Rybags

Got it at last. IGN has utterly crap hosting.

Not much of the new stuff gets me going. I'm eagerly awaiting Crysis 2, the last game that did anything for me was COD2 and I only bothered playing through the one time. The problem is there's just no innovation and not much original. There's barely any Space/Trading type games, and I've not heard of any RPG in the vein of Alternate Reality that's made me want to play it. Add to that the bastardry present in the industry - first they removed the mod-friendliness that so many games encouraged, then they moved towards user-pays additional content that used to be free. The next slap in the face is crippling new games because they're developed in parallel with the lame console versions. About the only positive there is that your 4 year old hardware has no problems running anything. Then they top the whole thing off with ridiculous copy protections that force you to be 'net connected just to start a game that doesn't even need a 'net connection to play single player or LAN mode, plus this business of legislating to make selling your used game media illegal.

By the look of that circuit it has nothing to do with the Pot inputs. But yes, if the paddles work fine on your 2600 then it's a possibility you've got something wrong with the XEGS.

Start it with Basic, run this: 10 ? PADDLE(0),PADDLE(1),PTRIG(0);" ";PTRIG(1):GOTO 10 Well working paddles will have minimal jitter of the values when not being rotated. It's perfectly normal to have a dead zone at each end as well.

If you're wanting to run on a TV with SCART that does RGB then yes. If you're wanting to get the composite signal from the ST then I believe it will only work with models that have an RF modulator. Also, you can't get S-Video from a normal ST - the Colour/Luma aren't present on the monitor port. http://pinouts.ru/Video/AtariStMonitor_pinout.shtml

Seems it's a recent hack. http://mameworld.info/mrdo/dkfoundry/index.html http://www.jeffsromhack.com/products/donkeykong.htm

No need to do that - just move the head towards the back of the drive and the belt should be visible - don't expect something big, it's only a couple of mm wide.

The auction links to the "official site" which in turn has the device 5 Quid cheaper. It's got USB connectivity... so probably also has a microcontroller that does all the conversion for the various controllers. But yeah, a little pricey although I can't recall seeing anything else that works with multiple old system's controllers to USB.

The issue isn't XL compatability, it's just the fact that some carts are having spurious reads at those addresses. Bob... could you try swapping the two ROM chips in the cart over, then see if the read anomolies still occur at the same address? I guess also try the equivalent address that'd hit the same data, ie old address $8100, new address would be $A100 if it's 2 x 8K ROMs being swapped. Of course, the thing then won't run so you'd have to have the test program running and hotswap the cart.

The other thing is that you need to weight each loss and gain in a lookahead algorithm. You might have a situation where you lose a third of your pieces in several moves, but can be put in a winning situation, but some algorithms might miss it entirely because they quit the scan if a bad run starts. Additionally you have some chess programs that have a bunch of "classic starts" programmed in - by allowing them to use them would be unfair if against a program that relies only on it's own merits.

It depends on the individual animation really. I did the entire 27 or so Impossible Mission images, and only needed to rework pixels on 3 or 4 of them. Another thing - a complex animation might look entirely crap when you look at indivual images, but when you play it back it can look entirely OK.

A much more workable solution would be to have an entire new BIOS and IDE or SATA interface that can use a modern drive. Even then, it'd likely be a headache and would also depend on the particular system always using specific system calls to do I/O. But if you went to such trouble, in this day and age it'd just make a whole lot more sense to use SD cards instead.

You've only got 6 sprite shapes you need converted? That could be done in like 10 minutes using Paint, The Gimp or Photoshop.

It won't necessarily work. The Translator copies the modified 800 OS into high RAM. Not sure how the AtariMax ATR loader works, but I'd guess that it might rely on a modified OS that intercepts SIO calls. In that case there'd be a potential for conflict. But not all is lost - it'd be reasonably easy to create an XEX version that should work from disk or cart.

The belt goes around a small spindle on the drive motor, and the flywheel which is attached at to the drive spindle by a shaft. The motor is towards the back corner of the drive mech, obscured by a circuit board. The belt is barely visible, you'd probably need to move the head backwards a bit to see it (the belt is actually right down the bottom of the drive mech. You might hear the motor turn if you turn the shiny spindle below the plastic one that holds the disk. Turning the plastic spindle that holds the disk shouldn't do anything, it seems to run on a freewheel mechanism.

Fairly sure Atari's Chess is only 4K - so it's not exactly going to contain much in the way of super algorithms. Probably why the top level moves takes 20 hours - rather than having much in the way of strategies, the computer just evaluates every single possibility a certain number of moves into the future depending on level.

An interesting experiment might be to see how smart the computer player really is at the top level. IIRC a move takes something like 20 hours at the highest setting, but under emulation that could be sped up to something like 10-20 minutes. I'd try it myself, except Chess for me is about as interesting as watching paint dry.

Good idea to take the top off, then you can see if stuff is moving. While you're in there, it's probably overdue for a head-clean.

Trust me - they are two distinctly seperate SIO commands. It might be that DOS has the smarts to check the drive type first... like I said, my 810 doesn't work so I haven't used one of them in decades.

Memory a bit fuzzy here... my 810 doesn't work, but I don't think the 810 actually turns the disk like the 1050 does when inserted. The main reason the 1050 needs to do that is so it can work out what density it's dealing with. When using DOS 2.5, I'm fairly sure you just use the Format command as normal with the 810. Format Single is actually a seperate command that is specific to the 1050 drive.

A Boot Error is at least a sign that the logic board is working. Just remember, it'll only work with 88K Single-Density formatted disks - put an ED or DD floppy in and it can't read it. Best bet would be to boot up with 1050 as D1: and 810 as D2: then try doing some stuff like formatting, writing DOS files etc. Screws are accessable from the top - 4 of them and they might have little plastic covers that you can just lever off with a small screwdriver.

Hope it's got some stuff in there to make it worthwhile. Fairly sure some of the tech docs for the chipset (that we have PDFs of) had the odd page in them that had the similar "internal use only" types of stamps on them.

The version kjmann posted is better IMO. Virtually the same procedure, but leave the PBI alone - grab the address bus inputs from the pads above Antic. 64k_upgrade_600xl-1.txt I did it slightly differently - rather than cutting the resistor mentioned, just sever the trace below it.

I wouldn't use it myself although I've done hotswapping but generally only when copying carts. There's better options around anyway - most incompatible software has an "XL-fix", it's just a case of finding it. A better cartridge option would be an AtariMax cart - a Translator could be run from it without any need of removing the cartridge because you can just switch the cartridge off. No idea if anyone's bothered to create such an image yet though.

Check his recent sales. A whole bunch of stuff for next to nothing. Maybe he's trying to make up for the poor form.