frogstar_robot

That's really nifty! That sounds similar in philosophy to the Chimera project for the 2600 which has sadly been dropped by it's developers. Chimera would have had an ARM (I believe) processor emitting 6507 opcodes on the fly for the 2600 to execute. In effect, this would make the 2600 a peripheral for a much faster processor. It seems this 64 project suffers the same bugaboo as any clustered app: the interconnect. Still, a virtual processor that is 3 times faster is nothing to sneeze at. I wonder how feasible it would be to replace the processor in an old 8-bit with a bus connection to a fast PC that behaves as the processor? Probably not very but it is fun to think about.

more like pathetic. Makes me even less interested in checking out the Atari 8 bit computers. Agreed but then the C64philes haven't always behaved either (and in one of the few A8 forums no less). A few A8philes misbehaving here doesn't mean everyone that likes it is a jerk and by association the A8 is a jerk's platform. I mean if I took Oswald as representative of C64 fans...... Anyhoo the A8 chipset is basically the same design aesthetic as the 2600 with some obvious improvements and expansions. Flesh out the TIA with some more modes, another player, and another missile, add the ANTIC so that the 6502 doesn't have to spend so much time "chasing the beam", put an expanded version of the TIA's sound generator on a separate chip and give the whole thing the ability to access more memory without banking and you essentially have it. It's a pity you're being put off it. I bet you could do great things with it.

I'll add this is quite the nice update. I never played Crossbow with the gun on real hardware; I had to get by with stick mode. Using the Wiimote for a gun was nifty.

It's come up before but could be many 10s of pages back now. SuperIRG mode is a way of getting at least 13 colors on screen. It switches between two 4x8 character sets on the VBI which means two different character sets on alternating frames. Here is an editor for the mode: http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/sife/ The same developer has done at least one game in the mode called Gem Drop. The technique does have some flicker but appears simple to implement and actually use.

It doesn't have to be GTIA though. Once can just alternate 160 with two different palettes. If the additional palette isn't too different from the first then the flicker is hardly noticeable. That isn't as useless as it sounds as it does allow finer shading. If doing a background that is mostly reds then think additional shades of red to accentuate detail with maybe even a touch of orange here and there. Throw blues or greens into that mix then the flickery jig is up though even there it is tolerable on small areas of a picture especially for things like stars and water. Though I don't mind super obvious flicker in demos, it is probably best for games to resort to it with judicious care.

Rather than the oft quoted 23 colors per scanline, how many colors can be used without excessive developer pain? In non-GTIA modes, 5 can be gotten through naive use of the hardware and with slightly more informed use a different 5 can used on every scanline and those 5 can even be somewhat fine shades of one hue if desired....a true strength there. Like many, I believe 23 per to be a special case of limited practical use and it does the A8 community no good to continually assert that any ole game can utilize such color easily. It is a help that the PMG can be different colors entirely from the playfield but using them to augment playfield graphics leaves less for moving objects. It is a valid but severe tradeoff. It is a help that higher color GTIA modes can be used on alternate lines or frames but that is a set of tradeoffs that costs flicker and difficulty in planning a display. If one does not use PMGs or flickering between frames/lines to enhance then what realistically can be done in the 160 and 320 modes? For that matter one can flicker two different pallettes but well...it flickers. Since games are brought up as a point against static pictures and mockups, it seems a valid question to me.

D-Pads in general and this includes the NES controller are HORRIBLE for arcade style action titles. Games like Berzerk or Robotron are just gawd awful with a d-pad. The problem is accuracy especially on the diagonals. A game like SMB is more forgiving of minor input mistakes by the player. Though I don't KNOW this, it wouldn't surprise me if most games for systems based on d-pads are designed with such forgiveness. The CX-40 joystick was no great shakes but if one is good shape and I'm running from ghosts then I won't have to worry about momentarily jogging up when I meant to go left. The best controllers for such games of course are actual arcade controls but the 2600 stick bad as it is makes a better approximation than a d-pad. Don't get me wrong; such controls do nothing for a game like Zelda but I wouldn't want to play Asteroids say with anything else.

Funny you say that. My wife is into RPGs on Genesis and SNES from that period but would never consider playing them on real hardware. The emulators greatly improve on the originals when it comes to saving. State saves put you in control of save/resume rather than the developer. There is a design/balance argument there but people like my wife wouldn't have it any other way. We've had a Wii since last november and she sometimes laments not having state saves.

At one point the 2600 was going to include speakers built in. You can even sorta see the "grilles" on some cases. This feature was dropped but not before the tooling and physical design were completed.

Check out Kenta Cho's stuff. He makes fast abstract shooters with a colorful vector appearance. The controls are very simple and the games are mostly designed to be short unless you are VERY good. http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/index_e.html Though not on Kenta's page, one Evil Mr. Henry ported most of these games to 'Nix.

Excellent point. With the lamentable exception of Adventure 2, pretty much the entire 5200 library has been ported to the A8. A small handful of titles suffer from the loss of analog control (I never did get to play proportionally steered Star Raiders .) but most others are improved by digital sticks. I have a 130XE so the 5200 isn't terribly interesting to me since I can play those games anyway. I like the idea of some sort of centering analog stick for the A8 and more faithful translations of those few titles but I think we'll live OK without that.

What games have been ported from the MSX1 to ColecoVision and vice versa? What are the considerations involved. In the case of porting from 5200 to A8 one has to remap the graphics registers, replace the paddle based controls with stick based controls, redesign for any memory banking used, and possibly redo some OS calls though I don't know how much the contents of the 5200 rom are used in the games proper. The other direction reverses this though A8s generally have more RAM to play with. Sometimes that is easily addressed by putting character tables and such in ROM sometimes it is harder and even if doable a game that isn't using banking schemes on the A8 may need to use one on the 5200. A8 to 5200 is generally messier and the library is vastly larger. Save for some homebrews, almost the entire 5200 library is playable on A8. In any case, once the porting is complete the games should play just as fast on either. The 5200 is basically a 400 wired up funny. I'm curious about the analogues to these issues between the MSX1 and the ColecoVision. The TI99/4a would be interesting to contrast with too.

Only if the 800 in question has only 16K ram. 800s were supported up to 48K with up to 3 Atari manufactured 16K RAM packs. Those games could be ported but some would have bankswitch ROM at least. Going in the 5200 -> A8 direction is generally easier as A8s in use after '82 or so generally had at least 48K and probably 64K ala 800XL. Incidentally the A8 chipset was originally slated to be used in a console long before the 5200 came out. The success of the PET and Apple IIs caused Atari to rethink. IMHO, they made a mistake by making it incompatible to the A8. They could have done an "XEGS minus the keyboard" and made titles that didn't need the keyboard. Furthermore don't even bother with a keyboard add-on. But if you did upgrade to an 800XL say then all your carts would still work.

I believe you are incorrect about the additional gfx hardware. Though a SoundBlaster Pro was added (and serves as the timer source for sending info to the CGA as well as the sound hardware proper). The demo isn't intended as a statement of XT 5150 superiority. He just wanted to show something is possible. The author anticipated statements like yours: And yes yes we know he missed the digitized audio possibilities of old 8-bits.

Speaking of CGA, the following is wrong but oh so right: http://www.oldskool.org/pc/8088_Corruption

That train didn't really get rolling in the US though I understand it was big in Western Europe, Japan, and maybe even South America. I like the idea of an 8-bit that had lots of different vendors and standard spec that still evolved over time kind of an 8-bit meets PC-style ecology.

Replaced the dat file and found replacements for the problematic roms elsewhere. It is working much better. I see slowdowns and some graphics glitches in Midnight Mutants but I believe that is due to the underlying emulator and/or the Wii sometimes coming up a bit short in the CPU grunt department. Still playable though and I can play every 7800 game I used to play now. Good stuff.

Sears and K-Mart would often keep a TI with Parsec running as the store demo. That game really wowed me back in the day. I suppose two answers to your question are "ColecoVision" and "Adam". They had basically the same VDP chip though the CPUs driving them differed. Properly marketed as a console system with good licenses perhaps it could have done as well as the Colecovision but I recall that licensed titles were a TI weakness. You got games that were almost exactly like Pac-Man or Galaga but proper ports didn't come until later. It wasn't really hobbled with Adam's kludges but that system being relatively open did little to rescue it. The TI was pretty solid technically but didn't seem to have terribly savvy marketing behind it. 16-bit chip hype aside, it really only kept pace with Atari and Commodore. Little about it is markedly superior to either machine.

Thanks for answer. Somewhere I read cartridges are region free, the only difference could be in the colours of the screen. Is it true? Largely in that PAL consoles don't refuse to run NTSC titles and vice versa. But PAL versions can have more scanlines and will make many NTSC TVs roll.

Eggomania added this. It is like Kaboom! but you have a bird laying eggs at you and you are a bear with a bowl on his head who has to catch them. You don't have the three bucket system; the penalty for missing an egg is that the other eggs in the air after you miss one fall to the ground and your bear starts drowning in yolk. The game ends when the bear is completely covered in egg. At the end of a round, you have a limited amount of time to fire eggs back at the bird. If you hit the bird, he loses all his feathers and turns out to be wearing boxer shorts and a wolf whistle sound effect plays. I've seen Eggomania catch some hate. It is easier than Kaboom! on the whole and has a cutesy whimsy that many dislike. Still, a throw the bombs back hack might be fun for Kaboom! though it would disrupt the Zen state some people get into playing that game.

The User Port was very friendly and easy to work with for various electronics projects. Much like a PC parallel port, it is easy to interface switches, lights, relays, and other such simple devices to it and reading/operating with software is simple.

I've been enjoying a few of my old 7800 favorites. Thanks. I have had some issues though. Only about a third of my roms will start. All others just show a black screen. When I get the black screen, I can just press Home and load another rom so the emu isn't locking up. It also appears POKEY emulation isn't working for me. BallBlazer starts up but has no sound. I've downloaded all my roms from AtariAge's 7800 rom page. Midnight Mutants is one that black screens. Pole Position II is one that works.

Thank goodness we have the likes of you around to bump it: http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/necromancer.htm

I'm no Intellivision maven but a bit of Google shaking turned this up: http://www.intvfunhouse.com/tech/rfmod/ That page gives instructions on replacing the RF modulator in your Inty. Or you could just try doing without the modulator altogether: http://intelliwiki.kylesblog.com/index.php...eo_Modification

That could be good for more than just LW. Things like term programs and code editors could use it.