Dr. Van Thorp

Could you give a little information about what this code does? Are you just switching out stack and register information in to a block of memory? Is this interupt based?

Looks like I've killed another discussion. I have heard of later cartridges that had some tricky hardware on them to make the 2600 do things that it wasn't designed to do. Can anyone give some information about any of these cartridges?

Yes. A game was released when the movie was released. There was also a board game with a cool die-cast metal Jack Flak game peice.

As far as a GPU goes, however, there's really not much that one could do. The problem is that Atari made some poor design choices with the 2600. In order to save fifty cents, they gave us the 6507 instead of the 6502, and to save ten cents they only gave us a 24-pin connector for carts. We do not have access to IRQ, clocks, 6502 chip enable/output enable and R/W signals that are almost certainly required for serious interfacing. Since we don't have these, the TIA remains intimitely tied to the 6507, and this severely limits what we can do. However, the 7800 does not have the limitations above. With a GPU on a 7800 cartridge, we could probably do some amazing things. 841075[/snapback] I was thinking in terms of an FPGA programmed to handle things like rendering backgrounds, rotating sprites (players), etc, and then feeding the data to the raster kernal by puting it in to an area of RAM on the cartridge. You could do this without having to access IRQ, clocks, etc.

Funny thing is that the movie may have been based on an actual incident. Back around 1980, federal agents came to Bally's developent lab and arested an employee; a Chinese imigrant. The man arested was part of a spy ring. Members of the ring would bring him sensative military information, and he would record the information in to the unused space in the master copies of arcade video game ROMs, which would be copied by the millions and put in to arcade machines. Then Chinese agents would by the arcade machines through normal commercial channels and export them to China where intelligence agencies would retrieve the information from the ROMs. So there are probably vintage machines all over the world that still contain spy messages. But you can't read the messages by getting a high score.

Smeg 842925[/snapback] I suspect it means that the KoalaPad reads as a pair of paddles. Sort of like an Etch-a-Sketch, one knob is your X axis,the other your Y axis. 842971[/snapback] Yep. The Koala software could be used with a pair of paddles, but I don't recomend it. Also, most paddle-based games could be played with Koala Pad, but it might not work very well.

I suppose that you could do anything if you had the time, knowledge, and money. Recently many hobbyists have been doing interesting things with FPGA's (field programable gate arrays) which are like chips that can be programmed to act as whatever complex hardware device you need. One of these might be programmed to act as some sort of graphics proccessor for the VCS, though you would probably still need raster kernal software to get data from the FPGA to the screen. Has anyone attempted such a project?

I think that the Colecovision had a ROM kernal that you would need to copy, but I could be mistaken.

Well, I stand corrected. The two machines had the second most popular CPU.

The similarity between Colecovision an Spectrovideo may have been coincidental. Both had 6502 CPU's, but that was the most popular CPU of the time. Both had the same stock, off the shelf graphics and sound chips from Texas Instruments, but those chips were among the best and most popular low-cost sound and graphics chips that could be bought at that time.

Well, if you think that outdated hardware is a good route, you could look in to the availability of Famicon clone hardware. This would give you NES hardware, which is well documented, and for which there are allready games. You could build an NES clone with a flashcard reader and whatever alse you want. Or you could go with XGameStation.

Does it have any kind of manufactuere's markings on the underside?

Well, digitized speech is not really as difficult as some people might think. Mostly, it uses up memory for the sound samples. The 2600 hardware could have done digitized speech, but the cartridges were very small, and I guess that the programmers weren't willing to give up that much memory for a sound effect.

I remember a Commodore 64 game called Space Cabbie that used digitized speech, and I'm pretty sure that it was out a year or two before Impossible Mission.

I think that most Atari 8-bit fans would not get much satisfaction out of an emulator pretending to be an enhanced Atari. You could modify a 2600 emulator to have 1024x763 32-bit graphics, but what would be the point?

If I am understanding this correctly, this board uses the luma from one graphics chip, and the chroma from another chip. A suggestion: an enhancement that allows mixing of the luma from both graphics chips, for greatly increased subtlety of shades. The board could output luma from just the one chip, or the average of the luma from both chips; or there could be a variable control for mixing of the two luma signals, which could be used for cool cross-fading effects.

The same graphics and sound chips were in the TI99/4A and the MSX. The information is available somewhere; possibly from someone that has written emulators. Also, there is an MSX computer implimented in FPGA, so there is an off chance that you might be able to get a peek at the FPGA firmwear. If you can do a Colecovision in FPGA, you might be able to license it for use in a joystick game.

Apple managed to make a 16-bit GS computer that was almost completely compatable with existing Apple II software. It is a shame that Atari and Commodore never did anything similar. But then Apple did eventually drop the IIGS, out of fear that it was taking market share away from the more expensive Macintosh. Atari and Commodore had similar motivations related to the marketing of the ST and Amiga.

I think that the Apple II was important for setting the standard for a machine with color graphics and built-in BASIC. But the C-64 was responsible for ultimately getting a comuter in to every home. 20 million people would never have bought the thousand-dollar Apple II. The Atari 800 was a sort of transistional machine. The C-64 would probably have never been developed if the Atari machines hadn't been made, but then Commodor took most of the market. I had the C-64, and but I knew that the Atari machines had some features that the C-64 didn't. It was obvious to me that both Atari 800 and C-64 were way superior to the Apple II. The Apple guys would claim that their machines were superior because they ad more internal slots and could theoretically be expanded to Cray supercomputer graphics, but this argument didn't impress me. To me, the only advantage of Apple II was more software in the early days, and the availability of a really good Apple Cat modem that could produce blue-box tones. You could almost allways spot a game that had been ported from the Apple II: that background was allways black, the color and sound was usually very limted, and often (I guess just to drive the point home) there was a small apple somewhere on the screen.

Wasn't it almost identical to the Colecovision on the inside?

I would swear that I saw this feature in an Apple II or Commodore 64 game.

Well, I am one of the scumbags that buys stuff and sells it on ebay, but I specialize in old toys and board games. I am in the thrift stores a few times a week and still don't find game consoles.

I live near Detroit. Maybe things are different in other parts of the country. On the very, very, very rare occasion that I've seen a console in a thrift store, it was in the glass case at the front counter with a price higher than what it would go for on eBay on a good day.

Nonstandard conectors and serial protocols are not an accident. This prevents thrid party manufacturers from making unlicensed replacent controllers. The greediness of the console manufacturers is a primary factor in the death of the 9-pin controller.

I remember the first time I tried out an Intellevsion in the store, and I thought that the disk was a paddle controller. Controllers are very important. The knob joystick might be the worst part of the Colecovision design.