Bruce Tomlin

http://atari7800.net/files/ (Yeah, I noticed the other day that nobody had taken that domain name. I couldn't resist.)

I mean that of the two games that actually did support a Pokey, both of them put it at $6000. RoF doesn't access $600x.

I said I'd like to get something useful scanned.

Pokey goes at $6000. No references to $600x anywhere. Also no reference to sound except for clearing AUDV0 and AUDV1 to zero. The right joystick is completely ignored. The left joystick fire button doesn't seem to do anything except start the game going, and that's only if you have a Proline or other 2-button stick. For those wondering what you can do in it, you can 1) zoom around the map a lot, trying to fly toward the bases and grounded ship (the right radar display shows the grounded ship), and you can 2) watch the blinkenlights. Because it's only a nice demo. If you don't do anything, it starts turning the ship on its own. The messages probably don't correspond to anything and are probably random. The clock and frame counts in the upper right corner let you compute the frame rate, which is around 6fps. That's not bad for a 6502 doing barebones 3D rendering during the time that the video chip isn't hogging the bus.

At work we have new Buck Rogers copier/printers which, among other things, can scan documents at high speed and e-mail a PDF as an attachment. But only if it's on plain paper. So I'd like to try getting something useful scanned. Here's a list of some of the things I have handy. What's most important is that it's not already scanned by someone. (I'll probably just go ahead and scan them all anyhow.) It'd also be good to know where I can put the stuff after it's been scanned. Magnavox O^2 Service Manual, 13 pages, plus 16 more pages of Videopac schematics and diagrams Coleco TIA clone documentation, about 135 pages, plus an 11x17 packaging and pinout diagram, and an 11x17 audio waveforms diagram The Frob (Colecovision dev system) documentation, about 150 pages

Kick ass... I guess the CC2 RAM address lines weren't directly connected to the 6502 after all!

Inside or outside the chip? From the way you said it, the pin is probably broken where it comes out of the chip. Half legs are easy, I deal with them all the time when I'm desoldering chips for fun. Just tack a new leg on top of the old one. Fully broken legs have been too much trouble for me to even try fixing. (And a broken bond wire? I'll leave that to the folks with the serious pro tools.)

I think it would be a good idea to compare the partial dump of this proto with this new one.

You guys do know about Goo Gone, right? As long as we're complaining about labels, Texas Thrift down here has the worst stickers. They're round (which makes them harder to remove to begin with) and stick way too hard. Thank goodness for Goo Gone. It's the morons who price everything with big magic marker writing that are the real problem.

That's why you have to remember as much as you can what they looked like when you start over again. It helps a lot if you can remember where edge rows start, since they will pin one end of the rows. If you have an edge square identified, and it's got a "3" for that end, then pop two more zits and put an X mark for the next one. (You did find out how to do the X, right? I didn't need to read a thing to figure out that one.) When you get a hint at the start of the level, you can more or less control where it stops. You don't want it to stop on an all-on or zero row. You can also press START (I didn't find this until I had almost completed the game) and can get another hint for a five minute penalty. This can be really helpful on the higher levels. The hardest puzzles are two in the last level which have no run longer than 9.

Are the DVDs of individual files, or it is one big mass of files in a few RAR archives? Because if the torrents are of files as you'd download them from usenet, you can just drop them in (stop your torrent first) and let BT figure out whether they're right or not. More than a few times, I've taken a bunch of old damaged files (one even had a CD-ROM read error near the end, so I just copied what I could) and run them in a new torrent. It's nice to start your download at 80% or more.

Aha, a Champ Adapter keypad. So that's what the box to those things looks like. Just so you know, I have two of them that I found long ago at a flea market. The one thing I don't like about them is that they made it so that it wouldn't pass through a right button on a joystick plugged into the thing! In fact, I recall that they dioded the whole thing to make a 2600 stick into the equivalent of a Coleco stick. I mean, it's a simple matter of rewiring it, but it's not quite a trivial rewriting, and you have to actually do it.

Okay, I found the fix to the warp screen that I overlooked, but it's not important enough for a new upload. But I thought I'd mention that after watching this thing before the patch, it's clearly double-buffering the viewscreen. The unitialized RAM was switching back and forth between two different random patterns. So what kind of speed is this thing getting anyhow? 4-6fps?

Is the plastic part from the lid shorter than the others? When I finally finished my S-video mod and decided to stop playing on naked 7800 boards, I found I had two lids with broken SELECT button shafts. So I took the PAUSE button out of one and stuck it upside in place of SELECT.

This one should be less ugly for CC2 folks. The reset warp is almost perfect, and the main viewscreen now only has orange lines in the sky. Includes .bin, .a78, and .asm based on a disassembly with all address references changed to H() and L() for ease of code changes. CC2 info: Fractalus (cleaned up) / rescue2.bin / 78SC_R16 / 78BIOS / 816C450B rescue2.zip

Then why do they have pads? They clearly look like Super Famicom units. So they must have been counterfeit SF consoles. This being in Brazil, I wouldn't be surprised to see such a thing.

Yeah, I think I've seen one of those before. That's probably what it is, since TI managed to get two joysticks into a single 9-pin plug.

Ah, now I see. The difference was that when I first ran it, NOT on an emulator, I had bus float to work with. An emulator generally isn't going to emulate the subtler electrical effects of bus float. So instead of a solid orange band, I had a mostly orange band with some vertical stripes and a few flickery pixels. I didn't see that crap on the emulator screen shot and didn't realize that I shouldn't have. Now that I've looked back at the original picture, I see the orange band. That's certainly a damn cheap-ass way to do line doubling. So if the CC2 was to have a bank switch mode to run RoF properly, it would have to somehow mask out A8 from RAM accesses. I'm not sure that it even has this level of control available. I wouldn't be surprised if A0 through at least A8 of the RAM were directly connected to the address bus. And I'm not sure how one would go about patching the code to work the "right" way. It was probably done this way for speed reasons. It *might* be possible to do a whole bunch of OFFSET=0 or OFFSET=1 display lists, if that doesn't run afoul of the 512 byte maximum DLL. But then the rollbar graphics DLs would have to be redone. The wierd RAM mapping probably played an important role in killing this title. 1) at some point, Atari issued a "no RAM" edict for new 7800 games, and 2) it would have needed a custom cartridge board made, where the A8 line didn't go to RAM. No way would Atari have gone for such custom stuff when they were convinced that the video game market was completely dead.

Perhaps the switch needs to be replaced? It's not simple to do, and requires desoldering and resoldering a new switch in place. They're a pretty standard type of switch, though.

Don't bother with SBC's news server. 1) it sucks due to lack of completion and 2) it sucks more because they don't carry alt.binaries.{multimedia|sounds|warez}.* My current choice is newsreader.com (current offer is $10/mo for 30 gigs) for bulk downloads, and a second level Giganews account ($12/mo?) for retention. (My newsreader acct has $10/mo for 50 gigs, and my GN account usually rolls over with lots left over.) Giganews now has an offer of unlimited download for $25/mo.

Why are you posting this in the Atari 7800 forum? Is there going to be a Beef Drop 7800?

Yeah get this - the one near me has Conker's Bad Fur Day and some ECW game for N64 for $79.99 !!! No joke. No wonder they are in trouble, the idiots. I hadn't been in one in years. I go inside and geez... first, the place looks like a box of crayons exploded in there, then I find they have freaking clothes there, and they take up the entire center of the store. Oh yeah, when I think of kids clothes, the first place I think of is a toy store. No wonder they're screwed, trying to compete against Wally World's 3rd-world clothing producing minions?

Especially the folks in San Antonio! It features scenes of the Riverwalk and of the old airport which has since become "Terminal 2". And HT lived in San Antonio at least into his '20s. The only thing missing is an imaginary Dabney Coleman.

Fscking DC fanboys. I mean, it's pretty nice for a dead system, but it's like a religion to these wankers.

That's assuming it isn't a problem outside the chip. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a loose connection or bad solder joint (or bent pin if it uses a socket). The first thing to try is to check for continuity.