bcombee

The earliest 2600 plug and play I've got in my collection has Activision games on it. I think I bought it around 2000.

You know, even if you couldn't get the whole Galaga in a 2600 cart, it would be pretty amazing to just have a game that was round after round of "Challenging Stage", with formations of various alien bugs going by and the game giving you scoring based on completeness of their decimation. I'm not sure how you'd implement the linked ships for that mode, I suppose in some ways that would resemble MegaMania, but with less emphasis on large horizontal regions of invaders.

Weirdly, the Space Age joystick was very close to the joystick that Milton Bradley made for their MBX Expansion Unit for the TI-99/4A computer. See the notes at http://www.videogamehouse.net/mbx.html. I'd love to hear a story of how that deal came together.

The Wico sticks were all high quality. They supplied arcade cabinets too. I'm also partial to the Epyx 500XJ, it is has a much more clicky feel, but used a steel shaft.

Looks like its from the guy doing Brik. It's not an exact clone of Canabalt -- you're collecting things and the gap between buildings is a bit short, but it looks like it could be fun. Strangely, I was thinking about doing a game like this recently and had plotted out how the various VCS resources would be used in my head, but I didn't have time to really get started on it. I think I might have gone with a smaller runner sprite to give it more of a feel of the original game, but I'm not sure how the pacing of the Flash game would work without some of the graphical and sound detail. BTW, link to his game page is http://www.retro-reload.com/jumpvcs/

@awace, I wasn't indicating that the Front Line game in the Flashback 4 was the version from the ColecoVision. I was noting that the original Atari 2600 release of Front Line was from Coleco, so I was curious as to the ownership of that particular program code. Coleco licensed the game originally from Taito, but they or a company under contract did the adaptation, so who owns the copyright on that particular object code was uncertain to me. If you look on the back of the original box (https://atariage.com/box_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=198&ItemTypeID=BOX), you'll see two copyright notices; one for Taito and one for Coleco. I'm sure Taito has the right to license the game to AtGames, but I wasn't sure how they got the rights to the Coleco-made adaptation. Coleco did license or sell a lot of those game rights to Atari in the mid-80s which led to the Atari releases of DK and DK Jr. If you look on the boxes for those (https://atariage.com/box_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=149), you'll see copyright notices for Nintendo, Atari, and Coleco.

I know I saved several of the APX Catalogs from back when I had my original Atari 800, but I'm going to have to search a bit to see where those are. They might still be at my parent's house. If I can find them, I'll definitely get to scanning.

This was my first time coming down to Houston... I got there at 1 on Saturday from Austin, caught SpiceWare's talk, then hung out on the floor most of the day. Stay Frosty 2 is coming along very well, and will be a must buy. I really likes Space Rocks, but I think I'd want to play it with a Genesis controller instead of a CX-40 as the backwards "special action" detection seemed very twitchy. I found myself hyperspacing unintentionally a lot. Star Castle Arcade was great, but it took me a few games to realize that both difficulty switches were set to A making it insane. I also liked Frenzy, but really wished it had a feature to disable the voice, as the show floor was too loud to hear it, so it just seemed like the game hung for no reason. The game also really needs a S-Video connection to the TV for the fine detail to look it's best. The trivia contest at the end of Saturday was a lot of fun. It's inspired me to write up a set of early console trivia questions -- they had a good set for pinballs. for early arcade video games, and for post-NES consoles, but almost nothing for the 2600-era devices. I still ended up winning ST:TNG Pez dispensers and a giant stuffed dragon which now is being loved on by my 9-month old boy (while supervised). As for the arcade and pinball games -- I fell in love with the arcade version of Reactor once I finally got the hang of repulsing the particles, and I discovered ColorDMD displays for the first time, which replace the yellow dot matrix displays with RGB LED ones to really nice effect. There were both ST:TNG and Medival Madness pinabll machines with this setup, and I really felt it improved the game a lot. The new boutique pinball machines were very impressive, especially Wizard of Oz, but I never got to play them as they were always mobbed. I finally got to play Major Havok with the horizontal spinner, and it really made control a lot better than the Tempest-style spinner.

Oh cool! My parents live near Chattanooga, I hope they are still around in late December when I'll be visiting home.

I think that's for Albert to decide... this was a special design to accommodate the Sega carts, but it could handle regular ones too since it gives you a nice area to grip the cart by when opening the box. We've got to tune the production process a little before doing another run -- the manual cutting of the plastic from the sheets was a bit of a chore.

Here's a couple of pictures of one of the rejected inserts... if I remember right, we let the plastic sheet get too melty before doing the vacuum form on this batch. I've attached both with and without cart views. For the Sega style carts, the cartridge ridges extend out just beyond the plastic well.

OK, I had the mold design class... it's a lot to take in. The injection molding process involves melting plastic pellets, forcing them at high pressure into a metal mold, and figuring out how to release everything from the mold with a reasonable amount of effort. The design of the runners that channel plastic from the entry point to the mold into the various pieces can be quite complex. It will be a fun challenge, and the good news is that TechShop has very good design tools for these. One aspect of design that was interesting was how you can design the molds for easy modification. Specifically, it seems that it won't be too hard to design the molds to the cart end can be either solid or empty with panel holders, so that aspect won't be bad. I am a bit concerned about the speed of production, although the good news is the machine there is large enough to do both the top and bottom parts on the same mold. As for custom logos on the shell... that's actually looks to also be pretty easy to handle. I could design the mold to have a small block that is either blank or has a raised part with a logo design. It will take a while to get the other classes in and get a mold designed and milled... I'll update when I've taken the next step.

That's all good feedback... I think accepting standard Atari boards is important, and I really like the idea of having the screws in the back and accessible. I'm against having the complication of the dust cover. I'm also thinking how to make the design easily able to accommodate things like adding accessory ports for USB connectors, SD card slots, or external sound jacks. One thought it to make both ends open -- one end for the cart connector, the other end to hold a plastic blank (for normal games) or a laser cut acrylic panel for specialty carts. Since I'm designing this for the injection molding hardware at TechShop, doing different designs is basically the cost of a block of aluminum, the time to update a design file and the time to CNC mill out the aluminum. However, I still don't have a good feel for the economics of it... obviously this saves Albert time by not having to scrap existing carts, but there is the time of actually running the machine, plus the cost of the raw plastic. I'll have a better feel for this once I've taken the classes.

I helped Albert with the vacuum formed inserts for Ixion here at the Austin TechShop... They also have an injection molding machine, and I'm about to start work the class series to get certified for it with the goal to make new cartridge shells. Monday nights class is on mold design using Autodesk Inventor, then my next class will be on using the CNC mill to cut the aluminum via the computer design.

Oooh! That was done by the PCC (People's Computer Company). Those really need to be scanned -- I've not been able to find too much PCC stuff on the net, but they were also behind the original Dr. Dobb's Journal, and one of their founders did a column in early issues of Antic.

I think the issue is that Sea Battle and Sword Fight were original IPs, while Anteater was a licensed game. In order to officially release Anteater, they would have to find the current rights holders and negotiate with them, which would be a major pain. Look how much trouble it was to get Boulder Dash released for the 2600, and that was a case where the rights holders were easy to determine.

E.T. I like. Good one.

I was tracing the signals on an Imagic display kiosk game selector last night, and was surprised to see that it also seemed to be switching both power and ground instead of using A12 as a chip select. That was based on some quick continuity testing while the unit was powered off, however. Has anyone traced out of these and made a schematic? The construction of the board looked top notch, and while I saw multiple uses of 74LS244 buffer chips, there was another common chip with an obsolete part number that I can't remember. The selector definitely had an issue with multiple chips driving at once, although usually interference was in the same column rather than across columns. If I get a chance, I'll get some high resolution pictures of the front of the board, as the only ones I found online are of the back. The design was neat, mostly all discrete logic. It had a hefty 5V, 3A linear power supply to run the board, but I suspect 30 years haven't been kind to the capacitors.

That's a pretty sweet setup. The poster looks awesome.

Evil Otto could work in a filled in version... actually, Winky from Venture would be similar, but with more interesting detail. The Combat tanks aren't bad... Pitfall Harry is tough due to the multiple colors needed, same goes for the Mad Bomber and Demon Attack birds. The AT-AT is doable, but I'd need the right color of acrylic to make it work. An orange translucent Pooka from Dig Dug would be interesting.

Several M-Network games are significantly different. Kool-Aid Man is a totally different game, for example. Reading through http://intellivisionlives.com/bluesky/games/credits/atari1.shtml will give you a feel for the differences and how those were developed.

The NES controller is very simple. It's a shift register attached fo a set of buttons and d-pad switches. You strobe one line to latch all those inputs into the register, then pulse a clock line to read them one-by-one. A simple adapter could be made to allow the NES controllers to be plugged into a DB-9 port, then you could write code using the input and output nature of the ports on the 8-bits to read those controllers. This would also work for SNES controllers too, as they use the same setup, just with more buttons. Both run on 5V, which is the voltage output of the 8-bits.

Based on the way the paddle works, it might be really hard to read the full range. The paddle has a variable resistor in it connected to a capacitor in the 2600. The game charges that cap, then checks scan line by scan line for when the charge has been drained from it. So, you're only going to be able to detect ranges of resistance that drain that cap in the time it takes to paint one screen. If they take longer, they're pegged to the bottom, and if they take less time, they're pegged to the top. Some games might delay this charge/read cycle too until after they've painted their kernel or test for a value less often. On the 8-bit computers, this charge/read was done for the CPU by the POKEY chip, but this was all CPU managed on the 2600.

Oooh, I'd not see that. There's some really neat designs there, but most of them are multi-color, so not really suitable for mono-color material lasering.

So, I recently made one of these for my window on the laser cutter at TechShop. It's a little over a foot wide. I'd love to do some other ones based on beloved 2600 game characters. Any suggestions? They need to be one color and somewhat contiguous (you can shift around pixels a little for connections, like I did here). Having some sort of natural base to stand on is also good. I was thinking the dragons from Adventure would be good candidates, as would be the Yar from Yar's Revenge. A Berzerk robot would also be pretty easy, but the guy from the game wouldn't work due to the detached head. Outlaw has some good outlines with the cowboys and the stage coach, so I could see some sort of recreated scene from that. Maybe one of the cows from Stampede?