Dr. Van Thorp

A subject that has come up elsewhere on this forum is interlacing. I have a technical question. When you display an interlaced image on a computer of video game console, the image is sent to the TV in two peices. First the odd numbered scan lines are sent, then the even numbered scan lines. Then the proccess is repeated 30 times a second. How does the TV set know which set of scan lines it is recieving at a given time? If they got switched, you would get a scrambled image. Is there some difference on the sink signal, or some kind of signal sent at the end of the vertical blanking interval? Thank you for whatever information you can provide.

Was there ever a successor to the 65816 microproccessor?

I can't site an example, but I know that the guys at Atari were knowledgable in the inner workings of TV sets, and they had to have known that the 2600 was capable of interlaced video. The Commodore Amiga, created in the early 1980's by the original designer of the 2600, had an interlaced video mode. Not a recent discovery.

Is there some massive resource page someplace for new operating systems that run on non-X86 machines?

Yes, how can you take seriously a company named for a national symbol of the country where it is based.

Yep. This was a fairly common peice of software. Many, if not most, Commodore 64 games used re-designed text characters to make backgrounds. There is even a graphics mode for multi-color text characters. The VIC-20 also had these graphics modes, and virtually all non-text VIC-20 games used them. And the Atari 8-bit machines, TI99/4A, MSX machines, and untold others also have this feature.

I'm amazed that someone would use this primitive feature when something so much more advanced and easier was available. Was this also available on the 8-bit computers? I allways thought that they had the same graphics hardware as the 5200.

If you really want to play the game from the movie, you will have to call every phone number in Arazona until you reach a computer named Joshua.

I blaim mocrosoft for not making windows work better with old DOS programs. You SHOULD be able to double click on the file, and Windows SHOULDN'T close the DOS window without giving you a chance to read the error messages. That's just laziness and apathy on the part of Microsoft.

I just got ahold of one of these: What can you tell me about it? Can I load ROM images or homebrew games in to it?

The two machines have very differenct internal workings. You could port the game, and keep the look of the original graphics, but the part of the software that displays those graphics would be very different.

The C=64 doesn't really have a BIOS like a PC. It has a built-in BASIC, and something called the Kernal, which contains I/O and text oriented subroutines and would be the machine's closest thing to a BIOS. The C=64 kernal is well documented, and only has a couple dozen very simple subroutines. It would be fairly easy for a group of hobbyists to create a new kernal that would be compatable with most old software. The basic might be another matter. Also, if Tulip really wanted to go Gestapo, they could enforce copyright on the 8x8 pixel text and graphicall character set design. Then someone would have to design a new font with equivelent wacky graphics characters.

Thank you for posting a giant picture and forcing everyone to scroll left and right to be able to read this thread.

The are similar stories from the toy industry. One toy company licensed Flubber from Disney, back in the 50's, and made a product to compete with Silly Putty. The product had a major flaw: it was oily and left stains on carpets and walls. So they buried it in a hole under the toy company's new parking lot. And, so the story goes, the rubber material expanded as it broke down over the years, and a bump formed in the parking lot.

Then you could soft-scroll the playfield one big blocky pixel at a time. The Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit machines had redefinable character graphics, and some programs "faked it" by moving blocks of graphics characters a whole character space at a time. A character space was 1/40th of the screen, just like a 2600 playfield pixel. As long as it wan't to slow, it really didn't look bad.

Were any internal improvements made when Atari designed the XL computers? If I remember corectly, they removed two joystick ports, which was a strike against them in my opinion. Could the XLs handle more memory?

This sort of thing does happen occasionally. I buy and sell vintage toys, and about three years ago, my local Meijer store got a shipment of little diecast Airwolf toys.

http://www.alteeve.com/~lance/System.html Does anyone else remember this game system? I played with the deisplay model in a Montgomery Ward store once. It wasn't a bad system, and the controlers were some of the best available at the time. Aparently, there was a users group for people that wrote programs using the Bally Basic cartridge.

Why not?

If you have a working Vectrex controller and an ohm meter from Radio Shack, you should be able to figure out what switch needs to be connected to what port contact.

Maybe if you remove the screws and take the base apart, you can get to the tabs from underneith.

The RAM savings is the big thing.

How hard is it to replace the potentiometers?

If you are going to modify the background color on the pot-of-gold scanlines so that the ladder steps are golden yellow, then the ball object will also be golden yellow, and you can use the ball for the pots of gold, and not have to store those portions of the playfield in RAM.