Dr. Van Thorp

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.

Nice trick. Then you still have the players and one missile left over. Now lets see a Doom clone.

If you don't program, this would be a hard way to learn programming. I suspect, however, that in the next year, there will be some nifty programming tools, BASICs etc, to make the programming of the device easier. There are also likely to be many very cool games. But right now, it's all speculation.

Yes, and you can burn perfectly legal stuff on to an eprom. I think that there might be some confusion about deinitions here. When I was very young, there were EPROM burners for sale in little ads in the back of Compute magazine. The EPPROMs being sold were erasable, prorgramable, read-only memories. They wer blank, but you could burn programs or data on to them, then plug the eprom into the Commodore's cartridge port, and run the program. When you no longer needed that program, you could erase the EPROM and burn something else on to it. This is the kind of EPROM that I am talking about. I think that the confusion comes from the way some people think of EPROMS. Maybe some people think that EPROMS are pirate ROMS that have copies of Break Out on them. If you beleive that this is what an EPROM is, then yes, Atari might have a problem with people selling them through catalogs. However, Atari couldn't do anything to someone that was selling Atari 2600 compatable cartridges with blank EPROMS.

So we have established that a cartridge with flash memory is legal, but somehow a cartridge with EPROMs is not legal. Now everything is perfectly clear.

http://www.xgamestation.com/ I haven't seen any discussion of this machine on these forums, so I was wondering if Atari retrogamers were aware of it. This new machine, aimed at hobbyists and hackers, is like a super-powered 2600. It uses a similar graphics kernal/code syncronized to the raster aproach to putting graphics on the screen, but it has a 50 megahurtz proccessor and 520 colors, so you can get some pretty good graphics out of the machine. You are basically modifying the raster color as the raster moves across the screen. Very basic, but no specific hardware limitations. The machines comes with cross-assemblers, developement tools, and copious documentation.

How did they get such smooth lines on the tops of the walls? They would have to use the players for this, right?

Well, I see that the operators of this web site are selling a new Atari 2600 cartridge with a flash memory in it. How soon do you think they will get their CAD letter?

Many years ago, I saw the Yamaha MSX machine in a pawn shop. I now regret not having bought it.

Like the CAD letters that were so effective against Activision, M-Network, Imagic, Parker Brothers, and the hundred other venders that manufactured Atari cartridges without Atari's permision in the 1980's?

There seems to be a fairly healthy community of Atari retrogamers. Why isn't there a catalog company somewhere that sells cartridges with eproms allready on them? Not so mention a cheap eprom burner specialized for this format.

You might be able to sell it to a VIC-20 enthusiast. The VIC's memory was small, and you load a VIC-20 game from cassette in a minute or two. Also, the disk drive was not immediatley available for the VIC-20, so a lot of games got released on cassette.

Does no one sell cartridges pre-equiped for this purpose?

A DAC and a digital-to-analog converter are the same thing. The way a DAC typically works is that you write a digital number to a byte of memory, and the analog voltage output of the DAC changes to a value corestponding to that number. You can hook up a speeker to the DAC, and repeatedly raise and lower the number in the byte of memory to produce voltage ocicilations that come out of the speeker as sound. This kind out sound synthesid requires the continual attention of the proccessor, so, if your proccessor isn't very powerfull, there won't be time left for anything else. If you are old enough to remember Apple II games, you will remember that the sound effects weren't very good. The Apple II produced sound through a very primitive version of the DAC called a speaker toggle. When the processor read (yes, READ) a certain byte of memory, the built-in speaker clicked. The speaker actually clicked once for every two readings of the byte. You could click the speaker rapidly to produce beeps and buzzes. More complex sounds, like digitized samples, tended to sound as if they had been recorded on a worn-out cylender phonograph. Apple sound synthesis required the 6502's full attention, so Apple game sound effects were usually just short bursts of sound, during which nothing on the screen moved. Apple II games NEVER had background music. No, a DAC would not be a good replacement for a real sound chip.

Ah, that isn't that big a cart; just a little bigger than a VIC-20 cartridge.

Too bad. It would be cool to see what could be done with the Atari graphcs chips and a whole lot of speed and memory.

So if it is a 16-bit proccessor, compatable with the 6502, and has the number "65816", what was wrong with describing it as a "16-bit 6502 series proccesor"?

I think that there is something odd about someone that calls people fascists while he rats them out to giant corporations. I'm also surprised to learn that there were some 400 self-apointed protectors of a large corporation's 15-year-old copyrights.

Ah, I was hoping that someone would have some real information other than "it failed". If you do a web search on "fifth generation", you get web sites reprinting articles from 1980's computer magazines, which only contain rumors and press-release informatiuon. I was hoping that there was an article some place that explained what happened to the fifth-generation project. I am currious to know whether the project resulted in any technologica inovations that actually got used.

I collect old toys, and I have knowingly bought knock-off toys just because of their novelty value, and sometimes also because they varied in some interesting way from the original, or because the original is very rare and out of my price range. The pirate item described above contained all the original hardare of an item that has not been available for over a decade, and also supposedly contained rom images of many, many video games that would take considerable time and money to aquire in their original form. If I had seen the item for sale, I probably would have known that it was not licensed, but I might have bought it anyway. People are not buying this item because they are "stupid".

I've seen web sites mentioning a Commodore 64 ad-on called SuperCPU. It is a 20 megaherts 16-bit 6502 series proeccesor and 16 megabyte memory expansion. People are using this device to run GUI operating systems and to play super-advanced games on the 64's modest graphics hardware. Does any similar device exist for the Atari 8-bit machines?

Does anyone else remember "Fifth Generation" computing from the mid 1980's? It was some kind of heavily-hyped project, funded by a group of Japanese electronics manufacturers, to produce some kind of super advanced personal computer. It was mentioned in all the computer magazines at the time, then it faded away, never to be heard from again.

I remember Lupin as a tall, thin guy, and the guys in Lock N Chase are kind of small and squarish. How can you tell that it is Lupin? Was his picture on the Japanese packaging?