Andromeda Stardust

Bummer. Maybe he sold out?

Well I got a pair of them on eBay in a 2012 BIN for $10. The trackballs go anywhere from $30-$80 depending on the exact model and condition.

It was posted in the "Air Raid found" thread somewhere back in 2012. That was an epic find! Rosa is off her rocker though if she genuinely believes her crap is real though...

Regarding Tempest/Gyruss style control, I'm aware the driving controller has much lower resolution, but it's a lot more common than either type of Atari trackball. In fact a Driving controller would probably work in a CX-80 mode ROM since it uses gray code on the Y joystick axis, but movement would be really sluggish.

The plot thickens...

Black is cool. Black is awesome. Color of the night. Famicom was a rainbow. Everything else by Nintendo was boring-assed gray. Name one non-Nintendo system that used a color other than black for it's 1st party carts. PC-Engine doesn't count. Those were white cards...

I'll check it out when my 8-ball arrives in the mail. I'm going to add a 9-pin female Dsub to the exterior of the case for use with an Atari/Genesis extension cable. I'm assumng I can wire pins 1,2,3,4 straight from the comparator IC and wire pins 6,7,8 to the cable inputs? I don't have a logic analyzer to use so I'll need some way to make sure I wire it up right the first time. I don't want to wire my trackball up backwards.

Drunk Mario Kart is awesome!

Wouldn't the driving controller be better for Tempest/Gyruss style play?

Nothing a Retrode and a Game Boy adapter can't cure! I kid, I kid!

+1

Whoops!

And what makes anyone think that the Retro guys adding a PR person who has a track record of not giving an excrement about customer satisfaction was a good idea? I can just imagine how this pans out... RetroVGS: Thank you for calling RetroVGS support. Your feedback is valuable to us. How may we assist you? Customer: "My game is broken. I need to return it." RetroVGS: "We are aware of the bug and are working on it. [game title] version 2.0 will be available for purchase in the coming months, with extra special 'thank you' content." Customer: "But I don't want to 'buy' it again. I want you to 'fix' the one you sold me." RetroVGS: "But version 1.0 will become rare. It's a collector's item now." Customer: "I want my money back." RetroVGS: "Sorry, no refunds unless game is unopened and in like new condition." Customer: "Thanks for nothing. I will never buy from you [donkey's rear end] again!" RetroVGS: "You are welcome. If you should need further assist----" Customer: [click]

"Not Air Raid" - LOL! The game cart itself looks legit but I'm not solid on the VHS style clam case. But since it's either a third party title or vintage knockoff, there's no telling what the company might have used for cases. Also there is clearly molding inside the case to fit the cart. I'm not aware of any newly manufactured cases made to fit Atari games. They do have "bit-boxes" for NES though, and it would be very easy to print inserts for such a case... http://www.stoneagegamer.com/bitbox-nes.html

I will let you know if I encounter another crash. Could have been just a fluke though. While I have no experience with the "CX-80" encoded ROMs, the response of my "CX-80" (CX-22) trackball feels quite solid. If you doubled the sensitivity of the game, I think it would risk becomig too "twitchy". Already I find it easy to crash my ship into the spider or 'pede just by barely rotating the ball. Increasing the sensitivity might cause the ball to rapidly jettison your character across the screen. That's one reason why I downgraded the paddles in my custom joystick to 470/500 kohm pots instead of 1meg. No game I'm aware uses more than half the travel, and many games felt so twitchy as it was. Lowering the sensitivity really helped. However, while Centipede/Millipede hacks need the precision movement due to evasion of enemy sprites, I feel the Missile Command or Colony 7 hacks could actually benefit from faster travel so that the target sight can reach the missiles more quickly. And yes, there may be wide variation between varying models of mouse / trackball depending on the diameter of the ball, diameter of the rollers, and tooth count of the optical encoding wheel. Overall sensitivity could be expressed as: P = (π * RD) / (C * TC) where P= Pitch, C = clocks per tooth, RD = Roller Diameter, and TC = Tooth Count. Trackball diameter doesn't really influence the sensitivity so much as it affects the overall feel of the trackball, with larger or denser trackballs creating more rotational inertia and a more solid feel to the controller. Sensitivity or speed is inversely proportional to pitch, or the surface distance the trackball must be rotated to register an input. Higher sensitivity or smaller pitch results in tighter spacing between inputs. CX-22 encoding is coarser by design than CX-80 or true gray code because with CX-22, there are 2 clocks per tooth, whereas CX-80 encoding, 4 clocks per tooth exist. The logical output for CX-22 is coarser because it omits one of the gray code channels from the output. @Alex_79, thanks for the schematic for the CX-22 encoder. If someone could tell me where to tap the circuit board for the pulse traces, I would like to mod my "CX-80" by adding a 9-pin female header to the base of the controller so I can use it with "CX-80" ROMs via extension cable, or possibly make an adapter to interface it with a MAME compatible USB trackball encoder. I assume the comparator outputs would be a good place to cource the gray code signal.

I've heard a lot about Ledgend of Link. Sadly the only way to play it so far is by an overpriced repro. I haven't beat the first Zelda yet so I'm not ready to buy expensive ROM hacks. ROM CIty Rampage fits on PP and ED but so far MMC5 implementation is poor on both flash carts as the mappers so far have only really been extensively tested to work with Castlevania III.

I have a bug to report on CX-22 Centipede. The other night I fired up the Harmony ROM, and during one of my sessions, I collided with the Spider and possibly also a Centipede fragment simultaneously. I was in the lower middle region of the screen and had initiated a movement rolling the trackball upwards and slightly towards the left (about the 11 O' Clock direction) to avoid the Spider when my ship promptly collided with the enemy sprites. My score was in the 6000 range, still early in the game. Not sure what caused the crash but my CRT screen went totally black and the TIA emmitted a dull low pitch growl sound effect that persisted until I powered off the Atari. Controls were totally unresponsive. I have no means to reproduce this glitch and it was the first such occurance. On other thoughts, why is it that despite Millipede TB being so much more frantic than Centipede, I can reach much higher scores with it? I would have thought my rounds of Centipede would last longer due to fewer enemy sprites and an extra life every 10k points instead of 15k. Anyway great hacks. Please keep up the work.

So cool. I'm aware the Sony SNES CD project never became reality, but it would have been cool to see what could be done with CD drives. However, judging by the fate of the Sega CD and Turbo CD (at least in the US), maybe it is a good thing the SNES library did not get fragmented. While I love the idea of supporting and emulating CD quality expansion, I question the purpose of this endeavor. It is unlikely that and serious homebrew efforts beyond some proof of concept tech demo will ever get made.

Tip to the OP: If you're going to archive articles online with vintage scans, that's one thing. Archiving data for preservation has it's purpose, whether digitally or physically. Libraries provide an excellent resource. But to charge people for the service and claim it as your own work is something entirely different. In academic circles, we have a word for this behavior. It's called Plagarism, and it's considered a serious offense.

I was referring to the nut kicking video. But as for the original post, yeah, people who report auctions of legit items are douchebags. Probably the same scammers on eBay peddling fakes will try to get legit auctions pulled so innocent people don't know better and can't see the difference. I got the "ending soon" notification in my inbox (had it on watch list) before it got canned.

Yeah Max. Glad you're getting your money back. Open the hatch and snap a brief photo of the pins before you do though. We are all curious and wanna prevent this in the future.

Adding more conductors will not lessen the final blow when this train wreck comes crashing down. I would recommend rebuilding the bridge across the canyon first. Also this guy from SNK sounds like a jerk if they released a broken game and offered no compensation or at least appologetic feedback. Hard headed and stubborn people will never learn. For it is written, "A wise man learns from his mistakes, but like a dog returns to it's vomit, a fool repeats his folley."

I have a copy of Starkeeper Gift Edition, an NES game by 87Arts, with my screenname embedded in the ROM. Another way homebrewers are thwarting piracy, at least on NES, is by using custom mappers that aren't compatible with most flash carts or popular emulators. These homebrew mappers require custom builds of FCEU and anyone with a cart dumper can't dump the game without intimate knowledge of the mapper. Just erasing the title screen isn't enough. There could be a hex code or something buried elsewhere in the ROM, like a number or unique customer identifier. It would require buying at least two copies to remove such a watermark.

"Toddler Games?" Mario Kart, Smash Bros, Bayonetta, hardly what I would consider for kindergardners.

No sudden price jump according to pricecharting. http://videogames.pricecharting.com/game/atari-7800/ninja-golf