Bruce Tomlin

Blue Stinger is the most notorious bad pressing. I even have a bad copy that I got at a Goodwill (one of those returns that Target dumps on Goodwill so they can say they're "giving back to the community").

Only if it's a 2-chip design, with the ROM being a separate chip. There's not even a guarantee of that until it's released. What with FPGAs being old hat these days, they could develop on an FPGA and then commit the final design, ROM and all, to an ASIC. One glop-top is cheaper than two. Plus, there may be other issues, like no audio-in pin for the cartridge slot, so you can probably forget about hearing Ballblazer or Commando. Lack of an IRQ or HALT line won't be a problem (nothing released ever used them), but will it have the phase-2 clock output accessible? Will data or address lines end up buried in middle layers of a multi-layer board?

Yeah, and the picture quality of some 2600 games on that PBS special last week was awful. One of them you could see typical RF interference, and there was at least one NES with CHRROM problems, but then there was a 2600 playing Yars that had a bunch of vertical shimmers like it was an NES, not a 2600. It sure can't hurt to show off homebrews (especially ones that you want people to buy) on nice systems with clear screens. It's all a matter of presentation. Hmm... all this time I thought the TMS9928 generated RGB, and it turns out it generates YRB component, just like you find on an HDTV. After the success of the mod I did to my 7800, I guess I ought to look into doing a Colecovision S-video mod. I've been pretty satisfied with my auto-RF-switch mod, but now it's time to raise the stakes. Hey, Albert, if I do two, would you be interested in one? (FWIW, I have more Colecovisions than you have 1702s.)

Holy crap. So this guy threw out dozens of Apple II systems, of which more than a few were probably IIgs systems with hard drives and Transwarps? Damn. I wonder if he even tried to sell them on ebay. That's funny if all the keyboards were like that. Anyhow, IIgs keyboards aren't that hard to find. Not compared to internal hard drives and Transwarps. (I got two IIgs systems with 8M or so RAM each, SCSI card in one, Vulcan drive in the other.)

Has anybody actually SEEN a screen shot of the menu program yet? And yes, it is more than a 6507/TIA/RIOT. It's also a 7800. Which means it's got Maria circuitry and 4K of RAM. I currently don't have any reason to believe that it's NOT running a VHDL design of the Atari 7800 circuitry. But a decent menu screen would be no trouble at all on a 7800. In fact, it's been done before:

If possible, I recommend an S-video mod to a system, and an adapter cable to split the S-video in to separate chroma and luma plugs. I did that to my 7800, and the picture on my Commodore 1702 is amazing. (It's a lot better than to the 1802 I recently got, which gives a really fuzzy picture.) Of course the picture is even better on my HD-ready Sony with 480p upconversion turned on. And in case you don't know, "chroma luma" == S-video with separate plugs. Commodore was years ahead of their time on this. If you're lucky enough to live near a Fry's Electronics, they sell a cable for five bucks with an S-video male on one end, and two RCA male on the other end (red is luma, white is chroma). This is what you need to plug a Commodore monitor into an S-video source. Unfortunately they don't have one with an S-video female, or an S-video gender changer for use with more modern systems, but I made myself one of those a few years ago, and leave it on my 1084S.

It's not possible without hacking the code, if you want the display to stay there. If you were to somehow halt the CPU during the "pause", you would lose the screen display, because the CPU is always locked to the display. In fact, it would become vertical stripes. And the audio would be stuck on whatever it was before, which can be real annoying with TIA sound. Of course if you blacked the audio and video outputs during this "pause", and that was acceptable (which it seem it was in the linked system), then that could work.

Not for me. I don't get cable. (And there are others who aren't even in the USA.) I vote for the 10 meg version. If someone with a copy wants to PM me about it, I could even put it on bit torrent. Just create a .torrent file with the tracker address I give you and send that to me. Then share your copy out.

Please don't start a new thread for this. The other one is even linked from the AA home page.

It looks like the kind of gun that went with super Pong games of the era, though those usually used some kind of DIN plug. The lack of orange at the muzzle (and that it looks like a real gun) indicates that it is probably from the era.

Any particular reason you're using that? Most folks around here use DASM. Except me, but that's only because I wrote my own. ( http://xi6.com/hacks/ ) I haven't heard of this one before, and I'm probably not the only one, so you might want to give us a link or something.

It was okay. But the funniest part was how they used cuts from The Sims as a "simulation" of Atari's hot tub.

Unless I find out otherwise, I'm going to assume that it's easier to get Planet Smashers in there if they use the real hardware. It's not like it existed as C code or something they can tweak and recompile. It would be MUCH more difficult to convert or "port" PS to something with an NES style graphics chip, given how unique the 7800 video hardware is. I'd also like to believe that those folks who went and did VHDL designs of the 6502 and TIA chips didn't just disappear after being visited by Men In Black and that these mini-consoles are the mysterious commercial projects that they got approached by.

The reason some of us want it to at least be hackable for a cartridge slot is simple. Because that would mean that they could be hacked into portable units.

I was thinking that's what they could be... BUT! How the hell did they wire them up, then? Assuming they're really using a standard DB-9 plug for the controllers, that is.

Will it be based on 7800 hardware or not? I was going to say that it would be hard to tell since all the games had 2600 versions. Then I saw Food Fight on the list. Planet Smashers is on the list too. The games that DO have 7800 versions are: Asteroids Centipede Desert Falcon Food Fight Planet Smashers So one quarter of the games could be the 7800 version. I have to wonder if Robotron, Dig Dug, etc. were left out because they didn't want to have to re-license them. Maybe they're saving them for a second unit? And Warlords is on the list too... are they planning to release a version of Warlords that works with the joystick controllers or what? Another question is if those are proper 7800 sticks with the pair of 680 ohm resistors inside. My guess is "probably". And are those two nubs on the top of the controller fire buttons or are they just for looks? I would also be interested in the inside contents to see if a cartridge slot could be added. I have doubts of seeing holes in the right place, but there's still the question of whether it uses a ROM separate from the main chip. The picture shows only two buttons on top of the unit... power and reset? No select button? The 7800 games they chose don't need the select button, but the 2600 games would.

Hit First Saturday, got some EPROMs (apparently PC BIOS ROMs), a CD-I Digital Video cartridge and Litil Divil game, a box full of 40 soldertail CR-2032 batteries, and a LONG printer cable so I can run my EPROM programmer from the sofa (with the video player PC on a shelf by the TV.) It was a load of stuff purchase, so I can't say exactly how much some things cost, but the batteries were 5 bucks and the DV cart was 2 bucks. Now I need to see if my player has a DV cart slot. Also, on the way up to Dallas, for six bucks I got a bunch of crap. It included lots of milk crates (4 real, 2 store-bought); an old Supra modem with a 1 megabit flash, a 1 megabit SRAM, and a 256 byte serial EEPROM; a piece of whiteboard; some Bionicle pieces; and some satellite receiver junk. There was something that appeared to be an antenna rotator control unit, and I'd like to figure out how they got a 3 digit LED display with only two or three 16-pin chips on the board.

The insane cost of Neo Geo carts was because they were all arcade licensed. As I understood it, you could stick the carts into a coin cabinet and they'd run as a coin-op game.

http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Is there any reason why the Archives stop in June?

2-port only, unless you are lucky to have the rare compatible 4-port version or a modified 4-port unit.

How much room is needed anyhow? PS2 games are on DVD-ROMs. That's over 4 gigs. They could put desktop themes on the DVD-ROM for reading on a PC if they wanted to. That can't need more than 10 or 20 megs.

I've known Temple of Apshai to be collectible. (From many years ago when I found a copy of Apshai Trilogy at a closeouts place. I got a copy for myself, and one for someone on the net who asked about it.) As for the Infocom stuff, all Infocom games in their original packaging and with the original stuff (like the lint from HHGttG) are collectibles. Also good to have for completeness are the Infocom collection boxes. There are two of them, each in a CD and a floppy version. The CD version has extra games. I bought one CD version new, and found all the other three used at various times. Famous games with nifty stuff can be collectible, like the maps in the early Ultima games. And then there are people who collect merchandising. Like the Alf party games for Alf collectors.

For Fractalus, see its thread. Chad posted a new bankswitch file just for RoF.

I was just wondering if it was possible. Since I've disassembled Montezuma's Revenge, it looks like PB's programming style was to do three or four banks of variable size. If they never swapped in part of a bank while expecting the new bank to be able to read part of the previous bank, then it could go to a straight 16K layout by changing around the bank select code. While it's possible for a game to have violated this rule, I think they probably didn't. So I'd say that PB games should be assumed convertible to 16K until a given game is tried and found impossible to convert.