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Breaking News: A working pause button for Atari 2600


vtrucco

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I thought he said it would be random colors.

Ah, there it is, at the very end: "Note that the image will get some colorful patterns, but when you turn off the pause, you can play normally again."

I suppose it would be much like the random patterns exhibited sometimes when you power on a 2600 with no cartridge or with a cartridge that isn't working right.

 

 

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Wow, that is tremendous! :thumbsup: A true milestone in post-modern VCS dev!

 

Only one very minor quibble: You really didn't need to resurrect all those old threads; this thread that you started will surely serve as a memorable marker of your achievement. IMHO, you bumping those old threads was a bit redundant.

 

That said, congratulations! Quite an achievement.

 

-tet

Edited by tetrode kink
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Wouldn't installing an external switch running to the CPU's halt line work for pausing a game? (or could that result in crashing?)

 

From the page I gather that pausing the machine that way at the wrong instant will cause a crash. The circuit shown gets an input from the board so it waits until just the right time to halt the CPU.

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Great that you solved the issue.

 

However, I don't believe it's correct that RDY should not be asserted on write cycles - From what I have read, it is perfectly safe to do so, but what actually happens is the 6507 just won't pause until the writes complete. It's true that the 6507 does not have phi1, but maybe if you only pause on write cycles, maybe the timing isn't strict.

 

Here is my proposal for a poor man's pause switch: connect a switch between pin 3 of the TIA (RDY) and pin 26 of the 6507 (R/W#). On my 4 switch, these pins are right across from one another so it would be really easy to try. Maybe it won't be as reliable but if my theory is correct, it should work reasonably well.

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About the page itself, instead of resizing the images using HTML, it would be better to resize the images with your favorite image editing program, then link those smaller images to the larger ones. That way the page would load faster and it wouldn't feel like it's trying to molest my computer. I can actually 'feel' the weight of the pictures when I scroll up and down.

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Great that you solved the issue.

 

However, I don't believe it's correct that RDY should not be asserted on write cycles - From what I have read, it is perfectly safe to do so, but what actually happens is the 6507 just won't pause until the writes complete. It's true that the 6507 does not have phi1, but maybe if you only pause on write cycles, maybe the timing isn't strict.

 

Here is my proposal for a poor man's pause switch: connect a switch between pin 3 of the TIA (RDY) and pin 26 of the 6507 (R/W#). On my 4 switch, these pins are right across from one another so it would be really easy to try. Maybe it won't be as reliable but if my theory is correct, it should work reasonably well.

I was tired when I posted this and overlooked that R/W# is not an open drain output so you need a diode in there. TIA pin 3 is open drain so no problems here.

 

That is:

                  SW
6507 Pin 26 --|<|--/ --- TIA pin 3

 

I just tried it myself and it works 99% of the time. Maybe with a debounce capacitor it could work nearly 100%.

 

EDIT: Never mind, on some games it works maybe 80% which is not good enough.

Edited by batari
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Great that you solved the issue.

 

However, I don't believe it's correct that RDY should not be asserted on write cycles - From what I have read, it is perfectly safe to do so, but what actually happens is the 6507 just won't pause until the writes complete. It's true that the 6507 does not have phi1, but maybe if you only pause on write cycles, maybe the timing isn't strict.

 

Here is my proposal for a poor man's pause switch: connect a switch between pin 3 of the TIA (RDY) and pin 26 of the 6507 (R/W#). On my 4 switch, these pins are right across from one another so it would be really easy to try. Maybe it won't be as reliable but if my theory is correct, it should work reasonably well.

I was tired when I posted this and overlooked that R/W# is not an open drain output so you need a diode in there. TIA pin 3 is open drain so no problems here.

 

That is:

          		SW
6507 Pin 26 --|<|--/ --- TIA pin 3

 

I just tried it myself and it works 99% of the time. Maybe with a debounce capacitor it could work nearly 100%.

 

EDIT: Never mind, on some games it works maybe 80% which is not good enough.

 

 

Tangential request: Would you mind briefly expounding upon the purpose/function of this diode for those of us to whom the term "open drain" has meant only "success with a plunger" for the past 20 or so years?

Edited by BigO
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