e1will

It's definitely timing related. STA HMOVE is the actual command that causes the black line to appear, and there are reams of info and discussion to be found about how it works and how to get it to do neat tricks. Ed Fries recently talked about it a little bit here, which is probably a decent introduction. --Will

Yep. There are ways to hide it, but most of the early games didn't bother to. Activision did horizontal repositioning on every line whether the sprite needed repositioning it or not, so instead of a bunch of individual lines there was one black bar: Screenshot --Will

You mean the black ones on the left side of the screen? Those are there whenever an object has been horizontally repositioned. In Berzerk, for example, each time the program draws a new robot, it has to reposition the sprite it uses to draw the robot. So there will be a black line between each robot. --Will

I remember being surprised the first time I played a game in B/W mode on a color TV and it didn't switch entirely to grayscale; some of the bits remained in color. I didn't know if it was a bug, or an Easter egg, or what. I know Video Pinball still shows the "tilt" bar in red even in B/W mode, and Adventure shows colors during the victory flash even in B/W mode... I wonder what was the first game that didn't go exclusively grayscale in B/W mode? --Will ETA: Dodge 'Em does this too; Player 2's car stays green in B/W mode while the rest of the screen goes grayscale.

If you own the cartridge, putting the ROM on a Harmony cart is perfectly legal. The most relevant legal precedent in the US is probably when the RIAA tried to stop people from putting mp3s of songs they owned on their Rio mp3 players. The court said that consumers were within their rights to "format-shift" the data from their CDs to their mp3 players, which is why iTunes will allow you to rip a CD you own and put it on your iPod. I'm not a lawyer, but I can't imagine how using a Harmony in this way wouldn't fall under that precedent. --Will

You posted your boxes in three different threads in this forum and somehow didn't manage to see the Halo 2600 Boxes Available post? That seems... peculiar. --Will

Yes, 4 pixels is correct, if you're using the playfield (which most games do.) --Will

Good point; now that you've clarified that, I'm sure a rephrasing will follow in the relevant articles. --Will

Thanks, everyone! Those screenshots really enhance the article, I think. (And for the record, the "including Duck Attack!" bit was not my idea, although I'll admit it was really cool to see that.) --Will

The arcade version works the same way. Why it's that way, I don't know. Presumably, they're "sleeping" at that point. --Will

Very nice. I'm a big fan of those maps. --Will

Thanks Chris! --Will

Thanks Darrell! --will

What kind of TV do you have? NTSC CRT, about 36 inches wide. --Will

I just received my Harmony in the mail, and wow, is that flicker horrible! I'm definitely going to go with the blocky-for-real-hardware, flickery-for-emulators approach on this one. --Will

Awesome! And perfect timing... the Atari 2600 homebrew article is scheduled to be featured on the front page of Wikipedia very soon. --Will

Stella for the 2600, no opinion on the other systems (commenting here since it won't let me cast a "partial" vote.) --Will

Strat-O-Gems Deluxe is an excellent game and extremely addicting.

Oh yeah, I don't know why I didn't remember that. --Will

Thanks Jonathon. Did this end up on a cart? If not, no problem, a screenshot of a bB game would still probably be useful in the "creating homebrews" section. Is there a list someplace of which games in the AA store are bBasic games? I know Melbourne Tatty is one, maybe Solar Plexus too? --Will

Thanks Erik! --Will

Thanks Ed. I understand things aren't quite as clear-cut in this case, but at least the screenshot will be able to indicate you don't have an objection to it being used, which should help. --Will

Thank you Thomas! They do allow animated GIFs. Nukey: The concern's basically if we want a single "fair use" screenshot to illustrate the idea of an Atari 2600 homebrew, no problem. If we want a bunch of them, "fair use" won't fly. Personally, I'd prefer a bunch of them. If they're "free images", they can be used much more easily on articles that aren't about that game specifically, and nobody will try to delete them. --Will

Hello everyone! If you've written an Atari 2600 homebrew game and would like to make a screenshot available for Wikipedia to use in an article, please see this thread. Thanks! --Will

Good news, everyone! There is now a Wikipedia article on Atari 2600 homebrews. The bad news is, there aren't enough screenshots in that article. Now, of course, anyone can take screenshots, but due to various boring legal reasons it's much, much better if the person who wrote the game (1) takes the screenshot and (2) releases it either to the public domain or with a CC-BY-SA license. I agreed to release a whole bunch of Duck Attack! screenshots CC-BY-SA, so there's a Duck Attack! screenshot in there, but it would be great if we could make some other games' screenshots available to the good folks at Wikipedia. Basically, if you've written a homebrew game and you're willing to offer a screenshot to Wikipedia and whomever else might want to use it, please post the screenshot in this thread and say something like this: "I, _______, wrote this game, took the screenshot, and release the screenshot with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license." I'm especially hoping the following people are able to help out: - Ed Fries, because there's a Halo 2600 article that really needs a screenshot; - Zach Matley, because there's already a Four-Play screenshot there, but it's tagged as "unfree" so it could get deleted; and - Bob Montgomery, because there's already a Go-Fish screenshot there, but it's tagged as "unfree" so it could get deleted. Everyone else who's written a 2600 homebrew is welcome to offer a screenshot too: if we had some free screenshots of Medieval Mayhem, Juno First, Lady Bug and K.O. Cruiser available to the Wikipedia folks, I'm sure they could find a good home for them. Thanks! --Will