AVGCART

[AVGCART]

Very cool! I'll check those out.

[AVGCART]

My apologies if this question has already been answered (this is a very long thread, and my search terms have not clarified things much):

 

I recently received an AVGCART and have gotten it preliminarily set up. Besides emulating game cartridges, my other big reason to use AVGCART is to dive into using SpartaDOS X. I noticed on tmp's YouTube channel a video showing off Action! being run as a stacked cartridge on top of SDX (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vc6JYne79o). Perhaps I have simply not read the manual closely enough, but is the ability to use stacked cartridge images currently in the production firmware?

 

 

In any case, I give hearty thanks for such a well-made device!

[[*FULFILLED*] WTB some common Atari 8-bit cartridges]

PM'd

[[*FULFILLED*] WTB some common Atari 8-bit cartridges]

I recently bought an NTSC Atari 65XE and have been having fun with BASIC and a copy of Video Easel. I plan to expand the computer with a FujiNet and one of the SD-based multicarts, but in the meantime I'd like to have ready access to a few good little games.

 

In particular, I'm looking for:

-Star Raiders

-Pac-Man

-Asteroids

 

I live in the USA and can pay by PayPal. Thank you in advance for any offers!

[Atari paddle rotation]

I'm wanting to make a custom pair of Atari paddles, and I'm confused by a detail of the controller schematics (excerpt posted below). The pots in the paddle circuits are drawn with small arrows next to the wipers, circled in red. The arrows point in the direction of lower resistance, but I don't know what meaning they're supposed to convey. Does lower resistance correspond to clockwise or counterclockwise rotation?

EDIT: Ah, I didn't look hard enough. A search for "clockwise" in this forum suggests that clockwise rotation lowers the resistance.

 

[Maximum volume recomendation?]

I've never heard of any precautions to follow with the TIA voices. The only thing that would happen from setting both to 15 is that the sound would be loud.

[Build Your Own Greeting Cart! Can you type MAKE?]

Oh my gosh, this is wonderful, Andrew! I was wanting to use BYO today, and lo and behold you've come out with a new version!

This is great.

 

heeho.bin

[Forum Upgrade Today, June 15th! PLEASE READ!]

This update looks pretty good overall. Thank you for pushing through HTTPS support!

I have a small request: I've never liked this style of relative timestamps. Is it possible to have absolute timestamps again, perhaps as an option?

[How does a real console & TV behave with a "no kernel" program?]

Not sure if this sort of thing is kosher (a jmp jumping to itself):

 

InfLoop jmp InfLoop

Is it?

Absolutely. Nothing bad happens if you (intend to ) do that.

[How does a real console & TV behave with a "no kernel" program?]

I'm assuming that, if these rolled, it wouldn't really make much of a difference, eh?

Indeed not.

 

Oh, a good thing to know for the future is that the TIA's registers latch the values written to them, so they won't change until you write different values. So, your example programs could write their values once and then fall into infinite loops.

[How does a real console & TV behave with a "no kernel" program?]

The limit can be different from set to set as well, so there's no guarantee that your program could draw a stable picture on any given TV.

[How does a real console & TV behave with a "no kernel" program?]

Yup, without vertical sync the TV will keep scanning down until it reaches its "natural" limit and starts over. Whatever you draw with the Atari will show up at some slower-than-usual frame rate, assuming the TV shows it at all. Some more modern TVs will suppress any signal that doesn't have VSYNC.

[Having trouble with a RAM label in self-modifying code (DASM)]

Success! Thank you again, AkashicRecord.

[Having trouble with a RAM label in self-modifying code (DASM)]

Thank you very much! I'll fix that when I get home.

[Having trouble with a RAM label in self-modifying code (DASM)]

I adapted a self-modifying 48-pixel routine from JAC!'s Silly Venture 2017 Invitro for a little personal project, and for some reason the address of one of the immediate operands in the routine, 4thColumn, is being treated as an absolute address instead of zero-page, even when zero-page addressing is specified with the .z suffix applied to a STA. Could someone help me figure out why DASM is running into this issue? I'm running version 2.20.11 on Windows.

 

Here is the listing for my RAM declarations so far:

     10 U0000 ????				      seg.u	RAM
     11 U0080					      org	$80
     12 U0080
     13 U0080		       00 00 00 00*ramDraw    ds	52	;buffer for self-modifying code
     14 U0080		       00 81	   loadIndex  equ	ramDraw + 1	;immediate operand, init'ed before draw
     15 U0080		       00 8f	   colorTable equ	ramDraw + 15	;bottom of sliding color window, init'ed during vblank
     16 U0080		       00 a6	   4thColumn  equ	ramDraw + 38	;immediate operand, set in media res
     17 U00b4		       00	   temp       ds	1
     18 U00b5		       00 00	   bgPtr      ds	2
     19 U00b7		       00	   gfxHeight  ds	1

Here are all the store instructions that I will use in relation to the self-modifying kernel (to be clear, I wish to avoid needing to use the .z suffix). I see that DASM isn't initializing the 4thColumn address.

    124  f8ab		       85 81		      sta	loadIndex
    125  f8ad		       85 8f		      sta	colorTable
    126  f8af		       85 90		      sta	colorTable+1
C:\Users\galen\Desktop\vcsdev\big_mood.asm (127): error: Syntax Error '4thColumn'.
    127  f8b1		       8d 00 00 	      sta	4thColumn
C:\Users\galen\Desktop\vcsdev\big_mood.asm (128): error: Syntax Error '4thColumn'.
    128  f8b4               8d 00 00           sta.z    4thColumn

And here is the issue exhibited in context:

     99  f876				   ramDrawTemplate
    100  f876		       a0 00		      ldy	#00	;02 , 63:189 (loadIndex @ +1)
    101  f878		       b9 00 00 	      lda	gfx0,y	;04 , 67
    102  f87b		       85 1b		      sta	GRP0	;03 , 70
    103  f87d		       85 02		      sta	WSYNC	;!0
    104  f87f		       b9 00 00 	      lda	gfx1,y	;04 , 04
    105  f882		       85 1c		      sta	GRP1	;03 , 07
    106  f884		       b9 00 00 	      lda	clrTab,y	;04 , 11:033 (colorTable @ +15)
    107  f887		       8d 08 01 	      sta	$100+COLUPF	;04 , 15
    108  f88a		       b9 00 00 	      lda	gfx2,y	;04 , 19
    109  f88d		       85 1b		      sta	GRP0	;03 , 22
    110  f88f		       b9 00 00 	      lda	gfx3,y	;04 , 26
C:\Users\galen\Desktop\vcsdev\big_mood.asm (111): error: Syntax Error '4thColumn'.
    111  f892		       8d 00 00 	      sta.z	4thColumn	;03 , 29
    112  f895		       be 00 00 	      ldx	gfx4,y	;04 , 33
    113  f898		       b9 00 00 	      lda	gfx5,y	;04 , 37
    114  f89b		       a8		      tay		;02 , 39
    115  f89c		       a9 00		      lda	#00	;02 , 41:123 (4thColumn @ +38)
    116  f89e		       85 1c		      sta	GRP1	;03 , 44
    117  f8a0		       86 1b		      stx	GRP0	;03 , 47
    118  f8a2		       84 1c		      sty	GRP1	;03 , 50
    119  f8a4		       84 1b		      sty	GRP0	;03 , 53
    120  f8a6		       c6 81		      dec	loadIndex	;05 , 58
    121  f8a8		       d0 cc		      bne	ramDrawTemplate	;*2 , 60/61
    122  f8aa		       60		      rts		;06 , 66:198 - 52 bytes

The graphics and color addresses are uninitialized because I haven't written those tables yet. I just need to get past this stumbling block in the immediate operand.

[Zoo Keeper (2600, Champ Games)]

I see you're in IL; I assume you got to play the machine at Galloping Ghost? I did too! Made a road trip there, my first visit, what a blast.

No. I don't live anywhere near Chicago.

[Zoo Keeper (2600, Champ Games)]

I had an opportunity to play the arcade version a couple months ago and had a blast. I have high hopes for this version!

[A Two-Player Competitive and Co-Op "Tetris" for the Atari 2600 VCS]

If there are any that object to this rotation behavior, I could have this as an "SRS On / Off" game option toggle before the start of a game.

I myself am used to the behavior of Game Boy Tetris, which rotates S and Z pieces such that they appear as they do in the third and fourth columns of the chart you posted. I pieces are rotated about the second block from the left (in horizontal orientation).

I'm not particularly fussed about the nuances of I pieces, but I have basically no experience with any Tetris where pieces translate as they rotate.

[How to output data from the controller port]

Nope, the paddle pins are analog. However, the eight digital pins for joystick 1 + 2 that are controlled by the RIOT can be used as GPIO pins. Iirc there is a bitbanging RS232 implementation floating around on the forums.

I found Teleterm 2600 on the [stella] list, is that the one you're thinking of?

[Amoeba Jump]

You can still jump across 3/4 of the screen with these controls, which is the about the same as the previous version.

Yup, I noticed that. The timing is a little different, but yeah the amoeba can certainly bounce far enough.

 

Anyway, I'll look into the controls tomorrow to see if a small tweak is needed. Otherwise it's probably a matter of getting used to these new controls.

Awesome. I should have no problem retraining if need be.

[Amoeba Jump]

About the acceleration curve: I just watched the recorded ZeroPage Homebrew stream where they played my game, and noticed that they sometimes missed platforms because they expected the slowdown to be less abrupt.

Is this what you're experiencing?

I don't have a problem with the slowdown. The speedup, though, feels a bit sluggish. It gave me a mental image of wading through water.

[Amoeba Jump]

First impressions:

-Oh my god the title screen is so cute!

-I got really used to the old acceleration curve, so this new one will take some time to feel natural. It's not bad, though. It makes the blue levels significantly easier (for me, anyway).

-It's very satisfying to get the super jump.

 

I'm definitely going to buy a cart of this.

[Pixel art Program for Atari 2600 Development]

I've had success with the GrafX2 paint program. It lets you define custom brush shapes and arbitrary grid spacings for accommodating the aspect ratios of, say, player and playfield pixels. It's plenty powerful enough for the task.

[Paddle/Driving Controllers on a Sega Genesis?]

Blue and White, referring to wire colors.

Pins 1 and 2 on the driving controller correspond to up and down on both the Atari joystick and the Sega d-pad, so there's absolutely no reason the Genesis couldn't read the Gray code. Since the two consoles have the power supply on different pins, though, it would be safest to have a little plug adapter that swaps pins 7 and 9 plugged into the console, with the foreign controller plugged into the adapter.

"...plug adapter that swaps pins 7 and 5..."

What was I thinking, the post I quoted even said the Genesis uses pin 5 for power.

[Play Atari 2600 Games using QR Codes]

I think I saw an nes homebrew that displayed a qr code linking to the developer's website. It was a tdch demo or something. Should be feasible on an atari 2600 using only playfield graphics (maximum 40 pixel width, and many codes are smaller than that).

Bang! does precisely that after the credit roll.

xSqueeker also puts up a QR code, but that one just says "xSqueeker" rather than a URL.