Rybags

Shorter characters. Not ground-breaking in a scrolling game but it does allow more frequent attribute changes.

That's a good idea... test any prospective monitor first on the PC. If it'll do 800x600 @ 72 Hz then it should handle the ST just fine. Although many LCD monitors will give you a very limited range of Refresh Rates to choose from - but with some nVidia and ATI drivers you can force your own custom rates.

I would guess that if Atari had a mono monitor with removable cable, the short would occur in the monitor, so that the cable would still work with colour monitors. That first one you posted seems to have audio... for $20 or so, well worth it considering the scarcity of the DIN plugs required, plus the fact it'd be a right fiddly sort of thing to construct yourself.

All the Ataris used DRAM. Exceptions to that would be some 3rd party expansions and stuff like RAM carts. I didn't know VIC used SRAM... wasn't it like 3 times the price or something at that time?

http://www.atarimania.com/atari-400-800-xl-xe.html http://atari.fandal.cz/ http://vjetnam.hopto.org/ Among those 3 you should find almost every game ever made.

The light gun is reasonably common and will also work with the 7800. Supposedly it's not very accurate and there's a project around to convert a Sega light gun to work on the Atari. The XEGS will work with any serially connected peripheral common to other 8-bit Ataris, so there's 810, 1050, XF551 from Atari, as well as 3rd party drives like Indus GT. An APE/SIO2PC interface is a much better/easier way to get disk images loaded onto the machine, it even means you can get away without having to get a disk drive at all for the Atari. There's also other options such as SIO2SD (SD card reader). Powering on holding SELECT reverses the behaviour of what happens when a keyboard is present, so you can get BASIC without keyboard (for what that's worth), or Missile Command with keyboard. All the XL and XEs came with Basic built in, so no, you don't have to find a cartridge for it.

The story should be on public record somewhere - they probably would have mailed all the shareholders telling them of their plans in order to secure enough votes.

They could have merged with a troubled chain of hot-dog stands, a completely unrelated business type, and it wouldn't have made any difference.

SIO2SD draws power from the Atari, yes. Can't you just reorder the SIO chain in a fashion where the interface does work?

Mono mode is actually ~ 71 Hz with a horizontal line time of ~ 28 uS. Standard PAL is scanline is ~ 64 uS (~ 16 KHz), so the horizontal rate should fall within range for practically any CRT monitor. Not sure what the actual resolution is, but considering the borders are somewhat large, it'd be somewhere around 800+ x 500 So, I'd say you'd be fine with most modern CRT monitors. LCD is a different story though, many just run at 60 Hz, best to check the specs to see if the one you want to use can go any higher.

Downloadable Basic Manual (PDF) ... has a little memory map and tech info. http://www.1000bit.it/support/manuali/download.asp?id=368

A bit of tech info here http://twilighte.oric.org/twinew/start.htm Oric FAQ here http://freespace.virgin.net/james.groom/oric/oricfaq.htm This guy has a book with the tech stuff, but looks like a bunch of links are broken http://home.btconnect.com/geffers/#oric Webring (remember those) http://www.webring.org/hub?ring=oric

AtariSoft actually started under Warner and I'm fairly sure they did PC games fairly early on. Supposedly it didn't last long into the Tramiel era though.

Yeah, it's pretty good (and fast). The OS is also fairly advanced and the machine's architecture well thought out in that you could have apps, utilities and the DFS (DOS) installed internally and they'd be banked in on demand and not hog much resources when not used. The games... although it had better base graphics capabilities than most, ie double the bitdepth at 160, 320 resolutions and it could do 80-column (640) modes, the BBC was crippled in that 32K was the most common RAM config. Also suffered in that it didn't have any hardware sprites or scrolling ability, although I believe VScrolling was possible via origin changes. The other downside was that it only has 8 colours (the base RGB mixes), in modes where 16 colours are available the extra 8 are just 2 colours from the base 8 alternating under software control. The 32K RAM left you with not a lot to play with. The disk drives were pretty quick too, fairly sure they used a similar philosophy to the ST/Amiga ie - disk controller onboard the computer, directly controlling the drives.

AY... *pukes* BBC uses that chip too and its 6502 at 2 MHz (double ORIC's) supposedly doesn't suffer any DMA penalties so maybe it'd be a better experimentation foundation for that sound chip. Possibly the best lead for getting some docs - found at the ORIC Wiki article: http://www.oric.org Found another site: http://www.48katmos.freeuk.com/

>50% obviously (combined) By 1996 they had nothing to sell the public, so the whole episode over the following years was just a slow liquidation effort. If taxation laws allowed everything to be sold off, take your money and run style, then they would have done that. But to maximise what you get from the carcass, you actually need to slowly bleed a company dry, take advantage of depreciation concessions etc.

Too bad he actually put in the effort to host the pic himself. If they steal your pic and bandwidth by just pointing to the original, you can fuck with them by replacing the pic with 1man1jar.

Might be that the system isn't getting enough power and is malfunctioning as a result. You could check what voltage TIA is getting with a multimeter. Check between Pins 1 (GND) and 20 (+5V). Pin 1 should be "under" the notch or dot on one end of the chip, Pin 20 is at the end of that row. | Pin 40 | Pin21 |---------------------------------| | | |o | | | |---------------------------------| | Pin 1 | Pin 20

Depends which version. According to AtariMania there was actually a ROM of the pre-release incomplete Utopia version as well as disk - the one I got in the 80s was an executable. There's also a few variants of the "cut down" version that was commercially released, and it seems Atarimania doesn't have all of them. http://www.atarimania.com/list_games_atari-400-800-xl-xe-p_total-page-step-letter_747-23-25-M_8_G.html

Note that "hum from power supplies" doesn't necessarily mean the hum you might get from the PS itself. Overvolting Ataris often show the symptom of unwanted audio through the TV - one I bought with a dodgy PS did it and it stopped as soon as I put it on my good supply.

I'd imagine that if only 1,000 or so were ever made you'd be holding something of extreme rarity, so the sky isn't quite the limit but I wouldn't be surprised if you exceeded $1,500 at auction.

512 bytes = 2 tables for the shift combinations of each 256 possible values. They're not actual sprite data, just representations of what values 0-255 would be after shifting e.g. 2, 4, 6 bits for multicolour modes. e.g. a sprite shifting 2 pixels right with initial value binary "1001 0110" First table entry would be "0010 0101" - that's the left part of the sprite. Second table entry would be "1000 0000" - that's the right part. You then OR that with the subsequent entry to the right for the next part of the sprite, e.g. you'd do it however many times needed depending on how wide the sprite is. Another method can be to just use a 256 byte table, with a "No Carry" rotate of the data. Then you just AND out the appropriate bits to give you the left or right part of the byte - halves the memory requirement but slightly more CPU time. ed - removed % binary and enclosed in quotes, for some reason it scraps the leading zeroes.

Check your TV tuning if it's via RF. POKE 77,128 and let it cycle through the colours - attract mode is good for generating weird sounds if the TV isn't tuned properly. Probably a good idea to check that the power supply isn't going bad. Check the +5V to GND on the SIO port with a multimeter - since the 800 does power conversion both in the PSU and the power supply board internally, that's 2 potential sources for overvoltage, which can potentially kill a machine.

According to the 1020 schematics, it should passthru the +5V It uses the +5V as input to a 75LS38, which appears to reset the printer if you power off the computer.

Standard 7800 output is not Composite video though. It's an RF signal that you have to tune into as Channel 1 (or whatever), just like most older computers. Composite is the "next best" or "second worst" option that you normally call AV these days.