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raindog

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Posts posted by raindog

  1. Posted

     

    And the game "roms" are available here (after you sign up) :http://www.mame.dk

     

    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

  2. Posted

    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

  3. Posted

    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

  5. Posted

    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

  6. Posted

    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

  7. Posted

    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

  11. Posted

    For what it's worth, you don't need glossy full-sheet labels to do Atari cartridge labels. I posted the procedure I used on http://www.kudla.org/raindog/pac26.html - briefly, I printed on a full sheet label, laminated it, and then cut to size. The result looks very professional and glossy and I don't have to worry about spills (the bane of inkjet labels.)

     

    Or you could invest in a color laser which is what I assume AtariAge did, since their stuff looks pretty pro too ;)

     

    Rob

  12. Posted

    I'd expect the demand for Quadrun would have diminished somewhat when Berzerk: VE got released. At least for me, Quadrun's only distinguishing factor was the speech playback, but then I'm a gamer, not a collector ;)

     

    Rob

  13. Posted

    I don't really think "it's been done" really matters if the only way to find one of these so-called "arcade controllers" is to hit ebay every day for six months and end up paying more than IceCold is planning on selling his for. :)

     

    Looking at the pictures, though, it doesn't even matter because most of those joysticks aren't even using arcade parts! Maybe internally, but for example, I was talking about the Wico one in an earlier post and looking at it now I see that the button is much smaller and lighter duty than an arcade button, and the joystick has a much longer throw and has a second button on top so you can't hold it like you'd hold an arcade joystick anyway! Some of the other ones were clearly small-outfit jobs using real parts, but I dare any of you to post a URL to any readily available source for these. They aren't something that 4jays carries ;)

     

    Sniderman, the only 2600-compatible console I have in my possession right now is a 4-switch 2600. My Amiga bit the dust years ago, I sold my C128 before that, my parents still have my C64 and my brother's Genesis but they're never powered up. I always wanted an arcade controller back in the day just like I wanted a Pac-Man that didn't suck. I am willing to go to some lengths to get what I want :D

     

    IceCold, I would buy one from you in a heartbeat given some pictures and a solid price, given that you work out the other issues associated with selling such a controller (casing, and the tendency of some other arcade controller makers to walk away leaving orders unfulfilled.) I'd even suspend my credit cards only rule for buying things online if you built a quality product at a reasonable price and prove to be capable of delivering it in my lifetime.

     

    If you don't, I have half a mind to sacrifice this old crappy C64/Amiga gamepad I've got and buy some Happ controls and make one for myself ;) But being that I've had half a mind to make 2600 ports of Ballblazer, Jumpman and Galaga for about 2 1/2 years now, you have plenty of time!

     

    Rob

  14. Posted

    Well, the Genesis arcade controller wasn't a real arcade controller. It looked like one (and was better than most of the other mass-market "arcade joysticks") but by no means did it use actual arcade parts. Now, Wico briefly made a big red knobby joystick for the Atari that really did use arcade parts, at least for the stick itself, but I can't remember its name and it was very expensive for an Atari stick.

     

    Sure you can use a $10 Genesis gamepad but then you're playing with a $10 Genesis gamepad. Those of us who wanted a nice responsive heavy duty joystick back in the day are the ones who are going to be willing to shell out a little more for one now. And for the record, I don't like playing games with a gamepad at all, or I wouldn't have spent the hundred bucks on the Hotrod for the PC. Hanaho's still selling them so I take it I'm not the only one ;)

     

    Rob

  17. Posted

    You can also extract the game files from those products and use free programs like Frotz to play them on basically anything from Linux to the Gameboy. I even hacked together a web version of Frotz, though it's not working at the moment since I wrote it to run under a win95 web server years ago. And because the Infocom virtual machine format (aka "Inform" or "z-machine") is well known at this point, there's a ton of "homebrew Infocom games" if you will out there too - search for "inform", "interactive fiction", etc. and you'll find them.

     

    I wonder if I can get them working on my new cell phone ;) What could be better than typing "kill troll" and "xyzzy" using T9...

     

    Rob

  18. Posted

    I feel I need to correct the original poster. My Pac-Man hack is a lot of fun, but calling it a homebrew is a disservice to the guys who have actually released finished homebrew games - the Xype guys, Bob Colbert, John Harvey, Joe Grand, the Ebivision guys, there are surprisingly a lot more where that come from. A Better Pac-Man/Pac-Man Arcade is a hack, and I came to it with the project 95% done as any hack 'author' does.

     

    I like Space Instigators best of the homebrews AtariAge has up for sale right now. I happened upon a pair of paddles on half.com today so maybe within a week or two I'll be as much of a freak about Marble Craze as everyone else ;)

     

    Rob

  19. Posted

    I actually thought at the time that he was referring to the Jaguar section as being out of place, having momentarily forgotten that it was an Atari machine. ;) I've just gotten so accustomed to seeing "forums" and "store" at the end of the nav bars of the sites I visit.... and this store is actually cool rather than just being a collection of Amazon links with an affiliate code tacked on, which I always hated.

     

    Rob

  20. Posted

    Yeah, a PocketPC is a level of investment I would like to reserve for things I actually use every day and not just when I'm in a 2600 developing mood ;) But I suppose there's always ebay. Or maybe I could try porting playbin to my obsolete and abandoned Helio...

     

    Rob

  23. Posted

    Not just success, but about 85% success when I last tried it. I think you're missing a few points here.

     

    1. The solution has to be portable. I don't have a computer anywhere near my Cuttle Cart (why would you bother gzipping BIN files anyway? all the BIN files put together would fit on a 16MB flash card with no trouble, never mind a CD...) and we were discussing methods of linking a Cuttle-like device to the 2600 on a chip. For the most part, I find even Stella acceptable for playing 2600 games when I have a computer around (I'd use z26 except no workie under Linux.)

     

    2. Sure MP3 is a lossy compression scheme, as are the other ones I was talking about (WMA and OGG). But think about what you just said referring to the Cuttle manual: Each bit is sent as a single wave of a single frequency. That means at any given time the codec only has one frequency to deal with, as opposed to things like white noise which indeed they have a great deal of trouble reproducing faithfully. The problem in the case of MP3 (as I already described) is not the reproduction of the frequencies, which is fine. It's that even at the highest quality setting, all the encoders I've tried tend to remove a few of the quick frequency changes. I suspect this may take place on frame boundaries and have yet to start introducing 5-10ms of silence at the start of the problem WAV files before encoding. Obviously the vast majority of them it leaves intact or I would never have been able to get the first game to work. This leads me to believe that one of these other algorithms might take care of most or all of the currently non-working games. It occurred to me tonight that the Riovolt might also handle MP2 files, which tend to throw out less frequency information than MP3's at the cost of size.

     

    3. I would, as I mentioned earlier, prefer to use a device that plays uncompressed mono 22KHz WAV files. I know of no such portable device, which would need to be either CD or HD-based unless I did a lot of whittling away at what I included (eliminating alternate versions, minor hacks, etc.) If you know of one, please suggest it.

     

    I've been working with compressed audio on a daily basis since about 1989. Forgive me for being tired of getting told I can't do what I've already done. ;)

     

    Rob

  24. Posted

    I did; the makewav I was using (the CC version) has three speed/pitch settings if I remember correctly, and I tried all three. Best results were with the slowest/lowest so I used that for all the games. I don't think it gets much above 2 or 3KHz even at the highest speed anyway.

     

    The problem wasn't with the MP3 encoder stripping out high frequency information (I use LAME which has switches to prevent that) but with MP3 eliminating transient pitch changes that it doesn't think our ears will notice. MP3 is a perceptual encoding algorithm and therefore not especially well suited to reproducing signals meant to be interpreted by machine. Most lossy audio algorithms aren't; even on my digital answering machine, when someone hangs up and leaves me a message consisting of a dialtone it changes the two frequencies of the dialtone into one that's sort of between them and sounds nothing like a dialtone.

     

    Not done experimenting yet, but at the moment my 2600 isn't even hooked up so it'll be a little while ;)

     

    Rob

  25. Posted

    Regarding the "Cuttle cart and MP3 player" idea..... been there, done that. ;) I burned a CD with all ~1500 BIN files I had, batch converted to fairly high bitrate (192Kbps mono, way overkill or so I thought) MP3. About 85-90% of the games worked, the rest would start loading and flash back to the Cuttle screen.

     

    I took a bunch of the failed games and burned a CDRW with them at 320Kbps. Only about half worked. I tried different encoders with worse results. I set every quality setting up as high as it could go with no luck. Finally I took one of the failing MP3's, converted it back to WAV, and compared against the original. There were some very clearly visible transitions from what I assume was a high bit to low bit (or vice versa) and back again which were just not present in the MP3 version even at the highest possible bitrate. I'm amazed that so many games loaded at all.

     

    I've been meaning to write a script to take MP3's of all the BIN's, convert them back to WAV and then to BIN, and compare against the original to get a rough idea of which ones would be okay for MP3. Then the rest of them I'd take and make a couple CD's of them. But at this point I think I'll wait to get a CD MP3 player that also does OGG files (which use very different methods to toss out data) or better yet, uncompressed WAV files (so I can still fit way more than 99 short mono tracks on a CD.) My Riovolt (which you can now get for about 50 bucks) also plays WMA files but I have no idea how to make those under Linux for testing, though I've heard it's possible. I also have an Apex DVD player that has surprised me in the past with what it could play, so maybe I'll experiment with that over my usual Xmas vacation.

     

    Anyway, I think that the work involved in making a mega-multi-cart to go with the 2600-on-a-chip will be similar to the amount of work that went into the Cuttle Cart, just without the analog bits. (That includes getting the rights for the Supercharger ROM from Bridgestone, unless that's not actually necessary to play SC games.) It's certainly beyond me, so I'll stick with the Cuttle and the hope of working compressed audio for now. ;)

     

    Rob

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