jaybird3rd

I recommend the Atari adapter also; it gives you many more options for controllers, almost all of which are better than TI's sticks. The one thing you have to look out for with the Atari adapter is that, because the original TI joystick port doesn't include any power pins, the Atari adapter can't provide extra power to the controllers. One consequence of that is that Atari trackballs will not work with the adapter, even in "joystick mode" (ordinary Atari joysticks will be fine). This is also why Wico's TI trackball included its own AC adapter. The speech synthesizer can usually be found fairly cheaply, and it adds speech to popular TI games like Parsec and Alpiner. Tex*In Treasures (a TI vendor I'd recommend highly) carries them used for $15.

Thanks! I'm glad to know that people are still following the project. A quick update: I mentioned earlier that I wasn't expecting any of these programs to write into the ROM space, but after some more testing, I discovered that several of them actually do. This results in an unexpected bank switch, which of course causes the program to jump into garbage and crash. I haven't determined exactly why they're doing it, but it might have been an attempt to disable pirate copies of the programs running from RAM. To get around this, I make a quick change to the hardware design that allows the programmer to (optionally) change banks in a way that blocks out future changes, and I'm using this new mode of switching to bank in the cartridge that the user selects from the menu. This seems to have solved the problem, and implementing it only added about a nickel to the hardware cost. Here is the latest version of the multi-cart test software (which is now in a 256K ROM so I could test more cartridges). I've tested each one of these programs, and they all work perfectly:

Those RF modulator boxes are notoriously flaky, and fortunately, they're not necessary anymore. The 5-pin connector on the back of the computer that the RF modulator plugs into actually outputs composite video and audio, so with the right cable, you can skip the box and plug the computer directly into the composite inputs on most modern TVs. They're simple enough to build yourself, or if you'd rather just buy one, you can usually find them on eBay. Here's one (not mine): eBay Auction -- Item Number: 130421460586

The last Atari computer that I had with this problem had a bad CPU. If you want to try to fix it, I would start with that since it's a very simple operation (it's part number CO14806). The RAM would be the next thing I would try if replacing the CPU doesn't work.

What color is the screen when you power it up? It might just be a bad chip.

These are probably the reasons why most of the new cartridge boards that have been designed for the 2600/7800 have been designed to fit into Atari shells. Atari's cartridges are by far the most common, so those can be recycled without having to worry about depleting the available supply for collectors. Those of us who are into homebrew games sometimes think that the "market" for them is much larger than it actually is: even with all the homebrew titles put together, you're only talking about a few thousand cartridges every year at most, which is a small percentage of the cartridges that are out there (especially the very common carts like Combat and Pac-Man).

That's interesting. Perhaps my information is incorrect, though I still think new shells would be prohibitively expensive. A few years ago, I took an empty 7800 cartridge shell to a local machinist who does injection mold tooling, and as I recall, he seemed to think it would be on the order of $12K to replicate the design and to create a set of molds. This is where I got the price range that I mentioned earlier. From what he told me, my sense was that the cost was more a result of the intricacy of the design rather than the size of the mold: Atari's 7800 cartridges have indented grooves in the bottom half of the shell and matching plastic snaps in the top half, plastic pins to open the cartridge door in the console, and a few other complicated elements that would take some work to replicate properly. Perhaps a simplified design could be created, but I don't know how much this would bring the cost down.

Heh ... that's probably what I'll have to resort to when it comes time for me to start shipping Mattel Aquarius games using my new cartridge boards. There aren't nearly as many donor carts floating around for that system, so the people who play those games might just have to keep an empty shell that they can use to hold whatever board they want to play. It won't be necessary for the Atari systems, though. As others have said, there are still more than enough donors out there, and somehow, there are still hidden stashes of new Atari product being discovered all these years later. That in itself really illustrates one of the main contributing factors to the video game crash: the amounts of excess product that was being stuffed into the sales channels in the early 80s.

The plastic tooling required to make new cartridge shell molds is very expensive. Tens of thousands of dollars expensive. If you make enough shells and if you sell enough homebrew games, you can spread the cost by increasing the price per game and you'll eventually break even. But it seems that there aren't enough homebrews being sold for this to be a feasible option, and as Albert said elsewhere, he'd have to significantly increase the prices for the games sold through the AtariAge store. This will probably never happen, but it would be nice if all the vendors/sellers who are making 2600 or 7800 cartridges could pool their resources and invest in a set of molds, to help spread the cost. And then don't tell Hozer where to buy the new shells!

"This new system is 2n+1-bit, so it must be better than that old 2n-bit system!" Insert your own values of n; the argument is the same for just about every generation of consoles, and it's always wrong.

He said in bulk so you probably can get them for $3 each if you buy a lot. They used to be a lot cheaper. Hell, I would still pay a buck for them if I had to buy 500 games again. Yes. Don't pay too much attention to the order form on O'Shea's website; the prices and the list of available titles are very out of date.

New, sealed 2600 and 7800 games, no less! It really breaks my heart, especially since there wasn't even that much gold in those cartridges. Atari got pretty skimpy with their gold flash during the the Tramiel era (which is when the O'Shea cartridges were made), and the plastic shells and maybe the SARA and SRAM chips inside were more valuable than the scant amounts of precious metals. The last time I talked to them, they did still have some cartridges left (about 20K, I think), but I suspect they're mostly 7800 Ballblazers, which they only kept because they learned that the POKEY chips inside were valuable. Unfortunately, they now want $3 per cartridge for them, even in bulk, which makes them a little too expensive to buy just for the shells and POKEYs (too expensive for me, anyway). But yes, there are still very many surplus Atari cartridges floating around out there, and the homebrew market is only using up a small percentage of them. Unfortunately, recycling the shells is such a labor-intensive process: unscrewing and unsnapping them, cleaning off the labels, scrubbing the plastic to get rid of the dirt and grease that's been ground into it over the course of twenty-something years, and in the case of Warner-era 2600 cartridges, cleaning and reassembling the spring-loaded dust doors. Even after all that, you've still got dents and scratches to deal with, warping and cracking, shell halves that don't match quite right, plastic snaps that have been broken off, and so forth. In my opinion, it can never be quite as crisp and clean as a new shell would be, unless the cartridge you started with was new. It's too bad that new shells are so expensive to manufacture, because eliminating all that setup work would probably be the biggest incentive to have them made, not to mention the possibility of making them in different colors. But because plastic tooling is so expensive, recycling seems to be the best option, especially for the relatively small quantities that are being consumed by the homebrew market.

Huh?

I use one of these, although I'm sure there are many other pocket programmers on the market just like it. It's a parallel-port programmer, and the most recent software for it is Win9X only, so I use it either with a DOS computer or inside a Windows 95 virtual machine. It programs EPROMs from the 2732 all the way up to the 27C080. The 2732 has been out of production for a long time, but it is still readily available on the used market. Your best bet might be a place like EPROMMan; they offer them in bulk for fifty cents each.

Okay, it looks like we finally have a games list for the DS version of Intellivision Lives!, which is due for release in September. All in all, I think it's a pretty solid lineup. From Intellivision Productions' Facebook page: Space: Astrosmash, Space Armada, Space Battle, Space Hawk, Space Spartans, Star Strike Arcade: Brickout, Buzz Bombers, Blow Out, Frog Bog, Hard Hat, Hover Force, Night Stalker, Pinball, Sharp Shot, Shark! Shark!, Snafu, Space Cadet, Thin Ice, Thunder Castle, Triple Action, Vectron Battle: Armor Battle, B-17 Bomber, Bomb Squad, Crown of Kings (a renamed AD&D Cloudy Mountain), Minotaur (a renamed AD&D Treasure of Tarmin), Sea Battle, Sub Hunt, Tower of Doom Sports: Auto Racing, Boxing, Bowling, Chip Shot Golf, Classic Baseball, Classic Basketball, Classic Football, Classic Hockey, Decathlon, Deep Pockets Pool & Billiards, Motocross, Mountain Madness Skiing, Slam Dunk Basketball, Slap Shot Hockey, Spiker! Volleyball, Super Pro Football, Stadium Mud Buggies, World Championship Baseball, Wrestling (I'm guessing this is Body Slam: Super Pro Wrestling) Gaming: Checkers, Learning Fun 1, Learning Fun 2, Poker & Blackjack, Reversi, Roulette, Royal Dealer, Takeover, Utopia There was some discussion earlier about the sports games, and it looks like they've included both the original and INTV versions. No ECS games, no Chess, and apparently Horse Racing had to be cut at the last minute due to a crashing bug discovered by Nintendo. It looks like the "Arcade" titles include Brickout and some of the mini-games from the canceled Party Line "album cartridge," which is interesting. I also like the fact that they've included the Learning Fun games: based on the success of the Brain Age series, I think that the number games and word games from Learning Fun (which are actually pretty good) would translate well to the DS.

Thanks. C will almost certainly be my language of choice for future projects, so I'll definitely investigate SDCC further. I've done all my work in assembly so far, and since the multi-cart software is relatively simple, it will probably be most convenient to stick with assembly for this project.

I hadn't heard of SDCC, but I have played around a bit with z88dk, and I've managed to put together a few simple "hello world" programs for the Aquarius in C, just to test it. Its support for the Aquarius as a target platform seems to be limited to compiling to cassette tape images, but it shouldn't be too hard to reconfigure it for cartridge binaries. I need to look into that some more, and I'll give SDCC a try as well, because I agree that C would be a very desirable language for Aquarius homebrews.

I'm sorry for keeping everybody waiting; I've been very busy with work and with other projects these last three weeks, and I finally found the time to get back to the multi-cart project this past weekend. After I got the prototype cartridge boards in, my first task was to write some software to test the flow of data from the cartridge as it cycled through the ROM banks. What little time I had for the project was spent on that, and since that was the most boring part of all, I'm glad I finally have it done. While I still have more testing to do, I'm pleased to see that the boards have worked exactly as expected. They support all the ROM sizes I wanted, from 16K up to one megabyte, so Aquarius homebrewers will have plenty of room to play with. Once I confirmed that the hardware was working, I proceeded to put together a very very simple test version of the multi-cart software, and I loaded it onto a 128K ROM (pictured above) with a handful of games: Right now, you just press the key on the keyboard corresponding to the game you want, and the game runs. I haven't played any of the games for more than a few minutes, but so far, they all work perfectly! After all the work I've put into the project so far, it's especially gratifying to finally see these first versions of the hardware and software completed and working perfectly together. With just a little dressing up (and with the full library of cartridges), this would probably make a perfectly functional multi-cart just as it is. But, as I've said, I want to do a lot more with it: manuals, overlays, and a few other goodies I have in mind. I've used my time away from the project to do some more thinking about it, and I've changed my plans for it a little bit, but I'll talk more about that later. The next steps are to complete my revisions to the cartridge board layout and to have the next--and, hopefully, the last--prototypes made, and to begin designing the final multi-cart software. I still plan to have the multi-cart finished and ready for sale by early fall.

Heh ... "oh face" ... (that's an "Office Space" reference, for those who haven't seen the movie)

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3551/a_history_of_gaming_platforms_.php

I hadn't seen Snake Rattle 'n' Roll before. Very interesting. I'm sure the 7800 could pull off a decent version of Marble Madness that is at least equivalent to the NES version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k154KxQ2Sw8 What I'd really love to see is a version of the unreleased Marble Madness sequel, Marble Man, which (as far as I know) still hasn't been dumped for emulation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cMKeOG2EBY

I think I've got some 2600 carts that I can send you, although it won't be more than two or three dozen. Have there been any developments toward getting new 2600/7800 shells made? Last I heard, it was still too expensive, but I know that somebody (was it VGWiz?) actually had molds created and was selling new shells at one point. With homebrews picking up, and especially with the popularity of Halo, there might finally be enough demand to cover the cost.

I think that's the same article that was mentioned here in the 2600 forum (although I think this is a better place for it).

"Damn ..."

I'm very unhappy with the quality of the pictures in the first auction, so I wouldn't bid on it until I got some much better pictures, or even better, a personal inspection by a recognized expert. Tanman did it right by arranging to meet Albert so that he could verify its authenticity in person; I think that's one reason his auction ended as high as it did. Granted, that won't be as easy in this case because the cartridge is in Germany.