Jaynz

I can really boil it down to the sports games. While the 'arcade game' aspect of Intellivision was anemic (though it had some classics), the sports games just blew the Atari away. The Coleco sports games were just badly put together, and COULD have buried the Intellivision otherwise, however. Also, the Blue Sky Rangers did do wonders with the limited hardware and nonsensical business demands they were working under.

Very appropriate...

Gee.. how hard would it be to find the maker of these carts and who could dispel the fraudulent charges here. Albert, Bob, can you help me out 'cause I don't know where to start looking.

Report it as fraudulent on eBay, along with a link to the AtariAge store.

He's our uncle.. and we're so sorry...

Not really... they're getting there. Greenpeace is watching the POKEY supply with worried interest...

Again, not to stir the waters again, but... well, I can see getting... nonchalant... about 7800XM releases at this point, much less working on them. But you're right that Curt is partially responsible for all those delays. But, still, I don't see why we're not seeing these nearly-done games put out on the 'extended carts' that we now have. You would think that Curt would want his EXISTING work available... But I'm weird about that sort of thing. I love having my work out there.

No. I get the feeling you're not going to be here very long...

Obviously, I've missed something big lately...

Hmm... you know, other than Bentley and a bit about DK, we haven't heard a LOT about the XM's game lineup in quite awhile. I didn't even know Dungeon was on that list....

Just dropping a quick note. I've got out-of-state-company and my 'development time' consists of reading a large volume on the 6502 I picked up. I also owe a couple of people some thanks for their assists in getting me started. Hopefully I'll have something worthy of the time soonish. This project isn't abandoned.

Seriously, Brian, your retort is that I'm too DEAF to pick up on this bug? Admittedly I'm not on a CRT playing the cart so I allow some variance, but following the given instructions registers NO STATIC TICK, even by watching my computer's audio output graphically. Would you be so kind as to record it and post up the video so we can see this error so Bob knows what to look for, if anything?

Sorry, Yurkie, I can't reproduce this one.

Not on Pro System. The only crackle I get is on the audio sample.

Day 2: Build 0.02 The worst part of these early stages is that there's really nothing to show despite putting a couple of hours' work into it. Mostly more ASM learning, setting up the 'commons' needed for getting an a78 project to run. Again, nothing exciting, but it's another black screen that doesn't explode and another successful compile. Huzzah! I admit I still haven't found my old ASM legs yet, and I still haven't gotten my 6502 book yet, but I'm a little more comfortable with what's going on. Though now I really wish Groovy's C compiler was available...

In quality, Bob? You've done that! In quantity... for the 7800 you're pretty close, aren't you?

So, I screwed up going for the 'paint scraper' docking bonus and blew up my 1st ship. This resulted in immediate 'game over' despite having the full rack of ships. You don't just lose a life in this case?

I'm thinking a lot of the articles I'm seeing are pretty conflated. If I get the expertise to do this (again, I've got a LONG way to go and a LOT to learn) I'll consider the voice - but in game voices are tricky. If I use the 2nd port for the keypad, though, for map editing, then the AtariVox is going to be out of the question. I also recently "saved a marriage" by effectively giving my 7800 to a friend (wife was a huge classic gamer fan, and this was a perfect anniversary gift... and I'm a big ass sap) so I wouldn't be able to test the AtariVox without emulation somehow, or to replace the 7800 in the short term. This is still pretty far down the road, though. I've got to get KC to show up on the screen, first!

I could probably do something for cart and cover artwork. The actual arcade marquee and cabinet art aren't that impressive, though...

Which, from Atari's point of view, was part of the problem. Yeah, it would mean that it was impossible for Magnabox to rip off the Atari, but Atari made the claim that they had the legitimate license. And, again, there's no way the case would have been settled the same way NOW, but this was 1980 and most judges had never SEEN Atari games, much less knew anything about the industry.

It's just a set of on-off bits. (7x9x2)-4 positions that are editable, so that's just 120 bits. The borders add another 16 (I think, I'll recount later), bringing the whole map to 136 bits. So that's just 16 raw characters. Making it alpha-numeric puts it at 64 characters per map. Pretty easily done, really. Still going to have to use the Atari Keypad in the right slot to get it to work, though.

Day 1: Build 0.01 Ah, a black screen never looked so good. This is my first successful build of A7800 code. It does, NOTHING! Well, that's not true, it gets the header and footer right along with Atari's start-up procedure. It successful detects as a A78 cart and doesn't cause anything to explode or crash. This may be meaningless to a lot of people on this forum, but this is a huge first step for me. Making the Maze Maker: Okay, one big feature for the O2 version of the game is the inclusion of the maze editor. I would like to include this eventually but it would need to use the keypad in the secondary port for it to work. It wouldn't save, either, though the use of the HSC may work around this - haven't decided if that's a good way to go, but I'm way off from worrying about it now. Krazy Chase: I'm putting this in the 'maybe' category for now. It's probably small enough to fit snugly, but there isn't as many resource overlaps as you would initially think. There's also VERY precious little information on the game out there, and the O2 emulators don't seem to have it right. Voice: Okay, far, far off, this is an issue I'm going to have to tackle. Apparently both games can use the voice add-on for the O2. Sadly, I can't find examples of it actually being used anywhere and the emulators out for the O2 don't have the add-on working yet. If anyone has an idea what's included here, please post up!

So we've hit the upper limit now, if I'm reading this correctly? Interesting - from the looks of it, though, we can hit anything from the NES and below in terms of RAM use. That's a lot to play with in classic design. Now let's get CPUWIZ to make a SID-capable cart?

It didn't take much. Remember that IP law for video games was in warm jello at the time, so a judge that sees something as 'close enough' could easily find for Atari. Also, remember that Atari wasn't suing over the arcade version of Pac-Man, but for the Atari 2600 version, where there are a bit more visual similarities. That doesn't make it a correct finding, of course, but it was easier to argue that Magnavox had cloned Atari's specific implementation of the game, which is all that they had ownership of anyway. Oh, I'll get it. This is just the first day I've had time to put to this and was surprised at all the dead links on AtariAge for the old resources. I can largely still read assembly, so it's not a lost cause... just going to be a bit of a hill to climb for a little bit. That's one reason that I chose a relatively easy, but still worthwhile, game.

Zylon > Other than getting this done eventually, I'm making no promises. This is a learning endeavor for me, to get me back into this level of coding after being absent from it longer than some of the posters here have been ALIVE. And on that note... Day 1: Build 0.00 It's not so much that ASM is really hard so much as that it's finicky and exacting. To do ASM for any system you pretty much need an "instructions guide", and while reading Bob's code helps quite a bit, it's not doing a whole lot to get me started. Sadly, the links from AtariAge to 'getting started' sites are mostly dead - long dead, in fact. I couldn't find much in explanatory materials to get this puppy going. Okay, fine, I'm really just looking into the 6502, which is new to me (having largely done 6803 and 6809 code in the far distant past)... so I go off to look up some 2600 information just to get started. Dead links. Dead links EVERYWHERE, including from AtariAge. Nothing like playing links to links to links to dead code as your favorite in browser game. I have ordered a couple of 6502 books, though, but they just ain't here yet... The next step is the obvious, grab Bob's PacMan code and start looking over it in more detail. This isn't an IDEAL solution, but hopefully I can get a little bit out of it to get the first successful build of anything. Optionally, are there any of these old development sites that actually work? Even the forums here kinda skip that whole "what you need in a bare-bones 7800 app" step...