cschell

I've never had much luck ebaying Cuttle Carts. Seems that when I do it, they get like one bid, and I just end up paying ebay money. It is an option I've been considering though. What I should really do is declare them sold out, wait a month, and then put them on ebay under a different name. They fetch a really nice price that way. Chad (And no, I have never done that and have no plans to do so.)

It does support both 7800 and 2600 games. I'm all good on pizza pans now. Thanks, Chad

Ok, I'm terrible about sitting on product stock, and would like to move the remaining CC2s. So I'm curious what price would motivate people to buy them. Note that some of these prices are lower than I'm willing to go (and way below my cost), but I figured I'd list them anyway. Add $10.00 for shipping into your consideration. Chad

The switch sounds like a good way to go. I have had cases where the POKEY played sound on startup. It was most common after the POKEY had been playing sound before shutting off the system and restarting it. Chad

Isn't the lack of reset a potential problem with your internal POKEY boards? What if they came up in a state where they were playing a sound? If one was playing a game that wasn't aware of your POKEYs the sound would never get shut off. Chad

Cuttle Cart 2 Labor Day Sale - 15% Off http://www.schells.com/cc2.shtml Sale ends 9:00 MST Sept 5, 2005 Limit 1 Cuttle Cart 2 per household at sale price. Quantities Limited. Offer good while supplies last. Not valid with any other offer. Chad

Sorry, didn't see that option. This must have changed while up-grading? It got reset to the default of "No" when the NVRAM was reset after upgrading to OS ver 2. Chad

I have updated the W32 Menu Converter to simply take XXXXXXXX.TXT and create XXXXXXXX.CC2 in the same directory as the original file. It's up to the user to ensure that the original name is less than 8 characters. New utility is available on the CC2 updates page at schells.com Chad

Ok, Here's version 2.01. It clears the menu when loading a new one, so smaller ones will no longer leave garbage lying around. Also changed it so that the menu bar will wrap from top to bottom / bottom to top when scrolling through a menu smaller than one screen. Chad CC2OSV201.zip

Hi, thanks for reminding me about the NVRAM issues. Here's an important note I forgot: When upgrading to OS Ver 2.00, the NVRAM format has changed. Therefore the first time you start after upgrading it will post the NVRAM warning and reset everything to the default values. Don't worry about it, just ignore it. However, if you have custom colors you may want to write them down before you upgrade as the colors will get reset to the defaults. Very sorry I forgot to put that in the notes. As for the garbage, I didn't try a menu smalller than one screen. I'm guessing it's as simple as needing to clear the menu before I redraw it. Looks like it's time for 2.01. Chad

Hi everyone, I've put together CC2 OS Ver 2.00 today. (You can think of it as a treat for all of those who didn't make it to one of the gaming conventions this weekend. ) It rolls in the improved speed performance of the earlier beta that I think 2 people actually used. But the big change is that it now allow multiple menus. Here's the blurb I wrote to describe it. Update notes for Version 2.00 of Cuttle Cart 2 OS. Minor Update: Slight speed improvement for MMC access over version 1.01. Major Update: Multiple Menus! The CC2 Menu system now supports multiple menu files, as opposed to the single flat menu of the previous system. Now all menus can contain other menus. Details: All menus follow the same format as the original MENU.TXT/MENU.CC2 files. They must be placed in the root directory of the MMC. They must have the file extension ".CC2". Otherwise they can be named whatever you want, but MENU.CC2 is reserved as the default menu. (BOOTROM.CC2 and EMGBOOT.CC2 also have special meanings and should not be used for menus.) After creating a new "submenu", to load it create an entry in your current menu whose BANKING file is "MENU " (four spaces at the end.) This tells the CC2 that this entry isn't a game, but another menu. When you select the "submenu" and press the button or reset, the "submenu" will be loaded and replace the current menu. Why is "submenu" in quotes you ask? Because they aren't really submenus, but rather alternate menus. There is no structure to how the menus connect to one another. All menus must contain menu entries for any menu you want to go to. Confused? Here's any example: You start the CC2 and it loads the default "MENU.CC2" file. MENU.CC2 contains the entry (shown here in MENU.TXT format) New Menu NEWMENU MENU IGNORE Parsing that out, the entries are: Display Name: "New Menu" File Name: "NEWMENU" Banking: "MENU" Startup: Any non-blank value <= 8 characters in length Just like a game entry. When "New Menu" is selected, the CC2 sees that the banking entry is "MENU ", and attempts to load the file "NEWMENU.CC2" from the root directory of the MMC. If it finds it, the new menu becomes the active menu, and the old menu is forgotten. If it doesn't find it, the old menu remains in place and an error message is printed on the screen. Now if you want to be able to go back to MENU.CC2 from NEWMENU.CC2, you have to have the following entry somewhere in NEWMENU.CC2 Root Menu MENU MENU IGNORE Selecting this line would tell the CC2 to reload MENU.CC2 in place of NEWMENU.CC2. (By the way, you don't have to make the display entry Root Menu, you can call it whatever you want as long as it's legal for a standard menu entry.) If you forget to add a line like the one above, you will not be able to get back to the original MENU.CC2 file. (At least not through the menu system.) Menus can link to as many other menus as you want. (Subject to the limit of 512 (? or 256, I forget) files allowed in a root directory on a FAT file system.) Menus can even link to themselves. (When a new menu is loaded, it always starts at the top of the menu. A menu entry linking a menu to itself could be used as a shortcut to automatically jump back to the top of menu. Cool eh?) Some more Details: If you have "Remember Last Menu Position" set to yes in the utilities screen, the CC2 will attempt to load the last opened menu, and move to the last game in that menu that was loaded or manual that was read. If nothing was loaded from the last menu, it will go to the start of that menu. If it can't find the last menu loaded, it will fall back to loading the default MENU.CC2 file. This is one way to get back to it if you forget to make an entry. (The other way is to edit the active menu to include the link, you can add entries to any menu just like adding them to MENU.CC2.) If you have "Remember Last Menu Position" set to no, the CC2 will always start at the top of MENU.CC2 regardless of what other menu was last active. The new multiple menus option has no effect on anything else. All games are still stored in the GAMES directory, and all manuals in the MANUALS directory. You can have as many entries point to a game as you want. You still need only one copy of that game and manual. I've had requests for something along these lines for a while now, so I hope people enjoy it. It was quite the overhaul to make this work. But my testing shows everything to be ok. Of course bugs might crop up when more people start to use it. (At worst case the emergency boot is alway there to let you flash back to an older version.) I do not intend to provide new PC menu tools to make taking advantage of this easy. That's just not my strong suit. Fortunately it looks like Mot's program is pretty close, and there's always editing of .txt files and passing them through the menu converter. It requires updates to the HSC, SC, and 3E3F512K startup files. Those are included in the zip. The new versions work only with OS Ver 2.00. If you don't know how to upgrade the OS on the CC2, please read the manual. I've done my best to explain it there. (It's really easy.) Edit: See lower post for version 2.01 which fixes the clear screen bug. Enjoy, Chad

Hi everyone, I threw this together a while back on request, but don't think anything every actually got done with it. (Probably didn't help that I was very slow getting it done.) Anyway, it's a version of the 78SCLOW banking file that has the serial port active. It was requested for debugging purposes. I figure some of the developers out there may be interested. Details on the serial port are in the tech docs in the zip file. Look for the section that starts like this: Serial Port: The FPGA in OS mode emulates an RS-232 serial port. It provides a 16 byte circular RX buffer and a 1 byte TX Buffer (in addition to the shift register of data currently being transmitted). Please note that this is essentially UNTESTED. I loaded it onto the cart and Aces of Aces ran, but I didn't try the serial port at all. So if anyone is interested, enjoy. Let me know if it works for you. Chad 78scser.zip

The only tip I would give is that you may need to make the tabs for holding it in place in the cartridge a little deeper. Two reasons. There is a lot of variance inside the cart shells, and the board shops will round the inside corner when they mill the outline, which effectively reduces the size of the notch. Then you have to hand file the boards to make it fit. It might be a good idea to see if you can push the passive components in a little at these notches as well, just to avoid clearance issues. Of course this is just from glancing at the depth of the notches. They may already be deep enough. Chad

You have to make sure the WE is only active during the portion of the bus cycle during which addresses are stable, otherwise you can accidentally write to the wrong address, violate setup and hold times, etc. This is true for memory systems in general, not just the 7800. I said "remember" because I've forgotten to add the clock in more than once when throwing together some programmable logic. Just trying to be helpful. Chad

Silly question, but you did remember to combine both the clk line and the r/w line for the ~we line on the RAM right? Chad

You could always read the manual itself. It's available on this page: http://www.schells.com/cc2utils/cc2files.shtml Chad

Well, it seems to work you, me, and Mitch. Perhaps I should release it as Version 1.10. I suppose I should test Dev mode a little more first. Chad

Cool. Glad to hear that you notice the difference. If you get a chance and have the games please give some HSC and Supercharger games (especially multiload) a chance to make sure they still work ok. They require special loading steps. Thanks, Chad

So no one's brave enough, or no one cares about a speed increase? Just curious, Chad

Ok, I finally decided to put POKEYs into my own CC2s, and while I had all the equipment out I decided to pull a few extras. So starting now, the next 10 Cuttle Cart 2's will come with a free POKEY sound chip already installed. Chad

This problem turned out to be a faulty MMC. In fact it was an RS-MMC. I couldn't read it reliably in any of my flash readers (they choked even worse than the CC2). So hopefully it was a bad unit and not an indication that RS-MMCs aren't really backwards compatble. Anyway, with a new MMC everything works fine. I know rxd already posted this in the "Chad Schell and the CC2! (AWESOME!)" thread, but I just wanted to follow up on it in this thread as well. So does anyone out there use RS-MMCs in their MMC based devices? How about in the CC2? Chad

Hi everyone, I've decided to make a beta version of the CC2 OS available to those brave enough to try it. Seems to work fine for me and Mitch. If you're timid with computers or electronics I strongly suggest letting others kick the tires first. Anyway, it's a very minor upgrade. All it does is improve the speed of MMC loading times. So large games like Alien Brigade and the 3E demos should now load in about half the time they previously loaded. The other benefit is that scrolling is faster near the end of large menus, so speed is more uniform whether you're at the start or the end of the menu. After the update if you go to the utilties menu the title bar should read version "FAST". Dev mode should read version FAST as well, although there are no speed improvements in dev mode. Here's the link to the zip file with the new OS. http://www.schells.com/cc2utils/CC2BETAOS_FAST.zip To install it copy the BOOTROM.CC2 file to the root directory of your MMC (be sure to select eject before removing your MMC from the computer on Windows operating systems), put the MMC in the CC2, go to utilities, then select "Update Boot ROM" and follow the onscreen instructions. If you give it a try let me and/or the world know how it goes. Thanks, Chad

Cools. Thanks for the positive review. 100% wow! Chad

Thanks for the kind words guys. Much appreciated. Of course I couldn't let someone go the weekend without Atari without at least giving it a shot to get them up and running. Happy gaming, Chad

Good catch on the A78 files Mitch. We should rename this thread to cc2 problems - oops don't use A78 files. Happens often enough it should have occurred to me. Chad