>Although there may be others, I know of one other game that behaves
>differently on the *Rainbow* than it does on the *traditional*. Yar's
>Revenge. On the *traditional* when you power it up you get a nice black
>background. On the *rainbow*, sometimes you get the correct appearance, but
>sometimes you get stripes down either the left or the right side of the
>screen. Usually they're green.
>after a power up? Well, you might be surprised. In any event, when I left
>these things uninitialized, Yar's Revenge displayed a nice green stripe
>right down the left side of the screen when the emulator was started.
>So I guess the moral of the story is that the *rainbow* Atari 2600 seems to
>power up with TIA registers and/or RAM in a different state than the
>*traditional* model. Not that this has anything to do with Multi050... but
>who knows ???
I'd guess that the stripes on Yar's Revenge come from an uninitialized
object, probably a missile - register RESM0 never gets hit. The code never
positions the object; so the 2600 just uses whatever random pattern of
electrons happens to be in the gates that represent RESM0 in the TIA when
the machine was turned on, and this pattern happens to correspond with an
offscreen location on the older 2600 but not on the newer one.
Just BTW, I think the machine you're calling the "rainbow" is usually
called the 2600jr.
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