DaveC1964

Yes, read the first part of my last message. It passes when pulling the cart away from the Lynx 2mm, fails when I press and hold inward.

I tried putting something between the lynx and the card the other way, so that the cart was about 2mm *away* from the Lynx case. I did it just at the end of the cart not all of the way in so that the Lynx SD was at an angle. It passed the writing and testing phase. Games also seemed to program fine now. Pressing in like before failed the test. Putting the credit card in front like before failed too (probably why some games failed to program). It really seems like it is something with the cartridge slot that doesn't like this card. I may try a more permanent shim to see if that helps. It seems a bit laggy though. When I press the dpad it doesn't respond sometimes unless I do it again. Also when pressing the button to load it doesn't seem to work sometimes. I am not sure if that is normal. The buttons respond normal in games.

I was able to get it working so that the menu comes up fine every time. I had to put a thin piece of plastic like from a credit card over the 3D printed "Lynx SD" area to make that slightly thicker and make contact better. Try that. It seems like the cartridge slot in the Lynx II is a bit more finicky than the model 1. It also could be that the copper on the Lynx cartridge slot has oxidized being old so more pressure is needed to make good contact. I still have issues with some games not working but that seems like a different issue. The same games will always work, and the same other games will always fail. That I don't understand. If it was bad static RAM wouldn't it be more random as in the same game sometimes working and sometimes not?

Yeah I tried cleaning the edge card, no luck. As a last ditch effort I tried something else, I don't know what made me think of it. If I press firmly inward on the card and hold it when I turn on the Lynx it works. It is like the card isn't thick enough to make good contact. Maybe I will try to shim the part with the 3dprinted Lynx SD logo and see if it works better. I found that some of my ROMs don't work though. I load some and it says "programming" for a few seconds then dumps back to menu. Other games say "Programing" for a while then The Lynx shows "insert game" screen. Some work OK. Is there something special that needs to be done to the ROMs? These ROMs work in an emulator so I don't understand what could be wrong, they are all .LNX extension.

I received my card the other day. Unfortunately it does not work. All I get is the "insert game" text with no menu, nothing. What should I do now? Yes I tried removing and inserting a few times, no work.

Yeah that would be ok too. Maybe two solutions would not hurt. One best case like SpiceWare's solution that works the best but is not compatible with dodgy emulators. Another solution as you say that may not be as good but works for everything. The author could then choose which way to go. That would leave out some users now if the author choose the best case one but eventually emulators should all evolve enough so that they all work.

Well if you could somehow add 32 gigs of RAM to a ColecoVision it won't look better than a PS4. The 2600 did have a palette of 256 colors compared to the Speccy's 16. And that speccy color clash...

Hey, it includes E.T. How can you go wrong?

Thanks. is there a place where i can get all of the homebrew games in one place (Pac-Man 8k, New DK, Space Rocks, etc) Or do I just need to search them out one by one?

Thanks. I heard somewhere that HDTVs didn't work with old analog RF. It seems some do and I should have just tried it. I have a 2600 Jr. and it does work. The image is a bit noisy (solid colors with slight bands, edges of high contrast areas have a bit of bleeding etc. I guess that is probably just the nature of old non broadcast quality RF.

I got one of those "full sets" and it is very big. Thanks for the info though I will try that, much better than manually doing it myself.

So I bought the Harmony encore cart. It seems great so far. I was wondering is there an easy way to get my ROMs to all NTSC versions and get rid of all of the various hacks, clones, duplicates, PAL etc? It looks to be a daunting task to manually weed out thousands of games. There must be an easier way.

Ok so most modern TVs no longer accept an analog signal. Is there some kind of converter box that will convert an old RF analog signal to HDMI inputs? There must be some doing that here as I doubt everyone has access to old CRTs (or maybe they do?)

Yeah I might have to just go the Raspberry Pi rout when they get a simple snap together design or wait for McWills portable if/when that is a reality. I didn't want to do the emulator thing but that may be the only way to get a decent display. Composite is crap and I don't want that. I wonder if there is any interest in a collaboration of coders and electronics engineer that would want to make the ultimate Raspberry 2600 kit including screen connection (nothing smaller than 3.5"), any specific coding, and a case (I could do the case/controls)? If there was interest this would be the forum for that amirite?

If I go to You Tube I see all kinds of 2600 portable hacks mostly on the FB2. I was just wondering, how are they all connecting these screens? They never tell you that in the videos.

I just tested on the AFP. It does work fine. In normal mode are you saying that you can only get 6 characters across? What would the other options look like (flicker etc)? While I can see this being ok for the AFP for now it is a bit of a kludge to have system detection etc. What happens in the future when they update the emulation on AFP 2018, 19 ...? maybe it will work, maybe it won't detect and not work right. There are so many combinations of hardware and emulators out there that trying to manage them all now and in the future may be a bit of an issue. Then all of the work doing instructions will be negated. What about Harmony carts, 2600 jr.s, modded flashback 2s, FBxx mods, etc? My goal was to have a pure 100% compatible way to display the instructions no matter what you run on from past devices/emus or in the future. The only real way to do that is to make something that will run on any 2600 compatible hardware or emulator. If it will run a bog standard 2600 game, it will display this text. (BTW those displaying on CRTs may have trouble with dark blue, maybe white or something NTSC friendly ? making this compatible with any display device is another consideration). Maybe this goal is impossible. I thought it might be as we are talking ancient tech here. It was worth a shot though. Thanks for doing what you did.

Well yes kind of. I think making users rotate the unit to read then rotate back is a bit awkward. Those running on a TV would need to cock their head 90 deg. The idea was to make this work for all users, even the home console 2600 versions. Limiting just to portables would be a very small section of users. Is there a way it could be done in a normal orientation?

Could I get added to the list too? Thanks.

Bummer. I am not too surprised though. Now I am wondering why I couldn't even see the file. I renamed to a simple Test.bin but it didn't show up. Maybe my SD is going bad or something.

I am interested in getting one of these. I was wondering, could you send me the uncased version but send me the .STL files so I can print one myself in a different material? Thanks much.

I tried that on a portable but the ROM doesn't even show up on the menu list. That is odd.

So I did the McWill LCD mod. It turned out great. If you have a Lynx I suggest this mod, if you don't have a Lynx get one and do the mod! It looks much better in person than my crap cellphone pics, the colors are much deeper. Scanline version shown. Everything works well so far and I had no bad pixels or anything. I used the ribbon cable that came with the mod and soldered the wires in order to the LCD module. I did the jumping around at the Lynx PCB. That seemed to work out well. Also I used some hot snot to keep the wires secure, I would recommend doing that so they don't break when re assembling the unit. I didn't do the VGA mod. It is a nice feature but I figured if I want to play Lynx games on my PC monitor I will just use an emulator. It was a pretty easy mod. Thanks to McWill for making it possible. Now all I need is a flash cart. I actually did buy just about all Lynx games and still have them but for convenience all in one would be nice. Trying some homebrew would be nice too.

Well that is obviously up to you if you are doing it. There are a lot of those FB units out there. Systems like the portable are things that really need something like this. A homebound system not as much as you can have physical manuals there or look it up on your computer, phone, tablet etc. On the go it is desirable to have it all in one. It would be nice to have something that will work with anything no matter how "bad" the emulation, not sure what could be done in that case or what the limits would be. Is it possible to display a one color bitmap on the whole screen? Maybe I could just type the instructions, then convert it to a 1 bit bitmap as white text on black? It is crude but it is still better than nothing.

That would be nice. Non-programmers could contribute game instruction ROMs that could be made public. I would be careful about using custom tricks that could cause compatibility issues though, it should work on all devices like the flashback portable, flashback2, Harmony cart, emulators and such that have trouble with certain things such as bank switching etc. I would do some of these if I had this template.

Then again, Frogger without the music isn't Frogger in my opinion, the music made it good.