Obiw4n

Yeah it is for me also, thanks for the nice comment, you know after playing as much as I have it's all down to getting all the powers and those little side pods and then it's like a knife through butter and then your playing just to get the highest score without spending a whole day playing it... anyway I did factor in those people who can do that... so the game can be almost endless, anyway 'too hard' was the only other criticism I had about the game from someone else... so hmmm, anyway cheers

Thank you Karl, yeah joypad is what I use... you can use a mouse also which is a bit fun... ( PC version only I think ) the arcade version ( for home cabinets etc ) uses a text file to assign keys to play, anyway I hope one day someone makes a decent youtube video of it, cheers

https://galaxypilot.uk/gallery/ That's the gallery for it, I got the kit from some chaps in the US ( I'm in the UK here ) supplied my own artwork etc and my game runs off a micro-pc inside the cabinet... on a special brew of windows 10... just loads my game from the power on after 30 seconds or so... anyway the game, well it's very niche... classic arcade shooter, 1980s style... basically my homage to Star Force if you remember that game... anyway if you dig down the url there's a link to download the game from Twitch if your interested, I finished the game six months ago... did the website etc... no money to advertise obviously so it went into obscurity within a day I think, anyway it was very disheartening... I've should make more videos of the game being played in the cabinet... maybe I will who knows, anyway I was just checking out the website after six months of non contact ( I had a feeling It would go no where... and I was right, hundreds of hits a day from bots but not one solid true blue human... ) so I've got a couple of years before the website I made for it expires and I suppose in the mean time if at least "3" people downloaded it and tried and started playing against each others scores ( which you can do ) then all those years huddled in the glow of my computer screen would have been worth it eh ? ah i dunno.

Not I, said the walrus, actually weirdly enough I live in Brighton ( well Hove actually ) and I have a VF and an asteroids overlay, I do now proudly own a 'Rocks & Saucers' cart for my Vectrex which was nice to get ( thanks again Thomas ) and I hope whoever bought this one recently uses it to create a new game which I'm going to do... it's going to be the best vector game ever created and the coolest, it's going to be so popular that it's going to be become eponymous on many other systems, even being shown in feature films, the Vectrex console as a result which become highly sought after and the prices for such a device will skyrocket... and the title for this most wonderful of games will be called : ? Dunno yet... I'm just chewing the cud... a bit of mental chewing gum... hmmm

Hehe, that's me... or rather that's mine, sorry about the price chaps it's what I paid for it at auction, anyway I feel a bit like cutting off a limb by selling it, I'm a developer myself ( one game in the offing and a couple of other bibbles ) and when this cartridge came up I didn't think I'd ever get my grubby mittens on one, anyhew but my ole Vectrex had a bit of a wobble and I thought to myself doh why I orta... so I wanted to claw back some of what I paid at least ( yeah right ) and thought about selling it again, I'm in the UK you see and Gumtree was there to hand so..., but you know what I may just leave it for another special day at that auction site beginning with the letter E and see If I can summon up some interest there, give some people a fair crack of the whip at getting one of these bad boys ( or the Rolls-Royce version of one ) but I have to tell you it's a sheer joy to use and play with... I feel utter delight playing Asteroids on there ( along with all the other games ) such a delightful privilege, you know Thomas has done astonishing things with the system and I feel like I've just scratched the surface of it's potential, so ahh I dunno, a guy feels quite bad selling her you know... and every time I play BattleZone on there or Star Wars/Tempest etc woah... utterly amazing, a heavy price tag yes but worth it in my view, If you can snag one for a tenth of the price oh yes lovely jubbly... If you've got the green you can beat the scene... they say... incidentally that TailGunner overlay I bought in the US of gold ole A and behind the Vectrex is Vector Pilot ( amazing ) and Vector Patrol ( again just amazing ) in their boxes and they are superb games for the system... and you can't see too well but under the Vectrex in the picture is a 1979 Cosmic Guerilla from Universal ( cocktail ) which runs my arcade pcb ( ArcadeSD ) which is American, I'm currently writing an arcade game myself which will become a real-world living breathing machine in a cabinet with artwork, marquee the lot... lovely ( Star Force remake basically ) so yeah... My ding-dong buzzed with the word "vec fever" and here I am... again sorry for the offensive price-tag and Thomas wow thank you thank you thank you ( if you ever read this ) for the dedication and joy, cheers.

Thanks Justin, I just installed a new 4.7uF 35V capacitor at C201 and its working like a charm... lovely jubbly.

Worked a treat seemingly, at first the Space Invaders cartridge I tried was B&W but with a slight tweak on that colour pot on the board colour returned, I did a few on/off tests and it was fine also, I ran it for an hour with no problems.

I have new sockets already on the way... hopefully they'll arrive tomorrow and If so I'll give it a try and report back.

Ahh yes that was me, not pretty is it... this was an aborted composite-mod board, plus I'd fried a set of chips on there so I thought I'll use it for spares, now of course I'll tart up that mess a bit and use it... I just don't know what's freaking out on that other mobo... the clue to that may reside in the way my Pole Position auto-started on there... bet you it would auto-start on yours also... and give me a Pacman cartridge and I'll show a nice ashtray made out of plastic. My Uno-Cart wouldn't start which is a quite modern cartridge and that may want parts of memory hardware to exist where it expects to find it... and when it go's reaching for it... poof. I really don't know beyond that... I'm clutching at straws.

I pulled the RIOT, CPU and TIA from my suspect 2600 and popped them into another 2600 motherboard and Combat worked, along with my UnoCart & Skiing etc, so it's gotta be particular to our main circuit boards then right ? or a particular set of components on these boards that is different in a subtle way which causes a glitch in certain games. I'm using the same switches-board and PSU as before, so there might be a subtle difference between certain electronic components on our boards which perhaps handles the feeding data from the cartridge slot to the RIOT chip...? we can't both have dry joints or grubby carts... So it has to be unique to these boards. Anyway see the attached image, the one on the left is our fussy board. The one on the right is an older 2600 board I had knocking about so I've simply popped the chips from our fussy boards in that and off it went, Memory IC quirk perhaps ?

Just as an aside to this, I tried Pole Position in another working 2600 and I was presented with the title screen... on the suspect 2600 it starts the game off right away with the intro music tune... also on this suspect 2600 the RF output has lots of ghosting regardless of tuning, you can either get a nice picture with buzzing or no buzzing but ghosting... I tried the little RF tuning pot on the modulator, so it's something else, a filter capacitor of some kind going bad, either way thanks for the feedback, I'm going to check every solder joint and check each cartridge, this all might be a quirk of a later TIA edition... we shall see hopefully.

I was just about to post on the very same problem ! - and before I went completely mental trying to work out why some cartridges worked and others did not I thought it best to post here first... and you beat me to it, now lets pool our knowledge and solve this odd little problem. I have a few 2600's knocking about and recently I bought a couple which were spares/repair just to refurbish, I had a few cartridges to test these new arrivals and so I tried 'Combat', 'Space Invaders' & 'Pole Position' and a 'Multi-Cart' into one console and they worked perfectly, the other console I'd bought had a liquid stain on the switches board and a little liquid had dripped into the main board, most likely via the cartridge slot, so I carefully cleaned off all the spooge from the switches board and also from the main board and I inserted Space Invaders and it worked... but Combat didn't... ( I had two Combat carts both failed ) my Multi-Cart failed, just a black screen or occasionally screen garbage with freaked out audio garbage... Pole Position worked every time, as did Mario Bros, same for Space Invaders and Surround... but my Yars Revenge didn't, two Combat carts didn't work... Breakout failed, Air Sea Battle, Skiing, all dead on this console but happy on the other one, Pal NTSC didn't matter. So I checked the pins on the cartridge slot and on the main board, the main IC's, reseated them after cleaning, cleaned each cartridge, some cartridges have that 5th pin missing on the top row, wasn't that. In my case I thought the spillage onto the console at some point had freaked out one of the IC's, maybe the RIOT chip ? I do have another I'll have to check, could also be a faulty memory chip with a dry joint... I'll have to check for dry joints either-way. Why would a later game like Mario Bros work while Combat would not... could it be sound ? there's a particular set of circumstances happening here, could be the board revision I have '1978 CO12283 Rev B' or it could be the versions of chips... a game expects a certain memory location or whatever and a custom chip would through it into confusion perhaps... I'm just guessing, I'll experiment some more.

Thank you for your informative reply, I was actually going to take out the 3.5mm jack altogether and replace it with a micro USB panel mount so that would plug into my little micro-USB breakout board which I could then wire the output of into the spot where the 3.5mm jack was and power it that way ? any good would you say ? I haven't yet tried this myself, but a friend also had the USB-power mod done and he reported that although he had colour on his big modern Samsung TV ( his 2600 also had a composite-out mod btw ) yet his old 14" Sony Trinitron was B&W, perhaps that colour pot needed tweaking, or the Sony ( CRT 1988 I think ) was being fussy or that mod wasn't up to the job of powering the board completely... odd, anyway I'll report back with some more results, but please If you could advise me further it would be a positive boon... and yes I used the word boon, cheers

I think I've just fried my 2600 with 28v... I thought I was being clever you see by using a DC DC booster for a USB power conversion I was doing, I forgot to measure the volts coming out of that booster after I'd fiddled with it and before you could say "Fricassee'd 2600" It was goodnight Vienna from my ole Atari, anyway I'll nab another one for the guts... but I may need some advice, I was simply trying to make my 2600 USB powered, then I saw this thread about the colour circuit needing 8v so I bought the booster and poof... I made a muck of it, next time I thought to myself I'll just wire in 5V to the board and then ask you guys where the booster should go. I bypassed the power regulator ( snipped the three pins, soldered the In & Out of the regulator together ) got the power switch working with it, I used a micro-USB breakout board which wired directly into the 2600's circuit board, I removed the old DC power jack input from the board and I had just enough space to install into the plastic case a nice female micro-USB port which then connected to my micro-USB breakout-board, If I had just wired it all up without the booster It may have worked ( without colours ) but in the end I restored the power regulator and the DC jack to see if it was dead and yup it's toast... just static & more static. But where do I insert the 8v for the colour delay circuit ? please explain clearly as I'm a novice at this, thank you.

All sorted now and I've been having a blast, amazing, thanks for this it's just fantastic.