Eckhard Stolberg

I was talking about about the games that CBS/Coleco released for the Colecovision and Intellivision consoles. Laurent also mentiones those in his article. While the label of the French version of these games say that the cartridges are SECAM versions, games for the Colecovision and Intellivision are actually system independent. All cartridges should play on all consoles, no matter if the consoles are NTSC, PAL or SECAM. For the VCS you are right. There are differences in the palette of the NTSC, PAL and SECAM VCS, so that games need to be adapted for that to look right. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

That's a nice article, Laurent. But I think you are wrong about CBS/Colecovision. Games for the Colecovision and Intellivision are system independent. You can play European cartridges on an American system, and you can play American games on an European system. Also I don't think they ever made special SECAM versions of their VCS games. I had a friend from France read out the ROM of a SECAM Schtroumpfs cartridge for me, and it was exactly the same data as the ROM images from my German and UK Smurfs cartridges. They are all three identical. Only the labels are different. Also CBS didn't even bother to adapt the colours for the PAL version of Roc'n'Rope. Therefore the game looks mostly grey on a PAL system. This is why I doubt that CBS did special versions with SECAM colours of their games. As for Spectravision, are you sure that PAL cartridges don't work on SECAM consoles? www.gamereset.de lists some Spectravision games that were sold in boxes with German names. But the cartridges were the normal PAL cartridges with English labels. Maybe the SECAM releases that you mention in your article were like this as well? The only company that really seems to have made special SECAM cartridges is Activision. But I'll have to see Pongbeat's screenshots before I can believe that. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

z26 doesn't use Direct-X directly. It uses the SDL.DLL, which maps it's functions to either Direct-X or GDI depending on what's available. Did you change something in your Direct-X installation before the problems started? Or did you install a different program that might have come with a different version of the SDL.DLL? Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

I don't know of any specific problems between z26 and either operating system, so you can make your choice depending on what else you'd like to do with your computer. XP in general seems to be a bit more gaming friendly, so that might be the better choice for emulators, if your computer can handle it. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

When you say there are variations, you mean that the games are different from Activision's PAL games played on a SECAM VCS, right? I've never seen games like these anywhere outside of France. I don't think there are screenshots or ROM images of such games anywhere on the internet either. Do you have some screenshots of your SECAM specific games? I don't think anyone here collects SECAM games. Do you have some spares that you'd like to trade for some common PAL games? Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

So there really are special SECAM VCS games from Activision? Which other games besides HERO do you have, and could you make screenshots of them? Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

If the right CTRL button is your only concern, you should be able to use all 2600 emulators with your laptop. z26 allows you to use either CTRL button for the left player's fire button. And PCAE and the new pre-release of Stella have user-definable keyboard controls. So, if they use the right CTRL button for anything, you should be able to assing that to a different button. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The Windows version of z26 works fine under Win98. But for the time being it doesn't have a build-in GUI anymore. Therefore you have to use it from a DOS command line window. There is some information about using z26 from a command line in the manual, which is called README.TXT. If that doesn't help you, you might want to use an external GUI front end for z26. There is a link to x26 on the z26 homepage. Also there is a new article about setting up z26 and x26, which you can find from the AtariAge frontpage. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

I don't think this is true. If export restrictions on the cryptography functions were a problem, the NTSC 7800s wouldn't have been manufactured in Asia. I think it was just cheaper to have a build-in game instead of packing the console with an extra cartridge. Also the PAL 7800 was first released in late 1989. By that time Atari probably was hoping for the European computer game makers to release unlicensed games for the 7800 to have at least a small chance against Nintendo. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The SECAM VCS should already have the same video cable that is used all over Europe, so you should be able to connect it to your TV without changing anything. However - just like with NTSC - your TV has to support SECAM for your console to produce a proper picture on it. Other than NTSC, SECAM is totally different from PAL. With a NTSC VCS you would only get no colour and no sound, if your TV doesn't support it. But with a SECAM VCS you wouldn't get a picture at all. And there is nothing in the console to adjust this. You would probably have to do one of those composite-out modifications. But I'm not sure anyone ever designed one for a SECAM VCS. Modern European multi-standard TVs are more likely to support SECAM than they are to support NTSC. So, if your NTSC VCS works with one of your TVs, chances are very good, that it would work with your SECAM VCS too. You might have to select SECAM input for the channel you are using in the menu of your TV though. You should check the manuals for all your TVs to see, if one of them supports SECAM. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The PAL 7800 does know that it has to display more scanlines per frame than a NTSC 7800. But the game has to tell the console what to display in these extra scanlines. If the game doesn't provide extra graphics data, the 7800 will try to interpret whatever other data it finds at the end of the NTSC display lists as graphics data too. This is why you sometimes see this messed up graphics in the lower part of the screen, when you try to play a NTSC 7800 game on a PAL 7800 console. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The SECAM CBS games for the 2600 are only label variations. CBS used half the label for their copyright message, and they did versions in different languages. I know of at least English, German and French CBS labels. And even though the label warns to use the game only with the local TV system (PAL-UK, PAL-German or SECAM), the games themselves are all the same. The same is probably true for the SECAM Activision games. The international version of the Activision boxes always lists both TV standards, PAL and SECAM, on the back. So maybe Activision just had all the games for the French-speaking market made in the same factory, and needed a way to identify the cartridges for the Canadian NTSC market and the French SECAM/PAL market. That would explain why there are cartridges with "N" and "S" stickers but none with "P" stickers. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Joysticks and paddles work the same, no matter if they are emulated with a Stalladapter or a normal PC-joystick. But the driving controller emulation needs to be handled differently on the Stelladaptor. Since I couldn't come up with a better way to autodetect the Stelladaptor, I'm assuming that a joystick with only 2 axes and 2 buttons must be a Stalladaptor. For some reason Windows detected your Stelladaptor as a joystick with 2 axes, 6 buttons and a PoV head. Therefore the autodetection in z26 fails and the driving controller emulation doesn't work. I know you can't edit the joystick properties in the Windows controller dialog. But maybe it would work, if you deleted the Stelladaptor from the controller list and manually created a new entry for it. The new entry should be for a "2 axes, 2 buttons joystick". In any way, I guess I'll better add an override funtion to the next version of z26, that lets you enforce Stelladaptor mode. You never know what other weird thinks Windows can come up with. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

OK, I tried out the BMP support again, and I'm getting the messed up pictures in the 256 colour video modes (-v0 to -v8) too now. The video modes that use the same colour resolution as your Windows desktop (-v10 to -v18 = windowed / -v20 to -v28 = fullscreen) seem to work fine though. But in these video modes the BMP files will have the higher colour resolution too. This is fine when you want to make screenshots of games that play better with the phosphor effect enabled. But just doing normal screenshots could use smaller files I think. I could have sworn BMPs in all modes worked fine for me before. I guess I'll now have to go through all the older versions of z26 to find out if this bug is something that we introduced in the past ourselves, or if it's something computer related. In any way, I'll try to fix BMP support for the next release. @ Danno Believe me that John and I like simple programs more than anyone. But making the controller code in z26 as easy to use as possible also made it difficult to maintain, because everything got dependent of everything else. So to be able to add new features to the controller handling code in the future, I decided to completely rewrite it. And while I was working on this, Joe and Albert approached me about adding support for the Stelladaptor. I really liked this device and wanted to add support for it to z26. But since the new controller code in z26 wasn't quite ready yet and Joe and Albert wanted to release the Stelladaptor at the PhillyClassic, I had to chose to either make the people who bought a Stelladaptor angry at me, because I had working code for it and wouldn't release it until everything else was ready, or make the people who didn't buy a Stelladaptor angry at me, because I would have to release a version of z26 that wasn't quite as easy to use as before. I tried to make it possible to disable as many of the new Stelladaptor features as I could think of, so that people without a Stelladaptor would be able to still use z26 mostly as they used to. But as it seems there are people that use z26 differently than I do. So obviously I didn't restore every possible way of using z26 to it's original state yet. I'll try to fix this in future releases as good as the new controller handling code allows it. Releasing the new version of z26 in it's current state is not some kind of useless marketing ploy for the Stelladaptor. I just wanted to be able to use my Stelladaptor with z26 and thought I'd share the results with everyone else, who wanted to use it too, as soon as possible. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

@ JL When you try out the Stelladaptor in the Windows controller testing dialog, does it only display the square for the two axis and two circles for the two buttons, or are there any other inputs listed? I'm just trying to find out, if your Stelladptor is detected incorrectly in the Windows controller settings, which would prevent it from working in z26, or if there is something else inside z26 that is not working properly. Unfortunately there isn't a command line switch that you can use. I build in a switch to disable Stelladaptor support, but none to enforce it. I expected problems with other controllers being incorrectly detected as Stelladaptors, but I didn't see something like this comming. If the problem really is that your Stelladaptor is listed as something different than a two-axis two-buttons controller in Windows, I'll add a command line switch to handle that to the next version of z26. @Bivotar, Oesi, Albert I don't think that different computer speeds or operating systems could have much impact on the jitter. The values from the Stalladaptor should get passed through to the emulator pretty much directly. But since the Stelladaptor checks the voltage to read the paddle, it might be possible that getting slightly unstable power from the USB port might cause some jitter. It might be worth trying out, if the situation improves, if you connect your Stelladaptor to an active USB hub with it's own power supply. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

If your TV has a headphone connector, you can easily connect that to the line in on your PC. Usually these connectors are hidding behind a little cover on the front side of your TV. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Which controller do you mean, and which emulator are you using it with? In general it takes a while for the Stelladaptor (or any other PC controller) to read it's inputs, create a data set and send that to the PC. Then it takes a while for the emulator to read this data, to evaluate it, to put into the emulated machine, and to display the picture generated with the new data. There isn't much that can be done about this, but fortunately it usually isn't too noticeable. The Stelladaptor supports real Atari paddles though, where there is a direct relation between the position of the paddle and the object on the screen. This is probably why you notice it on the Stelladaptor, while you can easily ignore it with other PC controllers. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Yes, that's what I was trying to say. The Stelladaptor uses PC button 1 for the firebutton on the Atari joystick. Colours in emulators are always a problem, because everyone has their own settings for the colours in their TV and in their PC monitor. So it's impossible to find a palette that no-one would complain about. I guess eventually we will have to add a way for the user to customise the palette in z26. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

For the BMP screenshots we are using a function that is build into the SDL. I think it reads it data directly from the video memory, so BMP screenshots always use the size and bitdepth of the video mode you are running z26 in. The last time I tried this function it worked fine for me, but I'll check it again. What video mode were you using when you got these messed up screenshots? Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

z26 always uses the first PC joystick for the left port and the second PC joystick for the right port. So your Stelladaptor should be listed in either the first or the second spot in the Windows controller settings dialog. If you only have one Stelladaptor and want to use it for the other Atari joystick port, you can use the -w command line otion to swap the ports in z26. This is done in Tac Scan by default for example, because this game uses a paddle on the right controller port. The Stelladaptor reads the paddles differently than the VCS. Unfortunately this results in a little jitter. For z26 I tried to filter this out. You can move the paddle freely as long as you move in the same direction. When you change the direction, the first step has to be a bit bigger before z26 would react to it. For all the paddles I had for testing this filters out almost all of the jitter and doesn't seem to be too noticeable. Is the jitter really that bad for you? What system and OS are you using? Have you tried to inactivate the mouse and/or keyboard input with the -iMK command line switch, to make sure that these controllers don't interfere with the Stelladaptor when playing a paddle game? Calibrating the paddles shouldn't have much effect on the jitter. It might make the paddles act a bit more jerky though. So it might be better to reset the calibration values to the default, so that Windows sends the data that it gets from the Stelladaptor directly to z26. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The Stelladaptor uses button 1 for the joystick and the driving controller. It uses both buttons for the paddles, because there are two of them per port. If Stella can read USB joysticks, then it should work with an Atari joystick connected to the Stelladaptor too. The emulator needs to be prepared to handle the driving controller and the paddles though. So you'll have to wait for an update to Stella before you can use these controllers with it. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The driving controller support only works, if z26 knows that a Stalladaptor is used. For the lack of a better detection method I'm assuming that every joystick with only two axis and two buttons is a Stelladaptor. Usually the Stelladaptor should identify itself this way to Windows and the right driver should be installed. If for some reason the Stelladaptor gets installed into Windows as a joystick with more than two axis and two buttons, the Stealladaptor autodetection in z26 wouldn't work. As you turn the driving controller it should send signals for "up - center - down - halfway down - up" and so on. I'm assuming it does this in the Windows controller dialog, right? Did you calibrate the Stelladaptor in this dialog? If you did, the values for these signals might not be in the correct range anymore, so that z26 can't read the signals properly anymore. These are the only possible problems I can come up with at the moment. Please let me know if it isn't one of them. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Yes you can. I only removed the -j command line option and a couple of others, because they were no longer needed after I changed the controller handling code. If you want to swap both virtual controller ports, you can now use the -w command line option. And if you want to disable the the PC-joystick input, you can now use the -iJ command line option. This also allows you to disable keyboard, mouse or Stelladaptor input with K, M or S instead of or added after the J. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

It seems to be included with all the carts. At least it is included in mine too. To activate this message you have to hold down the buttons on both joysticks when you power up your VCS. Then the menu will turn into the following message: (six hearts) I LOVE YOU BERNADETTE I LOVE YOU BERNADETTE (six hearts) If you now move the left joystick while still holding down the buttons, then the second half of the message will turn into: WILL YOU MARRY ME? SKID If your 6-switch VCS always goes to this message, something must be wrong with it's controller handling. (And no, this is not an April Fools prank. You can go and get the ROM image from an independent source and see the graphics data for the message at addresses $2BD0 to $2CF0.) Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

This sounds like you might have accidentally created a Z26.CLI file in the past. It's either in the z26 install directory or in your ROMs directory. z26 creates this file when you start the emulator with command line options but without a filename. This is to allow you to make z26 remember command line options that you always want to use, like your favourite video mode. If you find a Z26.CLI file in your z26 directory or your ROMs directory, you can either open it with a text editor and remove the -j command line option, or you can delete the file right away and have z26 create a new one for you when you always want to use certain command line options. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg