bcombee

I've seen a few crowdfunded 2600 homebrew projects. I was one of the backers of the Star Castle homebrew project at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/698159145/atari-2600-star-castle;I also tried to back https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yuppicide/skull-island-a-puzzle-game-for-the-atari-2600, but it didn't reach its goal.

I bought my copy of "Tax Avoiders" at a Kay Bee Toys around 1986.

I got the FB 7 Gold Activision edition for Christmas, and so far, I've been pretty pleased. However, I hit one glitch that was very surprising. When playing Street Racer, the graphics for the player object in games 21 through 27 are a bit deformed. Any idea what's going on here? This seems like a pretty simple game to do something that would mess up emulation.

The rarest cart from my original 80's collection was Tax Avoiders which I bought from a Kay-Bee Toys at Walnut Square Mall in Dalton, Georgia. I ended up getting a bunch of Datasoft Atari 8-bit computer games and books from that place too, as well as an original 70's Dungeons & Dragons players guide (before the AD&D or Basic edition sets).

I made a skill last month for Amazon's Alexa service to test your knowledge of Atari 2600 trivia. So far, it looks like no one has actually used it. If you've got an Echo or similar device, try it out using the command "Alexa, play atari twenty six hundred trivia". There's about two dozen questions in its database, and I can refresh it with additional ones if there's any demand. I made it to try to qualify for Alexa developer swag, so it's not that advanced.

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-comp-casten-game-disk-_7156.html Also, an interview with JD Casten - http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-episode-9-the-atari-8-bit-podcast-jd-casten-steve-wilds

It seems very likely. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was at Apple from 1986 until 1993, the year this patent was filed.

Look for a TV picture setting with a name like 'streaming contrast' or 'fail' brightness' and turn it off.

I'm going to be there too. Really hope the separate rooms for vendors, bands, and presentations improves the show vibe.

Really? $3 for the game by itself is fine, and the other tiers include lots of other games the developers have made.

Well, they were just a 7-day project, so they're only 2 days into it

The main developer at Pixeljam Games has a very short (7-days) Kickstarter for his new game, Pixel Golf -- it's kinda inspired by Atari 2600 Miniature Golf mixed with absurdist humor. I think it looks nifty. Details and a funny video are at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/milestilmann/cheap-golf

I assume KoalaPaint was using graphics mode 7 (or 7.5) which only support four colors. The only modes that had >4 color at a time support (without display list interrupts) were the GITA modes (9, 10, 11) that supported 16 colors or 16 shade of one color, or 10 separate colors.

How about getting a Harmony cart and trying the NTSC and PAL dumps on Boing and see what matches your observed behavior?

I think so. I got it find the e-store as soon as it launched. Pokemon Picross is another digital only title that is free to play, although some things can be unlocked a lot faster if you pay for currency.

I've spent countless hours on Picross 3D Round 2... so much puzzle fun. I finally got all the shapes, and now I'm going back through and getting the highest rating on all of them.

I've played both sets on my Xbox One. For the arcade games, I found the background music in Crystal Castles kept dropping for me, and the controls were too difficult to use. It really needs a track ball or to be slowed down. For arcade games, I found Tempest played fine, although the controller didn't have the sensitivity to play well. I had much more fun with Black Widow and Major Havok. Missile Command played well also, but the control wasn't good also. I tried a few 2600 games -- I went for the target fun achievement in Air-Sea Battle and found it worked pretty well. I tried Circus Atari too, and the default paddle control was terrible, although I see there's likely a tweak to make it better.

Something like https://www.amazon.com/Tmvel-RCACVS-Composite-Converter-Blue-Ray/dp/B009A6PJKQ//ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=ll1&tag=atariage&linkId=af565cdc5a5d3ba81be297c324c47b22 would work for you. The Flashback outputs composite video, so you need to covert that to a HDMI digital signal.

I've got a few pictures up at https://1drv.ms/i/s!Al1njiDPPbrog9w0dKMl4GZ35Wn1kA-- mainly one from the Imagic talk and a few in the museum.

The Flashback cases are the best part! I've been thinking of getting a FB7 both for a case to reuse for a CHIP-based system and to see if I can sniff the IR joysticks using standard protocols; it would be interested to see if I could hack them into the IR code for our Roku TVs to act as a remote control for games.

One way film festivals handle this is to often have "Conversations with X" where you get someone who's a known commentator talking with a director/actor/producer. That's a really nice thing, because it provides some structure to the talk and also can reach areas that the person being interviewed wouldn't have gone to on their own.

The catalogs were very sweet, and I loved the demonstrator Flashbacks. I'd seriously buy one of those preloaded with the AtariAge catalog. Based on the interface, I'm guessing there's not much of the original Flashback board left in those cases

Sorry for sounding negative -- I think the YouTube videos are great, but that's one part of the hobby that's changed a lot since I got involved back in the USENET days. I wonder when we'll finally be seeing panels from people who worked on the Jaguar or in developers like Tengen or 3DO. There was a panel that poked fun at the CDi and Nuon consoles, but given that a lot of people worked on those, I'd love to see a retrospective panel featuring devs that did some of those games or who implemented the hardware. I remember when I started at Motorola, I worked with an engineer who'd been on the 68060 project, a chip designed specifically for Phillips to use in the CDi. The lack of content on older systems probably also has a lot to do with the lack of sophistication. There are many great 2600 games, but not many that have the kind of depth that actually requires long commentary. Memory got cheap enough with the NES era (and the computer games that also were dominant then) to give games much more of a narrative arc. That gives people a lot more to engage with. I think the older game system fans who are still active are more into them for the technology aspect, while once you hit the NES era, you get a lot more of the emotion,

(Deleted -- Thomas beat me to it)

I really enjoyed visiting PGRE this weekend, but it was very clear that this retro gaming hobby has moved on a bit. There were two trends that made this show so different from the Classic Gaming Expos I loved in the 2000s. 1) Nintendo Kids For many of the attendees, their retro games started with the NES or Super NES or Sega Genesis. I suspect some of the attendees started with the Playstation/N64 era. It's great to see so many people excited about those systems, but it drowned out much of the discussion of anything older. Of course, it was great that PGRE still had space for those -- there was a lot of Intellivision love, Al did a great job with the AtariAge booth, and I loved seeing a fair amount of Atari 8-bit computer hardware on display. There was also a table full of TI 99/4A systems. However, most of the games available were NES and newer, sometimes with a box of 2600 and Intellivision commons over to the side. 2) YouTube Celebrities I saw a bunch of good panels at PGRE, but the ones that consistently had long lines and capacity rooms were the YouTubers. Angry Video Game Nerd, Metal Jesus Rocks, Gaming HIstorian, Pat the NES Punk, and so on. I admit they can be entertaining, but it was a little sad that people were more interested in seeing the people that talk about games than then people that actually made the games. I was in the Imagic talk on Sunday and there were 40 people in the room, compared the the 150+ for an earlier talk about the Super Mario Brothers movie. So, the event left me feeling a bit old. I probably won't be back next year (Portland's pretty far from Austin), but I'm glad I did get to experience it. It did give me some ideas to suggest to the organizers of Austin's own Classic Game Fest.