Greg Zumwalt

WHAT!?!?!? No votes for WakMan or Fish Revenge? Okay, so maybe I'm biased Although, I must say, I do like the dual controller hacks, and the adventure hacks. Oh, and Jungle Jane

Thus far, I have these Sci-Fi shows as having shown Atari 2600 related products in them. Can anyone think of others? SERIES: Airwolf Automan Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century Farscape Futurama Greatest American Hero Knight Rider Logans Run Max Headroom Mork and Mindy Mutant X Manimal Otherworld Sliders Starman The Tick MOVIES: The Last Star Fighter Tron

As of this week, I have had to take the entire network offline. This includes over 2 dozen server and 3 large sub-networks. This has occured for several reasons. After loosing my own home and business I had nowhere to house such a large network. A friend of mine allowed me to use part of their house and that is where it has resided since. Now though, they have sold the house and thus, ends that situation. I hope to have everything back up soon. All I have to do is burry a few doctors to their necks in concrete so they'll leave me alone; find a new line of work in the nations second worse work enviorment with the third highest cost of living; relocate everything; and avoid those evil women with their femanine charms that will undoubtedly distract me from my gaming hobbies.

Feel lucky. In this area, few people know what Atari is, and they have become very scarce (the Atari that is). St. Vincent DePaul, has not had any for nearly 2 years. Goodwill, refuses to take anything that isn't from a warehouse, and chose to not take any more used electronics. That leaves one other store in a 150 mile area that occasionaly get stuff like this, and they are a loose antique store, that like to charge as much as $5 for Pacman Lucky for me, I have most of what exists for the 2600. The last BIG take for me, was Tron controllers and Chase the Chuckwagon. I worked for a game store as a tech in Madison WI a while back. The owner, a nice guy, but not good at business, couldn't afford to pay me always, so I was given pick of merchandise. Worked well for me. Point is, he got a lot of older systems and I had a good picking option. But within the past couple of years, his place, and 3 other simular ones went out of business. As such, Madison, being a colledge population, has quite a few old gaming systems floating around, but no longer has an outlet to exchange them, which, oddly now, makes them hard to find. When I left that area, due to its very high cost of living and bad job market, it was on what is termed, "Moving day Friday." This is always a big event for those not swimming in money, as it is the day all the students finish classes and move out of the dorms. Most of them don't keep what they have used and put it on the curbs for trash pickup on Monday. This includes, mostly, makeshift furnature. However, I picked up a 21 inch RGB monitor that now resides in a MAME Cabinet. I also saw dozens of low end computers and quite a few game systems, including Atari. It can sometimes be like a grade B movie with the underground street punks fighting for territorial property. I even picked up 18 cases of beer, that, didn't belong to any of the 6 teenagers whos parents were coming by to pick them up within the hour Since then, I've not seen a decent Atari rave. That of course, begs the question, is there such a place anymore, or is that just another one of those things of the past? Well, I'm babling on now, so I can tell my medication is kicking in. Ergo, sparing the rest of you, I shall depart for now and continue my stroll down Atari lane in the hazey rose colour hues of my own imagination.

I do! I still have mine! And I got off cheap paying only $150 for it at the time. I have had to replace the power supply, but the rest is original. I also have my vader, big 6, junior, 2800, 5200 and 7800. I have my Odyssey 2, Intellivision, Coleco, and quite a few more. In 1998, I donated a bunch of computers and consoles, including a 50 baud coupler modem, an 18 inch 180Kb floppy drive, an 80Mb SCSI harddrive (which cost me $2,600 in 1988, 2 real-to-real systems, a packet radio) and a slew of simular equipment to the St. Paul Museum of Computer Antiquities. In 2000, saddly, a tornado indirectly put to rest, over 2 dozen of my 2600's. The tornado, while it didn't strike my place, cause the nearby river to swell and flood the area. I still have quite a few types remaining, over a hundred controllers, and several hundred games. They are safely in storage in air tight containers where they'll remain until I can build them a new home. Meanwhile, I do all my controller abuse on my PC. Back in 1984-88, I owned a small arcade in Michigan. It is my hope some day, to open a new moderized arcade using a MAME network. I would then build a small electronic game museum in it, in which I'd display all my goodies. Oh well, I can dream

I've used HOM quite extensively. I presently use it under WinXP SP2. (Formerly under XP and XP SP1) It works without needing Win98 compatability. Although, I can't speak for Win2k. I also run it on another computer under Win98se. I have loaded 32Kb ROMs without problems. I do not know its limits. Although, it is supposed to in theory, be half of the physical RAM available. I decided to perform a test. Under WinXP SP2 with 2Gb of RAM and a 1.8 GHz AMD CPU I have loaded a test file. The result shows some degree of error trapping envolved, as the program will not load files in excess of 64Kb. 64Kb is also the largest 2600 ROM size, including the S.P. cassette games merged. The testing, on this computer, demonstrate an average 1Kb/second translation. Hence, a 4Kb rom will translate very fast, and a 64Kb rom takes just over a minute. Hope that helps. I have yet to have any issues loading a 2600 ROM. I have however noticed, and reported, with confirmation from the programmer, a bug that prevents the program from working properly if: The main executable is too deep in the directory tree. For example, the first time I set it up, I put it into c:Atari2600ToolsEditorsGraphicH-O-M and it refused to work properly. The prorgam was built with a little known language that has a few limitations. When I move the H-O-M folder to c:HOM it worked perfect. The developer of the software used to make the program, also notes that long file names, and filenames with non-alphabet characters, can also cause problems. In my VaderMatic documentation, I went into all of this and notified this group of those finding. Of course, you may also just have a corrupt file. Try downloading it again.

Great news! Glad to have gotten my copy before I have to move. Won't be on here again for a while Good luck with any new projects.

Sorry, myself, health aside, have been busy making 2600 images and finishing a Basic D&D style Graphical Multi-User Dungeon for a friend. The GMUD has taken me over a year to complete. Oh, and add to all that, selling home, land, business and moving. As for ideas... find an old tree. Get yourslef a grinding wheel. Find a decent hatchet and chisle. Imagine the face of an old man in the tree. Hack away!

If you download the BINs, you'll know who most are by the title. A small percentage, are people I know (such as the SCA ones.) If any did, not by me. Most of these were submitted requests. Ones that very well may have, are not included here. * Please see notes below. Hmmm, both a compliment and point lost all in one... these are images for the Atari 2600. I suppose if people think them good enough to mistake as high quality XL images, they must be great quality for good ol' Stella, eh? *Notes: I have no issues with the content people send me. I think it is humerous to see images on a 2600 machine. After all, since the 2600 can now store digital music and images, it makes it the oldest multi-media device I know. The two issues I do have, are that one, I could spend a lifetime putting images onto the 2600. It would be nice to see others doing this on their own, although I understand it still isn't the easiest task for most people. The second issue is, I got a lot of nudes and the like. From experience, I've learned, it is very difficult to distinguish body parts that overlay. For example, a hand placed on a bare stomach is difficult to see unless the colouration varies greatly from such things as a tan or shadowing. Without getting graphic, the same applies to lips with no lipstick in places with same flesh colour. Nearly impossible to distinguish. The best photos to convert are those with high contrast, brightly coloured clothes, dark backgrounds. I had one fella send a photo of a girlfriend in a black fishnet body suit. Very nice in deed, but it was a brunette, on a blue coutch in a dark room. It simply couldn't be done with a degree of satisfaction. On the other hand, a pale skinned bleach blond, wearing a bright red x-mas teddy, against a dark stone moutain backdrop, works very well. These are just some things to consider before hand. Oh, and if people haven't already figured it out, I do well and really like portrait shots. Especially those with exotic eyes.

Well, I'm back from the hospital for a while, and bored, so I thought I'd make some of those cart images people requested. I've included a couple dozen here, but many the pictures sent were "not appropriate" for a public forum Those people have gotten their bins privately. They are also available to persons with access to my server. (You know who you are.) So, if you are an image fanatic, I hope you enjoy. greeting_cart5_23_2003.zip

Same here... bad health, high medical bills, out of business... I have to opt for quantity over quality, so cheaper gets the sale. Of course, if I could, I'd have 2 of everything ever made for the 2600. One for show and the other for play

Worse I've had a dog do is to turn my atart controller into a chew toy. As I'm deathly allergic to cats, none have ever gotten close enough to my Atari things to be of concern... but I do feel the pain. Pitty. Slightly off topic... I lost an entire computer when a mouse, that is, rodent, pissed on it. Blew out the motherboard and the mouse as well!

I cleaned systems for many years, and the best and safest method I've found is to use a soft bristle toothbrush along with Q-Tips and a %100 bio degradeable, organic, non-toxic cleaner called Simple Green. Do not use orange cleaners, as they often strip paints and the like. It isn't as fast, but when you're concerned about the things such as Fugi, trim, etc., it is very safe. I used this method to restore a Gold trimmed Intellivision that sat in an attic for 12 years. Looks good as new.

May 13, 2003 Atari 2600 BIN archive present total 2,263 If you have anything not on this list, please e-mail it to: [email protected] I modified this post, as it was, for some unknown reason, cropped Don't know what went worng, as it was all there, but I appreciate being informed it went bad. As such, I have attatched the info as a zipped file. The file is in plain text format. romlist.zip

Please tell me that someone else out there was thinking this too... Is it just me? Woundn't most of us be suprised to find our girlfriend glueing eyes to our nuts? Jesting aside, very cool. I still have my official Atari pencil and paper weight.

If Stella could speak, I wonder what she'd say about being called:

Great job! Excellent Smithers.... er, I mean JS and ES. Win XP, gamepad, 4 button, gameport... no issues so far.

Don't forget, the newest DiStella and DASM now handle 7800 data. The rest is up to graphic hacking (H-O-M) and then knowing a bit o' coding. Luck.

Well said Cryptik76 About 6 years back I made a blue plastic case for a 4-switch. It took me about 3 months to make the mold. Then a friend of mine took it to his place of work (a plastic injection plant). My materials cost about 90$ and he said the plastic and time would have been about 15$. So, for a little over 100$ US, a new form can be made. The process I used can produce about 300 before the mold fails. Thus, I'm certain that if they wanted, a professional business could recreate even better molds.

I have contacted Schachte, the senior PR rep for Atari Inc., and requested they join in this forum. Here's hoping for some possative responces .

It is very strange for myself. I used to work for Atari as a repair technician. Oddly, I didn't get into programming the 2600 until only a few years ago. I don't think working for the latest Atari would be anything like the old Atari. I have over the years worked security jobs and served in the military. The original Atari was much like all of them rolled up into one. Also, a great deal of pride was associated with Atari. Now a day, it seems Atari is just a snappy attention getter. Thus far, Infrogames has been primarily a PC game developer. (I'm not sure they ever even made a game counsole.) And the lack of acknowledgement to the history of Atari is in my opinion, tasteless. But it is early, and things could change.

Their is a "junk store" by me selling 2600 units for $200!!! The owner says they are collectables and originaly sold for more. While he is correct, I think he is also very twisted. Fortunately, I still have about 2 dozen varying units myself PS How big are those flees?

Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2003 8:00 am PostPosted: Wed Apr 23, 2003 8:32 am Post subject: results... PostPosted: Wed Apr 23, 2003 4:21 pm PostPosted: Wed Apr 23, 2003 8:06 pm

I tried that one, but it didn't work. I've used Joystick 2 Mouse for my MAME arcade for some time. . The name is misleading. http://atzitznet.no-ip.org/Joy2Mouse3/Joy2Mouse3.exe It is free and works with every joystick I've tried. And yes, it is now running on my 2600 box. It is kool, as it now runs my front end too. With a 4 button gamepad, you can assign ESC, Reset and C/B&W (along with directions and fire of course Not a problem... the real question I had, was weather this was a quirk in my setup, or z26. So, now that I know it is z26, I can do this until joystick support is restored to z26.

It is not USB, plugs directly into gameport. But at least that clearifies things. The readme.txt should be updated to reflect this. Meanwhile, Joykeys, is working for the 2x windows version of z26. Unfortunately, it means manually starting a second program. (I use a package that mostly automates everything from one program.) (While I could rewrite all my code, it would be just about that time that joystick support would be reintroduced.) Bother Thanks.