Well, a coworker came through and gave me her old Atari 2600 which had been
sitting in her mom's basement getting damp. It works great (well, as great
as you can get when you're sending your signal out over RF ;) ) and I
finally got to try out some of my recent 2600 projects on the real thing.
Prognosis: 50/50. Obviously I have to get another Supercharger now for
development purposes (if the New Brain 2 disc wasn't reason enough.)
Pac-Man Hack: Works fine. Played with a joystick on a real 2600 on a 25"
TV with the sound going through my stereo, I think this may be my favorite
pre-crash home version of Pac-Man, even if it was 15 years too late. :)
Naturally I can think of about 20 more things in it I would 'fix', but we
won't talk about my filthy acts of illegal hacking here ;)
Space Invaders Hack: Here the problems started to creep in - the "missile
launcher" part of the player, 1 pixel wide, is too narrow to see easily and
my choice of green (which looked arcade-perfect in the emulators) is kind
of bluish on TV. The shots seem pretty dark but they very well may have
been in the original too, it's been almost 20 years for me.
Boing 2600: Eckhard was right, I get nausea just from looking at this thing
on a real TV. It's like one of those scrambled pr0n channels. Note to
self: Test these things on a real 2600 before releasing them! (Luckily
this is the version from before I joined the stella-list; I would imagine
more recent versions are working better since I haven't heard a peep out of
anyone and at least two folks are apparently making carts of it.) Oddly
enough my cheezy pseudo-4-channel music sounds better (albeit just as
cheezy) through the TV. Maybe there's some kind of low-pass filter thing
happening that I don't understand.
I haven't been able to test my playfield demos or my "still too embarassing
to post but it's going to be a Jumpman clone" yet. So jackbergsales.com
gets a check in the mail tomorrow for a Supercharger and I can at least go
to bed satisfied with one of my hacks ;)
Rob
kudla@xxxxxxxxx ... http://kudla.org/raindog ... Rob
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