Re: [stella] Compumate....

Subject: Re: [stella] Compumate....
From: "Eckhard Stolberg" <Eckhard_Stolberg@xxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2001 14:45:21 +0100
> I wonder how it dealt with the atonal qualities of 2600 sound...  Could it
> have possibly done something similar to Pitfall II?

No, I think it just uses standard TIA sound. At least everything
works in the emulator and we don'T have a special sound handler
for this ROM.

> That's comparable to Bally Basic which allows 1800 bytes (even though the
> Astrocade has 4K RAM total).  It's unfortunate that Compumate Basic won't
> let you do any gfx.  If it were possible to do Peeks and Pokes and USR
> calls and have inline machine language it would have been able to do some
> cool stuff (Combat like games, but with the advantage of more read/write
> memory), but then the inner workings of the 2600 were hardly common
> knowledge to the hobbyist at the time, and had Spectravideo tried to
> publish what it knew, Atari would have been on their case.

But that's pretty much what Computer Magic/Commavid did with their
Magicard in 1981. That cart contains 1K of RAM and lets you input
programs as hexcode values with the keyboard controllers. The
Magicart manual explains how to create programs for the VCS and convert
them to hexcodes. The manual doesn't go much into detail though.


Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg



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