freewheel

Sales go up by 10%, but your costs can balloon. Sometimes it's distribution or our tax system, but the bulk of it is the language issue - all retail products in Canada must be dual-labelled. Translating the box and instructions for a FB is NOT trivial, never mind having a separate layout and print run of them as well. When the margins are small (as they would be at $40), that eats into your profit damned fast. Keep up with the updates on locations, everyone. As a Canadian I figured my only hope was to be raped with shipping costs, but now that the Royals are in the real post-season I'll be heading to KC on Saturday. Hoping like mad to get the DG version without having to hit up 20 stores.

I've seen homebrew in Activision carts before. If I ever make a homebrew that people get as upset about as Blix, I'm going to make a special release that ONLY comes in Tutankham cart shells. You'll need to prove your desire (and worthiness) by watching me sacrifice the cart first, then by paying the obscene cost. And I'll just re-sell the bare boards as people apparently sometimes do, with rare enough games. Muahahaha.

As already mentioned, for VERY coarse estimation, sure. The problem is that for stuff that rarely sells, you can get hilarious results. Like say a pretty common game that we all know is worth little, but in the past week only some idiot Amazon seller has had it for $50. Well, that site will faithfully say $50. Price guides based on "for sale" prices (as opposed to "actually sold" prices) are never accurate, especially in this day & age where random Joe can sit on merchandise for months or even years. When everything was via a retail store, at least you had an idea if it was in the ballpark - they had to set prices somewhere close to reality.

Chalk me up as another person who'd LOVE to see Intellivoice added to IntyBASIC. No idea how hard that would be, but it already makes music and sound effects soooooo easy. Would be so slick to have a drop-in routine for voice samples.

Oh it absolutely is, in fact it's mostly why hex was created in the first place - and certainly why it has such widespread use in computing. It all just gets translated to binary in the end anyway. It still doesn't help much when you to use flipped bits and such in registers. Until you start memorizing certain bit patterns.

Need me one of these. Got no way to test homebrew on real hardware, and I'm already suspecting I'm doing a few things that emulators allow but the real deal doesn't.

Love the clean look. And seeing prices on these games instead of having to dicker One suggestion - I loathe websites that seem to insist I'm using an iPhone or dial-up internet. Let me look at dozens of items at once, or even better, have "all" as an option. 8 items at a time drives me bonkers. Should be 25, 50, all. Something like that. I realize this is a non-issue at the moment when you don't have a lot of stuff, but nothing grinds my gears more than clicking next....next....next just to browse catalogs. I have a scroll wheel on my mouse for a reason!

Random place to do this but - GO ROYALS. Wildcard game tonight and everything, first postseason in 29 years. I'm Canadian with no connection to KC but I'll cheer for ridiculous underdogs and sad sack franchises every time. Plus the Royals were a good team back in my formative years when I first played INTV, so it's kinda on-topic?

I only want boxes for 2: Artillery Duel/Chuck Norris, and Motocross/Tomarc. Got them together for a song with all instructions but not the boxes. Given their condition (minty minty) and their overall rareness, boxes would be AMAZING to stumble upon.

DK for Colecovision is rare now?

This can be a contentious one. 3 reasons that I can think of offhand: 1. We never had HD, LCD, or anything like this "back in the day". So it's just "new stuff is bad, mmmkay?" 2. 2600 games should be played 4:3, not 16:9. Yes, with many TVs you can set this, but many people end up playing the games "stretched". Like in your avatar 3. The real CRT love comes from what the image looks like, and it generally comes down to one thing: scanlines. These little devils are how 80s graphics were designed to be played. When you remove them, things appear even more "blocky" than originally. Granted, on a 2600 it's not as bad because the pixel size is so huge to begin with. But it still does make things look "worse" in some ways. Oh, and CRTs all had overscan areas - parts of the screen you couldn't actually see - that some games and systems exploited well. With an LCD you often see these areas and it kinda ruins some effects or introduced graphical elements you weren't meant to see. All told, using a modern TV looks much like playing an emulator on a computer. It just doesn't seem "legit" to old school types. That being said, I have much less of a problem doing it with a 2600, INTV, or Colecovision than I do an NES or something slightly newer.

In every case like this that I can think of, there's been an architectural reason. Often it's for efficiency or some other performance trick. I've always tipped my hat to programmers who just took it in stride and programmed around it. Personally it just means that I'm endlessly writing out binary strings. I suppose if I did this fulltime for a few months it'd become second nature eventually.

Another thanks to you. That last piece was a big chunk of what was messing me up. Out-of-order bits (in this case BG color) make life ... complicated. Edit: never mind, the GROM contents are on the wiki as well. Awesome!

It's been interesting watching the progress of this game - from a basic "how to make a sprite move" into all the various stages of fleshing it out into what looks like a full game. I'm running into the same things myself as I foray into the unknown here. It's also been a bit of an inspiration, so thanks

Ah, cool. I know I've stumbled upon this info before but couldn't find it. This is exactly what I was looking for - a few subtle nuances that aren't apparent without a LOT of mucking about. Muchas gracias!

Ah, true - thanks. But it only works for scrolling in 2 directions I guess.

OK, so first off I just have to pass on a HUGE thanks to nanochess for INTYbasic. What a ridiculously handy tool! I've already managed to prototype out a working game in a matter of hours (and it's been probably 10 years since I've coded anything serious on any platform, let alone BASIC or ASM). It just saves so much effort and thinking. Also holy crap thanks for including &binary support in 0.8. My brain thinks in terms of bitmasking everything and on a platform like this it just makes so much sense. So nice to see it laid out in the code when necessary. I'm gonna have a whackload of questions as I slowly reverse-engineer everything. I've got MOBs figured out pretty well but other display elements are confusing the hell out of me. Perhaps there's a reference doc somewhere that I haven't found, but: 1. What does BORDER really do? The MASK allows some thicker borders on a couple of sides, but it's not a full rectangle. Not sure I understand the point of this because no matter what, it's uneven. 2. When you blit data using SCREEN, how exactly are the bits in the DATA area used? I've been playing around with someone's "clouds and hill" example from another thread and I can mostly figure it out with trial and error, but I'm a binary guy and I like to know what each bit represents. For SPRITE, the manual has a good description of what each bit does. Made it pretty obvious. But for SCREEN - I know that some bits are being used to set FG and BG color on a card, and other bits are being used to select the card from GROM/GRAM, but I can't quite line it up every time. They're close, but not the same, as the bit pattern for SPRITE. At least I don't think so? I'm using MODE 1 if that helps as I believe this limits the number of cards you can access - but I don't understand why the bit assignment seems so different.

.vision got registered as a TLD?? Is this just for 80s retro gamers or what? What next, .tron?

And our recent thread on the controller for one of these: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/229464-atari-kiosk/ Not sure if it's for the VGSC or the POP, but yours has controller ports on it which leads me to believe it belongs with this controller someone else found. Together, that's a hell of a nice setup. Can't be very many of those left.

Oddysey seems like a strange market to try to corner like that. While it's not exactly the most common stuff out there, they made well over 100,000 of the things. We're not talking about someone buying up every Spiker they can find and driving the price to 3-5x SMB or anything.

Wow, that thing is VERY cool. Probably went into some sort of in-store or industry demo kiosk. I highly suggest dumping those ROMs - "Speed Racer"? What the hell is that?? I can't read all of the names from the pic but it would be super cool if you turned up an unknown or variant prototype from this. Beyond that, it just looks like a multi-ROM 2600. Including the ability to plug in a cartridge. The wide variety of dates on the ROMs is a bit neat as well. I wonder if this plugs into that massive kiosk controller someone started a thread about recently. Where on Earth did you find this?

My nephews played the living shit out of Frog Pond for the 2600 (came on the FB4). These are kids who've grown up with ultra high resolution games and they can master a 17-button controller like no one's business. Never ceases to amaze me what kids find interesting.

I don't even understand what Ebay's Global Shipping is supposed to accomplish, beyond fucking over Canadians. We're right next door and our postal systems work very well together. I've mailed dozens of parcels to the USA over the years (and received several times as many) and it doesn't cost a tenth of what Ebay claims it does. I wish I still lived within driving distance of a US postbox, because I'd be using that exclusively if I could. Drive down once a month, and give buyers a break on the shipping because they'll have to wait a bit more to get their items. Probably cost me less in gas than the $100 shipping/customs charge for a couple of cartridges I saw once.

My problem is that my price ceiling for games these days is in the $5-10 range. I'm not quite at the point where every new addition to the collection is gonna cost me real money. Plus thanks to this forum I'm really thinking a boxed collection (outside of a few) is doable, so now loose carts just make me go "shrug, maybe if it's a huge deal". I guess this is my roundabout way of saying "I'd be curious what you expect for these" I'm so used to picking up stuff at well below retail that I don't even know where to begin. I am curious though - why the bare boards?

While I'm ready to be as critical as the next person - emulation is not that hard to get "mostly right" - I'm kinda shocked at some people's reactions. A few sounds are off? One feature in one out of 60 games doesn't work? It's 40 bucks, people! It's designed to be cheap and effectively disposable. An impulse buy. Get back to me when you can get even a third of those games, hardware to play them on a composite screen, and brand-new controllers that are actually better than the originals for a measly 40 bucks.