How do i test it?

[Primordial Ooze]

Once i create a .bin of my game how do i go about testing it on my real Atari 2600, preferably with a reprogrammable cartridge? Cuttle Cart and Krocidile Cart are no longer being produced requiring me to buy therequired chips from the store and soldering them everythime i update my game and want to test it. Can someone please help me out?

 

Sincerely,

 

Space Xscape

[cd-w]

Once i create a .bin of my game how do i go about testing it on my real Atari 2600, preferably with a reprogrammable cartridge? Cuttle Cart and Krocidile Cart are no longer being produced requiring me to buy therequired chips from the store and soldering them everythime i update my game and want to test it. Can someone please help me out?

 

Sincerely,

 

Space Xscape

 

For 4K bins you can use a Starpath/Arcadia Supercharger, by following these instructions. Superchargers are relatively easy to obtain on eBay and sell for around $20 (e.g. this auction (zero feedback seller so be careful!)). However, the Stella and Z26 emulators are good enough that you shouldn't need to test on real hardware except at the very end of development.

 

Chris

Edited December 26, 2007 by cd-w

[Primordial Ooze]

Any way to store the rom image a little more perminetly like a flash card instead of having to load it everytime i want to play?

 

Thanks,

 

Space Xscape

[SeaGtGruff]

Once i create a .bin of my game how do i go about testing it on my real Atari 2600, preferably with a reprogrammable cartridge? Cuttle Cart and Krocidile Cart are no longer being produced requiring me to buy therequired chips from the store and soldering them everythime i update my game and want to test it. Can someone please help me out?

 

Sincerely,

 

Space Xscape

 

For 4K bins you can use a Starpath/Arcadia Supercharger, by following these instructions. Superchargers are relatively easy to obtain on eBay and sell for around $20 (e.g. this auction (zero feedback seller so be careful!)). However, the Stella and Z26 emulators are good enough that you shouldn't need to test on real hardware except at the very end of development.

 

Chris

You can also post your ROM image in the forums and ask for someone to try it on a real 2600 and/or 7800. I can test it on both. Or, if you don't want to post it for everyone to download, you can email it to a few people who agree to test it and keep it under wraps!

 

Michael

[Primordial Ooze]

I don't mind if everyone has a copy of my game as most likely it will be open source. I just wanted to have some way to create a real cartridge for those who wanted it and mainly for testing purposes.

 

Thanks,

 

Space Xscape

[Tom]

I use modded 2600/7800 cartridges with a ZIF socket sticking out of them and a bunch of EPROMs. This IS a painful way to test software, but the emulators available for many systems are pretty good, so I need only few tests on real hardware. Knowing the flaws of the emulators (like having a too fast CPU, as VBA has or used to have) helps.

[Ben_Larson]

IMO it's a very bad idea to wait till the end to test on the real hardware. I've run into problems doing this with stuff that is very tight time-wise and doing other strange things. For example, try changing the player size/copies bits on the same line you're displaying the player - this causes problems on the far left side of the screen on the real hardware but not on Z26 (at least on the version I'm using). Another thing that can trip you up is the fact that the real hardware starts up in a random state and the emulators don't. Which may not seem like a big deal until you accidentally do something like this:

 

LDA $0

 

when you really meant:

 

LDA #$0

 

...and then you wonder why it works (at first) on an emulator but crashes right away on the real hardware.

 

-Ben

[+batari]

LDA $0

 

when you really meant:

 

LDA #$0

 

...and then you wonder why it works (at first) on an emulator but crashes right away on the real hardware.

 

-Ben

These sorts of bugs can be caught with my auditasm utility. I think the second zip file is the latest one (it's been so long that I can't remember )

[cosmosiss]

http://www.atariage.com/store/index.php?ma...products_id=217

 

It says they won't fit on a cart because of the socket (plus EPROM), but I suppose you could cut a hole on the top half of the shell so you can close it.