GradualGames

I've got a vader upstairs with a CRT for everything else, I just have the retron downstairs to enjoy a handful of classics with family and such. So yeah sounds like it may be worth sending in for a replacement.

Ugh, what were the new issues?? I really only care about a handful of games, like Asteroids, Missile Command, Enduro, and then I'd love to be able to play Super Breakout and Warlords.

Just making sure this wasn't a typo.... you're saying replacing the retron 77 DID fix the paddle issue?

Has anyone else tried to use paddles with the Retron 77? I have a pair of clean paddles which have zero jitter on my vader. On the Retron 77, they have jitter. I've tried other sets of paddles with the same result. The support team tells me the console needs to be replaced--- I'm not buying it. I just think they never engineered the hardware properly to work with paddles. Anyone else experience jitter with paddles on retron 77 or are some of you getting buttery smooth operation? If anyone is getting smooth play I might just send it back to hyperkin for a replacement as they suggested....

I never thought I'd hear Iron Maiden on the Atari 2600. Now I have. I love that the 2600 always sounds out of tune, I find it very charming. Also that's a very cool visual effect. Do you do it by making the playfield black, light sprite yellow, then making the sprites go behind the background? (I'm new to 2600 programming, but have been doing NES for 10 years so I know 6502 and have a passing familiarity with 2600, but have not made anything significant yet)

For the life of me I can't figure out how to play Boulder Dash. All that happens is boulders fall on my head and die. Sometimes they fall on the ground and suddenly 9 diamonds appear. I know I'm supposed to get those diamonds, but I only see them after I die. What am I missing? Haha

Oh my goodness no, I don't want to reinvent the wheel. If I did, I'd join some retro computing forum and learn to code games in assembly language or something! I jest, I jest. I am devouring these tutorials, fear not.

Thanks all, very encouraging to have your thoughts and help. Okie dokie, now I have my own 2LK working with two objects. Likely nowhere near optimal if I wanted make any sort of game yet perhaps, no idea, but I'm happy I think I have the principle basically down. Not using VDEL yet to line them up. ;Initialize kernel. ldy #96 ;Kernel loop scan_loop: lda player_buffer ;3 ;Wait for beginning of next scanline. sta WSYNC ;3 sta GRP0 ;3 lda #0 ;2 sta player_buffer ;3 ;If we reach the bottom of the player, start ;a counter for its height. cpy player_y ;3 bne :+ ;2/3/4 lda #PLAYER_HEIGHT ;2 sta player_line ;3 ;10 : ;If the player scanline counter is nonzero, enable ;player 0 and decrement the counter. ldx player_line ;3 beq :+ ;2/3/4 lda BigHeadGraphic-1,x ;4/5 sta player_buffer ;3 dec player_line ;6 ;18 : lda missile_buffer ;3 sta WSYNC sta ENAM0 ;3 ;15 lda #0 sta missile_buffer ;3 ;8 ;If we reach the bottom of the missile, start ;a counter for its height. cpy missile_y ;3 bne :+ ;2/3/4 lda #MISSILE_HEIGHT ;2 sta missile_line ;3 ;10 : ldx missile_line ;3 beq :+ ;2/3/4 lda #2 ;2 sta missile_buffer ;3 dec missile_line ;6 ;16 : dey ;2 bne scan_loop ;2/3/4 ;4

Yeah one problem I discovered was I was starting my scanline counter at 191, and so when I added the second dey in there, it skipped from 1 to -1, never reaching zero so it stayed in an infinite loop, haha! I now at least have a working 2LK with ONE object on the screen,

This is a great tutorial, thanks for putting these together. I think I understand the gist of the 2LK technique now. However, I am slightly thrown off by something. Why is it that the top of the loop is a "continuation of line 2" yet precalculates line 1? Is it possible to reorganize the 2LK to be less optimized for the sake of demonstration? I made a stab at a 2LK today (note: without directly copying the flow of your tutorial, for learning's sake. I wanted to know: can I organize a 2LK in a less optimal but easier to understand way or not?), but it really doesn't behave the way I'd expect. I do see that my missile and player are offset by one scanline (which I further understand is why the VDEL registers are there, to enable this 2LK technique), but I'm getting rapid flickering. It's so rapid I can barely tell its there, but it changes the color from red to a darker red, almost brown. ;Initialize kernel. ldy #191 ;Kernel loop scan_loop: ;Wait for beginning of next scanline. sta WSYNC ;3 lda player_buffer ;3 sta GRP0 ;3 lda #0 ;2 sta player_buffer ;3 ;If we reach the bottom of the missile, start ;a counter for its height. cpy missile_y ;3 bne :+ ;2/3/4 lda #MISSILE_HEIGHT ;2 sta missile_line ;3 ;10 : ldx missile_line ;3 beq :+ ;2/3/4 lda #2 ;2 sta missile_buffer ;3 dec missile_line ;6 ;16 : sta WSYNC lda missile_buffer ;3 sta ENAM0 ;3 ;15 lda #0 sta missile_buffer ;3 ;8 ;If we reach the bottom of the player, start ;a counter for its height. cpy player_y ;3 bne :+ ;2/3/4 lda #PLAYER_HEIGHT ;2 sta player_line ;3 ;10 : ;If the player scanline counter is nonzero, enable ;player 0 and decrement the counter. ldx player_line ;3 beq :+ ;2/3/4 lda BigHeadGraphic-1,x ;4/5 sta player_buffer ;3 dec player_line ;6 ;18 : dey ;2 bne scan_loop ;2/3/4 ;4

This is so cute! Very inspiring. Found it from SpiceWare's 2 Line Kernel tutorial. How did you get the sound to sound so nice? Haha

Well hello sir! I was wondering when I'd bump into you here! I thought I read somewhere a lot of games use 2 scanlines at a time to be able to position more objects. Perhaps that's what I need to do? Seems rather nutty to run out of cycles after positioning just TWO things, haha.

Above post edited to reflect my current problem.

Whenever player 0 is right around the same scanline as missile 0, it nudges the missile up or down, but I don't know why. Maybe there's no way around this? I store the previous scanline's buffer for both missile 0 and player 0 right as a scanline starts; I would think those few instructions would fit in hblank? Here's my kernal (ca65 syntax): scan_loop: ;Wait for beginning of next scanline. sta WSYNC lda player_buffer sta GRP0 lda missile_buffer sta ENAM0 ;If we reach the bottom of the player, start ;a counter for its height. cpy player_y bne :+ lda #PLAYER_HEIGHT sta player_line : ;If we reach the bottom of the player, start ;a counter for its height. cpy missile_y bne :+ lda #MISSILE_HEIGHT sta missile_line : lda #0 sta player_buffer sta missile_buffer ;If the player scanline counter is nonzero, enable ;player 0 and decrement the counter. ldx player_line beq :+ lda BigHeadGraphic-1,x sta player_buffer dec player_line : ldx missile_line beq :+ lda #2 sta missile_buffer dec missile_line : dey bne scan_loop

I've got a Sony Trinitron which is just a gorgeous piece of retro gaming hardware. Playing systems with s-video on it is to die for. sadly however, the s-video port on it appears to be shorting out plugged in to my rgb modded nes (it has an s-video port as well). I made sure to test the same modded nes on the s-video port on my framemeister, no issue, same cable. So I'm fairly certain at this point the s-video port on this television is faulty. I'm planning to finally learn to solder so I'm wondering if I were to open up this TV if: -I will die from discharge of large capacitors -How could I troubleshoot any issues with the s-video port -Is this even worth bothering with or should I sell this TV as-is with s-video flaw and buy a refurbished one

I'm really new to soldering. My goals are: -Solder contacts from a new atari joystick cable to a new joystick pcb -Solder a broken wire inside a paddle controller -Remove and replace a difficulty switch -possible other mods What do I need besides just the soldering iron, wire, and wick? Or is a pump better? Do I need any sort of clamps or anything to make holding a circuit board easier? I did a tiny bit of soldering when I was 13 and totally destroyed what I was working on. Now that I'm 34, maybe I'll be more careful.

Aha! That's it. The left difficulty switch appears to be faulty. If I hold it a certain way it seems to settle down. Is that something that can be replaced or fixed/cleaned fairly easily? This topic maybe doesn't belong in here, doesn't appear to actually be relevant to the harmony cartridge as I erroneously first guessed.

I've been messing around with the Atari 2600 101 tutorial, and have been commenting and rearranging the program to fit my coding style and to understand it a little better. One thing I noticed was that the standard: sta WSYNC sta HMOVE which is done to make all the objects move by their current increment register, can be done WITHIN the vblank period. When it's NOT in the vblank period, you get a little black horizontal line somewhere on the screen. Thus I'm inclined to believe putting this command within vblank is the best place to do it. Is that correct?

NM, I see SPG says: "WSYNC (wait for sync) This address halts microporcessor by clearing RDY latch to zero. RDY is set true again by the leading edge of horizontal blank." That's actually kinda neat.

When I do a sta WSYNC, does this cause the TIA to actually pause CPU execution until the beginning of a scanline...?

I just got my Harmony cartridge in the mail and tried to load Space Invaders. Works fine, but the main player gun changes width randomly. In the Stella emulator, it remains the same width as expected. I think I may have seen this happen on another cartridge, in Super Breakout, though, randomly changing the width of the paddle even when it isn't supposed to. Has anyone seen anything like this happen? Is it more likely to be the harmony cartridge or maybe a dirty contact on the cartridge port, or even something starting to go bad in the TIA chip?

Thanks for the assurances above, the power supply arrived and seems to be working fine. I think it may have cleaned up a little noise in the tv signal. Though I'm not really sure, as it still gets some noise. I have a ferrite core on the way for the rf cable to see if that improves the signal at all. Depending on the time of day it seems better or worse so that really seems like rf noise...... I actually just placed an order for six of Best Electronics cx-40 gold replacement pcbs. From the looks of it, installing these should be pretty simple and involve no soldering at all, just slip the little wire clips off the old board and slip them onto the new board?

I noticed that Super Breakout has different sounding timbre in the sfx each time you reset the game. I'm curious as to whether that was by design by the developers or not. The Stella emulator exhibits the same behavior. I'm guessing there are sound registers that are left in an uninitialized or noisy state between resets or something like that? So whatever value is there is what it will sound like? It's actually kind of fun it behaves that way, makes it a little different every time, haha.

I have a game concept in mind (which I will NOT attempt as my first game, don't worry. Experienced coder here. Gonna do lots of small things first so I know my way around this system I UNDERSTAND THAT IT IS HARD.) which involves this image: Obviously, this 320x200 resolution mode (it's from an old DOS program) is dramatically higher than what the 2600 can output. What I want to know is, is it at all possible to create anything remotely like this shape, in the playfield? I understand from the SPG that the playfield basically only occupies half of the screen, and you can either duplicate or reflect it. So I'm guessing if this is at all possible, it may have to become perfectly symmetrical, or employ some trickery which I probably won't have any idea how to do til I've been working with the system for quite a while. I'd just be interested in hearing experienced 2600 homebrewers' thoughts on whether creating a lower-res version of the above image in a 2600 game is feasible.

I'm finding the Atari 2600 101 tutorial: http://atariage.com/2600/programming/2600_101/to be a good enough starting point, thanks folks! Looks as though dasm is pretty much the standard assembler. I actually don't think the fancy bells and whistles of ca65 would even benefit me much with the Atari 2600. This system makes me feel downright spoiled as an NES developer. Like, I look at the Atari 2600 then I move to NES and I'm like: