iesposta

Watching the stream, you do have them set to "B". I guess I'm mistaken. The Pong Paddles seemed extra short. I did the speech, sound and music for Draconian, and the Christmas music in Stay Frosty 2, and the sounds and music in Supera Cobra. I even gave a suggestion to Space Rocks for the option "Friction" which put my name in the "credits Easter egg". Hold player 1 & 2 fire button and turn on the Atari. Funny you bought all the games I helped out on!

Has anyone mentioned your Atari Difficulty Switches are set on "A" or Advanced/Expert? Had they been on "B", the Paddles in Video Olympics would be longer, the shots in Galaxian would be larger squares.

I like those! I went with a more reuse recycle route. The modem board has 2 or 3 transistors used for those simple 1 or 2 transistor plus a few resistors Composite mods. Gosh I hope I don't need an Atari dial-up modem.

I was going to add this. Glad I read to the end. Thanks for posting sramirez2008! Unless you are in Europe, contact him here on AtariAge. His websites don't ship to the US (unless things have changed since I last ordered boxes from him - like the Medieval Mayhem box that isn't an option from the AtariAge Store).

I'd love to see "Maelstrom". Maelstrom is to Asteroids, what Araknoid is to Breakout. Maelstrom has good and bad Powerups like air brakes, triple shot, burst shot, maximum shields, clover for luck (may keep your power after losing a life, may not). Apart from the rocks that break and break a 3rd time, there are metal spheres that ping when hit and take a lot of hits to destroy. Shooting them might turn them mad causing them spring red spikes and chase you. There are comets that add bonus multipliers, super nova that burst causing everything to halt and shake as if in an earthquake, astronauts to rescue for +1 life, care packages for said Powerups, of course large and tiny saucers. Every new thing is announced with either a sound clip, or a sound effect, or both. I substituted a lot of Led Zeppelin words from their songs that announced or described what was happening. Like when the bonus multiplier gives you bonus over 10,000 points, it sings, "Oh, you've got so much, so much, so much", and when the comet appears, "I come from the land of the ice and snow...", missing the astronaut extra life brings up, "You let me down, you let me down..." Atari evolved Asteroids into color Space Duel, which is a fantastic game, but just imagine it going in an Araknoid direction. Araknoid is still Breakout, but with more to do and things to look for that give you a larger advantage. Same with Maelstrom!

I like "homebrew of the year"; However "programmer" is tricky because sometimes a lot of people end up being involved. Draconian: I did the majority of sound effects, music, speech. The idea and sprite artist was Nathan. The main assembly and C code was SpiceWare. The second coder was Thomas J. The bankswitch format was CD-W (who also added code suggestions), SpiceWare and batari. Then sometimes the artwork is someone else. In this case it was Nathan. Albert puts out the money for box orders, cart and end label, manuals, assembles and ships them. Kosmic (I think) suggested a randomized level. And I'm sure there were others. Without suggestions, Space Rocks wouldn't have the "friction" option of your player slowing down to a stop or keep on going; Scramble and Super Cobra wouldn't have a "star field" had I not suggested it because it was initially thought there wouldn't be time to update the ball object, but turns out the kernel already contained ball positioning per scanline.

What bit would it be if you wrote to both AUDV0 and AUDV1? I still suggest when trying to do a video image, use the start and end half scan line for an interlaced kernel and the doubled vertical resolution will not flicker.

Thanks for clarifying. With BUS Stuffing and / or CDF with ARM methods, it will develop. I just want to add that on real hardware (2600 and CRT TV) when you get the display to output 2 interlaced frames (by using the proper format of starting and ending with a half scan line) it goes from flickering progressive to native TV. Very shocking to see the old VCS display so nicely!

Wow! I would have thought a game would be made first with true interlacing because of its unique look with double the vertical resolution. Then you demonstrate color video! "Bad Apple" with its big playfield squares in black and white was the closest thing to video until this. Thanks for sharing!

I love the mini-Galaxian! Worst thing is it halts player ship each fire. Other poor elements are that fps is low, making movement very jerky. And of course it is very small. Sound is spot-on. This is from Taito. I bought a Galaxian to keep stock, and the Space Invaders to mod with 4 wires to select Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Galaxian, or Space Invaders. Of all 4 games, Space Invaders plays best with the low frames per second (fps). They are all fun and NOT Nintendo-on-a-Chip remakes. I wonder if a faster crystal would improve fps? Probably will speed up the perfect sound...

Short answer? Astro Blaster is a game I keep returning to on the 7800. It is the evolution of Astro Fighter, so arguably much better. Long answer? Games like Astro Blaster and Moon Cresta are better for home consoles as opposed to an arcade game, because initially they are difficult. At home that just means "one more time". In the Arcade, for my 13-year-old self, another game meant another quarter! So games that would last a minute or two were passed over for games that had longer play entertainment. As for longer play time, Draconian plays much longer than any above mentioned game. As a kid, I never saw Bosconian in central Pennsylvania.

As one who has spent a lot buying from Team Pixelboy, thank you for the present of cheats and roms! "Try before you buy" may increase demand for actual carts. Usually I would only buy a game I had played in the past, mostly arcade, and a few unknown SGM titles because I have SGM.

Yet that's Trak-Ball in joystick mode. Only the game hacks linked to above have real mouse-like control, which, in the Millipede case, was always said impossible because it is already pushing the VCS limits and no ram was left. The coding geniuses found ways to save some cycles and ram and even a few tricks and made it work. Atari was still trying to sell the Trak-Ball hardware that does work with games of this type and crosshairs, but in Joystick mode the player can only move as fast as the joystick direction. Real Trak-Ball mode the player moves as fast, medium, or slow as the ball is moved.

Thank you for posting! I have some like this style that need cleaning and refurbishing. They really changed a lot between 1977, 1978 and 1979. *Your pictures are of the 1977 original model. *The 1978 CX-10's can be different in these ways: • Different board with some contacts, everything else like the original, as in springs, plastic tray... • Rubber cover without top indent. Everyone recommends Best gold contact replacement boards for CX-40's and I guess the CX-10's with round contacts. I bought 2 boards, and tried them in two CX-40, and neither lined up. All 4 directions correctly work, the fire button does not. I noticed on my downstairs Heavy Sixer I've been using a CX-10 that arrived working 100%. I like the way they feel a lot.

The designer of this hardware may answer as he's posted here in the past. The CX22 Pro-Line was first released and labeled Atari 2600 Trak-Ball with the bottom part dark like the top and outputs joystick only. Then it released with the white bottom, it added a switch for Joystick mode / Trak-Ball mode, dropped 2600 labeling as it can be used on Atari 8-but computers also. The bottom pictured CX80 Trak-Ball matched the 8-bit Atari XL computer design. Its button design works much better than the CX22. It still retains the JS/TB modes selected by a switch. Only a late version of 8-bit Atari Missile Command used the real Trak-Ball mode output, ending up built in to the XEGS 8-bit computer game combo console released in 1986. Today real Trak-Ball control has been added to Atari 7800 Centipede, with awesome options like 2-player at the same time! On the Atari 2600, real Trak-Ball output has been added to around 10 existing games, making them control just like an arcade trackball game. See the following thread for the developments and news about upcoming PAL or NTSC carts: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/243453-atari-2600-trak-ball-games/?p=3338227

Here's a sneak peek at the 2600 soundtrack:

Hacking in the speech code is beyond my ability also. I really want Arcade Wizard of Wor, & I know Al has all the white/gray carts ready. As stated, this being an existing game hack, CDS made all the mazes and improved the graphics, then Nukey game hack master added bank switching and a Titlescreen and made the score's 6th digit work and probably fixed some more sloppy programming, I made 40 of the 70 taunts for AtariVox+ that the game speaks at you, matching the arcade sound as best I could. The hard part is always last where the Vox speech has to be hacked in and scripted to speak the right things in the right mazes. I never knew it was that specific and only remember a few taunts and that "ah-ah-ah-ah" that's supposed to be a laugh! This is approaching its 5th year soon. There's a thread about using 2 sticks in one port. It would be nice to add or detect that. As well as someone else claiming the joystick and AtariVox+ both working in the player 2 port at the same time. As I've been doing sound, music and digitized speech (Stay Frosty 2 / Draconian / Super Cobra), if a 64K cart or larger Melody is designed, which originally stated extra RAM/ROM could be specified, it's actually easier to digitize the game's sound samples, and more people that don't own the AtariVox+ could get it with speech samples built-in. However there the easy way of playback when the screen goes black, and the hard way that Draconian does speaking during gameplay. The 2nd option takes cycles away during the display drawing and that might not be possible to hack in, but would require a ground-up assembler / C code rewrite. P.S. Draconian only being 32K, those speech samples are at the low point of "terrible but understandable". Comparing, that's how the Arcade Bosconian sounds. I just made the smallest data samples as placeholders, and intended for them to improve at least twice the quality they are now. The PRGE show deadline and the 32K game size meant the speech wasn't going to have the time or ROM space to improve. And I didn't get the big, booming explosion sample in that could have been used 3 ways by being played slow, medium and fast for 3 different enemy explosion sound effects. I still can't believe Draconian has everything it does have and that it's on the 2600 at only 32K in size! That's masterpiece programming, optimizing and debugging. Mappy's already at the point where it's won the Award For Most Colors In A 2600 Game. I personally never minded the need to have the 2 objects flicker because it meant more challenging, visually interesting games. I bet Champ Games finds a way to make it flicker less as it develops due to the power the CDF bank-switching allows.

And now we can make more great bit-mapped games like the Sillyventure 2600 game RoboMechanik (or Robo Mechanic as in the Topic)! http://atariage.com/forums/topic/273227-robo-mechanic/

Very Nice! There will be future games made similar to this (because I've seen one, and not the Bus Stuff demo). The CDF bank switching even gives more time than traditionally to do bit-mapped screen games like this. The Starpath Supercharger did a bit-map kernel in Suicide Mission, but it skips every other line. Those Supercharger programmers really knew their stuff back then! If home console gaming wasn't crashing so bad, the 1983 tech and know how would be more like the cutting edge games made currently. (The Starpath prototype for Sweat (a Decathalon-style multi-load game) even has 2-channel perfect-pitch music by banging the volume register like Pitfall II music and Chetiry music does. Sweat! - The Decathlon Game (1 of 3).bin sweat.zip

They're not. And don't call me Shirley!

I remove all the old glue with Zippo Lighter Fluid, use Peroxide 40 hair bleach (got a little bottle from a licensed hairdresser) and full sun on the back label side, the use the strongest home store spray adhesive and reapply the label. Not perfect, but much better and it stops further damage.

The current best 2600 emulator, Stella, doesn't get it totally correct. An upcoming version will improve the audio reproduction, but of course at the cost of using more processor power. I read a long text that thoroughly explained the sound generation. I don't remember where, but someone here may remember the link.

You should photograph the serial number sticker on the bottom, since there were around 8 variations and Bally only made the early 1977 ones, then Astrovision / Astrocade made them. Since the box says Astrocade and "produced under license from Bally" or something close to that I can say it is probably not a 1977 Bally Professional Arcade. You are trying to sell to a collector, so model / serial number helps. I can't really guess on a price. I have a working Bally Professional Arcade with S-Video adapter. The original usually suffered from overheating, but this came with 6 controllers and lots of game carts, so it has been played a lot and working a long time (or the previous owner wouldn't have spent so much money on all those games and extra controllers). It had no original box and was around $230. I also have a newer Astrocade model that does not work. I would guess showing it works would add to the value, but the fact it is new may also sell it.

Sorry. That does confuse things. Just this sound demo is DPC+ which plays back thru 3.7.2??? The new Mappy game is CDF bankswitch: Stella 5.0 or greater

First attempt 2600 DPC+ music. Main lead channel begins in lower key, higher key when repeat starts. I like the higher key. Thoughts? For this sound demo: Stella 3.9.3 or greater, or fast processor / browser: https://6502ts.github.io/stellerator/#/cartridge-manager MappyDPCMusicMainMerge01.bin For any Mappy game demo: Stella 5.0 or greater (new CDF bankswitch)