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juansolo

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Everything posted by juansolo

  1. I've got an AtariVox inside my 6 switch and my 7800. The one in the 2600 has a speaker mounted under one of the holes in the speaker grille, the 7800 blends it into the audio out. I kinda prefer the speaker if I'm honest but it wasn't practical to do that in the 7800. I have them switchable for when I want to play 2 player games to turn off the AtariVox. If you want to play a 2 player game and keep the AtariVox on it needs to support a Quadtari and you only plug one side of it in. I've made my own half-Quadtari in this instance and it works fine plugged into port one with the AtariVox enabled in port two.
  2. Even though I've wanted that cart for ages and it's just way out of my price range, I think something different would be more interesting. Once the sale is done and the dust has settled, maybe a Vol 2 containing some of the games that have been pulled? That way it'd not step on anyone's toes (though obviously it couldn't be done by AA). Given his back catalogue, the hardest thing would be choosing what to put on there.
  3. It's final form (well with the shield off for the photo):
  4. Hmmmm, it's annoying. We've managed to make a simple mod that doesn't need external clocks or relays and can look really good (still got the Maria colour running, but nothing we can do about that). What it also does do is completely eliminate the chroma/luma timing mismatches that seem to effect all 7800's. But we're struggling to make it run on everything. Get it set up perfect on one set and it needs tweaking on another. It needs more work and sadly our 30+ year old oscilloscope bit the dust a couple of days ago (we're not having great luck with our tools lately. Our iron died the week before but that was at least under warranty). Having Guitari's machine as well as our own PAL machine made life a lot easier as we can compare changes we make between the two, but that needs to go back now. We're sending it back with proto 2 on it to see if it works on his TV. If not it'll come back and either go back to it's old MK mod or a UAV with our mods to make it work better. The PAL 7800 is so utterly frustrating it's untrue. There's a reason we abandoned it. We do want to try and make this mod work, but we're likely to do that on an NTSC machine. We're gonna need a new scope first though, so it might be a while. EDIT: After tuning @Guitari's machine on my TV's, Cleggy takes it back to his and the horizontal interference makes a return... Add the external clock though and it's gone... I hope this works on your TV dude, because this is about as good as we've ever had from a PAL 7800.
  5. Champ have demo's you can download for free to try. If they work, likely the full games will too.
  6. Where I agree with you, that only works in the US where you can buy the carts reletively cheaply. Due to ever increasing shipping and duty costs, elsewhere in the world buying from the US is becoming a very expensive affair. Sadly the order I put in for the sale at AA will probably be my last because I simply can't justfy the expenditure any more. I can however justify buying ROMs which for many of us might soon be the only economical way for us to get these games. I understand the fear of the ROMs leading to piracy, but I think this community is actually very good at respecting the devs work and very little gets out there in ROM form. Doesn't stop people from dumping the carts of course if they're going to be tenatious about it, and pirates who sell clone carts are always going to find a way. As with everything to do with protecting IP, ultimately the legit user/buyer is often the one who gets boned when any sort of anti-piracy countermeasure is implemented. But as with everything, the devs get the final say. It's their work, they get to say how, where and if it's sold, and for how much. I can accept that.
  7. We need to do more work on this. We've done a second machine (for @Guitari who's machine we had in to deal with a different problem) and though the mod is incredibly simple in terms of parts and removes the need for relays and clock crystals to get a good picture, it's not straightforward to install/setup. Plus we're having some issues in getting both a good S-Video and Composite picture out of it. We can do one or the other, but not both, which is annoying and we'd like to address that. Anyhow thought I'd add the pics from his machine.
  8. I've knocked a PCB layout together. But we've still got testing to do... Couple of issues to iron out.
  9. Something new! This is our single remaining PAL 7800. It's not the prettiest inside like all our machines that we experiment constantly on. We're still doing the separate clock for the MARIA (stuck to it for the moment, it doesn't live there), we're also doing the chroma shift that we do on the NTSC machines, but using a different 4050 who's timings seem to be more in line with the PAL machine's offset. But now we're running that through a 74HCT32 which is dealing with the TIA and MARIA chroma's instead of the relay we were using previously, and is also buffering the unbuffered (on a PAL 7800) LUM0 line. Then that goes into our little FMS6400 S-Video/Composite board that we use for just about everything now. Anyhow, can't see any bleed at all from the pic Cleggy sent me from the BVM. Sad thing of course is that we do so few PAL machines that it's probably not worth the effort of doing a PCB for it, but I might. It's always the ball-ache of having to re-acquaint myself with KiCad, something I use so infreqently I constantly forget, and knocking things out on veroboard is just easy and quick (if ugly). Anyhow, a bit more testing and we'll see where this goes next.
  10. Send it on over and we'll take a look, bob me a PM and we'll sort it out.
  11. Good point. I'll have to have a ponder.
  12. Should be easy to do as long as they're all of the the same type otherwise you'd have to move some jumpers at the same time. If they're all EPROMs it should be as simple as lifting the CS pin on each chip and running it through a switch to select the active ROM. I plan to do exactly that if I ever get hold of a Kiloparsec ROM and switch between that and the Asteroids one I already have in there. It won't achieve much to be honest other than having a different game on boot as making a 7800 truly region switchable would be really complicated. Sure you can put the PAL/NTSC ROM which removes the NTSC region lock. But it doesn't make a NTSC machine PAL or vice versa and you will have compatability problems.
  13. In my experience, machine locking ROMs doesn't work long term. I bought Oids back in the day for the PPC Mac, it locks the the processor ID of your machine as part of the install process where you sent the dev the results of a code and he sent another back with the unlock key. Great, until I upgraded my machine. Got in touch via e-mail and he sent be a new code for the new machine. The new machine then failed several years later and despite the website still existing selling the game, I recieved no replies to my emails. So I suppose I could have re-bought the game and he might have answered me, I didn't particularly want to buy a game I already owned again to run on my machine. So currently, despite now owning another PPC power mac (I've been through maybe 5 or 6 since buying the game, looking back on my e-mails he gave me 3 codes in all before ghosting me), I do not own a copy of that game any more and indeed I suspect it'll dissapear into the ether as another lost game ultimately. As such I would not purchase any ROM that locks to a machine. Similarly any DRM that relies on an online component. I have several old PC games that can no longer contact an authentication server to authorise their installs. Meanining I have to resort to patches and cracks to install games I legitimately own to make them work. I suppose this explains my hardline rule of only buying non-DRM games from GOG these days for the PC. I've had people say I'm missing out on all sorts of stuff because of this, but I'm not going to spend money on any game I do not ultimately own. DRM punishes legitimate customers unless it's well thought out (which it very rarely is). Locking a game to a single machine assumes that the buyer will run that single machine forever... As someone who restores old computers and consoles I can tell you that I don't just have one machine and those machines are subject to change at any time. The lock to a particular type of device is something of a compromise, but that only works when there's only one device available, the Jaguar GD is a perfect example. While that is the only flash card available, that's fine and that's what's currently happening with Reboot games. But on the 2600 and 7800 there are multiple devices and who's to say what there will be in the future. Any sort of DRM is going to adversely affect the long-term preservation of that artwork. Because all DRM is a short-term sticking plaster that addresses a single problem to the detriment of everything else.
  14. I suspect this brings us to the inevitability that the value of an item is what someone is prepared to pay for it. So if a ROM is $20 and it sells, then it is worth $20. If it wasn't, people wouldn't buy it and the seller would have the choice of not making any money or reducing the price. So in answer to the OP question of 'does anyone actually buy $20 ROMS' the answer simply is yes. Then it comes to what a seller is willing to sell things for when, ultimately it might not be about making money. But it is instead about selling your work at what you believe is a reasonable amount for it. Again, that is entirely the creator's perogative. We can bitch and moan about it as much as we like, but that's the reality. FWIW I used to make custom guitar effects pedals because I enjoyed making them and the hobby was entirely self funding based on sales. Ultimately people wanted them for the same sort of costs for mass produced MIC effects. So when the hobby was no longer self funding, I withdrew completely from that sector. I repair and restore vintage electronics now. Again, I don't do it because I make any money out of it, because frankly I don't. I do it because I enjoy it and the people I do it for seem genuinely appreciative of it. Creatives who feel exploited will re-direct their energy elsewhere or just not bother. That's certainly my own mentality and I suspect it's the same for others. Not everything is just about the money...
  15. Wanted to order a whole load more but the timing was bad with other bills and what have you.
  16. Guilty on the first two counts. Though though I only drop hundreds at a time on the store because it's the only viable way to buy stuff in the UK. Therefore I buy annually usually and the order usually is around $300 (FWIW, $113 on top of that for postage and duty this time around). I'm happy to pay $20 for a ROM as an alternative and would love to be able to do the same with Jaguar carts for example which end up costing over $100 a pop to get them over here. So I have to REALLY want them to buy those these days. For example there's three on the Telegames store I'd like right now but at £85 a pop plus delivery I just don't want them enough to buy them, so I do have limits. As for spooging on OOP homebrews on eBay. Never done it, never will. I find the whole act of scalping abhorrent.
  17. I don't think anyone is making a profit out of the homebrew scene. I think you're seriously underestimating how much effort goes into these things.
  18. I think $20 is completely reasonable for a new game of the quality of Champ or Muddyvision (both of whom I've bought ROMs from). They also have lower tiers for other titles and give a discount if you own the physical. There are two reasons for this, the main one is that I want to thank these devs for writing them and hopefully encourage them to keep doing so. The second is because buying physical games in the UK from the US is becoming increasingly untennable.
  19. Ever so slightly worried, is M&M going to be caught up in the recent drama? If it is are there any plans to release it as a buyable ROM?
  20. There is a version of 40th Anniversary like that (the short mazes one), but it's only available as a download not as a physical cart as far as I'm aware.
  21. Mine just went through OK via PayPal. Just had a thought afterwards, just because I know how awful our postal service is at this end, would it be possible to put some sort of note on the packaging that the duty has been paid at point of order just to be sure they don't try to double charge me?
  22. I've always had my county in that field and it's still failing.
  23. Bah, pulling the trigger early I'm waiting another 6 mins like a good boy
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