Eckhard Stolberg

The text is "Stella says: Write a Game!", but admittedly I had chosen a way too low sample rate for it to be understandable. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

I've returned the protos to Walter, so he would have to try that. I'm not sure this trick would work too well on the warranty stickers though, as they are designed to tear easily. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Hello Manuel, Populous has always been one of my favourite games too. A couple of weeks ago I introduced it to one of my nephews, and he was really surprised that they made games that good before he was even born. On the sound issue of the PC version: I think it depends on which soundcart support you enable. The Roland version has good music but poor sound effects. The Adlib version has not so good music, but much better sound effects. And you might have to disable the music during gameplay to get the most out of the effects. I don't know about the Final Frontier add-on, but the Promised Lands disk exists for the PC version. I still have my original copy. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Since I still have Walter's protos, I thought I'd post a quick picture of them. Food Fight and Xevious are boards only. Dig Dug and the diagnostics test cart come in plain Atari cases. Unfortunately the diagnostics cart has a warranty sticker over the screw hole. I don't know of a way to get these off and back on undamaged, so I didn't dare opening the case. I'll leave that to Walter when he gets his protos back. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

You are right. I compared your PAL Springer ROM with the NTSC one, and large parts in all banks are identical. So it must be the correct PAL dump. Now I wonder why the game doesn't work on your 7800. Maybe the port extender is slowing the signals down so much, that the bankswitching can't work fast enough for the game to play properly. For the cartridge reader that wouldn't be a problem, because it needs a while to set up the data transfer after the bankswitch anyway. But maybe the game code itself is more timing sensitive. IIRC the Miner preview copy also delayed the access to the code in a new bank after a bankswitch a bit compared to the release version. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Actually a game that fits the 7800 cartridge slot but still doesn't work, ususally fails because of a problem with the bankswitching. I don't think it's possible to dump all banks of such a game correctly with a modified 7800. There is a small modification on Chad Schell's website to make the later 7800 consoles compatible with the Cuttle Cart 1. Maybe this modificaion also helps with 3F compatibility. The reason why z26 works automatically with Miner 2049 is probably that a PAL dump of that game already existed and that Omegamatrix's dump is identical to the one we had for referrence. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

AFAIK the term 3rd party developer stems from the lawsuits against IBM in the 1960s, where independent hardware and software producers tried to force IBM to standardize the interfaces for IBM's peripherals and to price the peripherals and the software seperately in IBM's contracts. Since the independent developers sued against IBM's contracts, IBM was referred to as the first party in all the legal paperwork and the company who bought the computer was referred to as the second party. That made the plaintiff the third party. Somehow the term stuck on and later was used for the independent developers for home computers and video game systems too. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Actually some of the games in the original Interton library could be considered to be homebrew games. In 1979 the German electronics magazine Elektor published plans for a simple home computer based on the same chips that were used in the VC4000. People who had build that computer wrote games that were published by Elektor on tapes. Some of these games were bought by Interton to be turned into cartridge versions for the VC4000. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

There should be working versions of these ROMs available. The first time the ROMs were available was in the form of these bad dumps, so they got spead pretty widely. Therefore it might be a bit difficult to find good copies. You need to start these games in the higher bank, because the lower bank has the system vectors from the higher bank too, which doesn't work. IIRC, CommaVid extra RAM has the read ports at $1000-$13ff, the write ports at $1400-17ff and the ROM at $1800-$1fff. Supercat is right. The current versions of the emulators aren't that acurate when it comes to HMOVE handling. For the special cases, like Cosmic Arc or Kool Aide Man, we basically cheat well enough to get the available games working. It would be quite easy to break the emulation with a new game. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Sky Patrol and Sir Lancelot are most likely bad ROM dumps that have wrong system vectors in one of the banks. You have to start them in the other bank to get them working (or fix the reset vector in the ROM image). Video Life uses 1K of extra RAM on the cartridge. If your test system doesn't support this, the game won't be able to change the display. Kool Aide Man uses one of the difficulty switches for a pause feature. If the switch is in the 'pause' position, the game will lock up in the title screen as you describe. Simple flipping the switch will solve the problem. The display problem that batari mentioned is indeed related to the Cosmic Ark starfield effect. If you have your HMOVE handling work properly, then there shouldn't be a problem with Kool Aide Man. If not, then the digits in the score display might overlap. In that case the game constantly triggers the collision detection, so that the Kool Aide Man sprite bounces back and forth in the top left corner. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Yes label and box are the same, except for the S sticker. They even used this label and box in NTSC Canada (with a N sticker on it): I just had a look at the SECAM list on atarimania.com, and saw that you have the CBS games on it. I think for them it's exactly the other way around. CBS did have special labels and boxes for France that claimed the games were SECAM only. But the ROMs were the same as the PAL version. At least it was for the Schtroumpfs game that I tested a couple years ago. Maybe you could have a look at your other CBS SECAM ROMs and see if any of them are different from their PAL counterpart? Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

That depends on your TV set. Multi-standard TVs with 60Hz support might stretch the display vertically, so that it will fill the entire screen. Normal PAL-only TVs will only use the center 262 scanlines of the screen and therefore have a black border at the top and bottom. At least the borders are black, if you don't forget to turn on VBLANK during the vertical sync. Otherwise you'll get a spooky glow instead. If the black borders don't slow down the rendering, you could keep them to make Stella look more real. But to be fully authentic you'd have to keep the 4:3 aspect ratio for the 312 line display. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

I'm not sure how reliably it would work, but I think you could convert a Proline joystick by simply removing the red and yellow wires from the board with the direction inputs. The wires are clipped to the board, so you could easily put them back, if the joystick doesn't work reliably with Omega Race. If you unconnect the red and yellow wires from the resistors on the directions board, then the buttons on the Proline joystick only connect the paddle inputs to the joystick button input, which should also provide +5V. I think the second button on the Colecovision controller works this way too. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Domino was done by me, not by Piero. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Wierd, the mouse cursor should automatically be hidden. Does it always display for you or only is some situations? If you don't want to play games that require mouse input, you could start z26 with the -M command line switch. Then z26 won't grab the mouse cursor and you could at least move it out of the way. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

The ribbon cable connects the buttons on the top of the console with the mainboard. There is a 4 pin connector on the board, where you need to slide the ribbon cable into. The variable inductor is under the metal shield, but it should be accessible through one of the holes. IIRC on the Jr. Atari used a small metal cube instead of the long red plastic shaft for the audio inductor. Look into all the holes of the metal shield, and if you see a small metal cube with a hexagonal hole in it, that's the part that you'd want to adjust. And if your TV does support several different PAL standards, you should be able to select PAL-I in the channel setup menu. That's the menu where you assign the channels to the program numbers. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Where did you get the console and the games? There are different versions of the PAL standard throughout Europe and the world. In the UK they use PAL-I for example while we in Germany use PAL-B. The main difference between the different version of PAL in Europe is the sound carrier frequency. I think Greece also uses PAL-B. So if you got the console from the UK for example, you'll have to set your TV to PAL-I mode too. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

CloneSpy proves that they are closely related (49% identical). But how do you know which came first? If you play Zoo Fun / Pumuckl I, step off the hill in the center of the screen and wait untill the timer bar at the bottom of the screen runs out. The game will then display the number of remaining lives. To do so it uses the exact same panda head graphics that Panda Chase uses too. The game is so easy that you don't loose a life very often. So the panda head is a little detail that would be easy to miss, if Zoo Fun / Pumuck I was created in a hurry from the Panda Chase source code. But if Zoo Fun / Pumuckl I was created first, it wouldn't make much sense to add panda heads as a life counter. Therefore I think that Panda Chase came before Zoo Fun / Pumuckl I. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

It might be worth noting that Zoo Fun (SS-27) has a lower number than Panda Chase (SS-35), even though Zoo Fun is clearly based on the Panda Chase code. There are too many changes for Zoo Fun to be a simple hack, but the two games are definately related. Zoo Fun even displays the number of remaining lives with the same panda head graphics as Panda Chase. So, if Suntek really released the games in the order that the numbers suggest, it would seem unlikely that they programmed them themselves. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

I also think that Farmyard Fun was programmed by Homevision. They probably did the game for ITT Family Games to be released in their Pumuckl series. The main character in Farmyard Fun (and Zoo Fun) looks exactly like Pumuckl did in the German TV series of the early 1980s (red spiky hair, yellow shirt, green trousers and bare feet). Also the game plays the title melody from the TV series. Therefore I think the game was supposed to be a Pumuckl game. ITT Family Games had a Pumuckl license and got most of their games from Homevision. It would fit the picture, if Farmyard Fun also originated there. And if Farmyard Fun and Zoo Fun were created as contract work for ITT, it would explain why no-one has found Homevision cartridges of these games yet. BTW, Ariola is what later became the Bertelsmann Music Group. Ariola still exists as a BMG label. They officially distributed the Activision and CommaVid games in Germany. They are not the same company as Suntek. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Any write to an address below $0020 will also change the 7800's mode control register (unless it's already locked). Writing $00 there will enable the 2600 memory setup. In this mode every even 4K memory bank will contain a mirror of the TIA & RIOT, just like on a 2600. Only the odd 4K banks will allow access to your BIOS / cartridge ROM. So your code at $eed8 will pull out the ROM from under it's feet when it tries to clear the TIA. Whatever code the 7800 is running then is probably causing the CPU to lock up. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Thanks. It looks much better now. But could you also change the colours in 'code' segments please? That one still has blue text on a light blue background. Since code segments use a different font than the rest of the text, I don't think they need any extra highlighting. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Mondo Pong uses a range of 0-100 scanlines for reading the paddle. So you would lose 10-15 %. That would make the game unplayable, since you couldn't hit high balls anymore. For Party Mix I'm not quite sure. IIRC it was the game with the fireball-throwing wizards that needs the quick paddle response. In this game you wouldn't be able to make the wizard's arm move really slowly, which would make aiming more difficult. But the game in general would still be playable. But there are some other games in the 10-15 lines range. Tac Scan for example needs a value of 10 or less for steering sharply to the right. With higher values you'd still be able to turn right, but navigation would much more difficult. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

Is it possible to get all text to appear in black when switching to the printable view of a topic? Currently it seems that headlines, poster names, quotes and code segments are always blue. Also posts that don't have any quotes will have all their text to appear in blue. And quotes and code segments will have a light blue background. At least that is what it looks like for me in Opera. I would prefer it if all text was black and there were no coloured backgrounds. It would make print-outs easier to read and also save some of the expensive colour ink. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

I tried out the paddle range for every known game when I was adding Stelladaptor support to z26. In z26 the paddles are emulated by a counter that flips the corresponding paddle bit in the TIA after a certain number of scanlines. The highest number of scanlines is 260, which is needed for Casino game variation 4. The shortest time is used by Mondo Pong, which starts polling the paddle right after releasing the capacitors. The next game is one of the Party Mix loads, which starts after 2 scanlines. Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg