Bruce Tomlin

Then how are the emulators getting it right?

Those don't just look like any old "pirate" systems, they look like actual counterfeits. The difference is that a counterfeit is being passed off as the real official thing. Nobody is going to mistake a Power Joy or "100000 in 1" cart for the real thing.

So that should mean A5 (pin 3) is floating high. Which means it came disconnected somewhere between the chip and the edge connector.

I warned you. The good news is it only lasts a week or so until you've solved all the puzzles.

What's all this jibber-jabber?

Then why isn't it working correctly when I use 78SC_R16 mode?

I guess one question is whether it's a first edition or not. I really don't know the difference, except that I recall that the book to the first edition should have a number in silver ink. I think they only made about 200 of those. They went wild on the second edition, presumably because the cost of producing 1000 wasn't that much more than the cost of 200.

Not that I know of, but more recently there has been the Nostromo. Found one of those for five bucks recently. Ten keys, throttle wheel, D-pad. There's a later version with fifteen keys, a spinner wheel, and a D-pad. They even have OS X drivers.

It's because the CC2 is a 7800 cart and has access to the phase 2 clock line, instead of having to use a cheap delay timer to guess when to latch the bank select.

The one with better contrast.

Galaga '90 is a must-have.

I never said anything about the joystick. On power-up you have to hit reset, then it works fine. It's the display that's screwed up. I'm using it appended 4 times to make 128K, plus a small patch to the reset vector (and the binary re-signed) to make sure it selects bank 6 for $8000-$BFFF. Until I ran it as 128K, the reset screen was completely screwed up. It was apparently copying display lists from unmapped memory during the "warp" screen. I sure wish I had a 6502 ICE so I could go digging around in RAM to see what the display list looks like to find out why the viewscreen is screwed up.

No.

I've probably missed a few, but: . RCA Studio II, Fairchild Channel F, Atari 2600/5200/7800 . Atari 400/800/800XL/1200/XE, Colecovision, Intellivision/II/III . Arcadia 2001, Odyssey 2, SMS, TG-16, CD-i, Virtual Boy . NES+top-loader, SNES, Tri-Star for SNES, N64, Gamecube, Euro SNES . Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance . Genesis, Genesis 2, Sega CD I/II, 32X, Nomad, Saturn, Dreamcast . Playstation, Playstation 2 The major systems I know I don't have: . 3DO, X-Box

According to that link, it was available in a cassette version. Games which load in to RAM are usually going to require more than 16K of RAM, because they use up some RAM just by existing. One could also hope that they didn't use any self-modifying code. It's one thing to convert a 400/800 cartridge to the 5200. It's another thing to convert a disk/tape game.

Those were all older games. They were just getting rid of old titles to make room for new stuff, including the annual sports titles. And some of them should have been cleared out long ago, like Universal Studios. There was a lot of crapware in that sale.

You don't need one. Once you understand how it works, all you need to read are numbers. It's just run-length encoding of a picture in two directions. It gives you the length of the runs of pixels in both directions, and you have to figure out where they are on the line. It has sort of a Minesweeper-like feel to it. For instance if it's a 15x15 board and you see "1 11 1", it's going to be every pixel but the second and fourteenth. If you see "2", that means there is a run of two pixels somewhere on the line. When you start a level, answer "hai", and it gives you one free hint. You can also press start and get a hint from one of the options on the menu. Everything else, just play around and see what it does.

Actually that should be A9 06 8D FF BF. I tried patching that in, but it made no difference. When I run it on a CC2 in 78SCR8SM mode, I have to press reset, the screen goes nuts (uninitialized display lists) for a few seconds, then it starts to run. But the middle half of the viewscreen area is just a bunch of bars that look like a display list is pointing to nowhere land. I just tried doubling it again (with my bank 6 patch included) and using 78SC_R16 mode. Now I get a "warp" showing up in the display screen when I press reset, instead of crap. And now in the middle of the viewscreen, every other line is correct. It's like looking through a punch card or something. I think it's definitely a problem accessing the graphics in ROM. In every case, when you first move the joystick after power-up, it goes to a blue screen with an underline cursor on it. You can also get there by pressing select. Reset does the warp thingy and it goes back to the cockpit.

I don't think there is a proper bank switch mode for this on the CC2. It needs a non-bankswitched 32K plus RAM. I think if I hack around with it to add hard-selection for the $8000-$BFFF bank, plus an extra 32K of padding in front, it can be made to run in 78SCR8SM mode. As it is, if you append the .bin file to itself (to make it 64K) and run in 78SCR8SM mode, it does partially work, but it's got a bunch of bad graphics rows in the middle of the display area. This may be due to the $8000-$BFFF bank not being swapped in. The bank select to make this work should look something like LDA #6 / STA $BFFF (A9 02 8D FF BF). If Chad is reading, it would be useful to have bankswitch files like 7800_4R, 7800_8R, 7800_16R, and 7800_32R. And give 'em all 16K RAM just because you can. (Actually, giving them all RAM from $4000 through to the bottom of ROM could be even cooler.)

"Paint It Black" Based on the performance by The Rolling Stones "Kim Jong IL" Parody by Johnny D There is a dictator whose name is Kim Jong IL It's understatement to call him mentally ill Why don't we trust him and call back our spys and spooks? Because that psycho-nutcase probably has nukes! If secret agents kidnapped him and brought him back And locked him in a padded cell that's painted black They'd hear him scream all night in psychiatric pain At every demon writhing in his squirming brain The Chinese know he's nuts – the Russians know it too The Japanese would like to lock him in a zoo Bravely all the South Korean citizens stand their ground They won't be terrorized by any psychotic clown Hallucinations of gargoyles inside his head Their rasping voices whisper to him that he's dead If there's no hope to heal his mental Yin-and-Yang Let's hope they overthrow that nutcase in Pyongyang Then peace would come to the peninsula at last Korean people could come to terms with their past Then all Koreans would be free to live as one No more North versus South, no DMZ with guns Hmm, hmm, hmm,... They wanna see their freedom, freedom now In Pyongyang, and in Seol They wanna see their tears blotted out from their eyes They wanna see their freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom now Yeah!

Correction: I have the postage here, and it was $3.13. I'm still impressed that he shipped a BBA complete in box for that price via the USPS. It must have been just under the First Class/Priority Mail breakeven weight.

It also depends on how it's shipped and how much you were paying in the first place. If they ship via Parcel Post and pocket the rest, that's really crappy. With Parcel Post, the post office keeps your mail in the zoo for three weeks before sending it out. The difference between Parcel Post and Insured is that Insured is kept outside the gorilla cage for those three weeks. I won a buy-it-now on ebay a few weeks ago for a Dreamcast Broadband Adapter. $80 bucks, and the guy charged $7 for shipping. And then he sent it First Class for less than 2 bucks. But you know what? I didn't care. I was happy enough to get it at that price to begin with (the BIN was only an hour old) that I didn't care. And he also shipped it the next day without waiting for payment (so naturally I was ethically required to drop the money order in the mail on the first day!)

Zombies Ate My Neighbors (also called "Monster" in a ROM I have) - this is a REALLY fun game. It also has a 2-player mode. Mario Pic-cross (good for sucking away a week of your life)

There will definitely be another one. The only question is when. Currently, very few people know the answer to the second question. Meanwhile, I I'm going to resurrect something I tried to start years ago: VECTOR - the Video Games Enthusiasts of Central Texas ORganization. Right now I need to find a host for a mailing list. Just something where people can shoot the bull about local stuff, and maybe try to meet F2F a bit more often. Meanwhile, folks in San Antonio might want to check out http://xcssa.org , which grew out of an Amiga user's group. Oh, and next weekend (the weekend of the 28th), someone in San Antonio is having a big anime/games/whatever weekend: http://www.xcssa.org/pipermail/xcssa/2004-...ust/002115.html I plan to be there.

At this point, the chance is close to zero. Not only did he not get enough interest to ramp up for a second run, one of the parts (the MMC socket) is no longer available, and would require changes to the circuit board, meaning a larger interest is needed for a second run. Nonetheless, mine was well worth the $200, just as a development tool.