vidak

I earned less teaching at college than I did stacking shelves at the supermarket.

You say "for your own purposes", but I'm imagining a free, open, and collective system of property you should never be able to profit off of someone else's work. The corollary of that is that you should never be able to profit of your own work. The phrase from Kropotkin is that "all belongs to all". Private property is immoral, only a system where everything is owned by everyone is moral. My imagined system of licencing is that you should encode in the property rights of your games that you are to share the game freely and prohibit anyone from profiting from the work of art.

that's a funny way to interpret what I'm saying. I can't afford Albert's carts, no slight against him. I doubt anyone in Australia could on minimum wage. I was trying to be humble, I don't think I would be as good as Albert starting out.

I'd stop. Like I said I really want to focus on abandonware. That said, I morally don't think it's stealing though. The law has nothing to do with what's right and wrong though. It only contingently institutes justice. The law is about "might is right".

I mean I can explain why I disagree, but I don't want to start a flame war. I am a university academic who has taught Intro to Ethics for about 2 years, and the standard response on meta-ethics from students is the one I quoted twice above. It happens to be completely false when you examine the position carefully. The name of the position taken above by Kaeru is called Moral Relativism, and it is wrong and in fact very dangerous.

I disagree with your understanding of morality. But we can agree to disagree!

Becoming a legitimate manufacturer of indie titles is probably a good move. Carts might be cheap in the US but postage to Australia is slow and expensive. Quite a few carts on eBay which are otherwise $2 get $30 postage slapped on them.

you've got the first part right, the second part not so right. Authors shouldn't be entitled to copyright. That's what I'm saying. No-one should be entitled to copyright. When I make games, I won't release them under copyright because that's immoral. I will release them as freeware/under an open source copyleft licence.

You raise a good point. This issue of creative ownership is what would distinguish me from Hozer. Whatever model of organising I use would follow social mission principles. I do not aim to set up a for-profit business. I would aim to distribute as cheaply as possible, hopefully at cost, and run on donations. I'm an opponent of profit making, because profit always comes from exploiting someone else's effort. Profit is basically unpaid wages. I think when it comes to mere licence holders of game intellectual property, they're the ones in the wrong. They own the property to someone else's effort, and they're trying to profit from something they didn't do. In the case of moral intellectual property, people who actually made the game but may not own the legal property, I think making reproductions would not infringe on their moral rights. If anything, their decision to claim ownership behind proprietary copyright is immoral. Only a copyleft licence is the moral "copyright". The source code should always be released for a video game, and it should be freely useable in new games, so long as /their/ source code is also freely available.

ahhh I see!

http://www.classic-games.com/atari2600/bankswitch.html

From my research the bank switching is done in code in the ROM. There isn't memory mapping circuitry like in NES games. It is true that the 2600 can only address 4K of ROM. Different carts use different memory locations for the different banks.

I understand Albert makes reproductions, but I was thinking of doing it for cheaper, with perhaps a little worse quality. What I've learned from researching is that it's not really prohibitively expensive, and 2600 carts are actually much easier than other systems because the carts don't use memory mappers, all the bank switching is done in the ROM. You just have to make sure that the banks line up at the right memory addresses for 8KB and upwards games. I may take out a personal loan or something, and just make a run and see who is interested. I plan on having very simple labels to make sure that the reproductions don't get passed off as originals. I may even hack the ROMs to make sure nothing unethical happens.

ah thanks! This site is like a rabbit warren, it's so hard to navigate when you've just joined

Some more! http://nintendoage.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=123503 http://www.atariage.com/2600/archives/schematics_pal/images/Schematic_Atari2600_Cartridge_PAL.gif

Here is a list of other threads about making reproductions. http://atariage.com/forums/topic/188328-id-like-to-make-my-own-reproductions/ http://atariage.com/forums/topic/54045-reproduction-games/ http://atariage.com/forums/topic/224010-checking-interest-for-air-raid-reproductions/ http://atariage.com/forums/topic/170387-sold-atari-2600-reproduction-games/

Could you point me to some repro makers I could get some carts from, then?

If I was to get involved in repros, I'd mark them as repros, to not affect the vintage market. I would also advertise them as reproductions. Any reproduction organisation I set up would also have to have a social mission. I would aim not to make profit in running the organisation, and I would try my best to sell cartridges at cost, to make them as cheap as possible.

I've noticed a lot of threads on multiple forums lately about how expensive it is to get a hold of carts of fun games to play. Especially for the VCS2600. Personally, I will never be able to afford many of the video games I collected and sold when I became unemployed in 2014. Prices for 2600 consoles are pushing AUD$250 for good condition lots on eBay and on our local second hand site, gumtree.com.au. Many old carts are now becoming rare and as a result expensive. YouTube is also driving up demand for the limited supply of old carts, and in the long run YouTube will eventually make it virtually impossible to collect all your favourite games. I was wondering, is there an organisational and social case for getting involved in making reproductions of carts? I understand there would be some tricky legal issues to work out. My hope is that a group of people could organise production around abandonware for the 2600. There must be a lot of it. I see "multicarts" of NES Megaman on eBay, and I see obviously illegal reproductions of Pokemon Stadium 2 on Alibaba. I've always wanted to give back to the retro gaming community, and I feel like getting involved in making reproductions could keep the community alive and accessible to new blood. I firmly believe that gaming culture belongs to everyone, and having cheap copies of carts would strengthen and grow our community. What do you think? Also, what would I have to do?

I think it's despicable to hoard works of art. My favourite slogan on private property is that "all belongs to all". The collective effort of generations went into making geniuses and talented people alive, so their efforts belong to everybody. It's even worse when someone hoards art for their own singular interest.

I'd be interested in a homebrew compumate. I have a little experience in hardware design, but I have always been an amateur.

I can make a version of number 9 happen. I am currently in the process of learning how to program 2600 games, and I have a big collection of introductory material collected from my efforts. It is not really necessary to write a new book because all the material you need to learn how to code in machine language is already online. I may make a big master list of forum posts and web links to make navigating easier.

Thanks so much for all your help! This is so much more help than I could have expected! I started looking through Thomas Jentzsch's decompile of River Raid yesterday. I was surprised at how little ROM data Carol Shaw used in setting up the entire map. I'm going to copy the idea of controlled randomness into setting up my scrolling playfield. The difference between the 80s and now though is that ROM is much cheaper, and I may just construct an entire playfield in ROM and make a 16KB or 32KB game with bank switching. All of what everyone has said has made perfect sense, and it's always awesome to have the legendary SpiceWare comment on your thread

I started off with Commodore 64 BASIC, even though the C64 was discontinued in 1994, and I was born in 1991. The Usborne books you could follow along and type in the typed up programs were my first experience of programming, and it was all in BASIC. I completely agree with DZ, you either have two types of people: people who begin with BASIC but move on unharmed, and people who remain ensnared within BASIC metaphors (or put better: its lack of metaphors and structure). I used to love QBASIC and how unstructured it was, but I never learned much. I learned a lot more about structure and flow from learning Python. I'm surprised no-one brought up Python in this discussion. I think Python possesses all the beautiful things about BASIC, while improving markedly on its lack of structure. Of course Python is completely unsuitable for 8-bit development (although someone might prove us wrong!). I agree with what came out of this discussion: that BASIC is great for getting up and going with little experience, but it doesn't offer much in the way of learning how to code professionally. For developing 2600 games I prefer machine code. Contrary to the philosophy of BASIC, I think understanding the stuff "under the hood" of a computer isn't that hard. Digital Computer Electionics by Malvino is a great introduction to CPU electronics.

I personally think assembly language ("machine language") isn't that hard. Try watching this youtube series put on by John Dale (Oldskoolcoder): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiOlLd4dhIDC6RN6t0cCCQwBlusnHm8nt This series of videos tells you basically everything you need to know about the fundamentals of assembly language. A lot of programming skills are portable across languages, so if you'd like to have an interactive experience of learning how to code, try the Python language lessons on Code Academy (www.codecademy.com) I personally think Python is very similar to BASIC, so a lot of the skills you'd learn about variables, functions, subroutines etc would all be portable across to batari BASIC. Here are a couple of good books from the Atari Archives on 6502 assembly language. The 6502 is the CPU of the Atari 2600: Machine Language for Beginners: http://atariarchives.org/mlb/ The Second Book of Machine Language: http://atariarchives.org/2bml/ I am a huge advocate of open source free software, so I recommend always releasing your source code. Read others' source code as often as you can to learn new techniques. What got me really started in programming for the Atari 2600 was Andrew Davie and Kirk Israel's tutorials: Andrew's Tutorial: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/33233-sorted-table-of-contents/ Kirk's Tutorial: https://atariage.com/2600/programming/2600_101/ These are two really accessible tutorials for learning machine language for the 2600. Also check out SpiceWare's CollectMini tutorials. If you have trouble finding them, let me know. I'm a beginner programmer as well, but if you have any questions about where to start and what to do, you can DM me, or I'll keep checking this thread : ) Personally my first step in a new technique is to copy! Copy other's ideas and learn how to progressively tweak and improve them!