SpiceWare

Is that what's going on - I thought it was a static image with the sailboat as the A As such, SCORE mode won't help, but I'll explain it anyway. Scores were originally intended to be drawn using the playfield(this was before the 6 digit trick was figured out), so they came up with a setting that causes the playfield to be colored the same colors as the sprites (the left with sprite 0's color, the right with sprite 1). You can see this in all the early games, such as Combat, Space War and even Space Invaders. I used SCORE mode in Medieval Mayhem to make the kings, drawn with the playfield, show in the proper colors. To set SCORE mode you have to use the playfield control register, CTRLPF. The bits used in this register are: 0 - Reflect Playfield 1 - SCORE mode 2 - Playfield has Priority 3 - n/a 4 - Ball Size 5 - Ball Size 6 - n/a 7 - n/a the bits are arranged in the byte as 76543210, so to turn on just SCORE mode you'd do the following: lda #00010 sta CTRLPF

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I think you could make the Spinnaker correctly colored by using SCORE mode.

I think your list pretty much sums it up.

AtariVox Speech Synthesizer, by Richard Hutchinson 5/5 When the Atari reigned supreme, there was something other systems had that it didn't - voice synthesis in the form of The Voice for the Odyssey 2 and Intellivoice for Intellivision. With digitized sound, kids today can't imagine what it was like when arcade games first added speech, and to have that ability at home was ubercool. After these many years, Richard Hutchinson rectified this in the form of the AtariVox. The AtariVox utilizes a SpeakJet, which is a single chip solution for adding voice and sound synthesis. It also contains 32K of non-volatile memory that can be used to save and recall data. In order for the AtariVox to work, it must be plugged into the right joystick port, which effectively limits its use to 1 player games. It also needs to have speakers plugged into it, I'm using a pair of Sony SRS-P3 speakers I had laying around. I have a stereo modified Atari, so one of these days I need to get around to building Nathan's sound mixer: http://www.cheeptech.com/atarivox.html The AtariVox announces itself when you first turn on your Atari. That's handy as it lets you know the AtariVox is set up correctly. Beyond that it will sit there inert until accessed by a game that knows how to use it. Games that currently support the AtariVox are AStar, Elevators Amiss, Fall Down, Go Fish! and Strat-O-Gems Deluxe. Currently I have three of them, Elevators Amiss, Fall Down and Strat-O-Gems Deluxe. I've also used it with the unfinished homebrew Man Goes Down by utilizing my Krokodile Cartridge. While the games work fine without an AtariVox, they are all enhanced with it. Elevators Amiss only uses it to save the high score for each of the 4 difficulty levels. Fall Down uses it to announce the name of the game when the Atari is turned on, save high scores and announce the winner of each round. Strato-O-Gems Deluxe uses it most effectively - saving the PAL/NTSC setting and high scores, announcing the name of the game, counting up the combinations made and saving data for instant-replays (I think that's a first in a VCS game). It even saves the best play sequence for the attract mode! Man Goes Down makes great use of it as well, saving high scores, starting off the round with "Run Run Run" or other phrases, announcing various items that you acquire, additional sound effects such as R2D2 like noises to follow the phrase "The fruit is with you!" and even berating you with "You Suck" for an extremely low score. Even though it's not completed, it's a really cool game. I hope Alex Herbert is able to someday finish it. I had the original style AtariVox, with everything exposed on an open circuit board and needing a joystick extension cord to plug it in. Richard was kind enough to send me the updated board w/case, all I had to do was swap the SpeakJet and memory over to it. The extension cord is no longer used (it's now connecting my C=128's 80 column output to a 1084). He also sent me a serial interface adapter and I plan to resume writing a Mac OS X program to talk to it once the Cannonfire hack is done. Next up, Reindeer Rescue

Haven't needed it yet, so I guess fine http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/30/copy-...-on-the-iphone/

Not to bad. A few typos here and there, but the iPhone self-corrected most of them. The ones it didn't correct were actual words, so it didn't think it was a typo. Hardest part of the blog entry was hitting Add Entry in the Entries pop-up menu, it kept highlighting both options until I zoomed in closer on the page.

In the early 90s on a friend's system - Fleetwood Mac, Behind the Mask and Information Society, Information Society. I now play them on my Amiga CD32.

Hey Nathan - one of the ring tones is "Strum"

trying out my new toy.

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ah, the days before PAUSE

As I understand it, ChronoColor is just changing colors over time. In this Andrew mentions ChronoColor in relation to an update to QB, so I gather changing between 2 colors is the bare minimum for his ChronoColor definition. His other examples I've seen used 3 colors - red, blue and green.

Did you mean the Maus Games intro? I'm always dissapointed that I can't do anything even close to as nice as the MM title/menu. I forgot to put the title screen into this demo. I guess it is a splash screen instead of a title screen, but yeah - I like the mouse sitting on Maus and the color scheme. Though it does seem like the right side of the G should be narrow like the A and M. Thanks! The MM title/menu did take about 6K of ROM.

Holiday Qb, by Andrew Davie 4/5 Ho! Ho! Ho! It's Christmas Time at Atari Age and you've been tapped to take on the role of good ol' St. Nick! For some reason, instead of preparing for Christmas Eve, you're solving puzzles by sliding blocks while collecting goodies and avoiding baddies. Holiday QB is the holiday cart for 2004. This was the second year of what's become an annual tradition here at Atari Age. Sadly I missed out on the first year, but I won't let that happen again! For this year's holiday cart Andrew Davie took his original game, Qb, and spruced it up with some holiday themed graphics. Even the digits in the score have been jazzed up. When you power on Holiday Qb you're presented with the main game screen with a nice demo of the game going on. The larger area on the left is the playfield, with a smaller target grid located in the upper right. Santa starts out in the lower right of the playfield and can slide the block he's standing on in any direction until it hits the edge of the screen or another block. If you slide up against another block you can jump on it to take control of it. The goal is to arrange the blocks in the playfield to match the arrangement shown in the target grid. The target grid will helpfully flash blocks that still need to be positioned. Sounds easy, but snowballs will pop up on some of the blocks. When the snowball melts a goodie or a baddie will appear. The goodies are items like gingerbread men and candy canes. The baddies are characters like snowmen and Santa hats that have taken on a life of their own. Collect the goodies for points, or even extra lives if you can figure out the secret collection sequence. While you may want to avoid the baddies, don't. They have a habit of moving around the blocks, thus hampering your quest to match the patterns. Banish a baddie by jumping onto their block while holding down the fire button - but be careful, holding down the button will decrease your score. If it gets down to zero the banishment will stop working. While the playfield is pretty sparse, the characters are done using a flicker technique to create some slick multi-colored sprites. It's a neat way of working around the Atari's single color sprites, at the expense of characters that look a bit ghostly due to the flicker. Sound effects are functional, but nothing to write home about. One thing I found really odd was the lives indicator that appears at the start of each round in Qb was left out of Holiday Qb. All in all it's a fun puzzle game. Next up, AtariVox Speech Synthesizer

Same here, I noticed the stickers were doubled on one set of paddles. When I peeled off the top label I found heavy sixer paddle labels.

Good to know. My Atari's across the room from the iMac, so that's not an option for me.

Good point - it's been added No problem, it's an excellent piece of hardware

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Really? I never even considered leaving the power supply plugged into the Krok Cart, so didn't think to say anything about it. I've added "Unplug the serial cable and power supply, then pop it into your Atari."

Thanks! I see I forgot the comment about the manual, it's been added as well.

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Krokodile Cartridge, by Armin Vogl 5/5 As a developer, emulation is great in that it allows you to quickly test your VCS creations on a computer system. The only downfall is that no matter how good the emulation is, it's not yet 100% accurate. I found this out the hard way when writing Medieval Mayhem - a change that worked just fine on the emulator caused all sorts of problems on the Atari. Testing on the real thing can be accomplished by burning an EPROM and building your own test cartridge, but that can take a bit of money and know-how. As a gamer, emulation is great in that it allows you to play homebrew games that others are writing(and hopefully give some feedback on), as well as VCS games that you've not been able to acquire. Emulation isn't perfect though, and sometimes that distracts from the experience. Armin Vogl to the rescue! He created the Krokodile Cartridge, which is flash programmable Atari cartridge. Just plug it into your computer via a serial port(or USB-serial adapter), attach a 6 VDC minimum power supply(note - your Atari's 9VDC will work just fine, but don't use anything higher than 9VDC), run the included Krokodile Commander software and transfer your game's BIN file in a matter of seconds. Unplug the serial cable and power supply, then pop it into your Atari. Due to hardware limitations, the VCS can only address 4K of ROM space - plus it only has 128 bytes of RAM. Various companies came up with bank switching techniques to allow larger games and/or additional RAM. The Krokodile Cartridge supports a number of these, including one with 512K of ROM and 32K of RAM! For the games not supported, hacks can often be found that convert the program to use a bank switch method supported by the Krokodile Cartridge. A search of "+krokodile +conversion" in the Atari Age forums could prove useful for those so inclined. As if this wasn't enough, the Krokodile Cartridge also supports a MultiCart mode, in which numerous games can be loaded into the cartridge at the same time. A nice menu(written by Thomas Jentzsch) allows you to select which game to play. MultiCarts are limited in that all the games must support the same bank switch schemes(Atari standard 4K, 8K, 16K or 32K), and no extra RAM is allowed. An exception to this is that 1K, 2K and 4K games can be included in any MultiCart. The included software is Windows only. I wrote a command line program, krokcom, for Mac OS X. It's not as fancy, but it gets the job done. It can be found by doing a search on "krokcom" in the Atari Age forums. Comes with an excellent manual, with some slick cover art by Nathan Strum. Next up, Holiday Qb

I don't have any of those, but I did review SCSIcide, which I gave 4/5. I also mention that Ultra SCSIcide would probably get 5/5 as it appears to have addressed my main issue with SCSIcide.

I agree with this, it's a big part of why Medieval Mayhem came to be. Back in 2003 when I told my brother & sister I'd picked up an Atari on ebay, they wanted to know which games I had - specifically asking about games we played as children. That Christmas I gave them both full setups with 60+ games, including the games they asked about. In Christmas of 2005 I was playing Warlords with my nephews and their friends. At first their friends weren't impressed ("that's a king?", "why's the fireball just a square?" and so on), but after a couple rounds they had a good time. That inspired me to fulfill a childhood dream of writing a game for the Atari. I gave everyone a copy of Medieval Mayhem for Christmas 2006(and got a VCS for my folks). We had a blast playing over the holidays, the winner of each round would dance to the music while their knight marched across the screen.