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Paul Slocum

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Posts posted by Paul Slocum

  1. Posted · Edited by Paul Slocum

     

    Hmmm never heard of conservation glue. I´ll do some research. :)

     

    Thank you for the tip!

     

    I don't think it's common knowledge in the videogame collecting community, but as some of these things are approaching 40 years old, it's probably worth considering. I just know about it because I've worked in art conservation. There are actually a lot of different ways to approach it. I've used both archival glue and tape for repairing boxes.

     

    Cheap glues will eventually yellow and become brittle, and cheap paperboard is likely to eventually decay and damage adjacent materials. But you have many years before this happens.

    • Like 2

  2. Posted

    Museums do similar restorations sometimes, but if you care about your collection long term, it's important to use archival material and archival glue for repairs -- the same stuff used for conservation of old books and documents. It only costs about $15 to get a bottle of Jade 403 archival glue and some archival paperboard. I'd guess that styrofoam is probably pretty safe for conservation work, but I'm not totally sure.

    • Like 1

  3. Posted

    Once they had assemblers, then it's really not that different from what I use today. I still use a EPROM emulator with a serial port to do C64 development (which is very fast), and I use a Cuttle Cart for Atari 2600. Often I use up testing more on the real device than on the emulator.

  5. Posted

    It does ultimately cost money to own a big collection. The space to house a collection probably typically costs $300-$2000/year. Mine is in storage and is about $400 per year for the space it takes.

     

    A while back I sold off a good portion of my retro computer collection because they're big and difficult to maintain, and I don't really regret it. I probably will never sell my entire videogame collection, although I might eventually end up selling off some of the more obscure consoles that I don't care about as much.

     

    I was always skeptical about whether retrogaming collections would hold their value long term, but most of what I own seems to have actually held its value pretty well.

  9. Posted · Edited by Paul Slocum

    I love the idea of communicating to a computer using audio. Made me think video would be another way. Use the play field as bar code type deal.

     

    Since my program can already display the data on screen in hex, I thought about having the user take photos of the screen and feed them into a program that reads them. But I know more about audio than I do about computer vision, so the audio route seemed easier.

  10. Posted

    Does anyone have a utility to do this already? I am very interested in this as I have these and I had already started working on a program to develop sounds. I was planning on storing the data to the Vox and dumping it this way.

     

     

    Soooo.... has anyone already written something? I just need to extract the data from the Vox to a binary file on my computer. :)

     

    Nothing is currently written. I know it's possible because I confirmed that the joystick port pins are bidirectional, but I'm not totally clear whether it requires an update to the 2600daptor's firmware or not.

     

    You could just use the audio code that alex_79 posted to dump data from your Atarivox as audio. I'm not sure if he has code available to decode the audio into a binary, but I don't think it would be that hard to write a decoder. I'm planning to write my own anyway, which I'll eventually share.

  14. Posted

    I'm working on an Atari 2600 music program, and I'm trying to figure out a good way to get music data from the Atari 2600 to the PC.

     

    The best idea I've had so far is to encode the data into audio, and to have the PC record the audio and decode the data. Anyone have any thoughts on this? It seems like it would be pretty easy to modulate the 2600 audio signal into a bitstream that would be reasonably easy to decode on the other end. Transfer rate would probably need to be slow, but the total transfer would probably only be 500-1000 bytes.

     

    Other ideas I've had are to display the data as hex and have the user transcribe it. I currently have this implemented, but it's a bit tedious and error prone to transcribe hundreds of bytes of data.

     

    Another idea is to use the Atarivox to store data, and then use the 2600daptor to transfer the data to the PC. This seems like a good method, but then the user has to buy $75 worth of extra gear. With the audio method, no extra equipment is needed.

    • Like 2

  16. Posted

    I'm curious what kind of budgets 2600 games had, especially in the early 80s? Based on making my own games and on what I've read, I would think each game would take 3-6 months of programmer time -- plus graphic design and copy for the packaging. Running some rough numbers, I end up with a game costing maybe $30k-$50k in 2015 dollars (not counting marketing.)

     

    Although the fact that Atari spent $20+ million on the rights to E.T. makes me wonder if that estimate is too low? Apparently the E.T. licensing deal was unusually high, but that still probably means that it was common to spend a million marketing a game. Parker Bros Frogger cost $5 million in marketing.

     

  18. Posted

    A little off topic posting about my iPhone app, but since it is still an embedded platform and this app definitely evolved to some extent out of my Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 music programming, here it is:

     

     

    The app is a sampling keyboard, similar in functionality to the Castio SK1 toy sampling keyboard from the 80's.

     

    And to my fellow 2600 programmers: iPhone programming is fun once you get over the hump. You're actually pretty close to the hardware.

     

    -paul

  21. Posted

    Kind of old thread, but I just found it. I programmed the demo except for the scroller at the top which is Eckhard's classic scroller routine. I probably made this demo in 2005. I used it for a long time as the opening visuals when I performed live. There's a song that goes with it that I would perform.

     

    I had a musician in Spain that I was working with translate it into Spanish. Yeah, it was intended to mimic how the early demo/DIY computer scene was so international.

  22. Posted · Edited by Paul Slocum

    Someone has suggested that the thing on the left is a prototype for the Emerson Arcadia.

     

    It's not Emerson. With four 2764's that's 32K, which is way more than the Arcadia machine can address. And it looks like the wrong physical size too.

     

    Update: It's gotta be a Coleco or Adam board. It has the same number of pins, same size, and the same pin has NC on it.

  24. Posted

    I'm looking for something frame-accurate, so I don't think any of those vidcap programs would work for this.

     

    I figured out how to get it to work with PCAEWin. My main problem was that it was outputting this really old Microsoft RLE codec that none of my video editor programs would handle. I finally figured out that Windows Movie Maker will read it, and you can use that to convert it into a codec that other programs can deal with.

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