Lynxpro

There is an unreleased 5200 Kids Controller. It's the 2600 Kids Controller painted black and has a silver label across it. There's pics of it on Cyber Roach's old website. Dan Kramer has a lot of the silver labels left from them.

They could if they had permission from the author. That's been mentioned as an issue over in the Jaguar area of this site. But then again, has anyone made a JagLink - or CatBox Link - to MIDI cable? So the Jag could be hooked up to a MIDI Maze ring of STs and A8s? Apparently, there's a controller chip in the modern A8 MIDI adapters that does the transfer processing so there's no need for a Motorola 6850 or MOS/Synertek/Rockwell 6551 to assist/improve upon the MIDI/serial transfer duties... Notice the 1088XLD is installed inside that 1050 Disk Drive case...

That's all-true, and I'd add Xevious to that list as well, but let's not kid ourselves about this. Rikki & Vikki delivers what we all knew the 7800 was capable of doing had proper resources been made available to it.... high-capacity ROM size to match NES games, other sound chip options built into the cartridges, etc. Of course, getting the MARIA and SALLY to operate independently is a stroke of genius.

That is frikkin' awesome, SainT!

Nice, but the 5200 cartridge shells didn't have a handle on the top. See here for a better reference...and yes, it was helpful if only for some extra leverage. An elegant design for a more civilized time: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atari-5200-Cartridge.jpg

I wonder if the problem is SIO-to-MIDI on the Atari 8-bits is too slow. Maybe they should use a 6551 or 6850 mod to run MIDI to improve performance.... of course, they'd have to hack A8 MIDI Maze to support that... Then again, MIDI transfer doesn't seem to be a problem with the newer project 1088XEL and 1088XLD homebrew motherboards: But more importantly, why isn't MIDI Maze on the Lynx yet??? Or the Jag?

SainT, I just watched your recent video and I was looking at the cartridge shell design for the adapter. Since you aren't using the Jag Cart Knob design on the top, would it be possible to do another pass on the cart design so it could have something on it to make it easier to remove the cart? 5200 cart shells have a nice design on the back to assist with pulling the cartridges out...

If it was easy to do, then why didn't they? I mean, if not doing 48 colo(u)rs, the publishers could've at least matched the 32 colo(u)rs of their Amiga versions. Can't the STE do more on-screen sprites and hardware scrolling than the non-AGA Amiga chipset? Granted, even the "standard" STE features barely were supported by the publishers, let alone special hacks like 48 colo(u)rs. *Cough* Enhanced Joystick Port support *cough*. Now I'm wondering if 61 colo(u)rs - like the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive would've been possible...

As if EA/3DO didn't play dirty. It appears Trip Hawkins finally paid off the State of California - or entered into some settlement - since he's no longer on the Franchise Tax Board's list of top tax delinquents.

When the iPad first debuted, I thought to myself "I wonder when the Hotz software will be ported to it". Well, it's 2019 now and still no dice...

I'm a big fan of a proportional Atari Fuji logo cycling the rainbow colors. I guess it would remain all-black in monochrome mode. Maybe add a quick YM2149 version of the old Have You Played Atari Today? jingle like the Jaguar had with its start-up. I'm assuming ROM size would have to scale up to 256K or 512K to add GDOS to the mix like how Atari should've done themselves by 1987.

The last Bourne film had an Atari ST in the hacker collective...

Wait... the BBC does something else besides complain about muh Brexit all while killing off the international golden goose that was Doctor Who in favo(u)r of their atrocious DoctorWoke pet project?

Have you found documentation on this? Was this a legit Atari [uS] Corp claim - about 48 colors on-screen at 320x200 resolution on an STe - or an Atari UK claim? Seems to me if this would've been possible, Atari Corp would've informed all of the software publishers about it and would've bragged about it in their marketing since it would've [finally] been a leg-up against the Amiga and its 32 colo(u)rs. Colo(u)r me intrigued...

Why wouldn't you get an ST anyway? But if you settle for just an ST for those games, you generally won't have: *Enhanced audio in the form of selecting TIA, POKEY, SID, PAULA, YM2151 options for a lot of the ports. Cyrano has added those options to several of the releases for the Jag since he knows how to get the Jag's DSP to play back those audio versions. *Support for STe Power Pads/Jag Pads. Patching the games to use them isn't a high priority on the STe/Falcon030 compared to getting the games running in different resolutions, different TOS versions, working on other 680x0 CPUs, and making the games installable on hard drives.

One other thing, before I earn a Klax here... The 7800 needs the MindLink Controller released. Sure, it doesn't really work as a telepathic device but as a migraine-inducing forehead wrinkling head-band controller, but it's so quirky and odd that it truly deserves to be released. If the Vectrex homebrewers can build their own light pens and 3D visualizers, the MindLink should be a walk in the park to assemble if the docs are out-in-the-wild. They're probably in Curt's library... I'm already imaging getting a massive headache using it to blast away the Commies in a 7800 version of Communist Mutants from Space...

Uhm, Atari's Quack! predates Nintendo's more famous Duck Hunt. In fact, Duck Hunt is a rip-off of it. But adding the stupid dog to it and allowing one to blast it would be amusing...

It would be funny if as an Easter Egg, you substituted the Chalice for the SwordQuest Sword and you had to fight Jack Tramiel* for it, surviving his patented "Jack Attack"... *Yes, I know... Jack didn't have the sword hanging up in his house. It's just an Atari fan urban myth but it would still be funny as a meta in-joke... Maybe have it in a castle with a map matching the floor plan of 1196 Borregas Avenue...

Definitely voting for 100% original PacManPlus IP.... the 7800 - and the 5200 - is definitely up for more Dual Joystick* blasting action, especially with zombies in this case... *Although Crazy Climber is sorely lacking on both the 7800 and the 5200... I'm still surprised the 2600 version hasn't been modded to support Dual Joysticks yet...

That obviously wasn't out or known-about back when I posted my post a year ago... And that game deliberately still uses the TIA for audio SFX...

Remember, everything in the European Union has to be sold in Metric units. They were giving British pubs a bad time over selling drinks in Pints. Granted, 1L is more than a Pint but the disagreement wasn't related to purchasing value. And don't give me a bad time about digressing because alcoholic consumption and retro gaming go hand-in-hand. With all of that having been said, I wish we [North America] would've adopted SCART... I would've assumed Thompson-era RCA TVs would've come equipped with them here, but I'm probably wrong in assuming that...

Was that because TVs by then in France supported PAL and SECAM?

I don't even think the YM is really necessary for this title, but obviously more options is always a good thing. I think an A8/5200 POKEY audio option would rock... then again, that goes for all of the 7800 titles that were available on the A8/5200/XEGS....

I have to mention a few things in here. The Sega Master System cartridges [not the cards, of course] - to my knowledge - maxed out at 4 MegaBITS [512K Kilobytes] of ROM space during its North American and Japanese commercial life cycles. Unlike the NES or the 7800, It didn't have the capability to pack RAM, graphics, or sound chips on its cartridges [or CPUs, like the 7800 although still has yet to be done commercially]. Or, maybe it would be fair to say doing so would require extra logic chips, just like it does for the 2600 and would for the 5200 if anyone did such a thing. It did have 8K RAM as well as 16K (V)RAM for its Yamaha graphics chip, compared to the 4K RAM standard in the NES and the 7800. There was a comment in here mentioning how the sound capabilities of both the 7800 and the NES are greater than the SMS but that is in terms of expansion options since the SMS can't add sound chips via the carts. It also excludes the Yamaha 2413 that was included in the Japanese version which for some reason wasn't included in the North American models. The 7800 could've been far superior with a few tweaks but they probably would've been cost prohibitive considering Warner demanded the console to be backwards-compatible with the 2600, graphically more powerful [in theory] than the 5200/Colecovision/Famicom, and also be a cost-reduced console much cheaper to manufacture than the 5200. Cost-reduction is another reason why GCC/Atari Inc stayed with the 1.79Mhz SALLY 6502 instead of other variants that were in Atari Inc's Consumer Engineering Division where Jerry Jessop and Tod Fry were putting together their own proposed systems to counter the Famicom and the GCC 7800 projects. They supposedly were using 6502s clocked at twice - or faster - as fast as SALLY. Throw in a 3.58Mhz - or better - 6502 and the system would've obviously been more powerful. Put MARIA on a separate bus - like the NES had - and performance would've improved. Give MARIA her own separate DRAM/VRAM/SRAM and her performance improves even more. Stick a POKEY/Dual POKEY/Quad POKEY on the 7800's motherboard along with the standard TIA and you improve the audio even further. But how much would that have potentially increased the MSRP of the 7800 for the Christmas 1984 shopping season which was when it was originally set to debut nationally?

Ah, the joys of "Soviet" design aesthetics from Apple II and early IBM PC era analog joysticks... I cracked a joke about that over in the Apple II Facebook group and sure enough, someone from the [former] Warsaw Pact posted pics of their clunky ["Soviet" looking Apple II] joysticks. Mind you, they also had pics of Atari Jaguar JagPads in the shot so life is obviously 100% better there these days, and ever since the 1990s.