jaybird3rd

I ordered one, too. There was an issue with their shopping cart software (it imported information from the previous buyer by mistake), but they responded to my report very quickly and fixed it.

I've used my CC3 with both models and have had no problems. The sound issues you mention are due to changes that were made in the Intellivision II (I don't recall the details); the CC3 won't "fix" them, so those games will still have the same problems.

You're awesome! Thanks very much! I've got to finish the final menu software so people will get to see what the finished product will look like! I just need to stop playing BurgerTime testing the cartridge hardware long enough to finally get it done ...

That would be my guess also. There are a few other interesting bugs in the game, too, which we'll be documenting in the multi-cart's "trivia" section. By the way, the-topdog posted another YouTube video of the multi-cart in action, which includes some footage of the "fixed" version of BurgerTime (without the extra characters).

I don't have a picture handy, but I'll try to take one shortly. I haven't looked closely enough to determine exactly why it's happening, but the extra characters seem to be a result of a problem with the routines that set the screen colors. The Aquarius graphics memory is divided into two adjacent parts: there's a 1024-byte matrix for the characters on the screen, and there's another 1024-byte matrix for the colors for each character. To put a character on the screen, you would simply write a character code (0 to 255) in the right location in the character matrix, and you would write a color code into the corresponding location in the color matrix to set its foreground and background color. This is why each character on the Aquarius display could be a different color, with no limit on the number of colors per line. In addition, the character and color in the very first cell (in the upper-left corner of the screen) are also used to fill the screen border. The BurgerTime screen background is black on dark gray, which on the Aquarius is color code 15. This means that every byte in the color matrix has to be filled with the number 15, including the first one, to change both the screen color and the border color. The extra characters in the screen border are this character (one of the running man "walk cycle" characters) ... ... which happens to be character code 15. I don't know whether the "fill" routine isn't checking its boundaries properly or whether the number 15 is simply being written to the wrong part of the graphics memory, but this character code is somehow being deposited into the first cell in the character matrix, which is why it fills the border. Because it happens to have the same code as the background color, I'm almost positive this was simply a programming error that wasn't fixed. So, I went ahead and fixed it.

Based on the limited testing I've done so far, I think the effect will still be acceptable even through composite video, although it will probably be more noticeable through S-Video. The video upgrade, by the way, is the main reason I wanted to get rid of those extra characters in the screen border: they may not be very noticeable through an RF modulator, but they'll stand out more prominently when seen through upgraded video. The version of BurgerTime in the multi-cart will replace those characters with a solid border. I tried making the border the same color as the game background, but I got a very strange artifacting effect between them along the left edge, almost like a hovering green line, so I had to stick with the dark grey. I plan to include the original version as well, so anyone interested in seeing what that looked like will have that option. I think that Mattel's artists had gotten pretty good at using color bleed effects to create the illusion of more colors than they were actually able to use, and BurgerTime may be another example of this. On the Intellivision, for example, they would place red and blue patches of color next to each other, which created a thin line of purple between them. All of these effects inevitably suffer when you view them on something other than a CRT television connected through an RF modulator. That's one reason why real video game purists keep old televisions around, so they can view the games the way they were intended to be viewed. I think it's inevitable that this will become more rare with the passage of time, as the old TVs break down and as people switch to more convenient 21st-century alternatives (such as LCD TVs).

I actually looked into this myself, because it was an interesting "trick," and it turns out that it's a very clever use of the way adjacent colors tend to "bleed" together on conventional televisions, especially through an RF modulator. While I was looking around in the program code to get rid of the extraneous characters in the screen border, I found the routine that paints the chef's hat, and it's just an ordinary white-on-orange character, so there's nothing unusual going on in the hardware. The hat is white, its background is orange, and the screen background is black (actually, it's dark gray for some reason, but it looks black on the real hardware because the two colors are so close in the Aquarius palette). Because the contour between the hat and its background isn't as prominent as the contour between the orange and the black, and because the white is brighter and tends to bleed over the orange, the undesirable thin orange line along both sides of the hat seems to disappear. I tested this by comparing the way the chef looks through different displays. The first of these pictures is a photograph which shows him through an ordinary television, and the second is on a Commodore 1702 monitor connected through a VCR: As you can see, there's a lot less "bleed" on the 1702, which reveals that the orange background is still there. That also explains why the orange stands out so prominently in emulation, which doesn't reproduce the bleeding effect. You can see the same effect if you take character number 18, a plain vertical bar that is the same width as the chef's hat, and paint it white on an orange background against a black screen: again, the orange seems to disappear if you view it through a regular TV. People really should check out your YouTube channel, by the way: it's a great way to see the Aquarius games in action on the real hardware, which does the games justice much more than running them through emulation. BurgerTime is one example of a game that doesn't look nearly as good in an emulator.

It was three chips, 4K each, but no two were alike. The cartridge board was set up to map the last ROM from $C000 to $DFFF, the lower 8K of the cartridge space. In the case of AD&D, the last ROM (labeled "C" in the picture) was only a 4K chip, so it was repeated at both $C000 and $D000: Other prototypes which needed the full 16K (such as Logo, pictured below) had an 8K ROM in that slot instead:

AD&D puzzled me at first, until I realized that it's only a 12K cartridge: the 4K ROM at $C000-$CFFF is mirrored at $D000-$DFFF. Once I put two copies of that ROM back-to-back inside the image file, the checksums matched.

I dumped the X10 Command Control cartridge from the collection that Ian Baronofsky loaned to me. It will be included in the multi-cart. I also got an AD&D proto, but I compared checksums and it was identical to the released version.

Yes! And there are (I think) two or three others that I didn't include in that prototype for lack of space, like the 1541 Extended BASIC ROM, so that isn't even the full lineup. There will also be a few little easter eggs that I think you'll all enjoy.

Thanks for making that video! You're the first person other than me to see it in action, so I'm glad it's working for you. Here is an embedded link to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0x7SjrPfPY In case anyone was having trouble making out the menu, here's a screenshot: I should point out that the board you see in the video is one of my very first prototypes, which I cut up a bit to test my revisions, so it's kind of ugly and beat up as a result; the newer boards that you'll all be getting will look sooo much nicer! The final menu will look nicer, too; the one above is really just a placeholder. Here's how the final menu will work: each cartridge on the menu will be mapped to a letter, so to choose a cartridge, you'll simply type the letter and then press RETURN to load it, or select it with the hand controller. If you already know the letter corresponding to the cartridge you want, just hold it down on powerup and the multi-cart will jump right to it, bypassing the menu completely. That idea came about by "accident" because of the way the temporary menu works, but it was such a nice timesaver that I decided to make it permanent. And, in case you missed the other thread, Erik has also arranged for the manufacture of a complete set of reproduction Aquarius keyboard and controller overlays to go with it!

I really don't think there is one, in today's world. I toyed with the idea of including the modem terminal software in the multi-cart, but I don't think I'm going to, mainly because it can never actually work without the modem hardware in the cartridge. I cut the QuickDisk-enabled version of Extended BASIC for the same reason. I'm going to put together a USB interface for linking the Aquarius to a modern computer (another one of my future projects), and that's about all the modem would have been useful for, except as a collector's item.

I'm sure that the-topdog and I will be working out a package deal, where you'll be able to get a set of overlays along with a cartridge and (while supplies last!) a cartridge shell. With all that, and with complete high-resolution scans of the original game manuals to refer to, I think this will give you about 90% of the experience of owning all of the real cartridges, at a fraction of the price.

It didn't ruin anything! It was a perfectly logical question, and I think it demonstrates that there was already a demand for them, which I'm sure is something the-topdog was concerned about. I think it's a great idea, and it's so exciting to see the momentum that's gathering around the good old Aquarius, of all things! First the multi-cart, then a complete set of manual scans, and now reproduction overlays! I'm especially pleased to see that it will now be possible for homebrew games to include their own custom overlays, which was something I was going to look into on my own anyway.

I'm sure it would work for personal use. Either that, or you could buy a box of those Avery full-sheet inkjet labels, print a high-resolution scan of an original overlay, cut out the keys with an X-ACTO knife, and stick it over top of an original set of Night Stalker overlays (which are the most common). One of the things I like about the Aquarius as a gaming computer, incidentally, is that its chicklet keyboard can accommodate interchangeable overlays for every key. That's something you couldn't have had with a full-stroke keyboard. I can understand why Mattel opted for the thick plastic sheets, too: they were probably fairly cheap to manufacture in large quantities, and I don't think thinner plastic film (like the Intellivision overlays) would have held up.

You'd have a very hard time getting good square cuts doing it by hand. My impression is that the original holes were punched out. I also think they used some form of screen printing to print the original overlays; I'm not sure regular inkjet printers would work very well on solid plastic sheets.

Aquarius overlays are tough to reproduce because, unlike Intellivision overlays, they aren't merely printed sheets of thin plastic. They're thick pieces with cutouts for the keys, which also have to be printed and cut to fit inside the keyboard and hand controllers. I'd love to see new overlays made, too. They are pictured in the Aquarius manual scans that I've been involved in making, so you'll at least be able to see them that way, but having real ones that you can use with the real hardware would be the perfect companion to the multi-cart project.

They must have been limited to 2K RAM chips at the time the RAM expansion modules were designed. The 16K module actually has eight of them in it, all surface-mounted chips, crammed onto (I believe) two circuit boards that were sandwiched together inside the cartridge. No wonder the thing was so expensive. That's probably also the reason why the few 32K modules that were made had to be so huge. Nowadays, of course, you can get a single 32K SRAM for under $2. Speaking of which, I've just finished building three 32K RAM expansion modules, which are brand new 4K modules that have been upgraded to a full 32K. I'm putting one on eBay, but if anyone here is interested in one of the other two, PM me and I'll give you the details. I'm offering them for $35 each (plus shipping) to help offset the costs of the multi-cart project. As for the project itself, I completed the hardware revisions yesterday and generated the final plots, so the board design is now locked. I'm just waiting on some contact information so I can send it off for quotes, so if all goes well, the boards will soon be in production! I'm also finishing up a screen editor to help me construct the manual pages and other static screens in the multi-cart software, and I should have some screenshots to share before the end of the week. So far, it's looking really good!

You'd still have the "dead" rubber dome switch in the middle. I'm sure it would work fine, but it would still feel different than a true arcade joystick. I'd actually like to come up with a solution to get rid of the dome switch altogether.

Some users reported having difficulty with the RSI joysticks (particularly with Robotron, as I recall) because the engagement zone for the diagonals is narrower than on a true eight-direction arcade joystick. On an eight-direction stick, the diagonals have their own switches, but in four-direction joysticks, you have to make contact with two directions simultaneously. This means that you have to hit the diagonals much more precisely, or that you have to rotate the joysticks a bit to "find" the diagonal. This website does a good job of explaining how arcade joysticks and joystick restrictors work. I don't recall having much of a problem with this, and the diagonals in the RSI sticks work fine for my purposes, but I was going to look into a replacement restrictor or some other modification to the RSI sticks to make the diagonals more responsive. I never actually started the other thread; I began working on my Aquarius multi-cart project around the same time, and that's kept me very busy ever since. As for the microswitch modification that I mentioned in my previous post: I did get a batch of the switches I linked to, and they're almost suitable for the RSI, but the button on the top of the switch is a little taller than the ones in the XBox controller. This means that the microswitch closes before the rubber dome switch, which can be confusing to people who don't know what's going on: it feels like the switch closed, but it didn't, because the rubber dome switch is the one that's actually connected to the 7800. I suppose I could wire up the microswitch instead, but I didn't try this. I'll revisit the project at some point, after I have the multi-cart finished.

I used to have one of these TS1000 clones, which was apparently marketed by several companies (usually as a "PC 8300" or some similar name): They don't turn up on eBay often, so when one appeared last week, I added it to my watch list. I was shocked to see that it ended this evening at nearly $230! eBay Auction -- Item Number: 390246102549 We actually had a huge box filled with them in the early 90s, from a surplus/secondhand computer clearance store where I worked at the time. I wish now that I had kept them, along with all the other old stuff at that store which would be worth a ton of money now (like stacks of DEC Rainbows and other rare classic machines). I also notice that the ZX80/ZX81 itself tends to go for good money. So anyway, this got me thinking about the market for ZX81 / Timex-Sinclair 1000 computers and clones. Does anyone here still use them, what do you use them for, and are they really worth this much nowadays?

The Aquarius/Intellivision controllers don't really bother me; I've gotten used to rotating the disc to move around corners, which is the key to playing four-direction games. Even so, I've got a project in mind which will allow some easy replacements for the stock Aquarius hand controllers, but that's in the future somewhat.

The hardest thing to get used to was the more coarse movements of the nasties, which comes from the fact that they're limited to one-character increments on the Aquarius. But once I learned new techniques for guiding them and grouping them together, I was able to work out a pattern that allowed me to drop every nasty on every layer of every burger. This, by the way, earns you a total of 66,550 points on the first screen if you also pick up every pepper bonus, including the last one that appears about a second before the end of the level. It's actually easier than coin-op BurgerTime in certain ways because the nasties are more likely to completely overlap each other, if you do it right. The most frustrating thing about the Aquarius version is the nine life and nine pepper limitation, since I can hit that limit fairly easily now, sometimes before I'm even done with the first screen.

That BurgerTime cartridge can be easily fixed with a replacement board. One of my new boards, or an old board retrofitted with an EPROM copy, would do the job just fine. The nice thing about Aquarius cartridges is that they open from the back, so you can swap the boards out without damaging the labels. Seeing this thread again reminds me of the "negative review" that I posted earlier of Aquarius BurgerTime (in Post #2). I've spent quite a few hours playing it since then, and my overall impression is much more positive now; it was mainly a matter of getting used to the gameplay and finding new patterns.