bcombee

A.E. was an Apple II port that used Graphics 8 to good advantage. Lode Runner and Pinball Construction Set were others that I liked.

Yeah, I have a copy that I bought new from an Electronics Boutique back in the late 1980s. I think they picked up the rights to sell it for a few years.

Yeah, I've been a Resistor member for a little over a year now -- I coordinate classes at the space. There's a group in Jersey called FUBAR Labs (http://fubarlabs.com/) that might be closer to you and does similar stuff to NYCR.

I used batari Basic and Harmony to make a nice demo for the NYC Resistor booth at Worlds Maker Faire here in New York. My writeup is at http://www.nycresistor.com/2010/10/11/atari-2600-demo-for-the-win/. This was my first real batari project -- I'd played with a few simple sprite ideas a couple of years ago, but hadn't really touched it since moving here from Austin. With VisualBB, it was a really nice environment. The demo just ran in a loop with no controls. I used the autorun feature on the Harmony cart to keep it going, even across power glitches. The monitor we were using didn't have audio, so I didn't program in any sounds. I'd like to add more to this -- music and some interactivity would be nice, but I'll probably try to keep it under 4K so we can easily burn a cartridge for safekeeping at the hackerspace. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvlydgCWYLM&feature=player_embedded Quick question -- has anyone done a mod of Stella or another emulator to let you create a movie file while playing a game? I had to capture this with a screencast tool, but it would be alot cleaner to just have the emulator feed frames to a video encoder.

You can also use a Colecovision controller -- the second button acts like the "booster" button. I found one at Game Over in Austin a few years ago and snapped it up; hadn't seen it in the wild before.

That looks like it's from the PSP homebrew "Frogs and Flies". See http://www.qj.net/psp/homebrew-games/psps-get-frog-and-flies.html

I've finally got the NYC Resistor blog post up - http://www.nycresistor.com/2010/10/11/atari-2600-demo-for-the-win/

I don't think it had anything to do with opcodes... it was either power related (which makes sense, because you've got two separate CPUs running when the Harmony cart is doing its thing) or it was related to the connector -- I know I was able to reproduce one crash just by pushing on the Harmony cart while my demo was running which could have also glitched the power to it.

Great - I don't think I ever properly tested that feature, so it is good to know that it works! I'm looking forward to seeing that video. Chris The Harmony cart performed well, but when I had the monitor and 2600 on the same power line as our air compressor, I did get some glitches where it looked like the ARM in the cart sent NOPs instead of instructions, so the screen drawing timing got off, data got corrupted, or it just froze. For day 2, we used a separate power line and had no problems.

The AUTORUN technique worked wonderfully; we used a Harmony cart, Batari Basic, and an AV-modded 2600 Jr. for part of our NYC Resistor booth demo. As soon as I can get a video of the demo made from Stella and uploaded, I'll be putting the code up at nycresistor.com.

I looked through the Harmony manual, and didn't see anything on this topic. Is there a way to have a SD card with a single ROM file on it, like a "autorun.bin", that would be loaded automatically and started when the 2600 was turned on? I want to use my Harmony cart for an art exhibit at Maker Faire NYC next weekend, but I don't want to have a joystick hooked up to the 2600 or anyone to have to interact with the console once it's turned on. [Edit: looks like I can use programming mode to just load a single game onto the board without the standard multicart firmware. This should work for my needs, but I like the idea of autorunning from SD too, so I'm leaving this post around.)

Different video generation hardware. It probably properly offsets the odd frames for NTSC where the other consoles don't. When I had a TV affected by this, a SNES and N64 would fail, but a cheap plug-and-play Pac-Man was fine.

This display probably won't likely be fixed by the other cable. When I've seen these, it's due to how the game consoles generate non-interleaved NTSC video. Some of the video decoding chips in modern TVs can only handle interleaved video -- without the frames starting with the proper offsets, they get confused and either go blank or just freeze on one image.

The 74HC133N is a 13-input NAND gate, while the 74HC160 is a BCD counter. This seems to allow multiple bank access -- probably the NAND gate is tied to the address bus in a way that hitting the right address increments the counter, which is used to select the high-bits of the address on the EEPROM chips. The counter is triggered by the logic line transition.

I've got all my flights and my hotel room at the Tropicana confirmed. bcombee is going to CG Expo!

I'm planning on attending! The last one I went to was the 2005 one near SFO, but I had a great time there. 2007 was a bit too busy for me to attend, as that was the summer of the aborted Foleo launch, but this summer looks like it's wide open.

I purchased Star Rangers a couple of days ago and tried it out on my iPod Touch... it's a very nice homage to Star Raiders, and it played very well... I think I got through two full missions before I had to go do other things. The tilt steering was nice, and I liked the popup distance markers on the aliens. I'd love to see a "retro" mode with graphics more like on the old Atari 8-bit, although I'm sure you couldn't use all of the original ship shapes. This reminds me to go and do a review!

I'm planning on attending both days. I'm very interested in hearing David Ahl speak, and I've already signed up to build a PockeTerm board. Plus, I'll finally get to meet Curt!

Also, Sega Genesis controller extension cords are fairly easy to find and work very well with the Atari controllers. They connect all 9 wires.

I'm very happy with my SDrive NUXX; I built mine from c0nsumer's PC board and parts I ordered myself, but he still has a few assembled devices that he's sell if you don't want to solder it up yourself.

There was Blaster, an unreleased shooter for the Atari 8-bits that got turned into a very limited release arcade game by Williams. Details at http://www.atarimania.com/detail_soft.php?...ERSION_ID=11544. It's not greyscale, though.

I've digg the story at http://digg.com/tech_news/Rob_Fulop_Sues_F...ful_termination Please digg it too to get the word out to more people.

I built a SDrive NUXX from one of c0nsumer's PC boards, and it's a great solution. I found it much simpler than either SIO2PC or the flash cart, especially since I didn't have a PC near the Atari 130XE which was hooked up in the living room. You can get a 2GB SD card and pretty much hold any game you'd ever want to play on the old Atari.

Yeah, out of the box the only thing the Atari computer knows how to do with disk drives is read a binary program from the first set of sectors -- that's how the DOS gets read into the machine, and DOS provides all the useful commands like format and support for actual files.

I'm not sure. Kevin's main site is still on the net; maybe the domain expired and someone snatched it up. I'll send him a message on Twitter about it. I was just using the Antic archive last week, so this just happened.