Bruce Tomlin

Can someone tell me just what is wrong in that picture? Is it really making those circular moire patterns, or what? I will say that in my first attempts at 7800 programming, I found that forgetting to set the stack at startup could cause some wierd problems. The stack pointer is initialized to $16 by the boot ROM. Using the stack for JSR/RTS would somehow cause the screen to break up with herringbone patterns. This is wierd for a couple of reasons: 1) The RTS shouldn't have worked in the first place, because the 7800 maps $0100-$013F to the TIA and MARIA registers. It would have just read mirrors of the collision registers. The game (in this case the tank demo which I had typed in from the Monitor Cart docs) was clearly still running in spite of the screwed up screen. I downloaded a copy of the Monitor Cart to my CC2, and was unable to get the $116 area to read back what I poked there. But by messing around in the $116-$11A area, I was able to sometimes get the screen to break up. 2) $116 may be firmly in the TIA area, but it's in the audio registers area. That shouldn't cause the TIA to go unblanked. 3) The herringbone pattern was out of sync with the Maria, as it made wavy vertical and diagonal bars. They were wide enough to have been TIA sync bars, though.

Are you kidding? Do you really think anybody at Atari, especially Tramiel, would have gone for a lockout chip? There were some real penny-pinchers over there. If Atari had bought the NES, and not just to bury it, it probably would have had a regular Famicom slot too. The stupid "pop-up toaster" design would never even have been considered.

I went by a Goodwill today and found a nifty looking calculator. It was solar powered, had the hexadecimal keys where I would want them, etc. Then I looked it up on Google. Seems a Casio CM-100 Computer Math Calc went for $65 on ebay back in April, and they show up less than once a year on ebay. I paid $4 for mine. I also got a TI-81 graphing calc with dead batteries for $2, just because. This thing looks like the Speak & Spell designers worked on it. Midnight blue with a hard plastic slide cover.

If it isn't announced soon, there won't be an AGE '04, it'll have to be AGE '05. Anyhow, the longer it takes for it to happen, the longer I have to work on code to show at it.

Ditto that. Just sitting back trying to write some hairy 6502 code.

I don't see any such requirement. It just says if you buy in packs of four, you save 8 bucks. Sounds like that's how they had them cased, and they'd have to break a case to ship fewer than four.

The difference in this case is if nobody had a copy of Action #1, not even a photocopy. So nobody actually knew what was in it, other than what could be guessed from #2. Or even more like if DC or Marvel had been rumored to have started work on a new superhero series, but then the comic book industry suddenly crashed and nobody was sure if they had even finished the first issue of the new series. Right now it's like having a bad photocopy, and only every other letter of the dialog is readable.

When the next phase of coding is done, it will be ready for a demo release.

That's I2C. Whatever he does, he should document it. I can see how an I2C EEPROM hooked up to the right joystick port would make for a great 2600/7800 "memory stick", and it could be done without any other parts (aside from the plug and circuit board), and no need for anybody to invent a new protocol. ( I2C is very documented... there's even code for it in the Linux kernel source)

Can somebody say 'ROF'? I was actually referring to one I've been writing. I've been using the CC2, but I even made a proto board out of a Pole Position II. I haven't had time to work on it in the past couple of weeks though.

How about a boxed version of a barely playable 7800 homebrew? There aren't a lot of 7800 protos out there, you know!

My estimate was based on 1) having enough Commodore monitors already, and 2) what I can usually get them for at thrift stores. I just checked ebay and it seems that three of them have gone for $50, $50, and $60. Meanwhile 1084S monitors have gone for $40, $55, and $100, plus a no-bid at $50.

First question, already answered, was 1084 or 1084S? The 1084S has stereo and is more useful because of that. A regular 1084, 1702, etc., I'd say $10-$20. Maybe $25 if it's a model that can hook up to an Amiga with RGB, and you need it for that. If you get the right adapter cable (which Fry's sells for five bucks), you can hook them up to S-video. And for what it's worth, there are multiple versions of the 1084 and 1084S. I have a good 1084S which is different from a broken 1084S that I have. And the US version doesn't have SCART. Most people in the US not only wouldn't know what to do with SCART, they might even think it looks scary.

Sigh... if one only knew what the value of something would be in advance. I remember when Blockbuster was selling Christmas Nights for $0.99 each and had a TON of them. I remember it too. Me and my stack of 'em. From which I carefully Goo-Goned the stupid Blockbuster labels. :-) I just can't pass up a stack of $1 copies of a game that's at least moderately interesting. I've noticed that most of the copies that show up on ebay are either the Japanese or Euro versions, which don't sell for as much as the US version. The Japanese version is interesting in that it came with instructions, and was packaged in a regular jewel case. All three versions use different artwork on the disc itself. If anyone in, near, or coming to Austin wants to trade a Euro version for a US version, I'd be happy to swap so I can have one of each. But I'm not interested enough to go to the trouble of a trade that's not in person.

It ought to. They use the same graphics chip. (Technically that's not true. For some reason, Coleco used the RGB version of the chip, which meant they needed an RGB video modulator too. Maybe TI gave them a better price because nobody else wanted that version.)

I remember many years ago, somebody on RGVC found two copies at a flea market in Georgia, and at least one of them was sealed. The picture provided above is basically correct.

Or you could just require a 7800 for debugging 2600 code, and use its cartridge HALT line (the one difference between Atari's "Sally" 6502C and regular 6502 chips, and a damn useful one, too) to arbitrate by halting the host system when updating the RAM. Who needs dual ported RAM then?

Around here in Texas, there are signs in front of many thrift stores saying that items left outside are considered dumping and will (if they catch you) be prosecuted as such, just as if you had left a bag of trash or a pee bottle.

You can also order them direct from MCM Electronics, but I think they have a minimum order. From their March catalog, their prices are Q1-4 = $8.79 Q5-9=$7.89 Q10-29=$7.39 Q30+=$6.79. I found out recently that they still have over 20,000 left. The people selling single ones probably bought an order of 30.

I haven't looked at it in detail, but basically I've got the idea that what is needed is a 16-bit address latch (sort of like what the 8085 uses, just twice as wide) plus a PAL chip to decode the three bus signals to load the latches, decode the high bits of the address, and enable the EPROM outputs as necessary. And a circuit board which fits into the Intellivision. That totals up to three ~20 pin chips plus a 40-pin 16-bit EPROM. (The 10-bit minimum instruction word makes it simpler to just use a 16-bit chip.) It would be a bit tricky to fit this into a standard Intellvision cartridge (since the EPROM is as long as the cartridge already). Which means that you either have to go surface-mount or come up with a plastics mold for a T-bar or extra long cartridge. I suppose if you used a pair of 4-sided EPROMs you could get everything to just barely fit in a standard cartridge. But that would require at least surface-mounting a pair of sockets. I think it would be interesting to see what this cartridge looks like when released.

Addendum: that's with no flicker. If you want to drive people nuts by making them read flickery text, there are a lot less restrictions. See the Basic Programming and Stellar Track cartridges for an example.

Before you get too enthusastic about this, you do realize the 2600 has no such thing as a text mode, right? The best you can do horizontally is either 48 pixels of raw graphics, or 13-15 very small (as in 4 pixels wide) characters, and they probably have to be mostly raw graphics too.

Um, plugging in a chip backwards DOES cause improper voltages to be applied. In particular, +5 and ground are now on the wrong pins. The line that got blown was a corner pin.

Of course the real answer is simple, if you can find one: Tristar 64. I have the second best, with a SNES with Super 8 (Tristar clone) and a N64 both hooked up. And indeed my N64 normally stays unused. The Dreamcast gets a bit more play from me, thanks to emulators. (Arrrrrr!) Even when you have the real cartridges, it's often just more convienent to run an emulator. Before this weekend I mostly used NES and Colecovision emulators, but now that I've learned how to burn self-boots with OS X, this weekend I tried burning a couple more. DC7800 seems to run everything at half speed, it's really sad. Dreamsnes works rather well with the two discs of ROMs I got from some guy in trade for a DColem burn. Dreamsnes works well enough that I wasted most of yesterday playing SNES Mario Picross.

In the past, I've had at least one EPROM lose an address line due to plugging it in backwards. Of course you can't program it properly after that. More likely the problem here is a bad connection outside the chip.