[How come a lot getting into retro games skip Atari?]

On 9/1/2023 at 12:18 PM, 82-T/A said:

 

This is so awesome. This is a huge part of arcade "culture" that a lot of people who didn't live the time, simply do not understand. I always keep a quarter up on the glass on my Super Pac Man multicade. But what's more funny is how everyone at the time knew this. How it became a thing around the United States in a non-internet connected world, is amazing to me.

 

My daughter brought a friend over a few months ago that saw the quarter on the arcade and he said, "Ooh... I found a quarter!" and then she had to explain to him that this is what you did so you could mark that you were going to be playing next, or that you had a set of games lined up to play.

Karate Champ was the first arcade game that I played regularly, in 1984 at the local laundromat. When people would pull down on the joysticks hard, the control panel would pull away from the front glass just enough for any quarters leaning against the glass to fall down into the cabinet. When the route operator would come around to collect the money, he would always find a bunch of extra quarters that weren't in the coin bucket because of that. I remember telling him how it happened because he couldn't figure it out; he was thinking there might be something wrong with the coin mechanism making some of the coins miss the bucket.

[How come a lot getting into retro games skip Atari?]

13 hours ago, wongojack said:

Ah you're offended - neato

Your crystal ball is in need of repair.

 

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The answer is that I made the last comment right before yours, so I wanted to see what the next post was.

That doesn't have anything to do with my question. Irrelevance seems to be your thing... and attempts at crystal ball readings.

[How come a lot getting into retro games skip Atari?]

30 minutes ago, wongojack said:

Wow - dug up a thread about new collectors ignoring Atari to quote a post from 2015 about fighting game strategy. 

What of it?

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Honest question - How did you even find yourself reading this post?

How did you find yourself even replying to my post, since you said nothing that was relevant to anything I said?

[How come a lot getting into retro games skip Atari?]

On 11/17/2015 at 5:15 PM, MeneerJansen said:

Same thing goes for smup's and, especially, the fighting games. Fighting games were all like rip offs from Way of the Exploding Fist for the C64 to me. That is: bash buttons like crazy with out knowing what so ever what they actually do and win from your friend or the computer. Now a days I can appreciate a game of Mortal Kombat, especially if I succeed in doing a special move. But it is too tempting to just bash buttons and win faster than by using a "strategy".

You wouldn't win at all against someone who's good at, say, Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat, by just bashing buttons, let alone win faster. You'd be lucky to even land a single hit, even if you played against him a thousand times in a row. I've seen other people say the same thing on other forums; it seems they've never played against anyone who wasn't a novice.

 

In 1991 when I was 16 I was working next to a drug store that had a small arcade in the back of the store, and they had a Street Fighter II: The World Warrior machine. I started playing it a lot, but only against the computer, because there was hardly ever anyone else there. After a couple of weeks I thought I was getting pretty good at it, because I could get to Vega, who was one of the four unplayable boss characters, though not without continuing quite a few times. Then one night some guy walked in there and started playing against me, and I couldn't do anything against him. He easily countered everything I tried. I played him probably 20 times in a row without even winning a single round. I learned quite a bit from that session though, and I started going to Space Port in Bangor after that where there were lots of good players, to learn even more. Current me, or even 17-year-old me, could do the exact same thing against 16-year-old me that he did.

[Harmony and paddles]

5 hours ago, alex_79 said:

I have two standard (non Encore) Harmony carts and I can navigate the menu with paddles on both of them. The firmware is shared between standard and Encore Harmony cart, so it should work in the same way.

 

The way it works requires a bit of practice:

There's a really small range of rotation that allows to scroll through the entries in a page. Only if you're in this range you can start a game with the button. If you move outside that small range by rotating counterclockwise, it will keep cycling back the pages (if the directory you're browsing has more files than can fit in a single page). To stop the page cycling you have to move the knob back in that previous small range. If you move outside it clockwise it does the same thing, but in this case it cycles the pages forward.

 

So:

1 ensure that you have a reasonably clean and jitter free set of paddles

2 turn the knob slowly across the entire range to learn where the three areas of movement are: cycle pages back, select games in a page, cycles pages forward.

 

Thanks. In my case, after booting to the Harmony cartridge, when I turned the knob it would just move the selection indicator from the "[.]" to the last folder, skipping all other folders, and turning the knob in the other direction from there would just move it back to the "[.]", no matter how slightly I turned it. Even if I found the exact position where it would jump back and forth rapidly and automatically between two selection, it still skipped everything between the last folder and "[.]", plus the paddle's button wouldn't do anything.

 

After reading your post I fiddled with it some more and I discovered that if I turned the knob CCW a little ways there was a point at which it would start moving the selection indicator correctly, and once you're at that point / in that range you can turn the knob in either direction and the selection indicator moves correctly (down for CW and up for CCW), and it doesn't skip any folders and the paddle button works to make a selection. So the paddle's knob needs to be about in the middle of its rotational travel to be in the right range to work correctly. When it's rotated almost all the way CW it will start moving the selection indicator again, but incorrectly, like I described in my first paragraph.

 

Previously I was always turning the knob CW until the selection indicator moved, so I always ended up in the end-of-the-travel range where it doesn't work right.

[Harmony and paddles]

2 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Paddles were never meant for Stella menu navigation, sorry.

What do you mean? Stella the emulator? I'm talking about navigating the Harmony cartridge menu. The Harmony cartridge manual says you can do it:

 

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The menu system can also be navigated with a paddle controller or driving controller in the left port.

 

https://harmony.atariage.com/files/harmony_manual_v2_online.pdf

 

It doesn't work for me though, not on any of the three consoles I tried it on.

[Harmony and paddles]

10 hours ago, MaximRecoil said:

I just got a new Harmony Encore in the mail yesterday. So far it works perfectly with a joystick but I can't navigate the menu with a paddle. The paddle moves the selection indicator, but not correctly. It only moves it back and forth between the "[.]" and the last folder, skipping all other folders, and the paddle's button doesn't do anything. Also, I can't even use the console's select and reset switches to navigate the menu like I can when a joystick is connected, because they are completely non-responsive. So the only way I can play a paddle game is to navigate to and start it with the joystick and then unplug the joystick and plug in the paddles (which work fine in the games, just not in the menu).

I just tried it with an Atari 7800 and a 4-switch woodgrain 2600, as well as with a different pair of paddles, and they did the exact same thing as with my heavy 6-switch 2600. Menu navigation doesn't work with the paddles and it doesn't work in exactly the same way on all 3 consoles that I tested it on. The firmware version is 1.06.

[Harmony and paddles]

I just got a new Harmony Encore in the mail yesterday. So far it works perfectly with a joystick but I can't navigate the menu with a paddle. The paddle moves the selection indicator, but not correctly. It only moves it back and forth between the "[.]" and the last folder, skipping all other folders, and the paddle's button doesn't do anything. Also, I can't even use the console's select and reset switches to navigate the menu like I can when a joystick is connected, because they are completely non-responsive. So the only way I can play a paddle game is to navigate to and start it with the joystick and then unplug the joystick and plug in the paddles (which work fine in the games, just not in the menu).

[What is the one thing you'd most have wanted the VCS/2600 to have improved before release?]

26 minutes ago, LatchKeyKid said:

When did composite video become a standard option for most TVs?  I don't recall seeing it on my family's TVs (or at least the two that I had unfettered access to) in the mid to late 80s though admittedly we didn't have high end sets.

At some point in the 1990s. It still should have had at least composite output like the TRS-80 and Apple II did, which were both released the same year as the 2600 (1977). The original NES frontloader had composite video output in 1985, which was still before the vast majority of people in North America had a display with composite video input. They were thinking ahead, and I'm glad they did, because even though I had no use for the NES's composite video jack in the 1980s, I do now.

[What is the one thing you'd most have wanted the VCS/2600 to have improved before release?]

There should have been a minimum of 2 buttons on the controller.

 

They should have ditched the Color/B&W switch, which is nearly useless, and put a pause switch there instead, which is very useful.

 

There should have been at least a composite video output in addition to RF.

 

The joysticks should have been designed like arcade joysticks, i.e., a single, fairly strong spring around the shaft for snappy self-centering, a restrictor for a positive stop at the end of the travel, and good quality leaf switches or microswitches. Compare a CX-40 to say, an IL/Happ Competition joystick; the difference is night and day.

[Have you ever seen colors like this in Space Invaders?]

3 hours ago, save2600 said:

Here's a 2600 that displays like yours.

That's different than the TIA I tested. His tank is green like it's supposed to be rather than blue. His player 1 score is blue on the tops and bottoms of the numbers but is green on the sides, which is weird, but starting at 0:32 the parts that were blue have turned green, though a slightly different shade of green than the sides of the numbers.

 

This is from the start of the video:

 

 

And this is from the 0:32 mark:

 

 

My player 1 score numbers are uniformly blue, and the tank is blue too. The rest of the colors are the same as with the original TIA chip installed.

 

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BTW: it's normal behavior for the 2600 to slightly change its colors/hues the longer it's been running. It's why when you go to tweak the adjustment pot, should do it only after the machine has been on for a full minute. After you get the desired result at the minute mark, and you've been playing the machine for some time, the hues continue to change ever so slightly before finally (or mostly) stabilizing.

 

Yeah, I've read that before, but if the colors change on any of my six 2600s or my 7800 then it's too slight for me to notice it.

[The new Atari 2600+ w/HDMI out and 2600/7800 support]

It being emulation is a deal killer for me. It not having analog video outputs would be a deal killer too, had the deal not already been killed by emulation.

 

One of the best things about the 2600 hardware is its responsiveness (no frame buffer, so no input lag). I can tell the difference in responsiveness when playing 2600 games in Stella, especially with games that I've played a lot on real hardware since childhood, like Space Attack.

 

To make matters worse it only has a digital video output, which means you get display lag to go on top of your input lag. Even if you use a digital-to-analog video signal converter and connect it to a CRT, you'll still get display lag because the digital signal has to be processed; it can't directly drive the CRT's electron guns like an analog video signal does.

[HELP! Did I just find a French heavy sixer boxed?]

12 hours ago, tkarner said:

All the boxes show a heavy. They never changed the graphic even after they changed the hardware.

They changed the picture when they went to the 4-switch design. With those there's a picture of a "heavy fourer." It looks like they just retouched the original picture of the heavy sixer. The 4-switch "Vader" design had a completely new picture on the box.

[Have you ever seen colors like this in Space Invaders?]

48 minutes ago, save2600 said:

Any change when left on for a while?

 

No. If it did change I would consider that a problem in and of itself, since the colors don't noticeably change on any of my 2600s regardless of how long they are left on.

 

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Have you tried compensating via the color wheel? Should be able to dial in the correct combination of hues after the machine has been on for a while.

 

Doesn't the color pot have a global effect on colors? In the case of this particular TIA, only the tank and player 1 score are the wrong color. The ground, aliens, and shields are all the right color. But I don't want to change the color pot adjustment to try to compensate for a weird TIA when the colors are already correct with the original TIA.

 

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But I've had systems that even after recapping, couldn't be dialed in 100% to spec and suspected a slightly faulty TIA.

 

Well, it's definitely the TIA causing the wrong colors in this case. I only installed it to test the TIA itself; I didn't install it to try to fix anything because there's nothing to fix; the 2600's colors are perfectly fine with its original TIA installed.

 

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The color bar generator program can help sort all this out. Especially the first screen where you're trying to match up the top and bottom halves...

 

That looks like a useful program, but I don't have any way to use it at the moment. I ordered a Harmony cartridge a few days ago but I don't have it yet. It shipped yesterday.

[Have you ever seen colors like this in Space Invaders?]

I tested a TIA chip I just got in my 6-switch 2600, and in Space Invaders the tank and player 1's score are blue:

 

 

Those are normally green on all my 2600s, in the Stella emulator, and in the screenshot in the manual. Is this TIA defective or do some variations of it naturally produce different colors? This is:

 

AMI 8317MCC

C010444D-01
C04075

Philippines

 

In a 2-player game the second player's tank is light green, same color as the second player's score.

[Problem with EPROM PCB]

1 hour ago, alex_79 said:

The ATF20V8B_8K.jed you posted is identical to the one on this page, which is where that board design from the PCBWAY link posted above originates from.

The layout of the board shown on the 8-bit classic site looks different, so you'd have to trace it to confirm that it's the same design, and so that you can use the same code for the GAL chip.

If you're referring to this picture on the Grand Idea Studio site, then that's a 2K/4K PCB, which does have a different layout than the 8K/16K/32K PCB that I have.

 

The ATF20V8B_8K.jed file that I downloaded from the PCBWay site shows a Rev. B 8K/16K/32K PCB, and my PCB also says Rev. B on it. I wonder if my GAL chip is defective. I don't know if it can be defective yet also program and read in my programmer without any issues.

[Is staggered movement possible in Space Invaders?]

1 hour ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Thanks. That demo is quite old, I think it started in 2001. Will many on and off periods.

Did you make it from scratch? What's there so far is the most arcade-like SI I've ever seen for the 2600. You have all 55 aliens (5 rows of 11) exactly like the arcade rather than 36 (6 rows of 6) like the official 2600 port), the staggered movement that looks very arcade-like, and the small, thin-lined numbers for the score look like the arcade version too. I didn't think that such an arcade-like port was even possible on the 2600.

 

I guess that replicating the arcade sounds can't be done though, unless it's possible to include a sound chip on a cartridge? The arcade sounds are great, especially the sound effect the UFO makes, and the sound when you shoot it, and the thumping 4-note bassline.

 

I'd love to have an arcade-perfect port of Space Invaders on the 2600 (even if the sounds weren't perfect), especially if it had the option for 2 things from the official 2600 port that make it more fun (IMO) than the arcade version: double-shot capability, and being able to turn off shot-to-shot collisions (i.e., in the arcade version if your shot hits an enemy's shot, your shot gets cancelled out, which aggravates me to no end). Those things could be turned on and off with the difficulty switches or a menu.

[Problem with EPROM PCB]

45 minutes ago, alex_79 said:

H.E.R.O has 263 scanlines, but it should work fine.

 

I just tested in Stella by forcing the bankswitch to "F8" (without ram), and the game is unplayable but it displays a stable picture.

Check that you're using the correct rom (PAL or NTSC) and also that the code in the gal is for the right bankswitching method: F8 for a 8k game, F6 for a 16k one and f4 for a 32k one.

A 8k game will not work correctly if the gal is programnmed for a 32k one, even if you use a larger eprom and concatenate more copies of the rom.

 

EDIT:

in other words, choose the jed file based on the size of the game, not of the eprom you're using. If the eprom is larger than the game, concatenating more copies of it to fill the eprom usually works fine.

I've been using an 8K EPROM every time except the one time that I tried it with a 32K EPROM with concatenated ROM files, and I do know that the JED file needs to match the size of the ROM file regardless of the size of the EPROM.

 

I've attached the 2 JED files I've tried. The one named GAL20V8B.JED is the one that came on it, which I dumped before trying the other one (ATF20V8B_8K.jed) from that PCBWay share link. The code in them is very different; the one that came with the PCB has hardly any code at all.

 

I just tried Asteroids (the version with fixed VSYNC that Thomas Jentzsch posted some years ago) and it displays a stable copyright screen, but when it tries to go to the attract mode, it only shows it for a split second and resets to the copyright screen, ad infinitum. One time it stayed on the attract mode screen for a little longer, maybe 2 seconds, and you could see the screen roll. That was with the ATF20V8B_8K.jed file programmed to the GAL chip. Then I tried the GAL20V8B.JED that it came programmed with, and I just got a blank screen, nothing else.

 

Do you know if either of those JED files I attached are correct? The JED file I downloaded from the PCBWay share site is for an Atmel ATF20V8B chip, and my chip is a Lattice GAL20V8B. I'm guessing that they are interchangeable, but I don't know for sure.

jed.zip

[Problem with EPROM PCB]

8 minutes ago, alex_79 said:

The issues you're experiencing have nothing to do with the PCB or the eproms: the culprits are the roms you're using.

Space Invaders Deluxe doesn't generate a proper VSYNC signal (it's too short, and just a few cycles longer on the title screen, which allows your CRT to sync there).

Defender II requires extra ram on cartridge, and the board you're using does not provide that.

What about Activision's H.E.R.O.? I tried that one too, with the same results. Do you know of any that should definitely work?

 

If the problem with Defender II is that it doesn't have the extra RAM on the cartridge, why does it have the same rolling screen / sync problem as SI Deluxe? Shouldn't it have a completely different problem?

[Problem with EPROM PCB]

The problem is that the screen is rolling. There are brief moments of stability for up to about 5 seconds, but it's rolling most of the time, like it's not syncing properly with my CRT TV. The first game I tried was a hack (Space Invaders Deluxe 8K), and I thought maybe there was some issue with the hack, so I erased the EPROM and tried an official 8K game: Defender II, and it did the same thing. So then I tried some different EPROMs. The first one I tried was a Fujitsu 27256 (I concatenated 4 copies of the ROM to make it 32K) and the next ones I tried were a National Semiconductor 27C64 and a Fujitsu 2764 (no need to concatenate the ROM file with those), and I got the exact same results. Also, I tried two different Atari 2600s: a "heavy sixer" and a 4-switch woodgrain version, both of which work perfectly with all of my cartridges, and got the same results with both.

 

The PCB is a common design that's been shared on PCBWay's website for example (link), and is sold by 8-Bit Classics (link) and maybe others. Mine came from 8-Bit Classics, and they said they would send me another one, but it might end up doing the same thing.

 

Here's a video of what it's doing (note that the title screen is stable; the picture doesn't start rolling until the attract mode starts or a game is started):

 

 

 

I also looked at the code on the GAL chip and it didn't seem to have much on it, so I reprogrammed it with the JED file from that PCBWay link, which had a lot more code in it, but I still got the exact same results.

[Is staggered movement possible in Space Invaders?]

Your attached demo looks awesome... when did you make that? Its staggered row-by-row movement isn't exactly like the staggered one-by-one movement in arcade SI, but it creates a very similar effect (especially since the arcade movement looks like row-by-row movement when viewed at full 60 FPS speed), and is a huge improvement over the all-at-once movement in the official 2600 SI cartridge.

 

I'm not sure what you mean in your first paragraph. If you watch the arcade movement in slow motion, like in the animated GIF I posted (which is a screen capture from MAME), it shows the aliens moving one at a time, and sometimes two at a time.

[Is staggered movement possible in Space Invaders?]

In the 2600 port of Space Invaders all the aliens move together like they're joined at the hip. In the original arcade version, the aliens' movement is staggered; one alien moves, followed by the next alien, followed by the next alien, and so on, like falling dominoes, which looks more organic to me (and more visually interesting) than the all-at-once movement in the 2600 port:

 

 

Was the staggered movement not included in the 2600 port because it couldn't be done or was it an oversight or intentional omission? If it couldn't be done back then, could it be done now?

[Atari 2600 Jnr PSU Video Interference]

On 8/11/2023 at 4:14 PM, SYSTEMSQUIRREL said:

Perhaps you right however maybe you shouldn't push it too much over 500ma considering the heat sinks on a 2600 console are on the anemic side not to mention that in almost all cases these regulators are going to be running with the original dried up thermal compound.

It doesn't matter how much current the power supply is rated for, as long as it's at least 500mA (which is what the factory one is rated for). It could be rated for 1,000 amps, or a "zillion" amps, and it wouldn't make a difference, because the Atari 2600 draws less than 500mA of current regardless of how much current the power supply is capable of delivering. Power supplies don't shove current down the wires. The device being powered by a power supply draws the current it needs. Think of what goes on in a car. A car battery can deliver hundreds of amps; some of them over 1,000 amps; enough to arc weld fairly thick steel plate. Yet the tiny little lights in your dash, the small dome and other interior lights, and lots of delicate electronics are powered by the battery and the alternator; the alternator is often rated for over 100 amps by itself.

 

You can do an experiment to illustrate how it works. Connect a small 12v light bulb directly to your car battery. It will light up to its normal brightness and only draw a tiny amount of current, which you could measure with an ammeter. Then take that same light bulb and connect it inline between the positive post and the positive battery cable that goes to the starter (or between the negative post and negative battery cable that goes to the engine block) and try to start the car. The bulb will blow quickly, because now the starter is drawing hundreds of amps and the only path is through that small light bulb.

[Regarding interlaced, pseudo high-res and true high-res modes on SNES]

On 8/24/2022 at 7:21 AM, Kirk_Johnston said:

interlaced mode is always 30 frames per second (or 60 fields per second), and there is no 448 progressive mode on SNES?

448p wouldn't make sense on an SNES, since it would require a "VGA" monitor (~31 KHz) to sync to it. The SNES was designed only to sync to a standard CRT (~15 kHz). Consoles with 480p output didn't become a thing until ~31 kHz TVs started becoming available in the late 1990s. The TVs were marketed as "progressive scan," and coincided with the availability of "progressive scan" DVD players. They all had component (YPbPr) inputs because composite and S-video only support up to ~15 kHz video signals. And yes, 512x448i on an SNES would always be 30 frames / 60 fields per second. 60 frames per second is inherently/mathematically limited to around 240 lines if you want it to sync to a ~15 kHz TV/monitor.

 

The Sega Dreamcast is the first major console I know of that definitely had a 480p mode, though only some games implemented it. I've heard that the Sega Saturn could do 480p, but no official games implemented it.

 

Also, in reality, the SNES has no "high-res" mode. 512x448i is a little lower than 480i, which is 15 kHz, which is standard resolution. It's not even as "high-res" as an ordinary NTSC TV broadcast (1941 until analog TV broadcasts were largely discontinued in 2009), which are full 480i (480 visible lines; 525i if you count the lines you can't see).

 

Nearly all SNES games are entirely ~240p, which, like ~480i, is standard resolution (~15 kHz). Hardly any games used the 512x448i mode.

[All 329 & 27 Unreleased SNES Games Compared Side By Side With The Genesis]

1 hour ago, Tanooki said:

Good on you @Kirk_Johnston not backing down

He tacitly conceded near the end of page one, which is the very definition of "backing down."

 

The SNES's display aspect ratio is 4:3, and that was intentional. What he, and you, are doing is tantamount to telling the director of a classic 2.35:1 movie that 2.35:1 is the wrong aspect ratio to watch his movie in, because the original frames of film are 1.375:1.