jbanes

Ah HAH! Fresh meat for the grinder! I just so happen to need some help with such a device. Let me know if you have any questions, and/or if you want to help out.

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Great, then lets get back on topic shall we? Show all of us a better source that says Coleco made Intellivision adapters (or even had ones on the drawing board). That is what the original question was asking for after all.... 983381[/snapback] If you want it that way, fine. /ME cracks knuckles. In an interview with the founder of Intellivison Productions, Keith Robinson, the following conversation took place: Interestingly, Keith seems to believe the problem was replicating the Intellivision OS without getting into trouble. The lawsuit with Atari was probably costly for Coleco, and they may not have wanted to get into one with Intellivision. It's hard to say if he's right, since most of the lawsuits over DOS clones wouldn't come until later, but Tempest may find this info to be of interest. And with that, Mr. Else, I place the burden of proof to the contrary fully on your plate.

Excellent. Then flow with me here. I never said that people don't make mistakes. However, I'm using the best sources I have available at the moment. If you find them unsuitable, I can try finding better sources for you, or we can agree to disagree. Let me ask you, is it your position that the judge did NOT find in favor of Coleco in the Atari vs. Coleco case? If so, please share the basis for this position with the rest of us. Okay, please explain further. Coleco settled and agreed to pay Atari royalties AFTER the judge had found them not guilty? Sounds goofy, but I'm all ears.... Yes. You said you understood how the legal system works in the country? Then you must know that companies as large as Atari and Coleco can always find more Intellectual Property to sue one another over. Technically, they don't even have to have a case to harrass one another. So it's usually in the best interest to get a contract stating that they won't sue each other as long as XYZ happens. If the settlement talks failed, then the judge would have had to resolve each and every complaint the two companies had filed against each other. Many of those complaints may be completely off topic, but the result would be that both companies would lose, and one or the other could continue to prosecute the other under different complaints. As a result, a resolution that has Coleco paying a small fee to Atari in exchange for the full rights to make money off of Atari's hard work is a win for Coleco (they're still making money) and a less costly loss for Atari (they save face on one hand, and make a minor revenue from something they can't stop anyway on the other).

Yep, this is exactly the part I am talking about. Okay, maybe it wasn't ruled illegal, but a settlement was reached nonetheless.... Settlements are almost always reached. A judge will actually encourage two parties to reach a settlement that is equitable to both parties so that he doesn't have to decide a much nastier resolution. Take, for example, the case of USL vs. BSDI. USL sued BSDI for using copyrighted Unix source code. BSDI not only won the case, but also won a counter suit against USL for their use of BSD code. The final resolution was a settlement that gave BSDI perpetual rights to the Unix source code. 1. If you'd rather, I can stop citing references and fall back on the traditional "You're wrong luser! Make your time! HAHAHAHA!" Why should you believe anything I say if I don't back it up? 2. You stated (and I quote) that "Coleco's Atari adapter was ruled illegal too." The fact that they settled has nothing to do the fact that the judge still found in Coleco's favor. Thus the case is still used today as precident, since it wasn't settled before the judge produced a ruling.

Wait. Are you talking about the same Colecovision as the rest of us? From the Coleco FAQ: From the Emulation FAQ: What you may be thinking of is this part: Atari NEVER would have let Coleco produce its adaptor if they had a choice. (Which they didn't.)

You previously said that Wikipedia should be "fixed". I only suggested that if you're worried, you can clarify it to be in line with the reliable references. If you don't buy into the references, bring it up on the discussion page. Copyright law actually has exceptions for reverse engineering. Even the fearsome DMCA has holes for reverse engineering. The decision of the court in the IBM vs. COMPAQ case was that COMPAQ did not use any proprietary information to reverse engineer the BIOS, and that their replication of the code was free from IBM copyrighted code. Thus COMPAQ was found to be in the clear.

It might. The Coleco FAQ states unequivacally that the device was planned. Only the existence of prototypes is left as an open question. So if you want to change Wikipedia, you should probably change it to be more in line with the Coleco FAQ. e.g.: "Coleco had plans to create an adaptor that would allow the Colecovision to play Intellivision games. It has been rumored that prototypes of this device were created but never released." Adding the FAQ as a reference would also be a good idea.

This is a pretty tricky question. In the case of the PC BIOS, the courts decided in favor of COMPAQ, stating that the reverse engineering was legal. OTOH, courts found that AMD's use of Intel's microcode was not acceptable. (AMD later cross-licensed the code.) As a result, the question of firmware remains up in the air as it's very case specific. Of course, you must consider that the COMPAQ reverse engineering would have occurred about the same time Coleco would have considered making an Intellivision adaptor. The entire case may have scared Coleco away from the idea. Or perhaps Coleco was never able to emulate the machine well enough to make it a commercially viable product. One way or another, I can believe that Coleco worked on such a device, but ditched it before release. Keep in mind that they're not the only ones who did such emulations. For example, the Spectravideo had an adaptor for emulating the Colecovision! How about you first fix the perception that the device existed (which would require proving that it didn't exist), THEN fix the encyclopedias of the world?

I think JimmydelaKopin's point is that you're three degrees removed from the Copyright violation. The original developers violated the copyright, then managed to convince or deceive Walmart of their legitimacy, who then decieved you as to the legitimacy of the games. Even the best prosecutor in the world would have a hard time nailing the consumer on such a scandal. That being said, I'm not too keen on the copyright violations going on here, and would generally avoid these systems when you know that they're illegal. If you do accidently pick one up, however, don't spend too much time worrying about it.

One minor change from me. Instead of getting the Atari Paddle, grab the Atari 2 Player Paddle. It's a lot more fun to be able to play against a live person rather than just the computer.

Neither are many magazines and journals we read every day. That's why it pays to check the references. In this case, Wikipedia provided us with their references. Following the link to the "Article at Dot Eaters" nets you this text: The link to the Classic Gaming site nets this text: The semi-official Coleco FAQ also lists this info: Unfortunately, I think the adapter was lost to the sands of time. AFAIK, No actual hardware has ever surfaced. Then again, I don't know very much, so you may want to poke around a bit.

I just got my wife an Atari 2 Player Paddle TV Game for a gag gift for Christmas. (We usually open our gifts early.) Hot damn is that ever fun! Pong is smmmooootth, Warlord comes in two (fun) variations, and Breakout is as bad as ever! The rest of the games are so-so, but you can play most of them in two player mode, making the games a lot more fun! Sure, they may not represent precise emulations of the originals, but they're more than good enough for enjoying yourself in a head-to-head with your spouse, friend, or sibling. The downside is that there are a few minor glitches. 1) The Pong paddles can go part-way off the bottom of the screen. 2) Sometimes you can't quite get the Pong Paddle to the top, and the ball goes right on by. 3) The Breakout Paddle "sticks" for a few moments when your turn starts. (Don't launch the ball until you're unstuck!) None of these really bother me much, and I would recommend these paddles to anyone who is looking for head-to-head TV Game play. Oh, and the picture is much cleaner than the FB2. (Not surprising since it's probably Nintendo hardware.)

Cool. A little Rube Goldberg, but definitely cool. From the sounds of it, people around here are really looking for someone to sell them new paddles to use with their Atari Flashbacks. (You can include me, BTW. It would be pretty cool to get my hands on a pair, but only if it's less than the cost of the Flashback itself.) I don't know if this helps or not, but you can design yourself some quality parts using these two sites: http://www.pad2pad.com/ http://www.emachineshop.com/ You can do up a few proofs of concept to make sure they work and the price is low enough, then take pre-orders for the controllers. If you get enough pre-orders to meet your price point (say, around 100 units) you could put the orders through and ship everyone a brand new paddle! Just an idea, anyway.

It would be especially cool if they did some of those 80's style commercials where everyone looks unnaturally happy and amazed at the product in question. As long as the commercials aren't actually serious about their dopiness, it could be a lot of fun. Just please don't do as badly as the old Zelda commercial.

The CV used a Z80 processor, which was more or less a clone of the Intel 8080. As you may already know, Intel didn't add Floating Point support to their chips until the 486. (You could get a separate chip in earlier models, but the 486 was the first with it bundled.) Sooo... the only option for floating point numbers is to use a software library like this one. Be aware that this is slow, painful, and ultimately pointless for video games. Your best bet is to work out a fixed point math library and use that. (There's one on the same page as the floating point implementation.) The only thing you lose over floating point is the ability to go beyond a certain number of digits. On the bright side, your math will be far more accurate. That should be more than sufficient for video games. (Hey, it worked for BASIC back in the day, so it can't be that bad.)

Fair enough. I think I still have an MMC card floating around as well. Unfortunately, what makes a good storage device for consumer electronics doesn't necessarily make a good distribution media. (As evidenced by the failed N-Gage and the cool-but-going-nowhere Gizmondo.)

I'll never understand why everyone is so fixated on flash cards. A much better solution for this sort of thing is SmartCard Memory Cards. They come in just the right sizes for 2600 work (4K to 512K), they're cheap to manufacture in bulk, development kits are easy to come by, and they have a much more pleasing form factor. Flash cards are nice if you need to store 4-32MB of data, but otherwise they're extremely expensive. Not to mention how easy it is to lose the darn things. Plus you can't put any real artwork on something so small. (A SmartCard can have any type of high-color artwork you want to put on it. And it's printed right on the card, no stickers!) The advantages of the SmartCard form factor are the primary reason why I chose it for my game console work.

I've actually played the DreamGear at a local coffee shop. (They have a kids area of sorts.) It's not anything special, but it is kind of fun in its own way. The games consist of a bunch of shoot'em ups (including an interesting Space Invaders clone), a weird cross between Frogger and Back to the Future I (I hated that game), and a metric ton-load of mini-games. None of them really stand out in my mind, but most are good for a few minutes of amusement. The one thing I've been trying to figure out is where the games came from. My suspicions originally leaned toward crappy games from the Sega Master System, but I'm starting to wonder if they're not just NES games that were never released in the US. I did consider for a short while that the DreamGear might be a pirate console, but quite a bit of Internet research led me to the conclusion that it's probably legit. I just wish I knew where the games came from. That, and when can we get the Action52 plug and play game?

I got one of the original sticks for my son last year. I haven't noticed any serious control problems. (Other than the poor design of the joystick itself.) I can't speak to the scoring on Pole Position other than to say that it's a lot of fun competing for the high score with extended family members. Unless there's some way to outright cheat, I don't think it's that big of a deal for most consumers. /Me scratches head My memory may be faulty (since I don't have the unit in front of me), but doesn't the "Menu" button on the front of the unit allow you to pause the game? IIRC, it pops up a "Resume/Exit" menu, freezing the game in the process. Of course, I could be wrong... I saw one of these in the local Wal-mart the other day. Not quite a Capcom collection, but it might hold you over for a time.

What console are you reffering to? 973746[/snapback] The Nintendo Entertainment System. As I said, the NES's hardware was born obsolete, but kicked butt in the market. Even in the face of the far more modern Master System and (later) Genesis.

Technically, the XBOX 360 is extremely impressive. 3 cores sharing a memory cache, each with dual thread support (think: HyperThreading but with an extra pipeline), powerful SIMD instructions, incredible throughput, and ultra-fast memory all combine to create the most powerful console machine EVER! With all this parallel processing power, Microsoft can channel TERABYTES of data through the processor each second! Gigaflops of raw power coursing through the console, throwing heat and power in every which direction as it chews through instructions like candy. making short work of any task thrown at it! Why, with this technology Microsoft could... Err... Could.... *crickets chirp* Actually, I haven't the foggiest idea what they'd do with it. One would hope that Microsoft is thinking ahead and that the three cores/six threads actually have a real-world purpose. Parallelism is a wonderful thing in theory. It allows for all types of opertions to occur in a fraction of the time it would take for a single-threaded operation. Yet in reality, multiprocessing rarely lives up to the hype. Gaming, for example, is well known for its traditional use of single threads while shunning a true multi-thread design. This isn't by accident. Gaming is the very definition of a real-time system, with things having to happen at precisely the correct time to be valid. Adding threading into the operation tends to mess with the specific timing rather than help. The end result is that games probably won't use all the multithreading abilities of the XBOX 360. Instead, they'll continue to lob the hard work to the real processor of the system: The GPU. And when you consider that the difference between GPUs of the same generation is mostly minor, the XBOX 360 may not appear to be much different than any other console or gaming computer. MadDonna hit the issue on its head. The real key to gaming is developing fun games. The technology is secondary. Systems like the N64 were truly revolutionary because they used new technology to create fun new games rather than seeing the technology as an end unto itself. (Anyone remember how "3D Platformer" was an oxymoron until the N64?) IMHO, the Playstation (bad) and the XBOX (worst) have always pushed the technology over the games. Anyone remember when Sony couldn't sell the original Playstation because no one was interested in the games? Sony tried to push their Crash Bandicut series to get people interested in the games, but that initially only drove gamers away. (I'm sorry, but guys in velvet suits do not an interesting ad campaign make.) In case anyone thinks I've lost my marbles, keep one thing in mind. The NES hardware was not all that different from the Atari 2600. The difference was entirely in the fact that Nintendo had a more sophisticated PPU capable of pushing more sprites at a higher resolution than the original Atari TIA. Yet developers worked with a console that was born obsolete to produce some of the best remembered classics of all time. If that doesn't bring home the message, "it's the games stupid", I don't know what will.

I just tried this cart in the Stella emulator. I'm impressed! Great work, Thomas! If the Atari had more games like this back in the day, it might have given the Nintendo a real run for it's money. Things I liked: 1) Superb graphics 2) Smooth scrolling 3) No flicker 4) Responsive physics 5) Very cool reinterpretation of the Cave game 6) Great looking title screen Thing I didn't like: Um... I'll get back to you on that.

From the perspective of this question, the fact that it's Java is really irrelevant. If you poke through the console design, you'll note that the hardware is designed around Java code, as opposed to cell phones that need to load a separate JVM. So really, it works out to just a different type of machine code than most people are used to. If you haven't already, perhaps you might spend some time tooling around the site to gain an understanding of where I'm coming from? To give a quick rundown of the idea I've been pursuing, the idea is to create a new game console that doesn't compete in the current game console market. Instead, it goes above and beyond the TV Game "toy" market to deliver a brand new console for $25-$50 a unit. The unit itself is based on open standards (Java, USB, and Smart Cards) making it highly accessable to hobby coders. Using Smart Cards for the software limits the available data sizes to 1MB maximum (with your average card being about 32K), but keeps costs low enough to offer the cards for $5-$15 a piece. The form factor is also appealing because it encourages the whole "collectable/tradable" mindset, especially since such cards can be manufactured with colorful artwork on the card itself. (Both front and back, BTW. There's no magnetic strip, just contacts. If you've ever seen those hotel key cards, that's what these are.) Thus the end value proposition is: - Low cost console targetting the toy market ($25-$50) - Low cost games ($5-$15) - Easy access for hobbyists - Creates a market for more casual games - Quick to produce games means large library in short order - Cards are in an attractive form factor to kids - Marketing can further focus on the "tradability" of games Make sense? Sorry, I didn't want to turn this into an advertisement. My specific ideas are my own. However, I do feel the market is lacking a real game console at the moment (in the traditional sense) and that someone needs to fill it. The only question is, who will create the games for the console when it's ready? (Regardless of who finally creates the console.) If you're given a new level of challenges, but of a familiar type, would the community be interested in embracing them? I suppose it's a very difficult question to answer. A bit like, "if you like vanilla, do you think you'd like Chocolate if you tried it?" Thus a better way to state the question might be, "Would you be excited about a console that targets hobbyists?" Feel free to throw your own ideas out there about how you think such a console should be built. I'm just trying to get a feel for the communities feelings on such a beast.

Djmips and kisrael, thank you for your responses. They're most insightful. So from what I'm hearing, the biggest pull to developing the Atari is the challenge in programming it despite its natural limitations. (As opposed to the 4K gaming I've been doing which has artificially imposed constraints.) From this challenge stems a strong sense of achievement, especially when others recognize your hard work. The one thing I guess I'm still looking for to understand is: Do you think that your desire for a challenging would extend to other platforms? i.e. The Atari has long been a target because its hardware has been deciphered and is not protected in any special fashion. (As opposed to the NES which has patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets standing in the way of creating new games.) As a bonus, the platform was also a very popular one, thus making the hardware easy for enthusiasts to come by. What if Atari made a new console today, but with new challenges and the promise of actually being able to sell your games to the general populace? Would you jump on the opportunity? Taking the JGC console as an example of such a console (my pet project, and part of the reason I'm so curious about this question), I envisioned it to handle games ranging from 4KB to 1MB in size, allowing the game producer to scale his costs with the size of the game he wishes to produce. The processor wouldn't be very fast at all (less than 100MHz), yet developers would have to drive high color graphics and stereo sound using the best tricks they can come up with. The prices would be low, and the limitations of the system would again allow single developers to create competitive, quality games. (Can you imagine that we can shrink the carts of yesterday into simple credit cards of today?) Now I know that Java developers would jump at the challenge just because Java developers have something to prove. (Even if they've proven it 50 times over.) But what of you all? Putting aside the Java element, does the challenge sound like one you'd want to meet? Or is it just not as interesting as the Atari?