raindog

That does look lovely, and seems like it would be a nice approach to take. (I'd never seen it till now.) I suppose the usual bB blank scanlines are another thing that would help visually distinguish it from actual Zelda games if the OP is using that, though (as in Surround back in the day) I find them extremely distracting. Anyway, I think the OP's statement of intent to make "a demake of The Legend of Zelda" could put it in the same category as PR, since pretty much anything released after 1980 ported to the VCS is automatically a demake. But you're right, no one said anything about making carts. On the other hand, I was never under the impression sprybug was a profiteer either; it was just inevitable once it started getting good that people would start bugging him for a cart. If piders7 succeeds in making something merely as big as Atari Adventure with a Zelda-esque feel, the same thing will happen. Maybe he could call it "2D Dot Game Heroes"

Calling the Mario clone "Princess Rescue" didn't seem to help much. But that is an epic name. If he makes fun of the original a bit, he should be okay -- I noticed Nintendo didn't rattle their sabers over 3D Dot Game Heroes, which was a pretty shameless (albeit voxel-based, and lovely) ripoff/parody.

I think the chubby version is a little better, but you might want to consider doing it multicolor the way Coleco did with Donkey Kong, changing color per scanline: http://mysocalledcloud.com/aa-post-20140810/link-8x8-demake-bad-aspect-ratio.png But the 2600 doesn't have square pixels, so when you play it on TV, it's going to look like this: http://mysocalledcloud.com/aa-post-20140810/link-8x8-demake-aspect-ratio-corrected.png So if you can spare a few extra pixels vertically, you might want to try 8x10 instead of 8x8: http://mysocalledcloud.com/aa-post-20140810/link-8x10-demake-aspect-ratio-corrected.png I'm no pixel artist, so I wouldn't claim that these are better than your monocolor 8x8 designs. But looking at this now, it seems to me you may even want to go up to 8x12 pixels per tile. (The preview shows my images for a moment and then they disappear. I'm not sure if it's the editor hating me again or just Firefox acting up, so I apologize if you can't see those. I'll repost raw URLs if they don't work.)

Never saw this till now -- thanks!

Given that what you'd like to write is the kind of game that was the NES' bread and butter toward the end of its run, it'd be far easier to do on the 7800, whose capabilities at least approach the NES (though you'd probably want a POKEY chip to do better music). On the other hand, games like Pitfall 2, Panky, Princess Rescue and Zippy the Porcupine demonstrate that what you want to do is at very least possible on the 2600, even in Batari BASIC in the last two cases, and you'd have a much larger audience, as well as greater respect for doing something that's trickier. Having played and loved games like Dust: An Elysian Tail and Knytt Underground in the last year, I'd love to see a combination of your two concepts: a scrolling or vast multi-room 2D RPG with Metroidvania exploration and new capabilities throughout the game that allow you to backtrack and explore further. The Harmony Cart would let you make an enormous game on the 2600, at the expense of some of your audience (though at this point, I think most people try new 2600 games on Stella, since there are only a few hundred of us with Harmony Carts). Doesn't matter how saturated the market is... if you create a huge RPG-platformer of the sort no one has completed to date, people will take interest, even if it may not get the kind of mainstream press that the first half dozen or so Flappy Bird clones got. Once you get the core mechanics and interactions written, you can just keep adding on rooms until you run out of space (however much space you decide to use). But you may want to start a bit smaller for your first project. "Man Running And Jumping Across One Screen" is probably where to start since both your ideas have that in common. Then "Man Jumping, Running and Using a Weapon", then "Man Running, Jumping Over And/Or Destroying One Enemy", etc. Do the nitty gritty coding stuff first and save the fun map design stuff for when the code is pretty solid and most novice programmers would be just about giving up because they did all the fun stuff first and then ran into limitations they weren't expecting.

Not particularly interested in doing it myself, but sure, it should take all of an evening to write something that (given an existing "marry me" or "happy birthday" binary with a predefined song and graphics data stored in a documented location) will jam the user's desired, possibly scrolling text in and crap out a custom ROM image to burn into a cart. I could even do it with my Boing demo that plays a weird polyphonic "Jingle Bells" and says "Happy Xmas! From Rob Kudla" when you hold down Start, since it's just a 48x40 bitmap. Maybe I will, as proof of concept, since I wouldn't need to try to compile dasm to do that.

Yup. The open atmosphere we had on the [stella] list is well and truly dead.

I brought these up in tabs but forgot to copy-paste till now. Some inspiration, perhaps, for people who might like to take a stab at the "X-on-a-stick" Raspberry Pi/3D-printed case idea. http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:195529 tiny Atari 400 case (too small for RPi, but love the idea of having a tiny USB membrane keyboard integrated into a "Flashback" type of machine) http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:321624 The whole package, an RPi portable with its own screen (different than a PnP but clearly it's possible). I'm sure the ultimate "bunch of emulators and homebrew on a stick" device will show up on Kickstarter soon, if it hasn't already. Edit: OMG, AtariAge, your rich text editor sucks so hard. That is supposed to be five links, and instead I got two links with a bunch of my text jammed into them. Here they are again, minus descriptions: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:195529 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:158331 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:30129 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:30008 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:321624

Anyone who wants an Atari 800 (or even 5200) on a stick has the pieces available already. A Raspberry Pi (or one of the faster clones), a joystick and a casemod await. The "X-on-a-stick" devices are mostly of interest to collectors here, since we all have better emulations (if not the original equipment) readily available to us. So it's easy to think of the target market as being collectors, but it's not. It's people with vague nostalgic feelings about the emulated/recreated systems, who aren't exacting about every detail being perfect. These are mass-market products. They're sold at Target and TRU, not AtariAge. They are not going to be made unless they're going to sell tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands -- more, at any rate, than the entire population of this site. I'm actually surprised that no one has 3D-printed (or even had mass-produced) a modified Atari 2600 joystick case to fit the Pi. I bet it would sell larger quantities than most homebrew projects, simply because the overlap between the maker community and the "nostalgic for the '80s" community is quite high.

You might as well hope for an Odyssey2 Flashback since even that outsold the Atari 5200. But I could totally see an "Atari Flashback XL" with 400/800/5200 games (modified for digital control in the case of 5200 games, or the lack of a keyboard on 8-bit computer games) on it.

Can't believe I haven't seen this till now. AtariAge's new post notifications apparently don't always work. Added to my Amazon cart (at $40, sadly... haven't been in a TRU since my nieces left the Barbie age range.) Thanks for the post, despite the snark of others.

Off-topic, I realize, but thanks for turning me on to Mediacrush. Youtube has been getting very, very irritating over the last year or two and it's nice to see an open-source competitor that's not designed to promote a failed social network.

I'm pretty sure some of the CPU lines are exposed through the cartridge port pins, but I don't know if they're enough to allow that sort of add-on without modifying the Vectrex. That would be the big question. If not, though, something like DPC+ could still be done where there's a faster CPU on the cartridge and it does the heavy lifting just-in-time, generating code or data for the Vectrex CPU to access as though it were on a regular ROM chip. That's just a question of the size of the Vectrex enthusiast scene and how many hardware gurus are part of it. I'd love to buy a VecHarmony, for example. I always thought the horizontal (U-shaped) lines were just scaled up and down, and shifted to one side or the other to simulate perspective which could actually be done using a table, while the lines emanating from the vanishing point were just drawn from the vertices on the furthest away visible U to the closest one. Figuring out the path of each of your shots was probably harder than that. But I haven't disassembled the game, or even played it in years, so my memory might be off. At any rate, that mostly-fixed perspective with static "sprites" for the enemies seems a lot simpler than having free movement in any direction and full 3D enemies and objects, as you'd need for Battlezone. You could probably take some shortcuts since everything but the initial approach of the missiles happens on approximately the same plane, as in Wolfenstein 3D, or alternatively, make a bunch of pre-rendered but scalable "sprites" for views of each object from the 4 or 8 cardinal directions as in Robot Tank and Battlezone on the 2600, or Ballblazer on pretty much anything. I do think the existence of Web Wars makes at least a slightly ghetto-fied Star Wars demake possible, even without the DSP Atari apparently used in that arcade game. It just wouldn't fit in 8K.

Well, the forum really buggered that post up, and editing it only gives me up to the colon before the link, with the rest of my post erased. Can't even view source to get what's hidden behind the "..." above. Can a moderator or DBA fix the raw text so that the space after the link and everything else up to "boring" is not considered part of the link? I've never liked rich text editors, but this is an especially egregious one.

I would think that some of the stuff Thomas has done on the unmodified 2600 (like this: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/155657-elite-3d-graphics/ ) would be helpful here, since the 6809 is a more capable CPU running at a higher clock speed. (Didn't someone make a Tail Gunner clone for the Vectrex too? The enemy ships were definitely 3D objects in that one when you missed them and they passed your ship.) But the only way I'd be interested in working on it myself would be to make a version of Battlezone where all the urban legends are in there, the "drive long enough and you get to the mountains" one, the "kill 10 UFOs without dying to get a boss battle" one, etc. I found the actual combat to be simultaneously difficult and boring. I could get behind Star Wars a little easier, and I think it would also be easier to cheat on since most of the objects that change perspective aren't detailed enough to need 3D calculations. But you'd really need to use the 3D imager to get those colors, and mine was lost in the depths of my parents' house in the 25 years between when I moved out and my stepdad sold it and gave me all my old videogame stuff back.

Just pretend it's like the Wave Motion Gun in Space Battleship Yamato/Star Blazers, where it drains the ship's power while it's firing. But seriously, glad to have discovered the Defender Arcade hack. I'm sure I already had it as part of one ROM pack or another, but I don't think I've ever played it. I do love it when someone else takes the sequel to a game and makes a better version of the original out of it

I think this one is a lot prettier (I assume it's assembly and not bB, so it's possible to do much more fun stuff in the kernel), but I have no idea if it would still work with Sonic and enemies in play. It's also a lot more likely to be C&Ded if it's completed and offered for sale, name change or not. But I love the look of it. Nice demo of what's possible on the 2600.

Richard seems to have made vectrex.biz a frame that displays this site: http://www.aptd07.dsl.pipex.com/ which is what's returning the 403. I'm guessing he moved ISPs or something and forgot to fix the frame reference.

Personally, the hum is just part of the experience to me. Maybe mine just doesn't produce as much as some other units, I don't know, but it just sounds like early '80s "portable" technology to me (I've had the same Vectrex since xmas '82, though it was supposedly my brother's until he left it behind for college). If anything, MESS and other emulators are missing that option as far as I'm concerned, though it would be easy enough to sample and play in a loop in the background.

I or one of my brothers had one of these. I loved that it was blatantly just a calculator case, right down to the buttons. Somehow (probably because we were a blended family) we had both this and Pocket Simon, and I think I still have Pocket Simon in my garage somewhere, but have no idea where this ended up. It sat with no battery in the same junk drawer in our kitchen for at least 20 years.

I know that, you know that, and onmode-ky knows that. The other million or so people in the world who even know these things exist think that they're made by Mattel or some company called Intellivision. Not disagreeing with you, just explaining why no matter how many times the few of us who can tell the difference between TechnoSource and AtGames try to explain why this time it's different, we're still going to get "Cool, I had no idea Intellivision was still in business! Does it have a cartridge slot? Can I use the controllers on my Timex-Sinclair 1000? Does it come with all the Tron games, or just all of them?"

It would be a head-scratcher, yet the Intellivision 10 and Intellivision 25 were NOACs with Intellivision games (rather poorly) reimplemented as NES games. I think that's why this assumption keeps coming up. People are confusing the NOAC nature of the older INTV PnPs with the "emulator on custom ARM" nature of the forthcoming AtGames one. The Blue Sky Rangers' own site is not helping matters: So, right from the horse's mouth we have two conflicting explanations, one of which is a misconception from a review that they didn't bother to correct when copy-pasting it to their site. And when you go looking for an Intellivision plug and play, at least until the Amazon search results for the AtGames one start appearing higher in search results than intellivisionlives.com, that's the page you wind up on. But what both explanations have in common is the NOAC that people keep bringing up.

Why are people still subtle about pointing out April Fool jokes when April 1 was 49 days ago? This thread could have been 2 posts long.

I don't know that there ever really was a "dev kit" for the 2600. Remember that Atari never wanted third-party games to be made for the VCS, going so far as to sue Activision over it. If Crane had a dev kit for Pitfall, it was something Activision came up with on their own. I vaguely remember something about a minicomputer being used for assembly at Atari, I want to say a PDP-11, and then, yeah, burn an EPROM and probably a bunch of oscilloscopes for debugging. I think Activision used an Apple II assembler, don't know if they had a fake cartridge that plugged into the VCS to avoid the EPROM burning cycle.

I'll save Bill the trouble of replying for the hundredth time that this is not an Intellivision-on-a-chip product, it's custom hardware running emulation. I'd love to see an SD card version when revision 2 comes around (I have my Intellivision Lives and Intellivision Rocks CDs around somewhere for a full non-licensed collection, and there are a number of homebrew and other games that could never be included in a legitimate product and it'd be nice to play them on a modern TV with real controllers) but a cartridge slot would really be prohibitive, since you'd actually need extra hardware to dump the cart to a ROM image that the emulator could then execute. But the point of plug and plays isn't to provide the few thousand hardcore retro fanatics with updated hardware, it's to give tens of thousands of mildly nostalgic gen-Xers a way to revisit their childhood interests without a lot of effort or investment. We are not the target market, though those of us who aren't purists are a subset of that market.