Fort Apocalypse

woot woot! someone selling their atari 7800 signature series prototype on ebay. see this topic

Try assigning the output/return value of the function to a variable first and it will compile: function Test_Function temp1=rand+temp2 return temp1 end a = Test_Function(3) on a goto T1 T2 T3 T1 T2 T3

I think they should keep it as Atari, Inc. Renaming it to Atari America or Atari US sounds stupid, at least to me. Usually you wouldn't put the name of the country in the company name it was founded in. I'll be pissed if they change the name. I agree. Putting a country in the name is just screaming "my company will never get big enough to expand internationally".

If you read back over this thread, there were a number of reasons. First and foremost is that Atari Inc. was a black hole of money. If you take a look at the stock history, its gone down and down and down ever since they became majority shareholder (back when it was still GT Interactive). When they bought the Atari name and properties and had GT rename itself to Atari Inc., they also had it take over most of the exercising of the Atari brand. That includes development and publishing of all the major titles. Infogrames had shut down those operations in its own organization. What this meant was that the entire web of companies became completely reliant on Atari Inc.'s business and direction. Hence as they began to suffer financially, so did Infogrames. There's also the legality of it - when they had GT change their name to Atari Inc., they made them lease the Atari name and properties. That lease wasn't up yet. They did have Atari Inc. sell back the Atari.com website (in effect unleasing it), and really this was the next logical step to kill two birds with one stone. Just curious... Do you think that any part of Atari's downfall in the last few years has been due to younger game players thinking of the Atari brand as old and outdated? Or is the Atari brand a plus when it comes to younger game players? Since I'm not young (well, relatively not) I can't speak to that. And would it have any impact on Atari's ability to hire good game developers (because of a possible perception of Atari as being old and outdated)?

a couple of things... * you can attach your source as a file to your post instead of including the whole program each time if you'd like. You can also remove a file from the post by clicking on the X next to it. * bB does handle decimals but you have to define the variable it goes into like: dim mynumber = a.b (so it uses up two variables) it is a little tricky to use decimals- * to set, for example use mynumber = 1.5 * to compare, you can compare to an integer (if I remember correctly) like mynumber > 15 there is probably a much better topic somewhere on this * for your ai, I would just add to ai player y based on the position of the ball instead of setting it to equal some multiple of the ball's y. how you decide when to add/subtract to ai player y is up to you.

The Wii virtual console has support for NES, SNES, N64, NEOGEO, Sega Genesis, TurboGrafx 16, and Sega Master System. But will it ever support Atari 2600/5200/7800 or arcade games that will run in Mame? I've read in some old pages that people have hacked the Wii to get Mame to run on it, but I'm more curious about whether anyone knows if the Wii has plans to support these in the future? It really seems like the only console system at the moment that gives a crap about classicgaming/retrogaming. (Yes I know- lots of legacy titles out there for other systems- but the Wii at least has the potential to keep making more available in more than just some lame "arcade hits" type titles.)

OK, I did that. Below are two sound comparisons. This is *awesome*! Good job!!!

thats what I thought. just wanted to make sure There are actually a few ways to write text, but nothing really super easy. * write text using playfield - this is what I usually do. can scroll it too * write text using player sprites, or a really tall player sprite * override the definition of the numbers/digits displayed for score and use it to display characters There may be other ways as well, but those are the ones I know of.

If someone else talks to them, please tell them that we can't wait on the 7800 and their website doesn't seem to render well with Firefox- especially if you can reproduce the issue I'm having- when I click on the menu links on their homepage, it wants to download files instead of show any pages.

Wow, a thread from August of 2007... ...I guess I should probably search the existing topics before reopening one that's already been done. Along with the addition of the Sims objects, it looks like they're planning on integrating the Java language (...or at least provide some kind of translation/mapping of Alice constructs) to Alice, to make it more useful beyond the teaching environment. I have experience in C++, Delphi, and Java, which are all object oriented languages; so it's basically different syntaxes trying to solve the same problems. Of course, none of this is of much use in programming for Atari computers or consoles. I salute all you 6502 assembler programmers out there. That is a truly awesome skill. You should really give batari Basic a try if you're interested in programming for the 2600. If you can do C++, Delphi, and Java then you can definitely handle it. It takes a little bit of "unlearning" of OO concepts to get back into procedural mindset, but isn't hard. The forum for that is here: http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showforum=65

The demo movie of Alice reminds me of Logo, a 1980's application that allowed you to move a turtle to draw things; you could rotate the turtle in what ever direction you wanted as well as moved forwards/backwards(?) to draw pictures. I know that's not what Alice is about though. I think that when you create a tool for development of the logic of an application (whether it be for game development, or otherwise), if you restrict the user so they "can't make any mistakes" (or at least not any syntactical ones) the developer will soon tire of the tool. On the other hand, if you provide them full flexibility, but it takes too much work to produce results, then that solution will likely be avoided. However, if you just provide a high-level language environment where the developer can make mistakes, has a good level of control for almost anything you want to do with it, but can develop efficiently, that tool/language will eventually win out (assuming it is acceptably robust, etc. and becomes commonly used). In the 80's there were a few applications, Garry Kitchen's GameMaker and Arcade Construction Kit, which would let you develop games in a structured environment, and that was pretty fun. But after a while I always got bored because of their limitations. I spent many more hours back then programming in BASIC, because I could develop things quickly and it was pretty wide-open. I started going down the road at the time of getting into assembly/machine language, I could never get into it (when things get to a low enough level, my brain stops making sense of it, unfortunately). After somewhat of a hiatus of programming for several years after, I got into Java, which I found was a very powerful language, but high enough level to make sense of it. I've had jobs where I dealt as a developer with workflow UI applications to handle login and they ended up eventually being rejected because they make it harder to get the work done. In some cases the application can make it easy and provide some structure/restrictions on part of its development while still allowing you to customize it with your own code/services. As long as the application has the right balance in such a scenario, it can be wildly successful (like SalesForce for example which started off with a webbased software as a service where you could define/remove fields/move some fields around in the CRM, etc. but also provided an API into their application and the ability to link off to your code to then in turn call their API to do whatever you wanted, almost. It evolved a lot since then, but the reason it had that flexibility is a primary reason it was so widely adopted, even if it was a bit clunky at times). But back to game development, I think for the near future, using a high-level language will continue to work best for freeform development and game development, in-general. The general approach that works best is for the tool to help you work more efficiently, but not *force* you to do things the correct way. Good IDEs like IntelliJ IDea do this, and high-level languages that aren't *too* high-level like Java are great. For 2600 development at the moment, I think bB (batari Basic) is the best choice considering this.

I could make a short YouTube video showing the difference between a real Atari 2600, Stella, and JStella if you think it would be helpful. I'd be interested in seeing that! I'd also be really curious in seeing a 2600 hooked to an older CRT TV vs. LCD and show real phosphor effect vs. Stella phosphor effect and 2600 + LCD vs. Stella without phosphor effect. If you did it though, I'd be careful to show the versions of Stella and JStella (and maybe even say something quick about the OS, memory, cpu, and Java version you are using).

I have written a number of bB games and have yet to write one line of assembly. It is frustrating periodically when you run into something that won't compile in bB or run because the compile errors can often be very cryptic, but over time, if you follow the rules and play with it for a while, I think it is a great platform for writing atari 2600 games.

Yeah... it doesn't look like they spent much money on their website (please don't take offense, O'shea, Ltd., but your site needs work), so my guess is that they were in no way able to afford producing a ton of new 7800s, even 5-6 years ago: http://www.oshealtd.com/atariorderform.htm http://www.oshealtd.com/

Ah, and if I had read it I would have seen, "The client never produced the product for retail sale." Darn.

Saw this on Curt Vendel's site (Legacy Engineering Group). Anyone know (or Curt could you say) if this is planned to be sold or was just a prototype? http://209.94.123.106/leg/portfolio-7800.htm

Thanks! Here is a search on superufo that shows a number of carts (I think it's funny how some have 4 games and others have 35 for the same price, but I know some of those 35 may be just parts of games from what other posters have said about famiclones): http://superufo.com/pp/item_search_list.as...ord=one+station Here is the one station itself (out of stock): http://superufo.com/product_html/Cool_Stuf...me_Console.html

Sorry to dig up an old thread, but for some reason when I play thrust at http://www.ataritimes.com/jstella I lost control of the ship right away. I click on the window and try to control it but it just goes nuts. Can anyone figure out why?

Atari Times has JStella with a number of Atari 2600 roms: http://www.ataritimes.com/jstella/index.php There others out there as well, but it's kind of neat to choose a game from the dropdown and then hit play to reload. Note that some games either don't work (Frogger SuperCharger) or are hard to figure out how to control in JStella (Thrust). Like most applets you need to click once within the applet window to get control and then use arrow keys and spacebar. Would be fun to have a similar page for homebrew games (including ones in development).

Some more links: How it was made: http://retroactive.be/multari/making.html Another topic on the Multari 2600

You guys see this?: http://www.product-reviews.net/2008/04/11/...ste-your-money/ Any thoughts on the Multari 2600?

Has anyone tried StellaDS lately? Looks like it supports sound now. If so, what is the cheapest recommended way to get it working on a Nintendo DS? (from what to buy to how to set it up) Also, what's the method for getting homebrew games to run with it? I know some of this info is elsewhere, but I'm just not sure how straightforward getting it setup would be and whether anyone would be willing to share their experience and info on setup. Thanks!

Is Atari dead yet?

Awesome!

But by "a real system", what do you mean? A 2600 plugged into an old tube T.V. via the old cable connector might act differently than the same 2600 via a new-fangled A/V converter into an LCD HDTV I'd think. Or is that wrong and it is still all about hertz and very little about phosphor? I think every other frame flicker in bB games I've played are for the most part acceptable in Stella without phosphor effect, but obviously look better without flicker; however, unless you are using multisprite kernel in bB it is pretty hard to do a whole lot without a little EOFF ("every other frame" flicker). (Sorry, just felt like inventing a new acronym.)