CongoZombie

We're happy to go ahead with a translation and stick it up somewhere. We can always remove it if Peter has a problem with it being published since you are unable to get hold of him.

Interesting... what did you get when you tried to run them? The crazy screen patterns that you expect from a non-working 2600 cart? My 7800 seems to not recognise a couple of my carts at all without some wiggling (the internal asteroids rom will display). Maybe the TIA is faulty?

Yes. Plug in the 7800 board, then put the ground probe (the black one) onto a ground source. (The easiest is probably the thick silver line around the board that connected to the shielding). Then just test each pin with the red probe.

I remember when I first played it thinking that it would be quite good. I walked towards the enemy while getting ready to kick him, only to get booted in the face and sent immediately to the Game Over screen. The mind boggles at how the programmer saw fit to release it in that state.

That is completely normal with Karateka- the controls are terrible. The 7800 port is one of the worst games ever made in my opinion

Or splice the plug from a non-working power supply onto a different working power supply with the wrong plug like I did

I would be interested in a 1050 and possibly a 1200xl if any were available (I'm in the UK)

Cool, a reason for me to get into 7800 development

I'm interested in the expansion module. Out of interest, where does one get YM2151s these days?

I always thought Atari came from the game "Go" where Atari is the equivalent of "Check" in chess...

Ok, I had a 4 x 2 input NAND chip lying around, so I made a buffer out of that. The vertical banding has gone, now just the dot crawl remains. This might be due to my LCD tv (though I've not experienced it on other consoles to the same extent). can you post part numbers and a circuit layout/picture of this? I'm curious how this would behave in an NTSC 7800. I'll try, but the board layout of the PAL rev C 7800 is quite a bit different to the NTSC layout

At least with the 7800 they didn't seem to- the RF out on my 7800 ghosted about 6 times. The RF out on my 800xl and XE GS doesn't ghost at all really... The buffer made a huge amount of difference for me, eliminating the crosstalk, although a lot of dot crawl does remain (Xevious is particularly bad, since there seems to be a lot of contrasting colours in that game). This could just be due to the nature of composite video, but I'm pretty sure that none of my other consoles exhibit dot crawl to quite the same extent...

Awesome, thanks Hopefully this will be a nice reference for everyone else too.

Ahh, Nice one, thanks. That save command should come in handy! If Peter does agree and you are willing to scan it, I feel that it will be a helpful thing to have it up online (since I found it impossible to find on searching). I've got a couple of German friends who might be willing to translate. I'd be willing to OCR it or copy out the text as-is to make google translation possible if it comes to it. Thanks again EDIT: Seems my German friend is on board. We could make a nice translated PDF between us, so if you're up for it...

Cool, I'm interested to hear more about this, since I myself am currently trying to recreate an Atari 800XL in VHDL in an FPGA. This makes me interested in getting a VBXE to play around with too... It is very interesting that you have the ability to upload the bitstream to the FPGA directly from Atari software. That would essentially make the Atari quite a powerful FPGA development platform. Something like an 80 column driver + z80 core could be interesting, since you could run CP/M and output directly to the Atari screen.

Waiting for the PAL version. Good times!

Ok, I had a 4 x 2 input NAND chip lying around, so I made a buffer out of that. The vertical banding has gone, now just the dot crawl remains. This might be due to my LCD tv (though I've not experienced it on other consoles to the same extent).

Thanks, I tried it and it has indeed reduced the ghosting slightly, however, crosstalk is as bad as ever. I am using a PAL 7800, so it could be that this is due to hardware differences. when you say crosstalk, do you mean ghosting/haloing or chroma/luma sync problems? Vertical banding and very bad dot crawl. From reading up in some other threads, seems that the clock line between TIA and MARIA is at fault, and the problem can be solved by buffering it with an and gate.

Thanks, I tried it and it has indeed reduced the ghosting slightly, however, crosstalk is as bad as ever. I am using a PAL 7800, so it could be that this is due to hardware differences.

Did you get any kind of chroma/luma cross talk on 7800 games? I built the original amp, but the crosstalk is pretty bad on maria games (2600/tia games look fine, though there is a little ghosting). I'm still to try out the fix mentioned, but I was wondering if there was a way to do it with passives

I did laugh when I saw the new description. Nice one

Wow, this game is great Count me in for an AA release if it ever happens

Can you not load up the executable into a text or hex editor and try and find the command table? You might be able to deduce and intuit some of the commands from that... Already tried that, but couldn't seem to find anything that helped on first inspection. I'll take another closer look later and maybe try disassembling.

Thanks guys, unfortunately the page that flashjazzcat found is the one that I already had- enough to get a bit of info, but lacking a list of commands. Ah well, I guess I'll just have to suck it up and use another assembler

Seems strange that someone collecting games to later sell would mark it with his own initials... I think that a lot of people assume that because things are old that they will always go up in value. At least, this is often the case on ebay. I once saw someone list 3 common boxed 2600 games for £120. Their reason- "I saw some other games go for more than this, so I'm doing you a bargain as I'd be happy with this price." heh. Thinking about it, since this guy didn't play the games, did he not think that instead of spending the money he could have put it into a high interest savings account?