jaybird3rd

Some version of Qix might be possible, but your movements would probably be limited to the borders of the background cards. You might want to check out Thin Ice if you're looking for that kind of game on the Intellivision, because it's somewhat similar.

Given Bushnell's "selective memory," and given the fact that he perpetuated the "daughter's bedroom" Computer Space myth in that same interview, I think it would be a mistake to take anything in it at face value.

I'm especially grateful for the games Imagic did for the Texas Instruments 99/4a; I think Microsurgeon was probably their best work on that platform. Imagic almost got the rights to the 99/4a, when TI decided to leave the home computer market and was looking for another company to handle distribution and support. At the last minute, TI decided that Imagic was too small/unstable, and they went with another company instead. Imagic might have stayed open longer if they hadn't.

I haven't played any of the more obscure Imagic releases (No Escape!, Moonsweeper, etc), but of the ones I've played, here are my: Favorites: Cosmic Ark Demon Attack Trick Shot (although I'd probably enjoy Super Pro Pool & Billiards on the Intellivision a lot more today) Solar Storm Most Disappointing: Laser Gates Fathom Fire Fighter The celebrated Atlantis is somewhere in the middle. The original 2600 version is a good game in its own right, but it was considerably improved on the Intellivision.

Yes, "All In The Game" has been discussed several times before. It's an amazing documentary, and I wish there were more like it from that era. We even got a note from the Producer/Writer/Director, who happened upon one of the threads discussing it and was kind enough to give us some interesting backstory. By the way ... this is only a theory, but I suspect that the "hot air balloon game" that they were "researching" at the end of the documentary was the unreleased Sky Patrol. If so, the red-bearded programmer in the balloon was probably Brad Stewart himself!

I asked about the FB1 a few times years ago, but apparently the information on the ROM is still under wraps, including information about how to replace it with either a new ROM or an NES-compatible cartridge slot. I'd prefer the former, but according to a post by Curt Vendel in my earlier thread, an NES cartridge slot has been connected to the FB1 successfully. I still have both of my FB1 consoles, and I'm sometimes tempted to look at them again, but I've been too busy with other projects recently.

Me too. But to answer the OP's question ... the reason there was a black-and-white switch on early consoles is that a great many people still had black-and-white televisions in the late 1970s, and if you tried to view a color video game on them, certain color combinations that might have looked great on a color TV didn't show up very well. The black-and-white switch was just an easy way to change the game colors to appropriate shades of gray that would look better on a black-and-white TV, if the game was designed to do this. Many of the early 2600 games could, but later games used the black-and-white switch for other purposes (such as a pause switch).

Here's mine: Serial #: A1 781215941 (long rainbow, NTSC, Taiwan, "Atari Corporation") Serial #: AT 860698246 (long rainbow, NTSC, Taiwan, "Atari Corp.")

Speaking of Activision Checkers, did you know that it was originally intended to have a 3D user interface? Apparently, the idea was to use the red and blue colors to create an anaglyph display, which would create a stereoscopic 3D effect when viewed with red/blue glasses. I happened to be reading Alan Miller's interview with Digital Press, in which he mentions his experimentation with this technology. He said that the idea failed because of the 2600's limited horizontal resolution and because of the inconsistent way that televisions of the time rendered the colors.

Unfortunately, the 7800 uses an unusual power connector. Your best bet might be to contact Best Electronics to see if they stock any. I didn't see them on their website, but only a fraction of their inventory is listed on the site. Or, if you want to get creative, it might be easier to get a standard panel-mount barrel plug connector and a matching 9VDC 1A power supply. I did this with one of my 7800 consoles because I was missing an AC adapter. Just make sure you get the polarity right when you wire up the new connector.

Laser Blast got very repetitive for me once I figured out the pattern. Megamania seems to be crazy popular for some reason, but I thought it was boring.

I'll bet you one can of coke that he comes back and says that his camera has suddenly broken.

... again! I just read through the World of Spectrum thread and one of the older threads here on AtariAge. Interesting reads. If our friend The_Laird had invested all the effort he's apparently put into making up stories into actually learning to program, he probably could have written all the games he's claiming to have written! Big thumbs-up to the WOS guys for exposing him.

It seems that Jaguar Disease has now infected the Classic Computing forum. Who's next?

It's pretty easy to do. The INTV System III had a red LED between the power and reset switches. It was just an ordinary-looking LED wired directly to the +5V and GND pins on the cartridge port (I don't happen to remember which pins). Since the operating voltage of most LEDs is 2.2V-2.4V, this must have been an LED with an integrated resistor; don't try to connect a regular LED directly to this pin or it will burn out! Here is a picture of the LED on my System III console: Just drill a 1/4" hole in that spot, and use a Radio Shack LED holder (part number 276-079) with a T-1-3/4 (5mm) LED, and you'll have an exact replica. INTV used hot glue on the inside of the console to seal the LED and holder into place. Be sure you know the specifications of the LED you plan to use. If you use a regular green LED (like this one), with a 2.2V operating voltage and a 10mA maximum current, you'll also need a 330-ohm resistor between the +5V power supply and the LED; some LEDs have a 20mA maximum current, in which case you'll only need a 150-ohm resistor. The resistor is necessary to bring the current down to a safe level. Here is the online calculator I'm using to compute the resistance values; they also show a wiring diagram and the resistor color codes.

Thanks for making such high-quality scans. That's exactly what I needed.

Thanks, Bill! That looks great.

It might be possible, but I probably wouldn't be interested in doing it. Floppy drive technology is totally obsolete nowadays, especially given the incredibly large capacity and low prices of modern flash memories. To make the 1541 DOS work, I'd have to recreate the Koenig interface inside a specialized cartridge, but I'd much rather put my efforts into a more modern solution. There are certain creative opportunities in going with a different storage technology, too, especially on a niche system like the Aquarius. With more popular classic computers (like the Atari and Commodore machines), there is a huge back catalog of software that was designed to run from floppy disks, so any new storage peripheral for those systems has to be backward-compatible with the original floppy drives in order for those programs to work. With the Aquarius, the only two floppy drive options that I'm aware of (the QuickDisk and 1541 interfaces) were never more than curiosities that very few people had, so you have a lot more freedom to start from scratch. What I have in mind is a flash-based solution that uses a PC-compatible FAT32 file system on an ordinary CompactFlash or MicroSD memory card. I've never build such an interface, but I've seen similar microcontroller-based projects on other Z80 computers, so it seems to me that it should work. And the best part is that the Aquarius has all of the necessary signals right inside the cartridge port, so it would be completely plug-and-play. Just stick it in the memory cartridge slot in the Mini-Expander and leave the other slot free for new homebrew cartridges, which can load/save data to the flash card directly. That's interesting about the Tandy X10 interface. The fact that they were still using the original Aquarius-style cases seems to suggest that they repackaged the system for the CoCo fairly quickly. If so, they would have had to write all new software, but the hardware interface probably didn't change very much at all. If the Tandy interface could be made to work with the original Aquarius software, it might be possible to reverse engineer it and make new ones specifically for the Aquarius. Might be a fun project to do someday. I'm really surprised that Radofin didn't try to sell that system themselves after they got the Aquarius rights back; it seems like the home security/automation market would have been a good one for the Aquarius after it failed as a home computer. As for the AD&D manual, I do have a scan of it, but it's pretty low-res. It's legible, but I'd like to find a better one so I can get a good look at the map at the beginning (which I'd like to recreate on the screen in the electronic version), so if you could send me your scan, that would be great.

Yes. All 2600 consoles used the same power supply, so if yours works with the sixer, it should work with the Jr. also.

If somebody was to do a "sequel" to Night Stalker, it should incorporate some of the features that had to be cut from the original (the spider web, the bazooka to blast through walls, etc), and a greater variety of robots. I'd also like to see more than one room. One idea I've had is a game world that is an actual maze (preferably a dynamically-generated maze) made up of interconnected rooms, leading to something "special" in the center. You'd have to defeat a certain number of robots in each room before the doors to the adjacent rooms open up, so the gameplay would be a combination of fighting robots and finding your way through the maze. I've been looking at a disassembly of Aquarius Night Stalker with a similar idea in mind for that system. It could work on the Intellivision, too, although it might require extra RAM. Having said all that, I'd much rather see original games than ports, remakes, or sequels.

The 7800 FAQ has a wiring diagram for the ProLine controllers. It's a very easy design to replicate; it only requires two resistors (680 ohms, as I recall, although the values probably aren't critical) and a joystick cable with all the necessary pins.

Time for some long overdue updates. First of all, the next (and, hopefully, final) revision of the cartridge board hardware finally went out this morning: My progress on this has been frustratingly slow over the last six weeks, mainly because I've also been busy building a two-story addition onto our house this summer, so I'm very glad to have this step finished. This new revision integrates the changes I had to make to implement the bankswitching lockout mechanism, along with a few other minor changes (mostly cosmetic) based on my experience with the first prototypes. I mentioned earlier that my plans for the project had changed a bit from my initial conception. In particular, I'm probably going to drop the idea of including cassette conversions. I had originally thought about converting at least some of the Aquarius machine-language cassette programs to run from the cartridge, and since many of them require expanded RAM, I was also thinking of designing a simple 32K RAM module. However, a future project that I'd really like to do instead is to design a cartridge that combines extra RAM with some sort of flash-based persistent storage, which would also be capable of handling cassette tape images. Assuming this comes to fruition, it would make both the RAM cartridge and the cassette conversions obsolete, so I'd rather cancel those and put that effort into the flash cartridge instead, limiting the multi-cart to the Aquarius cartridge library. This also leaves me enough room to include more documentation and extras. Speaking of which, I've also been hard at work gathering supplemental content, with the help of other Aquarius collectors and enthusiasts. I'm glad to say that I've managed to obtain the full manuals for almost all of the released Aquarius cartridges, including such rare ones as Melody Chase and Chess. The only manuals I'm missing at this point are those for the the "edutainment" titles, Space Speller and Zero-In, both of which are exceedingly rare. Here are some of the "exclusives" that I will now be able to include, in addition to the core library of Aquarius applications and games: A Y2K-patched version of Biorhythms (courtesy of Martin van de Steenoven) which will allow you to use the program with four-digit dates. A patched version of BurgerTime which removes the extraneous characters in the screen border (this was just a quick hack that I did, and in my opinion, it makes the game a little nicer looking). The 1541 Extended BASIC ROM: In 1988, Ron Koenig designed an Aquarius interface for the Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive. Koenig also included a modified version of Extended BASIC which integrated a series of new DOS commands, along with commands for using the Mini-Expander hand controllers and sound chip, reading and writing to I/O ports, quickly filling the screen with color, and other tasks that previously required the use of assembly language. The DOS functions will not work from the multi-cart, of course, but the other commands will make it easier for Aquarius programmers working in BASIC to get the most out of their machines. The 1541 ROM also includes a simple monitor, useful for dumping/disassembling memory. The Mini-Expander Diagnostic Cartridge: An internal tool used by Radofin to test the Mini-Expander and accessories. It includes tests for expanded RAM cartridges, the AY-3-8910 sound chip, and the hand controllers. The "Aquarius Home Computer System Command Console" Cartridge: the software portion of the first home computer interface developed for X10, an industry standard protocol for home automation (turning electrical appliances on or off, dimming lights, raising/lowering the temperature in a house, monitoring sensors, etc). X10 was originally controlled by dedicated devices, but the Aquarius was intended to be the first computer system to have an X10 interface and control center. The Aquarius was discontinued before the interface could be marketed; the technology was eventually ported over to the Tandy Color Computer instead. The last two cartridges in this list were dumped by me (for the first time, as far as I know) from a collection of prototypes, while the first two were prepared specifically for this project. In case you're interested, there is a picture (probably a non-functional mockup) of the Command Console interface on the Blue Sky Rangers' Aquarius page, and the Aquarius is also mentioned in this interesting article about the history of X10. In its current form, the Command Console cartridge isn't usable without having the interface connected (it errors out and stops at the title screen), but perhaps its inclusion in the multi-cart will inspire somebody to recreate the interface hardware. So, while I'm waiting for the new boards to arrive, I'm going to turn my attention to the software. I already have a functional bare-bones multi-cart program, so I will be expanding it with a better menu system and with a viewer for the documentation and other materials. I also need to create plain-text versions of the manuals. Because some of them (such as Aquarius Logo) are very long, I might have to limit myself to a command reference or some other subset, but I should have enough room for the full text of all of the game manuals.

Please, post some pics. I wish to see them. Androbot

Wow, that's great! Now everybody will get to experience the joy of typing in long BASIC programs on that Aquarius chicklet keyboard! (I'm just kidding! Of course, I'm delighted to see that you're taking the time to archive these programs.) Reading through line-numbered BASIC listings is pretty horrifying now that I have more experience and two CS degrees, but it always brings back bittersweet memories for me. I keyed in quite a few of them growing up, and it gave me my first experience of typing and simple programming. Looking back at some of these programs now, I'm surprised that Aquarius type-ins in particular didn't use assembly-language subroutines more often, especially for time-consuming things like coloring/filling the screen.

What an idiot. Why would anyone complain about something so stupid, and why is it being reported as news? So many people today seem to enjoy being victims, judging by how hard they try to find things to feel offended about. He should be out looking for a job instead of playing shooters on the XBox.