bcombee

Finally caught up on this thread: It was great to see Albert and chat with Spiceware and Serious and play all the new games! I posted my pictures from my Saturday helping Albert on the AtariAge Facebook group -- https://www.facebook.com/groups/atariage/permalink/10152569268700255/

Octopart shows pricing for the NXP ARM Cortex-M3 chip in the $2-3 range, depending on packaging and quantity purchased. See http://octopart.com/partsearch#!?q=LPC1313 There's no FPGA component here, just a very tiny ARM core with a bunch of peripherals. I wonder if the HOKEY is just handling the audio registers and output; for use in carts, there's no need to hook up keyboard scan, serial I/O, or potentiometer scan features.

Mr. Do was still being actively exploited... I've got a licensed Mr. Do cart for the Super Nintendo from 1995(ish) that plays nicely, and it was released in the Wii Virtual Console in Japan in 2010. It looks like the company is still around, see http://www.universal-777.com/en/.

Almost all of my 8-bit hardware is from my original run -- an Atari 800, a 1050, XF551, and a 130XE, plus lots of cartridges and disk games. Of course, I've added to that over the years!

I think Battlezone was one of the IPs that actually sold in the first round of Atari IP auctions last summer before they reorganized and decided to not liquidate everything. That might be the reason for non-inclusion. I notice that Math Grand Prix is also missing from the list, another of the IPs that sold.

Yep, I'm also very impressed with the game lineup for this system. There must have been some real fortuitous license agreements written by the Coleco lawyers back in the 80's, and I'm sure the footwork done to put out the retail Coleco emulator collections a while back helped too.

UA's Cat Trax (available in reproduction form at the AtariAge store) is pretty similar to Make Trax, although not identical. See http://atariage.com/store/index.php?l=product_detail&p=153

That looks pretty amazing. Sorry I wasn't able to get around to making any locally, I've just had very little time since my first attempts at putting a TechShop-ready mold together.

I actually know the programmer of Ruiner Pinball, Scott Corley. He went on to develop some great Palm OS software under the company Red Mercury, with ports over to Windows and iOS. I've not played it in a while, but I remember liking the game, although I'd not put it on the same tier as the Alien Crush/Devil's Crush games.

Awesome to see you back in the anthology game. The Activision anthologies were all excellent!

That's pretty amazing!

Jsmess can do 2600 emulation using JavaScript. http://jsmess.textfiles.com/

Well, the light gun was included with the XEGS, so it may have been them just wanting to support that platform with this release and not thinking much about the existing 8-bit users. Having some light-gun exclusive games was a way to encourage 8-bit fans to buy the XEGS.

Bump 'n' Jump had a similar box in its Mattel release -- see http://atariage.com/box_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=57

If you're serious about doing this, I'd start with a surplus Blackberry phone trackball -- SparkFun sells a breakout board with one that has all the needed sensors. The board outputs pulses for each of the four directions that can be used to measure speed, but I don't know if it always returns to the same high/low value when not moving, so you'll probably need a microcontroller to decode and turn it into the joystick direction signals. - Link to Sparkfun's site: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9320

My understanding is that it's loosely based on the founding of Compaq who made the first 100%-IBM PC compatible by doing a "Chinese Wall" reverse engineering of the PC's BIOS (one team of engineers reverse engineered it and wrote a spec, another team used that spec to make a new implementation).

I just got a Edit 6502 cart yesterday, although my copy has a very nice condition label. However, I can tell that it was screwed together with the screw on the back side of the case. The brown casing is of similar color to what's in the listing. However, the front of the cart on the eBay listing has two slots that my copy doesn't. My copy of Monkey Wrench II has those slots, but that's a gray color. I think there's a good chance this is a legit LJK cart; I'd guess there weren't that many companies with 8-bit cart molds and the small makers just bought what they could, with runs not being consistent color.

The inclusion of Gauntlet is interesting; there was no 2600 version of that, so we've officially moved into "2600 games + random other old Atari properties" world. That's also an Atari Games title, rather than legacy Atari Corp, so there's some licensing from Warner Bros too. That trend had already started with the FB4 and it's arcade-based Space Invaders, but I'm really curious to see the game list and see how far its drifted from the pure 2600 experience of the FB2.

I used the debugger to stop at the end of the frame, then directly poked in "0A" value into RAM for the cells where I wanted 1024 tiles, then turned off the debugger and continued play. I was able to get the memory layout from the source code.

Oh my... I'm having a great idea -- let's take this, the 2048 clone, and maybe a few more games like this, then make a multicart called "Fun with Numbers, For Real This Time Guys".

Just had a chance to try this out again, some amazing improvements here! I really like the end-of-game detection crash sound, and the high score is a great addition. Hopefully, I'll get some time to finally hack on a few things with the code this week. I'd like to play a little with sound effects to see if there could be some differentation based on the biggest block to combine. I'm also still thinking about the larger scale animations I'd mentioned in one of the bug reports. I have to admit that I cheated and used Stella to poke a couple of 1024 blocks on the board so I could see what happened if you won. Nice!

I'm seeing a strange bug with the latest version on Windows trying to compile the 2048.asm from https://github.com/chesterbr/2048-2600/blob/master/2048.asm When building, it would repeatedly fail with error 2048.asm (500): error: Unknown Mnemonic 'of'.until I changed a line reading bit $80 ; (3) ; and P1 close to the beginning of the secondto bit $80 ; (3)I've not had time to build a debug version of this and try to track down the assembler bug yet, but does this seem familiar to any of the developers?

Awesome, just posted a pull request to fix a bug with filling the last cell.

Yeah, their site seemed t go down just after I posted this... it's back up for me now.

Nope, there are some similar questions, but the responses are different. This interview also talks about his start making handheld games at Mattel, and his later work with GameMaker.