7800 Atari 7800 PAL related test results (not NTSC!)

[panamajoe]

Let´s collect test results for the 2600+ regarding its ability to play 7800 PAL carts!

Please add more!

(and let´t keep it PAL 7800)

----

 

unplayable:

- Ballblazer is very slow, glitches, unplayable

 

- Commando (resets when you press fire to start)

- Choplifter (black screen)

- Food Fight (black screen)

- Karateka (black screen)

- Ms. Pac Man (crashed screen)

- Joust (black screen)

 

playable, but messed up:

- Galaga (playable, but bottom quarter of screen not visible)

- Kung-Fu Master (playable, but background graphics messed up)

- Title Match Pro Wresting (playable, but sound issues)

- Tower Toppler (playable, but tower graphics differ from original)

[+karri]

According to @gambler172 the Galaga (PAL) (Atari) (1987) worked ok.

 

Edit: Once I got the 2600+ I tested it myself and the lower part of the screen is missing. The upper part has a lot of black border. So I assume that the extra PAL lines may be messed up somehow.

[DEANJIMMY]

1 hour ago, karri said:

According to @gambler172 the Galaga (PAL) (Atari) (1987) worked ok.

 

I can confirm the lower 20% of the screen of Galaga PAL are missing.

 

Xevious has been reported from at least 6 players to fail with crashed screen but one player got it working (Dr Karnov)

Edited November 20, 2023 by DEANJIMMY

[Dr Karnov]

20 minutes ago, DEANJIMMY said:

I can confirm the lower 20% of the screen of Galaga PAL are missing.

 

Xevious has been reported from at least 6 players to fail with crashed screen but one player got it working (Dr Karnov)

 

[panamajoe]

PAL Xevious doesn‘t work, it produces just some graphical gliches.

 

all tested Homebrew carts (Beef Drop, Pac Man Collection, FailSafe, Knight Guy, Rip Off, Slide Boy, Popeye) don’t work

 

Planet Smashers, Galaga, Dig Dug do work

 

Ikari Warrioirs works but the buttons are reversed

 

 

[panamajoe]

23 hours ago, Dr Karnov said:

 

i guess this is an NTSC cart

[Dionoid]

On 11/20/2023 at 1:44 PM, panamajoe said:

unplayable:

- Ballblazer is very slow, glitches, unplayable

 

 

- Commando (resets when you press fire to start)

- Choplifter (black screen)

- Food Fight (black screen)

- Karateka (black screen)

- Ms. Pac Man (crashed screen)

- Joust (black screen)

Xevious should be added to the "unplayable" list as well. It crashes after loading.

[Avenger75]

From the test done using the Dragonfly and the orginals PAL 7800 games rom, I find :

ace of aces : work
alien brigade :  work
ballblazer : flicker  
baseball : work
basketbrawl : work
centipede : work
choplifter : black screen
crack'ed : work (joystick)
crossbow : work (joystick)
Commando : loop on the intro presentation
dark chambers : work
desert falcon : work
dig dug : work
donkey kong : work
donkey kong jr : work
double dragon : failed
f18 hornet : work
fatal run : work
fight night : work
food fight : black scren
galaga : work
hat trick : work
ikari wariors : work
impossible mission : work
jinks : work
joust : black screen
karateka : black screen
kung-fu master : work
mario bros : work
mat mania challenge : work
mean 18 ultimate golf : work
meltdown : work ? i don't catch the rules 🙂
midnight mutants : work
motor psycho : work

mrs pac-man : music but image not correct, don't work

pole position II : work

xevious : don't work

 

I didn't have time to play much each game, I cannot guarantee that button A and B are not inversed, or the screen cropped a little

 

Edited November 21, 2023 by Avenger75

[tradyblix]

Damn that really sucks. I feel for you guys. 

[Diewaldo]

I got the machine a few hours ago and did a quick test with some PAL 7800 games as well:

 

Running:

 

Pole Position II (PAL)

Impossible Mission (PAL)

 

Not running:

 

Food Fight (PAL)

Xevious (PAL)

 

Will do some more test tomorrow with my other carts. The 7800 side of things definately needs some work.

[Zap1982]

Ahh... I have some 7800 games to play then since I started collecting a couple of weeks ago 🤬 / 🤣

 

I might get lucky with Xevious as there is no 'P' sticker on it or any noticable residue on the back so it could be an NTSC. Hopefully that firmware patch will be in time for Christmas..

[Diewaldo]

I have now tested all my Atari 7800 PAL carts as well with the following results:

 

Not working:

Food Fight (PAL)

Ninja Golf  (PAL)

Xevious (PAL)

Basketbrawl (PAL)

 

Working:

Impossilbe Mission (PAL)

Crack'ed (PAL)

Mario Bros. (PAL)

Realsports Baseball (PAL)

Tower Toppler (PAL)

Mat Mania Challenge (PAL)

Pole Position II (PAL)

Planet Smashers (PAL)

One-on-One (PAL)

Titlematch Pro Wrestling (PAL)

F-14 Tomcat (PAL)

[DEANJIMMY]

3 hours ago, Diewaldo said:

I have now tested all my Atari 7800 PAL carts as well with the following results:

 

Not working:

Food Fight (PAL)

Ninja Golf  (PAL)

Xevious (PAL)

Basketbrawl (PAL)

 

Working:

Impossilbe Mission (PAL)

Crack'ed (PAL)

Mario Bros. (PAL)

Realsports Baseball (PAL)

Tower Toppler (PAL)

Mat Mania Challenge (PAL)

Pole Position II (PAL)

Planet Smashers (PAL)

One-on-One (PAL)

Titlematch Pro Wrestling (PAL)

F-14 Tomcat (PAL)

I have two carts of Basketbrawl one works on the 2600+, the other fails 

They both fail on my real 7800...

I would say your cart is either dead or has got  connection Problems, which happens more likely with a few 2600 carts.

Basketbrawl should work.

[Dr Karnov]

I can confirm that my PAL Basketbrawl works fine

[+karri]

I soldered a few wires to see if the dumps made by the MCU matches the Galaga cart that leaves 20% outside the screen. The result is surprising. The failing cart gets tagged as NTSC - not PAL as it should have been imho. So you can forget everything I have said about PAL compatibility about Galaga. It is wrongly tagged by the MCU and because of that the screen gets shifted down.

 

This is the header created by the dumper.

 

0000000 352 352 252   U   x  \0   2 001   A   T   A   R   I   7   8   0
0000020   0                               G   a   l   a   g   a       (
0000040   N   T   S   C   )  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0
0000060  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0 200  \0  \0  \0 001 001
0000100  \0 001  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0
0000120  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0
0000140  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0  \0   A   C   T   U   A
0000160   L       C   A   R   T       D   A   T   A       S   T   A   R
0000200   T   S       H   E   R   E 242   G 251  \0 235 323 035 251 001

[chad5200]

54 minutes ago, karri said:

I soldered a few wires to see if the dumps made by the MCU matches the Galaga cart that leaves 20% outside the screen. The result is surprising. The failing cart gets tagged as NTSC - not PAL as it should have been imho. So you can forget everything I have said about PAL compatibility about Galaga. It is wrongly tagged by the MCU and because of that the screen gets shifted down.

 

This is the header created by the dumper.

That's some great information.  Let's just hope someone at Atari/Plaion is paying attention to this information.

 

 

[+karri]

This is a bit strange as the original ProSystem 1.3 specifies the Galaga as:

 

--- the NTSC version ---

[fb8d803b328b2e442548f7799cfa9a4a]
title=Galaga
type=0
pokey=false
controller1=1
controller2=1
region=0
flags=0

 

--- the PAL version ---
[f5dc7dc8e38072d3d65bd90a660148ce]
title=Galaga
type=0
pokey=false
controller1=1
controller2=1
region=1
flags=0

 

The MD5 sum of the dumped cart is:

f5dc7dc8e38072d3d65bd90a660148ce

 

So it matches the region=1 cart.

 

From ProSystem sources:

#define REGION_NTSC 0
#define REGION_PAL 1
#define REGION_AUTO 2

[Diewaldo]

5 hours ago, DEANJIMMY said:

I have two carts of Basketbrawl one works on the 2600+, the other fails 

They both fail on my real 7800...

I would say your cart is either dead or has got  connection Problems, which happens more likely with a few 2600 carts.

Basketbrawl should work.

I'll give it a good cleaning and try again one more time. The cart runs on an original 7800 without any problem ...

[+LS650]

I can't comment in PAL vs NTSC, but I had one NTSC 7800 cart (Pole Position II) that I used four Q-tips cleaning over and over before it suddenly started working.

 

Now PP2 boots just fine... but I can't play it because I only have 1-button controllers at the moment.

[Diewaldo]

14 hours ago, Diewaldo said:

I'll give it a good cleaning and try again one more time. The cart runs on an original 7800 without any problem ...

Unfortunately no amount of cleaning achieved anything from this. But fortunately I also have an Evercade EXP with all the Atari Carts. So fortunately I can still play Food Fight and Basketbrawl and Ninja Golf. And on one of the Namco cartridges there is also a NES Version of Xevious I think. So the games currently not running are covered anyway ...

[Zap1982]

1 hour ago, Diewaldo said:

Unfortunately no amount of cleaning achieved anything from this. But fortunately I also have an Evercade EXP with all the Atari Carts. So fortunately I can still play Food Fight and Basketbrawl and Ninja Golf. And on one of the Namco cartridges there is also a NES Version of Xevious I think. So the games currently not running are covered anyway ...

It was playing Food Fight and Xevious on the Evercade that made me pick the 7800 carts of the same up, so I am still holding out for a patch.

[+karri]

_{As I showed with Galaga: the dumper claims a PAL cart to be NTSC. My guess is that there is some left over testing code in the Dumper MCU that forces the region flag to be 0 (NTSC) for all 7800 carts. That would explain colour errors, wrong number of scanlines, crashes etc.}

 

[Avenger75]

Out of PAL/NTSC different behavior, it is Strange to see that the "Game Station Pro" from Atari is able to launch the 7800 homebrews like Pacman Collection and Galaxian, and that the "2600 +" from Atari released the same month is not able to launch all the original games ....

Let's hope that a firmware update will improve this for the 2600+ .

[tradyblix]

4 hours ago, Avenger75 said:

Out of PAL/NTSC different behavior, it is Strange to see that the "Game Station Pro" from Atari is able to launch the 7800 homebrews like Pacman Collection and Galaxian, and that the "2600 +" from Atari released the same month is not able to launch all the original games ....

Let's hope that a firmware update will improve this for the 2600+ .

it's not strange. One has a cart dumper, the other doesn't. obviously there's issues with the dumping. see the problematic carts thread, what karri said, etc. 

[Avenger75]

3 hours ago, tradyblix said:

it's not strange. One has a cart dumper, the other doesn't. obviously there's issues with the dumping. see the problematic carts thread, what karri said, etc. 

What I find strange, and the meaning is more; what is a pity for me,  is that the 2600+ who is supposed to be specialised  in handling atari 2600 and 7800 cart is less efficient than the Game Station Pro for other cart than the NTSC original game.

 

Note also that the cartridge pdf compatibility list of Atari 2600+ contains no reference to PAL or NTSC system.

 

Using a cart dumper technology, or a different way to access the Cart rom is the choice of Atari.

But here if the dumper claims a Galaga PAL cart to be NTSC , it means that we meet bugs in the dumper result,even for a very popular PAL 7800 cartridge.

 

Edited November 26, 2023 by Avenger75