folders
fix: brief hiscore screen glitch could occur
fix: double snes2atari controlled by first port
fix: data statement line length being exceeded didn't trigger line length error
fix: sprite index could fail with very tall and wide tallsprites

If I've discussed a fix/change with you and you don't see it above, I haven't forgotten. I'm just a bit short of time these days, and wanted to get these features and fixes out first.

I also noticed that in a few weeks 7800basic will have been around for a decade. I guess I need to go eat some cake or something.

February 8

To get the 2600+ to look like a proper usb-c legacy device, I used a usb-c to usb-a adapter...

usb_c_to_a.jpg.3faf0770a6b314974a2ca33df5a9c818.jpg

...and plugged the USB-A end into the USB-A to USB-C cable that comes with the 2600+.

This arrangement should allow the 2600+ to work with anything that's USB-C standards compliant, like USB-C computers or compliant USB-C OTG splitters. (the latter is how I'm connecting a keyboard).

I seem to have poor luck picking cursed adapters, and I didn't want to Frankenstein a cable, so intentionally "fixing" the legacy pull-down issue was the easiest course for me.

February 8

16 minutes ago, Krullor said:

@Ben from Plaion This update has broken the sound on Phoenix PAL. It plays the shooting and explosion noises but none of the background. BTW this is one of my favourite games how do I roll back to version 1.0?

Flip your difficulty switches. The updated corrected the switch positions, and Phoenix plays the background sounds based on the difficulty switch position.

February 8

February 7

22 minutes ago, CapitanClassic said:

Most of these misconceptions could be cleared up if you read the instructions.

Is that an instruction book, or is it Mushroom Kingdom propaganda?!?! :mad:

February 3

Let's keep this thread on topic. (2600+ firmware update)

February 1

1 hour ago, Atarius Maximus said:

I have AtariVox support enabled so I could (not sure yet if I want to) add voice, however adding hssuport results in a "-570 bytes free" and adding multibutton support results in "-439 bytes free". I don't suppose there's any way around this, @RevEng ?

7800basic normally reserves ~4k of space at the end of the last bank for its runtime code functions, which isn't enough for all of the features you could possibly enable. So you need to give up some space elsewhere in your rom, to house those features. Check out the feature modules section of the docs for details.

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