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Hello all, After 2 years+ of development, Turbo Arcade is nearing completion and will be available at the Champ Games booth at this year's Portland Retro Gaming Expo. A huge thanks to @Nathan Strum and all of his hard work researching printers and producing all of the artwork for the game (box, manual, label and poster), as well as all of the in-game graphics and sounds! (is there nothing he can't do?!?! ) Here are some images of the box: I also want to thank @Albert for helping with the transition process with recommendations, suggestions and reviewing the text for the box and manual (Nathan and I are C+ grammar students at best ). We also plan on adding Turbo Arcade (both boxed version and digital download) to our Champ Games store after we return from the convention, most likely in early December. If you're in the Portland area in mid-October, come on down and visit as we will have the games set up to play as well. Our booth will be in close proximity to the AtariAge booth. Hope to see you there! Thanks, John

Hey Dan, it's winding down, creeping toward the finish. Ratings are done. After play testing this a bit I've had the chance to patch what I think are the last set of bugs, annoyances, and gameplay tweaks, *knock on wood*. There is one tweak / gameplay change left that I've been tinkering with in Waves mode. The bonus round put in initially I feel is kind of bland at early phases so I've been experimenting with loading it in realtime instead of having coins spilling out the pipes. I find that it's working well so far. All it needs is the "perfect" bonus applied and randomization when more! points are enabled. wavesbonus.mp4

RGC RetroGameCon Syracuse NY October 7 & 8 2023 Midnight Blue & IntellivisionRevolution will have a booth set up. Anyone planning on attending, post in here. Zendocon will be hosting the booth. Programmer of Minehunter, Blix, Fubar, A Better Mousetrap and more. Convention releases planned: 1. Triple Challenge Vol. 2 2. Melody Blaster II Sneak peek of the overlays.

this isn't true. my 68K is based on the decap, and I used extensive logic analyzer and chip testing to reproduce functionality of the rest of the system. my 2600 and 7800 cores are based on the chip schematics.

I tested a bunch of random homebrew games this afternoon on the 2600+. Here's what I tested: Spies in the Night (8K - F8) Medieval Mayhem (32K - F4) Dungeon II (4K) Incoming! (4K) Dungeon (32K - F4) Reindeer Rescue (16K - F6) Thrust+ Platinum (16K - F6) Go Fish (NTSC, 8K - F8) Toyshop Trouble (8K - F8) A Roach in Space (32K - F4) Bee-Ball (4K) Seaweed Assault (32K - F4SC) All worked perfectly except for Seaweed Assault, which did boot fine, but when you start a new game, the screen is full of tons of random seaweed, making the game impossible to play. I assume this is some sort of RAM-related issue, as that game uses the extra SARA RAM, so I will investigate. (Forgot to put Seaweed Assault in this bin before I took the photo). ..Al

Look what I got today from Canada 🇨🇦! I have a couple cool games to play,so awesome.😃 They were packaged 📦 perfectly, unlike some stuff I've been getting from Amazon. Thank you Intellivision Collector for coming into the game producing scene and distributing such great,fun and well presented stuff.👍

Not that I've experienced, and I'm pretty sensitive to that. Initially when I hooked the 2600+ to my LG OLED television, there was noticeable lag. I had to put the TV into a predefined "Game" mode, which presumably removes most of the image processing (which is kind of insane on some of these TVs) and that fixed it. ..Al

Atari Game Station Pro Games 2600 (82) 3D Tic-Tac-Toe Adventure Adventure II Air-Sea Battle Aquaventure Asteroids Atari Video Cube Basic Math Basketball Bowling Boxing (Activision) Breakout Canyon Bomber Centipede Championship Soccer Circus Atari Combat Combat Two Crystal Castles Dark Chambers Demons to Diamonds Desert Falcon Dodge ‘Em Double Dunk Drag Race Fast Eddie Fatal Run Flag Capture Football Frog Pond Golf Gravitar Hangman Haunted House Home Run Human Cannonball Indy 500 Maze Craze Millipede Miniature Golf Missile Command MotoRodeo Night Driver Off the Wall Outlaw Pong (Video Olympics) Quadrun Radar Lock Realsports Baseball Realsports Basketball Realsports Boxing Realsports Football Realsports Soccer Realsports Tennis Realsports Volleyball Road Runner Saboteur Save Mary Secret Quest Sky Diver Slot Racers Solaris Space Raid Space War Sprint Master Steeplechase Street Racer Stunt Cycle Submarine Commander Super Baseball Super Breakout Super Football Surround Swordquest: Earthworld Swordquest: Fireworld Swordquest: Waterworld Tempest Video Checkers Video Pinball Warlords Wizard Yars’ Revenge 5200 (7) Centipede Frisky Tom Meebzork Millipede Missile Command Realsports Baseball Realsports Basketball 7800 (10) Alien Brigade Asteroids Basketbrawl Centipede Dark Chambers Desert Falcon Food Fight Motorpsycho Realsports Baseball Scrapyard Dog Arcade (39) Alpha One Asteroids Asteroids Deluxe Atari Baseball Atari Football Atari Soccer Avalanche Basketball Canyon Bomber Centipede Cloud 9 Crystal Castles Dominos Drag Race Fire Truck Food Fight Gravitar I, Robot Liberator Lunar Battle Lunar Lander Major Havoc Millipede Missile Command Monte Carlo Night Driver Pool Shark Quantum Red Baron Runaway Sky Diver Sky Raider Space Duel Super Breakout Super Bug Tempest Tournament Table Ultra Tank Warlords Bonus 8 Eyes Bad Street Brawler Beast Ball Brave Battle Saga Burglar X Canon: Legend of the New Gods Cheese Chase Dash Galaxy in the Alien Asylum Diver Boy Eliminator Boat Duel Escape from Atlantis Exploding Fist Fancy World Free Fall Galaxy Gunners Gorodki Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3D Lan Master Lawn Mower Little Lancelot Lucky Boom Maniac's Square Mega 3D Noah's Ark Mermaids of Atlantis Metal Mech Mighty Warriors Motor City Patrol Nightshade: Part I: The Claws of Sutekh Noah's Ark Ping Pong Masters 93 Pow 2 Power Punch II Pyramids of Ra Radical Rex Snakki Snowboard Championship Stanley: The Search for Dr. Livingston Steel Force Street Racer Sumo Slam Super Hunchback Switchblade Sword of Sodan Target: Renegade The Fidgetts The Gadget Twins The Humans The Immortal The Mutant Virus Thunderbolt Thunderbolt II Tinhead Top Racer 2 Treasure Master Viking Child Water Margin World Rally World Trophy Soccer Zany Golf Zooming Secretary 😎

This is a common problem with the original Geneve cards, especially those without heat sinks or without thermal compound between the heat sink and regulator. Be sure to use both with your replacement, unless you decide to use the DC-to-DC converters as discussed in prior posts. The DC-to-DC converters are cool to the touch. The VDP RAM on the other side of the card is subject to eventual failure, especially the chip adjacent to the regulator. A proper heat sink will mitigate the heat issue in most cases. I replaced the regulator with a DC-to-DC converter on my 24/7/365 Geneve because the VRAM kept failing over time. This is especially noticeable with Extended BASIC and other VDP-intensive programs. And since most disk DSRs also use VDP, failure can cause file content corruption in extreme cases.

Hello all, After 2 years+ of development, Turbo Arcade is nearing completion and will be available at the Champ Games booth at this year's Portland Retro Gaming Expo. A huge thanks to @Nathan Strum and all of his hard work researching printers and producing all of the artwork for the game (box, manual, label and poster), as well as all of the in-game graphics and sounds! (is there nothing he can't do?!?! ) Here are some images of the box: I also want to thank @Albert for helping with the transition process with recommendations, suggestions and reviewing the text for the box and manual (Nathan and I are C+ grammar students at best ). We also plan on adding Turbo Arcade (both boxed version and digital download) to our Champ Games store after we return from the convention, most likely in early December. If you're in the Portland area in mid-October, come on down and visit as we will have the games set up to play as well. Our booth will be in close proximity to the AtariAge booth. Hope to see you there! Thanks, John

The funny thing is that I cannot really be certain that it wasn't me who put the heat sinks under the regulators. After such a long time, you really don't recall every screw turn. 🙂

So was my Geneve already improved when I bought it in 1990? (concerning the heat sinks, not the battery or SRAM expansion, that was me)

Plus there's always room for some mistakes. It always happens for instance on replica circuit boards for classic 8-bit computers. While not nearly as complicated as decapping and replicating something like a processor or sound chip, the first attempt sent off to a company like PCB Way inevitably always has some mistakes and needs a trace cut here, a bodge wire somewhere else, etc. So while in theory it's a great sounding idea to avoid inaccuracies, I can only imagine the challenge involved in creating a cycle accurate replica of a classic game system that ramps up the complexity exponentially. So much opportunity for small mistakes to slip in. I simply did a poor job of expressing myself with my initial post. I wasn't out to denigrate any project (I've spent countless happy hours with my Analogue systems, Kevtris). While I'm largely clueless in the challenges, techniques, and such involved in such projects, I was just trying to explain to Dr Karnov that FPGA hardware simulation isn't automatically better than software emulation like he seemed to think. It offers advantages like a live cartridge bus, but also comes with disadvantages. There's still plenty of room for human error, incomplete technical information, and such. It's all up to the capabilities of the author or team behind a project. So just as we have top notch emulators like Stella along with poor emulators, not every FPGA core is created equal. I'd take a good software emulator over a lackluster FPGA implementation any day and vice versa.

I don't stream often, but when I do I'm usually doing development. Which means it's mostly code and might not be TI-centric. And my streams only stay up two weeks and are auto-deleted. But, if you want to follow - https://www.twitch.tv/tursilion

Yeah, the other cars were a quick addition I threw in and they aren't really polished yet. Now that I'm back from vacation, that's one of the things on my todo list I'm looking forward to tackling. I also don't know if the C64 let you move your men past each other when facing the same direction, something to figure out later today. Sorry for picking the wrong monitor, but it's what I had back in my day, so it's staying ;). (although I had the amber version, it's just that the TI doesn't have any good shades of amber to work with). Still planning to do the boxed release. Hopefully more news on that soon...

The fact it can load ROMS from SD increases my interest in it! OK even I think this is pretty cool to see, as someone burned out on the overly focused 2600 which, make no mistake I LOVE, great to see some other classic Atari platforms represented, hopefully, this is the start of seeing more products focused on more Atari platforms. NGL this is way better than my skeptical ass expected.

Hi. The new version of IntelliTool, a graphical interface to assist in creating games for Intellivision, is available for download. It has an intelligent code editor, tile and screen editor, as well as integrating other tools such as IntyColor and Bin2Rom/Rom2Bin. Write your code and simply press F5 to see the result. Allows you to create a project with several BAS files (to test different versions, for example). This short video shows some examples. IntelliTool (for Windows) can be downloaded from: http://intellivisionbrasil.com.br (Software/Emulators and Tools menu). Note: you will need to manually include the GROM.BIN, IVOICE.BIN, ECS.BIN and EXEC.BIN files. I hope it can be useful.

I honestly don't think the release schedule is intentional in any way other than they have a limited pool to draw from and it takes time to acquire new licenses. In other words, their "sluggish" release schedule is a side effect of how they're acquiring licenses, not an actual plan (I know when I worked for AtGames, negotiations could stretch on for years, which is why, for example, you're only just now seeing a Zen partnership for AtGames). Of course, they DO have to be careful not to flood their own market, balancing releases with what their present userbase will support. It does them no good to have thousands of titles available when the roughly 500 they have now are what can presently be supported by their userbase. In short, I think they simply can't increase the pace even if they wanted to. Getting new licenses is tough. The trickle of releases is all that's possible, plus again, it allows their present userbase to snatch up most of what's available rather than having to pick and choose because too many cartridges are released at once. I know for me this is one of the only platforms I've been able to purchase (collect) EVERY release for for that exact reason. Any speedier and I'd inevitably have to skip some. That's also another way to say that adding a Spectrum, ColecoVision, Apple II, whatever cartridge to the mix is not really going to affect scheduling one way or the other. That just gets baked into the sustainable release cadence.

NES Die Hard 75 Rad Racer 2 8 Road Blasters 50 Spy Hunter 260 I kept playing Nes and Famicom games this week via the AVS. I even put a few scores down in the Spy Hunter HSC over at VideoGameSage.

Today's (09/18) totals: GBC 1) Chase H.Q.: Secret Police - 30 minutes

"Cycle accurate" doesn't imply decapped chips or netlists were used in the design of a core; software or hardware emulators can be completely cycle accurate by replicating only the observed behaviour of a system without internally implementing any of the original hardware design.

All the settings will be configurable. I prefer the slower speed (level 1) when working on parts. With there being options when starting the game, I do not think it will be necessary to map a button to slow/speed up the controls. I need to post a video of how the game looks/plays.

Pretty excited about this one, now I can play 5200 with a reliable, self-centering controller. It works perfectly and I have a backup AT-5200 controller that also works perfectly.

The filter was applied at strategic timing, with different frequencies offset to produce that "sweeping effect", which was effectively resetting the channel phases to a known initial position, in order to cancel each others with slight phase offset to allow the filter to create a pulse width modulation effect. Here it was reset with a clock 64khz to improve the pulse width precision, the mode switch was getting masked every beat with the kick drums. Further in the video I was experimenting with various combinations in order to create stable pulse width modulation, which was pretty convincing if you consider that it's difficult to make things sound stable in the first place.

Improved enough for the card to operate under general usage. The regulators are original components. The two heat sinks may have been added at build time or later, in response to the failures experienced by other owners without proper heat sinks. The regulator above the LED is missing a heat sink but you can see that someone scraped away the blue/green top layer, which may have been an intentional attempt to let the card draw away some of the heat.(Not a good idea). It is hard to tell from the picture but I would guess (and expect) the capacitors are original parts as well.

Only one game this eeek atari 2600 Solar Fox. 178 minutes.

Also it's not like they released both Commodore 64 carts or Toaplan carts the same month for instance, so nobody is gonna have to skip a month because of the ZX Spectrum, don't worry. Personally, I'm all about quality vs quantity, so I would even be OK with less releases if that's mean better compilations (even though that's partly subjective of course, as you just reminded us with your shitty American tastes, famicommander 😉).

Lady Bug (std B/B): 118,300

Update: Labels reprinted without the logo or CX... I've also extended the .mvc format to support PAL and other vsync/blank/overscan/lines variations.

Lady Bug - Standard - B/B - I actually like this version MUCH better than the Intellivision (Coleco) POS version. With this version the Lady Bug actually goes where you point it to with the joystick. Using the disc with the 2609 this game is a complete disaster. The Lady Bug gets stuck everywhere on the screen. This version of the game was VERY smooth control-wise.... 👍 This game was played in emulation - (Stella 6.0) on my Laptop. Worked great, BRAVO!!! 71,210

@Punisher5.0 I hate links like that too, used a deep untracked browser with no feedback to check it, it's Pickles. I wish sites made it a rule to tell people what the video has as far as some/all (summary) of the content has in the link as not everyone can or will want to clickbait into a video.

Managed to eat every veggie and got to Japanese Radish! Got “extra” once, but didn’t manage to get “special”. The bonus system in this game is neat and has you weighing out path options and waiting on colors, which slows you down and makes you think. Great port! Ladybug 🐞 , standard - 66,700

It looks like it is using the AltirraOS 5200 ROM, which is a reimplementation of the 5200 OS ROM. It doesn't have any dependency on the main emulator, so it can be used on anything that implements the 5200 hardware. I permissively licensed it, so it can be used this way, but I had no knowledge of or involvement with this device or company. I don't even understand why it would be used here if they had official licensing for the games, they couldn't license the OS ROM too...?

I did not steal it. I used a balloon to entice it into my garage. Fight me.

Wonder woman used her invisibility powers to fly away in it.

Anyone know what "go codes" are ...or how to bypass?

Haven't watched the full video yet, but the Gamestation Pro looks to be more impressive than I thought it would be.

Atari 2600 Kaboom! - 174 minutes Lady Bug - 15 minutes Pressure Cooker - 5 minutes Solar Fox - 201 minutes

I agree about there being no issue with "primitive" and again, it's not like the Spectrum wasn't a massively popular platform in certain regions. Goodness knows that enough Spectrum games have been released as-is on various platforms, including Xbox and Steam, that there's no reason to think there'd be an issue now on a platform that's primarily focused on retro. Frankly, I can't imagine ANY platform being off limits in any way, as you can make up for mediocrity with more titles on the cart or licensing costs with making sure you have a banger or two in a smaller set. Of course, there are two main issues with targeting EVERYTHING. First, of course, is that license rights for most games are a mystery and the second is that the controls/interface have to be adaptable to just a d-pad and some buttons.

I know one of you guys has this thing in your garage... but you can't keep it! The DOD takes a very dim view of people stealing their stuff. So give it back, OK? 🤓

So best pdf of the issue I can find is here https://archive.org/download/Page_6_Issue_22_1986-07_ABACUS_GB/Page_6_Issue_22_1986-07_ABACUS_GB.pdf I thought it had redacted code but those appear to be inverse spaces? Could probably get it keyed in if one were motivated to make it happen. The similar Tinytext program was also in both Page 6 magazine and I think Analog? It did some good things as far as being like the first tiny text word processor in basic format. Probably also worth looking into as having similar parameters (providing a tiny environment for users to play with text or data on the 8 bit using easily understood code). I once wrote a tiny assembler for creating tiny text strings to make USR calls to from Basic - was both an editor and compiled the basic code lines to add the USR string to the program - worked well but is gone 99% chance gone for good - might still exist on an old SCSI drive in a bin in the shed but long shot more likely was gone when the box of old floppies got pitched out (sad face)

Welcome to ZOMBO.COM!

Gorf (Skill 1) - 24,030

Any update on the game? The anticipation is killing me!

Bot & Tom is a new 2600 game that will make its debut at this year's PRGE! Here's a preview of the artwork and box by @Atariboy2600: Join Bot & Tom on their dangerous road trip by helping them to overcome the increasingly difficult road blocks. The twist is, that you can only control Bot directly, while Tom is affected by Bot's movement. If you push up with your joystick, Bot jumps up and quickly pulls Tom fast back onto the road. If you push down, Bot quickly returns to the road and, when landing hard, bounces Tom down. The faster Bot lands on the road, the higher Tom will bounce. How far can you make it before running out of energy? Power-Ups If you have this option enabled (Left Difficulty = A), you can collect power-ups, which randomly appear at the top or bottom of the screen. But Bot & Tom will receive no extra energy at the end of a stage. Left arrow - Moves the bots a bit to the left, making the game a bit easier. Orange bomb - Removes all orange obstacles Blue bomb - Removes all blue obstacles Battery - Restores some energy Shield The shield option (Right Difficulty = A) allows Bot & Tom to pass through an obstacle without losing energy from doing so. To active the shield, press the fire button. While the shield is enabled, a small amount of energy will be used. Additionally, if Bot or Tom hit an obstacle without the shield enabled, they will lose twice as much energy than without this option enabled.