Eyvind Bernhardsen

Oh, it looks like the mouSTer is still available on eBay: https://www.ebay.de/itm/324483346054 Their GitHub repo is still active, too. (Disclaimer: I haven’t actually used one, but I’ve come close to buying one on several occasions!)

It sounds like you’re looking for a mouSTer, but they seem to be out of stock.

There’s an ARM64 build of Altirra. Still needs Windows, of course.

Not only did they exist, there was an entire magazine named after the dual format disk they put on every cover: ST/Amiga Format (later split into ST Format and Amiga Format) from Future Publishing. Heady days.

I _think_ it’s okay to just write 3 to PORTB as a segment of the load file (start address PORTB, end address PORTB, 3), which most assemblers can generate.

That’s correct. Note that older 800s and 400s might have less than 48KB of RAM, in which case there’s no RAM to be switched in. Those machines won’t be able to run your program.

You’re fine as long as no cartridge is inserted. 8KB cartridges use $A000-$BFFF, 16KB carts (or 800 “right” carts) additionally use $8000-$9FFF. That’s why a lot of games used to tell you to “REMOVE CARTRIDGE”; they needed that RAM to be available.

Oh, that’s interesting. This method works fine for me with both executables and app packages, but if you do need to use the terminal, the command is sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine tnfsd

The easy way to do this is to control-click the executable in the Finder, select "Open" from the drop-down, and then "Open" from the security warning dialog. This only needs to be done once per download. (Source: the asterisk at the bottom of this Apple Support page)

I’d love one, but second pokeys are hard to come by (and/or expensive) these days.

Works fine with my Joy2B+ Sega adapter, but players take turns using a single joystick even though I have two connected. How do I get it to recognise the second joystick? Edit: I found out how to change the port number! Works fine with two Joy2B+ controllers, I don't have a 400/800 so I can't test with more.

Yeah, I’ve tried to support standard joysticks in the games I’ve patched for Joy2B, when there’s room. Will see what I can do with Scorch. Would this change even be relevant for the 5200 since its controller is completely different?

Not sure if any Atari games used extra buttons back in the day, but the SEGA consoles and the Amiga had the same convention of buttons being active low. Turrican is one title Extra buttons on the C64 worked the way you suggest, though. Nowadays a bunch of Atari games have been patched for Joy2B+, of course.

The decision to make pot-pin buttons work like this wasn't invented for Joy2B+, so changing it would break old games, but it's not quite as bad as you make it out to be. This code is universal: PADDL0 = $270 pot_max = $e4 test_button_c lda PADDL0 cmp prev_button_c beq not_pressed sta prev_button_c eor #pot_max bne not_pressed ; code to handle button press goes here! ... not_pressed ; button wasn't pressed, go do something else prev_button_c .byte pot_max (My code calls it "Button C" because that's what it's called on a Megadrive/Genesis controller). You can detect a Joy2B+ or compatible button by checking if prev_button_c ever gets set to anything other than #$e4, and you can read the third button from PADDL1 in the same way. Edit: the code works with a normal joystick because the button is "held down" on startup, and won't be detected until it's "released".

Yep. I've been worried about the high ledge that runs all around the bottom case, but the connector will be clear of it if it's still where it was in this picture: I think this will work!