The Eyeball Mural

Just to fan the flames a bit... http://www.rickguidice.com/illustration/atariart.html

I might as well add my voice to the chorus. I've owned half a dozen 2600's and never had any failures with them, only occasional minor problems which were easily remedied by cleaning. I am very suspicious that there is an undiscovered issue in the OP's house wiring or in the "electrical environment" the failed machines operated in. I confess I chuckled a bit over the concerns about uptime. When I was a youngster in the 1980's it was common for me and my friends to wring out our Atari VCS's with thirty hours or so of gameplay over a single weekend. During summer vacation from school I would play eight to twelve hours a day most days of the week. I would also play Yars Revenge marathons over many days, leaving the game to idle on the score screen after a Qotile kill, and come back to it the following day, playing for an hour or two, then repeating the process. Just this past summer I played my current VCS for several hours on a Saturday, then again the next day. Intellivisions and Playstations will wilt if they get too hot for too long, and don't get me started on how much trouble a PC can be if you ask too much of it while gaming, but the Atari 2600, in my experience, is a tank. A chain of failures might be bad luck, or it might be a red flag indicating some unexplained external problem, as many replies have suggested.

A great game, highly recommended. Also wee wongojack's thread here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/225539-tower-of-doom-tips/?hl=tower%20of%20doom

At the very least, I am always interested in research into the provenance of intellectual property rights regarding the Atari 2600 software catalog. Given that there doesn't seem to be a concrete answer on the nature and extent of Activision's absorption of Imagic, it is no surprise that tracing the rights of less prominent game producers from back in the day is a substantially foggier quest. If there is a document online, or a thread on this site, which details the ownership through the years of the various 2600-related properties, I would love to be pointed to it. If the aim is to advance the hobby and preserve history, then identifying and purchasing properties would be worthwhile, would it not? As a profit center, why would it be any less profitable than homebrew game production, custom controller manufacture, book publishing or console repair and upgrading? There is not a gold mine to be had from the Atari 2600 hobby today, but opportunities are there to help the hobby, save games from being swallowed by the mists of time, and perhaps make a small amount of money. Also see this: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/227735-data-age/ Any thoughts on 2600 hobbyists forming a trust and buying rights to old games, and perhaps recruiting a board of directors from the admins or senior members of this community to direct the trust? Or simply releasing the properties to the public domain as a service to the hobby? My first question for the original poster is: what market value is there in the more obscure games from the old catalog (e.g. Data Age, Spectravision, US Games/Vidtec, Mythicon)? My second: does the answer to the first question align with your own assessment of value, vis-a-vis your entrepreneurial ideas or any altruistic ideas you have for the games in question? I think the whole idea is worth exploring, at least. The worst outcome would be to add to the existing scholarship on the 2600 phenomenon.

Which explains why flicker is encountered in the dot room of the grey dungeon (black castle maze) in Adventure when only one "nominal" object is in the room: nominal object (e.g. sword) + dot + torchlight = flicker threshold reached?

I never miss a chance to gush about my lovely 32" NetTV CRT. It plays my Atari games and my old 1970's TV shows beautifully, haha! I can add, in response to some above comments, that in my area as well (southeast Tennessee) the Goodwill stores have ceased taking CRT TV sets. I tried to unload four of them over the holidays, now they are in the backyard covered in snow.

Did the OP get any more help elsewhere? Anyway, here's some basics to start with: ► Make sure you've cleaned the console very well inside and out. Used compressed air (canned air is great because the velocity is less risky for electronic components) and electrical contact cleaner (or diluted white vinegar, which is cheaper). Camera brushes are also handy. ► The same applies to the cartridge circuit board contacts. Circuit interruptions caused by dirt or damage, or shorts caused by metal debris, can cause glitched images like yours. ► You say you bought a new power cable. Do you mean a new power adapter? If you have a new adapter, make sure the voltage and polarity of the adapter match the Atari's needs. We'll have to rely on some of the real hardware gurus here to enlighten us on what those parameters actually are, my knowledge fails me on that point. But a mismatched adapter might cause the kind of glitched images you're getting. ► Inspect the performance of the power toggle switch. If it is not making and breaking contact cleanly, then glitches might result. If the switch is wiggly, or if it obviously contributes to activating glitchy start screens, that might isolate your problem. ► As another reply above said, reset any adjustments you've made, since they didn't solve the problem and might be contributing. In other words, eliminate those variables. If you actually hardwired a power cable with a plug on the end, consider analyzing that modification. And maybe you can answer these questions: Q: What is the nature of the new power cable? Is it hardwired into the console, or is it a replacement adapter? Is it a vintage Atari-branded adapter? Or did you just pick up an adapter that you thought would work? Q: Why did you use a new power cable? What was wrong with the old one — or — what led to your decision to replace the old one? Q: Do I understand correctly that your colors seem off and you have glitchy sprites / random noise patterns? Or are the colors now known to be OK, with or without your color adjustment? Q: Have you tested the game cartridges on a system known to be good in order to evaluate the possibility that the cartridges are the problem, and not the console? You can also repost your request for help in the hardware forum if you haven't already: http://atariage.com/forums/forum/8-hardware/ We'll help get you up and running, but we'll need more info first.

Age 13. Christmas Eve, 1982. 4-switch woodgrain. Asteroids, Berzerk, Breakout, Defender, Football, Missile Command, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Yars Revenge, Combat. I played until about 3AM, then bundled up and went outside to lie in a lawn chair, in the snow and subfreezing Wisconsin temperatures, and read game instruction manuals by the light of the moon. After I froze, I went back inside and played until after 5AM. My folks were awesome, I love them and miss them very much.

Yes, I neglected Qix on my list. Qix on Intellivision would be great!

Games I would have loved on the Intellivision in the 1980's... and newer games I'd love to play on Intellivision as well... Alien Garden Battlezone Berzerk Bosconian Crypts of Chaos Duck Hunt Entombed Flappy Bird Galaga Galaxian Hexic Incredipede Joust Keystone Kapers Lemmings Lode Runner Lunar Lander Megamania Miner 2049er Montezuma's Revenge Moon Patrol Mountain King Ms. Pac-Man My Singing Monsters On the Ball Planet Patrol Riddle of the Sphinx Seaquest Space Duel Spindizzy Wetrix Yars Revenge

Great write-up! Covers the game and its nuances very well. I'll add that it is possible to run completely through a blob and survive, provided you are at full health before the attempt. It doesn't always work, but sometimes it does, and this brute-force approach is sometimes the best option.

The screen graphics of my cousin's new Intellivision Flashback are ratty and artifacted on his 70" HDTV. Of course, as I love to tell anyone who will listen, this is why I cherish my NetTV 32" CRT multi-media monitor

Ha! I agree, it's easy to get lost in Tarmin for hours! Amen to getting your stuff out of the garage and to getting a Flashback!

"Atari's once-buried E.T. cartridges hit eBay, going for hundreds of dollars" by Michael McWhertor Nov 04 2014 http://www.polygon.com/2014/11/4/7158267/atari-2600-et-landfill-cartridges-ebay-auction

Thanks for the update! Sounds like a bigger egg is being hatched! Good things take time, you've got my support, no matter how long it takes. Don't mean to hijack your thread, this just seems lke the best place to talk art-related stuff. Serves a dual purpose since it keeps your publishing efforts churned to the top. Of course, if this new project of yours blossoms that will deserve a whole new thread

This post doesn't exactly fit here, but it is Atari art-related so I thought this would be the best place to put it. This is about modern Atari art based on classic coin-ops, but still mostly relevant to this thread. Atari Jackpots (atarijackpots.com) has a slot machine section branded with classic Atari arcade game stylings. The reel symbols on these slots are new interpretations of classic art (with seemingly some new designs thrown in), so I know Atari art fans will enjoy seeing these designs. I compiled all the symbols into one sheet. These pix are a little ratty since they are from browser screencaps but they're still fun to look at. In-game these symbols will sometimes animate.

More things than I can list, but number one is that AtariAge is far and away the friendliest, most down to earth enthusiast forum of any kind on the web. There are lots of good folks on here who are smarter than I am but (in the best Elmer tradition) they are always glad to take a moment or two and offer insight and encouragement.

This sounds intriguing, and fun. I'm not sure what exactly you have in mind, but I'll bet the underlying logic of the gameplay would be understandable by the player, even if it made for a different sort of challenge. At first it would seem random, but there would patterns and clues to recognize nonetheless.

I guess this is the way to go if I want to explore these spurious character displays further. Load whatever game I'm exploring into a debugger, learn my way around the code and start hacking or experimenting. Both of the above ideas seem like good places to start. Any sort of overflow is a candidate for causing display anomalies, right? And any game that uses the BACKTAB for other than the intended purposes will likely have data hidden somewhere on the game screen, since the BACKTAB's purpose is to handle the background (or playfield) display. A reasonable assumption?

Well, the ideas about time constraints and about not expecting players to reach certain thresholds echoes what intvsteve said above To lean on the old saying, I suppose great game code is never finished, merely abandoned! When I was a young gamer in the 1980's my friends and I were motivated to reach high scores in order to see how the game's counter or screen would react as much as we were motivated by competitiveness or a sense of achievement. It was sort of like tilting a pinball machine, except instead of the game warning you to stop playing rough it was symbolic of beating the computer at its own game, leaving it in a state of "does not compute," spouting gibberish. Even being a non-programmer (though most of my buddies wrote code) I could still grasp the basic idea behind such a glitch i.e. the game has moved into uncharted territory and is behaving oddly or even unpredictably. My fascination with this stuff in Treasure of Tarmin has a different root, though. Since the game is about exploration and discovery, and has an eerie or spooky feel to it, anytime I find something odd it adds to my enjoyment of the game. The quirks (like the score counter ciphers, or the flicker of the item sprites when they render, or intvnut's discovery of the location data hidden onscreen) are not necessarily unique to this one game, but they seem to fit right in with the game's RPG-like theme of prowling an enchanted dungeon. The score counter going "crazy" I can imagine as the gods' warning against greed, as if too much wealth will twist your treasures into something unrecognizable and useless. The glitchy rendering of the item sprites as they sit on the floor makes me think that as the adventurer prowls the dungeon he may suffer effects from all the magic about, and begin to hallucinate and see things not as they are; or the visions can be divinatory, helping the player find the items he needs, as if spirits are coming to his aid. The location data revealed is something like entering the Matrix and seeing more reality than normally meets the eye. Of course, all this is just my imagination running free, while behind all this is, as you say, a frazzled programmer struggling to meet an unreasonable deadline!

Some more notes about the castle map screen, specifically, the treasure score display. This info is verified by gameplay and has been analyzed by the community in another thread. THE MAP On the castle map screen there appears a treasure score counter. It occupies a five-digit space on the right of the screen, just above the player's attribute scores (or statistics). The counter is blank when no treasure has been collected; that is, no digits are entered on the counter. When digits appear they are black in color, against the tan background of the island silhouette. Since there are no treasures with values in single digits, the minimum number of digits in the treasure score is two. The nominal maximum treasure score is 99,990. Exceeding this score will cause the counter to "roll over," and subsequently the counter will insert ciphers in the first digit of the score. These ciphers take the form of punctuation, alphabetic characters, and other elements of the Intellivision's built-in character set. This behavior is due to the way the Intellivision displays score numbers and how the Intellivision calls these numbers and other characters from the console's Graphics ROM (GROM). The GROM is the chip that stores the character set and which shoulders much of the workload of displaying graphics onscreen.

Not counting the emulations of golden age games (Midway Collection, Namco Museum, Intellivision Classic Games, etc.) 10. Tekken 3 9. Blast Radius 8. Asteroids 7. R-Type Delta 6. Rollcage 5. Roll Away 4. Space Invaders 3. Lode Runner: The Legend Returns 2. Devil Dice 1. MediEvil

The technical overview at intellivisionlives.com is also helping me understand these explanations.

Fantastic! I've never been sure if Treasure of Tarmin was resource-intensive or not. On the one hand, there is lots of stuff to keep track of, but on the other hand everything is turn-based, and there is little on-screen movement. Now I'm even more interested in getting at the nuts and bolts of this game. I never would have imagined there was stuff hidden on screen like that! I have to see that for myself! I've used Nostalgia instead of jzintv because it seemed more user friendly. I didn't know jzintv had a debugger, My understanding is that it used to have a disassembler or decompiler but doesn't anymore. Wouldn't the debugger be the same as a dissasembler, or does the debugger incorporate a disassembler? Or am I wrong? I appreciate the responses and the patience. This is all compsci 101 stuff, I suppose... the more I learn, the less I know, as the saying goes.

Fascinating, thanks for the knowledge! If I understand correctly, this explains why Tarmin doesn't simply use a sixth digit to match the other counters on screen (or add one at rollover). It could be done, but the new last digit would also have to be zero, which wouldn't solve anything and would only create new issues with the display of the score (since there are several treasures in the game with two-digit values). So, the game is basically displaying a standard four-digit score with a zero added to the end. Adding digits to a score basically results in ever-greater loss of numerical resolution (since all you can do is keep adding zeroes) and also creates these character display anomalies. A workaround is to use strings of numbers in which each number has four or fewer digits. Do I have it right? Then, this must mean that the attribute scores (player strength or "hit points" | armor | weapon strength) are not six digit elements, but use three digits for the war score, one digit for the slash, and two digits for the spiritual score... spread across six consecutive cards.