Chimera Call for Engineers

[mos6507]

Delicon always wanted Chimera to be an "open-source" device where he would bootstrap it and then the rest of the community would enhance it, maybe make their own variations of it using the freely distributed source files. With that in mind, and with Delicon no longer being around for several months, I think it's worth it to take the pulse of the community to see if anyone else might be qualified and motivated enough to complete the cartridge in his stead. Unfortunately I do not have all the files you would need in order to avoid recreating a lot of his work, however if you did it yourself for all we know you may come up with a better, cheaper way of doing things. Remember that this is, at best, a break-even venture. The cart would have to be sold for a low price otherwise it defeats the purpose of the project. If you are interested, please send me a personal message.

[Richard H.]

Perhaps you could merge projects with supercat. I don't think there's anyone who know's as much about Atari hardware as John.

[supercat]

Perhaps you could merge projects with supercat. I don't think there's anyone who know's as much about Atari hardware as John.

 

Well, I really should push myself more to do something with 4A50 before I take on yet another project. I find some of the Chimera ideas interesting, though I fear it's getting too far away from being a "real" 2600 game. Not totally beyond the realm of reason (after all, David Crane's DPC was used in a real 2600 game) but the Chimera seems to take things to the point that the 2600 becomes more of an obstacle than anything else. My design philosophy in 4A50 was to maximize the amount of processing work the 2600 could do, not offload the processing to another device.

 

I'd be interested to see what people do with Chimera. I really do need to focus on my own projects, though, or they'll never get done.

[mos6507]

I'm bumping this thread. Maybe I should expand my search outside of AtariAge before giving up.

 

I do hope that Delicon rematerializes and gives a nice explanation for him being away for months, but that seems less and less likely with each passing week. I think I'm going to have to do some more legwork to track down his nearest kin. If the worst has happened, I will have to ask for access to his computer materials so that I can at least publish his work in its current state. That's something I failed to do with Jim Nitchals, who in the end was working on some cool stuff like Combat networked between two VCSs.

 

In the meantime, I still have enough material here that someone with the right skillset could probably get the gist of what he was doing and finish it off.

 

But the biggest limiting factor is finding someone with the motivation to do this for nothing else than the sense of accomplishment and maybe getting slashdotted. I could afford to, let's say, just pay Chad Schell outright to do it, but then we're talking about a pure financial loss on my end. The reason this project was going to be doable was the combination of Delicon devoting his time to it, and me being willing (in the end) to sell carts at or below cost. Also, this has been a lengthy on-again-off-again project for me, all the way back to right before Hurrican Katrina. I was going to enjoy being a financial enabler to help pull off this coup of engineering, but if this doesn't get back on track through one means or another in the next few months, I just think I'm going to lose the motivation to pony up the money for it. There are plenty of more practical things in my life to budget for.

 

So for anyone in a position to make it happen, it's fast becoming now or never.