-^CrossBow^-
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Posts posted by -^CrossBow^-
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59 minutes ago, marauder666 said:
Those switches are getting replaced. Corroded on the outside cant be good inside.
Here's the bottom of the pcb.
Interesting. So the traces top and bottom run perpendicular to each other? Or at least they mostly do. I wonder if there was an actual reason behind this? The NTSC boards have their traces running every which way like a maze as is common.
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11 minutes ago, marauder666 said:
Got a PAL machine in to mod, and its got this bodge on pin 27 of the BIOS, pulled out of the socket.
Notice that the jumper is set for a EPROM.
Any idea what it does? I'm thinking its a EEPROM, maybe, and not a mask ROM. Who knows?
This is second I've seen like this, last one was a faulty, failed modded, pcb that Juansolo got. It didnt work, need some wires to repair traces on the back, lots of missing pads.
We tested it with my EPROM BIOS and it does now work fine. Luckily I only threw out the BIOS from it the other day, thinking it was bad. managed to find it in the bin. Put it back in with the bodge and it actually does work. No need to program an EPROM.
Don't assume a PAL machine is a mask rom or EPROM, it might be something else like these two.
Totally off topic but in looking at the PAL board layout more closely, I have to wonder if the wire-wrapped 3600 prototype was used for the PAL console design? Are there are a bunch of traces on the bottom of the PCB like there is on the NTSC ones?
Also those panel switches look mighty crusty!
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On 9/9/2023 at 6:45 PM, Dustin22mason said:
In looking and thinking about this more, did you order the 7805 from Console5 along with the compound? The white stuff that is sometimes tossed in for free, I've never used as I find it much too runny and use a higher quality compound. Also I can see what I'm pretty sure is the heatsink in the lower right side of this picture? Did you remove the heatsink to take the pic of the regulator then?
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Okay, looks like you are using one of the simple composite only output kits. I can see that you are using a prefabbed PCB by zooming in on the pic you posted.
Also, I assume you still have the heatsink being attached to that regulator? Because if not, then the smoking is very likely the thermal compound smoking from the heat of the regulator as it is supposed to be bolted to the large heatsink but it seems yours is removed?
Also, I think personally that you might have too much thermal paste on there as it looks like it is also gooped around the regulator legs a bit? Over time, I've see the oils separate out of the paste and become conductive overtime. It would also help to see those solder joints on the legs a bit better to make sure they aren't bridged with each other, or more importantly, bridging on a trace next to them as again, especially on the top, those traces are really close to each other.
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2 hours ago, Dustin22mason said:
I need some help I did a av mod and replaced all the capacitors and my regulator now my new regulator is smoking help me !!!!!!!
You installed a new regulator, can you give the link to where you bought it and show the solder work on it? My initial guess here is a short on the pins where it was soldered or perhaps on he bottom/top where some of the solder might have crept over and is shorting against one of the other traces as they are so close to each other that it is possible to do.
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This is awesome Mike! Excellent work. I've had this on loop for quite some time just listening to it in the background. Seems to work quite well from the BackBit Pro as well...
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15 hours ago, zzip said:
Do you mean those 16-glyphs you need to collect and enter at the portals? Those have been in the game since at least 1.3 (Atlas Rises), they had a quest around it.
Yes those glyphs, but now they show the glyphs needed to reach the planets you have found in your Wonders section that was introduced about a year back. But in the past, it would only show the planet name and the stats on it. Now, it actually shows a small section of the glyphs needed to get to that planet you have added to your wonders and I'm pretty darn sure that is new since singularity or even possibly the Echos update itself?
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So I'm late in finding this. But when did they add in the portal glyphs for the planet discoveries?!
I just found this out the other night while playing and had not recalled seeing those listed before? This was a huge thing to me because over a year ago I apparently had found a 99.5% hospitable planet and didn't realize it at the time as I was just going through the systems trying to get to some specific star color system. And then when the discoveries were added I saw that I had this awesome paradise planet that I never even explored. But all it would show is what system it was part of but I had NO Clue on how to go about finding exactly where it was. Now that the portal glyphs have been added I was able to go straight to that planet that I'd been searching on/off for the better part of the last few months! So yeah... that's pretty awesome and I hadn't really noticed it mentioned anywhere?
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On 9/5/2023 at 9:36 AM, bsteux said:
Good news. It's working. So signing ROMs is required on DragonFly even on PAL Atari 7800... I thought it was required only on NTSC units...
That's odd because the DF is able to run PAL versions of the ROMs without issue and as far as I know, they don't have the encryption in them? Now I'm running a modified BIOS in my 7800 that doesn't require the encryption so I'm able to run both PAL and NTSC games and demos from my DF cart?
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20 minutes ago, juansolo said:
Welll expected to spend today socketing up my 7800 to work through possibilities as to what had gone south. Popped out the Riot, dropped it into our socketed test 2600jr. RIOT deed. Interestingly running the 7800 without the RIOT and the pic was ok (obv other things stopped working). Cleggy probed the address lines and one of them was completely borked. It would have been a case of swapping every IC connected to it to find the prob, but thankfully the first thing we pulled was it. Handily we have a couple of good spare RIOTs so popped that in and we're off and rocking again.
So, feeling confident we went to my spares PAL 7800. This is one we bought as a spares/repair job that was just a complete nightmare. Someone had tried to mod it in the past and had just burned up everything... I was just using it as a chip donor to this point, but we decided to put our mod onto it because, well, we had one left. It didn't go quite as swimmingly, and it's bodges galore as a machine. But eventually it burst into life (Cleggy had to do some fettling after I left as one of the bodges was connected to the wrong luma and was causing problems). Now just have to swap a few chips back into it, write a BIOS chip (one of the many things that was wrong with it and it's finally prompted us to buy a burner) and I'll have another machine to drop into one of Bob's 3D printed boxes that we can use for testing. Nice!
There's a machine hopefully incoming that I'm going to document the full PAL install on. The mod seems to work best there anyhow. But that'll start to happen when it lands.
I've heard others report about RIOTs being problematic on NTSC 7800s, but that hasn't been my experience and I've held a lot of NTSC 7800 consoles. But given the description of what was happening it seemed to be the culprit.
For the record, I've only had one Maria that I know was bad that I had to swap out (Was missing some of the lum signals as the colors were just wrong). I've had to replace about a half dozen TIAs in 7800s, and 3 6502 CPUs at this point. I can't recall a RIOT being an issue in a 7800 I've serviced so for me, they appear to be pretty robust compared to the TIA and CPUs. Glad you got it going again!
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13 hours ago, newtmonkey said:
I decided to give Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost of Tsushima a second chance last night.
Horizon Zero Dawn
I'm just not feeling it at all. The robot dinosaurs are cool, and the bow is fun to use, but the weird stilted dialog ruins any attempt at world building. I also don't like how the game takes place in an open world, but you can only climb specific areas. It makes the game feel pretty flat. Finally, I've just had enough with gathering trash to craft stuff in games; I hate this in general, but to have to tediously craft arrows for your main weapon is such a drag. A good looking game, but certainly not anything I want to play.
The sequel helps address a lot of this as I recall just basically buying up everything I wanted vs actually crafting most of it. Also they improved where the climbing in a number of ways in that there is a LOT more verticality required in places now and to help the player know where they can and cannot climb, you can enable a mode where sections of the rock and structures will highlight in yellow so you know it is something you can grapple onto and climb.
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17 hours ago, bent_pin said:
You can get a 7800 with this quality job on ebay for a reasonable $350: https://www.ebay.com/itm/285407838001
I really don't have any words for this. I'm hoping that the case shell was so utterly scratched with gouges and the like and that the trim plate was so horrible, that this was seen as an improvement.
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7 hours ago, roots.genoa said:
I mostly agree with you but I'm wondering about that assumption. Like some said earlier (or in another 2600+ topic, it's hard to follow), the 2600+ doesn't really cater to a mainstream audience (at least not as much as plug & play systems) since it plays actual carts. Do you think people who collect or just kept their Atari 2600 carts to this day don't know about homebrew games? Once again I'm not saying you're wrong about that, but I'm wondering. Since a cart is included, it may also make some people without any cart collect them.
To add to this, the recent emails sent to Atari subscribers for the new XP Outlaw limited edition release, even mentions at the bottom that it will play on the upcoming 2600+. So this in part exists to help promote additional physical cartridge sales and drum up interest in future releases as well.
It is that last part that interests me the most as while I'm not really in the market for another copy of Outlaw, I was on board for buying games they released that I didn't already have a physical cartridge of. And curious to see what comes in the future from this new Atari for additional cartridge releases.
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I'm running an additional wire off the composite output of the UAV to the composite pin on my 9-pin that I have installed to provide me with c-sync for those cables that need it. But I'm also running sync itself to its dedicated pin from the Sync off the UAV which, I believe is just the sync off the 4050 it is attached to.
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48 minutes ago, bent_pin said:
I have a pile of 7800s to repair. To keep from polluting the forum with many threads, I figured I'd jut make one running thread to use from one repair to the next.
The first unit that I'm working on works perfectly except for the power latch circuit. If I weight the power switch down the unit works without issue, but as soon as the switch is released, the power is cut. I think it's the CD4013 latches that have failed. Here is the schematic:
Has anyone else had and corrected this issue before?Not this exact issue no, but the 4013s are a common failure point with something similar in the 5200s so it isn't a bad place to start and is a cheap enough part to replace. This might even qualify to piggy back another 4013 on top to see if the behavior changes to give you a better idea.
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47 minutes ago, madman said:
I knew I should've checked C5, I didn't want the Best replacement since it's switching (not to say ALL switching PSUs are bad), so I grabbed a NOS one from B&C on EBay. I need to place an order with C5 anyhow for other parts, so I'll grab this too.
Pretty sure the ones that C5 is selling these days are also switching based. But I've used their 5200, Genesis, and Intelly 2 replacements and haven't experienced any noise related issues. So they seem to be pretty well filtered for that.
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1 hour ago, zzip said:
Horizon Zero Dawn had stunning graphics and was fun to play for awhile, I finished it, and the DLC but I think I've had my fill of that formula, I haven't felt compelled to get Horizon Forbidden West even though I've had a PS5 for a few years now.
Well Forbidden west is more of the same of course but just new regions and environments to explore. Most of the machines are still the same as they were in the first game and of course the new mount you can get later is basically an end game mechanic. I understand why that is given it would have made the game over with way to quick otherwise. But yeah, even on the aging PS4 hardware, Forbidden West has the best graphics I've seen on a PS4. The new God of War games are also equally impressive and I actually ended up liking Ragnarok more than the first game.
But yes, once you have the skills in place and the right weapons in hand, the Horizon games can start to feel like it lingers on a bit towards the end. Still, the way they handled the environments and diversity of it in the first game I still feel was done better than the sequel.
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13 minutes ago, John Stamos Mullet said:
That seems a bit harsh. It will play 99% of commercially released 2600 and 7800 games. Honestly, that's all they are required to do with this thing.
While it would certainly be nice if it also supported modern homebrews, I can completely understand Atari/Infogrames unwillingness to dive into that end of the pool because it opens them up to being possibly looped into potential lawsuits by the IP owners of original games that have been copied/updated/hacked by homebrewers.
We're all fans of the homebrew community here, but we're not even 1/100,000th of the audience for this kind of thing, and most of them don't even know modern homebrews exist.
There is also the issue that current Atari wouldn't want to deal with support calls from customers when their homebrews they purchased outside of Atari, don't work. I noticed an email from Atari today, for the new Outlaw XP release and it states at the bottom that it will work in the upcoming Atari 2600+ console. So again, they are going to want a way to monitor and control what games will and won't work on something like this.
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10 minutes ago, wildstar87 said:
Thanks for getting this pushed through Piotr. It gives me a bit more motivation to trying to get it working.
Well, I didn't quite outline the exact steps I had to take so for any others that similar to me, just aren't versed in using an Atari computer beyond simply loading games. I have a 130xe that I installed my VBXE into and used my FujiNet 1.5 to get it done. This is what I had to do:
- First was finding a SpartaDOS ATR image that would work. The 3.2 image from Brewing Academy's TNFS worked for me. But I had to copy it to my SDcard and then load that to a drive slot.
- I also had to go into my FuniNet's configuration via HTML webpage and set the SIO speed to the slowest setting of 55kb. Anything faster and SpartaDOS would refuse to load properly.
- I downloaded @Piotr D. Kaczorowski ATR that has the FC.com and needed XBF file and placed that into a different slot on my Fujinet. Slot 3 in this case for drive 3 emulation.
- Held down OPTION to have the fujiNet boot up using the SpartaDOS ATR in slot1
- In SpartaDOS I just had to type 'D3:' to switch to drive 3 (Slot 3 on the fujinet). That allows me to access the ATR files that Piotr provided.
- Type FC.COM
- From here the program comes up and shows me what is currently in the banks of my VBXE. I had the original FX 126 PAL installed into the first 2 banks and the GTIA 106 in banks 3 and 4.
- Made sure that bank1 was selected (It is by default), and had to press the 'L' key to load up a different XBF. It will come up with a list of the XBF files found.
- Use the cursor keys on the keyboard to navigate and select the XBF you want. If you use the ATR from Piotr, there will be just the one. I did add in the Rambo NTSC to the ATR using Altirra so I could select it also.
- Press enter on the XBF you want and at that point, it should begin to flash program the VBXE. This will take a few min given the slow speed of the SIO in this mode.
- Once that is done, it will then go through the Verification process which, looks the same as the programming. This should complete with no errors...although I still had some issues...
- You will be back at the main FC program screen and you can press the B key on the first bank or whichever bank you installed the XBF core file to, so that is the core that the VBXE boots with when it comes up from then on.
- Press Esc to exit and...you're done.
For some reason, the MyDos ATR had issues in that my VBXE was never being 'seen' properly by the program and it would only work properly using the SpartaDOS image. Even then I still had 2 instances where the verification process would just stop and give an error. Once was after the first verification, and the second time it happened was about midway through. On the 3rd attempt it seemed to pass without issue. I also got and still get verification issues when trying to load up the RAM expanded NTSC core. However, while it does or seems to fail verification, it still appears to be loaded and working regardless.
So that was the process I went through on my 130xe to get this going using my Fujinet.
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Just want to state that I do own an SD-20 myself and for many of my classic retro DOS games, I prefer to use it for all the General Midi stuff because it has quite an excellent sample set of instruments in it. And with it having so many voices it supports, there isn't a risk of any instruments dropping off as I used to experience back in the day with my SCB-55 Roland card I used on my SB-16.
There is a USB interface on the device but it is only for communicating with it and can't be used to power it. So for me with my setup, I use mine using a Roland PSU and a Roland UM-One MK-II. It is the only USB to MIDI adapter I would advise for trouble free operation. Even Windows 10/11 just picks it up and works.
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Console5 also sells a nice replacement PSU that is compatible with the 2600. I've not actually used this one personally, but I've ordered and used many of their other replacements and never had any issues with them.
https://console5.com/store/power-supply-adapter-for-atari-2600-and-atari-dedicated-systems.html
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Well, for me Horizon Zero Dawn was the killer app for me on the PS4 only I didn't know that at the time. I was late to getting my PS4 as I waited and just got a PS4 Pro. I got the game when it was on sale phyiscally for like $20 or something and have NEVER regretted that decision. I couldn't stop playing HZD. In fact, I stopped playing Breath of the Wild on my Wii U because I liked HZD much better. I think the combat mechanics are what I like most because I like using the environment to my advantage. Like climbing up high on a cliff to take out nasty machines below me where they can't touch me. Good thing as they were usually much more over powered compared to what I could do face to face. The DLC for it is a very impressive one with an all new region, new enemy types and story. The sequel was okay, but didn't capture me the same way as the first game did. That said, the sequel looks freaking amazing on the PS4 Pro!!! Sucks the DLC is PS5 only though...
That said, I'm still pretty much just playing No Man's Sky on the PS4. They continue to put out amazing updates for it and the expeditions are a good draw to get you back into doing some things for those rewards they provide while also introducing you to the new stuff they might have added. And even on the aging PS4... No Man's Sky still looks amazing to me graphically!
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I would offer to help, but shipping from the US back to Canada is... not to the benefit of Canadians shall we say? It sounds like the 7800 should be a pretty easy fix. It is likely just the power button going faulty as many of them have over the years. $4 in parts cost would replace the entire front row of buttons with new replacements. For a bit more, ($6) I install some even higher quality buttons into the 7800 console. And that would or should give you both your 7800 and 2600 setup in place in one small package at that point.
But get a simple Pac-man or combat or other crazy common game for cheap to see how your Jr is first.
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12 hours ago, swlovinist said:
I want to know the sound options for the 2600+. If I insert a game that can use pokey sound, will it have that option? If anything, I would like to have the option that if a game is programmed to use pokey sound, it can utilize it by having on the internal options to do so. I know that this may be a longshot, but it might impact at least the direction of one homebrew game
Well, I believe Ballblazer was listed as being compatible in their list. So that tells me they have to have Pokey working somewhat since that is the ONLY audio that game uses unlike Commando which, uses both TIA and POKEY for all sounds heard in that game. So again, if BB is listed as working, then we have to assume it has audio as well and that would be Pokey.
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IntelliGamepad - Development Thread
in Intellivision / Aquarius
Posted
You could also call it the "IntelliControl"...