Albert

Time for another update! I received the manuals last Saturday! 19 boxes worth of manuals (for 32 different games, most new, but some old as well) and they all look fantastic! Although it was painful going back and forth, resulting in five sets of physical proofs, it paid off since all the manuals came out great. The only missing piece now is the label order. Last week I received a full set of label proofs, and everything looked perfect except for four of the Atari 2600 end labels (an issue with the black on those). More proofs for just those labels were sent out yesterday and I should have them on Saturday. Assuming those look good, that entire label order will go into production. In the meantime, I continue to solder and build games. I'll post some photos of the label proofs later. ..Al

Time for another update! I received the manuals last Saturday! 19 boxes worth of manuals (for 32 different games, most new, but some old as well) and they all look fantastic! Although it was painful going back and forth, resulting in five sets of physical proofs, it paid off since all the manuals came out great. The only missing piece now is the label order. Last week I received a full set of label proofs, and everything looked perfect except for four of the Atari 2600 end labels (an issue with the black on those). More proofs for just those labels were sent out yesterday and I should have them on Saturday. Assuming those look good, that entire label order will go into production. In the meantime, I continue to solder and build games. I'll post some photos of the label proofs later. ..Al

Time for another update! I received the manuals last Saturday! 19 boxes worth of manuals (for 32 different games, most new, but some old as well) and they all look fantastic! Although it was painful going back and forth, resulting in five sets of physical proofs, it paid off since all the manuals came out great. The only missing piece now is the label order. Last week I received a full set of proofs, and everything looked perfect except for four of the Atari 2600 end labels (an issue with the black on those). More proofs for just those labels were sent out yesterday and I should have them on Saturday. Assuming those look good, that entire label order will go into production. In the meantime, I continue to solder and build games. I'll post some photos of the label proofs later. ..Al

Yes, by D. Scott Williamson: Atari 2600 Star Castle Kickstarter ..Al

Thank you!

I did respond to your email yesterday, can you check your Google spam folder to see if it's there? I was wrong, I somehow missed sending you an email after updating your store account. I just sent you the email now, so you should have it if you take a look. Thanks, ..Al

No, you will need to create a new account in the store if you don't already have one. Unfortunately they are two completely separate systems at this time. ..Al

Excellent, thank you! ..Al

You're welcome, thanks for the order! ..Al

Yes, I have to go through all the emails, edit everyone's account so they can see the hidden Jaguar GameDrive entry, and then send emails to those individuals with a link to that entry in the store. It's a bit time consuming, so I will do this in batches so I'm not just sitting at the computer doing these individually. ..Al

You're welcome!

I will send you another email with the details on how to order. ..Al

You're welcome! ..Al

No, only for the Atari 5200 and Atari 8-bit computers. And for the Atari 2600, there's an excellent rendition of Warlords called Medieval Mayhem. Kind of surprised nobody's made a proper port of Warlords to the 7800 yet! ..Al

Looks good for me, also tried yesterday and it came right up. If it's a DNS propagation issue due to changes, it could take longer for ISPs caching DNS information. ..Al

Love that label artwork! ..Al

I never hear the Synology units, and they are fairly close to my primary computer in my office. But I'm also not running much on them except for file services. Since they've served me well, I haven't recently explored other NAS units from other companies (such as QNAP, Netgear, Drobo, etc.), but who knows down the road. Competition is good. ..Al

The default configuration for these units is Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR), which can be setup with one or two disk redundancy. I use one disk redundancy since I have the entire thing backed up to another unit daily, and if a drive did fail I'd swap it out immediately. https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Storage/What_is_Synology_Hybrid_RAID_SHR ..Al

I've been using Synology servers for years now and they have worked pretty well for me. The lower-right unit is the newest, a DS1819+. The box to the left of that is a five-drive expansion unit. A DS1512+ unit is sitting above, and the DS1819+ is backed up to the DS1512+ nightly. Several important shares are also backed up to external drives, which are rotated periodically to a bank vault. The headless Mac mini sitting on the upper shelf acts as a spam filter and performs some other tasks, and the external drive on the second shelf serves as a network Time Machine disk that all my Macs are backed up to. That drive is also rotated to the bank vault. ..Al

You can now edit the first post indefinitely. If you need the ability to edit other posts, you can send me a PM directly and I can help you (links to specific posts are helpful, you can click on the post number to get a direct link to that post). ..Al

I received the fifth (!) round of manual proofs last week, and they all looked great! The order finally went into production and I should have the manuals by the end of this week. There are some reprints of earlier manuals above as well. There are no Jaguar manuals in the above image, as I didn't need to run proofs for them again. However, the entire order needs to be printed together, which is now being done. I'll have more physical proofs for the labels this week, and if those look good they will also go into production. The light at the end of the tunnel is getting closer! I'm really looking forward to getting these new games out to everyone! ..Al

I received the fifth (!) round of manual proofs last week, and they all looked great! The order finally went into production and I should have the manuals by the end of this week. There are some reprints of earlier manuals above as well that you can see in the above image (Colony 7, Conquest of Mars, Epic Adventure, etc.). But most of the manuals above are for new games, and this doesn't include the Jaguar manuals (didn't need to run those proofs again). I'll have more physical proofs for the labels this week, and if those look good they will also go into production. The light at the end of the tunnel is getting closer! I'm really looking forward to getting these new games out to everyone! ..Al

I received the fifth (!) round of manual proofs last week, and they all looked great! The order finally went into production and I should have the manuals by the end of this week. There are some reprints of earlier manuals above as well. But you can see the 8-bit Adventure II XE and Scramble manuals in the above image. I'll have more physical proofs for the labels this week, and if those look good they will also go into production. The light at the end of the tunnel is getting closer! I'm really looking forward to getting these new games out to everyone! ..Al

Those patents are all long-expired, anyone can develop a system these days that plays 2600 games. Just don't try to make your system look like an original Atari console, as they can attempt to go after you for infringing on trade dress. It's just much more expensive to develop hardware that mimics the original 2600, versus using cheap modern hardware that can easily emulate the 2600 (with varying degrees of success). The Flashback 2 developed by Curt Vendel years ago actually did use proper hardware that allowed you to run binaries natively, and it could be modified with a cartridge port to use physical cartridges. There are some FPGA solutions as well, such as the CollectorVision Phoenix, that will let you play 2600 as if they are running on the original hardware. I believe you can only load games via the SD card slot with the Phoenix, not sure if they ever created an adapter that lets you use 2600 cartridges. ..Al

The manuals finally went into production last week, so I should have them by the end of next week or early next (they were supposed to ship them Friday, but don't think that happened so hopefully Monday). Several labels (non-Jaguar games) had to be revised so they would print better (black, I hate black), and I will have proofs of those in a few days. Assuming they look good, they will also go into production and it'll take probably ten days to receive them. Beyond that, I have been building and testing games so I can label and ship them once the labels arrive. I will be so glad to get all these games shipped! ..Al