Paul Slocum

I submitted an article to Slashdot. I think this is a very interesting topic and deserves some attention. I'll let you know if it gets accepted. Although I'm really irritated and dissappointed by what's happened, there is still a chance that Infogrames will change their tune when the see the backlash. Albert said he's going to try to work out an agreement so that he can get stuff back in the store. And hopefully I can still include some Atari references in the Homestar Runner RPG. -paul

I'll submit a story tomorrow.

Mondo Pong and Joust Pong too. All the hacks. And I bet all the ROMs will be gone soon. Screw Infogrames. At least there are companies like Tulip (owner of Commodore properties) that seem to understand that it's best to keep retrogamers happy. Hopefully Infogrames will get the idea once they get some bad publicity. -paul

Amazing. What's next? Gunfight and Thrust? Marble Craze because it includes the maze from Adventure? Mondo Pong and Joust Pong were also pulled. So much for a fun hobby. But I can understand how selling maybe 50-100 carts for ancient hardware is going to ruin their bottom line. Guess Homestar Runner RPG will not be including retro-gaming monsters. I'm going to try to get the details from Albert and submit this great news to Slashdot. -paul

Here's a ROM of something I started working on a while back... space.zip

Maybe, but it would be very complicated. It would be much easier to buy a Cuttle Cart 1 or 2 or a Pocket Romulator. -paul

I've got my own versions of the driver with those mods as well. I hope so! 3 people are now working on front ends, but nobody's released one yet. Could you private message me his email address? I have a lot of requests for 2600 game/demo music, but rarely have time. Maybe he'd be interested in doing music for other demos/games? -paul

holy $hit, did you see the OHP demo compo on there??? hahahaha, that's AMAZING!!! http://www.buenz.li/13_ohp.php -paul

Very cool! It's using my music driver. Anyone know who did this?? -paul

if you can get Realplayer to work, this is a live A/V capture: http://www.qotile.net/temp/combat.rm (9MB) -paul

I think Albert (Atariage) will burn an EPROM for you. Just ask!

hey guys, thanks for posting the video. That guy that interviewed was actually a really nice guy. He seemed genuinely interested in the homebrew Atari stuff even if he didn't know a whole lot about it. I talked to him some before and after the show too. Everybody I met at G4 was nice and laid back. One guy there that I had emailed a bit before brought his Synthcart for me to sign. And a couple of them came to see our band on Saturday. I even had my own dressing room w/ my name on it! haha Anyway, it was great to get to plug Atariage and talk about the homebrew community. -paul

I'll be on ScreenSavers tomorrow (Friday Sept 10) talking about some of my Atari 2600 projects, my band, and showing some designs I drew up for Atari 2600 games when I was in elementary school. I believe the show is at 4PST. -paul

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I looked into doing this w/ the Colecovision adapter, but it turned out that it required the Colecovision's clock signals. Still doable, but you'd have to add a clock circuit which was more than I wanted to mess with. Not sure if this is the case with the 5200 version. -paul

But a way for many games to share blocks of data on an EEPROM is not part of the I2C protocol. That's part of what Jeff covered in his 2600 memory card design. -paul

How can I contact him?

Hmmm, I was going to have the Homestar RPG support saving using Jeff/Viso's save module. It would be nice if you could support the same protocol... http://home.hiwaay.net/~jeffj1/projects/amm/ Do you have an ETA on this project being available to the public? -paul

David Crane's flicker text from Basic Programming/Steller Track is only 12 characters wide. It looks pretty good though. The flicker isn't that bad if the colors are selected carefully IMO. My small no-flicker text can do 13 characters (or 13 plus 2 more chars on the side), or with flicker you can do 24 as Christopher Tumber has demostrated. -paul

Those are awesome ideas. And they seem like they'd be easy to implement. I tend to use a little more trial and error than Thomas, so something like that would be really useful to me. -paul

That would be SOOO easy to paint like that. The only stuff you'd have to mask carefully would be the label on the bottom and the woodgrain. Just pull the feet off and mask a little patch to reglue them to. Might even be able to remove the label and reglue it. Actually looks like the edge of the label is peeling in the picture. A while back I went spray paint crazy, painting all kinds of stuff. I have a peach composite monitor. -paul

In Rasty's front end, he put play buttons everywhere that assemble a ROM and automatically start the emulator. So if you hit the play button next to the high hat section, it builds a ROM that just plays the high hat. If you hit the play button next to the pattern section, you can hear the current pattern. If you hit the play button in the song section, it builds the whole song and plays it. I thought this was a really nice (and simple) way to quickly hear what you're working on. Being able to immediately hear individual notes through MIDI would be nice too. Personally I'd prefer to hear samples of a real Atari, but that would probably be more complicated. -paul

Looks cool! Something I've always really wanted in a front end is an integration of Ekhard's sound guide and my music guide into the front end. So the actual note and tuning are displayed alongside each pitch setting. And I think it'd be nice to have palettes of notes, so it's easy to pick notes that are in tune with each other, or sounds that are good for drums and other effects. -paul

The image of Megaman doesn't use that many colors or pixels, so it seems like it would be pretty easy to construct it manually.

it'd be cool to do one of those things where you do a giant image of megaman made up of lots of small screenshots for pixels