Magic Knight
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Posts posted by Magic Knight
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19 hours ago, drpeter said:
Hello @Magic Knight, as a fellow UK resident, where do you source your Chinese boards from for under £5? Looking to make up some of these for a project I have in mind...
I use PCB Way in China. They are brill for recognizing price sensitive prototype orders vs comercial orders.
They charge $5 (yes dollars) for 10 boards (plus postage). Above this then they see this as commercial and price goes up a little (but not heavy like uk prices).
Board colour choices are red, blue green, yellow white or black. Purple or Matt versions are more expensive as less demand.
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18 hours ago, Stechmann said:
two player mode please please pleeeease!!!
post is 10 years old - Wow - talk about a "Blast' From the past
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7 hours ago, MrFish said:
Care to name something specific? Are you referring to a commercial game that was released during the Atari's production lifespan or something that was more recently produced, or even some title that was converted from some other format (disk, cassette) to run on a cartridge?
The standard for cartridge games by Atari and other major publishers (and I suppose minor publishers too) was that the game cartridge would reload.
If it's not on cartridge, then I guess results might vary more; if it's a disk game (or an executable that originally came on a disk), it would make sense that it might attempt to boot the disk to restart the game (although that would obviously be much slower than a cartridge restarting).
Sorry i should have been more specific - Games in General - Often if you mess up on something whilst playing and want to start it may take a ponderous time to lose lives, or in the case of a sports/timing games can take forever.
or even accidental pressing of reset instead of option. (resulting in a reload - tapes taking 20 min on some games made this painful).
With loading taking seconds with SD and multi-carts these days its not a biggie but back in the day with tape players to depend on, it made a big difference on occasion.
2 hours ago, Rybags said:It does go against the grain a bit. On 2600 Reset starts a game.
But with computing in general, Reset will generally mean at the least a warmstart.
In the modern day it's sometimes desirable anyway to get a coldstart - the XL OS has the magic numbers which some software overwrote which would force a codestart when you press Reset, so it can sometimes just be inadvertantly using memory which was originally spare but later allocated.
Yes, a warm start would sum up what i think (most) games would benefit from. Can understand non games having their own needs on whether this is required.
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Interesting to know if it would be easy enough to code back in the day, so it stays in memory?
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This question has had me pondering for a while now,
After loading a particular game on a 'Vanilla' Atari when you press RESET it sometimes restarts the game and sometimes its lost from memory and tries to look for a drive.
Is there any reason why some games are programmed to have the game still in memory and others are lost if RESET is pressed. (or certain types have no choice in the matter?)
Sorry if this has been asked before, tried searching but couldn't see mention of it.
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1 hour ago, karri said:
The whole pcb in KiCad format is there. You can plot the gerbers if you want. Or get pcb's from me.
Thanks 😃
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1 hour ago, karri said:
You will not be able to run any 7800 games on that cart. It lacks the 7800 signals.
The resistor is likely 10k pullup for the switch.
Are there gerber folder/files availalble for this?, I didnt spot them on Github
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Thanks for the info guys, I'll focus on 2600 titles for this PCB and look at the other for 7800.
I was thinking of a DC delay circuit for the over-quick startup inside a real 7800 to let the Pico catch up, if i implement this, ill share when tested.
Great support here and I thank you all for this!
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Im currently building this up and have noticed there is a difference on pcb revision from the pictures on the github and previous posts.
Could someone kindly let me know what resistor value R3 is on this build? (Its from the VBUS leg to the capacitor)
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33 minutes ago, karri said:
The cart is great for running some homebrews and most 2600 titles. For many titles you need an external powerbank. Some high speed titles makes the pico run very hot. The games may crash...
Thanks, i mainly game with 7800 stock titles, but good info to know for the higher end titles done more recently with the extra weight,
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1 hour ago, karri said:
The critical part is the amount of RAM. The flash is too slow for being run at 400MHz. Many homebrews won't fit in the 256k of RAM available.
Thanks, Ill heed advice and stick to the SC0915 type as recommended earlier in the posts, https://www.mouser.co.uk/ProductDetail/358-SC0915
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How important is the spec of the PICO board in that tthe fimware works with it? (Ram, memory etc).
The board below (from Alliexpress) is used on the A8PICO cart and i haven't had an issue in quality.
Would the one below also work with the 2600+ card project build?
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Now its gone! 😵 Cant get it at moment
Not showing up on Amazon searches either (only linkage from Google)
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On 1/27/2024 at 4:48 PM, Fred_M said:
The autorun is a standalone firmware and is not built in the normal firmware.
You can find the autorun firmware here:
Hi, is it potentially possible to do this with XEX files? Looks like currently it's only CAR or Roms that can be Autorun.(format)
Would love to see a single XEX run off the single booter program.
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1 hour ago, DjayBee said:
You might also try A8PicoCarts.
Somebody has written an autostarter which does not bring up the usual selection menu but starts a predefined file from the Pico's flash memory.
Alas I tried this with several XEX files and just black screen. Anything with CAR was no problem.
I too would like XEX files to autorun but they only seem to work with the menu based software. I guess a fix could be done as clearly it's capable of XEX.
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7 hours ago, mimo said:
Crazy but 7 hours later, it's now up to £63.92
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It occured to me that they may be competing with the other platforms of a similar vein for price.
For example, the Amiga counterpart is well tempting @ £84
Just guessing but could well be a Commodore/ATARI price war happening here (again).
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2600+ prices on Amazon UK now looking more like the stock exchange!
Might go down again soon :0)
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27 minutes ago, karri said:
You can convert a78 or bin files to uf2. For a78 files the script gets the information from the header how to emulate the cart. For bin you need to find out the details by yourself
Thanks, a78 works best for me.
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For the 7800 rom files, can .A78 format be used or does it have to be bin?
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Great to see it reduced on Amazon UK.
Now at the (slightly more affordable) price of £91.10 🙂
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Thanks, makes sense.
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12 minutes ago, ascrnet said:
Lack of RAM, the Raspberry Pi Pico includes 256KB of RAM. 😉
There are ways to automate it, but it would not be a simple cartridge to put together and the cost would go up.Thanks for the quick answer, i'm bit confused, i always thought of the PICO as a storage device (16mb of flash bit etc) that the ATARI just loads in to it own ram?
Am i right in that the PICO needs to populate the ram storage with the file as part of its transfer/call-up of the file (so for example a 512k file has to go through the PICO'S ram prior?
or somehting like that?
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First of all - New to this and i think this project and development has been excellent. Kudos to Electrotrains for this!
Ive made a few units with 3D printed shells(and i only need one). Being less than a couple of quid from Ali for the Pico boards and PCB's being less than a fiver from China makes this probably the best bang-for-buck ive seen for A8 modding.
Ive a couple of questions
1. Files are only permissable up 128k, is there a way to go above this? (Space harrier and larger files im thinking of...)
2. How is development for the 2600 comming along? (my own wish would be the 7800 version ultimately myself - being a fanboy of this model also ).
Great work also from all others on this thread who contribute to the development of this also
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Project to make Mastertronic's "Colony" work
in Atari 5200 / 8-bit Programming
Posted · Edited by Magic Knight
Wow! Only noticed this thread resurfacing last week. As a 'campaigner' of this project im a little disappointment that i never kept up on developments and late in checking this out.
Anyway - a big thank you to @Wrathchild and @jindroush for the work put into this.
I glad to say that the remote droid is up and running and has no random rock generation going on. (although he is completely mad and goes on a rampage with no agenda! 😃)
Ive play tested around 10 hours worth and its definitely a playable version that's now available - well done guys!
Now that the worst is fixed, its clear that the developer(s) had other issues during programming. The bugs left are don't spoil things too much but ive listed what ive noticed:
1. Some of the fence storage facilities state that you have 0 in stock but if you pick up fences the real inventory appears when counting. (it still keeps stock of what you really have but sometimes shows 0 on screen)
2. Sometimes if you pick up seeds from a drop off and go to the seed store and click drop mushrooms off - you get several thousand credits instead (nice to have as its a killer in normal play to get any build up.)
3. Occasionally the game will just freeze up for no reason (luckily i play this in Altirra so i save periodically).
4. Remote droid is known to just vanish out off the game with no reason (not often but hapoens) new droid needed on next shipment.
Other than that its a enjoyable spinning plate/management game that keeps you interested.
(20k - would take me weeks to get that in a normal game)