bcombee

I'm interested, but will be out of town for the first meeting. I'm passing this on to a friend, though.

This was my second time flying out to Portland for PRGE - I had gone in 2016 as well. In general, I had a really good time at the show, although I found it very front loaded, with my Saturday going from 9 in the morning until 10 at night, and my Sunday spanning from 11 to 5:30. Highlights for me were the panels: My first one was the Atari arcade veterans talk where I got to ask Ed Logg about how Dandy on the 8-bit influenced Gauntlet. He'd been thinking about how to do a D&D-ish arcade game and when he saw his kid playing it on the 8-bit, he knew what the system would be like. He also noted that the game was the first Atari had shipped without a plexiglass cover over the screen and how nervous marketing was about the possible damage; the omission of the covering was needed to allow the two side players to be able to see without so much glare. When they did their first arcade test, the machine brought in more in a weekend than the whole arcade had brought in the week before. I really enjoyed the talk by Howard Scott Warshaw, especially him opening up about how filming the "Game Over" documentary helped him realize how this stigma of being blamed for the 1983 crash had been subconsciously affecting him for years and how he feels free from that now. Pamela Smith's talk on working in graphic design for Atari in 1982-1984 was really neat, seeing the kinds of advertising materials they were producing and how much effort went into all that material. The Atari 800 panel with Joe Decuir, David Crane, and Kevin Savetz was really nice, especially hearing the stories of just how much the RF shielding kept the system from being competitive after 1981 and about how Atari's management really didn't know what they were selling yet. I also saw the Dan Kitchen/Garry Kitchen/David Crane panel on Sunday where I got to ask about the game "Ghoul School" that had been highlighted just the previous evening in the "Watch Out for Fireballs" live podcast. The show floor was crowded, especially first thing on Saturday. My haul wasn't too bad: a 8-bit Uno Cart in OSS Orange, a modern XL/XE power supply, a boxed PAL KLAX for the 2600, "Des Chiffres et des Lettres" for the 800, the Dorsett version of the educational system cart for the 800, and the softbound edition of Leonard Herman's gigantic "Phoenix IV" history tome. Al's AtariAge booth continued to look the most professional at the event, although Limited Run Games wasn't far behind. If I'd been local, I might have picked up one of the really neat wooden pieces I saw on the floor; there was one that recreated a Battlezone screen using carefully routed vectors filled with a glowy green material. Maybe I'll try my hand at a design like that using the local hackerspace's CNC machine. It will probably be a couple more years until I return; you can easily burn out on seeing the same vendors and talks over and over, but I think it was a very worthwhile weekend, and I got to enjoy some gloomy Portland weather too

The indie game Cheap Golf used a 2600-ish aesthetic last year. https://pixeljam.itch.io/cheap-golf

One of the problems is that the R/W line used by the processor isn't available on the cartridge port. So the hardware doing the bankswitching can't tell if it's a read or write. That's why they have different addresses decode as read-only or write-only. See https://old.pinouts.ru/Motherboard/AtariCartridge_pinout.shtml. Hmmm, reading your post again, its unclear to me where you want the RAM-based hotspot to be. Are you treating one of the ROM-address space memory locations as a bank register for this?

Wow! I had no idea someone had done this circuit. Very cool!

I'll be around that Sunday and can stay after the show to help with teardown!

I'm going to Portland too! I'm not getting in until Friday afternoon, but I'm happy to help with pack-up at the end of Sunday. Ben Combee bcombee Austin, TX

Looking at the TIA chip pin out (from http://atarihq.com/danb/tia.shtml), there are no RGB signals to use. The TIA directly outputs a color signal and three luma signals, so S-Video is the best video quality you can get out of it. Any RGB circuit would be decoding the baseband video signal in much the same way that a monitor would.

I just made my order for the sale. This bunch of 2600 homebrews came in just over $200 after the 10% off: Assembloids Stay Frosty 2 Wall Jump Ninja Super Cobra Arcade Scramble Space Cactus Canyon I ordered Sheep It Up! for the bonus game after playing the ROM on my Retron 77 and really enjoying it.

I suspect it's a hardware issue. The analog-to-digital converter works by putting the pot between the high voltage, and a fixed resistor connected to ground. This makes a voltage divider; the voltage level at that midpoint is directly based on the value of the pot. If you have a mismatch between the fixed resistor and the range of the pot, then there won't be sufficient voltage levels to get a lot of different ADC readings.

There's info in the pinned thread:

I recently got a Retron 77 which came with the 2nd version of it's "Trooper" joystick. It looks like a CX10/CX40, but has two fire buttons (either corner, fired the same) and faceted corners for your palm to rest. It also has an embedded strain relief and a really long cable. So far, I've found it to be really great. I know people had issues with the longevity of their initial run of joysticks, but I've not had any issues with this one yet. https://www.amazon.com/Hyperkin-Trooper-Controller-not-machine-specific/dp/B07M5HYTZL

I did find some 2600 carts that I needed from the excellent Ianoid, and I got a couple of old BASIC type-in game books from the Game Over Clearance section, but that was it for retro content for me. (I also seriously considered getting a Tandy 102 that was for sale, but decided I had enough projects) I picked up a screen-printed t-shirt that was a mashup of Star Wars and Galaga. This was my first time watching the "This Controller Sucks" panel, and I liked it, but I left during the book author panel as I just wasn't hearing anything that exciting. I liked the old computer content -- the Apple II and Mac gallery with the old games was great, as was the bitgod booth and the Irata Online people. But it really feels more like a local show than something trying to be one of the big ones. It did redouble my resolve to go to PRGE this year, though; that's the closest show to the feel of the old Classic Game Expo shows in Las Vegas of the ones I've visited.

I'm going on Saturday for the panels. I'm getting disappointed with the show's inability to attract many speakers; maybe next year, if it happens, I'll apply to do a talk about Atari 2600 homebrew.

The Activision Blast should have come with a small USB-A to micro-USB cable. Most TVs with HDMI ports also have a USB port, and people usually plug it into the TV's USB port to supply power.

Just noticed this topic... since i live here in Austin, I definitely want to come to some of the event. I've not done much TI99-4/A hacking, but I think I do still have a system and some carts in my storage. I was very impressed with the display of recent TI work I saw at the Vintage Computer Fest SE in Atlanta a few months ago.

IIRC, you can also plug a Colecovision controller into the 2600 and use that with Omega Race, with the two side buttons acting as the main fire button and booster.

This was my first time seeing what the latest TI homebrew could do and I found it very impressive. Alas, I'm terrible at the game, as proven by me losing all my Dirks about four screens in.

There look to be a lot of Atari 8-bit activities planned for Vintage Computer Faire Southeast coming up at the end of the month in Atlanta. See http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/otherevents/vintage-computer-festival-southeast/vcf-se-exhibits/for exhibits and links for more info.

Sorry for the very long delay. I'd forgotten about this until I got notified by a mention and finally got to digging into my collection this afternoon. This is a CamScanner version, I'll try to get the pages scanned with a real scanner soon. Also, a lot of the pages at the end had been damaged by inter-page xerographic transfer over the years, but it's mostly still readable. https://archive.org/details/Edit6502Manual

There are good compatibility lists for Flashback versions posted here on AtariAge. See http://atariage.com/forums/topic/258970-atari-flashback-portable-faq-and-compatibility-list/and http://atariage.com/forums/topic/285118-atari-flashback-9-compatibility-list/ for discussions.

That sounds like Telegames. They had a warehouse in the Dallas area and also did game fulfillment for Radio Shack. They lost a lot on inventory in a tornado in the mid-1990s. The UK branch is still around. See http://www.telegames.co.uk/

I wonder if the lack of "Casino" is due to "Atari Casino" being an ongoing business concern: https://www.atari.com/atari-casino/

very nice, I'd never heard of the PORKY variant on the POKEY chip before reading that.

My biggest request would be great versions of the core controls from classic arcade machines: joystick, trackball, and spinner. Arcade1Up really messed up with their sub-par spinner and low-resolution screen for the Atari vector game model.