Here is a picture of the board inside the Activision one:
http://www.atarihq.com/danb/images/toymax.jpg
There are two epoxy blobs but it doesn't appear as if one was ROM and
the other was the system. The large blob has all the inputs going to it
and the smaller one has the video signals coming out of it.
Maybe I have missed a discussion of this but is it known that this is
cloned hardware? Are the title and instruction screen that the unit
displays within the capabilities of the 2600 or would they have to have
added extra hardware to generate these?
Dan
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-stella@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-stella@xxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Ruffin Bailey
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2002 8:00 AM
To: stella@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [stella] 10-in-1 Toymax
> At 05:59 PM 8/18/2002 -0400, you wrote:
> >Boy, that was tough to track down. Here's some 10-in-1 info. I
> >think I'll be picking up two of these pretty quickly -- one to play
> with and one
> >to rip to pieces.
>
> Don't know what you intend to gain by ripping it apart. There
> isn't much
> to hack with inside it. It's just a tiny glob of epoxy, I believe.
The hope was that the games weren't on the same chip as everything
else, but I take it you're suggesting that they are. If they
weren't, you could (maybe ?) solder in a cart slot somehow if the
design lent itself to that. Course you wouldn't know until you'd
ripped the thing apart -- or at least looked through the groovy
plastic. There's also the possibility of doing some VCSp-like
hack, which would be much more straightforward with this hardware.
So there's just one chip in this thing? Not even a separate chunk
of hardware holding the ROMs, even if it isn't something easy to
hack? I'd have to think at least the ROMs are out separate so that
making ones with new games (eg, this Atari 10-in-1 (versus the
Activision 10-in-1 I'd forgotten about)) would be less costly. Do
you know if the "VCS hardware" in this unit is a different version
than the last, perhaps?
I also noticed that it doesn't produce HMOVE lines (so the TIA
really isn't exactly a TIA, as Glenn had suggested about a year
ago) and that this new Atari version should have Combat. Do they
realize Combat isn't much fun as a one player game? (Which also
gave me the idea to start messing with AI with Combat --
unfortunately this sounds about as much fun as adding AI to any
other "action" game, ie "really tough".)
Thanks,
Ruffin Bailey
http://myfreakinname.blogspot.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------
Archives (includes files) at
http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/
Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/
Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
