raindog

Wow, that actually looks kind of awesome, especially for larger C64/NES projects. While I've used graphical tools like Hack-o-matic (which I threw together in tcl one evening 11 years ago; these days I would have found a way to make it a web app) to make it easier to look for player data in ROM files I wanted to hack, this is really the first IDE for assembly language projects that's caught my attention. I already have Eclipse installed anyway, so... might as well give it a go

Arcane is in the eye of the beholder. vi was a huge step up from ed when I started using it in 1985 or so; emacs' non-modal editing seemed even easier to use when I discovered it in '88, and nothing has surpassed it for me since then. But the business world needed to make programming more accessible in order to make labor cheaper, so we got graphical IDEs that you can't really run on a remote server. Nonetheless, I cut my teeth professionally on Turbo Pascal, Borland C++, Access, VB, Visual Studio, Gambas, and most recently Eclipse. They're all nice for managing projects and (except for TP) drawing user interfaces, and integrated debugging of graphical programs is nice. But none of them has the ease of use for actual coding that emacs does for me after two and a half decades. And as "programming" for most people has evolved to become writing short little pieces of code to connect pre-made components that other people wrote for us, sure, the integrated tools have become more convenient to use. But homebrew video game coding, at least for the first 3 or 4 generations of consoles, is about talking to the bare iron, usually in only one or two source code files. And most of my professional work is web-based, meaning that I write code on a remote server and then debug in my browser using Firebug or the Chrome debugger, with lots of logging and more complex debugging tools for the server side stuff. I've brought up the print dialog in my browser like 5 times while making this post because to me, control-P is always going to mean "previous line". It happens probably 20 times a day, because, even though emacs got arrow key support something like 20 years ago, I still press control-P to move up a line hundreds of times a day.

Hexedit for ROM hacking, emacs and dasm for coding (at least, back when my laptop was 32-bit; never have gotten it to compile for 64-bit), stella for testing and debugging. (Back when I was actually releasing stuff publicly, I was using PCAE to debug because stella's debugger wasn't there yet and I was still on DOS for all but my last couple of demos on the [stella] list. I've actually never run any native 32- or 64-bit version of Windows on my own machines, nor owned any Apple products at all.) Command-line only, no xemacs or graphical emacs windows. I'd do Android coding in emacs too if I had the time to figure out how to get an eclipse-free build environment going. 26 years is a lot of built-up habit to break when there's no real need to do so. However, since I use bash with all the command-specific completion and interactive history editing stuff and a virtual terminal with lots of tabs (currently 8, though I don't have any coding projects open today since it's a bourbon, lasagna and Ratchet and Clank day), I can't claim to be '80s retro, more like mid-to-late '90s. I guess I could dig my old C64 out of the garage and play "video game developer circa 1984" again. I certainly was comfortable enough with its assembler back in the day, though having to print out all the 65xx and Atari-specific documentation would be a huge waste. Given that I'm happier playing the games in Stella on my 46" LCD than digging a possibly-working CRT and my old 4-switch out of the garage, though, I guess the retro-ness of anything but the games themselves doesn't carry a lot of weight for me. I'm not coding on an Apple II or mainframe, so there's no pretending I'm doing this stuff in 1982.

Anyone got a Makerbot?

That's how the 65xx series of CPUs works too (on the Atari 2600, C64, NES etc.) Those 256-byte chunks are called "pages" and are due to the 8-bit register size. On the 65xx it's beq and bne (branch if equal to 0/branch if not equal to 0) instead of jz and jnz (jump if zero/jump if not zero), but either way, the branching operations only work on the same page because (even if the assembler you're using hides it from you) the address you're giving the instruction is only 8 bits wide, while jmp can take a 16-bit address for access to basically all of RAM (it gets more complicated when you use bank-switching schemes, but that's basically how it works). I think it's just the nature of coding against bare metal. Modern CPUs have the same instructions (x86 assemblers call them jz/jnz and ARM and MIPS ones have bne/beq if I remember right) but since the CPUs are dealing with more than 8 bits at a time, there are versions of those opcodes that let you jump further away. Most modern coders never even see them, since they're writing in compiled languages, not assembly language. (Edit: But even now, assembly language programmers have to be careful of how they branch, and the tricks they use are still the same as what you have to do, as illustrated here: http://faydoc.tripod.com/cpu/jnz.htm toward the bottom, the bit with JNZ BEYOND)

As long as not too many Mountain Kings are sacrificed to this cause, I could get behind it

Well, that's how many it's designed to handle, but in at least one game it approaches 30. I've disassembled it but I'm not familiar enough with o2 programming to even begin to figure out what they did. I assume it's similar to what people did on the C64, disabling the built-in kernel routines and writing their own to trick the VDC into thinking a new frame has started on each line and draw more stuff, racing the beam Atari-style. But I can't even get dasm or o2em to build on my new laptop, so I can't really experiment.

I just got my digital subscription link. When I log into Subscription Genius with it, it says I have 5 issues left and there's a button to "renew". There is no visible option to access the current issue (they don't even have the cover yet) and your last update makes it sound like we won't get it till January. At my pledge level I should be getting 6 issues. What's going on? I'm asking this here because the most recent post in the KS comments section is a question that hasn't been answered after 9 days, at least publicly, and I know firsthand that Atariage thread notifications work.

Ah. I don't know why I keep thinking the ARM's clocked at 20MHz. Must be a leftover from my C64 days when a 20MHz upgrade was the holy grail.

I have a modded 2600 and it already doesn't work on our current TV. I literally just said I went back to Stella and I'm happy with it. Cartridges are strictly things to collect for me, much as CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays are strictly for ripping and sticking on our Plex server before being put in a growing pile of plastic office totes for the rest of eternity. That said, like all but the cheapest current TVs, our TV has a "Game Mode" that's close to zero latency, which I was glad to discover the first night I played Rocksmith. I don't use the various "enhancement modes" that come with 120Hz, having chosen that feature strictly to be able to watch both 24 and 30/60Hz content natively. Kinda funny that you called out someone else for making an echo post when your own post #1011 had been stated by about 5 people before you (and is inaccurate to boot).

The original DPC came out in 1984 as part of Pitfall II. The DPC+ is an improvement over that, but I think it's still comparable to the Super FX chip introduced in SNES cartridges starting the year after the 2600 was discontinued. And don't forget that you could hook a Core i7 up to your 2600 and you'd still only ever have two players, two missiles, a ball and a playfield. It's vintage-ish.

You guys are saying that as though I would ever use a CRT again without a gun pointed at my head. As I've posted elsewhere,

I guess they could market it as the "Atari Flashback SuperSystem". That seemed to work really well in 1982.

Pretty sure it's still possible to get a copy of PR on cartridge. Just not on AtariAge. I wouldn't even ask here, to be honest. Personally, I'd be happy playing it on Harmony, if I still had a TV that worked with a 2600.

Yeah, I'm kind of surprised to not already have a PDF now that it's been sent to the printers. And the lack of communication about the method of digital delivery (the question's been asked but not answered on KS) gives me the sinking feeling that I may have inadvertently paid for something with DRM, or that requires me to log into some retarded website in order to read it, or both. Originally, the plan was that "Kickstarter backers will receive their copy of the premiere issue in December". Deadlines get pushed back; it happens to all of us. But I'm hoping to at least get the digital version before the credit card dispute cutoff happens in 3 weeks (60 days after funding succeeded and I got charged). In most cases, the cutoff happens long before the estimated deliverable dates. In this case, the schedule was aggressive enough that I still have that option, though I'm sure it would reflect negatively upon my Kickstarter account if I did.

If you don't think you need Atari's permission, I don't know why you think you'd need the permission of someone who made an impressive but technically infringing hack of Atari's code. I say that as someone who did a popular and rather involved hack and then never understood why people were asking my permission to distribute it when they obviously didn't care about what the actual copyright holder thought. Further, anyone who releases anything on the Atari (short of the use of unusual bankswitching or custom hardware) has to do so with the realization that there's a guy in the Massachusetts boondocks who is going to sell carts for people without consulting or compensating the games' creators. That said, looks like KevinMos3 did the hack, and many other interesting ones too. http://atariage.com/forums/topic/154984-hack-project-thread-galaxian-arcade-double-dragon-xenophobe-etc/

Nukey's working on it: This is an impressive hack; this thread is worth reading from the beginning.

The Ouya's controller sucks (despite its touchpad being a nice idea) and many of the emulators available for it, unless you figure out how to sideload regular Android apps, cost money even though the straight Android versions are free. It's notoriously brickable as well, due to its lack of a proper recovery mode, making it a lousy device to hack despite its hype. I'd definitely choose either a Raspberry Pi or one of the better-supported generic Android sticks over that. I still have hope for its next iteration, though.

That would actually be a far better option than my Android sticks, even though its hardware is weaker. The Pi has a huge community around it that no Android TV device does. Also, Linux emulators generally perform better than Android ones, and there aren't many good Android front-ends. (Yes, Android uses a Linux kernel, but doesn't run Linux apps natively due to all the missing GNU stuff. On the other hand, I don't think the Pi will be playing any N64 games, but most of us here probably don't care about that.) And while Android sticks all look kind of like the old RF switch box we all know and love, with the Pi you can get cases like this: http://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pibow-raspberry-pi-case or more seriously, http://www.fuze.co.uk/product/the-fuze-for-raspberry-pi-everything-but-the-pi/ or maybe most appealing to 2600 fans, http://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pibow-timber I got ours in a hurry when one of our laptops died suddenly and we needed a cheap, quick way to browse the web and edit documents, or I probably would have gone for the Pi myself. Wish Chameleon supported other devices -- there's an Android ROM called Chameleon, but it's unrelated, and making things like accelerated video work on cheap Chinese kit is often a lost cause. If you do go the Android route, installing emulators is a little easier than it is on a desktop computer, and XBMC makes an okay "big picture" style launcher that also plays music and video. I'd also recommend getting your emulators from the F-droid app store, because everything in it is free and open source. There are a lot of opportunists on Google Play, both the kind who want your money (which is fine, I've bought 60 or 70 commercial games myself, though many are better on a tablet than a TV) and the kind who want to spy on you or worse. I know, this is getting pretty tangential, but to me, unless you're getting something like the FB2, you're essentially using emulators anyway so you might as well get something that can do more. (Says the guy with a 6-foot-shelf full of plug-n-plays.)

Why not just spend 40 bucks on an Android stick, then? They're ARM-based too, and there are a couple different Stella ports which are probably more faithful than whatever Atgames came up with (unless they're using Stella and violating the GPL). Any of them have enough flash to put every Atari game, homebrew, demo and WIP on them, many times over, though I guess you'd need a Stelladaptor to use real controllers with them. As a bonus, you can also play almost every NES, SNES, PS1, N64, C64 and arcade game ever made too, plus the subset of Android games that have mappable controls. Yes, they're HDMI and not composite, but then, a real VCS only has an antenna output (and you can get a used one cheaper than any of these licensed ones, and it has a cartridge slot and all the terrible image quality a nostalgic purist can ever crave). To be honest, owning two VCSes and two Android sticks and an array of control options, the only things about the Atgames Flashback units that intrigue me are the games that are significantly different on them or don't exist outside of them -- I could easily imagine that portrait mode Space Invaders screenshot being representative of what's on the device, which would destroy the nostalgia value for those of us who grew up with the 2600 but might be an interesting variation nonetheless. But I'm not interested enough to spend 70 bucks on it, especially when I already have the FB2 for stuff like Return to Haunted House.

Oh yeah, I forgot about the terrible first one. I was thinking of the 2 and 2+.

That'd be a trick, given that apart from the first two Flashbacks, none of these has even had VCS chipsets in them. And then there's the licensing.

An EPROM is an erasable, programmable ROM chip. Usually you erase it with UV light and there are EPROM programmers you use to burn a new ROM image onto them. As nanochess said, they're not compatible with mass-market Atari cartridges which used non-erasable, mass-produced regular (mask) ROMs. But I'm afraid, if you didn't already know what an EPROM is, that you might be in over your head if you're trying to get this done by xmas. You might be able to get a game up and running with Batari BASIC by then, or you might be able to learn how to burn ROMs by then, but if you have any kind of job and/or life, both of them together might be too much to pull off in 3 and a half weeks.

That is pretty funny. Still, I hope there are still some around when I get paid next (and hope I can find something else to justify renewing my Sam's membership, because unless it's FB2-style real hardware, the FB4 isn't worth $100 to me).

I seem to remember an interview years ago with Skelly where he spelled it out, but while searching around yesterday I couldn't find it, and saw claims on different pages that it was from January, February or June 1980. I don't think OUI was quite the cultural touchstone Playboy was (though one issue description I found mentioned discussions of George Carlin and bar fight etiquette, so now I'm curious), so you're not just gonna find a torrent or newsgroup with all the old issues meticulously scanned from front to back -- and based on the kinds of vintage pr0n I do like, it'll be tough finding accurately-labeled scans of them at all.