Saturday David and I wasted a good three hours trying to get a Raspberry Pi 4B to boot using power from the 7800 joystick ports.
It didn't work. The recommended power supply for the 4B is 3 Amps. It's power requirement at idle is 600 mA.
I spent a good portion of this evening trying to get the boot time of an RPi Zero W down to something small enough to correspond with a cart change on the 7800. Best I could do was 28 seconds. Not bad considering that I shaved off 32 seco
After some more discussion with my friend David, we decided last night that it wouldn't take a whole lot more effort to build a prototype that supports both 2600/7800 ports as well as both the 2-port and 4-port version of the Atari 5200.
In addition to my 7800, I have a 4 x port 5200, so I can test the full-range of the prototype.
This can be done with 4 x 5242 chips, 13 x 715 chips, 1 x multiplexer, and power switch.
I ordered all the necessary parts today, s
I've received all the chips I need to wire up 2 ports on either 2600/7800 or the 5200.
Below is a photo of the chips for one port plus the multiplexer and the power switch. Also there is a photo of these chips wired up for all three controllers. However, I've temporarily wired it up to the 2600 cable as I don't want to dig my 5200 out of storage for now.
I haven't recorded another video because I need to rewrite my Python code to work with this new configuration.
I had no idea how much wiring was involved.
Drawings on a diagram don't look as complicated.
After thinking about it for quite some time. I decide it was possible to build a controller that can work with the 2600, 7800, and 5200.
The photos show one controller wired up using 4 x 715 i2c chips (8 switches per chip), 1 x 5242 i2c chip (two digital pots per chip), and a gpio controlled mic chip for controlling power.
The final version of this thing, t
Test with XBox One S controller using Bluetooth.
Development of the Pi hat is a two person endeavor. I'm doing the Python programming and testing, and my friend, formerly an enlisted electronics specialist in the USAF, is providing the electronics expertise.
I tell him what I want to accomplish and give him feedback after I layout the chips on the breadboard. He picks out the chips, does the pin soldering, and is designing the hat layout.
The hat will do every
Tonight I installed the development environment for DCP+, I will fiddle around with it and hopefully be able to suck some additional cycles from my scan lines.
Ubuntu 14.05 - Check
Shared Folders - Check
ARM Compiler - Check
Test Source Build - Check
Using the DCP+ tools, I'll probably implement a horizontally scrolling broomball pitch... and dynamically build the scan line data (color, sprite, playball) using the ARM processor in the 4K of Display Ram.
Hopefully this will give me th
I added a full compliment of sprites for the pitch area. The original idea was to make the center of the pitch where the goalies and centers are located to split into an interlaced area. Where GRP0 would be both goalies on the A/B frames (no flicker, no space between scan lines), and GRP1 would be the alternating team centers on A and B (no flicker, but the center for each team would render on alternating scanlines).
If that makes since...
Anyway, I was having problems getting the timing
I work at Univ of North Dakota, and I know one of the archaeologist who participated in the ET Dig in the New Mexico landfill. http://www.thenorthwestern.com/story/entertainment/2015/01/09/archaeologist-donates-atari-cartridge-dig-university/21516519/ Not long after the movie about the dig was released, we had a screening on campus, which featured not only a discussion with the archaeologists, but also a good portion of my Atari collection... All of which was setup for people to play. Xenophob
Met up with my mom at the mall today, and got my Atari 7800.
In the same storage box I also found my old Fischer Price PXL 2000 video camera, a Christmas gift circa 1988, when video cameras were super expensive. The PXL 2000 was $99, and used high-bias audio cassette tapes to record 60 minutes of B&W video. Ahhh.... the memories... and extremely embarrassing attempts at making making music videos.
My Harmony Cart arrived yesterday.
Since, I have started reading up on DPC+ bankswitching.
I bought the HC simply because I wanted to see the games I am developing on real hardware, but now I see that the features I want to add to Broomball will be so much easier (or even possible) with DPC+.
Quite frankly, I like the idea of writing the difficult logic parts of the game in C code rather than in assembly anyway.
Edit: Oh yeah - I forgot... I don't have my Atari system here. My mo
Alas, my family cannot see past my Amazon for xmas gifts.
So today, I added the link to the Atari Age Gift Certificate page to my Amazon Wish List using the "I want" box. Here's hoping that at least one person will copy & paste the link into a web browser.
I there is a better way, I'm all ears.
Updated the Broomsticks bin today.
Freed up 20 bytes of by implementing Indirect Indexed Addressing. Discovered in order to do so I had to swap all my X Register code with my Y Register code.
Then I used that extra ram to bounce the Quaffle around the screen.
http://8bitworkshop.com/?sharekey=f909be8aac064c47f5b0a2bd01793602
After a hiatus of 10 years, I have returned to try to finish a game. Hopefully the Atari Age community will keep me motivated, because admittedly, the going will probably be somewhat slow.
Where to start? I don't know if I have any great original ideas for game. Especially one that has really great graphics, so my plan is to try to turn the real world game of hockey into a somewhat visually appealing VCS game with halfway decent game play.
I guess the ultimate goal would be to have a com
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