raindog

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

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

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 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

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

I already have a Hotrod SE but I'd still buy a $40 arcade joystick for the 2600 (...Genesis, C64, Atari 800, Amiga....) But given the history of the "homebrew arcade controller" market in recent years, I don't think I'd be inclined to buy one before they were actually shipping. Rob

I'm in the same boat.... just ordered a set of paddles off of half.com but driving controllers are hard to come by even on ebay. Hey Als, seeing as how you're selling a couple of driving controller games maybe that'd be a lucrative hardware item for the store if you have any sources Rob

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

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

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

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

Nope, Mandrake Linux is it for me, so that sounds great, thanks Rob

If you do end up selling it, I hope you'll have some kind of protocol guide for those of us who are Microsoft-free Rob

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

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

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

I hate to admit it, but I show off all the carts I have of my own stuff. Sometimes I include the original 2600 Pac-Man to refresh their memories. Then for actual game playing it's usually Oystron. Kaboom would also be a fixture if we had a set of paddles here.... Madbomber under Linux is a fairly frequent waste of time for us. Rob

Wow, don't know how I missed this thread back on Monday. Thankfully one of the Als mailed me links to the labels anyway! Yeah, "Pac-Man Arcade" is "A Better Pac-Man" or whatever name you would like to call it. I was never really happy about any of my names. As for the labels, I made the first one (which you ought to be able to see an inch or two to the left of this post; I'm quite proud of it because of my lack of design skills), Randy used a modified version with Annoying Tiki Guy inserted somewhere, Lee the WTW guy did a version which was nice, and now there's the possibly definitive AA version with a new title to boot. For some reason four labels doesn't seem like so many to me As long as I'm going on about my own hacks, please let me encourage anyone getting a copy of my Space Invaders hack (from AA or whomever) to buy Space Instigators. Not because of morals or whatever, but because if you're interested in the hack you're presumably looking for a more arcade-like Space Invaders. Chris spent a lot more time and effort than I did on my hack to make his original game really cool and... well, you just have to play it As a gamer, I would feel awful if someone bought a copy of my hack and had never heard of Space Instigators. Glad to hear the new store is coming online today! It's like going to Toys 'R Us in a mythical 1983 Xmas season that never happened! Rob

Back to the "using a gameboy as a display" question, I have a Gameboy Advance TV tuner and composite input cartridge in the post from Hong Kong right now (a gift for my niece.) So you could use the Gameboy as a very small and rather low resolution 2600 display, but you'd probably do better with one of those 80 dollar active matrix TV's like (name forgotten) used for his portable 2600 a year or two ago. Or a Playstation screen for $100 or so. As for using the GBA as an Atari display, even with the tuner available my best hope is for the eventual maturity of the emulators. The NES emulator is working great at this point so it seems only a matter of time before a passable free 2600 emulator makes the rounds. And you can get every game, hack, demo and what have you ever made onto one of those grey market GBA flash carts, so I'll be pretty happy Rob

Found them, it was Telegames. Apparently they're still around and selling their two packs (which contain much less than I thought, but they do include some Activision stuff leading me to believe some cross-licensing deal might be in place.) http://www.telegames.com/retail.htm Rob

For what it's worth, whatever company it is that owns the Colecovision rights and was selling those cheap Colecovision consoles with incompatible controllers a few years back also released an emulator and ROM collection for the PC if memory serves. I can't think of the name, all that's coming to mind is Bridgestone (and they were the Starpath people, not Coleco.) I think that happened around or possibly even before the release of the first Activision pack for the PC. Rob

Judging by what appear to be scratch marks near the "GALAXY", I'm thinking homemade label with ruboff letters. Does the cart work? Does the game on it resemble any common games? Sorry if these questions came up the first time, but I can't seem to find that post now. Rob

Marble Craze does look pretty cool, but where does one obtain a set of paddles these days? Another item for the new improved AA store Of the homebrews I've actually been able to play on the console, Oystron is definitely my favorite. It must have been pathetic watching a then-31-year-old guy sit crosslegged on the floor for an hour and a half playing just one.... more..... game. I think that should really be in everyone's collection. Thrust is pretty awesome too, but just a little too hard for me at this stage in my life - guess I'll stick with Gravitar Believe it or not, I spent a good deal of time playing Dan Boris' incomplete paratrooper defense game before realizing it wasn't done... it reminded me of some other game I'd liked but can't remember now. And I like my Pac-Man sex change hack too, thanks, but I don't think it really counts as a homebrew! Rob

oh, if anything, I have too many credit cards - I'm just not going to entrust any of them to paypal, thankyouverymuch

well, AtariAge is on my daily surf list but I seldom had time to make it into the forums.... so I had no idea how lively they'd become Occasionally I would see some hits in my weblogs with a referer pointing to someone's post mentioning one of my hacks or whatever, but it never sunk in that it'd be a nice place to hang out. Glad to be here. Rob

Space Instigators is brilliant, just brilliant. Chris managed to do what I sort of fantasized about doing through my hack of Space Invaders. In fact, I think I'm going to put a link on my webpage suggesting people interested in my hack of SI check out his real SI instead. I am just thrilled and can't wait till I can order one online without Paypal. As for XYPE, I have never thought of it as a 'club', more of a tongue in cheek 'company' like Ebivision. I had such a 'company' when I was a kid; we called it Nostafavision and I don't believe we ever actually released anything. But seriously... Not everyone writing a random first person shooter in their basement would expect id Software to call them up and invite them to join id. I as an infrequent Atari programmer sure don't expect XYPE to do the same, though I hope to entice them to one day. But regardless of how it makes you feel - to date, all of the games under their name have been top notch, better than most actual companies trying to make money off of the Atari in its day. They are certainly not the only great 2600 programmers out there, but I bow before their mad skills and unfailing desire to help us all out on the Stella list. Rob