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here are some photos from this great event: http://www.krupkaj.cz/xgal/Fujiama2023

Hello folks, thought I'd mention I have all of the rating stuff hooked in visual and back-end. I'm running through the last set of changes, testing things out. A quick primer, here's what the custom/novice table will look like, below: After a few revisions I settled on this one because I think it's the least confusing! The overall rating can be 0-63. This is in context of the difficulty, displayed by coins next to the rating where novice is 0, pro 1 coin, etc. At the moment, 63 is a "perfect" game, literally, because it's all of the hardest settings (1 life, no bonus, +waves, +vs) and requires clearing every phase and of course, not dying is a big part of that! The shot above, 1st place, started as a 0 rated novice game all easy options selected. The rating here is low despite making it very far. 2nd and 3rd were based on Expert and MM, both 1 life, 50k 90k 40 bonus - much higher rated games from the start, but did not get as far!

Just a quick note to let everyone know that 2 new CIB games are available for purchase at www.IntellivisionCollector.com. X-Rally IntelligentVision's Lock'n'Chase: Revenge of Lupin. All copies are assembled and will be sent out within 7 days of purchase (or earlier). Direct Link: Lock'n'Chase: Revenge of Lupin Click Here! X-Rally Click Here! X-Rally has multiple different options to purchase (CIB, ROM, Board only, Full Cart & CIB + Rom). The ROM for Lock'n'Chase:ROL will be distributed from IntelligentVision @ www.Intellivision.us * IntellivisionCollector.com is only the distributor of this IntelligentVision game. The production run is limited to 150 copies. No further copies will be created afterwards.

The XE keyboard is available now (XL keyboard early November), but the XE case needs more work, that I've been prioritizing in favor of keyboards for other models of Atari 8-bit (currently working on 1200XL). I'm having my prototype cases printed by JLCPCB and PCBWay and the finish is fantastic, very smooth, doesn't feel 3D-printed. PCBWay now also does post-printing spray painting which I'm experimenting with right now. I hope this answers your questions.

https://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.20-test25.zip https://www.virtualdub.org/beta/Altirra-4.20-test25-src.7z Fixed debugger crash when opening source windows after having closed one, and tweaked the lookup algorithm. Fixed debugger windows that did not implement context menus properly when activated from the keyboard. Added context menu options to the source window to open the file in Explorer or the default editor. 1030 relay sound is now played instead of generic sound when going on-hook. 1030 full emulator now supports analog loopback. No, Altirra doesn't support VBXE core flashing. FPGA cores are raw digital circuitry and also stored in a proprietary binary format, so they're not easy to interpret and would be very slow to use. To give you an idea, when AMD first introduced AMD64, they published a Simics-based emulation of the Athlon 64 so OS devs could develop on it. It ran at 4MHz equivalent, on a highly optimized, precompiled simulation generated by a commercial simulator. The NTSC core isn't needed anyway as Altirra never embedded the laoo palette -- it presets palette 0 to the current palette in the emulator, so it was already effectively built in. This was partly to avoid dependencies on the laoo palette, and partly to avoid the ugly mismatch of improperly using a PAL palette in NTSC mode. This meant that programs didn't use quite the same palette as on the actual hardware even on PAL, but relying or modifying on the specific colors in palette 0 was not a great idea anyway, more so now that there are cores with the Rocky or NTSC Contemporary palette as well as the U1MB plugin.

And that all carts that use non-standard bankswitching are marked as untested, is what? A coincidence? If the Atari 2600+ would support these types of bankswitching, how should anyone verify without testing? Do you assume they develop a dumper that e.g. supports E0 bankswitching and does not not test it with an E0 cart? I am pretty sure they are untested, because when the list got compiled, there was no need to test them. Because at that time, the dumper wasn't supporting these types of bankswitching. However, this may improve until the release. And maybe even later too.

Why do you expect people to do research for you? Isn’t that list bad enough? On a system where supposedly everything was custom built, “exclusive,” and enhanced for the hardware. Add Moon Patrol and Sideswipers to the list, because even though they were unique, they obviously run fine on phones. And Nitro Derby, Night Stalker, Cloudy Mountain, and many more which only ever appeared in sizzle reel clips for a moment or two. Add to this the constant overpromises, failure to deliver, fighting with customers, lack of value, slimy investment schemes, deceptive marketing, and you have a real loser of a concept/project/product. Ask me to make you a list of reasons why.

Maybe the idea is to get it right for the 2600th iteration? 😅

I know we've posted some videos showing the CRY lighting effect, but here are some screens all taken while traversing a long hallway. You can see it gets quite dark as you move away from the light source.

The "no ports" rule was clearly just a meaningless soundbite. Most of the games actually developed for it, as opposed to the ones that never got past the demo stage, appear to have been ports of older Android games.

Recently, a friend of mine did me a favor and desoldered and dumped the ROM chips on a broken spare Atari 1030 modem I've had lying around for a while, to help answer some questions I've had about the behavior of the device. Attached are dumps for both the external 8K ROM chip and the internal 4K ROM on the 8050 and a disassembly of the internal firmware, for anyone curious about this slightly odd duck of a modem. Some notes: Unlike the XF551, which uses internal ROM or external ROM for its 4K firmware, the 1030 uses both the internal ROM and external ROM together for a total of 12K of firmware. The external ROM is used entirely for data storage and has no 8048 program code in it. The entirety of the external ROM and ~60% of the internal ROM is taken up by the downloadable T: handler and ModemLink software. The T: handler didn't quite fit in the internal ROM and needed an overflow to external ROM. I guess once they had that, it made sense to fill it with the ModemLink software. The different tones played during the ModemLink download are due to slightly different speeds of the routines pulling from the different storage locations, including internal bank 0, internal bank 1, and external ROM. The firmware runs four serial shift registers entirely in software: send/receive to SIO and send/receive to the modem. These are run at quarter-bit phase resolution (1200Hz for 300 baud). Thus, the 1030 reconditions and re-serializes bytes in both directions. There is a bug in the firmware where invalid command bytes can cause the firmware to jump to random code locations. For example, $5F locks up the firmware. I didn't dig into this much for fear of hardware damage from the 8050 trying to pull SIO ready low. Atari1030-8050.bin Atari1030-external.bin 1030-firmware.s

Market research indicates that people who repeatedly spend money on things like this enjoy being kicked in the nuts. Atari's just making sure that they get their money's worth.

it's clear this is simply a port of their Wii Ware game Dart Frenzy. Same aiming graphic, same game graphics (bullseye). Another Amico exclusive!

Mostly modern this week. Arcade: Battle Lane Vol 5 - 135 minutes This game went from being impossible to play to being… impossible to beat the second level. Still, another case of a high score challenge pushing me to actually understand a game! Dig Dug - 15 minutes Seemed unusually easy… Atari Lynx: Lexis - 60 minutes Just a little improvement. Genesis: Sagaia - 35 minutes For @Steven Pendleton’s HSC.

I heard about the Freezer but never knew much about it so I appreciate your post. I was so excited to get MAGICLON working that I just wanted to tell someone about it. I didn't think anyone would want it though. But since you asked, I am attaching it to this post. A caveat: It does not work on all programs. If the game turns off interrupts, then when you press SELECT, START and OPTION together, nothing happens. Having said that, here is how to use it: Run MAGICLON. It will display a screen that says PRESS SELECT. Insert the disk you want to copy and press SELECT. The game will load. Once the software is running, remove the original disk (IMPORTANT). Insert a formatted disk and press START, SELECT and OPTION at the same time. The system will write to the disk. Be patient; it has to copy a lot of data. To run the copied program, run MAGIREAD. At the SELECT screen, insert the disk that was crated and press SELECT. The software will load and run. IF START, SELECT AND OPTION do not work, try running MAGIBRK. This version will write out the data disk when the break key it pressed. Sometimes if one way does not work, the other does. If neither work, well, you just cannot copy that software.

Here is a short program that shows what you want to do. The video shows it first running in XB and you will see a slight flicker when the sprite wraps around. The compiled version does not do this. A revised version of RUNTIME4 is below the program. This has the proper code for EARLYC. The previous version had an older version of EARLYC that combined the sprite number and the sprite color. That is not done in XB256 and now the compiled version matches that behavior. 5 CALL MAGNIFY(4) 6 ECO=0 10 CALL SPRITE(#1,65,16,100,100,0,5) 20 CALL POSITION(#1,X,Y) 40 IF Y<2 AND ECO=0 THEN CALL LINK("EARLYC",1):: ECO=1 :: GOTO 20 50 IF Y>33 AND ECO=1 THEN CALL LOCATE(#1,X,Y-32):: ECO=0 :: CALL COLOR(#1,16):: GOTO 20 60 GOTO 20 (Edit) In line 50, the CALL COLOR(#1,16) is there to turn off the sprite early clock. In code that will be compiled, there is another way to turn the early clock on/off. There is no limit check on CALL COLOR, so if you add 144 to the color it will turn the early clock on. According to the E/A manual it only needs to be 128, but my notes say it must be 144 to work in Win99/4a, and that change seems to cause no problems on other simulators. CALL COLOR(#1,160) !early clock on CALL COLOR(#1,16) !early clock off RUNTIME4.TXT

Seeing that someone has made a robotron for the TI-99/4a I make this coupler for 2600 joysticks. I imagine if any of you have the 2600 joystick adapter, this would be a viable option: PM me if you'd like one I have considered making a coupler for the original TI controllers as I do have a pair of them, but I wasn't sure if anyone would want them..

Thanks, guys! To finish this off, I'm attaching the printed documentation Steve provided with the ROM cart. Then, I'll put both the scanned documentation and the dumped cart on archive.org. Finally, I'll get all of this back to @imutant with our undying gratitude! RandyWing_Wart_Program_Instructions.pdf

For the good of humanity ProSystem should be scrubbed from the internet. It's not at all accurate and relies on several bodge fixes to specific games. There are some newer emulators derived from ProSystem that fix a lot of the problems, but ProSystem itself is obsolete and should be avoided.

I strongly suspect it's just a redeco of the same old game, often used to replace missing leg of the couch.

No punishment, just delaying your times for next week so you have something to look forward to.

I didn't get my times posted either and I took advantage of the long weekend (and an Analogue Pocket) to play more games. I will accept whatever punishment Carlsson declares Atari 2600: Blocks - 235 minutes (broke my high score twice more). I'm now up to 4,134,990. Qyx - 20 minutes Beamrider - 10 minutes Dig Dug - 12 minutes Atari 7800: 3-D Asteroids - 8 minutes Astrofighter - 12 minutes Beef Drop - 5 minutes Donkey Kong - 10 minutes Mean 18 Golf - 15 minutes NES: Bases Loaded - 4 minutes Arkanoid - 13 minutes Gameboy: Solar Striker - 21 minutes

Please! The list of games marked with "pass" includes lots of extremely rare or even never released ones. They obviously never tested all those games. And anyone who knows a bit about Atari 2600 bankswitching schemes can easily see a pattern that indicates exactly what games the cart port can dump or not (also those that are not on that list).

I really don't think the R77 is "crap." While it doesn't have full cart capability because of the cart dumper, it does have Stella's full ROM capability. I've really enjoyed my R77, and that's even with owning real Atari hardware and a MiSTer. But if you take away the micro SD card capability built into the R77, as has been done with the 2600+, that cart dumper makes or breaks it.

Yeah I’m fine with ports. But I’m not fine with lying about ports and then gaslighting everyone about what the word “port” means.

Exactly. I'd actually say that using buttons for it would be better as you wouldn't have to look down at a screen and it would be quicker to select using buttons. DJC's video of Finnigan Fox where he had to keep looking down at the touch screen to know what button to press was painful to watch.

Haha- yeah because there is no way to do something like a= magnet, b= lightning, c= plunge into TT’s ego hole. I mean, that’d be too complicated.

B-b-but Tommy on this very forum said it literally couldn't be played using anything other than an Amico controller Qek6lCX.mp4

I can't speak for everyone, but I don't think any of us felt that anything was bad about having a few ports. Tommy (and team, maybe) was the one adamant about having no ports. Seems like it's only being referenced here because it was another lie by Tommy and not because anyone really thinks ports are bad.

SNES Wizardry V- 4hrs, 2min ☠️ Carts do indeed die. This one began showing all 6 characters, but having two vanish, when you'd select one. You could have either top 4, or bottom 4. Then, the puzzle screen showed up, and upon reset, 1st two characters gone, and it still only lets half of the remaining in. RIP, it lived a good life. Taking a whif near cart edge, something baked. VID_20230905_130039705.mp4

As of right now I'm working on a few items including a PCB revision change. Once I've got everything finalized, I will take orders from anybody looking to buy one. At that point, when I'm ready, the "process" will be to let me know what you're looking for, (same as something I've already built, or similar with modification(s), or something completely different), after which I can quote a price. Once all of the details are finalized, a 50% down-payment will be required (can be 100% if preferred)...after which the parts will be ordered and the controller will be built...and then its normally a 1-2 week turn around time, depending on in-stock/item availability. The circuit I'm working on will have an on/off switch to enable/disable the auto-fire circuit, as well as an external/accessible potentiometer w/ knob, to adjust the rate of fire. That's the goal, right now. Its probably possible to do, but I personally don't know of any such adapter that is available.

for gods sake let's hope atari read all this and make use of the 2 months until release.

Pyron's video about Xeno Crisis on the SNES. There are no English subtitles yet, so I'll try to summarize it: -The game runs at Mode 1 and they had to cut 4 tiles of the screen because of limitations. -The extra chip does all of the soundtrack, but it also helps with RNG and pre-rendering, they also admitted it would be a good anti-piracy measure. -According to the developers there aren't any SNES dev kits that would give them all of the features they wanted in order to make the port the way they wanted, this is why they took those measures. Pyron isn't involved with Bitmap, but he knows them personally.

Gameplay:

Hrm? Gameboy is one of the best looking things on the Pocket! Especially with the DMG/GB Pocket/GB Lite display simulations. What's this green blue native you're talking about?

I've progressed from "Promising" to "Amusing".

There is indeed a different cheat code in Towers II Enhanced. Good things come to those who wait.

Well, I had to wait for 2 1/2 years as my friend decided to wait for the price to drop to about $200. But this past August I finally got my Onyx all-in machine from him for my birthday! Just in time too, as my really old PC finally gave up the ghost, so this replaces it. My first new Atari branded computer/console since 1995! I had to do the OS flashed on a thumb drive update, but after that everything has been working like a charm. I currently have it set up on a coffee table under my projection screen until I'm ready to use it as my office PC. It's pretty portable so it will go back and forth most likely. There is nothing like playing Tempest 4000 on a 150" projection screen!

Also advise if you're using pal or ntsc consoles.

Original Carts: Missile Command Super Breakout Kaboom! Adventure Surround Warlords Pole Position Bowling Golf Video Pinball Homebrews: Strike Zone Bowling Bass Fishing Tournament Go Fish! Word Guess Yahtzee

It's amazing how this photo and your simple description of it, strikes me as more impressive than much of the Jag-era magazine hype I've seen. "It's capable of rendering 58-gaZILLION polygons!" Sounds cool I guess, but I have no frame of reference for that. However, walking down a sparsely-lit hallway? That's relatable to anyone with 2 functioning eyes (hell, even 1). An effect like that adds an element of realism that would've been unfathomable on prior-gen consoles. Sometimes it's the simple things that hit harder.

lol hey man everyone has their thing. heh heh. i find them kind of charming.. though i do need to open mine up to service some to get them a bit more responsive. at some point i'll probably get the 2600 joystick adapter myself.

I would like one for myself: Karl Garrison "Karl G" Indianapolis, IN I would also like one for my partner who is attending with me this time: Kerra Wagener Indianapolis, IN Thanks!

Hello guys I just uploaded the group picture to my meetings page and added the names. Sincerely Mathy

@jedimatt42 I'll be honest, that recent update of yours with extra DSK mappings and CS1 support was just the push i needed to stop using the 2.x PI software for good. As far as Plato is concerned i've never tried it. That video @Vorticon posted is making me think i should give it a spin sometime though.

Atari 2600 - PAC-Man 15 mins - PAC-Man 8k 15 mins - Go Fish 15 mins Genesis - E-SWAT 20 mins - Mean Bean Machine 30 mins - Bonanza Bros 20 15 mins - Biohazard Battle 30 mins I don’t think I have ever played ESWAT on Genesis. I thought I did but the levels were all new and unfamiliar to me. I think it’s a pretty cool game, like a mix of the first shinobi and RoboCop.

No gaming at all for me this week, I ended up passing my free time in the evenings smoking a pipe and reading instead. I'll probably be back with some time to contribute next weekend though!

My employer has done this motto nonsense in the past, and now we are busy at the last minute removing the motto from marketing images inside installers and login pages and login error pages, and... As an engineer, feels real productive (sarcasm)