Stephen

I'd have to say Caves of Ice. This is the 1st game I remember typing in from a magazine, and the only game my dad ever typed in with me. I believe the game was from Compute! magazine. I only had a 16K Atari 400 at the time (thank god it had the real keyboard upgrade). We spent ages getting the game typed in, saved to cassette tape, debugged, only to find out it needed 48K to run. It was really cool seeing it run on an emulator almost 20 years after typing it in! Funny how much nostalgia some of us have with these older systems. Stephen Anderson

Since I'm not the only late-comer, I'll chime in too. Great reading! I've done a small amount of assembly coding for the Atari 8-bit line of computers, but nothing on the 2600. Might be cool to try and at least get a static display going. Stephen Anderson

The game is not that bad. Find the pieces of the phone, call the ship, and get picked up. It had some pretty cool sounds too. I never did like the 8-bit version of the game though. Terrible graphics and what happened to the wells??? Stephen Anderson

You can always do the trick of hooking up the 2600 to a VCR (via RF) and use the VCRs audio out jack to run to the computer. Stephen Anderson

Thanks. I just got my 1st Atari 7800 last weekend at Philly Classic ($5 and it works) so I'm watching your progress on the 7800 stuff. Wish I could code the little 8-bits like you guys! Stephen

Of all the Atari demos I have seen, this one is probably my favorite. It's incredibly fast, has killer music, great polygon rotation, and the best plasma I have seen on Atari. And it is only 16KB. Does anybody have some information on it such as how the plasma was created? It looks to have well over 16 colors per raster line and in a high resolution. Stephen Anderson

Great show - and much thanks to Kevin Manne for talking me into going! Here's my pics. Descriptions / captions MAYBE later. It was pretty awesome having people play my Nuon Breakout clone (sucky as it is). http://home.neo.rr.com/mopar76/pc5 Stephen Anderson

Lode Runner was monochrome and used artifacting. Awesome game when it came out. I liked the way the levels would "draw in" circular fashion. The level editor was a great feature also. Stephen Anderson

I've seen most of the amazing demos for the Atari 8-bit from 1996 and up. Drunk Chessboard is one of the most impressive to me, mainly because it is so fast, the music is absolutely astounding, and the color plasma is great. Does anyone have any ideas how some of the effects were done? Mainly, the super fast zooming and scaling of the black and white chessboards? Stephen Anderson

Actually, the encoder from Happ only has 4 pins on it. +5VDC, GND, A,B. When wired, the GND goes to the ground leg of power, ground leg of LEFT, ground leg of RIGHT on the Jag controller. A then goes to the other pin of LEFT, B goes to the other pin of RIGHT. (Direction may be reversed, but I believe that's correct). Nuon is the media processor used in some new DVD players by Samsung and Toshiba. It was designed by VMLabs (founded by the same guys who designed the Jag custom chips and also a pretty popular computer in England, of which the name escapes me). Jeff Minter has lent his talent to the machine, providing an updated VLM and the most amazing to date version of Tempest.

OK - I apologize for such a lengthy delay in getting back to you. 1). The way I added mass to my spinner knob was quite cheap&simple. I started with a 1.75" wheel - nothing special about it. Since the backside was largely hollow, I filled every lasst bit of space I could with small nuts. To keep them in place, I filled the entire back of the knob (minus the space for attaching to the spinner of course) with silicone sealant. A small tube can be purchased from any automotive store for less than $5.00. This made for a VERY nice & solid feeling spinner. Also, once the silicone has set up (better llow at least 24 hours), the stuff will NEVER come out or move around. 2). With my encoder, one wheel rotation equals one web rotation (at least on the earlier circular levels). This is how the arcade behaved IIRC. Rotation with the 2600 driving wheels was WAY too slow. I believe it took 4 turns for one web rotation. Simply not an option. 3). All you need to find is a wheel with 24 slits! Make sure that the wheel and emittor/detector pair are a matched set. I don't think you would be able to precisely make your own wheel and detector anyhow. Just find a 24 slit wheel, and you will be good to go. This also takes care of your pulse sequence questions. 4). If you can find a used standard Jaguar controller on e-bay, your easiest solution will be, gut the controller. Then, you have a PCB with all of the button contacts there, as well as a nicely molded cable. Some people will probably scream at me for advocating the destruction of precious Jag controllers, but hey - they can't be that darn rare! I hope this helps you complete your controller. Feel free to e-mail me with any more questions. I will be putting up a new web site soon, which will be devoted to my various custom car & hardware projects, as well as my programming (specifically, my new work on the Nuon system). I am going to post this message over at the Atariage message board also.