bcombee

The pirate packaging I spoke of was the box shot of Front Line that was in the video when the game was selected. You can see it briefly at 6:26, I'm pasting in a screen capture . I guess I got confused at who did the latest Taito plug-and-play. It does look like a new implementation.

Updated URL without period at end: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/149660/stella-chumby.tgz

It looks like Space Invaders is taken directly from their Taito "Space Invaders" all-in-one. Front Line is an odd choice, but it likely came with whatever Taito license they were able to negotiate, although I wonder where they got the rights to the Coleco-made ROM. I do find the use of the pirate box shot amusing, however.

There's a real Space Invaders silver label, as seen at http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-space-invaders_8102.html. It was shipped in some of the late Atari red boxes for the game.

Added to my calendar, hope I'll be able to come down.

@toptenmaterial, have you seen the sales data that Curt posted from the Tramiel years? http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/144750-2600-sales-86-90

Oh, also see this thread - http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/144750-2600-sales-86-90 - with some info Curt dug up for the later years.

Looks like you asked that question before! http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/29048-earliest-maze-craze-box/ In the thread at http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/18431-maze-craze-256-maze-version, Scott Stilphen says the 256-box was earlier, but unless there are sealed carts with production codes on them out there, I'm not sure.

Well, it's actually quite possible to get this data, at least for Atari. The guys working on the new Atari history book, Curt Vendel and Martin Goldberg, have a dump of the ATARI Vax system that was used for interoffice communication and storing documents, so we actually are getting a better and better view into what was really happening then. If you want to dig for info, check out http://www.textfiles.com/games/ATARIMAIL/ as a starting point. There's also a 111MB file out there called atari-engineering-information-system-item-master_list.pdf that has a master list of internal part numbers, although it doesn't seem to have production numbers.

See the thread at http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/191914-superman-special-edition -- it looks like the Special Edition boxes are the original ones and indicate that the game used a 4K ROM, back when most other games used a 2K ROM.

I also PMed our Atari overlords.

I missed my first chance at the last CGExpo, don't want to miss it again. I'm in for one.

BTW, noticed something interesting in this the other day. In looking at the set of 2600 games included, they all use the Atari cartridge names when available except for one. Instead of "Video Olympics", they have "Pong Sports". The manual scan looks to be the Video Olympics manual with the name changed in a bitmap editor. I suspect that due to greater trademark enforcement, Atari didn't want anything new out there using the word "Olympics", since the IOC is going after anyone and everyone using that term without an expensive license from them.

IIRC, those sections were commonly filled with information about ATARI SERVICE, the 800 number you could call to get help with your system or repairs. I don't think the Tramiels continued this, but they might have used stickers to obscure those sections while using the old manuals. You can tell it's old stock since it still says "A Warner Communications Company".

Yesterday, in honor of the 40th anniversary of Pong, Atari made this collection completely free -- download it, go to in app purchase, and unlock everything for $0. The price will go back up very soon, so get this while you can. The URL for iTunes is http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ataris-greatest-hits/id422966028?mt=8

I just heard about the Atari 2600 game made based on this book, details are at http://www.oldgames.sk/en/game/stacks/. I just played a little on Stella, and it's actually pretty nice.

The picture they showed along with the licensing expo update for for Sony Pictures, while Addams Family was a Paramount movie. In case it's not AF, looking at the list of top-licensed games related to Sony properties, a few possibilities are "Bram Stoker's Dracula", "Last Action Hero" and "Starship Troopers".

I'm also liking Ketzal's Corridors - there's a good review at IGN. I've found their 3DS reviews to be very useful.

I'm thinking the best book is still in development, check out which is coming this fall.

There's also the VisualBB tool used with Batari Basic. It has sprite and playfield editor and the code it outputs can easily be transformed for use in DASM. It only runs on Windows, though.

Actually, I posted on this topic a few weeks ago, thinking about a demo mode. My idea would be to have the ARM code that implements bank switching also implement a timer. After so many seconds, the ARM core on the Harmony would just start injecting JMP instructions into the stream for 1/20th of a second to reset execution to the start of the cart, the would start with the new cart code. There might have to be some other reset logic, although most games do all the needed clearing/setting on startup. If I had access to the Harmony firmware, I'd look into the idea, but for now, it would be up to Fred & company to implement.

(I originally posted this on the Chumby forums at http://forum.chumby....id=42697#p42697) Yesterday, at the Austin Mini Maker Faire, I was demoing recent developments in the homebrew Atari 2600 world. One of the things I was showing was my Chumby One turned into a Stella box, running the Atari 2600 emulator with a ROM selection menu. I hooked the emulator into the Chumby boot process by creating a script in /psp/rfs/userhook2 that looks like #!/bin/sh # userhook2 - start stella if joystick is attached at boot # if ( dmesg | grep X-Box > /dev/null) ; then if [ -e /dev/input/js0 ]; then echo userhook2: joystick detected >> /tmp/userhook.log exec /mnt/storage/atari2600/stella -romdir /mnt/storage/atari2600 > /tmp/stella.log else echo userhook2: no joystick found >> /tmp/userhook.log fi This script looks for a joystick device on boot. If it sees one, it starts the emulator, otherwise it just goes ahead and boots the Chumby as normal. I've got the stella binary in /mnt/storage/atari2600 along with a collection of ROM images. The stella binary I have is based on the latest 3.6.1 version from http://stella.sourceforge.net/. It's a basic port using a version of the SDL library built from https://github.com/x...-sdl/downloads. All builds were done with the falconwing toolchain downloaded from the Chumby site. To install, untar the "stella-chumby.tgz" file into /mnt/storage the move /mnt/storage/atari2600/userhook2 into /psp/rfs. A copy of the SDL dynamic library will be in /mnt/storage/lib. The source I used is This version of stella has a code change to let it better accomodate a wired USB XBox 360 controller. It's setup to let you use all the controller buttons to run the 2600 functions: Left joystick + d-pad: left joystick LT/LB - left difficult RT/RB - right difficulty X/Y - color/BW back - select start - reset XBox button - return to ROM selector I tried to also get this working on the Chumby 8 which has a faster processor and better screen, but the kernel on the C8 doesn't have joystick support compiled in by default, and I didn't have time before the event to try to compile up the needed kernel modules. If you want to play with this, you can download the emulator binaries and my source trees at http://dl.dropbox.co...lla-chumby.tgz. I'm not including any game ROMs, but you can find a lot of hombrew ROMs in the Atari programming forums at http://www.atariage.com/

Of course, I meant "Medieval Mayhem"... it was a long day yesterday.

Just got back from the Austin Maker Faire. The 2600 exhibit was very well received, with a lot of interest from pre-teen boys and their dads mostly. Of all the homebrew carts I showed off, Gunfight and Medieval Madness were the favorites due to their multiplayer nature. Juno First was also well received, and Duck Attack and Cave In got a bit of play. My Chumby-powered emulator box was a hit, and people really liked the Harmony cart I expect Fred will get a couple of sales out of the event. I printed out Spiceware's slides and had several people read all the way through them. Special thanks to Bruce Tomlin who showed up and hung out most of the day. He got to show off his Blue/Red Box carts a few times too.

CGA monitors won't do analog. They expect TTL-level digital input on the various pins instead of a varying signal level and have a separate "intensity" pin that controls the brightness of all of the color guns. See http://nemesis.lonestar.org/reference/video/cga.html