Flashback 2 Reviews

[Curt Vendel]

It's called running logistics from 10,000 miles away, I cannot be in HK 24/7 to ensure everything.

 

I was debating whether I would answer you next part regarding firings and lawsuits, but let me just say this to you Carlos:

 

As for a company being sued, I'd honestly watch how you toss such things around Carlos... remember that you purchased a set of TIA schem's directly from me, and while technologies of the TIA patents may not be enforced currently, the design of the TIA is copyrighted and your 2600 on a chip and its turning over to retrogames could easily be placed into crosshairs and tied up in court for a few years... bottom line, don't step on toes connected to a foot that can kick you in the balls.

 

 

 

Curt

 

...in fact everything was as it should have been in the initial ASIC run we did for the E3 demo units, someone decided that they should "improve" the design and it is now permanently part of 860K chips that were run...

What do you mean with "everything was as it should have been"? if you are saying that your original design was accurate and those engineers in your HK office screwed the HMOVE bars, sound, reset position circuits, messed the motion circuits (that generated the Cosmic Ark stars bug), etc. then it looks to me someone has to be fired or a company sued.

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[Carlos_Lopez]

As for a company being sued, I'd honestly watch how you toss such things around Carlos...  remember that you purchased a set of TIA schem's directly from me, and while technologies of the TIA patents may not be enforced currently, the design of the TIA is copyrighted and your 2600 on a chip and its turning over to retrogames could easily be placed into crosshairs and tied up in court for a few years...  bottom line, don't step on toes connected to a foot that can kick you in the balls.

I don't want this thread to turn into a personal fight (it wasn't my intention, sorry). I'll just comment on the schematics you mention. You know that's a lie: I never bought schematics from you or anyone. Bottom line, if you have something you want to add regarding this, or my address, please PM me.

[ZylonBane]

As for a company being sued, SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!

Tch, tch.

[King_Salamon]

bottom line, don't step on toes connected to a foot that can kick you in the balls.

 

 

 

Curt

 

 

917322[/snapback]

 

 

Curt's got sexy toes...

 

(Hey Curt, got any more hidden goodies in the FB2?)

[shadow460]

Here's the solution for all these FB2 problems: Plug your 2600 in and play the real deal.    I've been playing my FB2 over the last few weeks, and decided to put it away and plug in one of my 2600s, and ended up killing a few hours easily.  There's just no true substitute for the real thing! 

917072[/snapback]

 

Thank you.

 

I also agree that the joysticks alone are worth the $30 pirce tag.

 

Seriously, I've spent less than an hour playing my FB2 since I got it. It's good for the friends' kids when they come over. they'll never know that Missile Command isn't right.

I didn't know that. I guess I just played the Sears version senseless instead of playing it on FB2.

 

If you don't like it, then don't play it.

[supercat]

As for a company being sued, I'd honestly watch how you toss such things around Carlos...  remember that you purchased a set of TIA schem's directly from me, and while technologies of the TIA patents may not be enforced currently, the design of the TIA is copyrighted and your 2600 on a chip and its turning over to retrogames could easily be placed into crosshairs and tied up in court for a few years...  bottom line, don't step on toes connected to a foot that can kick you in the balls.

 

Would not patent # 4,112,422 for the TIA have expired by now, given that they were filed in 1976? As for copyright, as far as I can tell that protects the physical layout of the components, but not the nature of their interconnection (which would have been, if anything, protected by patent). I sincerely doubt that the layout of transistors used in the FPGA will bear any resemblance whatsoever to that of those in the original TIA.

 

While I can appreciate that you're probably very frustrated at the people in HK and are probably annoyed that it seems like everyone here is attacking you for their mistakes, making idle threats of legal action isn't going to help anything.

 

Besides, would you rather have nobody complain about your work because nobody cared about it? Think of the complaints as being a positive, in that it means people care enough to notice things. And enjoy the fact that people here will probably buy the FB3 when it comes out.

 

BTW, what's the licensing status of Space Invaders and Ms. Pacman? Both of those are games that were very strongly associated with the 2600, and would seem like they should belong in retrospective collections. Also, if the rights could be worked out, Ebivision's Pac Man (unreleased) could be an interesting item to include as well.

[Curt Vendel]

Technical comments and suggestions are great and welcome Carlos, when you start to post thing such as to firings and lawsuits... you were out of line, if it wasn't your intention, apology accepted.

 

Now back to our regularly scheduled program...

 

 

 

Curt

 

As for a company being sued, I'd honestly watch how you toss such things around Carlos...  remember that you purchased a set of TIA schem's directly from me, and while technologies of the TIA patents may not be enforced currently, the design of the TIA is copyrighted and your 2600 on a chip and its turning over to retrogames could easily be placed into crosshairs and tied up in court for a few years...  bottom line, don't step on toes connected to a foot that can kick you in the balls.

I don't want this thread to turn into a personal fight (it wasn't my intention, sorry). I'll just comment on the schematics you mention. You know that's a lie: I never bought schematics from you or anyone. Bottom line, if you have something you want to add regarding this, or my address, please PM me.

917329[/snapback]

[Curt Vendel]

Okay... somebody's got a foot fetish...

 

 

 

Curt

 

 

 

 

Curt's got sexy toes... 

 

(Hey Curt, got any more hidden goodies in the FB2?)

917335[/snapback]

[Curt Vendel]

Interesting you bring up licensing...

 

Ever since the announcement about the Activision titles, there has been interest in discussions from several firms about possible inclusion of old Atari licensed 3rd party games in future Atari hardware products, some hopefully in 06' there will be more licensed games on the next platform(s).

 

 

Curt

 

 

 

 

 

As for a company being sued, I'd honestly watch how you toss such things around Carlos...  remember that you purchased a set of TIA schem's directly from me, and while technologies of the TIA patents may not be enforced currently, the design of the TIA is copyrighted and your 2600 on a chip and its turning over to retrogames could easily be placed into crosshairs and tied up in court for a few years...  bottom line, don't step on toes connected to a foot that can kick you in the balls.

 

Would not patent # 4,112,422 for the TIA have expired by now, given that they were filed in 1976? As for copyright, as far as I can tell that protects the physical layout of the components, but not the nature of their interconnection (which would have been, if anything, protected by patent). I sincerely doubt that the layout of transistors used in the FPGA will bear any resemblance whatsoever to that of those in the original TIA.

 

While I can appreciate that you're probably very frustrated at the people in HK and are probably annoyed that it seems like everyone here is attacking you for their mistakes, making idle threats of legal action isn't going to help anything.

 

Besides, would you rather have nobody complain about your work because nobody cared about it? Think of the complaints as being a positive, in that it means people care enough to notice things. And enjoy the fact that people here will probably buy the FB3 when it comes out.

 

BTW, what's the licensing status of Space Invaders and Ms. Pacman? Both of those are games that were very strongly associated with the 2600, and would seem like they should belong in retrospective collections. Also, if the rights could be worked out, Ebivision's Pac Man (unreleased) could be an interesting item to include as well.

917346[/snapback]

[retrocon]

An ARM without assistive hardware is not going to be able to produce a quirks-accurate emulation of the TIA at full speed.  And if one is going to add assistive hardware, one has the same issues as when just doing the thing "directly" with hardware.

 

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As far as I understand pocketpcs, palms and gp32 are doing 2600 emulation at more or less fullspeed.

 

For instance, this emulator for the pocketpc is pretty much just a heavily optimized hack of stella ( http://pocketvcs.emuunlim.com/ ). So if you can imagine this system as just a pocketpc designed to run one app, stella, very well, it should be very possible.

 

And I don't really disagree with the assistive hardware thing. You would probably want to throw some assistive hardware in there like a simple gpu/frame buffer/ntsc output. Then you would just have to make some changes to the stella core as necessary (it probably just outputs to a frame buffer anyway). All of the quirks of the TIA would be handled by stella - the assistive hardware would have no effect on that. It would just be a modern-era frame buffer that would be simple to code for. You would just need to customize/rewrite the lower-level video routines for the hardware and maybe speed up some slow routines with some assembly as necessary.

 

The Samsung S3C2410 is a nice Arm chip. You can get a 203MHZ multi-chip package with integrated 32MB of SDRAM and 32MB FLASH pretty cheap. I was looking a pdf dated 9/2003 that listed the starting price at $11. I'm sure for a million pieces that prices drops steeply. Then build your little video GPU and build a customized version of stella for this specific hardware (lots of arm ports already available to start with). With 32MB FLASH you could hold a simple os, stella and every 2600 game ever made.

 

Custom ASICs aren't that cheap are they? I have heard they cost $1Mil just to tape out. What do you think the FB2-2600 chip costs per unit?

Edited August 24, 2005 by retrocon

[supercat]

An ARM without assistive hardware is not going to be able to produce a quirks-accurate emulation of the TIA at full speed.  And if one is going to add assistive hardware, one has the same issues as when just doing the thing "directly" with hardware.

 

As far as I understand pocketpcs, palms and gp32 are doing 2600 emulation at more or less fullspeed.

 

Hmm... I'd not seen quirks-accurate full-speed emulation on anything less than my year-old laptop, and even that seems to fall short sometimes. Perhaps something not running Windoze can do better with less CPU power, but quirks-accurate emulation is hard.

 

And I don't really disagree with the assistive hardware thing. You would probably want to throw some assistive hardware in there like a simple gpu/frame buffer/ntsc output. Then you would just have to make some changes to the stella core as necessary (it probably just outputs to a frame buffer anyway). All of the quirks of the TIA would be handled by stella - the assistive hardware would have no effect on that. It would just be a modern-era frame buffer that would be simple to code for. You would just need to customize/rewrite the lower-level video routines for the hardware and maybe speed up some slow routines with some assembly as necessary.

 

When I looked (about ten years ago) at the possibility of doing a 2600 emulator, one of the big difficulties was managing precisely when everything happened. It's not really possible to update all of the hardware registers that have things happen to them on every CPU cycle, but it's still essential to know what things happen when. Were it not for the collision registers, all these things could be taken care of via queueing (make a list of all the writes and when they occur, and process that list when convenient) but the fact that collision registers are affected by the display registers and may (via the code) affect what's written further on in the same screen makes things tricky.

 

Besides, you still have no guarantee that the emulation is going to be right. If there's a bug in the ARM code that's discovered after 500,000 units have been built, that's no less of a problem than having a bug in an ASIC. Either way, the stuff that's built is the way it is.

[retrocon]

Come on, this little community is too small for everyone not to get along.

 

Carlos, you should have known that that comment would have hurt Curt's feelings. Those are actual colleagues of Curt's with real feelings and real families they have to support and I'm sure they're trying as hard as they can to make a great product.

 

Curt, you know Carlos is a competitor just trying to antagonize you a bit. Why did you have to go and use the lawyer card? Just because you have nukes doesn't mean you should throw in everybody's face? No one here is getting rich are they? Are they? This is just a small fun hobby. If people want to get rich, they sell online porn or pharms or online gambling. They don't hang around 2600 forums and build little niche products, homebrew games and hardware for long dead console systems. Bringing out the lawyers, not cool my friend.

 

Let's keep this a fun open community. And the FB2 is the first spark of Ol' Atari that's been seen in 10-15 years. Let's enjoy it!

[ZylonBane]

Holy crap Curt's top-posting is annoying. You have to scroll down below his post to see who he's responding to, then scroll back up to read his response!

[Curt Vendel]

Hi Retrocon...

 

Technical comments, suggestions and such are great and those kinds of comments from everyone are important and useful

It was actually he who said firing and lawsuit first, that was neither his place or business to make comment on, that is where I took issue...

 

Carlos already said in a followup it was not his intention and he apologized, I've PM'd him and its passed and we can all move on.

 

 

 

Curt

 

 

Come on, this little community is too small for everyone not to get along.

 

Carlos, you should have known that that comment would have hurt Curt's feelings. Those are actual  colleagues of Curt's with real feelings and real families they have to support and I'm sure they're trying as hard as they can to make a great product.

 

Curt, you know Carlos is a competitor just trying to antagonize you a bit. Why did you have to go and use the lawyer card? Just because you have nukes doesn't mean you should throw in everybody's face? No one here is getting rich are they? Are they? This is just a small fun hobby. If people want to get rich, they sell online porn or pharms or online gambling. They don't hang around 2600 forums and build little niche products, homebrew games and hardware for long dead console systems. Bringing out the lawyers, not cool my friend.

 

Let's keep this a fun open community. And the FB2 is the first spark of Ol' Atari that's been seen in 10-15 years. Let's enjoy it!

917374[/snapback]

[Curt Vendel]

Holy crap Curt's top-posting is annoying. You have to scroll down below his post to see who he's responding to, then scroll back up to read his response!

917377[/snapback]

 

 

 

 

I'll bottom post from here on ZB... just for you

 

 

 

Curt

[TrekkiELO]

Interesting you bring up licensing...  

 

Ever since the announcement about the Activision titles, there has been interest in discussions from several firms about possible inclusion of old Atari licensed 3rd party games in future Atari hardware products, some hopefully in 06' there will be more licensed games on the next platform(s).

 

 

Curt

917355[/snapback]

 

I sure hope that one of those Third Party Companies is Electronic Arts because M.U.L.E. has to be included on any Atari Flashback 3 8-bit Computer Version!

 

Signed,

 

Rick Vendl II

Edited August 24, 2005 by TrekkiELO

[Flojomojo]

Holy crap Curt's top-posting is annoying. You have to scroll down below his post to see who he's responding to, then scroll back up to read his response!

917377[/snapback]

 

 

 

 

I'll bottom post from here on ZB... just for you

 

 

 

Curt

917380[/snapback]

And I'll quote your whole post, in the same spirit. ZB

[128bytes]

Screenshots?

916892[/snapback]

 

Here you go, Thomas. Here's a screenshot of Missle Command on the FB2. I picked the green color on purpose to show you the lack of HMOVE bars/lines on the left, and also the "bar graph" just above the bullets.

 

[supercat]

Screenshots?

916892[/snapback]

 

Here you go, Thomas. Here's a screenshot of Missle Command on the FB2. I picked the green color on purpose to show you the lack of HMOVE bars/lines on the left, and also the "bar graph" just above the bullets.

917395[/snapback]

 

Does the "bar graph" go away when the right hand city is destroyed? Does it get replaced by a row of three dashes if you score zero points on level 13?

Edited August 24, 2005 by supercat

[supercat]

What do you mean with "everything was as it should have been"? if you are saying that your original design was accurate and those engineers in your HK office screwed the HMOVE bars, sound, reset position circuits, messed the motion circuits (that generated the Cosmic Ark stars bug), etc. then it looks to me someone has to be fired or a company sued.

917282[/snapback]

 

If the product was specced to way the Flashback 2 works, and ended up working the way the TIA does, one could say that the engineers messed up. If you think about it, though, the "problems" people are complaining about would have been improvements if they'd been done in 1977 or probably even 1979. Someone was probably trying to be helpful, not realizing that the goal is not to produce yet-another-video-game-system, but rather to mimic as precisely as possible all the bugs, quirks, and foibles of a 28-year-old system as precisely as possible.

 

Think about it. Given a choice, if the existing library weren't an issue, which would you rather have:

• -1- Any write of HMOVE (at least at normal times) causes ugly black bars to appear at the left side of the screen, or
  -2- Writes to HMOVE may cause sprites to be obscured at the left, but don't cause nasty black bars.
   
  
• -1- Writes to RESPx or RESMx cause a player/missile to start being displayed immediately, allowing it to be used on the current line.
  -2- Writes RESPx/RESMx hide the next copy of the player/missile and only allow copies after that to show.
   
  
• -1- Poorly-timed writes to HMPx. HMMx, or HMCLR cause player/missile motion circuits to go bonkers.
  -2- Even poorly-timed writes to HMPx etc. result in sensible behavior.
   
  
• -1- Selecting "no sound" from a tone generator yields a DC voltage on the sound output.
  -2- Selecting "no sound" from a tone generator produces nothing on the sound output.
  

If the FB2 were a "new" design, all those decisions would be entirely reasonable. If one doesn't really understand the 2600 and what it's about, one may not understand that such decisions must be done as they were before. Indeed, I would not be surprised if someone HK is rather pleased with themselves for having corrected all the design sloppiness by the people who gave them the thing to produce.

[DEBRO]

Does the "bar graph" go away when the right hand city is destroyed?  Does it get replaced by a row of three dashes if you score zero points on level 13?

I haven't tried it yet but why would it? The last byte read from the city (be it a city or flatten exploded city) would be #$FF. So we should see the same behavior.

 

EDIT: Oops, I forgot about Rob's initials Yes, the line turns into the last bytes read from his initials.

 

Also, try playing the game in B/W mode. Notice the left side of the bar (D7 - D1) is hidden. It's the color of the cities while the last bit (D0) of the bar is the background color (color of the missiles).

Edited August 24, 2005 by DEBRO

[supercat]

Does the "bar graph" go away when the right hand city is destroyed?  Does it get replaced by a row of three dashes if you score zero points on level 13?

I haven't tried it yet but why would it? The last byte read from the city (be it a city or flatten exploded city) would be #$FF. So we should see the same behavior.

917417[/snapback]

 

Eh, I should know better than to trust my memory. You're correct that the destroyed cities don't disappear. But if you score zero points at level 13 (being sure to fire off all your ABMs to prevent any of them from being counted) the shape of the rightmost city changes to something else without the bottom row of pixels (though my memory was faulty--it would be a dot and a dash, not three dashes).

[King_Salamon]

Okay... somebody's got a foot fetish... 

 

 

 

Curt

 

 

 

 

Curt's got sexy toes... 

 

(Hey Curt, got any more hidden goodies in the FB2?)

917335[/snapback]

917352[/snapback]

 

Actually my wife recently discovered the pleasure of having her feet played with... but that's another topic for another time! LOL!

[Curt Vendel]

Does the "bar graph" go away when the right hand city is destroyed?  Does it get replaced by a row of three dashes if you score zero points on level 13?

I haven't tried it yet but why would it? The last byte read from the city (be it a city or flatten exploded city) would be #$FF. So we should see the same behavior.

917417[/snapback]

 

Eh, I should know better than to trust my memory. You're correct that the destroyed cities don't disappear. But if you score zero points at level 13 (being sure to fire off all your ABMs to prevent any of them from being counted) the shape of the rightmost city changes to something else without the bottom row of pixels (though my memory was faulty--it would be a dot and a dash, not three dashes).

917430[/snapback]

 

The level 13 easter egg does appear correctly - start the game, fire all shots without scoring any points and the initials RF do appear in the right most city position.

 

 

Curt

[King_Salamon]

Interesting you bring up licensing... 

 

Ever since the announcement about the Activision titles, there has been interest in discussions from several firms about possible inclusion of old Atari licensed 3rd party games in future Atari hardware products, some hopefully in 06' there will be more licensed games on the next platform(s).

 

 

Curt

 

 

 

 

 

As for a company being sued, I'd honestly watch how you toss such things around Carlos...   remember that you purchased a set of TIA schem's directly from me, and while technologies of the TIA patents may not be enforced currently, the design of the TIA is copyrighted and your 2600 on a chip and its turning over to retrogames could easily be placed into crosshairs and tied up in court for a few years...  bottom line, don't step on toes connected to a foot that can kick you in the balls.

 

Would not patent # 4,112,422 for the TIA have expired by now, given that they were filed in 1976? As for copyright, as far as I can tell that protects the physical layout of the components, but not the nature of their interconnection (which would have been, if anything, protected by patent). I sincerely doubt that the layout of transistors used in the FPGA will bear any resemblance whatsoever to that of those in the original TIA.

 

While I can appreciate that you're probably very frustrated at the people in HK and are probably annoyed that it seems like everyone here is attacking you for their mistakes, making idle threats of legal action isn't going to help anything.

 

Besides, would you rather have nobody complain about your work because nobody cared about it? Think of the complaints as being a positive, in that it means people care enough to notice things. And enjoy the fact that people here will probably buy the FB3 when it comes out.

 

BTW, what's the licensing status of Space Invaders and Ms. Pacman? Both of those are games that were very strongly associated with the 2600, and would seem like they should belong in retrospective collections. Also, if the rights could be worked out, Ebivision's Pac Man (unreleased) could be an interesting item to include as well.

917346[/snapback]

917355[/snapback]

 

2006 will be a great year! 2005 saw the real return of the 2600 and 2006 will see the real deal with all the bugs worked out! I can see a commercial... the year 2006 will swirl and then we'll see 2600! Hmm.. perfect!

 

As for the possible 3rd parties... other than Activision.. who has what rights now anyways? Coleco would be cool but all their games were other company's titles. Same with Parker Brothers. Oooh the possibilities!

 

The thought of mini-multicarts are something I really wanna see for the next Flashback unit! Would the artwork for the labels be available or are the rights for the labels owned by someone else?