bcombee

There's a fair amount of composition software. Notable titles are the early cartridge "Music Composer" and the popular disc titled "Advanced Music System" and "Music Construction Set". Looking through the Antic archives, I also saw mention of the "Colleen Music Creator", which has a drum machine mode. There'a a lot of good music articles at http://www.atarimagazines.com/index/index.php?issue=v2n8

Atari already made an enhanced BASIC on cartridge -- Microsoft BASIC II was in cart form and had lots of extensions. They were selling that, so I suspect they didn't want to enhance standard BASIC much. Changing the original Atari Basic would also have meant risking incompatibility with BASIC programs that had already been written for the system.

LCD televisions work by having a circuit that samples the video signal, saving it into a framebuffer (an area of RAM) which is then used to refresh the LCD screen. It's like a video capture card, except the input is immediately used for display and isn't kept around. Because they're often only designed for interlaced NTSC video signals, I've seen the slightly off-standard signal the 2600 provides often get misunderstood. I have one LCD TV where it ends up showing a ghost image from the very first frame it received alternating with black, with no updates being made on the screen. I could easily see the sampling circuitry misreading the voltage levels from the 2600 or adding noise because of the sharp edges in the 2600's signal. There's probably not anything you can do to fix this.

I played it for an hour today, and so far, I really dig it. My favorite game on the cartridge is "Stay Frosty" which is a great platform game but requires some planning and puzzle solving. "Tossing Cookies" wasn't very exciting; I found it pretty slow and not that compelling. "Elf Dash" was pretty good, reminding me of a mix of Keystone Kapers and Fast Eddie. I liked "Grandma's Revenge"; it made me laugh, the power ups were great, and it played fast. Finally, I didn't get a chance to play "Cold War" as two players, but the mechanics seemed OK, at least after I figured out that my joystick was on "Turbo" mode. I also really liked the menu screens -- the colors were great and the use of a diagonal player for the titles was very effective, and the music was well done. It was easily the best part of my order.

I noticed you didn't include font.h in your archive. What's the format of this? Can you upload it too, or is it in another post.

If my game goes as I plan, I'll need to be able to show a couple of lines of text beneath some basic player pictures, plus some more text as horizontal or vertical menu (using a missile or maybe playfield to highlight choices), and finally a couple of lines of rather dynamic text to be used to show the results of actions. I just DLed the code, so I'm reading up to see how much setup I need, plus just how much RAM it will take to store my text.

I've got an idea for a game that needs some text display, although really only about four lines. I'll take a look at the kernel and see how I can adapt it. I'll be talking more about my game when I get more code done. Thanks!

That was a common style for Apple II joysticks... early Apple II models had a 16-pin DIP connector inside the case for plugging in paddles and joysticks, while later models brought that out to a 9-pin plug.

You might also remove Porky's -- it's based on an R-rated movie and features a shower scene (although no real nudity, IIRC)

According to the Best Electronics catalog, the Atari 400 uses a 9V AC power supply (18.5W for the 400-only supply, 50W for the universal one), where the 5200 uses a dual 9.3V/11.3V DC power supply. In other words, don't plug the 5200 supply into this computer!

Looks like I missed my original number -- how about #82?

I'd like to claim #43.

I've got cart scans of My Jong and Puzzled up on my Flickr account at http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2215776422&size=o Feel free to edit them and use them on the 8-bit pages.

I never saw them in the Austin Target stores, but I got the last one on display for $7.48 at the Atlantic Station Target in Atlanta, Georgia over the Christmas break. I'm keeping it; it's pretty nifty. I'd love to see an Atari Flashback using similar hardware (but with an expansion port!)

I got a few things... I always seem to spend in the $120-150 range at the annual sale. 1 x Sync = $25.00 1 x 2007 Holiday Cart: Stella's Stocking = $0.00 1 x Beef Drop VE = $30.00 1 x Thrust+ Platinum = $24.50 1 x Cat Trax, Funky Fish, Pleiades Bundle = $60.00 I was thinking about getting Colony 7, but I decided to wait for now until I saw some reviews.

The main reason for shutting down analog television is to free up the frequencies used by the high UHF channels to be reallocated for new data communication services. Those services will be used to make computers and cell phones more mobile and to allow public safety organizations (like fire and police) have systems that allow them to communicate with each other more easily in times of crisis.

The rarest game that I bought back-in-the-day for the 2600 was Tax Avoiders. For the 8-bit computer, it was TG Software's Night Strike.

Yes, the audio-video representations of games are copyrightable material, and since all of these games were made after 1976, they are explicitly under copyright unless released to the public domain. However, most common uses of screen shots can be considered fair use -- as part of criticism or as a small part of a larger work. Commercial exploitation would likely be infringing -- for example, taking the screen of Atari's Math Grand Prix and making that your album cover art, although there are some fair use exceptions depending on how much transformation is done to the work. http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_...ter9/index.html has a good description of how courts judge fair use of material.

Due to a happy coincidence with travel schedules for work, I'm going to be able to make this year's Vintage Computer Festival 10.0, and I'm really looking forward to Gosping's talk about "life" and AI hacking in the 70's. I saw that classic gaming vendors and collectors were allowed to setup space there (your gear needs to be pre-1997 to qualify). I was wondering if anyone else here was going, or if people had been in the past, what they thought.

Also, be sure that you're using an analog CRT television... going through a HDTV like a DLP or LCD set may not work with the light gun as the video signal gets delayed slightly before showing up on screen, and that messes with the timing.

One title I'd not seen mentioned, but that has always been near my 8-bit since I got it a few years ago: Zenji, a puzzle/action game from Activision where you have to manipulate a maze to make all of the segments connected while being chased. Love it!

Excuse me if this was covered in another thread or some obvious place, but I've never heard this before & want to know more about this. IIRC, the issue involved a patent license that Atari purchased from Magnavox. It went into affect in June 1976, and I think the ongoing royalties were connected with the first year sales, so Atari withheld their big product from the market until that year was up in order to avoid paying more money in the future.

When I saw the five audio pins, my thought was you connect them all up to different values of resistors, then combine the output to produce the analog signal, similar to how the old Disney Sound Source made audio from a PC's parallel port. I've not see the schematic of the Flashback 2 to know if that's the plan or not.

The Atari cartridge portfolios came with stickers like these to stick on the spine. I found a dark brown one that has the stickers for Space Invaders (with the Taito notice), Combat, and Video Pinball applied, and the orange/tan one that I had as a kid had those stickers too, although my set it long since gone. You can see one with some of the stickers still attached at http://www.atariguide.com/30/3041b.htm

I tend to listen to Retronauts (from 1up.com), but it's got more of a NES+ era focus, as the hosts are a younger than people like me Retrogaming Radio is probably better for 2600 coverage and has had some great interviews, but the length of the shows and long-windedness of the host prevents me from spending a lot of time with it. I also like the Bobby Blackwolf Show -- he interviewed Curt Vendel about the Flashback 2 last year -- but there's only occasional coverage of classic gaming.