Lynxpro

Standard 5200 cartridges can do 32K ROMs. I think AtariAge User Bryan - or was it CPUWiz? - created a 700K+ ROM cartridge PCB. Nobody has yet designed a 1MB ROM cartridge PCB - which a conversion of A8 Space Harrier would require - and also no PCBs with on-board RAM or a required "mapper"/logic/glue chip support to make it accessible.

If someone can get native Trak-Ball support going into Crystal Castles, then my hat's definitely off to them because some many people claim the kernel is "too busy" to do it and it would cause the CPU to send Bentley Bear through every part of the maze and castle with each spin of the Trak-Ball. This has also been claimed about the 2600 version, but specifically in terms of A8/5200, both versions of the A8 Crystal Castles. There's 2 versions because Atari Corp later had it redone by a different developer for the XE Game System. That's also been another question to ponder, whether the 2nd Crystal Castles truly requires the XE Game System's standard 64K RAM. Nir Dary has said before that with some bank-switching rewrites/mods to the code, every "XE Game System" title supposedly requiring 64K will actually run on 16K RAM systems like the 600XL. On the 2600 front, nobody has announced they'd like to rewrite 2600 Crystal Castles to use a DPC+ chip to handle Bentley Bear tracking and Trak-Ball support. I suspect if it's true the 6502 is the bottleneck on the tightly coded kernels preventing native Trak-Ball support on the A8/5200 platforms, then the code would have to be hacked to have the chip on the AtariMax SD Adapter to pull those duties or a 65816 upgrade would be required; both might speed up the games too much without adding addition code to slow it back down to normal.

Tempest Nut, I don't know what to say.... That is insanely awesome! I hope you post a video of it in action on YouTube... If you could do a similar design that would be a 5200-compatible rotary/spinner controller, the 5200 Tempest fans would go insane over it. I know Dan Kramer - the creator of Atari Consumer's Trak-Balls - took a CX53 Trak-Ball and hooked it up to an arcade Tempest rotary controller and got it to work with 5200 Tempest. There's some pictures of it here: http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/atariparty/2016/photos/ And here I just want a retrofit 4-piece PCB kit with dome switches for the CX52 5200 Joysticks...

Both would sell better on the 5200 if they were converted. Of course, Dual POKEY upgrade boards would have to become a *thing* amongst us 5200 owners to maximize the audio experience(s)...

I don't remember. I only bought the 30th Anniversary 7800 cover from them. I forget their names... it was a husband & wife team and the husband apparently passed away last year. So I'm assuming these aren't the same folks...

Does that actually work??? Did you assign Jag Fire Buttons 1-3 on 3 of the 4 5200 fire buttons? What did you do with the Flex Circuit? Did you add the gold dots to it or did you replace it with a thin PCB? Inquiring minds wanna know!

True. A unified Atari Inc being held together and releasing the 7800 at Christmas 1984 would've been incredible. There wouldn't have been the "split" with Atari Coin/Games going its own route and marketing all of their games under their Tengen brand on rival platforms. Atari Inc would've had Pac-Land on the 7800 before the NES with Super Mario Bros even made it to the States. And the Amiga deal would've ended quite differently than how it played out in our time line. What would've been interesting would be where Jack Tramiel and Co. would've ended up. Without being able to buy the assets of Atari Inc's Consumer Division, TTL wouldn't have had a famous brand, loads of engineers as surplus to their ex-Commodore engineers, nor manufacturing plants. Tramiel had looked at MindSet - and Amiga Corp - before buying "Atari" but he wouldn't have been able to buy Amiga and MindSet didn't have manufacturing facilities. He probably would've had to have purchased Coleco to stay relevant and then made MSX computers to replace the ADAM while putting together the RBP [the ST]. But Coleco wasn't flush with money and certainly wouldn't have floated their assets to Tramiel in the form of promissory notes like Warner did and Coleco's surplus hardware wasn't as valuable as Atari Inc's that Atari Corp lived off of for years... Atari Inc would've been smarter in dealing with acquiring hardware from Sega and Epyx than Atari Corp did. Tramiel famously botched the Sega deal for the Mega Drive/Genesis in North America, after all...

Wait... where did Palevich take the coin-op to? I knew he had it at his home for a while but a few years ago, he said he sold it.

It might not have been a modern hack. It could've been an A8 public domain/shareware/freeware attempt at replicating the unauthorized arcade game and then "transported" over to the 5200...

Yes, but the EU requires each "member state" to administer a VAT.

What about installing the 2600 RGB Mod into the Adapter? The Adapter that was known in-house at Atari Inc Consumer Engineering Division as the "Piggyback Parasite"...

You should also post that in the 7800 Forum...

Hyperkin probably has a lot less employees than AtGames does...

The VAT is due to the EU, right?

There's more than just the Star Wars games that used Quad POKEY audio. The Gauntlet games did too... although they had a 6502 assigning the audio work and controlling the coin slots, Quad POKEY, the TI Speech Synthesis Chip, and the YM2151* for the main music. *Had Atari Inc survived as a single united company without Warner selling it off in pieces, it probably would've been the AMY in there instead of the YM2151...had it been made to work properly.

That seems weird to me. I thought they used the actual QuadPOKEY chip, hence the semi-modern "Quad POKEY Eliminator Board" that instead used 4 regular POKEYs usually harvested from 7800 Ballblazer cartridges. Or is that what is being shown here? And what are the other empty sockets for?

And unlike Best Electronics, Albert has never claimed it wasn't anything more than a[n awesome] one-man operation.

Cool! Orbital Wars sounds like that would've been a lot of fun to play. Is the source code gone?

So, does that mean Hyperkin would have to update the Retron77 firmware to add controller support? Doesn't their engineer post here on AtariAge?

On a side note, Atari Corp had plans to "make" their own televisions circa 1987 along with offering an Atari credit card. I think Federated's hidden financial problems caused them to nix those plans...

They also have shorter cables because Atari Corp's thinking was the player would be sitting right in front of their Atari STe/Falcon030, whereas the Panther/Jaguar would've been more for couch gaming and thus had longer cables. The ST Power Pads were virtually impossible to buy in the States back then; same with the 7800 "EuroPads"... Funny how that was.

Warlords is far more popular than Video Olympics. Hyperkin probably only tested Warlords. I totally forgot about that controller combination on G.I. Joe: Cobra Strike. Loved that game...wish there was a 5200 version of it! Same with Jedi Arena!

The A8 version may be a prototype but it looks similar to the 7800 version. Both are very "economical" in the graphics department. The C64 version had better graphics in terms of the background visuals in the ship. The characters are slightly more detailed as well. The audio is also better, and I'm not saying that's due to the SID because it's not. The audio is just more polished. A lot of the XEGS titles had their POKEY audio capabilities short-changed. I'm looking at you, Desert Falcon, Food Fight, and Dark Chambers...

Looks similar to the other dust cover folks on eBay who were really popular amongst the various console owners...

Your suggestion for a "great hack" is definitely a good idea. The unthinkable hack - which wouldn't be easy at all - would be to display a single screen for all of the action on a single screen. Then you could have all of the graphics detail without the flickering. It would be more like the Lynx version than the arcade original. And then one would have more overhead available for controller options, whether to support 2 joysticks plus keyboard, 3 joysticks on a 400/800 or via MultiJoy, or throw in networking like A8 MIDI Maze... Lots of work... The A8 version could use some spicing up on the graphics; actually, the same could be said for the 7800 version. The NES version is pretty ugly too. The C64 version isn't exactly pretty but I hate to say it's slightly better looking. The sound is better too but the A8 POKEY audio work seemed to be an afterthought.