Cupcakus Posted October 15, 2002 Share Posted October 15, 2002 No not barbeque potato.... I thought the 2600 on a chip was just a work in progress with tons left to do, but a visit to the site today reveals to my surprise, that he's already finished the TIA/PIA and 6507 core... and he's got screen shots of it working and such. All that he has to do it write the 6507 software and it's a reality! Oh man I am SO going to make some cool crap when this comes out... I thought I had to wait ages still. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob Mitchell Posted October 15, 2002 Share Posted October 15, 2002 Oh man I am SO going to make some cool crap when this comes out... Me too me too! what's the website again? Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lemmi Posted October 15, 2002 Share Posted October 15, 2002 http://www.mindspring.com/~2600onachip/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stella'sGhost Posted October 16, 2002 Share Posted October 16, 2002 If he gets this thing to work, how will we be able to use it? WIll we have to design our own "computer" to play the BINS or does it use carts? I guess one could build a very compact version of a 2600 with this, would it work with a small LCD screen? I remember this Lopez guy. This sounds interesting, but very complicated.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lumpbucket Posted October 16, 2002 Share Posted October 16, 2002 If he gets this thing to work, how will we be able to use it? WIll we have to design our own "computer" to play the BINS or does it use carts? Considering he's just making a chip, what you attach to it is up to you. You could attach a cartridge port, or a compact flash interface with a bunch of ROMs on a card... I guess one could build a very compact version of a 2600 with this, would it work with a small LCD screen? As the guy said on the site, his main idea for the chip was to produce Atari 2600 handhelds that require a lot less current (= longer battery life), and don't involve cutting up existing ataris. So... yes Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CrazyImpmon Posted October 16, 2002 Share Posted October 16, 2002 If he gets this thing to work, how will we be able to use it? WIll we have to design our own "computer" to play the BINS or does it use carts? Considering he's just making a chip, what you attach to it is up to you. You could attach a cartridge port, or a compact flash interface with a bunch of ROMs on a card... Or how about something like a Cuttle Cart and a portable MP3 player in one unit? Play everything currently available (except for Pitfall 2 naturally ) and be able to upload and play new games as they become available. Cheap MP3 player with decent RAM can be bought for around $20-$30 AFAIK those have fixed RAM and has to be hooked to PC to add new files, while the MP3 players with removeable memory card or stick usually costs more. I guess one could build a very compact version of a 2600 with this, would it work with a small LCD screen? As the guy said on the site, his main idea for the chip was to produce Atari 2600 handhelds that require a lot less current (= longer battery life), and don't involve cutting up existing ataris. So... yes If the chip's as small as the person's making it to be, then it's possible to just modify a portable TV and fit the chip inside. No more making custom case or using ugly experiement box from electronics part store. of course if one were to add Cuttle Cart and MP3 player, a new case would be required. Now is there any chance someone would consider restarting the production of Cuttle Cart? I missed it because I forgot about it back then. I even found a post-it note on my older computer with the reminder to set aside about $100 for "SuperDuperCharger" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Happy_Dude Posted October 16, 2002 Share Posted October 16, 2002 You could design a 2600 cart with a 2600 in it. Double the power of your VCS. Though the games would cost a bit more Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CrazyImpmon Posted October 16, 2002 Share Posted October 16, 2002 You could design a 2600 cart with a 2600 in it. Double the power of your VCS. Though the games would cost a bit more That would be weird. If you put the 2600 gut inside 2600 cart, where would you go to plug in a game? In an empty 2600 console with game ROM? That would be a switch: game that is bigger than the system. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Happy_Dude Posted October 16, 2002 Share Posted October 16, 2002 Good call! I should have made it clear in the first place. What i meant to say was put the chip inside a game that plays on a normal VCS. You know like multi proccessing, taking the strain off the main unit. They put extra ram on some carts so, if its possible, why not this! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Happy_Dude Posted October 16, 2002 Share Posted October 16, 2002 Or as you said put it in a cart (all on its own) and then have the Game carts slot into the bottom of it. youd have the connectins on the top and the switches on the front. Sounds like a plan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jsoper Posted October 17, 2002 Share Posted October 17, 2002 The three chips don't actually take a lot of room IMHO, but the power saving benefits would be nice. What would really rock would be to modify the TIA so instead of NTSC video, it would output signals to drive a GBA lcd directly. Install the Afterburner screen light and you have a nice little 2600 in a GBA case. John Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Happy_Dude Posted October 18, 2002 Share Posted October 18, 2002 Thats good i guess But youd have to modifie the case to fit Atari carts. or All games would have to be rereleased in a compact size. I'd perfer the later as i wouldn't want to carry 20 or so Atari carts everywhere i go. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cupcakus Posted October 18, 2002 Author Share Posted October 18, 2002 Thats good i guess But youd have to modifie the case to fit Atari carts. or All games would have to be rereleased in a compact size. I'd perfer the later as i wouldn't want to carry 20 or so Atari carts everywhere i go. Not to worry my friends... I am finalizing several flash cart designs to get them out for production... Some will look just like regular carts for flashing ROMS and playing them on a regular VCS, and some will be proprietary small flash carts, for an atari handheld device I hope to design with this chip. Only time will tell tho. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raindog Posted December 13, 2002 Share Posted December 13, 2002 Regarding the "Cuttle cart and MP3 player" idea..... been there, done that. I burned a CD with all ~1500 BIN files I had, batch converted to fairly high bitrate (192Kbps mono, way overkill or so I thought) MP3. About 85-90% of the games worked, the rest would start loading and flash back to the Cuttle screen. I took a bunch of the failed games and burned a CDRW with them at 320Kbps. Only about half worked. I tried different encoders with worse results. I set every quality setting up as high as it could go with no luck. Finally I took one of the failing MP3's, converted it back to WAV, and compared against the original. There were some very clearly visible transitions from what I assume was a high bit to low bit (or vice versa) and back again which were just not present in the MP3 version even at the highest possible bitrate. I'm amazed that so many games loaded at all. I've been meaning to write a script to take MP3's of all the BIN's, convert them back to WAV and then to BIN, and compare against the original to get a rough idea of which ones would be okay for MP3. Then the rest of them I'd take and make a couple CD's of them. But at this point I think I'll wait to get a CD MP3 player that also does OGG files (which use very different methods to toss out data) or better yet, uncompressed WAV files (so I can still fit way more than 99 short mono tracks on a CD.) My Riovolt (which you can now get for about 50 bucks) also plays WMA files but I have no idea how to make those under Linux for testing, though I've heard it's possible. I also have an Apex DVD player that has surprised me in the past with what it could play, so maybe I'll experiment with that over my usual Xmas vacation. Anyway, I think that the work involved in making a mega-multi-cart to go with the 2600-on-a-chip will be similar to the amount of work that went into the Cuttle Cart, just without the analog bits. (That includes getting the rights for the Supercharger ROM from Bridgestone, unless that's not actually necessary to play SC games.) It's certainly beyond me, so I'll stick with the Cuttle and the hope of working compressed audio for now. Rob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted December 13, 2002 Share Posted December 13, 2002 I don't know exactly, what frequency the CC uses, but it should be quite low. Maybe reducing the frequency of the WAV first and then converting into MP3 might solve the problems. But probably you already tried that too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raindog Posted December 13, 2002 Share Posted December 13, 2002 I did; the makewav I was using (the CC version) has three speed/pitch settings if I remember correctly, and I tried all three. Best results were with the slowest/lowest so I used that for all the games. I don't think it gets much above 2 or 3KHz even at the highest speed anyway. The problem wasn't with the MP3 encoder stripping out high frequency information (I use LAME which has switches to prevent that) but with MP3 eliminating transient pitch changes that it doesn't think our ears will notice. MP3 is a perceptual encoding algorithm and therefore not especially well suited to reproducing signals meant to be interpreted by machine. Most lossy audio algorithms aren't; even on my digital answering machine, when someone hangs up and leaves me a message consisting of a dialtone it changes the two frequencies of the dialtone into one that's sort of between them and sounds nothing like a dialtone. Not done experimenting yet, but at the moment my 2600 isn't even hooked up so it'll be a little while Rob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
EricBall Posted December 13, 2002 Share Posted December 13, 2002 MP3 BIN2WAV Bad idea! Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad. If you read through the Cuttle Cart Manual You will see that each bit of data is sent as a single wave of either a high or low frequency. MPEG Audio (or Ogg or AC3 or WMA) is a lossy compression algorithm. It's like running the bin through a GIF2JPEG utility. The output waveform ain't gonna match the input. A better way would be to link a lossless compression engine (like GZIP) to WPLAYBIN and do the decompress and play in one step. I'm surprised you are having any success at all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raindog Posted December 14, 2002 Share Posted December 14, 2002 Not just success, but about 85% success when I last tried it. I think you're missing a few points here. 1. The solution has to be portable. I don't have a computer anywhere near my Cuttle Cart (why would you bother gzipping BIN files anyway? all the BIN files put together would fit on a 16MB flash card with no trouble, never mind a CD...) and we were discussing methods of linking a Cuttle-like device to the 2600 on a chip. For the most part, I find even Stella acceptable for playing 2600 games when I have a computer around (I'd use z26 except no workie under Linux.) 2. Sure MP3 is a lossy compression scheme, as are the other ones I was talking about (WMA and OGG). But think about what you just said referring to the Cuttle manual: Each bit is sent as a single wave of a single frequency. That means at any given time the codec only has one frequency to deal with, as opposed to things like white noise which indeed they have a great deal of trouble reproducing faithfully. The problem in the case of MP3 (as I already described) is not the reproduction of the frequencies, which is fine. It's that even at the highest quality setting, all the encoders I've tried tend to remove a few of the quick frequency changes. I suspect this may take place on frame boundaries and have yet to start introducing 5-10ms of silence at the start of the problem WAV files before encoding. Obviously the vast majority of them it leaves intact or I would never have been able to get the first game to work. This leads me to believe that one of these other algorithms might take care of most or all of the currently non-working games. It occurred to me tonight that the Riovolt might also handle MP2 files, which tend to throw out less frequency information than MP3's at the cost of size. 3. I would, as I mentioned earlier, prefer to use a device that plays uncompressed mono 22KHz WAV files. I know of no such portable device, which would need to be either CD or HD-based unless I did a lot of whittling away at what I included (eliminating alternate versions, minor hacks, etc.) If you know of one, please suggest it. I've been working with compressed audio on a daily basis since about 1989. Forgive me for being tired of getting told I can't do what I've already done. Rob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cschell Posted December 14, 2002 Share Posted December 14, 2002 PocketPCs are one option. There's a version of playbin for them, which converts .bin files to audio as they're played. This allows you to store all the ROMs as the ROMs themselves, which is far more compact than any audio solution you're likely to come up with. Of course PocketPCs aren't the cheapest devices in all the world either. I've personally never used a PocketPC or the PocketPC version of Playbin. I've been told it works fine though. Chad Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raindog Posted December 14, 2002 Share Posted December 14, 2002 Yeah, a PocketPC is a level of investment I would like to reserve for things I actually use every day and not just when I'm in a 2600 developing mood But I suppose there's always ebay. Or maybe I could try porting playbin to my obsolete and abandoned Helio... Rob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cschell Posted December 14, 2002 Share Posted December 14, 2002 What about an el cheapo used laptop? Chad Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CrazyImpmon Posted December 14, 2002 Share Posted December 14, 2002 Yeah, a nice 486 laptop could be found for a lot less than $100 (even less if you get one with B&W screen) Just make sure it has sound out! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob Mitchell Posted December 14, 2002 Share Posted December 14, 2002 Yeah, a nice 486 laptop could be found for a lot less than $100 (even less if you get one with B&W screen) Just make sure it has sound out! The perfect solution is a Cuttle Cart with a serial port .. so you can save all the BIN ROMs on the Atari Portfolio and send each over. Or use a serial port Cuttle Cart with the wonderful HP200LX palmtop! Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA (yeah .. I know .. I'm still dreaming!) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cupcakus Posted December 14, 2002 Author Share Posted December 14, 2002 Yeah, a nice 486 laptop could be found for a lot less than $100 (even less if you get one with B&W screen) Just make sure it has sound out! The perfect solution is a Cuttle Cart with a serial port .. so you can save all the BIN ROMs on the Atari Portfolio and send each over. Or use a serial port Cuttle Cart with the wonderful HP200LX palmtop! Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA (yeah .. I know .. I'm still dreaming!) Is Parallel port OK? If so I've got just the thing Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob Mitchell Posted December 14, 2002 Share Posted December 14, 2002 Is Parallel port OK? If so I've got just the thing Well I do have a serial -> parallel converter for my HP200LX palmtop! It's for printing .. We'll have to do some experimenting. .. but I bet it is not a perfect solution. Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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