jaybird3rd

It might actually be an easy one to do. You'll need an LCD display that is compatible with a 1200-baud serial interface. You can then hang it off the Aquarius printer port, which is a 1200-baud serial port (output only) repackaged into a stereo jack.

This might be too much like the MicroBox, but I've always liked the compact design of the DEC Multia (I own a few of them), which works either as a tower or as a "pizza-box" desktop: (The door in the front hides the floppy drive). If you were to take a design like this, updated and shrunken a little bit and styled after the 1450XLD, you could use the front floppy drive bezel in the 1450XLD as the model for the face of the "pizza box": This would give you a "retro" design that would also allow you to use standard FlexATX or Mini-ITX motherboards; it would look just like the upper portion of the 1450XLD (highlighted in the picture), without the keyboard attached. For the full effect, you could bundle it with a chocolate-brown USB keyboard with aluminum highlights. One other idea that occurs to me: if it wouldn't be too expensive, you might consider including a Stelladaptor-like interface, connected to one of the internal USB headers on the motherboard, with the DB9 joystick ports mounted right in the front of the case. That would allow people to plug a set of Flashback 2 joysticks directly into the computer, which would be more "authentic" than USB.

Yup, I posted it last night. Aquarius Chess is a surprisingly sophisticated program that has a lot more features than I was aware of, so it's great to finally have a manual to go with it. I've got one or two more manuals to scan, and I'll probably convert Bill Liscombe's scans of the Melody Chase manual to PDF as well.

I was somewhat unimpressed by Aquarius BurgerTime when I first saw it. Now that I have it on my multi-cart, I've been playing it quite a bit on the real hardware, and I enjoy it much more. It's one of those games that just doesn't work as well in an emulator. My main issue with it was that the characters can only move in one-cell increments, which makes the animation and movement somewhat blocky and prevents the carefully-timed moves that I was used to making in the arcade version. This limitation just takes some getting used to and I've since found ways around it; in fact, by using new patterns, I can regularly drop all four enemies on every bun on the first screen. My best score on that screen so far is over 65,000 points. I still don't like that you are limited to nine lives and nine peppers, but that's only a minor complaint. One interesting trivia item: all the "sprites" in Aquarius BurgerTime are made up of two 8x8 characters, one on top of the other, so the chef is just a hat on top and legs on the bottom. To make this look a little better, they placed the hat on an orange background, which gave the chef a "face" in the area beneath it. This left undesirable lines of color along the sides of the hat, but since the orange and white tend to bleed together (especially against a black background), these lines seem to disappear. This makes the hat and the "face" more clearly defined, and it's such a successful use of color blending that some Aquarius enthusiasts seem to think that there is some trick going on in the hardware to overcome the Aquarius's two-colors-per-character limitation. You'll see this claim mentioned in newsgroups and elsewhere, but I've seen the source code for the routines that display the chef, and I know for a certainty that this is not the case: the hat is just an ordinary character, painted white on a dark orange background.

All of the Sonic games have had pretty good music, but I thought that Sonic CD had a really outstanding soundtrack. I don't have a Sega CD, so I'm only familiar with the soundtrack on the PC version. Is this the same as the North American or Japanese versions for Sega CD?

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Interesting idea. If Atari is after a retro-themed gaming computer, they would probably be served better by going with an 800XL-styled design (or, even better, an updated 400/800-styled design), since those machines are more recognizable classic computers than the 130XE or the ST series. Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of it.

Thanks for the clarification. Just out of curiosity, do you know if Radofin developed any new Aquarius software after Mattel returned the rights, or did they just resell the product they got from Mattel?

I'm sure they were distributed in the United States also. If nothing else, I remember hearing stories from the Blue Sky Rangers about seeing Aquarius computer packages being given away as prizes to people who attended timeshare presentations. Topdog would know better than I whether the "Family Pack" was ever offered through retail channels or if it was mail-order only, but yes, it seems clear that there were very limited numbers produced. By the way ... thanks to a generous Aquarius collector, I have received a Chess cartridge and manual on loan, so I'll now be able to provide the full text of both the Melody Chase and Chess manuals with the multi-cart. There is no mention of Mattel or Mattel Electronics anywhere in this manual, but "Mattel Electronics" still appears in the copyright on the title screen. This seems to indicate that the game was completed at Mattel, but was not distributed until after Mattel sold their Aquarius rights/inventory back to Radofin.

Not to go off-topic, but it will be sometime this fall. I'm finishing the hardware revisions right now. Speaking of Aquarius BurgerTime, I made a few cosmetic changes to it--mainly getting rid of the weird characters in the screen border, which I think were a programmer error--which will make it a bit more pleasing to look at on the real hardware. I'll write more about that later, in my next update to the multi-cart thread.

Cartridge. I know that this option isn't as interesting to a collector as owning the originals, but both titles will be included in my upcoming multi-cart.

Topdog posted an item in an earlier thread about Aquarius BurgerTime which might answer your question: I could be wrong, but my impression is that Chess and Melody Chase were also distributed (by Radofin) only as part of the "Family Pack", which would explain their rarity. I don't believe either of them were ever released by Mattel.

The 8BitDomain site is offline, and the 7800 documentation doesn't seem to be in the Wayback Machine, so I've attached it in HTML format. It's over 2MB, so I split the ZIP file, and I had to rename the second part because the forum software didn't recognize the extension. Download both, rename "7800Install_02.zip" to "7800Install.z01", and extract "7800install.zip" into a separate folder (your ZIP utility should find and open the second part automatically; I created these with PKZIP). Then, open HTML file inside the folder. 7800Install.zip 7800Install_02.zip

From what little I know of the Intellivision homebrew scene I think your only option is assembly language at the moment. If you don't know any computer languages then BASIC is a good place to start but you might want to cut your teeth on some simple games for the PC first. Writing games for constrained systems like the INTV, 2600, 7800 etc. is an art form in itself. Yes, if you're totally new to programming, BASIC is a good place to start. You'll need to find a good tutorial that walks you through using the language, but that also teaches you how to think about programming in ways that you can apply to other languages (like assembly language) when you're ready. One that I like is You Should Learn to Program by Chris Crawford; the link takes you to a complete HTML version of the book on Crawford's web site. Its use of BASIC is general enough that you can follow along with just about any computer and any version of BASIC that you want. Since the book is 22 years old, it relies on line-numbered BASIC, so if you'll be programming on the PC, you'll want to find a contemporary version of BASIC to use (such as GW-BASIC). It's old, but it's still a good learning tool, and you can find it for free with a little searching.

Learn! . ... and don't say "I can't"! The tools that are available now for the Intellivision make it easier than ever. I'm not going to get to the Intellivision myself for a while, but from what little I've seen of the sdk1600 project, I'm very impressed.

Thats kind of what I thought too. Here's the problem with that explanation: the website is called "www.atari7800.com", which could mislead someone into thinking that it's an officially sanctioned site. But even if it is a fan site, it's just needlessly crass and vulgar and gives the 7800 a bad reputation, especially among people who are learning about it for the first time. Those are the people that you really don't want to chase away from classic gaming: the hobby will die with us if we don't attract new people to it, and websites like this don't help. Atari Inc. probably wouldn't be too happy about it, either, if they were made aware of it. If you owned the Atari name, and if "Atari 7800" was one of your trademarks, you probably wouldn't want it associated with an in-your-face "F*** YOU" website, either.

There's an obvious joke here somewhere about how mastering the gameplay of Donkey Kong 3 (which involves aiming and shooting up the monkey's butt) might be good practice for other activities, but I think I'll pass.

Never seen it either, looks boring. I've never seen it either. I don't watch TV, but the few times I've checked in to see what the TV world is doing (once a year, usually), I always come away unimpressed. I can always tell where the stories are going before they get there, I don't like the acting or the direction, and the dialog is hokey. I much prefer books or old movies, with the occasional exception of a few offbeat TV shows like Max Headroom. I forget who first said it, but the problem with the entertainment industry today is that the people making movies and television don't have anything interesting to say.

I'm afraid KMD fails the Turing test. He did get an ~$80 bid on that Sonic comic book, though.

I sold some more games to Austin recently. A pleasant transaction, as always. Thanks!

Geez, guys!!! I only just stumbled across this thread, and I can't believe the paranoia and suspicion that I'm seeing here. I've been working with Topdog on my Aquarius multi-cart project and I've done multiple trades with him, he's a reputable seller and collector, and any suggestion to the contrary is totally ridiculous. It shouldn't surprise you at all that he hasn't come back here to answer you: why should he deign to defend himself against anonymous nitpickers who are so eager to groundlessly believe that he's guilty? There is nothing but scant circumstantial evidence to support these wild conspiracy theories I'm reading, and Topdog has already offered a perfectly plausible explanation, so there must be something else that makes all of you doubters want to believe the worst about a fellow collector. I'm not sure I even want to know what that is, but I know for certain that you should reserve your skepticism for those who truly deserve it, because Topdog doesn't.

That's probably because Astroblast was designed to use the joystick or the paddle. The extra output pins on the Genesis gamepad are conflicting with the paddle inputs; it isn't a bug in the game at all.

What for? This thread was intended to be a place where we could convey our appreciation of his work, and where he could share as much of his own story as he wanted to share, in his own words. Both of those goals were achieved.

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Just talking for fun here, but there are actually a few changes I would make. Externally, I think the new shells should resemble the classic Atari shells; it's a clean and simple design that shouldn't be too hard to duplicate. The first change I would make would be to get rid of the plastic tabs that hold the shell halves together; they're more difficult to mold and too easy to break off. I would probably use pins and holes instead, something like the ones in the new Atari 800 cartridge shells that AtariMax uses. This would let you snap the shell halves together securely without using screws, and would finally get rid of that damn screw hole and post in the middle of the cartridge. The piece inside the front of the cartridge (with the cartridge door pins and the slot that the card edge fingers fit through) can be a third piece that mounts into a slot in the top half. This would be a compromise between the expensive spring-loaded dust doors in the Warner-era cartridges and the cheaper all-in-one Tramiel-era cartridges. I'd also make a change to the end of the cartridge: instead of having it divided in half, with a seam underneath the end label, I'd make it a flat, all in one piece which extends from the top half and fits into a slot in the bottom half. This would give you a design that is easier to assemble (no screws!), better looking (no holes or slots under the labels), and easier to design new cartridge boards for (no screw post in the middle to work around).