Mikebloke

It's interesting, my dad was a programmer back when programming was punching holes through a card and then it went through a reader but it was more a work thing than a hobby as he never owned his own pc or laptop until recently (and that is mostly for printing). He has digitalised fully now, there was a point where he flat out refused to own a digital camera or a mobile phone, all digital now. I remember the day when he "rebought" a zx spectrum and we played it as a family once or twice, but other than that he really isn't in games at all, and can count on one hand the number of times he's played a game since (Nintendo wii bowling actually!). My mum on the other hand is a bit more involved, but the games tended to be single player rather than interactive. Her favourite games were pac man, Dr Mario, tetris which might be a little stereotyping of 'female gaming' as it were at the time. My dad got a nes mini recently and they've been playing a bit of that, though I think it's mostly dad watching my mum. I showed off my smb1 skills and finished it in 5 minutes without continues (sweated at the end as I bragged about it before starting!). Still on with gaming with mum, we played a lot of n64 goldeneye together, and this might have been down to my dad working funny hours and generally not being that interested while my mum would entertain me in my interest. Quake 3 on the ps2 got some family time with her too, so it was a weird mix.

As the mini concept's first base of customers is nostalgia, I would have to go for an amstrad CPC line. It could mix a bit of 464 and 6128 line, and have the 3 exclusives from the GX4000. Options to have original palettes and expanded would be a nice feature too. Might be too much to ask for hardware scaling/sliding but it would probably help improve a lot of games! If taito was up for having some of their games on it too it would be great for me at least.

Does anyone know which factory the VCS is being produced in? At the risk of delving into politics again, several factories in both central and especially Eastern China have been indicted in a report by an Australian NGO regarding the export of Uighurs from Western China for the use of slave labour. Factories that appear to have benefited include anything to do with screens (pretty much every mobile phone company has been mentioned as being in the forced labour chain) including the Nintendo Switch. Several others that produce electronic boards has also been labelled, but as their customers tend to be less famous they haven't necessarily been outed. I don't know if any of the financial reports on atari specificly lists where in China it is the VCS is being made, but if It has engaged with a "work program" it is likely also guilty. Also, atari vault is decent, I appreciate the interface for game selection is clunky for those used to playing on console, but for an all round experience its brilliant. If you could do another 50 games I'd snap it up!

I would argue its more playable now than the business one (wall street) , but the modern combat one (conquest of the world) is the most fun one for "people our age". Although people try to design similar concepts for the original odyssey, given the videopac can handle actual games it's probably a better one to attempt homebrew with too - whether it was intended as a true spiritual successor to the original odysseys board game priority I don't know, but it's nice to think they might have "returned to their roots" at the end of the videopac life.

If you haven't already, make sure you push in all the circuit boards, as they never really had any system for keeping them locked in. My one has an odd issue of the ball slowing down on the right hand side and eventually stopping, but fiddling with the boards fixes the issue. You can know for sure that something is changing by removing a card, it should not be powered when empty as the first part of each card completes the circuit for power. Take advantage of the line move knob on the console to ensure you are getting a clear picture too, as it should move the centre line horizontally on the game cards that have that feature. Good luck! My first thought was that maybe it wasn't fully tuned properly. I discovered my (PAL) TV didn't take rf ntsc signals the hard way, but does take ntsc standards for every other connection mode. A USB rf tuner into a pc is what I use now and it gives the correct signal I can use in OBS to capture or display.

Given how many of us is still looking for a copy of that, your multicart might be next on my list ? I didn't think there were more region exclusives than chess commercially available ... I'm sure e5frog can fill us in though...

I don't speak German so I'm happy just having hangman and the others in English I do have Schach though.

For me it's quite simple, one of each game released, whatever its condition. I'm a gamer not a collector by nature, I do have all the UK releases CIB which is nice but it was more a product of good luck and selling doubles than a planned achievement. I've seen what slot machine goes for CIB, it's a price I don't really want to pay! Democart would be nice too, but again not going out of my way to pay a lot of money for it. The fairchild stays plugged into the TV more than most RF consoles, I've developed a love for it more than I do anything else of the period, it'll get plenty of use. I imagine one day e5frog you will have one of literally everything, I'll be happy just having one of each game whatever colour the label is ?

Was Stefan really there? Didn't write anything we couldn't have written ourselves.

It was me, I'm in "nearly complete" mode for the channel F and so few are available outside/ship from the US. At least nobody else bidded though, don't want to say it was a 'deal' but it means I just need to look out for checkers now.

Please post the rom up, it's a super dead console, most of the people in this thread have good sized collections and a few of us have (or tried) coded for it too. It's a valid hack, I always wondered why they didn't make the boundaries selectable either. Is your modified ves.h available somewhere too? What changes have you made to it?

I have to admit it is a bit old fashioned to try and increase profit via raising shipping costs. I'm pretty sure ebay still charges for that anyway. 100 seems a lot. I remember when it was pretty common, even for that condition.

Looks like they set some of their items up for international postage, but 22 is still not listed as such. Not sure if that is a manual thing or not, I might be hoping too much for a chance to get it myself.

How much are they charging for shipping for you regarding 22? I've messaged the seller in a round about way as the usual system didn't let me to plead to consider overseas sellers. Given that I got another loose game for under $25 postage to UK it can't be that expensive domestically. I've pushed how every use I've had with global shipping program has been successful and its basically me as a buyer having to pay extra for the privilege. As the seller only sells to US, I can't even see the items when I look it up - but I was able to use your link to browse the US section to get it to show it to me - but does not show a price for shipping. Edit: I think they've just set it as I now see shipping prices, but 22 has gone. Being reset as buy it now perhaps??????? maybe...

Don't forget the obligatory "After Action Report" too, as we're clearly all interested in how it turns out.

Think I'm going to need to look at the tutorial a bit deeper, but still wanted to update this with what I've got so far. I've also updated the original topic to cut out things I've done or fixed. Its getting there. Slowly. Switch between 1 and 2 player with game select. submarine help3.zip

It's going to be an age old question, emulation for ease or old tech for nostalgia. I have use for all, retron 77, real hardware (tend to just keep the 7800 out tbh) and just playing it on pc (both Stella and atari vault). The other barrier to original hardware is whether your tv is up for it. I'm avoiding a new tv because nobody has actually been able to tell me whether a wide variety of things I'd need (including NTSC and SECAM) would work on anything they sell me. A Retron 77 avoids all those issues. In terms of romcart, and if no price is an issue make sure it's a harmony encore. This ensures you can play things like the 2600 galaga game (now galagon I think?). A regular harmony doesn't play everything. If you can't afford or find an encore though, there is a great alternative in the uno romcart which is dirt cheap even generally for romcarts. There is hope for full compatability via software updates in the future but it plays everything original except pitfall 2 I believe.

Oh and it's a USB power supply, so no worries there either.

Depends how keen you are for original hardware, because my first suggestion tbh is to look at the retron 77. You can run original controllers with it, it uses Stella (update it for best results), you can use original carts (though there is a number of compatability issues) it can handle any region, has hdmi, and of course you can run any homebrew you or anyone else makes.

Thanks to Andrew Davie and SpiceWare. Im starting to get a handle for it. I don't think I've implemented it quite right yet, but it's stabilising more as I update. I've also worked out why it's not been detecting collision ; I've been clearing the collision flag between the two checks, a result of copy pasting code. This means it's been ignoring the second check between missile1 and player0, so that is one problem fixed! Also means there is now something "playable". Away from home at the moment so I'm just assembling through dasm instead of using 8bitworkshop; going to work on it some more over the next few days and hopefully get another version up later this week.

Probably cause I don't know what that is, could you explain/link me some information?

I've tried to have a go with it, does this look any better than the first version? I think its more stable, I've made vertical blank and overscan into better loops, and changed a couple of values that was used to work out the "skyline" including changing one into a different format (which is probably where I was going wrong). I'm also taking advantage of the debugger in stella too trying to work out some of the issues as 8bitworkshop one runs slightly differently. I still get two different things from both emulators, but it seems better than before. submarine help2.rom submarine2.a.zip I'm smart enough now to realise that missile1 is influenced by player1 being stretched. I attempted to rectify it but it caused more problems (either with screen flickering or returning player1 to not-stretched). So back to the drawing board with all the rest of it! Anyone know why missile1+player0 collision isn't being detected in my code?

Yeah its pretty common I've got a 7800 labelled one. Never seen a correctly labelled one though, are they rarer?

Great idea and I tried it out last night and it gives them all a new lease of life! It makes it feel like a 7800 game which I love for the menu's at the start of most games.

I had an issue with mine originally. I'm not a hundred percent sure it wasn't something daft like the micro sd card being the wrong way round as I think it needs to be inserted upside down. I think it also requires waiting a moment before anything comes up on screen. I just tied loads of different things till it worked, again, not sure exactly what happened. I updated firmware to latest version and never had a problem since though.