Blackbird

You could even say Garfield, though Garfield & Friends wasn't released until later...

Haha! I had a comic character who was a Venus Flytrap... what sand opera. Fourth grade was a rather strange year for me.

Battery-backed RAM being an issue, one could use non-violatile RAM instead...

I didn't even own Combat up until today... I went to a flea market and tried to make the purchase for a dollar, but he gave me it for free because he had so many... It was actually rather fun, considering this was the first time I've played it on a real television and with other people. Not like it's a candidate for my favorite game of all time, but it did provide some entertainment...

Do you happen to know who, or at least where you saw that someone had made progress in programming for the system?

Multi-load an 8k game... it'd have to be a game with different segments, really. If it was all the same game, normally the code would swap between the banks quite often and share a lot of code spread out over the cartridge. You could probably adapt some games to make them multiloaders, but it might be annoying too if the game isn't too long...

I'd like to know as well... if anyone's interested, I can probably give you the assembler with the F8 data file, it's a DOS compiler called Cross-16. The data file can be adapted for Table Assembler (I think), which would probably help alot... For some reason, every site I looked at said something different as to what the Fairchild's resolution is... the cart size is 2k, though.

Here's a black background one... it is rather hard to see.

I made a similar post in the VCSp boards. Take a look at this: http://www.bingbangboom.us/files/2600schematics.GIF It's a rather unfinished design for a PCB with same position for cartridge port and controllers as in your ASCII art. Ports for Video/Audio and switches are to the left, but those could easily be repositioned, along with a power jack. The switches would have to be attached to the case above it, though, no room on the board itself... Other than that, it would be good to go and you'd only need to make a case. If anyone who actually wanted to would complete the schematic, you could order some of these small boards, three for $59.

That means whoever finds that lot of buried E-T carts would be rich...

Bosconian was bad? I thought it was one of the best on it. Now I'll have to try the real version, see how much better it is...

Try this: http://www.radioactive3.fsnet.co.uk/atari2600.htm There are a ton of A/V mods out there... Ben's works, but is par from perfect. The sync signal is probably good enough for a normal Television screen, yet just too unorthodox for an LCD, which probably needs more exact timings.

Zelda, Majora's Mask had a "toilet", with the hand reaching out, asking for toilet paper...

Probably not, but it would make for a good programming challenge. None of the things you mentioned would be that hard to do, it's actually the items and boxes that seem harder to make (that'd be even worse than the 4-sprite flicker)... that, and the fact that the playfield is going to be extremely blocky. I guess a solution for a blocky playfield would be to move the playfield over one or two pixels horizontally every scanline... if you were to make the playfield constantly curving, it would look very nice. However, I have no clue how fine scrolling of the playfield is done, so I may be completely off the mark on that one. The 5200 could pull it off though, with some extra graphical touches. But another 4-player game on the 2600 wouldn't hurt.

AtariCart? That'd be awesome! Maybe you could adapt that scheme to use paddles (and though they don't turn all the way, they can provide enough for full rotation) and have a 4-player game? I think it would be more fun that way, than just two players facing off. Not to veer off the original topic, but that leads to an interesting question: Would it be feasible to have a four-way scrolling overhead driving game?

What's interesting is that Final Fantasy, for some reason, a lot of people today just group every Final Fantasy game into one category and say it's awesome/it stinks. How many people do you think voted for Final Fantasy just because they liked one out of the entire series? Had I voted, I probably would've gone for Pitfall!. More revolutionary than the original Final Fantasy in my opinion, I wouldn't even consider graphics and sound since they're both classic games, I've played them both and I loved Pitfall! more. Comparing it to something newer, I'd probably be less inclined to vote Pitfall!... depends on what you can play and enjoy longer, I guess.

It was smaller than that. I think that Final Fantasy was 128k, so it's much too big for Donkey Kong. It's somewhere between 24k-40k, I think.

With all that in mind, here's a concept idea:

Suggestions... well, first of all, you'd do much better to have every sprite mono-colored, at least per scanline, especially with the setup you have there. For the amount of sprites you have, you probably have two routes. Either you can design each level so that every platform on screen at any given time never has two monkies on the same scanline. That way, you could use one sprite for the character, and one for each monkey. The harder route is if you programmed it so that the kernal drew sprites according to when it's drawing the platforms. You could use one sprite to draw a monkey, and if there's another monkey parallel to that one, have the kernal update the registers and draw him as well. Again, one sprite would be used for the character-controlled monkey. You should eliminate the clouds completely, they'd never work out. The timer, maybe, as long as you don't have monkeys going behind it or relatively close to it. You might do better by having no platforms at the top at all, so that you're always insured you can draw the timer. You'll probably have to make the platforms less detailed, so there's only one playfield color per scanline. Mainly that's only relating to the darker ends of each platform... I actually think its a cool idea, for a minigame at least. What'd you get the idea from, when Wario's on fire? Same controls.

That'd be tricky. The only way I can think of to easily do it is if you have your 2600 modded for A/V out, or at least separate video and audio signals. Then you can buy a female RCA to male 1/8" plug, place that in your Line In port, and run an RCA cable from your Atari to the adapter. The other way around works, Male RCA to Female 1/8" jack, and a 1/8" connector from the Atari to the computer. If you don't have a modded Atari, and you're using the RF signal that came from the Atari, you'll need to wire up your own 1/8" jack from the audio lines on the main circuit board. There's no easy way to separate video and audio directly from an RF signal...

I wouldn't be surprised if somebody tried making one just for laughs... two gameboys, an Onyx and Red one, and a programmable chip to turn the color signal to purely red, keeping the luminance the same... all the headache-inducing red in a convenient handheld console!

http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html...areLabelID=1160 :wink: Well, of course there's that... I'm also thinking of getting a Krokodile cart when it comes out, anyway. What I meant was more along the lines of a cart that can fit the cassette inside it too. A little wacky, but of course, that's why I only said "I wish". In any case, it would save a lot of room, no?

RAM was probably expensive back then. Having each cart with the RAM it needed would've driven the price up. And also, it gave Starpath another way to make money-- in order to enjoy these good games, you'd have to buy their hardware first, too. Of course, Rabbit Transit was ported to cartridge, and there's no reason other ones couldn't have been ported either. There were just some advantages to making cassettes rather than cartridges... It'd be awesome if someone made a supercharger the size of a regular cartridge, but that's just me...

Looks nice! Hard to squeeze through in some places, but I like the room designs overall. Might I ask why you'd need an IPS patch? Nobody's had legal action taken against them for owning old media like this... in addition, if you own the original cart and dumped it, then you have rights to make a backup. You have rights to own a backup. Would you not then have the rights to own a modified backup, where you have purchased rights to the original software and free rights to the hacked portions?

Wow, that really covers it! I think I sorta understand it now... heh. Thank you!