Tom

so give me a link then. i can't be arsed to dig them out myself.

the point was, most of your ideas aren't really fletched out =P and still, with $500 you won't get anybody interested, unless he's interested in programming the game for the sake of programming it.

look, homebrewers don't do games for the money (possibly for fame and chicks, but definitely not money), and certainly not lousy $500 plus royalties. and if you come up with a cool game idea, that's not enough. you also have to find a programmer who thinks that game idea is cool aswell, and *wants* to program it. for the programmers, it's all about fun. plus, your game "ideas" often boil down to something like "Someone should design a Tutankham II." period. oh well.

you can split up > 4k rom images into 4k images and disassemble these using distella. if you're running a unix system, you should have dd installed, which is perfect for splitting up files.

can't you replace sec sbc #1 with lda #127 ?

basic math : subtraction isn't commutative.

z26 shows 262 scanlines for the ROM of Video Pinball I have. Out of curiousity, what kind of FPGA are you using ?

the quoted part basically suggests that the carry flag can be viewed as a 9th bit (bit , which is actually not a bad way of looking at it. but i agree, it is explained badly in that book.

what's the problem ? can't you compile it at all, or can you compile it but it doesn't work ?

Nah, anything with an x86 inside is evil.

You should read Kevin Horton's sizes.txt, which has informations about the different bankswitching mechanisms: http://www.tripoint.org/kevtris/files/sizes.txt When you're trying to dump bankswitched carts you have to make sure you don't accidentally trigger a bankswitch, since bankswitches are usually triggered by accessing certain ROM locations (not always)

but shouldn't you "oversample" the buttons a bit ? i mean, if you assume for instance that one can't press the button more than 10 times per second and thus only check every 5th (or 6th) frame, you might miss short triggers of the button, or not ?

And what do other emus ? Modify the ROM ? Early versions of VisualBoyAdvance did that too, this was a way to check wether a program was running on an amulator or on real hardware =)

if anybody really would like to do alley cat, if have a large part of the graphics (pc version - were there any other ?) extracted for a non-2600 project

oooh alley cat =) the first game i ever played, 1987 when i was six years old. there are many scenes that should be easily doable on the 2600 such as the backyard or the bird room, but other scenes have lots of freely moving sprites (like the fishtank)

yes, PC demo scene is alive, though not too exciting at the moment. groups like Farbrausch and Conspiracy who do cool 64k intros are an exception. i did some PC stuff too, but I haven't done anything since 2001, since i got bored with modern PCs.

you know, there's still the TIA inside the 2600 that limits what can be displayed on screen... one thing i'd like to see for the 2600: a ps2 keyboard adapter would be cool. i dug out some old ps2 keyboard interfacing code i had (mostly stolen from an application note from atmel:). a microcontroller could handle the communication with the keyboard and also provide different keymaps and a key buffer, and the 2600 could communicate with the micro via the joystick port. i'm too busy hacking other stuff at the moment, but i really should give this a try some day.

lda and sta have different timings: lda zpage,x ; 4 cycles, 2 bytes lda absolute,y ; 4 cycles or 5 on page cross, 3 bytes sta zpage,x ; 4 cycles, 2 bytes sta absolute,y ; 5 cycles, 3 bytes so zpage addressing is always smaller than absolute addressing and usually but not always faster. this is a good reference: http://www.6502.org/tutorials/6502opcodes.htm

yes, but there's something you should take care of: "zeropage,x" addressing wraps adresses around at page boundaries, "absolute,y" doesn't assume both x and y contain the value 1: sta $ff,x ; zeropage,x => writes to address $00, not $0100 (wrap around) sta $ff,y ; absolute,y => writes to address $0100

does a dreamcast (being more or less dead) count ? now i know how to waste my free time next year =)

isn't that the whole point of the xgamestation, a platform not only for software but also electronical tinkering ? (it's not like you couldn't do that with other systems aswell, though)

horrible is the right word indeed

could you explain that some more ?

but it would be cool to see an atari 7800 cart with, say, an OPL2. sounds imo way cooler than the pokey.

just out of curiosity, when are these boards available for purchase ?