Quadhorn

No, they are much better. Aside from the grammatical problems, there's a blandness about the bare stating of events in the originals that kills any chance of them being funny (#7 excepted). Jokes generally need a set up and a punchline. In one-liners there has to be some element of obscurity to prevent the reader / listener guessing what's coming. To use an old (and somewhat biggoted) but simple example: [stereotypical Irish Bashing] Irishmen fall off floors they fall off 'cos they're so stupid. Two Irishmen were sitting on the floor ... and one fell off. [/stereotypical Irish Bashing] One works(ish), one doesn't. Side by side, the originals read more like an attempt to un-funny n8's versions. Sega-etc, is English your first language? If not, you need to realise that the changes in grammar and culture make translating comedy from one language to another difficult. One-liners doubly so. Maybe these work for you (they can, as n8 has shown), but I'm guessing it's mainly due to the delay it takes to translate it in your head to whatever your first language is. There's a Finnish Star Trek parody called Star Wreck that works for the Finnish for exactly that reason; they translate the "tech speak" into Finnish. Normally the Finnish-dubbed Star Trek uses the English for technical terms, so it's what they're used to. When the tech speak is properly translated into Finnish, the translated versions sound strange and amusing to them. One of the few successful multi-lingual comedians is Eddie Izzard; his French tours only work because he's completely fluent in French. Sega-etc, fair do's trying - English is far from easy to learn and the grammar all but impossible - but the originals just don't work.

I have no idea; I was asking about getting a cocktail table in general, not specifically Sinistar. I just really like cocktail table cabinets - functional furniture and super-happy-gaming-fun combined. Some day, when the house is finished, my first project will be a custom-built cocktail cabinet. Mmmmm, Fablon.....

Thinking of the thread about systems with no homebrews, is there any technical data available for it? And how far would someone be allowed to go to homebrew something for it? Given you need to add a processor, would a modern Flash-based PIC or 8051 be cheating or about right?

How do's, NCN. Nice trade; 'round our way you'd easily be on the winning side there. PS1's are cheap and cheerful, but 7800's are few and far between. All this talk of the favourite games reminds me; does your's have a built-in game? Everyone seems to have mentioned Asteroids, which is exactly what's built in to mine. It's a nice version of it, but perhaps it should have been called Meatballs instead.

Purrrrrdy. So, are you going to enjoy it as-is or do you have MAME mod's in mind? Fair do's if not; I know many arcade enthusiasts consider MAME heresy. And is a cocktail table next on the list?

Aye, they do seem to have a lack of grip on reality. [whine] "But a Flash card's, like, $20 like. This is just a Flash card. Why can't this be, like, $20?" [/whine]. Err, 'cos we're doing this small-scale from home, not as multi-national companies bulk buying chips in the tens of thousands, perhaps? Go out into the world, kiddies, and find out how much things really cost.

I'm kind of surprised I had as little damage to this particular set of boards as I did; we had swapped R/C pairs (on power lines, not as signal filters), the decouple caps 90 degrees out and even a 16-pin layout that should have been 14-pin. Still, we learn; once upon a time I thought tant's were non-polar, 'cos they didn't have negative signs showing the polarity ...

Meh, these things happen. Even in industry, someone'll decide the machines should mount pairs of components 90 degrees to how they should be for no reason whatsoever. It gets pretty and the tantalum capacitors smell of fish... Well, if the chip's ok and the Atari's ok, then as you say it can only be the PCB. Time to pull out the multi-meter and check the traces one-by-one. Yes it's possible to damage it if, for example, you end up shorting the power rail to ground through one or more of the traces. If you don't have a spare PCB, I s'pose you'll have to check the traces and patch up any that have gone open-circuit. Shorted traces (? possible?) might be a little more awkward.

Ahhh .... 'makes sense now. I feel like I should have known. So, still kind of overkill compared to the abilities of the 8-bit's, then. I can't say I've looked at it, but is that likely to make it that much faster? It's still limited by the speed of the serial link. Would a feed-through ethernet cartridge (allows you to put a program cartridge on top for use with different programs) be entirely unfeasible? I suppose at least the USB connector would be cheaper than an edge connector for a feedthrough cart. On the other hand, looking at the USB SIO card, you'd have two main choices that I can think of: 1. Use the SIO card to connect the Atari to the PC, then program something to allow the Atari access to the PCs ethernet; requires no further hardware 2. Build a stand-alone ethernet adapter that plugs into the USB SIO, but that would have to have a USB Host Controller chip on it to talk to the USB SIO's USB Peripheral Controller chip (no small beasty to deal with, even with all the help and reference designs), coupled to the ethernet chip. Btw, looking down the thread, it occurs to me that I have the A2600 on the brain at the minute, but that's not what you're aiming this at. Maybe I just like the idea of an A2600 online. A simple text browser...? Use the 48-pixel sprite trick for selected images...? Back to sanity, was it just the 130-XE, or did you have other Atari machine(s) in mind as well? The PIC method might have the advantage that they come in FLASH flavours and handle everything themselves. On top of possible direct memory access providing higher bandwidth. The Atari would only have to deal with what ever interface you specify between its processor and the PIC.

... or "Driving to the Mountains of Madness" ... or maybe "The Dream-Quest of Unknown KR2600".

Did you mean "NIC" or did you mean "PIC", by any chance? I know Microchip currently do a 10BaseT ethernet interface on some of the PIC18, PIC24 and dsPIC chips, complete with free TCP/IP stack. 'S'pose it could be fun to fit one in a cartridge; maybe you could provide some kind of parallel interface between the 2600 and one of the PIC's IO ports...? At a push, some kind of 2-port RAM to provide a buffer between the PIC and 6507, so it has space both for the 2600 to form a TCP/IP packet before sending and allow the 2600 to read one back at its own pace afterwards. Meh ..... massively overkill and ends up with the PIC doing everything instead of the 2600 .....

Fantastic, Atariuser. It's good to know I've not gone insane quite yet. Btw, AJF's got a point. Aside from removing the DC so that it doesn't fry your speakers, the HP filter also removes low frequency hum (50/100 Hz or 60/120 Hz). If it works fine, great, leave it as it is. If you have problems with low frequency noise you might have to tweak the capacitor value to get a balance between audio range and noise suppression. Happy gaming, man.

Umm, that might be the problem. The 1k8 resistors should _not_ be in series. These are the "pull-up resistors". They should connect between the p12 and p13 TIA pins (the ones you have marked TIA12 and TIA13) and a +5V supply, such as the +5V / Vcc / pin 20 of the TIA. Have a look at the following for the TIA pinout: http://www.atarihq.com/danb/tia.shtml In fairness, the page does say "0.1microF to 10microF". The problem with that is that the resistor and capacitor pairs form a high pass filter; using the 0.1microF capacitors cuts off signals below about 350Hz, cutting into what you can hear. Those capacitors really need to be of a greater value. Try to find at least 1microF, larger if you can. Assuming that the diagram is correct (can't think why not off-hand), if you use a polar capacitor (marked with either a positive or a negative side, depending on type) make sure that the positive side is connected to the TIA and the negative side is connected to the output socket. Otherwise they might catch on fire. Aluminium electrolytics will have the negative terminal marked. Tantalum electrolytics will have the positive terminal marked. What you need is: TIA12-------|(----AudioR | < < < | TIA20 | < < < | TIA13-------|(----AudioL Where the sets of "<"'s are the two resistors and the "|("'s are the capacitors. 'Make any sense? Any more trouble, give us a shout and maybe a photo of the setup, if possible.

Cheers, man. Nice to see the strange-but-impressive 24-character-per-line code at work. How long did coding that font take...?

How do's, I'm looking for a couple of technical details about the Atari 2600. I've looked about the forums, the Krok Kart and Cuttle Cart homepages and the internet in general without success. What I'm looking for in particular are: * Physical measurements of a "standard" A2600 cartridge, including the edge connector (yes I should just measure one, but all my stuff's in storage and I thought someone might know the "official" measurements instead of me measuring them wrong) * How much current can a cartridge safely draw through the A2600? * Does anyone know where I can get either the actual cartridge sockets for the A2600 and/or A7800 or something compatible? Cheers, QH.

Have a look at http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=95382 - "supercharger and an iPod?". The highlights seemed to be {bin2wav, 128kbps, CBR}, though you may have to tweak things a little to get it going. The CBR I gather is essential; VBR results in too great a degree of compression in "simple" tracts, which we can ignore but the Atari can't.

I have absolutely no idea; it just has the usual red "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation." banner.

They've taken it down. How is footage of a home-brew game violation of the terms of use?

Thank the almighty Scrod for that. Having discovered the E.T Book Cart in the store, I've just spent the last half hour searching through the forums trying to find out how in Hades you made that text work (I've played a little with A2600 coding; I know its limits to a degree). I found myself looking at well over 8 or even 12 characters on a line, most definitely on an Atari 2600 and thought I'd gone mad. I'd been counting pixels to see if it was some strange use of the 48-pixel graphic routine and that didn't work either. Splicing pairs of 4x8 font characters into a buffer for a 12 character display makes sense; my sanity is restored. Nice job by the way; it must have been evil to code. I'd have never thought the Atari 2600 could display text that well. I am much impressed ... and may steal the idea for a small project if I ever get one underway ...

Ummm..... Real Sports Boxing / Title Match Pro Wrestling Moon Patrol H.E.R.O. Solaris Crossbow

So far as I've heard/read elsewhere on the board, it's perfectly possible to play the .wav's straight out of the PC or sometimes even from an mp3 player (with low enough compression). The only other routes seem to be either get the designs of one of the above carts and build one yourself, or go the whole hog and design your own shiny new copier system. Yeah, I know, not likely to happen. I guess if they were such easy options most of us on here would do it. Curse the mere 24 hours in the day. QH.

Many years back, Unreal Tournament and Team Fortress Classic. I realised it had to stop when I found myself strafing down the corridor to the kitchen, ducking in-and-out of door ways....hmmm....

When I bought my 7800 a few months back I picked up Crossbow at the same time, remembering how much I liked the 2600 version so many years before. On booting it seemed to work, sort of, but the graphics were all garbled. I took it back and got a replacement (the guy seems to be breeding them under the counter) only to find it had exactly the same problem. Has anyone else had a problem with 7800 Crossbow along these lines? The console and cartridge connectors are shiny clean and no amount of adjustment or positioning seems to have helped. I haven't had a problem with one single other of the stack of 7800 games. Is this a common problem or have I just been massively unlucky? Cheers all.

If you still care... ...there are four basic moves, done with button+direction combinations: Button +... ...Up = Punch to head ...Toward = Standard punch ...Down = Jab ...Away = Block Of the four boxers, two will drop from the head-punch and two from the jab. Whilst we're at it you could try Title Match Pro Wrestling for the something-similar-but-different. The matches come in both standard and lemon-fresh-tag-team flavours.

The first console in our house would have been the shiny black lil' 2600 Vader our Mam bought us some time in the late 80's; the first computer would have been a Spectrum several years before, though. I think on a technicality she still owns that Vader ... which would make the first console I _owned_ the ... no, the ... damnnit why did we have to share so may consoles? Many Sega consoles later the first I actually owned outright would have been the grey boxy Playstation in 1998, though the Mega-CD was mine (not much use without a Megadrive, eh? And some would say not much use even with). Meh, no-one else wanted the old consoles so these days they're all 'mine'.