Andromeda Stardust

If one game can change your mind, it would be this...

No, the guys in the know play this version:

Get me a gam cart made from pure Higgs Bosons, then we can talk.

People probably viewed the auction after seeing Pat's video and then searched for PVC Plumbing parts. Enough people viewed the auction and also viewed plumbing parts that they made it into recommended searches. Still hilareous either way. Thanks for sharing!

I don't have a Turbobooster. Can't afford one. I've just heard if you leave it unplugged for a month or so, it dumps your save.

Cool Idea. Love the colors... Might as well throw my own personal "do nothing" ROM up as well. Stick this in a fake Air Raid or something... Trollface v0.02.bin Original thread: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/218359-troll-face-my-first-atari-2600-rom/?p=2861882

Can someone explain what's going on here? Does the game just play itself?

What can I say? I lived a sheltered childhood...

Well my CX-80 just sits and jitters when I try to play a CX-80 hacked ROM. It actually moves around like a proper trackball when I load the CX-22 version of the ROM hack. From the description on the Missile Command TB entry in the AA store: https://atariage.com/store/index.php?l=product_detail&p=31

It's a different smiley. There is one smiley face (really two if you count the blackface one) under ASCII DOS; there are literally like a billion smiley face emojis stuffed into unicode. Unicode has really become a mess with Emojis. It seems like anybody anywhere can assign some stupid symbol, webding, or emoticon to a unicode block, and it's up to software vendors to keep their database up to date.

Square face. I love it!

You make an excellent point here. In 1983, there was no youtube. You walk into a store, you put $40 down on a game, and you have only the cover to go by when judging the contents of said game. There's no youtube with tons of gameplay footage. No detailed reviews to cross reference. Just a box with some artwork (which more often than not had zero to do with gameplay), a title, and publisher's name. Now some publishers such as Activision churned out quality titles that rivaled the stuff Atari was doing. And other publishers such as Mythicon and Apollo which were basically cow manure in a pretty box. So a company's name was often a good indication of quality. Yet with so many publishers pushing crap it's no wonder the bottom fell out. Crap titles are overflowing the bargain and clearance bins while Activision and Atari are trying to sell genuinely good games with a $40 price tag. Fast forward 32 years. The homebrew scene is completely differentnow . Sure, you get shovelware for modern consoles. Wii was full of it. But the care that goes into producing homebrew games is paramount. Developers spend months or years releasing a title, not for profit but for the love of the hobby. And you have demo ROMs, or in some cases the complete game available for download. Anyone who collects homebrew probably owns a Harmony cart and may have even tracked a title's progress since the beginning, or can view relevant threads in public forums or read reviews or watch gameplay videos on youtube to see if the game piques their interest. Usually you can tell if a game is worth owning or not with a couple minutes of actual gameplay footage. Collectors can still go after limited edition stuff and expensive CIB games with bonus contents. Gamers have the option many times to buy the box or not, at least in the AA store. Reviews, commentary abound in the forums and abroad on the internet. So no, there's no crash coming. Nobody's peddling crap on a cart, and even if they are it is their perogative, and nobody's forcing you to buy it. Every AA store purchase I've made has been an informed decision. Albert made most of the PRGE 2015 games available early to subscribers but I only bought CIB Zippy and CIB Star Castle. The others I'm waiting to drop in the store so I can make informed decisions based on videos and commentary. I'll probably pick up a handful of games with the loose option after I've cherry picked the selections. And yes, even I've got more backloggery than I'll probably ever have the time to play, but at least I can make informed decisions about the games and buy stuff that I enjoy or at least have a desire to play. Lastly, suppose the crash was imminent, and the market bottomed out tomorrow: I still have enough games right now, commercial and homebrew, spanning 8 generations, to keep me entertained for a very long time.

To be honest I haven't touched mine in a while. Last time I checked there was still activity on the Uzebox forums, but my biggest gripe was there simply aren't enough games out. The fact that the entire game is flashed into ROM instead of a cartrdige bus means the thing isn't really expandable. If a game were to read off the cartridge bus, it would require a new kernel. I guess it would be possible to load pieces of the program piecewise from the SD card, kinda like changing sides of an FDS floppy, but that would incur a loading penalty instead of instantaneous like with cartridge bankswitching. Honestly I think the concept is great but the level of care that goes into some of the recent NES and especially Atari homebrew is phenomenal. Thanks for bumping this. I need to check out the Uzebox scene again... Also what theloon said. I think the Raspberry Pi would significantly shrink the market for Uzebox. It's more expensive than the Pi but I do enjoy DIY solder kits. As long as there's not SMT work, I find it relaxing and rewarding to build a project and see it come to life. Really I imagine you could just emulate the Uzebox games on a Pi. In fact last I checked they had an official Uzebox PC emulator with full debug for development and gaming without purchase of a kit. Because the CPU is 100% documented, the PC emulator was flawless and bug free. You could also run custom kernels on the EMU which allowed for some nice enhancements not permitted with the stock Uzebox (For instance Pacman was updated with side marquee and a coin insert button but these extra features could not be crammed into 60kb for SD loading). While it's possible to flash a custom kernel game to the Uzebox via a set of optional headers (which itself requires a special programmer), this prevents the loading of games off the SD card. The bottom 4 kilobytes of ROM is write protected to prevent accidental corruption or erasure of the Uzebox kernel, which also contains the data to read the SD.

I cracked open my CX-80 trackball earlier tonight and thoroughly cleaned the rollers with cotton balls and isopropanol. I could tell it has been well used as all three rollers have a silver line on them where the trackball has rubbed the finish. The vertical roller offered a bit more resistance than the horizontal so I sprayed some silicone into the bearings, being sure to wipe any residual grease off the roller contacts. As I wiped the case with alcohol soaked tissues, brown coloration came off. It wasn't visible on the black case but sure as hell showed up on the white tissues. Not sure what the hell it was but glad to remove this mystery brown residue that almost coated the entire outside case as well as the rollers and ball. Got it reassembled and the thing handles like a dream. It operates in pure CX-22 mode as the CX-22 ROMs work flawless with it. Centipede and Millipede handle so amazingly, the controls are dream-like; I just can't describe it. FTR, I've never played an arcade game before that used trackballs and only had experience with 8-way joystick in MAME and console ports. This thing is really amazing. Thank you to everyone who worked on these hacks! I also can't wait to try the 7800 version of Centipede when Concerto releases. I may want to get a cart made as well someday...

My CX-80 functions as a CX-22. I think a lot of them do. Behind every trackball are the four signal pins XA XB YA YB. The trackball needs ground and VCC and feeds those four signals into whatever control circuitry is needed to convert the output. By tapping between the trackball and controller, you can get the necessary gray code and send it to a nine pin connector via the joystick directions. The fire button needs to share a common ground with the console though. The rest of the circuitry on the 5200 side goes unused when connected to a 2600/7800.

wrong thread whoops!

Doomed indeed.

Speaking of peddling crap, here's one for the collectards: Currently on the auction block at NintendoAge: http://beta.nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=34&threadid=155235 I never understood why people bid on stuff like this. Basically a prank on a cart. A gag that you can pull off on your best friend maybe once, then shelve it. I don't see why people would bid on this. If you want a Halloween themed homebrew game you can actually play, check out Haunted Halloween '85 instead: http://www.cashinculture.com/Haunted-Halloween-85_c_159.html

But anybody outside of this forum (and a good majority of the people in it, including myself) won't be able to see it...

Eric7100: So your Firefox doesn't look like mine? What version of Firefox are you using? I'm up to 42.0! Time to put on your derp face. Can you see the Emoji? ¯\_(😛)_/¯ Can you see the Japanese smiley face? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And the emoji disappears from the post whenever I try to save it. EDIT: Well that's weird. The standard editor does not save the emoji when I copy and paste it, but the full editor does...

See my edited post. Firefox paints the Emoji in color whereas IE and Chrome paint it in monochrome. While we are on the subject, how is it possible to embed emotes into text? It's clearly not standard Unicode if the graphics are showing in color.

The symbol shows up in Firefox. Does NOT show up on my Wii-U Gamepad. EDIT: The (toungue sticking out that somehow embedded itself in the thread title) symbol from the OP shows up in color in Firefox, monochrome in IE and Google Chrome. If anyone's wondering about the background color, I have AA configured to use the Deflection color scheme. Chrome web browser is not logged in so it defaults to the normal scheme.

I give up.

Yet you seem to be fixated around the notion that Batari Basic = newbie = poor quality games. Sprybug alone is proof that is not the case. Yes it sucks that some games are limited edition. Maybe the author doesn't want to spend all his free time in a garage assembling carts? IDK what the big deal is, especially if a ROM is released after the cart sells out. That too, is the author's prerogative if he/she wants to release the ROM or not. A lot of homebrewers have gotten burned by pirated repros of their games though.

Amazing! Better yet if you could get the Vox to talk or moan as supplementary sound effects. I'm always up for another game to support the 'Vox...