kenjennings

Persons at RPC over-hyped Centron on the Atari, making claims of discovering a new graphics mode providing 80 flicker-free colors, etc. When questioned about this capability RPC was initially evasive, then later belligerent and abusive. Plus, the graphics presented as proof of the claims were dissected by people with the technical ability to reveal them as fake mock-ups. Well, that pretty much opened up the floodgates for abuse. The one or more people running RPC (not sure if it is multiple people or one person with a multiple personality disorder) have bandied about idle threats of lawsuits for the "deformation" of character by people on AtariAge. The game was later released on the Amiga and as good as the graphics can be on that platform the game is a horrific thing to behold. Contrast that to the recently released Dungeon Hunt. The author made no pretense about being a master of all things Atari, revealed (with all its imperfections) works in progress, and accepted input from the community. Consequently he received consistent support and encouragement from the people on AtariAge.

I had a similar problem with a demo I was doing of a person (player) walking on randomly created land (playfield). The player was doing a horrible amount of jittering up and down. Eventually I figured out that BASIC XL as so fast that the time between HITCLR and checking the collision was so short that no collision had been flagged yet. (So, no collision flagged caused the person to "sink" down another scan line into the ground even though it had already been moved down into the ground.) Moving the HITCLR as far as possible from checking the collision smoothed out the motion. In BASIC XL that might mean slowing down the code. The perfect solution is locking to the frame rate which isn't really practical in BASIC. This might come close: . Poke 20,0: While Peek(20)<2: Endwhile . That guarantees at least one full frame has passed. If you can reorganize the code to separate the clock clearing from the clock checking delay, it may not even degrade performance (much). You want the player to sit in its current position for a full frame before evaluating the collision and moving the player again: . While MoreElectricity Poke HITCLR,0:Poke 20,0 Do stuff here which takes up time While Peek(20)<2:Endwhile Evaluate Collision here Move player to new position Endwhile . If you use Peek(20)<1 it may not be a full frame -- BASIC sets the jiffy clock to 0 at the bottom of a frame, VBI increments it, and BASIC checks it again at the top of the frame before most of the display has been drawn, so then collisions are not set.

The A8 font is (usually) 6x6 for most letters/numbers/symbols excluding graphics characters. In inverse video the 6x6 design has the characters completely boxed in by a border. I prefer that look.

RECEIVED!. Very nice packaging. And "healing kit" included.

Yeah. :-) Well, Pong takes out a bridge. Though, not exactly a game "character". The Atari logo appears about 1:18 on a building.

Dang, you are so 'leet. I tried my best and didn't even make the list. So, anyone been served with any court papers for "deformation"? Though not.

Looks like it could be fun. I liked Wreck It Ralph, too.

Yes, the Pet and its graphics characters did come before the Atari.

Yeah, forgot about this. I still have a 1200XL, with nice bells and whistles -- 256K, 32in1 OS, video mod, etc. I'd like a pizza case and keyboard, too. Up to $100 sounds reasonable. I think my original vote was up to $75.

Mountain King (used In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg) Shamus (used Funeral March of a Marionette by Charles Gounod. Just on the title screen???) loved those games!

PM sent

VBXE seems (to me) the best solution for maintaining the Atari-ness while upgrading the video capability. Too bad Atari couldn't come up with something similar that would have made a real difference between Atari and C64 and save their bacon from Jack. Instead, we got nothing. And then later we got an 80 column monochrome terminal connected to the joystick port from Jack. If I write any more about it I'll start to cry....

If you PRINT #6 escape and clear screen in Graphics mode 0, the screen also clears. If you just do a regular PRINT of escape and clear screen in Graphics mode 0 it outputs the clear screen symbol and does not clear the screen. My semi-educated guess is that a regular PRINT without device id is using the E: on #0 by default which interprets the escape sequences while the device #6 goes to S: which does not interpret the escape sequences.

Is there no break key on the Tandy?

This http://spectrum.ieee.org/ns/pdfs/commodore64_mar1985.pdf says the C64 uses a clock 7/16 of the NTSC clock. Which is essentially the same as saying its pixel clock is not really aligned to the NTSC color clock at all. (which then means at any horizontal position any given color is not guaranteed to be displayed as that color.) Forgot about the Apple. Yes, the Apple relies on artifacts for its "hi-res" color so its output clock must be in sync. (It also uses one bit out of each byte to tweak the timing of the pixels from that byte slightly which results in two additional artifact colors of pixels.)

(Well, that title was supposed to say "Video"). As far as I know the only video display systems on a computer/video game purposely aligned to the NTSC color clock timing are: the Atari 2600 TIA, Atari 8-bits GTIA/ANTIC, and the Amiga's. So, they all share the same basic aspect ratio for pixel dimensions (and/or multiples of or fractions of color clock width depending on graphics mode). Does anyone else know of any other systems that use correct color clock timing?

Because it is empty?

Dear Kyle22, The prices you quote are outrageous. I can do way better than that. Are you some kind of marketing shill for B&C? HAVE A NICE DAY PS. I have the cart and the light guns and would be willing to part with them for a mere $1,000.

I asked the guy a couple days ago and (without being insulting) pointed out that the description only discussed the cart. The seller said everything shown is being sold.

I saw a doc called Disk Utilities. Its an early listing of DUP. Is that what you saw?

I'll qualify this. The three button, original Genesis controllers work fine enough. Just plugged a couple into the 800XL to see what happens. On the first port they work as: Dpad == stick(0) B == strig(0) C == paddle(0) low value when not pressed, max/hi 228 when pressed. So, it gives a joystick and two buttons. Unfortunately, the Start button and A button do not seem to do anything. At least not with the simple direct reads. Maybe there's an output pulse or something that's needed. I have some 6 button controllers, not original Genesis hardware, but Hyperkin knock offs. The basic button seem to work like the three buttons for a few minutes. Then after some minutes the controller starts acting wacky -- some joystick directions stop working.... Not sure what's going on.

Well, a minimal DOS like that sounds better to me. Its such an obvious need... a general purpose disk support utility for games. Has nobody written this before ? A disk written by direct I/O likely won't look to DOS like it has anything on it and has a higher chance of being accidentally reformatted/overwritten.

That's actually nice looking. Form fitting. cool. Is there a version made for 800XL? 1200XL? 800?

All you need is a friend to wander by your office dumpster at night.

Sacrilege! Begone abomination!