jaybird3rd

I agree; it's way too early to consider the FB3 vaporware or dead-on-arrival or anything like that, and I don't want to overlook the efforts that Curt and his team have already made in putting it together. I'm going to write Atari and let them know how much I liked the FB2 and how much I want to see the FB3 become a finished poduct, and I hope everyone else does the same. One thing I would say to anyone who writes, though, is to be nice and polite and professional in your dealings with Atari. It shouldn't be necessary to point that out, but during the time Atari was owned by Hasbro, I seem to remember a bunch of Atari fans turning nasty and giving them all kinds of grief over the issues of Battlesphere and the Jaguar encryption key. The Atari community comes across as a bunch of crazies when things like that happen, and I'd rather see us make a better impression with Infogrames.

That's what I was hoping it was; I thought for a second that there was an acquisition in the works that I hadn't heard about. I just spent a few minutes looking into it and found that a lot of the senior management at Atari (including the former here-today-gone-tomorrow President/CEO) do seem to be Sony people. Is there anyone in particular at Atari that we should contact? I figured that the FB2 sales figures would have spoken for themselves, unless they weren't as good as we've all been thinking.

He sure did ... I'm just hoping that Atari's recent money troubles don't snuff out the FB3. I still think it has the potential to be a bigger hit for them than yet another Matrix game.

I'm not sure this is accurate. There is certainly a superficial resemblance between the two games, but during the Imagic roundtable at CGE2004, Michael Becker (the artist who designed the mothership for the Inty version) stated that he hadn't seen or heard of Phoenix until after Imagic was accused of copyright infringement. I've heard other Imagic guys make similar statements in the past. I prefer Demon Attack on the 2600 myself; I like the Imagic look-and-feel and Demon Attack had a lot more "style" than Phoenix, which was much better in the arcade. I also like the fact that the 800 version was exactly the same as the 2600 version, even though a lot of people seem disappointed that they didn't get something more.

I've been thinking of trying this myself someday ... copying my TI cassettes to a WAV file, verifying they can be loaded by a real TI (through a CD player or line out), converting them to MP3s, and testing them again to see if the data survived the compression process. If it works, it would be a lot less space-consuming to build up an archive of cassette software, and it wouldn't even be necessary to burn CDs.

Easy question. When I think of popular games on the 2600 that could have been even better on the 7800, the one that comes to mind first is Missile Command. If it was developed for the 7800's POKEY cart, you could have had something almost identical to the arcade: the CPU and sound hardware would have been exactly the same as the coin-op, and Atari's trackball would have been a great controller. I know that the GCC guys in particular could have done a great job with it: after all, they had reverse-engineered the original arcade game for their Super Missile Attack mod kit.

Glad to hear you enjoy it (so do I!), and welcome to AtariAge!

He was probably referring to the Atari Flashback 2, which you can read more about elsewhere on this site. That's the only hardware Atari is selling at the moment; Atari hasn't made PCs of any kind since the early 1990s.

I suspect not. An Atari 7800 with a DevOS ROM installed is a much better choice for 2600 dumping.

That one had me scratching my head for a while, too. They should have at least said a few words about it on the front label; I would have seen it there (as I was fidgeting with the cartridge) a lot sooner.

I'm far from an Amiga expert myself, but from what I understand, the Amigas that had the AGA also had newer versions of Kickstart (the "BIOS") that made them incompatible with some Amiga 500 games; I believe Marble Madness is one example. For these systems, it is necessary to use a software solution called a "degrader" that allows you to use an earlier Kickstart for games that need it; kind of like the translator for the XL/XE series of 8-bit Atari computers. I've been told by other Amiga users that the Amiga 1200 (an AGA machine) is the best overall for games, presumably because it's one of the lower-cost AGA systems around. You'll need AGA for some of the later releases for the Amiga, as well as for CD32 games (the CD32 was the XEGS of the Amiga line; an Amiga computer repackaged as a game console). The A2000 you have probably uses an OCS chipset unless it's a later model; I think the 2000C had ECS.

Amazing. If somebody had told me a few years ago that I'd see new 2600 systems from Atari on store shelves in 2006, I'd have certainly called them crazy. But not only are they there, they're selling like hotcakes. Congrats to the FB2 team, and here's hoping the FB3 is another success story!

It's very similar to the Genesis 1 cable, I believe, with a slightly different pin arrangement. Here is a page with instructions for a cable that I successfully built for my 99/4a (I used an old DIN-5 keyboard cable for mine): http://web.infoave.net/~compdr/videocable/video.htm It's 100 times better than going through RF, especially considering how brittle those old TI boxes were.

I can't believe I didn't see it earlier, but he's been spreading his madness recently in this thread in the Modern Gaming forum! He says that work is still being done on KR2600, too!

You might get the directionals working that way, but you'll likely have to cut some traces and add a few jumpers to get the buttons working properly in two-button 7800 mode (unless the Genesis controller happens to have the wiring and two 680-ohm resistors in just the right places, which I doubt).

Hover Bovver! That would work great on the 7800!

Ah, I see; I thought you were talking about the plug on the end of the cable. You'll probably only have to pull out or move the wires related to the buttons; if the controller works for 2600 games as-is, you can leave the directionals intact.

Yes, the controller diagram I quoted was a diagram of the connector on the console side. The controller side would be the opposite of that; the wires on the lefthand side of the connector will plug into the righthand side of the plug on the console. I don't know how easy it will be to actually move the pins around (or even to cut open the connector to see them) because Sega and Atari plugs were all molded into one piece.

7800 controllers are wired in an interesting way to get the two-button configuration working in a way that was also backward-compatible with single-button 2600/7800 games. Each of the buttons is actually connected to two inputs in the joystick connector: they both share the 2600 trigger wire (so that either one of them will work with 2600 and single-button 7800 games) and they are also connected independently to the two paddle input wires (which are then read by two-button 7800 games). To get the Genesis controllers to work in the same way, it will be necessary to replicate this wiring scheme. It isn't as bad as you might be thinking, but it is a bit more involved than simply changing the pinout. There is a set of pinouts in the 7800 FAQ which might be helpful, and I'm sure one of us can give you some additional help (I've built many 7800 controllers out of modified Space Invaders TV-games). If you'd prefer to build an adapter instead of modifying the controllers, there is a link in the FAQ that will take you to another site with a list of instructions on how to do this. I've never tried this myself, though, and to me it looks like a lot more work. EDIT: One place to start would be to let us know what type of controllers you have. Are they three-button or six-button controllers from Sega, or are they from a third party? It would also be helpful to find out which wire goes to which pin in the connector before you start. After a quick search, I found the following information on this site: Looking straight at the plug on the front of the Genesis the numbers are: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 (For those of you who buy a joystick cable from radio shack the pin #'s to wire colors are as follows: 1-white 2-blue 3-green 4-brown 5-yellow 6-orange 7-red 8-black 9-gray). The pins in the cable will be a mirror image of the diagram, of course. I would strongly recommend that you confirm this information with your own cables; the website may be incorrect, or the colors might be different if the controllers you have are from a third party. There's a much easier way of doing this than cutting open the cable. If you don't have a continuity tester, you can use something like the LED and battery inside one of those little keychain lights. Leave one leg of the LED connected to the battery and connect the other leg to a loose wire. Connect another wire to the battery (the one that the other leg was connected to) and touch the two wires together to make sure the light goes on. These two wires will then become your "probes" for testing the cable: insert one of the wires into one of the pins and use the other one to test each of the wires at the other end (the white connector inside the controller) until the light comes on. Make note of which wire connected to which pin, and test all of the remaining pins in the same way. If you have a continuity tester, you can use that instead.

I'll certainly do that if I can get my hands on one; of the two, I'd probably choose the MemCard because it's a lot cheaper and because the HSC was really designed for high scores. I'd like to support both cartridge RAM and the MemCard, actually, because I don't want to limit the game to too few people (the 7800 audience is small enough as it is and relatively few of them own a MemCard/AtariVox) and I want to make my game playable in an emulator.

I've seen new switches in parts catalogs that look exactly the same as the console switches in the 7800. Rather than trying to take apart and clean and reassemble such a tiny switch, you might consider simply buying another one and replacing the whole thing (it will require some soldering but would be a lot less trouble). I'll see if I can find a link to one of my suppliers that sells the new switches.

I was very fortunate to order my copy (along with Iron Soldier 2) from Telegames a day or two before they stopped taking orders for classic systems. I agree; it's a very cool game that makes me wish I had a paddle for the Jag.

As an early Flashback 2 adopter, I agree with your assessment of some of the new games (primarily the Asteroids hacks and Yars' Return), and I share your frustration that the subsequent fixes could not have been a part of the system from the beginning. Having said that, however, I certainly don't regret my purchase: even with its various flaws, the Flashback 2 stands head and shoulders above any other similarly-priced TV-game on the market (except maybe for the Atari Paddle from Jakks, which I've talked about in another thread). Aside for the significant nostalgic value, look at what you're getting: two new CX-40 reproductions that work with all your old systems and are worth about 70% of the purchase price by themselves, and a collection of built-in games that is larger than most of the others even without the bad ones. With a little work, you can add a cartridge slot and play the vast majority of your 2600 library on a new console with no compatibility issues at all. All of this is a lot more than I would have imagined possible just a few years ago, and the FB2 team has been beaten up enough about the problems with the product, so I tend to accentuate the positive. I'll probably be one of the first in line for a Revision C, too, if only to get a decent port of Caverns of Mars!

Beg pardon?1000058[/snapback] He's referring to the original Crazy Otto kit for Pac-Man by GCC, in which Pac-Man was changed into a character with legs and the "ghosts" had little antennae. With Crazy Otto, GCC added the concepts of the different mazes and the bonuses that wandered about the maze and other gameplay changes that they added to make Pac-Man more interesting. This was before the game went to Namco, at which time the graphics were reworked and the game became Ms. Pac-Man.

There used to be a Ms. Pac-Man coin-op in an arcade near me, and although I was disappointed when it was taken out, I don't miss it anymore now that I have Ms. Pac-Man on the 7800. To me, that is the very best version of the game for a home system: it's GCC's game, running on GCC's hardware, and to me it's as good as you can get outside of MAME. The 2600 version would never be mistaken for the coin-op, of course, but it's a terrific game in its own right and light-years ahead of the original 2600 Pac-Man.