Problem with Skeleton+ cart.

[Drewman21]

Howdy,

Say I picked up a Skeleton+ cart from the Atariage store at the end of December to get the X-mas game. I just last week got done with my FB2 cart mod and tried out my collection of games on it. I have just under 20 games that all work fine on the FB2. When I try the Skeleton+ cart I get no picture but I get sound and the gun sound if i press the fire button. Any one have any thoughts or ideas on what might be going on? I don't have a normal atari right now to try the game out on till my friend can bring his over so not entirely sure if the FB2 is the problem or not.

Anyone else have any experience with a problem like this?

 

Thanks!

Drewman21

[Drewman21]

Bump. Anyone?

[graywest]

If I had to guess, I'd say that Skeleton+ is one of the carts that is incompatible with your production run of Flashback 2. Certain games use a unique bank switching technique or non-standard programming that prevent them from running correctly on the Atari-on-a-Chip. If you get ahold of a regular 2600 to try it on, it will probably work.

Edited March 30, 2006 by graywest

[EricBall]

I'd have to look at the source code, but I do know there have been a couple of problem reports which I believe are caused by Skeleton+ not turning on VBLANK during VSYNC (although all of the graphics are blank) and performing HMOVE during VSYNC. This may cause enough of a glitch to cause certain TVs to not sync correctly. (May also be related to the specific model of VCS.)

 

AFAIK Skeleton+ doesn't include anything non-standard (i.e. undocumented opcodes) nor is it bankswitched (yup, just 4K). Of course, the FB2 could have skimped on implementing all of the VCS's quirks, or added some quirks of it's own.