Bruce Tomlin

I just looked up what it takes to do PCM with the PSG. http://www.smspower.org/dev/docs/wiki/Sound/PSG It appears that setting the PSG frequency to 0 will result in an "all-on" output similar to what the 2600's TIA can do. The main problem seems to be that the volume control is non-linear, so you would have to run the original samples through a special conversion process to get non-linear 4-bit that wasn't too quiet. The higher volume samples might sound bad unless you designed your conversion to use all three channels, but it could be done. The second problem is that 4-bit samples at 8KHz would take up 4K bytes/second, or 12K bytes/sec if you bonded the three channels together. For 4 seconds, that's 16K or 48K. That's still probably small enough for Berzerk. The third problem is feeding the sound chip at an accurate rate. When I wrote my 2600 touch-tone dialer, I used WSync to have the 15KHz horizontal sync as a reference. There seems to be no such reference on the CV, so you would have to freeze the screen and use timing loops for audio. On the MD/Genesis, you do have access to the H-sync, but you also have another sound chip with proper PCM support, and a second CPU to feed it.

When I was working on my RPG stuff, I found that even 16-pixel scrolling wasn't as bad as I expected. Then I changed to 8-pixel scrolling, and it was completely acceptable. If the scroll rate is fast enough, 8 pixels can be just fine. I never bothered to change it when porting to Genesis. At 8 pixels per vblank wait (about 2 seconds for a 40 tile wide screen), it's pretty smooth. Moon Patrol, as someone mentioned above, might count as not fast enough. I think I could live with the backgrounds doing parallax scrolling 8 pixels at a time, but the buggy might not go fast enough to do that with the foreground. A Super Mario clone might work well, especially if you only scrolled when he got out of the middle 1/3 or so of the screen.

I wouldn't mind seeing this too, but I'm not sure how much difference there would be, other than (maybe) the startup screen, and that one byte in low memory that is 60 decimal on a US version.

FYI, some (or many?) of these are apparently not a true "GoaC". They are actually a modern CPU running an emulator, with all the potential glitches thereof, and don't include the cartridge signals necessary for a few of the biggest games, most probably the !TIME select line that some use for bank switch control.

So maybe now you see why the interest in porting MSX games to Colecovision. MSX essentially didn't exist in the US. A couple of Spectravision consoles, probably only available by mail-order, and no cartridges. That's it. The crash of '84 suppressed a lot of systems from ever appearing in the US, or from appearing in quantities significant enough to notice. (People make "top ten worst game systems" lists all the time who have never heard of the Arcadia 2001, the US version of the Hanimex/Leisurevision, but they make sure to include the Studio II, which was only the second cartridge system ever, and in my experience, noticably rarer.) Guess when the MSX came out? Late 1983. And with no MSX1, nobody would have wanted an MSX2. The market was already tied up by the NES, the C64, and the PC at the various levels, with the Mac, Amiga, and ST filling in the cracks for those who (rightly, in my opinion) thought that the 8088 was a piece of crap.

Wiki says 512K program RAM (for the base unit CPU), 256K word RAM. That still doesn't stop you from having to burn a disc every time you want to try something. The CD is not going to make development any easier than an emulator + a floppy-based game copier. It will only make final manufacturing easier, and let you have redbook audio and more than 4 megabytes of data.

When in doubt, google parts of what you have: http://www.google.com/search?q=6502+"6+FFFE"+"7+FFFF" This is the main reference, 64doc v1.8, with all sorts of info about the "undocumented" instructions: http://www.eskimo.com/~tmcintos/atari/6502.proc.info This one looks kind of cool, since it's an MOS Technology 6502 programming manual: http://users.telenet.be/kim1-6502/6502/proman.html

Most "cheap" EPROM programmers will work with anything from 2764 to 27512, since they are all 5-volt 28-pin parts, and 2716/2732 since you just need to shuffle around the +5V power pin. Other than programming timings (which can be ignored if you simply use slower algorithms), the only real difference is the programming voltage. (But even expensive programmers might not support reading 2708, much less programming it, since it needed 3 voltages just to power up the chip. That's not much of a problem unless you play around with really old coin-ops or old Apple II stuff.)

Where are you, exactly? Not much of MSX anything can be found "easily" in the US, since it never went mainstream here. All I've ever found in 15+ years of thrifting is one Spectravision console.

The "original" version of Myst was on the Macintosh, so no. (they actually hacked up Hypercard with a bunch of extensions thrown in for the graphics)

Of course this is with non-store sellers raising their prices, and possibly in only one area, so it's not necessarily going to be a long term trend. (...assuming it's an actual trend, since this is only anecdotal so far) But assuming the premise, you have to consider what would cause a sudden jump? What happens this time of the year? Back to school, that's what. Maybe suddenly it's become a fad among college students or something. In any case, it's not exactly a crappy system, even if you ignore its enormous pile of annual sports games. There's no reason for it to have any less nostalgia than the SNES, other than Nintendo's blockbuster lineup of characters like Mario and Link. It could even have to do with the recent availability of Genesis clones. Anyhow, I'm still scooping up all the $1 clearance games I can find for their shells and cases. I found 5 more just the past week. But I plan to need them for their plastic, since I have a cartridge board design, and can code for it. In fact, I've been doing a LOT of Genesis programming this week. C is just so much more productive than assembly language, at the cost of about twice the code size. Stuff that took me days to write is taking me hours to rewrite, and as a bonus, I can actually read it that much more easily.

That sounds like a good idea. However what you can't do is use a 4416, since the VDP expects separate data-in and data-out connections to the DRAM chips. And that sucks, because it would be so cool for making a portable unit. FWIW, when I upgraded my CoCo to 64K back in the day, I apparently ended up with some 64K chip variant that still needed the +12 volts (or maybe it was -5 volts) to operate. Very strange, but at least it was on the same pin as with 16K, so I just had to set one of the jumpers back to 16K. And when you do replace those chips, be sure to use a socket. Just because you can.

For what it's worth, the Miracle Keyboard software actually talks to the keyboard using MIDI commands. However, it uses RS-232 serial (for PC/Mac) or the NES serial-clocked TTL protocol (even for Genesis). So you can't just drop in any old MIDI keyboard.

That sounds like a bad video RAM chip. Knowing what it looks like can narrow down which chip is the problem.

Another Genesis dev webboard: http://gendev.spritesmind.net/forum/ I think one big reason is that documentation has been hard to find, but another reason is that apparently the region-lock part of the boot process esentially requires you to put magic boot code in your image which not only is different for each region, it's a different SIZE for each region. The US version was even larger than their original design made room for. I'm not sure, but I think this magic blob contains the initial game loading screen. Another problem is that the architecture is a lot more complicated than the original MD/Genesis. Not only do you have a Z-80 to keep under control, you have two 68000 chips, running at different clock rates, each with different special hardware attached (the CD unit not only had the CD drive, but a bitmap rescaler, and PCM sound hardware), and a shared memory area, much smaller than the average cartridge, with a couple of different modes of how to share it. And you usually had to keep shuttling data across the shared memory, making sure that the CPUs didn't get out of sync. And then of course it's CD-based, so you have to burn a CD just to try your code out, or have an official dev unit which presumably had a way to simulate the CD from a PC. The limited memory immediately rules out the obvious idea of loading up a CD with a bunch of games and a loader menu. If you had enough one or two megabit or smaller games maybe, but most games were larger than that.

The "#" is usually part of the instruction syntax, meaning "use immediate mode". The "$" is part of the syntax of constant numbers. I'm assuming that the "=" stores a numeric value in the symbol table, not a macro substitution string (such as #define in C), in which case you can't use "#" like that.

Sega's own power strip was basically them admitting "yes, our enormous wall-wart bricks suck". Even the two of them you needed for just Sega CD was bad enough. As for the Laseractive, I'd still love to have a TG-16 module. But apparently those things sold out completely at the original price, long before everything else hit the clearance places like Famous Brand Electronics. I'm lucky enough to even have a Karaoke module.

I know the Sega Nomad has a replaceable cover for its display. I found a Nomad with the screen cover cracked and was able to order a 10-pack of replacements. It's possible that the GBC is designed the same way. Of course you will probably still have to take the thing apart far enough to remove the old one properly, and since this is Nintendo gear, that means you would need a tri-wing screwdriver.

The real waste was making the 32X in the first place. It was a creation of SOA, and "wart" expansions have never done well anyhow. They are a pain in the butt to use even when you don't need a special connector cable, and if you lose that special cable, your 32X is now a useless black mushroom. Then you want games which need yet another semi-wart (the Sega CD)? Requiring users to buy one expansion wart is bad enough, but two? (aka Tower of Sega syndrome) I'm not surprised that nobody wanted to release games for it beyond remastering the FMV shovelware to have better video resolution. But even if the 32X had been truly made of awesome, SOJ wanted to kill the MD/Genesis the moment the Saturn came out. The Saturn may have had some good games, but its intro was totally effed up by Sega, especially moving the release date months EARLIER than originally planned. But killing off a system that still had a few good years on it? That was stupid. But the real problem was that the 32X was still new when SOJ wanted to kill it, so it never even had a chance to catch on, and more importantly, those who bought the wart rightfully felt screwed by Sega. So even if someone had wanted to release a good 32X CD game, in spite of requiring users to have TWO expansions plugged in, the 32X just wasn't around long enough. Imagine what would have happened if Sony killed the PS2 within a year of the PS3 release, and no BC. Sure, the PS2 had been around a bit longer than the 32X by then, but there have been a lot of good PS2 games since then. Also, remember how few good games there were for the Sega CD in the first place. If you were to limit yourself to only a dozen good Sega CD titles, you wouldn't be missing much. You might even have trouble finding a whole dozen, out of one hundred and fifty games. (I just checked. I was stunned that there were that many Sega CD titles. And that's from just a US releases list.) EDIT: here's my list... and I actually have all of these except DMII and Sonic CD:

I'm going to point out here that if your objective is to run the game on real hardware, making a repro/copy cart for the single game isn't the only option. You can also use RAM/flash carts such as the Cuttle Cart 2 to run games on the real hardware. I call it "jukeboxing" when whatever device or technique you use lets you store and play multiple games on an otherwise standalone original-hardware console. The original Xbox and PSP are the kings of jukeboxing right now. As for the "ethics" of the situation, of course the usual arguments about piracy and abandonware apply, but the main additional concern is having it end up as a counterfeit sold to collectors as a genuine item. This is why coin repros, even crappy plastic kiddie toy coins for learning to make change, usually have the word COPY on them.

Isn't there a PSP-4000 coming up soon too? That makes the PSP BLATANTLY EVEN BETTERER. INSTANT WIN.

Woot! I'm marking 10-10-10 on my calendar!

Probably because your date of birth is in the stripe, and they can't trust cashiers to do the necessary math. And it's faster than keying it into the register.

You paid FOUR WHOLE BUCKS for Xmas Nights? I waited until they were blowing them out for ONE dollar each. Most of them even still had the CD sleeve. I also have a copy of the Japanese version. They actually printed up a full instruction booklet for it. No Europe version, but I do know from having seen pictures on ebay that there's different disc art on the EU version.

The result of putting the Seamonkey browser bug up on Bugzilla was "the 1.1 branch is in maintenance mode". Essential fixes like security fixes only. Even though the 2.0 branch is still beta. However, the 2.0 branch does not have the float bug that affects the reputation bar. For now I'll go ahead and try using it for a while. It seems noticeably faster with only a few minutes of use. The Camino problem is clearly because it is also based on the 1.1 branch of the Gecko rendering code. For those who really want to use Camino, try the beta: http://preview.caminobrowser.org/