Meadow Glen

The VBXE is still the best upgrade in my view. Truth is for my machine it has perfect output whether via retrotink to modern display or a 15khz monitor… until I hook up problem peripherals and then snow. for me this is solved with clean power. like 5v drives are powered from battery. crazy but true. but if using a simpler setup even that is not necessary. ok but notwriting about that. the comment was made enhance known modes absolutely. in altirra flicker modes dont flicker, unless you want. take a look at 8 bit unity project. if flicker modes didnt flicker you would essentially have more colors. this is where someone corrects my words. me no use words good…my point is the games are there like8bit slicks. the tools are there. if thise flicker modes were enhanced by hardware to have altirra like frame blending…effectively more colors with nothing new to learn, coding wise no real hardware is known to eliminate flicker in flicker modes

My son doesn't predict this will survive the weekend...but we are going to play some track & field, and it'll have one glorious last hurrah.

ordered a retroscaler 2x I will give it a try, I've been thinking about an s-video upscaler for my 600xl. It's quite interesting to me, how the displays I have treat the problem so differently. One display will have flickering pixels while I large part of the screen doesn't flicker. Which would make sense if both frames were the same in those areas of the screen, but they aren't. Hooked up to a different display i see no flicker until I blink. Then I blink - and I see one of the frames. at this point people think I'm crazy, and start wondering if I even have an Atari, what am I looking at, were the drugs any good.... but ultimately, it could be just a unique combination of devices that I end up finding acceptable.

Unfortunately I've only got two PAL monitors with s-video inputs, and I've tried both. Hmmm, I feel like I'd like to see if I understand this... Nevermind I just said PAL, for the purposes of discussion I'll talk NTSC. In my understanding NTSC is interlaced scanning at just short of 60 fields per second. The full screen drawn at 29.97 fps Atari is 240p. So here is what I'm hearing. The TV, an old school CRT 4:3 tv, was 480i. It received a 240p progressive signal and drew it in the even lines, vertical blank, it received a 240p progressive signal and drew it now, in the odd lines. 240p sent every time, but tv draws even, then odd. Now in someones custom written flicker mode, in that vertical blank, it switched to a different frame buffer, now going to draw a different screen. One screen sent, then the other, rapidly switching. 30 of one frame, 30 of the other, total in 1 s. Now if the modern device thought it had an interlaced signal, it'd deinterlace it. In my imagination, the end result is elimination of the flicker, and also not the screen you were expecting. Lets say - this isn't real world, nobody would ever do it, but , frame buffer 1 is all red, and frame buffer 2 is all blue. You were hoping for a color combination producing magenta. But instead your tv produces odd lines red, even lines blue. So you'd have found a non-flickering - but ultimately unsatisfying solution. But since everyone knows it doesn't color combine, only I'm confused, nobody else. Did I explain it correctly? lol oh dear, well I tried all my monitors...they don't work, but I have another machine coming, it has vbxe, I'll try that as well, more monitors and scan converters to test.

ah, explained perfectly, thank you so much. Yes, the issue is that Altirra makes the mode work perfectly, and thus an acceptable target platform. Whereas, on a real atari, I find the flicker mode to be more of a tech demo, but not for production use, as the flickering is too much to bear - at least by my tastes. drat - sounds like I need a frame blending mode that works precisely as altirra does - and not really available. pity.

Altirra has a frame blending mode. It makes flicker modes look perfectly. I want to do this on a real Atari. My first thought, was old school - a high-persistence phosphor color rgb monitor like the commodore A2080 - obviously hooked up (illegally) to a VBXE..joking about the illegal part. Cannot find that, cannot find a Taxan 420l, cannot find a Zenith ZVM-136. And the only other monitor like that I've found to be known color rgb high persistence, a barco, cannot find that either. My second thought, was a very early 2003 lcd that may have been known for ghosting (the reason for looking for this apparent flaw, is the hope that it is high persistence). I actually have a lcd tv from 2003, a sharp aquos, but that is a bit more quality than I"m looking for, and so, refresh rate is still too good. With that said, it isn't terrible for flicker mode, but not perfect. As far as modern tv's or scan converters that may do interpolation, deinterlacing and motion blur - I'm not sure they do precisely what Altirra does with frame blending, I don't want interim frames, I want the two flickered frame combined. OK, that's the background. Solved already? other ideas?

well I've recently been playing games, but still maybe 10 hours in a year. I do jump into programming projects, and I'm always wondering when life will intercept those plans and bring them to a halt, which happens every single time - without exception. oh well, it's certainly normal to have a halting, intermittent, and yet real addiction to Atari

my latest answer, always first mention: Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. But, been acquiring carts that I never had bitd, and playing a few rounds of: centipede, pac-man, frogger, qix, rally speedway, robotron, dig dug, moon patrol, summer games, jungle hunt and joust. I still plan to acquire, perhaps a few more games, like spy hunter, choplifter xe version, and track&field and the homebrew beef drop....but we'll see, I tend to buy these things intermittently, so we'll see how I feel about it next year.

sell my retro has a little toms 710 for sale, 3.5" fairly compact. I don't know if it'd fit, but at a glance, looks to me smallish. bits of the past sells SF551 3.5″ 720KB Floppy Drive Bare PCB I looked briefly into having someone do a project around it, but didn't find any takers at the time. personally, I finally acquired a toms 720, so that was the end of the project for me...but it is a cool idea, imho

I just love this stuff, it's so cool.

ah thanks, I give it a try..the power and the pia, tip, I'll see how that impacts it. of course on the cpu...well if cpu swap doesn't fix it, then that would eliminate the antonia as any concern, so that would be interesting. But if it did fix it, I'd still be wondering if my antonia or generally an antonia issue. But anyway, sounds like I need to start eliminating variables, I'll try power, pia, then cpu, and see where I'm at. thread hi-jack over thanks

My 800xl with Antonia has the wires, in the same location. They are both yellow. The machine works with the Antonia, afaik, but unlike my other Atari's won't work with m side3. Won't even start if the side 3 is plugged in. I tried changing the 74ls08 to 74f08, no difference. Anyway, for me the machine seems to work fine with Antonia, but just happens to be my only Atari that won't work with the side3 cart. Just a mystery. Do you happen to use a side3? I"ve been wondering if antonia users use side 3 - just be nice to confirm it's compatible.

I see that everyone's tastes are different. I know from surveys that most people here use real Ataris - I'm the same. I use an emulator for programming, because I can compile/test very quickly that way. But, I want a real atari, and it has to do everything I wanted my real atari to do bitd, but usually didn't actually do bitd. My display back then was a horrible mess of waviness, and I literally wanted to throw it in the ocean. bitd, I wanted to use my Atari for word processing, but used my Dad's trs-80 because the display worked...and mine was crap. My Atari was primarily used for programming and BBSing. Not for word processing as I strongly wished it had been. As for games, i couldn't afford them, I had only 3 games, if I recall. However, like most boys, i did play a lot of games...just not on a computer. Still I add that point, because now that I finally got my display issues sorted, I have bought a few games to play. carts off e-bay, Galaxian, qix, centipede...I find them to be quite quality stuff. I liek the cartridge experience, so I'm not into loading up 3,000 games and trying to manage that. I will never even get through the 3 games I just mentioned, to be frank. Anyway, my 2 cents, what works for me: real Atari, that can play any cartridge, have a perfect display, 80-column mode, a hard drive, an accelerator, a floppy drive supporting 512k sectors, both joystick ports must be available, and so forth. Lots of choices and expansions have trade-offs so it isn't quite so simple to gather an ultiamte system together, imho. However, now I have such. beast - well, one in my house that lacks the accelerator and soon - one that has it all (on its way). Unlike when I bought a colecovision or Coco3, decisions I later reversed - these high end Atari's, I treasure. The difference is, those other systems just don't have the same place in my heart.

remarkable

I've played with so many different strategies, but I want to just join in with what I'm sure many will say, which is s-video is actually very good. If your tv doesn't have s-video, then a retrotink 2x mini is an option to convert from s-video to hdmi. Still rather than pay $90 for a retrotink, I'd usually just go with a used tv off e-bay with s-video, and I've had a lot of luck with LG, for example an LG 22lg31 has s-video, support 4:3 aspect ratio, is quite good at reducing noise. not sure if that still fits within the definition of modern...I think it's already a 14 year old tv itself. Anyway, since I have an 800XL, getting a tv that looks like a color match, is a bonus.