jaybird3rd

Yes. I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of a small batch of prototypes. It looks just like one of my protos—and I'm sure yours, too—with the unbeveled card edge, the rough printing in the silkscreen layer, etc.

I find the router useful as a starting point, but I usually end up ripping the traces back out again and rerouting them by hand; it takes longer, but it's always a lot cleaner. The last cartridge board I designed used no vias at all, other than the existing component holes. Really? It looked like a board photo cropped out of its background to me, judging from the perforations around some of the edges, and the black plastic shell visible through the holes. (Not to mention the overhead fluorescent light reflections on the surface.)

They look autorouted to me. This particular board may just be a prototype; the card edge doesn't appear to be beveled, either.

Something else that I find interesting about that cartridge board: I was puzzled at first why they chose to make the key prongs for the cartridge door a part of the board and not part of the shell, but looking at them more closely, I notice that the tips are gold-plated, and that there appear to be traces running to/from the tips. There's nothing for them to electrically connect to inside the keyholes in a 2600, so I wonder why those would need to be there. Could they be using these prongs as wireless antennae? If so, it seems more likely to me that those cartridges are indeed going to have some sort of built-in wireless—probably Bluetooth, if I had to guess. (EDIT: It turns out that the games use QR codes.)

@DrVenkman: I was just in the process of cropping and posting the same picture! I notice that their cartridge board has a footprint for a standard through-hole EPROM—up to 256K!—but I don't see any bankswitching logic. Perhaps the other chips are mounted on the other side of the board; the placement of those vias would seem to suggest that there's something else back there. (I also wonder if they're using one of the standard bankswitching methods, or something different.) I found these details from the press release to be especially interesting ... "Every game produced by Audacity Games™ is manufactured to order, and each copy is customized with a unique serial number.": This makes sense to me. In addition to giving them the flexibility to customize/serialize individual copies, using a "print on demand" approach avoids the need to invest in a lot of inventory up front. I've found this approach to work well with my own cartridges. "Every game connects to the internet through your connected mobile device for registering high scores, gives the player a chance to earn a physical high score patch like those from the golden era of 2600 games.": I'll be very curious to know how they implement this. Again, we haven't seen the other side of that board yet, so perhaps they have some sort of wireless connectivity built right in to the cartridge—although going that route would make the cartridges more expensive. Or, perhaps they're using the joystick port(s) for GPIO, with a simple dongle or adapter providing a connection to the mobile device. In either case, I would imagine that most of the work of interacting with their online leaderboard would actually be done by an app on the device; the 2600 would need to exchange only relatively small amounts of data, which is certainly feasible. However they do it, I'm looking forward to seeing it! EDIT: It turns out I was reading too much into the word "connects." The games use QR codes.

Here is their press release, dated 3/6/2021:

Done! I've merged the new thread into this existing one, as requested.

It shows here, too, with no exceptions added on my end. (I'm in the southeastern United States.)

I think this thread has gone long enough.

My recollection is that the kids I knew looked a lot like the "Mr. Wizard" kids, as I said before. Beyond that, it's hard for me to remember specifics; as someone with almost no sense of fashion, then or now, I never paid close attention to it. I had a bowl cut, but it wasn't a fashion statement; I was one of five children, and Mom had to cut everyone's hair, so she opted for the quickest, simplest cut possible. I also wore parachute pants, but that was probably because we got them on clearance after the fad had come and gone; I would have been blissfully unaware that they weren't "fashionable" anymore. Most of my clothes and shoes came from sacks of old hand-me-downs, and my younger brothers got them after I was done with them. Quite a few of my peers were in the same boat. That's why I know it's a mistake to assume that everyone in those years was always sporting the loudest cutting-edge fashions. Not everyone could afford the luxury, and even if my family could, I know for certain that I would not have cared. I was much more interested in computers and technology—especially the Atari machines, to bring this back around on topic—and in retrospect, I don't think my interest was misplaced.

Here's the thing, though ... I grew up in the 80s, too, and the average person did not look like that. The mental image of the 80s that a lot of people seem to have—particularly those who weren't even born at the time, including (I suspect) the models in those pictures—is a neon, glittered, acid-washed, frizzy-haired nightmare, like a Juicy Fruit commercial turned up to 11. It's the same mistake that movies often make: if it's supposed to be set in the 80s, the cars and the décor and the fashions should not all be the most exaggerated examples from the 80s, because at the time, there would also have been a mix of the 70s and 60s as well. If you want to know what a typical 80s kid actually looked like, just look at the kids on "Mr. Wizard's World": relatively conservatively dressed, not all that different from a lot of kids today.

(You can now edit this post, as requested.)

I joined eBay on 2/27/2000, so it's been almost exactly 21 years for me. Wow.

I've enabled editing on this post.

Thank you! And congratulations on getting your Aquarius!

Correct. The Aquarius Printer and Data Recorder shown with the ECS in promotional literature had Intellivision nameplates, but they were never released with them, as documented here.

I absolutely agree. I've talked about this before, but I loved that Atari 2600 games were often accompanied by stories in the manuals, and also by vividly detailed artwork on the cartridges and covers. These were all enormously helpful for priming my imagination, giving me a dramatic context and visuals that I could superimpose onto the games while I played. This was a tremendously immersive experience because it engaged me on different levels: there was what was happening (and what I was causing to happen) on the screen, and there was also the story that I was actively building and unfolding in my own imagination, and each had the effect of amplifying the other. Many of the games were also abstract enough that if you wanted to, you could apply any number of different stories to them, so they didn't get "stale" nearly as quickly. Modern games, by contrast, try to pack a complete story—complete with cinematic audiovisuals—into the games themselves, and for me, this often has the effect of crowding out the gameplay. Because they attempt to be complete cinematic experiences, you're intended to enjoy them much more passively than the classic games, which is not as interesting to me. Granted, they are games, so there obviously has to be some interactivity there, but as impressive as they are as technical achievements, a lot of the modern games seem to be very much the same when it comes to their gameplay mechanics; lots of "Call of Duty shootie shootie" over and over again. They also demand a much larger time investment than I can spare, whereas many of the classic games were designed for the arcade, and thus had to hook the player and provide a fun experience in a much shorter amount of time. I've been reading a book recently about parsing algorithms. The author illustrated the cover with his own ASCII art, featuring a knight riding a dragon. In the book, he described character art in this way: I like this quote very much, especially now that I program games, because it's an elegant expression of programming as an art form—particularly for classic systems which have a limited memory capacity and instruction set, and graphics that are limited to a low resolution and a limited palette of colors. If art thrives on restrictions and limitations, as a number of people have observed, then the limitations of these classic systems needn't prevent anyone from creating an immersive experience. On the contrary, I find those limitations to be creatively engaging: they present a set of well-defined constraints to the programmer/designer, and the challenge is to find a way to create something immersive and fun within those constraints.

No problem! I moved your posts to the other thread, along with a few replies.

I've just granted edit permissions, so you should now be able to revise your post. Sorry to keep you waiting!

Great to see you here! That's a gorgeous printer: small, quiet, and fun to demonstrate for people who have never seen a pen plotter in action before. It uses an Alps plotter mechanism which was shared by other home computer printers of the time, such as the Atari 1020. As much as I love the 1020, though, I think the Aquarius version of this printer has the better design; it's a very nice cosmetic match for the system. Besides the problem of finding (fresh) replacement pens, the biggest issue with these printers nowadays is that the plastic pinion gears on the stepper motors have cracked from age. One of our members is currently offering replacement gears made of brass, which should be a permanent solution to this problem.

The discussion here has recently branched out to a discussion of emulation on the VCS. This is an interesting topic, and the discussions have been positive and informative, but it would be better served (and easier for others to discover) in a dedicated thread. Anyone looking for these posts will find them in this new discussion thread, and any further posts on the subject should be made there. Thanks!

This particular discussion has to include the Intellivision II. I like the Intellivision II design, though I know it has its critics, but I do wish that the power/reset button had been different. It used a dome switch internally, which offered little to no feedback, and it combined power and reset into a single switch: momentary contact reset the console, and pressing and holding for three seconds turned it off. I would have much preferred separate switches, as in the original Intellivision.

Ordered! Thank you for making these copies available!

So I see! I'm very flattered. Well, thank you again! I plan to get back into active Aquarius development myself this year; I've been sidelined for a while, but I now have a few projects in the works again.

I'll be there! Thank you!