bcombee

This is neat. It reminds me a lot of the Fox game Turmoil, but that's a shooter instead of focused on close combat. I admit to not reading the instructions at first and was confused about the knight's movement, thinking it actually had something to so with the jump-style movement it has in chess.

I don't know if it works on Track & Field, but for Activision Decathalon, you could get incredible times using a CX-80 trakball set in "T" mode. When you spin the ball, the signals look like the left/right motion of the joystick.

There was a 2010 remake called Archon Classic still available on Steam, see https://store.steampowered.com/app/65400/Archon_Classic/

Such a great idea. Thanks for sharing!

They also have a store on Tindie, see https://www.tindie.com/stores/alijani/

I was out of town that weekend so didn't attend, but I've found the last few years to be fairly forgettable. I sometimes find something at ianoid's table, and I bought a bunch of random diskettes from Game Over's $1 table a couple of years ago, but that's been about it.

No, the Harmony Carts won't work on the Retron77. The device works as a cart dumper and emulator, but the cartridge port isn't accessed during game play, so there's no way to run code on the cartridge's ARM processor in sync with the emulator.

Hot Rox was a prototype name for Demons to Diamonds, IIRC.

Unfortunately, this TV doesn't have a NTSC tuner, but it does have a composite video input, so if you do an AV mod on your 2600, you should be able to connect it to that. However, the 2600 composite signal isn't always perfect, so it might not be able to stay synced with it.

I think it could be fun to have some sort of compiled FORTH REPL with a host system and a 2600 emulator where the emulator would be restarted after each system change. You could perhaps use a system like the Melody cart to host an ARM core running an IDE on a 2600 ROM emulator system. I don't think you could really get something working well hosted on a bare 2600 - timing is just too tight for the display kernel. The Basic Programming cart does have a simple interpreter allowing running the small number of possible statements, but it does most program running in the vertical blank.

Yep - they were part of a big Atari inventory liquidation in the mid-90s along with Radio Shack. They had a bunch of Atari Corp 2600 and 7800 cartridges. See this old thread on the rec.games.video.classic newsgroup from back then: https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.video.classic/c/CJ0actTPQAs/m/g6pMJvqRQ2sJ

When I go to https://adgm.us/portal/index.html, Casey's Gold is still there, it's just the second page on the c carousel and shows up after a few seconds if you don't click on anything.

Hi, @rossum! I love your ESP_8_BIT project. I was actually just looking at it's BT HID support for a separate thread to pair a BT keyboard to act as a BT-to-PS/2 converter to hook up to my 576NUC+.

What about adding a secondary STM32 or simpler processor to the board to act as ROM emulator, with it talking to the ESP32 over an internal serial bus? It would increase BOM cost, but would solve all the timing issues, as it could init into a holding state until the ESP32 sends data.

I'd guess that reprogramming the EPROM to change the selections would require 8K images, since that's what both BASIC versions, Pac-Man, and Star Raiders all use. Looking through the list of other 8K ROMs, I'd probably swap Pac-Man for Zenji, one of my all-time favorites, although perhaps one of the terminal carts would be useful for talking to FujiNet for CP/M mode.

I was just thinking about this and thinking that it could be done with a hardware modification that uses some additional I/O lines to simulate a PS/2 keyboard? You would then need to wire this into a homebrew PS/2 to Atari keyboard interface. If this capability were developed, it could be really useful with a design like the 576NUC+ where its internal FujiNet could connect into the PS/2 port already in place. I might try prototyping this with one of my other ESP32 dev boards just to get an idea of the project scope.

I just got my 576NUC+ from The Brewing Academy today and wanted to post a public thank you for this manual. I found it very easy to get around the system, in large part thanks to your work, @massiverobot.

I live in Austin, so I went down for the first hour, and it was very similar to the previous one in 2019. I didn't stick around too long, as I didn't want to stay around so many people right now. It was competing with Retropolooza Houston which was the same weekend, so some of the guests I'd seen in Austin before were down there instead. I picked up a few import 2600 carts from @ianoid, but other than that, the only thing I found were some 8-bit disks from the Game Over clearance table (Solo Flight bare, F-15 Strike Eagle in box with manual, Reston Movie Maker w/ manual).

Oscar's Trash Race has a date later than any mentioned at http://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/oscar/oscar.htm This probably means it's final code, maybe a review copy. The Alpha Beam cart looks to be from the middle of development, and that date isn't listed at http://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/alphabeam/alphabeam.htm No idea on the two 5200 carts. They don't look like standard loner carts.

Missile Command on the Atari 8-bit computer has native support for Trak-Ball mode using the T key to toggle.

See the book "ABC to the VCS" from Rolenta Press for a nice capsule guide to the 2600's output. It was last updated in 2005, but has a lot of really useful material. http://www.rolentapress.com/

I had a HX-20, my mom bought it from a surplus store around 1988, and I remember taking it with me on a class trip and printing out fake biorhythms for everyone. I've sure it's still around at my parent's house, but I think it wasn't working last time I checked. It could be a NiCd problem, although I also suspected that I'd zapped the EPROM that's accessible behind an access panel. Now that I know how to fix such things, I'll have to get it out on my next trip home and see what shape its in.

If I were making a TIA replacement with FPGA, I'd want it to still feel like the TIA... here's some ideas: automatic playfield mode - you could preload left/right playfield bitmaps and colors for each scanline, perhaps using per-pixel color and a higher resolution. The FPGTIA would automatically replay the playfield on playfield on later screen refreshes, freeing up the 6502 to focus on the players and balls. I could see this using a page flipping mechanism too so you could load one playfield while not disturbing the display of the current one. player positioning via X register write - instead of having to time in a scanline when to write to HMOVE, you could just directly modify the position register expand to full 256 colors that GITA supports by adding 1 more bit of luminance

It's definitely homemade. The chips you see are two MC14538b Dual Precision Retriggable/Retargetable monostable multivibrators and a CD40106 hex Schmitt trigger. The hex Schmitt trigger chip is used to turn noisy signals into clean digital signals, so likely is used to reduce the jitter in the four direction signals. The other two chips are a bit of mystery as you'd normally use one of those to turn a trigger signal (a button press) into a short asserted signal, with it then resetting until the button was pressed again. Maybe they're paired to do some sort of rapid fire mechanism?

There a little info at KLOV, but it seems like a combination of low production run and not much collector interest. I don't think I've ever seen one in the wild. https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8742