raindog

Hmmm, I wonder how I introduced that extra scanline! Serves me right for hand-assembling my code and entering it with a hex editor I can't promise I'll ever get to fix that bug (since I don't even think there exists a 2600 debugger for Linux and I don't have Windows anymore) and in fact I don't think I can even verify it, but I'm surprised it took anyone this long to find it. Rob

I did a little bit of quasi-retro buying for my niece (Super Mario DX for GBC and Sonic Advance) but being the lone video game nerd in my family guarantees I never get any videogame-related presents But what I did get (from my partner) was a computer upgrade (which didn't arrive before we left to visit the folks, but I'll pick it up on monday) and the big surprise, one of those GPS'es with the "You Are Here" map display. I'm also the gadget freak in the family so this was very impressive to me Of course I also have a new wardrobe Rob

Okay, first off, change "supposedly existing" to "supposedly available" if it makes you feel less angry at my insinuation. The tone of the people who thought he shouldn't do it was very much "don't bother making one, I already have all these joysticks available to me." Well, I haven't even got a set of paddles yet for my 2600 (put an order in at 4jays for a whole array of 2600 controllers but haven't gotten so much as a return email yet, probably due to the holidays.) Second, I am not in the least a collector, I'm a hacker and player. I don't expect to be able to walk into K-mart and buy anything Atari-related.... but if I can't at least order it online and expect to see it within a few weeks, for my purposes, it really doesn't exist. Finally, most of the controllers cited as being "arcade joysticks" are plainly not arcade joysticks from the photographs, so I may have been alluding to that at the time, as well. I would much rather use a plain old Atari joystick than a falsely advertised "arcade joystick" made out of substandard or too-small parts. I don't have patience with collecting (or collectors, really, for that matter) but I do have a bit of disposable income, so bring it on already! Good luck with your parts situation, IceCold. Rob

Well, on my Celeron 400 it takes about 20 seconds to load a 4K ROM, so you may have just needed to wait a little longer. Just tested it on a Duron 800 and sure enough it was about half that time. Loading speed is something I'll need to address later (probably with a rewrite, because it's just slow drawing 32,768 squares in an interpreted language no matter how you slice it ) Rob

Oops, my bad, the Windows directory is all better now. Mac users should be able to run the original .tcl script (from the zip file in the "everything else" folder) using a Tcl interpreter. I have no idea which files you would need, but they are most likely among the ones listed at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.p...?group_id=10894 . As for making a standalone Mac binary, that may also be possible but I have no idea how. The tool I used to make these binaries (Freewrap) is Windows/Linux only, it seems. BTW, in case it wasn't obvious from my original post, Hack-O-Matic is primarily meant for and only been tested on Atari 2600 games. The screen shot depicts "K.C. Invaders" which I did while testing this thing and will not be distributing because there are too many Space Invaders sprite hacks out there already. Rob

Oh no, I forgot the obligatory screenshot!

Decided to post a little xmas present for the would-be sprite hackers out there. It's called Hack-O-Matic, and it's a very simple (and probably buggy) graphical bitwise file editor written in Tcl. Basically it lets you do the sort of things you'd normally use showgfx/editgfx for, only with a mouse. Like those tools, it'll probably work on images for any 8-bit system that used 8-pixel-wide 1-color graphics elements, like Odyssey2 and probably Atari 5200 and Colecovision. The Tcl interpreter runs on many platforms but I have also built Windows and Linux binary versions that are totally self-contained. (Haven't tested the Windows version though, no Windows box here.) It lives at http://www.kudla.org/hackomatic/ and is free software licensed under the GNU GPL. It remains to be seen which I'll regret more, posting this or giving my 8-year-old niece a karaoke machine. No rotten tomatoes please! Merry Xmas! Rob

Ah, OK. Don't know why I always thought of the black and white Gameboy as "a handheld Tetris that takes carts". As far as the GameGear goes, my pack-in was plain old Columns, but later Sega releases (once they dropped the price) included no pack-in and I think at some point in there it included Sonic. The Majesco rerelease of the Game Gear includes no pack-in (and is apparently incompatible with the Master Gear Converter or whatever it was called that let you play SMS games) so I'll hang onto my original as long as I can It's still the only handheld on which I can play Mappy (which I had to have imported by some random NYC shop back in the days before the web was even invented), and an awesome conversion of Mappy it is too, on par with the Super Game Boy conversion of Donkey Kong. Rob

I'm pretty sure the only way you could do sprite mixing using priority is through "chronocolor".... i.e., 30Hz flicker. Z26 wouldn't reproduce that effect in screenshots. Rob

Looking at the screenshots, it seems there are places where there are EIGHT color changes on the same scanline (nine, including back to the black background.) I don't think six would really be all that tough, though till I try coding it I wouldn't know: make both players a different color and the playfield is the third, mirror the playfield and have it be the outer cubes so you have time to change its color, and set up the two players to repeat once and you should have enough time to change their colors since you don't need to reposition them on each scanline. But those diagonal lines kinda shoot my theory down and point to self-modifying code which I wouldn't think you'd have time for without extra RAM in what appears to be a single-line kernel. Rob

The Astrocade was another one that didn't include a cartridge but had 3 built-in games. As far as I know, every system since the NES - SMS, Atari 7800, Game Gear, Genesis, Gameboy/GBC/GBA, Lynx, SNES, TG16, CD32, 3DO, CDi, Jag, Saturn, PSX/One/2, Game.com, N64, DC, Nuon and the current big 3 - has been available at one time or another in a stripped-down retail box with no pack-in cart or disc. (Although, didn't the Gameboy originally have Tetris built-in?) The INTV-branded Intellivision and Telegames-branded Colecovision clone may have been pack-in-less too. This includes the 2600jr - Lechmere was selling them in a little retail box for 10 bucks with no pack-ins when they were closing them out in the early 90's, with the remaining games at $1-2 per cart. Surprised Atari didn't make E.T. the pack-in the way they did with Pac-Man, since clearly they weren't concerned about giving new console owners a poor impression. Rob

I know it was their MTV sellout album, but I really like Electric Cafe as well Rob

I get free long distance with my cell phone (as do probably a lot of people nowadays) but it's not going to be me calling that poor guy. Rob

ah. Disappointing, but the guys there are nice and at least if it's a chain it stands a chance of being in the strip mall a little longer. Their "classic system" category on the web only goes back as far as the NES (and they'll even sell you a console) but they do sell that irritating replica of an Atari joystick with a bunch of badly hacked paddle games built in, and when the guys heard I like Atari the first thing they did was fire up a demo Activision collection disc on the PS2 and let me play Pitfall. So they're at least trying Rob

You mean follow it onscreen? I don't think I've ever seen a light gun game that did that. You might as well buy a $5 laser pointer and mount it on the light gun itself. If you meant "prevent the player from scoring big by aiming his gun at a lightbulb" like you could do with the first Odyssey game, that's trickier, but there's no reason you couldn't do the Nintendo thing of "blank the screen for one frame except a white square where the target is, sample the gun's input at the beginning of the frame and the end of the frame to make sure it's not seeing light, sample the gun while the white square is displayed and if it's seeing light, record a hit" on the 2600. You just have an alternate kernel for when the trigger's been depressed. Rob

One night last week I discovered a new store in one of the local strip malls called "Game Stop". Apparently it's a chain of at least two stores, no idea if it's a franchise of a larger entity. But they have actual SNES and Genesis sections and a bin full of (mostly common and overpriced, but I bought a bunch anyway) NES carts. They pretty much don't touch Atari anything but my comp carts from AtariAge of my two hacks had arrived that day and the kids working there were duly impressed at my old-skoolness I expect I'll start getting my used GBA/GBC games from there instead of half.com whenever I can, because it's nice to have someone around besides EBgames (who are pretty useless in my view.) Rob

They haven't been available there for some time after the lawyers got to them. Could try the wayback machine though. I think you can still find them there. At this point, your best chance of getting ROM sets that actually work is to get a newsreader and monitor alt.binaries.emulators.[arcade,misc] for a month or so. Inevitably someone will do a MAME flood, especially in the weeks following a MAME version release. You pretty much need a great news server and a lot of persistence, though, as last time I did this (in the 0.5x series somewhere) a complete verified set came to about 4.2GB and took a few weeks to get posted entirely. In the past, people have tried moving such operations to Gnutella (...Limewire, Bearshare) or Freenet, but there you can expect lots of issues with versioning and merged sets. Rob

I think you'd pretty much need to reimplement Defender to make it more arcade-like. Possibly using a keypad controller and/or booster grip for everything but movement/firing. It wasn't a bad compromise for its day though. Rob

I vote for Mountain King. I don't think I ever spent so long trying to win a 2600 game, not because it was so difficult but because it was SO BIG (for a 2600 game.) It took me longer than Pitfall. I played it on other systems (C64, maybe Colecovision?) and it was just never as good as on the 2600, somehow.... maybe the controls responded differently or something. I agree that Starpath Frogger is great. I think it's possibly the best arcade conversion on the 2600 (well, aside from the arcade games that predated the 2600 where the 2600 versions were better ) I think Starpath Frogger is better than Colecovision Frogger, even. Rob

Telstar was actually Coleco's brand of Pong-type games. From the looks of the picture, I'm guessing the one you bought is the earliest model: http://www.pong-story.com/coleco.htm No idea what they're worth, but 4jays sells a number of Telstar units (currently sold out) and that wasn't one they listed. Rob

Editing the graphics of a 2600 game is really easy, and it sounds like you have already downloaded the tools you need to do that (showgfx/editgfx). Changing ANYTHING else pretty much requires some knowledge of assembly language. I started making my color changes in my Space Invaders hack by just changing random bytes and I don't really recommend that. You'll want to find a copy of "distella" which allows you to disassemble 4K games back to something resembling source code. Then, unless you're a masochist (as I apparently am), you'll want to find a copy of dasm to assemble your code changes back into a working BIN file. More importantly, you'll want to understand the 2600's internals - trying to find the code where the color is set or the notes are played is going to be pretty tough for you if you don't know what memory locations you write to to set player 1's color or the DAC's frequency. There used to be a page dedicated to the various demos and homebrew games produced for the 2600 called "The Dig". In fact, it's still around: http://www.neonghost.com/the-dig/ You'll find some pretty important links, docs and tools, as well as the BIN file and source code to pretty much every demo and homebrew game ever posted to the Stella-list. Which brings up the single most important tool for coming to grips with Atari 2600 programming: the Stella mailing list. Thomas linked to a post above but I wanted to make sure you knew you should join the list. I didn't bother joining for a long time because back then the mood on the list was very anti-hack (and you still shouldn't post hacks to it) but the work of people like Thomas Jentszch has done a lot to legitimize them as well as disassembling various games from back in the day. Find it at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/ and check out the archives, and consider signing up. It's been well-googled and as you get more into 2600 programming you may notice that if you google about a problem you're having someone will already have dealt with it on the Stella-list. Hope you enjoy hacking the 2600. Rob

Yeah, that is a great idea. One of my friends locally suggested I should have named it "Hack-Man", but yours is better. Wish I'd thought of one of these names about 3 years ago. Rob

I thought about trying to hack Jr. Pac Man originally to make a Gameboy Color style Pac-Man (vertically scrolling so you could have the proper layout) but someone convinced me mimicking the 5200/Coleco/400/800/C64 look was the way to go so I ended up using Ms. Pac-Man. I recently got inspired to try something even more insane but still Pac-Man related so we'll see what happens Rob

oh, I think you misunderstood. The dare was for the people who posted pictures of supposedly existing Atari 2600 arcade sticks to provide links to reliable sources for them. If I end up building my own stick it's easy enough to find the parts from http://www.happcontrols.com/index.html?htt..._amusement.htm! . Otherwise how would IceCold be even trying to build his own.... Rob

ooh, cool! and which of those has a 2600-compatible db9 connector attached, again? Rob