Bruce Tomlin
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Posts posted by Bruce Tomlin
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...Atari service centers use to do it. It can be done, there are a couple of pins that have to be isolated on the cartridge port and a couple of jumper wires put in to carry the video and audio to the 5200 mother board...
Have you ever found a board that was modified in such a way? (Or do you even know of any random person who has actually made this modification?)
Over the years I have personally found two circuit boards, which can be identified by "REV 3" appearing through a corner of the base, that support the adapter. These in no way appear to have been modified from an original board. (And I would have noticed, because I had to replace a CMOS keyboard select chip in one of them.) In fact, I think it would be unlikely, since I think some of the pins involved were orignally wired to ground, and would likely have been "flood" traces that would be almost impossible to "isolate"... especially if they were on the top side.
My suspicion is that (when requested) Atari "modified" units by replacing the main circuit board with the compatible revision. I also suspect that this board revision may never have been shipped in a retail box.
As for identifying them, flip the 5200 over, and look through the case in the lower right corner (the corner under where the power button is) and look at the board revision for REV 3. I don't know the CO-number, but I don't think any other 4-port CO-number revision ever had a REV 3. (If absolutely necessary, I could go dig one out and look for the CO-number.)
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Is it possible to play game systems on this TV that use RCA cables?
Nothing older than the NES, and not the RF-only top-loader NES.
You could put an old junk VCR in between as a tuner. Yes, they are big. But anything smaller is hard to find.
You could also get older systems specifically modified for composite or better video output.
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I think the Champ keypads were the right idea, but done the wrong way. And so was my idea to make a 7800 joystick that used a D9F jack and a 9-wire extension cable to connect to the console. But if you combine the ideas...
What I want to do is to rig up a Wico stick for 2-button CV operation, with a male D-9 plug on it to use a standard Coleco stick as a keypad. Most games don't need the keypad during the game, so it's no problem if the wire falls out.
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I see no RF input.
If it has no tuner, it is not a television, it is a monitor.
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FWIW, Girl's Garden was essentially done and working two weeks ago. The current binary has some cheats turned on (the keypad is a nice way to support cheats), but it runs fine on real hardware. Anything that still needs to be done hasn't been specified yet. And my current high score without using cheats is 78130. The game starts to get mean at about level 5 or 6.
When run under some (many? all?) versions of the MESS emulator, it can lock up due to problems with the VDP losing an interrupt, but since this is a direct port, if you really want to play the game on an emulator, there's no reason you can't just play the original SG-1000 version.
I'm working on translating the instructions now.
When Pixelboy asked me about it a couple of months ago (once he mentioned the pink cartridges, it became a Moral Imperative), I was pleasantly surprised to find I had already almost finished a proper disassembly of it. Only the RAM addresses still needed to be done, and one bad reference found. But Coleco put the VDP interrupt on NMI, which, to put it simply, is a big pain in the butt, and the hard work was in making it work with non-maskable interrupts.
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It looks like Shining Force (one of the few "important" Sega CD titles I don't have) has been going for $40-$60, but someone still lucked into a copy for $15.
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If the item is as pictured, it appears that someone has hacked the power supply to power something else. That is the correct power brick, but not the correct plug. In that case, it is most definitely NOT "New Old Stock". (Which means "old but in shelf-new condition".)
What, an ebay seller not knowing WTF an acronym means? That's unpossible! Oh, and it's mint (flavored) too!
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The 7800 was only given a limited test market in New York and California where it did quite well actually, and most of the retailers put in advanced orders which were cancelled by Tramiel.
Yep, Kindly Uncle Jack (as the DTACK Grounded guy liked to call him)... his buying Atari helped set back the home video game industry. To him, consoles were just junk that got in the way of his desire for revenge against Commodore.
And the infamous "it's a toy that also plays games" scheme was one of several things they did to get it in to retaliers for the initial New York test market - because they didn't want to take on more game stock.
Ah, yes, that was it. I had forgotten the reasoning behind Nintendo trying to make it not look like a video game console. The retailers. It's a bit hard to sell something when the retailers have been burned by having to clearance stuff at a loss. Never mind that much of what they were getting rid of was due to third-party companies churning out crap games, with the thought that all games would sell equally.
The SMS deserved better than it got in the US, but there are reasons why it lost. Nintendo's exclusivity contracts, and Mario+Zelda (in that the best games for NES were better than the best games for SMS). The NES had a larger library because it lasted longer, but I can think of very few SMS games that I actually enjoyed playing, other than Rastan.
And FWIW, even there was no corporate lineage, the SMS and Genesis/MD were the successors to Colecovision in terms of architecture. Or perhaps more accurately, the CV was a branch of Sega's lineage, that had previously been limited to Japan only. In any case, from 1986 to 1995 (the Playstation launch), TMS-9918-style character cell + sprite graphics were king.
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Also, I've never found a non-working genesis console either. The closest was a second version with a flaky power jack that needed the solder re-flowed and then it worked fine. I prolly picked up about a dozen of them and they all work -- they seem to be built like tanks!
I've also picked up many SNES consoles and only one was broken to the point I couldn't fix it.
I may have found one or two dead units over the years, and one Genesis 2 with a ton of bad solder joints on all the plugs, but I have to agree, they rank up there with the 2600 for durability.
Of course the SNES has the problem with its plastic changing color, sometimes only one of the two halves.
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I usually use mess for testing my .rom files before releasing demos, etc, but I agree that I should do testing on other popular emulators (VColeco, Meka, BlueMSX), too.
SDLmess is good when developing code, because you can run it from a makefile:
messpm coleco -cart ${CART} -window -keepaspect -skip_gameinfo -skip_warnings -switchres -nofullstretch &
Testing on real hardware is more important than testing various emulators. I have written code that can lock up under an emulator (some versions of MESS) but not on real hardware, presumably because of a subtle bug in how the VDP interrupt is handled.
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I have a feeling the case design is going to be rather unimportant until there is some actual working circuitry to put into a case.
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As I've said before, Nintendo won out because they were the only company "stupid" enough to believe anyone still wanted home video game consoles. Everybody else "knew" that it was a fad that had ended, and nobody with money would have wasted it on trying to sell the things when everyone knew they were dead. Nintendo even had to go to an effort of making it not looking like a video game console (the "toaster" design that hid the cartridge like some kind of dirty underwear).
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If you don't have the special magic wire that connects the base unit video to the 32X, the 32X is worth approximately zero. The mushroom is rather useless without it. (And maybe add a few bucks if you still have BOTH versions of that cable, or sell it separately.)
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Sunday at a thrift store I found two junk Genesis carts priced at $4, but the last day of that color being half price. That made them a buck each, so I bought them for their shells. Gotta get cracking on my coding already...
And just now I found:
* NES Metroid w/box $1.50 (I didn't have the box)
* NES Last Action Hero w/Box $1.50 (I didn't have the box or cart)
* NES Yoshi $1.50 (already had it, oh well)
* A "pirate" tape of random Star Wars stuff like Troops, Hardware Wars, etc.
* Princess Bride 20th Anniversary edition widescreen, still shrinkwrapped, $1.50 (I think)
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The statement I read in the above link:
"download-only PSN titles seem to be well protected from piracy"
I'm not sure if this is true or not.
If nobody pays to download them, they're not going to get pirated. WIN.
...meanwhile, there's nothing new on the PSP that I want to play. So I'll continue to play rips of stuff I already have, both UMD and emulation. (Current game: Popful Mail)
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I think point #5 is actually the most appropriate.
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Actually, your best bet is if you can find someone local to you with a Pandora kit who already knows how to use it.
The battery alone is not enough. You need a properly formatted memory stick with the necessary files on it. It is possible to make the necessary file from publicly available versions of the Sony updater, but as far as I know, you need to run a program on a hacked PSP to generate the files. Of course you can get the necessary files (and even a disk image of the mem stick) as warez.
The best place I know of for info on hacking PSPs is on forums.qj.net, so you might want to go there and read around a bit.
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I think we need to be clear about something here. In the subject line you say "should've been released", which to me implies "back in 1983-1984". And that's the point of view in which I'm telling you it would not have happened, probably not even if the crash had never happened.
But if you're talking about today, then there's a different problem. In that case it's "then why don't you just play the original on an emulator"? It's one thing to make homebrews of new or under-represented games on an older system, but porting existing games which already had plenty of ports... there just doesn't seem to be much of a point.
...and not that the game impressed me all that much back in the day anyhow. I was specifically not impressed when I learned that no matter how good you were, you only got five (?) laps for your quarter, and then the game ended, period. (However, I didn't mind the absolute ending as much on Outrun, because the design of the game made it obvious from the start that there was an end, and each stage lasted longer too.)
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If you're going to use zip drives or floppies to transfer from a PC to a classic mac, how does that handle the resource fork? Will executables copied to the zip disk show up as executables on the Mac? Or do you have to use macbinary or something to get it across?
That's correct. The absolute minimum stuff you need would be Binhex 4.0 and a version of Stuffit.
If you can get a Mac with built-in Ethernet (they did make SCSI Ethernet adapters, but good luck finding a driver), it may be possible to set up a file server, but unless you can find a copy of the non-free Appleshare Server software, you will probably not be able to connect to a newer computer, like one running OS X. That's because at some point they switched over from Appletalk to TCP/IP, and the client needs to be compatible with the server. (Localtalk is an option too, but it's slower than floppy disks and probably more trouble than it's worth.)
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The one thing I hated about the Sega CD was that it required another AC adapter to power the thing. Hearing about the Sega 32X needing an AC adapter to power it as well, I decided that I wasn't going to get that after blowing $200 on the Sega CD.
That's why Sega made a power strip specifically for plugging in up to four of the enormous wall warts. I always thought of it as Sega saying "sorry" for all the wall warts.
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Definitely worth 10 bucks. That's what I paid for mine a few years ago when I found it in Best Buy's assortment of $10 games. I'm not sure what it was doing there, because it still sold for more than that used at the time.
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Um, yeah, Coleco sold quite a few pong clones long before the CV.
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(This is probably in more than a few FAQs, but whatever.)
For these older systems that don't have the auto-switch box (like the 8-bit Nintendo has), what can I do to improve reception?
First thing is don't use an auto-switch box on a system that doesn't support it. I'm serious. Whether you know better or not, it has to be said. It's too easy for people in general to not understand this, because they don't understand why it works in the first place. It works because the console sends power to the switch to make it switch. For what it's worth, the necessary circuit can be added to older systems with various levels of difficulty.
So with that aside, the best way (without getting a video-out mod) is to get an F-to-RCA plug adapter. The gender you needs depends on whether your system has a wired-in cable or not. For systems like the (non-Jr.) 2600 that have a built-in cable, you need a female RCA/male F connector to plug it into the back of the TV. For all the rest that have an RCA connector, get a male RCA/female F connector and use TV coax. If you don't need to watch actual TV on the set (now that only cable broadcasts analog signals), the lack of a switch is even better than an automatic switch. (But don't do this with a system that does use an automatic switch, to avoid having the switch power go into your TV set.)
If you do need a switch to hook up multiple systems, get a "Cable A/B switch". They are much higher quality than the slider switches that came with video games back in the day. They used to make multi-device switches, but that was so long ago that you aren't even likely to find them in thrift stores anymore.
(I should mention that the 2600 internally uses an RCA plug to connect the RF cable. You could probably replace it with a TV cable, but the thickness of the cable -- which is what makes it so much better -- would make it difficult to use as a substitute.)
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You don't need a speech synth to do speech on the CV. Why make people buy hardware they don't need.
Eh? I said nothing about a speech snyth chip. I was talking about the extra memory needed to hold the extra sound data. (But you do need a speech synth chip to do speech without spending way too much on ROM chips.) I hate to shatter your dreams, but extra stuff doesn't come free.
As I was saying, every extra 8K (enough memory to hold 2-4 seconds of raw audio) you had to add to a cartridge meant a couple dollars in extra costs. Extra costs mean either lower profit or you have to raise the price of the game. Neither was a attractive proposition once The Crash started to take hold.
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Question about the vcs adapter
in Atari 5200
Posted
Very interestring. Even more so when there is one 4-port board revision in existence that already had the update built-in.