Colmino
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Posts posted by Colmino
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I was planning on doing a Composite mod this weekend to my 4-switch. I also got it from the bay - frompags35 though.There is also one from retrofixes that i was looking at too.....but now I wonder if I should not do the upgrade.I'll just say that I personally wouldn't bother.
So what is a good S-Video mod to get?
As far as I had originally known, there was only ony svideo mod available. The name escapes me but Google leads you right to it. It includes the option to split the 2600's two channels into a simulated stereo, which I must say is very tempting because it really does add something to certain games, and it's easy enough to go back to mono with some simple rca wiring.
But now I know that there are apparently several options, including the one that's built into the RGB mod. And knowing what I now know, I'd probably opt for that. In fact I am sorely tempted. I suppose it depends on whether or not there would remain any possible benefit in getting one's hands on a heavy sixer, which I currently don't own.
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I calibrated the s-video / composite input on the XRGB-mini the best I could. Strangely it doesn't appear to have a contrast control, but I got it pretty close to correct with patterns from a DVD player.
Here are some comparison shots with the XRGB calibrated.
These are all with Palette setting #1 which looks a lot like the Stella emulator "Standard" palette.
2600RGB - Composite
2600RGB - S-Video
2600RGB - RGB
So this seems to be the most concrete evidence that the RGB is a bit too dim. If I had one of these installed, I'd probably opt for the svideo out, which is reasonably adequate and doesn't seem to have the dimness issue.
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You can check for videos on Youtube which will corroborate your observations: Composite video is potentially only a baby step above RF. (It depends; if your RF signal is really bad and bleeds colors massively, as it does on my light-sixer, it could be a noteworthy improvement). You will still have crosstalk between chroma and luma (dot-crawl).
You would be very well-advised to abandon composite and shoot directly for svideo, which is the best you're going to get out of the 2600. It is just fine. The improvements svideo offers over composite are surely the most dramatic in the entire upgrade chain; RF to composite can be minimal, and svideo to component can be even more minimal (the true benefit of component is the potential for progressive video), but in jumping to svideo you get to ditch almost every major issue with analog video in one fell swoop. Personally, the only capacity in which I would ever consider composite video might have been if, say, a version of the 2600 had been released which came with composite-out. (I was disappointed to discover that nobody had bothered.)
If I had a heavy sixer, I would order the svideo mod this moment and prepare to crack out the soldering iron. But I'm not going to waste the resources on what I have.
Edit: I just noticed that somebody on these forums has put together an RGB mod. It's an interesting development - I'm not certain, but I suppose the video passed is progressive, making it a theoretically superior option to svideo (not just on paper). These days, it feels slightly more probable for a given TV to have RGB-in than svideo-in, unless the TV is 5+ years old. In any event, the mod includes svideo and composite.
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Swordquest Waterworld. In fact it's probably the only rare cart I own; I never actually tried to collect games in the modern sense, so anything I have that's rare is just happenstance. Waterworld was a sort of special case, as I bought it during the crash, despite the fact that it was overpriced relative to all other (heavily discounted) games.
I discovered recently that I still have the manuals.
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When I play the hacks, it just makes me think that the original game is easy enough to learn. If I need some hack to keep me from falling in the pits then I just haven't taken the time to understand the game and how it works.
I agree. But at the same time I recognize that there is validity in a push to "correct" some of the behaviors in E.T. since after all they contributed to the early sense that it was a less than stellar game. I also maintain that the issue of E.T. shifting downwards by a pixel is a legitimate bug that deserves to be addressed.
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Although I will get flamed for this, but the whole imagination/interpretation argument doesn't hold water for me. Adventure was a very deep 2600 game but didn't need a ton of instructions and a comic to put the game in context.
You're just underscoring the difference between games with adequately simple mechanics (adequate in the sense that Joe Average can grok it) and those which aim a little higher and thus must offer a how-to to Joe Average in some form or other. Adventure would suffer much the same fate for anyone unfamiliar with castles, keys, magnets and swords; happily, the mandated concepts are generally known to its players.
My consideration that much of what we see in Atari 2600 games is dependent on imagination is inspired exclusively by its clear hardware limitations. Example: Every single Pac-Man clone uses "wafers" rather than dots. Because, of course, there's no way at all for the 2600 to have dots that persistently disappear one by one. Another: Generally speaking, full-screen graphics are rendered using the megapixels, such as the backgrounds in Superman, which must very generously be interpreted as city backdrops. Another: Heavy use is made of the hardware function of having a given sprite be horizontally duplicated 2 or 3x (or stretched fat), so that for example the mad rush through Journey Escape feels like an arcade fever dream and only very loosely resembles what the instruction manual says it's supposed to be.
The fact that your "super cannon" can only be activated by nibbling on the enemies shield or touching the enemy directly? Touching the Quotle directly???? That's so counter intuitive, you need a comic to explain it away.
That odd feature actually reminded me of Donkey Kong. In DK, Donkey Kong's sprite does animate, but it's tied to the horizontal flipping of Mario's sprite. Even back in the day, I recognized that this was probably because the programmer just didn't have enough variables and decided that using one for both events was a workable compromise. The trigger for enabling the Yar's super cannon may have been similar inspired. (Or else it just made sense that the Yar needed energy to power the cannon, and if he'd already destroyed all of the blocks, well the game couldn't simply be over at that point, so...)
HSW was unfairly judged as the author of the "game that destroyed Atari", but now as the pendulum swings back he's being hailed as an under-appreciated genius. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.
I think he was perhaps the most capable (contemporary) developer of Atari 2600 games, but as you say, he clearly reached further than the hardware would let him, or, as I would prefer to put it, was over-reliant on the notion that the gaming experience on the 2600 is assumed to demand imagination and interpretation.
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Personally I think ET is the classic "reach exceeding ones grasp". I've played it, and enjoyed it quite a bit. The gameplay is rich, requires resource management and with a little polish would have been a runaway hit.
HSW did not have the time to put on the polish and as a result, a lot of kids, at whom the game was targeted, didn't "get it". I mean "power zones" are a pretty abstract concept. I mean it makes sense that ET has to find a secret spot to "phone home" but to find zones to eat his candy? I mean the game has some really cool concepts, but there just wasn't enough time to see "what worked and what didn't".
Well, a couple of thoughts. First, Atari 2600 games quite often are, thanks to the hardware limitations, really much more reliant on one's imagination / interpretation than on direct recognition of concrete visuals. E.T. is somewhat less so than most, but I think of the abstract "power zone" idea as being in keeping with this defacto philosophy.
Second, HSW's previous entry (Raiders) is a far, far more abstract game, and is a perfect example of what I mean by being reliant on imagination and interpretation. So there was precedent for what HSW sought to achieve with E.T.; if anything, E.T. is a refinement of that approach. But it's true that the game lacks polish, as evidenced by the various pit-falling conundrums.
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Fixed version? What's wrong with the original?
The fixed version as outlined in the page I linked seeks to do a few things. The most conspicuous change is made to the circumstances which cause E.T. to fall down a pit - specifically, he now only falls when his feet touch the pit. Other than that, there are fixes (well, changes) made to the scoring system, which was in fact broken in ways that were not intended.
An arbitrary change was made to the energy system, based on the notion that the game is too challenging. Energy no longer depletes when walking around. It's a change I do not agree with. So all in all, the fixed rom is a kind of mixed bag.
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I see the phenomenon of falling back into the pit when exiting from above is noted in the above link. Since I believe it is an unintended result from an unintended sprite behavior (in addition to assuredly being one of the sources of frustration in general), I feel it would be worthwhile to investigate fixing the problem. I was surprised that it had not already been. ;p
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Two different items to discuss here. The first one is a digression: Is there a resource out there somewhere which documents whatever various fixes / hacks of games may exist? It would be interesting to have those as part of the collection whenever my Harmony cart arrives, for example. The usual collections out there don't seem to include them (or at least not this one).
Anyway. This fixed version of E.T. is definitely an interesting project. I'd known about it for a couple of years and was randomly re-acquainted with it today.
I am in the same boat with the author: I've always considered E.T. to be a fun and very advanced game. I'd go further, and say it's one of the best games ever made for the console. Why? Because, as I pointed out in another thread, it is one of the only Atari 2600 games in existence which is not only the perfect balance of challenge and fun, but it has an ending, and a scoring system which invites perfection. I very much liken it to a more recent example of this: Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. You have a set (short) amount of time in which to do your absolute best, it's amazingly fun, and there is always room to tweak your effort for a better score - and the limited play duration lends your score relevance; it won't be drowned out by a hypothetical score of 999,999,999 or by the score flipping or the game ending after scoring too high.
E.T. is the same. Its play mechanics are startlingly deep. If you use the speed boost, you waste a bit more energy and thus score. Careful usage of the call signs is the key to maximizing energy. You need to collect as much candy as possible while eating as few as possible. And then we have the pits themselves: There are strategies here which I never see discussed (which makes me feel like I invented them). First of all, if you allow E.T. to fall to the bottom unarrested, you lose a pretty big chunk of energy. You have the option of starting the hover on the way down. The trick is in maximizing the timing; if there is no phone piece to collect, you want to hover as soon as possible; if there is a piece, you want to hover at the last possible second, but the game punishes you for hovering too late by imbedding you in the ground, which is doubly bad for the energy meter.
Now, the reason why people "hate" this game, in my opinion, is due to a few things:
1) Yes, the process of falling into pits is unintuitive and a bit buggy. The unintuitive component is covered on the Neocomputer.org page: Because of the unusual perspective at play, people don't expect E.T.'s head to count as touching a pit. Plus it is a bit dubious that some of the pits hug the edges of the screen, which promotes falling into them if one doesn't already know they're going to be there. The buggy component will be discussed below.
2) The call sign system demands either a high level of intuition and experimentation, or a careful examination of the instruction manual. In 1982, gamers were generally ill-prepared for games that actually required such preparation, and often didn't have the instructions in any event. And these days it's a non-concern because there's plenty of room for the games themselves to explain how to play them.
3) Even though E.T. is impressive by Atari 2600 standards, most people who decide to come into contact with the game are lacking this context, and E.T. cannot be favorably regarded by modern standards.
4) Legend, legacy, tradition, and recently the faux ire of certain gaming personalities.
The first two factors were what led to semi-disfavorable reviews back in the day. Frustration with the pits and confusion over how to play the game at all. Once one knows how to deal with those two things, the game is perfectly fine.
Now the real reason for this thread: I wanted to talk about the one bug in E.T. which I personally felt - even way back in 1982 - was its Achilles' Heel, and which is still not fixed in the Neocomputer.org rom. When exiting a pit, as soon as E.T.'s neck finishes retracting, his entire sprite moves down one pixel. The fallout of this is that if one exits a pit from the top of it (as opposed to the bottom or the sides), as soon as E.T.'s neck retracts, his sprite shifts down a pixel, so his feet touch the pit, and he falls right back in. Even after coming to grips with the too-exacting collision detection, one would still be very easily confounded by this subtle bug.
It would be interesting to see if this final bug could be squashed. Then all that would need to be done is to implement some means of preventing RNG-abuse and the game would be, in my view, perfect.
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So the "frying" technique is basically toggling the power switch really fast (or nudging it sideways if it's going bad) correct?
The act of toggling the power switch repeatedly is actually redundant. Back in the day, I found that the following technique sufficed: With the power already on, flip it off and then back on once, with a 0.25 second interval. Flick-flick. If the rhythm of 0.25 seconds is uncertain, watch the seconds on a clock tick by and figure out how long it takes to count to four between each second.
The odds of getting a result that is both unintended and usable seem to be about one in 20, with heavy dependence on the game and sometimes the company. As was noted earlier, whole swaths of games from certain eras and/or certain companies seem to have absolutely no chance of giving a usable result, and this surely owes to some overarching similarities in the cartridges' guts.
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That's due to flicker, not FPS (which is still 60 NTSC or 50 PAL, or the image gets whacked and the game basically unplayable). Since the objects onscreen are only shown for 3 successive frames out of 60 or 50 before new objects are selected from the cache, results are crummy whenever there's more than 2 present in the room displayed - worsening in relation to the total number present.
I am familiar with the flicker (sprite turn-taking) you describe. Not applicable in the case of my clip (have a look) which has only the player and a single dragon. The frame judder phenomenon I referenced was due to the fact that the video footage in question was 60fps in fact, yet effectively 20fps (because it's Adventure), which Youtube's re-encoding process would convert to 30fps, which is incompatible. With no frame blending - and there wasn't - the resulting frame cadence was 4:2:4:2. This problem can no longer be observed because within a couple of months of Youtube's transition to 60fps capability, all videos originally at this framerate were retroactively re-encoded, including mine.
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Speaking of getting lost in unintended areas of old Atari games, one of my favorite things to do was find the "city in the sky" in Mountain King. Proud to say I found my way up there back when that game was still new. Since the results of clambering among the ladders up there are essentially random, you never really know how it's going to turn out.
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E.T. turns into Nihilist E.T. There are no phone pieces to be found, and no zones except for the "Call Elliott" zone. Poor E.T. wanders around lost and alone, and eventually dies, unable to get back home.
While I await the Harmony cartridge, I've basically been tiding myself over with occasional glimpses of E.T. Quite by accident, I fried the game due to a bad attempt at turning the console on. And the result was very like what you describe - no zones except Call Elliot, and while there were more of those than normal, there were fewer zones on the whole. However the phone pieces were in fact available.
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That is correct. The reason is that the game uses 3 frames to move and handle all the game objects and variables when a game is in progress (a game is in progress immediately when the number screen is shown). The sound effects routine and it's counters are updated on only 1 of those 3 frames. When the game is won, the display is only using one frame from the loop (specifically, the one frame that sets up the object display cache, picks 2 objects to display, checks console switch input, and sound effects). So any sound in progress is sped up when the game is inactive. Reset and Select do not clear the sound effect variables.
The 20fps nature of Adventure confounded me for a while. I had uploaded a video to Youtube which included a clip of Adventure, but 60fps is still a relatively new thing there, and 20fps was very incompatible with Youtube's native 30fps (the rest of the video was 60fps), so it is only recently that the clip is able to be played correctly.
It's actually pretty remarkable just how few 2600 games run at anything less than 60fps, given how eager devs are these days to use the extra processing afforded by lower framerates. Presumably this is because the 2600's limitations mean that there is not often any benefit. Still, I point to a case like Space Attack, which is a better game on the 2600 than the Intellivision original, mostly thanks to the slicker 60fps presentation.
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I had ordered the Harmony last week, and shot off a PM to Batari about it. This is the week I have set aside to dive into this hobby; generally I am too busy. The actual shipping type is a little vague, though I would guess "priority" would be USPS priority shipping. My worry is that I have not gotten a reply, so apart from the question of what day to watch for mail, I am left wondering if it has even shipped yet. If there existed an overnight option, I would now (or retroactively) opt for it.
Generally speaking, what kind of shipping did you all seem to get, and what day did it arrive for you?
Thanks.
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My favorites:
E.T. turns into Nihilist E.T. There are no phone pieces to be found, and no zones except for the "Call Elliott" zone. Poor E.T. wanders around lost and alone, and eventually dies, unable to get back home.
I actually just today hooked my old 2600 up (really rotten image a-la RF but slightly better than I was dreading), and E.T. was the first game I put in, largely because I knew it played audio immediately and I wanted to test/configure/balance my TV-out -> PC-in -> headphones solution.
I think I'm going to try this one out. It sounds like fun. ;p
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I've been giving it a shot, but as you say, getting anything more detailed than the year is troublesome. The only resource I have is Google and a knack for making use of it. For now I am focusing on scavenging preexisting resources - for example, there's a pretty handy rundown of many (though by no means all) 1982-1983 releases.
At the same time, though, there are many conflicting data. Example:
Oink!1982-12-27 http://www.giantbomb.com/oink/3030-1043/The latter date comes from a site where much emphasis has been placed on accuracy, yet it weighs against many reports of an earlier release date.Still, even having a less-than-complete chronology with at least the years of release would afford something more fulfilling than alphabetical sorting. -
I remember something happening if you reset Adventure during your bringing in the chalice. I think the music slows down. It's been a long time.
This is correct, and I used to do it all the time. It's not actually frying in the traditional sense, and it's not "dangerous" the way frying is speculated to be. The victory sound is reduced to 1/3rd its normal speed.
Also: After hitting reset, if you push down on the joystick, the character will appear at the bottom, and you can navigate around the room with the number in the middle.
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Seems like a fun topic so I'll offer what I can remember about the event. I too was somewhat young at the time but I do retain some scattered memories of it.
At the time, it never really occurred to me that there was a "crash" going on. Bins showed up outside of Kaybee Toys with a glut of mostly the same dozen or so Atari games, but it was still conspicuous that you could buy games for an average of $5 a pop - sometimes just $1. Once in a while you'd find a unique title all by itself. That is how I located Swordquest Waterworld, which was going for the atypically high price of $13. Most of my personal collection was amassed during this time, truth be told.
I think I shifted focus to my Apple IIe at this point, until eventually the NES appeared out of nowhere. As I hadn't had any direct experience with the ColecoVision before then, the idea of games that were essentially arcade-perfect was so unprecedented that it felt literally surreal. Certainly, coming from a background of mainly just the 2600 will ingrain the idea that arcade ports are going to be very rough outlines of what they're supposed to represent.
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Way, way back in the early 80s, I had randomly discovered "frying" (now that I know what to call the technique) and had tried it on most of my collection. I was just remembering this trick when I sadly realized that there really wouldn't be a convenient way of trying it out with the Harmony cartridge - or in any event it wouldn't be a good idea.
I couldn't help but recognize that most of the usable results when frying tended to make the game dramatically easier in some respect. Here are the examples I can recall:
Asteroids: Put the game in a mode where every asteroid was colorless, and originated from the right-hand side of the screen only. This meant that all one had to do to survive was aim to the right and keep firing.
Pitfall II: Although initially visually corrupt, you could move the character a bit, which would cause him to fall. The game would sort of re-sync at this point, fixing the graphics, and you would now be situated at what was meant to be the very end of the game, where you could immediately rescue Quickclaw and collect the rat.
Anyone have any favorites?
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Oh, sure. I recognize that with products which predate the internet and, indeed, appreciable record-keeping by decades, there are going to be big gaps. Hence the stipulation that such an accumulation effort would be undertaken only to the extent that it could be.
I actually just ordered the Harmony Encore today, and it will hopefully be shipped out today, per the product description (otherwise I am out a week and the point behind priority shipping has been defeated). I'll be dragging one or both of my 2600s out of the attic today, after a trip to Radio Shack to secure a couple of needed bits. (My original 2600 from ~1981 eventually developed a flaw which caused it to reliably suffer a video signal anomaly which lost color and massively degraded the image; this could be temporarily alleviated by flicking the connector. I thought about playing something on it for old time's sake.) I'll be spending the interim days sorting every 2600 release by date of availability, inasmuch as this can be done. As far as the other contextual data such as publisher info and box art, I expect reasonably good results just through careful Google scrutinization.
In a perfect world, Atari 2600 emulation would currently be 100% spot-on (it manifestly is not) and box art, manuals, anecdotes etc. could be made available as a bonus feature in a proper emulator. This entire project is inspired by my strong feeling that simply playing this or that title in a massive glut of titles is too impersonal to get much out of the experience, especially given that most Atari games are, brutally put, barely worth more than a minute's investigation - at least, without adequate context.
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I've had this idea for a while, which would be applicable to any gaming platform really, but is relevant here as I've recently been inspired to consider picking up a Harmony cartridge so I can give the idea some wings.
Basically it goes something like this: Compile or acquire a complete listing of every game ever made for the Atari 2600, in as best a chronological sequence as can be reckoned. (Not every game's date of availability is going to be well-established.) Then, to as great an extent as can be realized, find and compile the individual histories of each game - Publisher is obvious, creator(s) not so much; anecdotes about its development; a note about its rarity, popularity, special hardware tricks and innovations, etc. Anything interesting is applicable. Box art and manual would be important pieces of this archive. With those two resources in hand, step one is to find the next (or first) game on the list, step two is to delve into the game's history, box art, manual etc. in order to gain the proper context. Step three is to play the game. Repeat.
When it comes to playing these old games, there are generally just a couple of ways to go about it. You either cherry-pick the games of your past / games you never got to play, or you start picking titles randomly (or alphabetically, which amounts to the same thing) to see what you come up with. A chronology as outlined above would offer a third - and arguably definitive - method, and in my opinion it would be much more satisfying and a truer justification of time and money invested, as well as a more appreciative investigation of the 2600's catalog.
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Atari 2600 RGB mod
in Atari 2600
Posted
In the opinion of anyone who would know, would there be any real, observable difference in video quality between a heavy sixer and (whatever else) if the idea was to install this mod to it? I do gather that there's a hypothetical difference when the video being compared is the regular RF. Hypothetical, because I have never seen comparison images showcasing the difference. But you can't argue against the better shielding I guess.
Tempted to bite the bullet on this, and if it means I don't have to hunt up a $120+ ca. 1977 bit of hardware right away, all the better.