Paul Slocum

There is an existing engine to do softsynth music on the 2600. it's on the minidig under pitfall 2 sound. mp3 example here. http://www.qotile.net/temp/pitsound.mp3 Softsynth is probably the only way that song's going to be done on the 2600 without sounding horribly out of tune. -paul

Knowing Albert, I'm certain that if ads are ever used, they will be relavent (probably all videogame related) and unobtrusive. There's no way he would ever allow pop-up or click-through ads.

I'm writing to see what people think about adding some tastefully done, non-obtrusive, relavent ads to Atariage. After talking at length with Albert about the site and the store, I think it's just time to do it. This hosting for Atariage costs $400 a month, and with the profits from the store, Albert just about breaks even on that. And the store is a lot of work. I mean a LOT. I've made and sold cartridges before, and there's a reason I don't do it anymore. And what I did was nothing remotely close to the volume that Atariage does. It's not just making the carts, but testing them, redoing the ones that don't work, taking orders, dealing with order problems, shipping, filling out customs forms, answering questions, adding new items, etc. etc. On top of that, Albert maintains the site and does those amazing setups at the classic gaming conventions about 3 times a year (and those are often break-even deals as well). I hung out with Albert a WEEK before the OVGE show and he was already insanely busy and stressed out getting ready for the show (making carts, printing promotional stuff, etc). The main money-generating resource that's not being used for Atariage is the huge amount of traffic it receives. A little bit of advertising could go a long way towards helping with those hosting costs and making all Albert's work pay off a little more. And possibly he could use some of that extra money to streamline the store and make it less time consuming (he's talked about a new Atari 2600 board that would save tons of manufacturing time). It just seems to me that what started off as a cool hobby website has turned into a bit of a monster, and it needs to become a little more profitable or it's going to eventually run Al in the ground! What do you guys think?

We got back at 5AM this morning!! (played a show in Oklahoma City Sunday night). OVGE was great. A lot of great stuff to see, a lot of nice people to meet, and I played a whole lot of Rastan. I had to download MAME and Rastan later at the hotel room because I couldn't get enough! And how cool to get to meet Andrew, all the way from Australia. -paul

great, thanks.

Is there no "Ignore" feature on the new board?

I'm not really interested in doing a port of the song. I just prefer to write my own stuff. If Andrew decides he wants to get someone else to port the song, I can just use that song for some other game. But it may not be possible to port the song to the 2600 and have it be in-tune. When I was doing those music hacks, I had to throw out a bunch of ideas because I couldn't find the notes for songs I wanted to do. -paul

mp3 of the current version of the music: http://www.qotile.net/audio/boulderdash.mp3

It's on my todo list as part of the Loopcart, but unfortunately my todo list is very long at the moment. I am still working on Loopcart whenever I have a chance (made a little progress in April). It now can display the loop data in hex so you can type it into the sequencer kit, and it has the start of a new "light show mode". Should have some very basic Atarivox support soon.

Haha, that's awesome.

yeah, NES or maybe the 7800 would be much better choices.

There are 6502 C compilers. Somebody got a very simple kernal running with a C compiler a while back, but it's not practical for doing any real work on the 2600. There's been talk about doing some sort of GameMaker system for the 2600 (using pre-designed kernels) but it would probably be pretty limited. -paul

Found one, thanks.

Can somebody sell me a tested C64? Don't need anything but the main unit, C64 or 64C is fine. But I need it pretty quickly. I can Paypal. My band is playing an out of country show next week and we're short a C64 since one got banged up on the airline last time. -paul

It doesn't look like you're using any timer on the Overscan part of the code (if your code takes a variable amount of cycles, you have to use the timer.) And it also appears to be taking too many cycles (you'll have to optimize or split it up). This is often a problem with scrollers since they can take a lot of cycles to process. -paul

hi Robert. Since vcs.h and macro.h are standard 2600 "include" files, I think it's preferable not to post them when you post source. the latest versions are always available here: http://www.taswegian.com/TwoHeaded/Atari2600/dasm/ Maze demo looks cool. I'll take a look at the src. I wrote a scroller a few months ago, but it was designed more for coolness than gaming. -paul

It'll get done soon. I was going to try to hammer it out in January, but I ended up moving which has been eating up a lot of time. Hopefully I'll finish it up in March or April. I've completed quite a bit more than what's in the beta on my site, but it's too buggy to post yet. -paul

I've been considering programming something like a music multicart/demo. I'll probably be more likely to do that when I finish the loopcart and other people can start making full 2600 songs. -paul

LSDJ (Gameboy) can sound a lot like synthcart or the sequencer kit at times. -paul

I played live-action Adventure when I was a kid.

http://www.qotile.net/minidig/docs/2600_ad..._prog_guide.txt

Megaman: haha, no I don't think this is the same thing. Malc: Yeah, it helps to have a lot of weapons in your deck that can also be used for defense. I keep thinking I'm at the end but it just keeps going. I'm almost up to 50 hrs gameplay. -paul

Anyone else played this? It's a GC exclusive card-based RPG if you haven't heard of it. I'm really loving it. Decent story, lots of fun creative areas, great battle system. The only downside is the voice acting, which I find really annoying, but I just turn it off. I just got to the ice world, pretty close to finishing I think. -paul

1 kaboom 2 warlords 3 adventure 4 frogs & flies 5 pitfall 2 6 raiders of the lost ark 7 bmx airmaster 8 yars revenge 9 frogger 10 hero 1 escape from the mindmaster 2 party mix 3 fireball 4 frogger 5 communist mutants

I was running straight DOS. I have several DOS-only or dual-boot machines.