jaybird3rd

Glad to see you back, Mack! (I've been busier with other things than I would like, too, so I know what you mean.) aquarius.zip I've attached an Aquarius ROM set which you might find helpful. It includes the "S2" OS ROM set for both the Aquarius and Aquarius II, along with my dumps of the "S1" OS ROM and the character generator ROM. I just tested this set with the latest MAME 0.232 release, so all you should need to do is drop this into the "roms\" subdirectory. You can switch from "S2" (the default) to "S1" using the "BIOS Selection" option in the MAME UI. (Thanks again to Pernod for your work on the Aquarius/Aquarius II emulation! I'm still stoked to finally see bankswitched cartridges working in MAME! I hope to make use of it soon for some new projects.)

Imagic did produce a few games for the Atari 400/800 computers: in addition to Atlantis and Demon Attack, there were also (by way of the 1-2-3 pack) Wing War, Quick Step, and Laser Gates. It would have been relatively easy to produce 5200 versions as well, but perhaps they decided there wasn't enough of a market to release them—or, perhaps their own money troubles by that time prevented them from doing so. Someday I'd like to collect all five games into one album cartridge for the 5200.

I moved this to the "Gaming Publications and Websites" subforum, which is a more appropriate place for YouTube channel updates.

Moved!

I don't doubt it! That's an amazing run, and the games all look fantastic! I've held off on ordering any myself because I don't want to add to the workload until things quiet down a bit, but I'm rather envious of those who will be getting these.

Well, the new boards are (finally!) finished, tested, and working perfectly! It will be very satisfying to rebuild my Activision cartridges with these. (I've created a Marketplace thread for anyone who's interested in ordering, so see the first post in that thread for more information!)

As many Atari 5200 owners have learned, the game cartridges produced by Activision for the 5200 can be very problematic. They tend to exhibit certain characteristic issues, mostly related to age and how it has affected the printed circuit boards that Activision used. First, the card edge fingers seem more susceptible to corrosion than in most cartridges, possibly due in part to the lack of a dust cover like Atari's cartridges had. Second, the board itself seems to have been made just a bit too short, so it doesn't sit in the cartridge port as deeply as it should. Only the tips of the fingers (which would wear out first) ever make contact with the connector pins inside the port; as both the cartridge and the port get dirty over time, it doesn't take much dirt to prevent good contact. As a result, you really have to scrub these boards clean to get a good, reliable connection, and I find that they often require regular cleaning thereafter. For a long time, I've been intending to remedy these problems in my own cartridges by designing a new replacement PCB that fits inside Activision's 5200 cartridge shells. Earlier this year, I finally found the time to do it. Here is the result: This board is compatible with non-bankswitched Atari 5200 games up to 32K in size, so it can be used to repair or restore any of Activision's 5200 cartridges to working condition. Just burn the game binary to an EPROM, install it on the board with a 74LS08 logic chip and a 0.1uF decoupling capacitor, and drop it into your original Activision cartridge shell in place of the original board! (In Activision's cartridges, the chips face the *back* of the console when the cartridge is inserted, so remember this if you wish to test your assembled board outside of its shell. The board itself is keyed, so it can only be mounted inside the shell in the correct way.) To keep the assembly as simple as possible, this board is designed specifically for use with a 32K EPROM (27C256). If the game you wish to repair is smaller than 32K—as I believe all of Activision's released 5200 games were—simply concatenate enough copies of the binary to fill the ROM. (I do not provide or burn the EPROMs, so this step is up to you.) Of course, you can also use non-Activision game binaries with this board if you wish, as long as they are 32K in size or less. So, if you have any dead or intermittent Activision 5200 cartridges in your collection that you'd like to rebuild, just send me a PM and I'd be glad to supply you with the boards to do it! Here are the prices, with a discount offered for bulk purchases: 1–9 boards: $4.00 each 10–49 boards: $3.50 each 50–99 boards: $3.25 each 100+ boards: $3.00 each (Postage will be extra. If you also need a 74LS08 and capacitor for your board(s), I can supply those as well, for an additional $0.50 per board.)

Haven't we had enough sniping and insults? Let's bring this back on topic and let everyone enjoy using whatever it is they enjoy using, whether you think there's a better solution or not. (Using these old machines is supposed to be about fun, after all.)

I thought the same! (I'm glad I already have an XEP80.)

Works here. It's a little slow, which might be a server issue. (EDIT: It seems to be down for others, but I can open pages on the site I've never visited before, so I don't think I'm looking at cached content. Strange.)

I do the same. The clean desktop and hierarchical Start Menu from Win2K is enough for me. Windows 8 and beyond make it harder to turn off the "improvements" they've tried to add since, but at least Classic Shell—and presumably its successors like OpenShell—give back some of that control. They keep making it worse. In new Windows 10 installations, the option to create a plain local account at all is hidden; as I recall, you have to go out of your way to choose the "Limited Experience" option, which I take to be their attempt to make a standalone account sound "bad" compared to a cloud account.

Not to drag this any further off-topic, but my Windows 8.1 desktop still looks a lot like this with Classic Shell. Windows XP can be stripped down to a very Win2K-like look simply by switching to the Windows Classic theme.

On the 30th Anniversary release of the album (which includes commentary tracks), Jerry Buckner explains where that quote comes from. It's a reference to "Froggy the Gremlin" from "Andy's Gang."

When I have the chance, I'll relocate the hotel-related posts from the last few pages of this thread.

Can there be such a thing as a video game based on linguistic and/or mental gymnastics? We all know about dance/rhythm games, in which players have to stretch and strain themselves to match difficult dance moves, or to reproduce challenging musical performances. Could there be a game in which they are challenged to contort themselves in the same way to defend increasingly untenable points of view? I think "Atari" has the potential to create a whole new game genre here, and judging from their biggest fans, they seem to have a built-in audience which is already primed to play.

Oh, is that all?

I just granted edit permission to your post, so you should now be able to update it to reflect this correction.

I know what you mean! That's been the story of my life all year ... although I hope to have something interesting for you in the next few weeks.

I think the Atari 400 is the only real (released) A8 machine that I *don't* have. From memory, here's what I've got: 2 x Atari 800 (both of which have been in the family for 30+ years) 2 x Atari 1200XL 3 x Atari 800XL 3 x Atari 600XL 2 x Atari 130XE 7 x Atari 65XE 5 x Atari XEGS 3 x Atari 5200 4-Port Consoles ... plus a bunch of spare motherboards and chips to keep everything working, and a 1088XEL kit that is waiting patiently to be built.

Welcome to AtariAge! I *hated* having my picture taken as a kid, so I don't have very many pictures either, but in some ways I now wish that I did. On a related note ... if I may, I'd like to add a coda to the picture I posted earlier, which showed me playing Archon II at my grandparents' house during one of our many Christmas visits over the years. My grandfather has since passed away, and my grandmother is now living with others in the family, so the decision was made to sell the house. Christmas 2020 was the last Christmas before the sale—the house was dark and empty by then, but in keeping with tradition I paid one last visit, this time going back alone to take some pictures and to bid farewell to the place. While I was there, I recognized the exact spot where their Atari and all its gear had been set up 30+ years before. I didn't happen to have any of that stuff with me, of course—though it's all safely packed away in storage—but I did have a laptop and Altirra, which was enough to stage a quick "re-enactment":

I mentioned earlier that I was thinking of designing a new printed circuit board for Activision 5200 cartridges, one which I hope will solve these kinds of problems. I drew it up over the weekend and have just sent it off for prototyping. I made it just a little bit longer than the originals so that it will sit deeper in the cartridge slot for more secure contact, and as a newly-manufactured board, it won't have the same corrosion problems as the originals. I should be getting my first prototype in about two weeks! (EDIT 5/13/2021: See my post below for the completed cartridge boards!)

I think so. We have several open threads of complaining about Best Electronics—usually by people who have been spoiled by Amazon and don't understand the mysterious art of opening an inquiry with a courteous e-mail, or waiting patiently for an order to be fulfilled. I don't think we need another.