Eckhard Stolberg

Yeah Matty, what were you thinking? The first question you should have asked John is of course what the gameplay on his version of "Save the Whales" would be like. Then we would at least have had a chance to play the ROM image on our emulators by programming it first. But I must say that this year's picture looks much more real than last year's attempt with "Lady Bug". Even though John forgot the HMOVE blanks for repositioning the sprites again. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The layout of the Jinks board (as well as Tower Toppler, Impossible Mission, Summer Games and Winter Games) is what Graham Percy used to base his new RAM-cart designs on, because these games already come with some onboard RAM. Maybe John is only trying to find the best setup to play most of his ROM images on a real 7800. I think Oshea's still has some copies of some of these games. But they charge $5 per copy now, which might already be more than your limit. And I think Mitch found a different board type in some NTSC carts with onboard RAM. These boards are more difficult to modify according to Graham. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

I don't know about this particular game, but the asian pirate companies had a habit of using random artwork for their VCS releases. There are a couple of carts that use artwork from cartoons or movies while the game itself has absolutely nothing to do with it. Just look at the "Mr. T" game that Matty posted a scan of some time ago. And since there is an obscure PAL game called Challenge, it might be possible that a Ghostbusters picture was used for one of it's pirate incarnations. Maybe this is what the person remembers? Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

It should be possible to build a 2600 cart reader without the help of an EPROM programmer and a 7800 console. But depending on how many different bankswitching types you want to support, it might get much more expensive and complicated than the 7800 modification. Therefore I don't think anyone has any simple instuctions for something like this available. There is a cartridge reader for the SMS, which is based on a special PC IO cart. This could probably be modified quite easily to read VCS games as well. The reasons why we chose to build our 2600 cartridge reader from a 7800 are basically that I had a 7800 console and not too much experience with soldering at that time. Luckily the changes needed to do my PAL 7800 were really trivial, so that not too much soldering was involved. Also the 7800 already operates at the right speed to read 2600 cartridges, which made creating the basic software rather simple. Other advantages are that it also works as a 7800 cartidge reader, and when you have read all your games, you can turn it into a nice development system for 2600 and 7800 games by just adding a RAM cart. BTW, the "new" URL for this project is buerger.metropolis.de/estolberg/. The second version there isn't quite as new anymore though. We have done some improvements since (especially Graham Percy has created some really nice bankswitching 7800 RAM carts), but I need to find some time to catch up with the software and documentation before we can have another release. Since I always have more plans than time, you shouldn't expect anything in the near future. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

I don't know, if these games were sold like that, or if the ROMs floating around the net are just bad dumps, but I get the same kind of graphic errors on a real VCS that I get on z26, when I play the ROMs on my Cuttle Cart. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

I also got my "short rainbow" 2600 Jr. with the two proline joysticks and Centipede for Christmas in 1984, so that system definately was around at that time. A friend of my had gotten his VCS a couple of month before for his birthday, and that still was a 4-switch with Pac Man, so I'm not sure how common the Jr was here in Germany back then. p.s. I just saw, that you are from Hamburg, where Warner-Atari had their German headquarters. I live in a small town near Hamburg too, so that might be the reason why we had access to the Jr consoles in 1983/84. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg [ 03-21-2002: Message edited by: Eckhard Stolberg ]

I think KLAX was also released in 1992. At least that's what an Atari article in the news section of one of my old German video game magazines indicates. The computer versions of Pick'n'Pile came out in early 1991, so the VCS version must have been programmed and released after that. And I would put Acid Drop into the same time frame too, since it was done by the same programmer for the same company, and the title/options screens are pretty similar. Fatal Run was the largest game by Atari, but the ecucational games cartridge that came with the Dynacom Megaboy was even 64KB big. And it came out pretty late, so maybe this is the last commercially released VCS game? Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The SARA RAM chip is basically a 128 bytes RAM chip with the nessessary decoder logic onboard. They can be found on some other Atari VCS games, like Dig Dug or Defender 2 as well. I think the people who build the Elevator Action carts also took the SARA chips from old games. How you have to wire such a chip to your homebrew board is something you have to figure out on your own though. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Tetris could be easily done on the 7800. But who would really want to spend his time writing another version of this game? The only think I could see being worthwhile would be a port of Atari's level based arcade version. But unfortunately I don't know this game well enough to even get the levels right, so don't look at me. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Karolj, I don't even know the 5200 system architecture well enough to get that done. And Fox's XASM source code, that you sent me, unfortunately isn't much of a help in this respect either. Also I'm not much of a fan of adding subroutines in binary form. I would prefer to know what the code is doing before I use it. That way it would probably also be a lot easier to create new songs with the tracker software that would actually work with the player routine. There is no need to rush Fox with the format description, BTW. It's not as if I had a couple of games waiting, that are ready except for the sound code. I'm just curious about what the 7800 would be able to do from a technical standpoint. Thanks, Eckhard Stolberg

If you are having trouble connecting the VCS to the TV, you can open up the VCS, and replace the cable with a European version. I think the connector inside the VCS is the same cinch/RCA plug in all models of this console. That way you can at least rule out the switch and the converter as the problem cause. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

quote: Originally posted by King_Asmo: Apparently so was/is Andy Partridge of XTC fame. I read that he had one in his personal studio. I wonder how many other famous musicians used ST's back in the 80's and 90's? I think over here in Europe pretty much everyone working with synthesizers in the late 1980's and early 1990's was also using an Atari ST. I know that "Stock Aitken Waterman" were working with them, and they were producing most of the popular teenage artists in Britain during this time. And I wouldn't be too surprised, if Frank Farian had a ST too, while he was working with Milli Vanilli. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

This wouldn't work. Mountain King (accidentally?) reads some bytes from the TIA input registers as level data. For these registers only the two topmost bits have a defined state. On the 2600 the other bits stay at whatever data was on the bus last. In the 7800 this behaviour was changed. The unused bits are always set to 0. Therefore you get different values which results in a different setup for the upper regions in Mountain King, which won't give you any oppertunity to climb up there. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Speaking of it: Karolj, maybe you could ask Fox or someone else from your demo group to give you a detailed English desription of one of the POKEY tracker formats (including all the effects), like CMC, MPT or TMC? I think then it would be much easier for us to write our own player routine in DASM compatible format, or even to create a PC-based editor program. Thanks, Eckhard Stolberg

@ZANZA: Most multi-standard TVs actually support two different versions of NTSC (NTSC 3.58 and NTSC 4.43). I'm not quite sure, what the difference is, but if it were the sound carrier frequency, and your TV only supported NTSC 4.43 (I think NTSC 3.58 is the standard used in North America), then it might explain, why your console generates colours but no sound. @berzerker: Some multi-standard TVs only support NTSC through the AV inputs but not though the antenna input. Also PAL TVs usually take 75 Ohm inputs, so there should be no need to convert the output of the VCS to 300 Ohm. And just to make sure you are not forgetting something obvious here: you have set the program, that you are using for your VCS, to NTSC mode in the on-screen menu of your TV, right? Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Finding this type of tube outside of a Vectrex is very unlikely. But are you sure that it is really the tube that's broken? Vectrex consoles are known to have some of the chips or capacitors fail over time. And these are much easier to replace than the tube. The guys over at rec.games.vectrex are pretty good at talking you though these fixes, if you give them a detailed description of the problem. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

@Paul: There are two things to take care of, if you want to make sure that your NTSC program can work on a PAL system. Make sure that you are generating an even number of scanlines in all frames, and also make sure that you have exactly three lines of uninterrupted VSYNC (i.e. don't access the TIA or RIOT except for the three WSYNCs). Up until recently I was using an old Sharp PAL TV which would loose all the colour information, if you did frames with odd numbers of scanlines. It was able to sync to most NTSC games, but some of them were problematical. I'm not quite sure what caused these problems, but there were demos from the Stella list which only added a STA TIM64T during the VSYNC phase, and they would roll the screen. Eventually I was able to adjust the VHOLD knob on my TV in such a way, that it would sync to all NTSC games as well as the normal PAL TV broadcast. Some of the NTSC games that had caused problems on it (Indy 500, Desert Falcon) also seem to roll the screen on some NTSC TVs, as previous discussions here indicate. So it might not be a PAL only problem. The PAL version of these games always worked fine though. Now I'm using a multi-standard TV from Aiwa. It has a special PAL60 mode, so all NTSC games work nicely with it. Also It doesn't loose the colour when games do an odd number of scanlines per frame. Instead it sometimes shows the top part of the screen in totally different colours than normally. The palette between PAL and NTSC is very different. If colours matter for your program, you can try it out with an emulator. In z26 you would start your program like: "z26 -c1 synth.bin". The colours in the emulator are a bit too washed out, but you could get a basic impression. @ ZANZA: The carrier frequency for the sound is different between most versions of PAL and NTSC, so it's perfectly normal that you won't get sound when connecting a NTSC console to a PAL TV. The sound carrier frequency is different between different versions of PAL as well BTW, so you wouldn't get sound, if you connected a British PAL console to a German PAL TV for example. The carrier frequncy for the colour signal is different between NTSC and PAL too. So your NTSC console might not produce any colours either. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The 7800 doesn't have enough RAM to simulate a vector display. You would have to provide a serious amound on the cartridge. Then it becomes a question of how much screen resolution and how many colours you would need to still be able to recognize the game. The 7800 can do 320x200 pixels, but you would only get 3 colours plus background. In the 160x200 screen mode, you could get 12 colours plus background, but the addressing of the pixels is a bit wierd. Also the more complex the display gets, the more processing power the DMA takes away from the processor. This can be important, if you want to do a vector game where a lot of stuff needs to be changed per frame. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

That's probably why Atari decided to make their German slogan fit the jingle and came up with "Wer hat schon Atari gespielt?" ("Who has played Atari at all?"). And as a jingle, I don't think neither the German nor the English version is really better than the other. Considering how limited the possibilities for TV advertisements were back then in Germany, I don't suppose anyone here accidentally taped a spot with this jingle? Or does anyone still have his 20-year old recordings of "Western von gestern" and the likes? Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

@Karolj: I don't mind adopting new English terms into the German language. We have always done that with whatever language was popular at the time, and it just made our own language richer. But when someone only for marketing reasons replaces a perfectly established German word with some English nonsense, that not even people who speak English natively can unterstand, then I can only find that ridiculous. And if you think that translating a stupid German slogan into English makes it any better, I have to disagree. It still stays the same stupid slogan as before. As a marketing person you have to work really hard to come up with something clever and catchy. And if you do so, you might as well stay within a language where you know what all the words mean. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

@ Jet Boot Jack: So you programmed for the 7800 back in the day? Did any of the games you worked on ever get released? Tile based graphics are a hardware feature in the 7800. For each of the objects that you put into a display list, you can chose between direct and indirect mode via a bit in the object header. In direct mode the data that the address pointer referenced is interpreted directly for setting up the scanline. In indirect mode the referenced data bytes are used as the low byte pointer into a character- or tile-set. The high byte for the character pointers has to be set through a special MARIA register. And as you might remember, if you set up a display list to cover more than one scanline, the high byte of the graphics pointer is decreased for every scanline. To get smooth vertical scrolling on the 7800, you can just set up a 1-line-zone in the invisible part at the top of the screen. Then you can increase the line counter for that zone, and when it has reached the tile hight, you just reset it to 1 and copy all the tiles one tile-line down. Horizontal scrolling is difficult, because the horizontal position is stored in the header of each object in each scanline-zone. So you have to update quite a lot of values which might be spead out irregularily over the RAM. And adding sprites to such a setup is difficult because vertical positioning is done by adding information about the object to each scanline-zone where the object is supposed to appear. If you have many moving objects, that can be quite difficult to handle. But the nice part, as you mentioned, is that you can use the 12 colour mode for the background tiles, so that you can define them all with the same header, and then use the 4 colour mode with a different palette for each sprite. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Asteroids uses one button to fire and the other button for hyperspace. But the 7800 doesn't detect the controller type automatically. This has to be done by the game itself. I don't know how Asteroids does it, but when reading the proline joysticks is enabled in the 7800, then pushing a button will trigger the button line and one of the paddle lines. If there is a signal on the button line but not on either of the paddle lines, then a non-proline joystick must be connected. If there is a way to detect the joystick without having the user push a button, I'm not sure. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Ah, one of my favourites. What Karolj is talking about is a rucksack. There is a German chain of coffee-shops that nowadays makes most of their money from selling all kinds of cheap things in their shops too. One of the things they are selling is one of those tiny little rucksacks, that women use instead of a handbag. Apparently their advertisement department thought that the German word "rucksack" wasn't cool enough. And since the bag was supposed to be used as a handbag, but worn on the back instead of in the hand, they decided to call it "body-bag", not knowing what that word really means in English. The sad part about it is that German advertisers say that they are using English slogans or product names all the time because they think they can express themselves much better in that language. If their German really is worse than their English, I think they might have chosen the wrong profession. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

@ Jet Boot Jack: I agree with you that the 7800 hardware was quite different from anything else and that that was one of the reasons why it wasn't interesting for many programmers. But what I'm trying to point out is that the 7800 can be set up to act very similar to those other architectures in some respects, and that therefore your examples are chosen a bit unfortunately. For example you can easiely set up two Diplay List Lists in the RAM and then get page flipping by changing a single byte as well. While the 7800 only has screen RAM for two scanlines, writing to these lines is handled via DMA. The programmer only has to set up a description of where to read the data from for all the lines. And the 7800 does support an indirect character mode. You can set up an area in the RAM with 40x25 characters and have them displayed. So changing a single byte in this matrix will change a character or tile on the screen, just like it would on the other systems. Vertically scrolling such a display can also be done by changing only a couple of bytes, just like on the other consoles. But when it comes to horizontally scrolling the display, things become a bit different, so that is what you should have mentioned. And since for the 7800 everything is the same type of object, it gets really wierd when it comes to add independently moving sprites to such a scrolling tile-based background. This sure could scare off a programmer that is used to programming on the NES or C64. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg [ 02-25-2002: Message edited by: Eckhard Stolberg ]

Some time ago I got two PAL copies of Crossbow in a trade. Both of them showed a similar problem like your Scrapyard Dog cartridges. So I decided to open one up. As it turned out it had the solder jumpers for the bankswitching wrong. Atari had closed jumper W1 instead of W2. Due to this the game wasn't able to switch to the proper graphics bank and would show random stuff from a different bank. After changing the jumpers the game worked as it should. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg