Stiletto

Hey @Dan Boris, I know this is 8 years old but I was revisiting my few old posts on AtariAge. Blast from the past! And sorry for the necropost. Just the other day FlyerFever posted a Rover Leisure Products flyer for "Roverball", a clone/bootleg of Exidy's TV Pinball. https://www.flyerfever.com/post/628447939593928704/roverball They also appear to have made a clone/bootleg of Mirco's "21". https://www.icollector.com/25-Cent-Rover-Leisure-Products-Co-21-Blackjack-Video_i16154117 https://www.liveauctioneers.com/en-gb/item/17337274_25-cent-rover-leisure-products-co-21-blackjack-video Some kind soul also shared your 2012 post on KLOV Forums back in 2012, but it was never linked in this thread: https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/does-anyone-recognize-this-game.240286/ It's still anyone's guess which Pong-type game they cloned. Here's hoping Dan @ FlyerFever has the flyer for a coming update, this guy "gregf" thinks he has yet another recent flyer acquisition of a Rover Leisure Products game still to upload: https://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Number=387760

Greetings from a member of MAME's MAMEdev contingent... and a proud owner of "Atari: Business Is Fun"! I know I don't have many posts here, but I knew this was where the community memorial would be. This is an end-of-an-era moment: the community has lost a giant who can never be replaced. I had seen @Retro Rogue 's Facebook post in the Atari Museum group, and immediately spread the news at a few of my Internet hangouts public and private - what a shock. I first met Curt in passing at PhillyClassic 5, I believe. I've been Pennsylvania-based for quite some time and visited PhillyClassic twice I think, and then the event that followed at the same location, VGXpo (aka VGExpo aka Vintage Gaming Expo) (there's the event name you were looking for, @mstulir ... I think the showrunner's name was Ed Fleming? It was more mass-market and not as niche, I never loved it as much as I had PhillyClassic...) 2008 and 2009. At one or more (maybe all) of those visits, Curt was there, running a table or giving a panel or just there to socialize, tho sadly neither of us had much knowledge of each other in the retro gaming community. I remember remarking at my first PhillyClassic to no one in particular how odd it was for me to see these Atari prototypes all in one place, and it blew my mind... I know I took photos of the amazing Atari booth, and Curt's enthusiasm was infectious... but unfortunately my photos from PhillyClassic have been lost over the years. But I don't recall chatting more with Curt - my real passion was for coinop, not console, and I mostly ended up hanging out around the Videotopia exhibit, playing games like Major Havoc and chatting @Videotopia and Jeff's ears off whenever they came within earshot. With my being only a couple hours' drive from Philly, I deeply regret that I never got to know Curt better than I did, and I wish I had more stories to share. It sounds like he was a fantastic guy. Around 2014 I started attempting to socialize within the retro community in person more often - with plans to drop by VCF East and maybe present a booth or at a panel, and hoped to reunite with him and others there, but it's been like 5 years straight for me where schedule conflicts kept arising and resources were short and I was never able to make it happen. And while I should be able to attend the next time a large in-person gathering can happen, it won't have Curt. It makes me think about how short life is. I will try harder next time - Curt's passing is a bit of an inspiration to do this while you still can... I can safely say that several of us in MAMEdev (and formerly MESSdev) have had valuable and fruitful past interactions and conversations with Curt over the years to fill in gaps in our information and knowledge, in the hopes of properly preserving some Atari rarities through MAME's (and formerly MESS's) emulation of the hardware and attempts at preserving the history. His depth and breadth of knowledge of the history was astounding, making him a key person to talk to more often than not. Visits to his website were frequent enough as certain emulations were coming together back in the day. His leaving us unexpectedly has sadly left a few of those conversations unfinished. Hats off to a retro community champion. I've donated to the GoFundMe for Madison's education, please consider doing the same if you have the resources.

Hey, my name in lights. I intend to license the TI ROMs we can obtain permission for and host them at mamedev.org/roms free for personal use - and would appreciate mizapf's help when he can . Because we can do that sort of thing, when there's permission at least. Unfortunately I am a very busy guy and I'm not sure when I'll get around to it. I would be interested in hearing if iKarith made any progress finding out if Herb Foster is still with the company or has found his current replacement, though. *waves to all the familiar faces here*

As it turned out, "Star Fighter" (Potomac Mortgage Company) DID see release apparently, though the cabinet art looks quite different from the flyer. http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,149604.msg1562128.html#msg1562128 As "pbj" said, the photos ended up on the wrong KLOV entry. For his side-art / control panet / PCB photos, see the following KLOV entry for Star Fighter (Ace Vending) where they are mistakenly linked (as of this post): http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9757 Also, wanted to add that all Leisure Time Electronics games (so far as we know) are dumped and in MAME: http://www.progettoemma.net/indice.php?fast=&ricerca=&textype=any&romset=&manufacturer=leisure+time&year= Of Potomac games, only Star Warriors is dumped and in MAME so far: http://www.progettoemma.net/indice.php?manu=1560

Excellent, I'll see about getting this fixed, erased or relocated at Arcade-History.com

(With reference to the ggdb.com reference by pwalters... FYI, arcade-history.com is probably the place to go these days. Hardly anything updates faster, with the exception of sites like Wikipedia. KLOV.com/arcade-museum.com tends towards being inaccurate and outdated in comparison, and ggdb.com has few vastly populated entries...) BTW, pwalters, there's a weird comment in the Arcade-History.com entry for Tugboat: http://www.arcade-history.com/?n=tugboat&page=detail&id=2987 Sounds like this can be debunked, or at the very least, disconnected from the Tugboat (arcade) entry, no? You programmed Tugboat yourself, and Atari has nothing to do with Enter-Tech. But it's one of those claims for game "concepts", so IDK... I'm not sure what Tugboat-like game was made by Atari...

Hey CRV, astrp3, how's it going. (Yes, CRV, I finally located this thread. ) That USENET post actually comes from a prankster on KLOV: http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=1361 I've pointed him to this thread but I doubt he'll respond, hehe... pwalters, great info, thanks for responding. - Stiletto - http://www.mamedev.org | http://mamedev.emulab.it/undumped - http://www.vogons.org | http://twitter.com/stilett0_

Some concept art for Earth Friend has shown up today, scanned from Bill Kurtz's Encyclopedia of Arcade Video Games. http://allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com/2015/03/annotated-atari-depositions-part-5.html

Ah, Visicom, so I can't blame fauxscot. Well, as he frequently comes to me for help ID'ing chips, Guru's challenge to me in 2008 was: On Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:06:02 +0800, "Guru" said: > I need info / datasheet on a chip > Toshiba TMM331AP > It's some sort of ROM, from that old Toshiba console that arrived > recently. > Did a quick search and nothing came up except part sellers. I'm sure > you'll have more luck :-) So he and I spitballed stuff back and forth about what it could be. He credits Dox, I don't remember him being involved but perhaps it was in another email conversation. But yeah, I eventually found some Japanese whitepaper on some science project or military hardware, using various derivatives of the chip name and Google techniques, and Yasu translated it (I don't remember Gridle's involvement?) which got us thinking about possibilities of what the ROM chip could be, and its capacity. I could find datasheets for nearly every other Toshiba TMM3xx chip, but not this one. Still, Guru worked out like 80% of the pinouts and did a test dump which looked okay to people armed with disassemblers. That was around December '08-January '09. Also immediately following then in December 2008 I found a snippet view in Google Books of some large electronics catalog that claimed the ROM chip was pin-compatible with AMI S6831. And then we acquired that datasheet, and it matched the pinouts, but not the capacity (and voltage? something like that...) I wouldn't let it go though - I was sure the actual Toshiba datasheet must exist in a databook that was as-of-yet unscanned. So I would occasionally worry that little search project until I found more information, pestering certain databook scanners to upload more Toshiba memory books of the era... I even ended up forgetting the snippet view/chip compatibility discovery and rediscovering it again a few times over the last few years. Anyhow, like any of Guru's attempts at dumping completely unknown/unremembered ROM chips, it was based on whiffs of clues of what it could be, tracing out circuitry on old circuitboards, and lots of educated guesses based on other chips with similar part numbers and his years of experience. Anyhow, that's how I remember it based on old emails. Perhaps Dox and Gridle were involved secretly, I can't remember. But a MAJOR pain in the ass because whatever databook the TMM331 is hiding in has not yet been scanned to PDF. Assuming it wasn't custom. But it doesn't seem to be, just undocumented and uncommon. If we'd had the actual datasheet, that would have saved months. On the other hand, actually creating a dumping rig that can be used repeatedly and that isn't educated guesses and much more reliably based on Electronics Engineering? That's alllll Charles.

If fauxscot's still reading this, I'd like to know why it's so damn hard these days to find an actual Toshiba datasheet for the TMM331 ROM chip. Must've checked every Toshiba MOS Memory databook: 1981, 1982, 1983, 1987, 1989, datasheet websites... pretty sure someone checked a 1980 book for me too. Not that it's needed these days thanks to Charles...

Greetings from the MAME/MESS collective. With regards to the licensing question: The developer of a given piece of code in MAME retains the full rights to re-license the code as he sees fit. As such, Wilbert Pol ('judge') giving permission for Stella to use the code is all the permission that should be necessary,though we're willing to assist Judge in making sure it can be relicensed. As far as any of us on the MAME/MESS team know, the current TIA code is pretty much exclusively by him. All non-global-change-related mods to tia.c are his dating back to SVN being introduced in 2007.

Well, I wouldn't say nothing, I'd say there's two mentions of the company at NewspaperArchive.com for June 24, 1977 and June 25, 1977 in the Northwest Arkanasas Times. Looks like a classified, but I can't tell more without registering. https://www.google.c....1c.qKn2q3R4gIE http://newspaperarch...7-06-24/page-14 http://newspaperarch...7-06-25/page-11 (Hi Dan!)