tkarner

>NES - Super Mario Bros. definately had the largest impact on the history of the Atari 2600. Good one. But more precisely, NES Super Mario had a bigger impact on the Atari 7800. It killed the 7800. The 2600 was dying of old age by then without Nintendo's help.

Two weeks ago we had to endure the endless April Fool posts. Now April 15 has come and gone and I see not one post about the game Tax Avoiders!

Oversimplified answer: Space Invaders made it. Pac-Man killed it. Ironic since both were translations of the most popular arcade games ever. Proves that a name is not enough, the game must be good. You can analyze deeper of course. For example, if it wasn't for Pong the 2600 would never have been invented. Then you can say games like Adventure and Pitfall introduced a new genre that had an impact on subsequent systems and video game history in general. Enduro and Pole Position were precursors to all the 3D driving games out there now. Activision as a company showed the viability of third party software....

>Trust ebay. Well... I trust the sellers (which I guess is what the original poster was asking). The buyers on eBay are another story altogether.

>Heh, I used the other type of silver label to make a mock Pac-Man label >similar to that. I posted it somewhere on here before. I didn't see yours. I started with a Galxian label because the trademark and license info was correct (Namco, Bally-Midway). So I only had to change the date to 1981, and the product number to 2646. The graphic, in case you didn't figure it out, is from the 5200 Pac-Man cartridge. I just had to stretch it vertically to fit the 2600 label. Looks good in person. The glue is drying as we speak. Though the metalic silver comes out gray on an inkjet printer. Getting back to this thread. It reminds me of muscle car restoration. Some guys insist on restoring the cars to original condition. They're certainly worth more that way. Other guys will modernize their old cars with fuel injected engines, disk brakes, modern suspension and tires, etc. It'll certainly drive better than a carbureted, leaf sprung, old car with drum brakes and bias ply tires. Depends what you do with the car. If it's a rare Shelby that you plan to show, keep it original. If it's a run of the mill Chevelle that you plan to drive, go ahead and modernize it.

The label of one of my Pac-Man carts peeled off... I was reading this thread... I was bored and here's the result... At least the cart looks good on the outside now. Still plays the same though. Thomas

Oh yeah, I'm using the F-type adapter. It was the first thing I tried. That helped in a big way. The Atari wasn't even playable with the switchbox while the PC was on . Since that worked well I then decided to take the next step and replaced the cable. The new cable was a step backward, with more interefernce than the old original cable. That was the big surprise. So I went back to the old cable. The picture is ok now with the F-type adapter but not as clean as it should be. There's a big improvement when I turn off the PC. The PC is an old Dell PII desktop, by the way. It's connected to my living room TV, in addition to loading Supercharger games I use it for big screen web browsing. So turning it off everytime I play Atari would be annoying. I wonder if these old Dells were particularly noisy, or had noisy power supplies? Maybe I'll replace it with my laptop, see how that works.

I see what you're saying now. The answer is no, didn't try moving the Atari. The PC is on the bottom shelf, the Atari on the top shelf, about 5 feet apart. Installing the shorter cable didn't mean I put the Atari closer to the PC or TV. The new short cable did indeed cause more interference, all else being equal. But I see what you're saying. Place the Atari further from the PC in case the Atari itself is picking up some noise...

>What happens if you leave the equipment where it is and hook up the old cable? No, you're missing the point. The Atari never moved relative to the TV or PC. A shorter video cable is used simply because a shorter cable would act less like an antenna for picking up ambiant RF noise. A short wire/antenna theoretically picks up less RF, simple physics.

A puzzle, an enigma, a paradox... I often use a Supercharger to play games. I load the games from my PC. Only problem is that whenever my PC is on, the Atari's picture suffers from RF inteference. I suspected that the Atari's original video cable was to blame so I replaced it with a fancy new one. It's much shorter (4 feet, less of an antenna), shielded, gold plated connectors, the works. Here's the paradox, the picture got worse. The original cable is 25 years old, 12 feet long, presumably unshielded, and has oxidized connectors. So how is it that the new cable, theoretically better in every way, produces a worse image? Is the original a MAGIC cable? So I reconnected the original cable and am back to square one. I'll probably put all my Supercharger games on CD, that will eliminate the RF noise from running the PC. Or maybe I can do the composite conversion to my Atari (is it possible with a six switch, I've only seen instructions for the Junior)? Tom

Is there a way to indentify whether a BIN is a PAL or NTSC version? Thomas

But I believe the question really was: Would you prefer a ratty old but original label, or a nice reproduction label? I think I'd stick with the original label as long as possible before replacing it with a repro. When you actually have to insert the catridge and turn on the console to identify the game, then it's time for a repro label. Thomas

I heard about the compatibility list on the Worship the Woodgrain CD. But I read in an older thread that it isn't very accurate. I don't know first hand but I read that it basically lists all games that load on an unmodified Supercharger but they weren't tested beyond that. Many games will load but crash further into the game, yet they'd be listed as compatible. Gorf, for example, plays the first two levels fine but crashes at the third level. So you see, there's really no way of telling which games will work unless you play them. I guess I'll just brush up on my soldering skills and modify my Supercharger. It's just that I have the less common Arcadia branded model. Don't really want to wreck that one. Maybe I can find a Starpath model cheap somewhere for this project.

Chris, maybe we can collaborate. I did the same testing one rainy sunday and got a bit further than you. I think I got through the P's. I can send you my list when I get home tonight. There also seems to be one more category of Supercharger games. They load but the vertical hold is messed up. I only have a modern TV without a manual vertical hold adjustment. I wonder if these games would otherwise work if displayed on an old TV and manually adjusted? > Alien Invaders Plus Well, no surprise there. That's an Odyssey2 game! Thomas

I've had only two cartridges ever fail, both were Mnetwork Space Attack. Coincidence? My Starpath cassettes are getting increasingly stubborn with age but I guess that's to be expected. Thomas

Thanks for all the insight. So a simple text search is out of the question. Off the Atari topic but it sounds like a job for FormalCheck. That's a chip verification tool we developed while I worked at Bell Labs. It checked the logic of VHDL and Verilog designs with 100% state coverage. There was talk of applying it to software verification but that never happened as far as I know. Sounds like a good PhD thesis, any grad students out there looking for a project? Someone said it would be easier to just mod my Supercharger. Maybe you're right but I was always better with a keyboard than a soldering iron so that's why I went in that direction. I'm sure I'm not alone. Lots of people are afraid to risk the most prized item in their Atari collection. I wanted to make a CD for myself, kind of like Worship the Woodgrain, but containing only games that work on unmodified Superchargers. Now that I think about it, why limit it to just myself? Would anyone else be interested in such a CD? (Though I still don't have a guaranteed way of identifying which games would work). Thomas

I'm trying to put together a list of games that are compatiblie with an unmodified Supercharger. Step one: Only games that are 2k or 4k. Easy. Step two: This is the hard part. I could just try to load all the 2k and 4k games and see which crash and which don't. Problem with that is that would take much too long. And even if I had the time/patience to do it that way it wouldn't be definitive. Many games load fine but don't crash until later in the game. The only way to be 100% sure would be to play every game to completion. Not practical. So I thought I might be able to tell by looking at the code. After doing some research I learned that games that use memory address $FFF8, the bank switching address, crash on the Supercharger. So I thought I might write a couple of scripts that would disassemble all the game BIN files, then search the source code for "$FFF8". Easy enough, ten minutes to write the scripts and a few moments to run them. But first I decided to try this theory on a couple games that are known to crash on the Supercharger, Pac Man and Demon Attack. I disassembled them and searched for $FFF8 and the search came up negative. No sign of $FFF8. Yet the games still crash. There must be something else causing them to crash. Any ideas from the programmers out there? Is there another address I should be looking for? Is my approach too simplistic? Was I naive to think a simple text search for an offending memory address would yield the results I'm looking for? Thomas

Another way to look at this is that 2600 Pac Man was genius. After all, if the game was good nobody would still be talking about it 22 years later and no one would know who Todd Frye was. I take that back, despite the decades of attention it wasn't genius. It was the most terrible thing I've ever seen. Todd Frye must have been on Magnavox's payroll because it made me buy Odyssey2 and KC Munchkin. And I don't buy the excuses that he had a deadline and was limited to 4k. A good maze, one more like the original, would not have taken anymore time or memory. Neither would a blue on black maze, instead of that yellow/puke green maze. And it's my belief that given a better maze most of us would have forgiven the game's other problems.

Instead of MakeWAV I use a different utility. I think it's called PlayBIN. It does the BIN to WAV conversion in realtime. So instead of storing WAVs on your hard disk at 2 megs each, you just store the 2 or 4k BINs. Once it's setup you just double click on a BIN filename and it plays it as a WAV. Never had a problem with doing it this way. PlayBIN also has a few options you can play with, including playback speed. That might solve the problem. To be safe I always playback at the slow speed (because who really cares if the load takes 6 seconds instead of 3?). You might also want to play with your soundcard's output volume. The Supercharger is sensitive to that. Tom

They made Pac-Man for the 2600???? (The psychologists must be correct, the memories of a childhood experience as traumatic as 2600 Pac-Man get repressed). Tom

I have an Atari 10-in-1 and would like to get the Activision 10-in-1 also but don't really like the gamepad. I'd prefer to play the Activision version with an Atari joystick, so.... Has anyone looked inside both of these devices? Are the circuit boards the same or similar enough that I could fit the Activision 10-in-1 hardware into the Atari 10-in-1 package, with minimal soldering? Tom