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Are you able to play the Stay Frosty 2 demo (linked from the AtariAge front page)? Chris

Have you tried the ROMs from the atarimania collection: http://www.atarimania.com/rom_collection_archive_atari_2600_roms.html

Did you get any errors when flashing the loader onto the Harmony cart? This is the most likely issue. Chris

Thanks for the comments about my game - it is always great to hear from people who enjoy my creations. As far as I know, nobody has created a video of Juno First with the AtariVox speech, so it would be great if someone could upload one. Hopefully you will also enjoy my latest creation (programmed jointly with Thomas Jentzsch) Star Castle Arcade, which is planned for a cart release soon. Chris

Yes, PAL60 is the one that you will want for the UK. Thanks, Chris

On that note - there is a great free book on the making of rtype for the zx spectrum available here: http://bizzley.com Chris

You are free to write your own GPL version of Hunchy 2 Chris

To educate you: 1) The rom is freely available here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/72308-hunchy-ii/page-4?do=findComment&comment=945737 It can be played in an emulator or on real hardware with a Harmony cart. 2) The source code is also freely available (part of the zip archive above) so anyone can learn how the game was created. 3) The cost of the cart version is mostly production, and any extra I donate toward the running of the AtariAge website. Chris

The music is a TIA chiptune composition by Richard (Kulor) Armijo called "Zombified Zombie Bones". He entered it in the battle of the bits competition back in 2008, and kindly gave his permission for me to use it in Star Castle. You can find some of his other awesome chiptune creations linked from his battle of the bits profile. Chris

Only for the high score table and music playback - the Chetiry game itself is pure 6507 code. Space Rocks and SF2 use actual ARM code (written in C) for parts of the game. That doesn't mean Space Rocks is any less of an achievement - the tight timings on the Atari mean there is very little time to execute the ARM code, and heavy optimisation is still necessary. Chris

Nice work - it is great to hear the story behind each label, although it must take a long time to write each one! I'm looking forward to reading the rest of them. My favourite is probably your Chetiry label - it captures the Soviet propaganda poster style perfectly. Chris

3E/3F used by Boulderdash and a few demos - the ROM for boulderdash will never be released publicly. SB and 4A50 are schemes designed by Supercat but have never been used. X07 was used by Stellas Stocking, but the ROM has not been publicly released. Since it is a collection of minigames, it could be easily be broken down to work within 32K. EF and EFSC were designed for Homestar Runner which never progressed beyond an early demo. So you are really not missing out on anything ... Chris

The list of supported bankswitching schemes for Harmony is given in the manual where you can use a file extension to force a particular scheme: .2K Atari 2K .4K Atari 4K (default) .F8 Atari F8 .F8S Atari F8 with Superchip .F6 Atari F6 .F6S Atari F6 with Superchip .F4 Atari F4 .F4S Atari F4 with Superchip .FA CBS RAM + .FE Activision FE .3F Tigervision 3F .3E 3E (3F with up to 4K RAM) .E0 Parker Brothers E0 .E7 M-Network E7 .CV Commavid .UA UA Limited .AR Arcadia Supercharger .DPC DPC (Pitfall 2) .084 0840 Econobanking .CU Custom bankswitching As Thomas says, Harmony can support all bankswitching schemes that will fit into 32K ROM and up to around 6K RAM. The .CU extension allows user-defined bankswitching schemes (currently DPC+, Star Castle, and Chetiry schemes). Chris

Can't wait to see what you and DaveD come up with for the Star Castle label - the Space Rocks one was amazing! Chris

Have you tried cleaning the contacts and re-flashing the bios? Chris

Commercial game development (for consoles and pc) is completely different from home-brewing. Developers don't get much freedom to be creative - that side of things is handled by the game designers, directors, producers, etc. Commercial game development these days is basically about making a bunch of flaky sdks and engines (3d, physics, ai, audio, etc) work together, managing a huge collection of art assets, and writing state machines. This is normally done against an insane deadline, with constantly changing goals, and obscure bug reports from testers. All the time hoping that the project doesn't get cancelled, the studio go out of business, or the development gets outsourced! The closest commercial equivalent to home-brewing is probably app development. Apps are normally developed by small teams, with freedom to be creative, while working around the limitations of the platform. Regarding your dinner, I'd find out what kind of developer he is, and stick to high-level comparisons of modern vs classic games! Chris

Good to see you back on AtariAge. I'm also taking a bit of a break at the moment for family reasons. I was always hoping that Delicon would return at some point with a completed Chimera cart - I guess he just lost interest. The Harmony has now been pushed to do many similar things (e.g. Space Rocks is a combined ARM/6502 game), but the Chimera had some advantages. Are you planning to pick any of these projects back up? It would still be good to see the Cybertec mod improved (ideally with HDMI output), Death Derby is still an interesting project, and I hope to see [email protected] re-released at some point. Chris

Looking forward to the next update of Frantic now that Space Rocks is done Chris

Chetiry uses DPC music (not DPC+). It is similar but limited to square waves. I posted a demo in a thread about DPC music a while back. Chris

I'm based in the UK, and Thomas is based in Germany. However, we only worked on the software side of things. The carts can only be purchased from Fred, who is based in the US. If you ask nicely he may be willing to mark the package as a "Gift" to avoid import duty. Chris

I really hope you will reconsider. It would be a real shame to see this fantastic emulator go stale. Stella is one of the main reasons that I find 2600 home-brew development enjoyable, thanks to the excellent debugger. I have often thought about coding for the 7800, but the lack of a proper emulator that works on Linux always puts me off (I have always hoped that you might extend Stella with 7800 support at some point). There would be far less 2600 home-brews if it were not for Stella. I think the TIA emulation is already around 99% accurate? The only issues that I'm aware of are mid-line NUSIZx changes and some minor RESPx differences? Are there any other issues that need to be addressed? If the current implementation is difficult to understand, perhaps it would be more enjoyable to try a reimplementation, e.g. a gate-level simulation of the schematic? Chris

The rotating mines look good - much better than I was expecting! The updated siren also sounds great - nice work Ivan. Chris

It isn't available yet, and the guy running the project is currently recovering from major surgery. Chris

Very impressive work - the scrolling is growing on me now, but I'm still hoping for sloping girders on the first stage Chris

You probably need to use fractional positioning (eg 16 bit values) to get the jump offsets to look correct. Chris