freewheel

Text came first. Although there was a fair bit of overlap depending on which market you were in.

30/33 on the second one. Much better without the games-from-the-series-noone-actually-plays. I must type fast, I found found plenty of time in the quiz. I had almost 3 minutes left to guess at the last 3.

I'd first try it on another TV. Modern LCD screens are notorious for hating the video signals from Ataris. Failing that, there's an adjustable potentiometer inside that can be tweaked to fix a lot of these problems.

Interesting, I didn't realize they were all NTSC. They were marketed in PAL countries as far as I can tell, and at least one of the ones I has sure looks like the PAL pallette (even though it seems to have NTSC scanlines). Hell of a website, regardless. It's hard to find PAL information on this side of the pond but a lot of it does show up in the wild.

Yeah I'd be curious to know what the larger community thinks of these rarity numbers, after a while. Apparently I have a bunch of 6s and 7s which is always fun. Also, is there a plan to add dumps anytime soon? Oh - and I've got a couple of Dactar(i) multicarts that don't seem listed, but I'm not sure how anyone could ever keep a complete list of all of that. I'm impressed with the thoroughness. I love the "Fantastic Bird" as a label variation.

Something I've been looking for, for ages. I love how atarimania has it all, but broken out like this is very handy for certain purposes. I also LOVE (I cannot say this enough, LOVE) how you can bring up "ALL" records if you want. I cannot stand sites that limit you to 50 or 100 or 200 records in a query, and you have to click next, next, next and keep waiting for page loads. Sometimes I need a huge result because my search criteria is very broad. This will help immensely when I've got a really oddball cart in my hands.

I would have done a lot better if I had ever played "those" games. I won't mention which,to not spoil it for others, but I never thought anyone actually played them.

As you can seen from the replies, it's basically anything goes when it comes to PAL in an NTSC console. It depends on the game and your TV. I own a bunch of supposed PAL games (things that never had NTSC releases, or so I'm led to believe) that seem to play fine on my regular TVs - it's fairly tolerant of odd scanline counts and such. I have others that tend to give B&W depending on the set. Still others show the classic "PAL colours", and these usually suffer from rolling. For this last set I hook my 2600 into an old Commodore 1084 monitor that has adjustable v-hold, and I can stabilize the image and play them just fine. Most of this I've played around with a composite-modded vader. Not sure how much difference it would make over RF, except for a bit of signal strength - I carefully colour-calibrate every mod I do. Fortunately every CRT I own handles weak luma pretty well.

True, I never thought of pulling directly off the chip. I just have no idea how you would actually convert that into an HDMI signal. This gets way beyond my skillset but I bet it would be a hell of a fun project for shits and giggles. As someone mentions, with some newer TVs going HDMI only I wonder if we're going to see more signal converters cropping up. I still say the look of a 2600 on an LCD is horrid, but I guess given enough time CRTs will be museum pieces only. Oddly my newest TV has only HDMI, and RF. Such a weird combination - RF seemed to have disappeared a while back with the assumption that everyone was getting set-top boxes and the like.

Well you're not going to get any *increased* video quality, as all you'd be doing is putting S-video/composite output into a digitizer. The 2600 doesn't generate, let alone output a digital signal. It's kinda like ripping a VHS tape to DVD. Yeah, it'll play in a modern player, but you're not going to somehow get a better picture doing this.

Oh hey, thanks for the response Batari. You certainly did put a disclaimer... somewhere. And I knew I was taking my life into my own hands with this one It was certainly worth the experience if nothing else - I've been into the whole ROM/emulation scene for close to 20 years now and finally doing it to my own games was mesmerizing. I'll keep poking with the flasher. Done it probably 100 times now so I'm pretty familiar with it. It's never actually failed on me - I always get "download finished" with an elapsed time. To be fair, I only tried the copycart.bin and have never actually flashed back to the normal BIOS, but still... it seems pretty simple enough. I'm pretty sure you're right in that I've blown something. This all actually started when I had to.. shall we say modify my dumping cable a bit. The floppy connectors don't quite work on certain carts - the kinds that don't have a dust cover, but do have the plastic tabs to push open the cover on the 2600 itself. I had debated cutting the carts, but figured I might at well do some trim on the floppy cable instead. So I wouldn't be at all surprised if I shorted something somewhere. I wasn't expecting it to affect the Harmony as *that* end was never touched (in fact I never unplugged it once I got it working) but... without doing a full pin trace over what I might have done, anything's possible. The diode you mention - you say it's there to isolate console and USB power... it could make sense that I accidentally sent +5v over pins I shouldn't have if I really crushed things. Out of curiosity, what's the danger in removing it in general? That someone might hook up USB while it's powered by the console? Would the Harmony work in a console with it removed? With everything being surface mount I doubt I could easily remove it myself - my skills are limited to things the scale of the original 2600s and that's about it - but I must admit you have me curious. I'll PM you if I wanna get you involved in a physical sense. I don't really wanna bug you, as I know I brought this upon myself but if it could help you with other problems, then I'm game. I'm almost certainly going to order the next-gen Harmony anyway, so I may send this back and order that at the same time, cut down on shipping hassles.

I'd say that without sticking it into a 2600, the question and this thread is entirely pointless. Not trying to be rude, but literally the answer could be anything. Hell, it could be full of smuggled 80s cocaine.

Yeah, I'd just steal 5v from the board. USB is what, 100mA max? There should be enough spare power available for that, although I'm not sure how much gets lost from the voltage converter. I bet Ben Heck knows. I seem to recall there's a fair bit of capacity off the main board itself. Or could a person use a higher rated 9v adapter? I've got some that are rated for 850mA, that should give plenty of overhead given that stock is only 500. This is all sacrilege though. A 2600 on anything without scanlines is just ugly. (He says as he currently has a light sixer connected via RF to a brand-new LCD screen, for demo purposes on a pending sale).

"Use with many controllers" - I love it! Awesome find, regardless of its pedigree. I only ever find 2 or 4 game multicarts.

Absolutely. Be a bit careful, try not to touch anything else - odds are you'll be doing this with a metal screwdriver - but there's not much fear of danger. I do it all the time when fine tuning mis-behaving consoles, or adjusting mods. Just make very slow adjustments until things look "good". It's tricky unless you have a reference console to compare to, but you should be able to look at screenshots to get a good idea of what the colours should look like - at least close enough anyway. If sound works and it's only colours that are off... I'm thinking someone else had it right - possibly an NTSC cart in a PAL console. Not much you can do to fix that. I don't know if there's any easy way to tell PAL/NTSC on that game, some are obvious while others are a guessing game. Someone here probably knows better than me,

Interesting. 2003 was a very different time in retro collecting - a lot more stuff existed in the wild, a lot more people sold Atari stuff in general at garage sales, and prices of most stuff has skyrocketed (at least when I think of the NES-SNES era). Tempest, are lab loaners still in that $50-75 range for common, maybe $100+ for more rare ones? It kinda surprises me that there wouldn't have been some price appreciation given the rest of the hobby and how much harder it seems to find Atari stuff in general. At least in my experience, it seems like it's all been landfilled or picked up by overpriced stores ($5 Asteroids, etc). Not living anywhere near California these loaners and protos might as well be moon rocks for me. Also another curiosity, and this is more of a wild-ass guess thing, but.. what kind of numbers do you think loaners exist in? Like say the most common ones - would there be a dozen copies extant? 100? A few hundred? Given the insane prices people pay for crap like Air Raid, I'd have to think it's in the 100s at least, if these things are only worth $100 or less. Obviously no one's doing a census on something semi-common like this, but just curious if you have any sense of actual numbers.

Is the 2600 modded for output, or are you using the factory RF connector? I've seen weird behaviour on modern LCD screens with all connection types, but the sound makes me wonder if it's more than that. Often the only way to narrow it down is test with other TVs, other carts, etc (not always as easy to find another 2600).

Brazillian games work on my NTSC VCS, if I put them on a monitor with adjustable v-hold. Colours are wacky, but that's the pallette difference - I doubt you'd have that problem as they're both PAL. But if it's just the refresh rate, it's manageable I'd think.

I've been looking for probably 15 years for one - yeah I could just overpay on ebay, but I mean in the wild. Mostly for completeness' sake - much like the Fairchild, I don't think it was very good. I've found a few games for it over the years, just never a console. I'd pick one up if cheap enough.

Hm. Checked my dozen or so spares - I've never looked that closely, and well, there are more differences than I thought. The asteroids behind the CX, check. Also the streaks by the bottom left of the Atari logo itself. Third, the label has a distinctly reddish colour, at least on the asteroids themselves. However - it's not 100% consistent. Most of my carts are what I'd call "bluish" on the label, and these all have the copyright screen. I have 3 copies that are the more "reddish" colouring (with the asteroid/streak differences too) - 2 of them do not have the copyright screen, but one does. So it's not a perfect match. Unless I have some weird 3rd variant.

It was a throwaway "clever" nickname I created back when I first got online about 20 years ago and was younger and dumber. I've just kept using it because it amuses me that invariably, I'm asked a similar question within a few days of posting to any new forum (or IRC channel, or Twitter, or any other electronic communication).

My girlfriend swears she got a Colecovision almost a year before history says it was released in North America. Memories can be fuzzy, but she did grow up in the main product test market for Canada at that time, so anything's possible. If anyone has any way to put together test market info from the 80s, I'd love to see it.

Anyone who doesn't have this site bookmarked, shame on you How the hell else are y'all making your replacement 32X cables (not that those plugs are even remotely available)? http://www.gamesx.com/avpinouts/genesisav.htm Genesis 2 is most definitely stereo. I've never owned a G3 but everything I've ever read says it is as well. It's only the G1 that has mono coming from the back, which is why you have to use the headphone jack to get it. PS: damn near every other pinout you'd want is on that site, at least for anything remotely mainstream.

Blast Corps is hands down my favourite N64 game. It's just one of those weird, quirky, one-of-a-kind games that you so rarely see - because it's actually ridiculous fun. Medalling high gives it a ton of replayability, something I'm not known to do except in rare circumstances. It's got a charm all its own. Robotron 64 is also another hidden gem. The music is absolutely emblematic of the time it came out (mid-late 90s) and was a fairly decent technical accomplishment how they did so much in so little space. Controls are perfect.

Bollocks. The only people Notch has pissed off are for-profit server operators. The number of actual players who are upset by this is somewhere between zero and none. In fact, most players of the game are cheering his enforcement of the EULA. If you want to play WoW and level up with money, go play WoW. That's not what Minecraft is about. Millions of people happily play the game with no financial happenings, beyond funding a small VM instance if they want multiplayer. And anyone with any experience with the game knows that if you want to play without grinding for resources, there's always Creative mode. There's literally no reason for these "pay to play" servers to exist beyond profit gouging. Sorry, I guess a better term is "pay to win", as there's nothing whatsoever in the EULA that forbids charging people to play on your server. Server operators can still make a fuckton of cash, so long as they charge everyone equally. You simply can't buy your way into success in the game anymore. I've been playing almost non-stop since late 2009. "Digital LEGOs" is exactly what I describe it as to people, and the pixelated graphics are just a joy to the eyes of this retro gamer. It's probably my favourite "videogame" of all time - and at this point, one of the highest selling of all time as well. On any platform, ever. It's a lot more than this generation's Doom, although I can see where the comparison is coming from. It's more like this generation's SMB or Pac-Man. It's EVERYWHERE and EVERYONE under a certain age plays it. It was inevitable that people would try to dump on it at some point, and this most recent controversy is just more sour grapes from people who aren't really into the game for the game itself anyway.