trent

Thanks for the link. I had seen that but I'm a bit put off by Best's order process. Guess I will give them a try. Only one has been broken so far but it only took a couple of hours. That combined with my childhood memories of constantly broken inserts is why I want to have some extras on hand :-)

My nieces and nephews love playing the Atari but they keep breaking the white plastic inserts. What is the best source for replacement inserts? Atari2600.com has them for $17 a pair, but I can find used complete joysticks for less than that.

Mine came this week while I was out of town. Hooked it up today, super cool!

Sign me up!

Just ordered mine!

Neat!

http://www.facebook.com/AtarisGreatestHits?sk=wall

I'm going to remove all references to the word "Atari" from my emulator, get rid of any screen grabs from Atari owned titles, and re-release Droid2600 in the Android market. I'm thinking of calling it Irata. Any other suggestions?

And I think that is a framed copy of the Pac Man Fever album on the right...

I put a game rom (boulder dash cartridge) into the directory with all those files and now it runs I can't get a keyboard or joystick to appear on the screen at all? I have no "start" button so cannot get the game to start, it just goes to the demo. However, when i press the button set as the space bar the pause works so it looks like the remote is working with this emulator. Until I can get a start option on the screen or assign a joystick button to be "start" I can't test it further. Since the "space button" works I can't see why it won't work fully. Pete If that is the Atari800 emulator, I believe when you touch the screen in the upper right hand corner, you'll see some buttons appear, including the start button.

I'll add to that that I am discontinuing active development of Droid800 because the official Atari800 (or whatever it will be renamed) makes it redundant.

I think the safest thing to at this point is switch to a system that has no chance of having a revival, like say the Odyssey II. *ducks*

Starting to feel like a dead horse is being beaten, but I would not discount the role that Atari enthusiasts have played in maintaining the brand all these years. It is a combination of all these "grey area" activities that has help keep the brand alive. Yes this is a niche group, but it has made Atari the Pabst Blue Ribbon of retro systems. Atari may be well positioned to capitalize on it here and now, but it would be short sighted to take down this valuable assett in the process.

Yeah they are pursuing legitimate copyright claims in almost all of these cases, including this one. I completely understand why they want to get rid of unauthorized emulators, sites, and media that use their name. That doesn't mean everything they are doing is smart. The point of Flash Adventure isn't to replace your Atari experience, it is a technology demo to show what Flash can do in a fun way, in a way that is an homage to Adventure. As you say he clearly explained it is a copy. The community was filling a void with these types of projects, a void that Atari chose not to fill or pay attention to for more than a decade. I guess now they want to come and fill the void. Sure it is their right, but they going about it in a pretty lousy way.

:-( http://www.joystiq.com/2011/08/19/atari-appoints-new-cfo-digital-and-mobile-vps/ They are shaking things up.

pps' letter came from Kristen Keller. Not the new person at legal. Well, crap. Still though. Punching the geeks. Legal works with the rest of the business to accomplish business goals. They can't just go it alone. I would speculate that in this instance the business goal is to clear the mobile market of competitors. That means curtailing convenient access to emulators and ROMs. As would be expected, people in legal probably don't know a homebrew rom from Yars Revenge. The cynic in me says they probably don't want to know either, since the more they know the less they can claim "good faith".

I looked over the page, I don't see where the infringement is other than if you include the OS roms. That would be a copyright infringement though, and easily rectified by not including them. Otherwise you're allowed to mention Atari 800 in the context of what this is - an emulator of it. Any patents have long since expired as well. The title is not an infringement, it's Droid800, whereas I could see if it were Atari 800 Emulator or something like that. Emulators themselves are not infringements and there's not a thing legally they can do about them - just as long as you're not including anything copyrighted with them (Atari's bios roms). I would ask for further clarification and stand tall - you're completely in the right. In this case, Atari is dealing with Google, and Google is dealing with me. In the first case (Droid2600) I petitioned Google to bring the app back as it didn't seem to me to be infringing in the way Atari claimed. Atari claimed it violated copyright on the console and several games. In the second case (Droid800), Atari are now saying there is a trademark violation. I can't really argue with that except to say that this has been the status-quo for so long that I felt it was acceptable to reference the company name and include some screenshots in the application. As I said before, I think there is a bit of this going on. If they have an Android version of "Best of" coming out it would make sense to clear out other emulators.

I received another take down notice today, this time for Droid800. I also see that the the official Atari800 Android port is gone as well. This time the stated reason was trademark infringement. If these are infringing then so are all other ports of Atari800 and Stella, so I wonder if they are next. I suppose that is fine but it would have been nice to know their intention before spending countless hours on these projects.

No. Atari sued Activision, but lost. I think that pretty much opened the doors for everyone else to make games for the VCS. Michael That lawsuit was over non-compete agreements (Activision were former Atari staff) and they did not lose, the matter was settled out of court with Activision agreeing to pay Atari royalties.

My battle would be by proxy. Atari petitioned Google and Google responded by removing my app. I would have to convince Google to reinstate it. I've been given very little information. The complaint from Atari, signed by Kristen Keller, states that the copyrighted work includes "Multiple Atari video and computer games ant titles, as well as the 2600 console. I assume this is referring to the application description which includes screen grabs and a picture of the console. So basically I'd have to replace every instance of "Atari" and "2600" with something like "the machine that shall not be named" in order to get it back in the Android market. No thanks. You win Atari, congratulations. I don't think it is the end of the hobby though, I just think there is a bit of this going on. They are probably about to release an Android "Best of" app. On a funny side note, Google also hosts the source code project page for Droid2600 (http://code.google.com/p/droid2600/). The latest build can be downloaded from that site directly to your Android device. I've alerted them to that, we'll see what happens. edit: fixed link

App store doesn't publish numbers, but if the download to comment ratio is anything like Android, there have been about a million downloads of "Atari's Greatest Hits". Dunno how many of those are converted to in-app sales, but there is probably enough revenue to be mined there, enough to justify spending some money to chase off emulators and ROM databases with DMCA takedown notices. On related note. What gives with all the one star ratings of "Atari's Greatest Hits"? I've downloaded it and purchased a bag of games. It is a decent enough experience. Maybe not a 5 but surely not a 1.

I just got one of these letters for Droid2600, a free port of Stella emulator for the Android platform. Oddly enough they haven't done the same for Droid800, a free port of the Atari800 emulator. I suspect they finally see some value in this old intellectual property with the rise of apple/android app markets. If they release something for Android and force other emulators out it will be a shame. "Atari's Greatest Hits" for IOS is nice and all, but you can't exactly use it to load your favorite homebrew.

So what happens if you sell 2 carts in one auction? Lot of 10? 50? Do you have to do a catalog match for all of them?

It is feasible but you are going to have to clear several hurdles. First, your phone has to support USB host mode. The original Moto Droid does, I don't know about the Droid X. If your phone supports USB host mode then you'll need to make an adapter. After that you'll need a driver, I don't know of any but maybe you'll get lucky, you will likely have to root your phone. If all that goes your way then you just need an emulator that supports it. If the driver allows you to set up your controller as an IME I think that you can probably get it working via the key mapping feature that most emulators have. Good luck!

Not that it couldn't be improved, but audio just kind of generally sucks on Android right now. Up until very recently there has been no API supporting sound from native code. That situation has been resolved recently but only for Android OS >= 2.3. The default audio settings are 11025 Hz 8 bit mono. The goal is to, by default, decrease the size of the fragments because copying them back through JNI is expensive. I also reckon that about matches the fidelity of an average built in speaker :-) If you are running in advanced mode you can configure it how you like. I think you mentioned before you were running at full frame rate. I rarely notice any audio problems when I configure it to skip every other frame. I can't really tell the difference. Maybe one of the A8 experts in here can say whether or not A8 games typically move pixels around at ~60fps.