Minuous

Well, of course they want a Genesis/Megadrive, who would want to be stuck with a Nintendo?

This poll isn't very good, the four that I had the most carts for aren't even listed 😞

Actually the spite hardware is 4 independent monochrome sprites, any of which can be shown in any of the 8 colours, and which can be reused later further down the screen. The score digits can be shown at the top, bottom, both or neither. There's more information, emulators etc. for this system at http://amigan.yatho.com

It sounds like the price already went through the roof a long time ago.

Actually, the decision to use this instead of the actual Amiga operating system will give it incompatibility with a slew of classic Amiga games and other apps.

I have no evidence that 3D Attack was ever released for the Arcadia, so no. As for the site design, there's about a dozen different major Signetics 2650-based platforms covered there (not counting variants within each platform) and several gigabytes. The icons are explained at the bottom of the page. If you have any concrete suggestions about how it could be organized differently I'm happy to consider them. That Grand Slam Tennis overlay is interesting, I had not seen one for that game before. The "player colour" button doesn't seem to do anything, the other buttons appear to be rather subtle in their effects too. I will have to have another try at finding a manual for this game.

There are overlays for 3D Bowling in the Overlays Pack at EA2001 Central.

One thing I'm curious about is why there were any never any 2622 NTSC USG + 2636 PVI combination systems released. All the known systems are PAL ones, which is different to the situation for the 2637 UVI-based machines (eg. Arcadia). Perhaps you could ask him about that.

They haven't really evolved; SAS/C is still the best compiler for Classic Amigas.

>I'm not going to dive into a history lesson here, but the Arcadia 2001 was developed by Universal Appliances Limited (UAL) out of Hong Kong and released under license in the US market by Emerson in May 1982 (more details on this here). It was only produced for about 1.5 years in the US. There are 22 confirmed US releases but due to UAL having issued many licenses for related systems (more than 30!) around the world, that number increases to around 50 or so. Actually, I'm not sure if there was any licencing required, as far as the hardware is concerned. There is no BIOS, and the chips are standard off-the-shelf components available for any company to purchase directly from Signetics, and the motherboard is basically the Signetics reference design. This may in part explain why there was such a proliferation of these machines from such a variety of manufacturers. The software is a different matter of course. >What has always befuddled me is why every sound that comes out of the system brings to mind the sounds of an animal in its death throes. I mean, the sound chip clearly had as much range as the primitive chips on my Odyssey 2 and Apple II, but while the sounds on the former were boring and the latter a bit scratchy, nothing this side of Tom Waits sounds as bad as an Arcadia 2001. Was there a technical reason for that? It's just an ordinary square wave generator, but there are restrictions in the choice of frequency, especially for higher notes. So music will sound out of tune. Specifically, only pitches that are divisors of 7874 Hz can be produced. The emulator has an option to force tones to the nearest equivalent on the even-tempered musical scale, which makes music sound better.

The 2650 was rather expensive at first. From Microcomputer Digest magazine, December 1975 (prices in $USD): "The single unit prices for the 2650 were reduced by more that 50%, dropping from $165 to $72. A 25-99 quantity price of $62 was also announced. Signetics reports that the price decrease represents the first in a series of price reductions planned by the firm as the 2650 progresses from small to large volume production. The company also expects to further reduce the price to $30-35 in the early part of 1976."

California Games wasn't bundled everywhere. When I bought my Lynx ][ in Australia the bundled game was Ishido instead unfortunately :-(

That's definitely Paddle Pinball, for the TRS-80 Model 1.

Oops, wrong thread, sorry...

I have never heard A-Max be considered to be anything than an emulator, but it doesn't do CPU emulation. So running guest code directly on the host without CPU instruction translation does not necessarily mean something is not an emulator.

@mr_me: >Intellivision is the only second generation system that has multidirectional hardware pixel scrolling. That's not correct; the Emerson Arcadia 2001 can also do this.

I found some screenshots (in the Interton and Elektor Screenshots Packs at http://amigan.yatho.com ) but the colours seem to be rather variable between individual machines. Here is the PVI colour set I am planning to use for WinArcadia 27.82, it is a rough average that seems to reproduce the overall look fairly well: 0x00FFFFFF, // white 0x00B4B408, // yellow 0x00B408B4, // purple 0x00EE0C00, // red 0x0008BABA, // cyan 0x0014B414, // green 0x001414B4, // blue 0x00000000, // black 0x00B4B4AC, // grey 0x00AAAD52, // dark yellow 0x00A838A4, // dark purple 0x00822E24, // dark red 0x00409898, // dark cyan 0x00379630, // dark green 0x002E2E8C, // dark blue 0x00000000, // dark black

The 2636 PVI (Interton VC 4000 etc.) is probably different. Also, some of those machines use 16 colours (darker backgrounds). I will see if I can find any screen captures from real hardware for you.

Here's what the emulator uses (in UVI colours mode), it is based directly on the output of someone's TV capture card (ie. no camera involved) hooked up to a real Arcadia-family machine. I don't recall if it was PAL or NTSC; I will see if I can find the original capture files. It is quite close to what I see on my real PAL system; the paleness of the yellow is particularly noticeable. I'm not sure if the colours being washed out is due to the age of the components or whether they always looked like that. $FF FC FF // white $FF FE 6C // yellow $D8 2C D8 // purple $FF 00 00 // red $5D FD FF // cyan $47 F4 3F // green $03 03 A9 // blue $00 00 00 // black

Thanks heaps Crayon King, I have now added NTSC emulation for the forthcoming V27.8. That should now pretty much complete the emulation; the only thing not implemented is bus contention. I guess I could try to emulate that based on the UVI pin outputs but I don't think that would make a user-perceptible difference in any game.

Not wanting to rush you but did you have a chance to do any logic capture yet? I am hoping to incorporate NTSC emulation for V27.8; it should improve the Space Mission game in particular. The attached animated GIF shows the flickering under the emulator which is also the same on the real PAL machine. I am hoping that on NTSC this game will work correctly.

Thanks Crayon King, I can derive the retraces (HS and VS) from your CSYNC output. I am also trying to find out where the blanking periods (HRST, VRST) are in relation to the retraces, and ideally the colourburst (CBF) (although that is just to show the user and would not affect the emulation).

I am looking for a complete datasheet (or at least the timing diagrams) for the Signetics 2622 Universal Sync Generator (NTSC). This information would improve the accuracy of the WinArcadia emulator's NTSC emulation. This datasheet was stock number 800282. All the scans I have found are only of the product brief (ie. first page). I already have the complete datasheet for the 2621 which is the PAL equivalent. If anyone is able to help out I would be very grateful.

I'm considering adding support to the Ami/WinArcadia Pong simulation for some or all of the official modifications that could be made to AY-3-8500-based consoles (as detailed in eg. the "GIMINI Game Circuits" book at http://amigan.1emu.net/aw/GI-Games-1978.rar ). I'm just wondering if anyone who has actually implemented these modifications on the real hardware could enlighten me about some details that are not clearly explained in the original articles. I have made some guesses that it would be good to be able to confirm: Random angle modification: Presumably there is a 25% chance of each of the following outcomes, irrespective of which part of the bat was hit: (a) 40 degrees up, (b) 20 degrees up, (c) 20 degrees down, (d) 40 degrees down. 4-player modification: Only the behaviour of the tennis game is explained. What is the behaviour in the other games? Presumably every column that has a bat in 2 player mode will have 2 bats (belonging to the same team but different players) in 4-player mode. 3-player modification: This would presumably be done by only implementing one half of the 4-player modification, left or right.

Your video mentions a related Interton VC 4000 video, however I don't see it anywhere.