bcombee

Alas, looks like I won't be going... it's a busy weekend in the Combee household and I'm needed in Austin.

I just saw posted over at the Retro Gamer magazine site is this interview with 2600 Space Jockey, Donkey Kong, Keystone Kops, and Pressure Cooker programmer Garry Kitchen. http://www.retrogamer.net/profiles/developer/21929/garry-kitchen/ It's excerpted from RG 123.

You need a 10502PC cable, see http://atari8warez.com/buyDualUSB.html for one of them, although he's in between runs right now so it may take a while to get.

Marked on my calendar, hope I'll be able to fly out from Austin!

Looks like I've convinced the wife to come up to the Dallas area with me for the weekend, so I'll be able to attend at least part of the show. Sorry there won't be classic home systems, but given how much I enjoyed the arcade area from the Houston fest, I don't think I'll be disappointed.

I didn't get to attend this, but there was a session today at SXSW Interactive called "Unearthing the Atari Graveyard: The Search for ET". Details at http://schedule.sxsw.com/2014/events/event_IAP22574. I expect a video of this will show up online in the next few months. Update: looks like The Guardian covered the talk: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/07/seeking-et-atari-2600-landfill-xbox and the team making the film has a website up at http://dumpingthealien.com/

So, I just saw a post on Gamasutra,com [1] that pointed to a new iOS game, Star Trux. The team that put it together is listed at [2] and seems to be a number of original Atari programmers. I've sent an email to their contact address to see if they were involved with the version at Atari and if the new mobile game is inspired by this old project. [1] http://gamasutra.com/blogs/MattPowers/20140228/211946/A_Brief_History_of_Video_Game_Development.php [2] http://www.startruxgame.com/Team.html

I'd probably implement this as a box with a SNES connector on one side as well as a 9V power connector, and short DB9 and mini-jack cables coming out the other. I'd probably use a small microcontroller to act as the shift register to read the controller, and then have it control the DB9 output pins as well as relay to toggle power to the Atari 2600. Internally in the Atari, I'd wire select and reset to the mini-jack (you need two signals and ground, so using a standard L/R audio jack is easy and durable). For power reset, maybe use a combination of the two shoulder triggers pressed at the same time to prevent accidentally hitting that.

Here's the link the the completed Star Castle Kickstarter ... a CD with the ROM image and supporting material was a reward at the $20 level.

I think the more likely problem is that the cord from the joystick is acting as an antenna. I wonder if wrapping a ferrite core on the controller cord would reduce any RF noise that the joystick produces.

I wonder if it's actually the Option key that's broken and now always indicating that it's pressed. You could try booting the 800XL with the keyboard unplugged internally and see if it comes up in BASIC.

One quick and non-invasive check is to weigh the cart. EPROM chips that are commonly used to make reproductions tend to weigh slightly more than the typical ROM chips used in production carts due to the ceramic packaging and the need for an addition inverter chip on the board.

This now resembles the arcade game Lunar Rescue (http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?letter=L&game_id=8466). There's an Atari 2600 homebrew, This Planet Sucks, that came out in the late 90s. There were a few unofficial computer ports of Lunar Rescue.

OK, do any of the games in this gallery http://www.atarimania.com/screenshots_games_atari-2600-vcs-quelle_publisher_28_2_G.html look familar? (fixed URL -- bad automatic URL formatting, followed by a cosmetic fix to blame)

There was an Epyx 500J joystick compatible with the Atari 2600 and computers. It sounds like you were playing Cosmic Creeps by Telesys (http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-cosmic-creeps_7639.html).

Yeah, I definitely think the Star Ship image is fake too... I could easily believe that they thought there was a picture release, but just had the weird cart and the box, so they made a mash up, but the image has some clear signs of editing, and no one has come up with a cartridge like that from the collector community.

I just heard back from Andrew Webster, the writer on this article, who I mailed after this thread showed up. His answer does help things much:

I recently lucked onto a NTSC copy of Panda's Tank Brigade. Unfortunately, when I tried inserting it into my 2600 Jr, the tightness of the connector ended up breaking one of the cartridge's internal supports. The game is made very cheaply, but I thought it was interesting to examine how it was made. The shell is three pieces, a top, a bottom, and an insert for the positioning slots. That insert just slides in to the bottom half. The PC board is held in place by just three plastic supports. There's a single pin at the top of the board, then either side of the cart connector is held into place by small pins sticking up from the bottom piece. However, these don't go through a hole in the PC board but instead on the board's side. One of these is what broken in my cartridge. There are no screws in the cart design, it all just pops together, but it also means that the design is pretty weak, with small pieces of cheap plastic taking a lot of stress. The PC board itself has TI (Texas Instruments) markings. On the back, it identified itself as TMS4732-45 MGL B8405L ZA 35465 101 PANDA KOREA The TMS4732 is a 4K masked ROM part. On this board, the die is bound directly to the PC board and covered in epoxy. The only other part is a capacitor that likely ties between power and ground to provide some buffering for the power supply. Looking at TI's data sheet, the masked ROM can be set to have chip select as high or low at programming time, so it doesn't need an inverter to flip that logic. Given that the TI logo is on the PC board, I expect that the whole thing was fabbed at TI, not just the die. I find it interesting that this little pirate shop used TI for their manufacturing; anyone seen any other TI-marked boards in their carts? Back in the 90's, I'd heard from friends at Motorola that 2600 ROM carts were pretty popular at their semiconductor fabs, so I guess Motorola was also doing some mask ROM production then.

Activision's Freeway shares a lot of characteristics with Atari's 1973 coin-on Space Race. Both involve moving from the bottom to top of the screen, with only vertical controls, while dodging horizontally moving obstacles. Unfortunately, there's no emulated version of Space Race as it was done with discrete components. It wasn't until 1975 that you got the first games using CPUs. Kaboom is certainly inspired by Avalanche, a 1978 Atari game, although it used the Mad Bomber character instead of having a wall of rocks. I think that was a clever way to work around the 2600's RAM limitations. There was an Atari 8-bit computer version of Avalanche published through APX but written in-house by Dennis Koble who later left Atari to form Imagic.

StoryBundle had an e-copy of it as part of their recent Video Game Bundle 2.0, but I don't know if they'll repeat any titles when they do VG Bundle 3. The ZIP for that included both the Mac and PC emulators. Ah, looks like Ian is still selling this e-version via the Humble Store. See his "A Slow Year" webpage for links, the ZIP with the book and emulator is $8.

Back in the mid-90's, I got a unboxed Glib from a yard sale here in Austin... the same summer, I found Crazy Climber loose at an Austin Goodwill, and a box of four or five boxed Caltron 6-in-1 carts from a random junk seller at the Big Saturday Sale in Dallas. Unfortunately, I traded off a couple of the Caltrons before I really understood their value.

The CX22/CX80 trakballs in "trak" mode will do a great job at simulating the back and forth for Decathalon. In that mode, they act more like a pair of driving controllers, alternating left/right or up/down to indicate the direct rotation of the ball. In joystick mode, the IC in the trakball reads that motion and converts it into up/down/left/right signals, passing on the direction but not the speed.

That looks like a homemade EPROM board -- the green socket is a Zero-Insertion Force socket for inserting ROM chips. Depending on if there's an inverter, this would either be used for burned EPROMs or masked ROM chips acquired directly from the factory.

Would love to have an interview with Bill Houge of Miner 2049er fame... he updated his site at http://www.bigfivesoftware.com/ back in 2007.

Someone just did a sweet 2600 speaker mod - http://atariage.com/forums/topic/219575-modded-light-sixer-with-built-in-speakers-and-amp/