raindog

Haven't looked at the Donkey Kong code, but since Coleco's own system had purple/pinkish girders, I assume they did it intentionally. Maybe when they bought their DK cabinet from Nintendo for reference, the monitor was messed up...

BUMP I'm not finding an order link on that page. How are you handling it, through email? (Yes, I want to order one. Best Vectrex news in a decade, as far as I'm concerned.)

Builds and runs fine under Ubuntu Karmic using gcc `sdl-config --cflags --libs` -lstdc++ -o my2600 my2600.cpp Really sweet for a 3-day-old emulator. Great work.

Well, except that the Vecflash isn't being made anymore, so it's just a matter of which one appears on ebay first. I'm pretty happy with my Sean Kelly cart, but a flash-based one sounds great too. I'd never heard of VecMulti before, so I'm glad someone mentioned it above. Does anyone know of some Vectrex news site with an RSS feed or with emailed updates so I know when it becomes available?

Congratulations! Can't wait to get a cart of this one.

What happened to shareware was, a lot of carpetbaggers wanted to cash in on the rising popularity of "shareware" in the early 90s, so they joined the Association for Shareware Professionals and changed the definition of the term "shareware" from "try the full version, if you like it, buy it" to what they loosely call "shareware" now, with time bombs and access codes and limited functionality and the presumption that your customers are thieves. And that's when a lot of us who'd previously done shareware either left or moved over to the free software movement and started selling our services rather than our "products".

They were selling Frogger USB drives a few years ago that contained an emulated Frogger for Windows. I think that's how "plug'n'play" retro games are going to be done from now on, if they're done at all. Notebooks are a lot more popular than anything with a full-size PCI slot now. But I made a CD once with MAME, Stella and some other emulators and an auto-running, no-install Windows front end, and if you put it in a PC at boot, it would boot a minimal Linux distro with the same games. It ought to be possible to do the same thing with a USB keychain drive now. I mean, yeah, you could put one of these systems on a chip on a USB2 device with breakout dongles for the joysticks and feed the video and audio over USB2, but at that point it seems to me the emulator would be just as good for any system but the ones with funky controllers (Intellivision, for example).

Wow, 65816-compatible, huh? Surprised there are no SNES plug-n-play devices, at that rate.

The difference is, there have been Chinese NES-on-a-chip and Genesis-on-a-chip devices for over a decade, cheap and readily available for inclusion in DVD players, knockoff game consoles and the like. There are also any number of emulators for low-end RISC chips of the sort used in iPod knockoffs, some plug-n-play devices, etc., which are delivered in firmware and can't be distinguished from the slightly-off systems on a chip without taking them apart. On the other hand, the only commercially available 2600-on-a-chip that I know of is the Flashback 2, and I'm gonna guess Curt and company are not offering their design to every electronics manufacturer in the world.

If I'm not mistaken, all of the ones that actually look like Atari 2600 joysticks are really NES-clone-on-a-chip devices to which the games have been ported (though I haven't managed to come by any of the ROMs and have never taken mine apart to look into dumping it.) I think the only one with a 2600-on-a-chip setup is the Flashback 2, which has been modded but isn't all built into the joystick.

Free distribution of my code has never eroded my motivation to create, and several other developers have said the same thing. Neither has the sight of my code on an amateurish repro cart with a disembodied retard face wagging its tongue on it, knowing some other guy got paid to make it and I never got a cut. Those coming in here with a profit motive can deal with it or find some more lucrative venue in which to practice their art. You keep saying that what you're describing is not DRM, but that is exactly the form of DRM used by Liquid Audio, one of the early (failed) digital music stores. They watermarked each song with the buyer's personal identification and their player refused to play it if it had been tampered with. They patented that technique, and after the company failed, Microsoft bought their DRM patents and used them in their (also failed) "PlaysForSure" music format. It's actually kind of funny -- DRM was introduced as a euphemism for copy protection when copy protection got a bad reputation, and now that we've had DRM for a decade and a half, those promoting restrictions on the things we buy are starting to back away from that term as well. While I have no interest in posting ROM packs or duplicating cartridges, the introduction of DRM of any kind would turn me and any number of other technically oriented people into crackers, just so that we could demonstrate why DRM is a waste of time no matter what you call it. Disembodied-head-guy has already profited from my code, so I wouldn't really care if he benefited from my codebreaking. We already have a widely accepted form of digital distribution. There's an "Attach This File" button about 2 inches below where I'm typing this. Check it out. You're acting as though no one's distributing their homebrew code online because there's no DRM or encryption or whatever you want to call it, but people have been, for well over a decade now. And they'll continue no matter what the results of this thread are. The new idea you're coming up with isn't a way to allow authors to distribute their code. It's a way to allow authors to distribute their code *less*. What you're saying is that your code is special, that you're entitled to special treatment because of your unwillingness to share. And you're welcome to believe that, but don't expect pats on the back for it. Whether or not you think you're talking about DRM, you are, as described above. You thinking that videos and reviews "should" be enough for the community is no more valid or invalid than me thinking people who are in this for the money "should" just stick with the iPhone. Hozer's probably still selling my stuff, but posting the binaries still doesn't seem counterproductive to me, nor the hundreds of other homebrew authors who have released binaries in the last 15 years. If you put the protection you're describing on your works, it just guarantees I won't buy a cartridge of them, and the only way I will ever play them is after cracking them. And if it really wouldn't be DRM, I'm pretty sure it also wouldn't be a DMCA violation for me to post any automated tool I would create to do so. I really think that someone could do Super Mario Galaxy 2600 and it still wouldn't be worth it if it created a paranoid, possessive DRM culture among homebrew coders. And I'm pretty certain that's exactly what it would do. I got out of hacking and homebrew not because people weren't buying cartridges of my stuff -- they were, for years after I stopped -- but because some guy (a guy who's still active in the retro gaming community, though not on AtariAge) threatened me with a lawsuit because he'd allegedly bought the rights to Atari console versions of Pac-Man. He later confessed that it was a scam; he intended to strong-arm me into letting him feature my hack on his site for some kind of promotion -- it actually never occurred to him to just ask, or even read the disclaimer on my page. But homebrew stopped being fun for me because of that influx of greed. Regardless of what I do or whether my skills are up to defeating a given DRM scheme, you might consider that for every theoretical profit-minded genius DRM will entice to share with us their bounty of code, another coder may get alienated and cynical when confronted by a change from a sharing-oriented culture -- and that is what we have now, a sharing-oriented culture -- to a business-oriented one, and stop coding just as I did. And if the next David Crane is out there just waiting for a viable DRM solution before unleashing his genius, I'd love to see some proof of that, but I'm thinking it's mostly mockup makers and BASIC coders. Err.... not that there's anything wrong with that. Most people in the homebrew scene aren't as serious about this as I am, but most people in the homebrew scene haven't had opportunistic douchebags threaten to sue them.

OK, I'm coming at this from a 2600 perspective because my experience with homebrew on the other platforms is pretty minimal (except for having a couple Vectrex multicarts). What batari said is pretty much accurate: the only way to really "protect" your game is to put some wacky kind of bankswitching in it (or some feature that wasn't available during the 2600's run, like a coprocessor that does more substantial stuff than the DPC) but that'll just put a big target on it, kill most of the word-of-mouth your game would ever have had, and vastly increase your unit cost for physical cartridges. My hacks and demos were out there long before carts were made of them. Less scrupulous cart duplicators charged people a lot of money for them, put their own crappy labels on them and then never gave me anything. People still bought "real" carts when Albert put them in the store. Never made much at it, but I never expected to, and I got to support other, more skilled homebrew authors whose work I loved. I had all of those games in ROM form before getting cartridges; unlike, say, a Wii game that might take 70 hours to play, I can't imagine buying an Atari game before playing it pretty thoroughly. I had all the Ebivision games in ROM form before you could even buy them (in fact, I never did... I see someone's selling them now, but when I left the scene, no one was). "DRM" is dumb enough when we're talking about 5-9GB of data. It's completely ridiculous when you're talking 4-16K of data. If someone did try to copy-protect one of their games, I'd be first in line to get a copy just so I could spend some quality time cracking it. I'd be writing a crappy Visual Basic serial number generator (do they still do that? I would have to find a Windows machine, I guess...) and putting Z's on the endz of allz my wordz. It would be such an insult to my intelligence that I wouldn't be able to contain myself. In short, I think anyone doing homebrew for any other reason than because he enjoys it should pretty much just suck it up. If you want cashflow, Facebook and the iPhone are eagerly awaiting your arrival. If you love coding, here we are. Respect us and we'll adore you, and some of us will pay you. Treat us like criminals or morons, and you'll get... less.

I thought we'd gotten to that point years ago, myself. Unauthorized ports are essentially the video game equivalent of cover songs. No one cares what you release unless you make a commercial product out of it. AtariAge and businesses like it provide the service of allowing us to pretend our ports were contemporary to the consoles to which we ported them, by providing cart burning, labels and boxes. I don't see them as selling the code itself unless it's not available except through buying a cartridge. I don't get email alerts for the Colecovision forum and no one's provided a link to that discussion, so I don't know which games people are talking about. But there are a number of ports for various systems that were released on cartridges but not as ROMs, and I still have the ROMs. Except for the 2600 and Vectrex, I no longer have the means to play any 8-bit games except with the rom-and-emulator method anyway. I would go to Usenet or any of a hundred torrent sites looking for that kind of thing, not buy someone's ROM pack. And of course there are leeches out there in the form of less scrupulous cartridge duplication companies. Without the loving attention to detail provided by AtariAge, or a cut to the author, or at least fulfillment of the author's license terms, and with low quality printing, and the addition of things like logos implying the guy who burned the cartridge also made the game, and (in the old days) ad copy claiming to be the exclusive source for various games also sold elsewhere, some cartridge burning companies are a blight, not a benefit. I still used one to get a vanity cart of one of my hacks before AtariAge got into the cartridge business, but the experience left a bad taste in my mouth.

These already make me question the use of the word "ultimate", as "ultimate" means "no need for any further iterations" and any ROM pack I use will have easy-to-read titles and multiple sets sorted by name, year of release, publisher, category, etc., but.... ...this means the set won't even be complete, since no Atari collection can be complete without Oystron, Thrust, Space Instigators and all the other homebrew games that have pushed the limits of what's possible on the 2600, not to mention some of the more substantial hacks like Nukey's Pac-Man variations. So I guess I'll hold out for the "ultimate ultimate Harmony ROM pack".

Yeah, this is looking better than a lot of platform games I played on the C64, and gives me hope that a Jumpman clone (even with different screens/bomb layouts) will be possible someday. I could certainly see myself buying a cartridge of this.

It probably wouldn't be too hard to patch Stella to print a dump of the TIA sound registers' values once per frame, redirect that to a file and write something to extract changed values and frame counts into some standardized format. That would take care of any game that doesn't hit the sound registers more than once per frame, basically everything that doesn't do digitized sound. Or someone could add the option to log the debug console to a file and variables for current frame and scanline number, and just do it with some trap functions in the debugger. This should support pretty much every game that uses the TIA for sound. Not volunteering as of yet, just throwing out some options. The output file could be MIDI, but that would be a pain because you'd have to have a virtual instrument that maps MIDI events back to TIA register changes (and handles microtuning), and that would be a pain. You could use the XML-based formats of free sequencers like Rosegarden or LMMS, but again, you need that virtual instrument. So the easiest way to make a .TIA file format would be to make it a valid 2600 ROM that does nothing but hit the audio registers and NOP loop till it's time to hit them again. I guess you'd have to bankswitch if it got to be over 4k. Means the people writing the equivalent of SIDplay plugins would have to emulate at least a 6502 and TIA with no video plus bankswitching, but I gather that's the kind of thing some of them are doing already to handle other old chiptune formats. Such an emulator would also be capable of playing back any BIN files that didn't require user input to play their music. Or just a "timestamp AUDF0 AUDC0 AUDV0 AUDF1 AUDC1 AUDV1" format would be fine too, so they could get away with emulating just the TIA. Lots of ways to do this.

I would play my Virtual Boy for hours, and I never, ever had any sort of headaches. That's cool, but lots of people did. Just five minutes in a Blockbuster Video with a demo unit told me buying one would be a waste for me.

I'm putting my hope in the homebrew community having its gentle but firm way with the 3DS shortly after its release, and a no-glasses Virtual Boy emulator soon after that. Not that an anaglyphic Virtual Boy emulator running on a plain old PC would be much more headache-inducing than the Virtual Boy itself.

Just set a pointer to some random chunk of code within your ROM, read 4 bytes, write them to PF0/1/2 and COLUMPF. Repeat for however many lines you want to cover (probably about 32). See whether it looks cooler reflected or repeated. Apart from using all of the playfield instead of just a little chunk, I thought that was how HSW did it in Yar's Revenge anyway.

For what it's worth, I never referred to my Space Invaders hack as anything but "my Space Invaders hack" until long after its last release. The last version I released, which I think is what Al used for the cartridges, was just called "spchack3". I told him I didn't mind him changing the names of that and "A Better Pac-Man", but the name changes didn't occur during development. (But in the case of Pac-Man, the name did change -- there were some early versions I referred to as "PacFTM".)

Anyone know if these NOAC units have ever been dumped? It'd be fun to play these "Atari" games with a NES pad and pretend they were inferior NES ports, in the way that Coleco made inferior Atari ports of its games.

Already pretty impressive. Looking forward to trying the final version!

They're right, it clearly needs a new name. I'm thinking "Panky Panda and the Attack of the Humorless Twats". I eagerly await the E-rated hack, "Panky Panda and the Quest for the Un-dunked Teabag". This is one of the coolest homebrews I've seen in a long time. You should be proud to call it whatever you'd like to call it.

Moon Cresta is an excellent sugestion. Esp. If the music was spot on. That would be my hope. I started thinking about it again when I bought a "Galaxy II" on ebay -- most people think it's a Galaxian clone, but it's actually a Moon Cresta clone, docking sequence and all -- and noticed the music wasn't as right-on as I remember it. Of course it's the 2600, but it turned out to be able to handle the Pac-Man music which is more complex than the Moon Cresta music, so it should be fine.

Are the ROMs out there, then? I've never found anything about this project except a page promoting it with a video and some screenshots. I was curious about his techniques as well.