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Even Better Than The Portable 2600
Walton C. Gibson writes: "Instead of a portable 2600, how about a device that plays EVERY 2600
game ever made in hardware, and it all fits inside a single Atari 7800 enclosure?
Check out Bankzilla -- as well as some this guy's other projects like the NES music format, making a portable NES."
if you want to get stuff from c64 disks (1541 & 1571), take a look her e
you'll also need a copy of star commander or trans64 (can't find a link for trans64, sorry).
it does require that you have a 1541 or 1571 drive, and i don't know about it working on the mac... but it works just great on a pc.
i seem to recall a linux driver for this style of 1541 interface a few years back, but i can't find anything about it now. it would probably work under dosemu or vmware though.
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FWIW, the real reason he doesn't want to even try to sell these is because it would be an unholy pain in the butt. This ain't no Heathkit we're talking about here. I've done EPROM mods for the 7800 and ColecoVision, and installed region mods for Saturn and Playstation, and this is way above that. I've also made three cart dumpers, the first was a socket adapter for an EPROM programmer, the next was a rigged TRS-80 Color Computer, and the third was a rigged 7800, and I dumped quite a few rare cartridges with them.
The trickiest part of designing this thing was emulating all the bank switching schemes used on the 2600. There were well over half a dozen different schemes used, plus this emulates the Supercharger, which had its own bank switching scheme. An FPGA was used here to give maximum flexibility with a minimum of chips.
The reason bank switching on the 2600 was so non-standardized is that there was no R/W line, so you had to use special addresses to trigger bank switches, and separate address ranges for reading vs writing any RAM on the cartridge.
And then there were the cartridges with custom chips, like Pitfall II, which had a chip containing the music data, copied to the volume registers at the start of each scan line, and the Supercharger's main chip, which had to be removed from an actual cartridge and insterted into the project. The Stella TIA chip also had to be salvaged from a real 2600.
On top of all that, he's got an 8085 and TMS9918 to control it, and to generate the audio signal for the Supercharger games. That's like putting a second custom video game system into it.
Also not mentioned above is that Kevin wrote a Tetris for the 2600.
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
The designer states that he will not sell this, and legally I can see his point. The question becomes, would any of us pay $199 for a mass-built one with Atari's blessing? I suspect that I would. What about the rest of you?
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
Cowboy Neal: "Beer?"
CmdrTaco: "Already tried that. Hemos?"
Hemos: "How about we run another anti-Microsoft article? Or say that RedHat has 2000 bugs again?"
CmdrTaco: "Too plain."
Timothy: "I know. What if were to run an article similar to the repeated ones, but not nearly as engrossing?"
CmdrTaco: "Great idea! All in favor?"
All: "Aye!"
Cowboy Neal: "Beer?"
CmdrTaco: "Soon, son. Soon......"
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Am I the only one that looks upon this whole fascination with retro to be a good thing for this country? We see people playing Atari 2600 games like they're the latest thing, people are falling all over themselves playing Pole Position on emulators such as MAME, old style dressing is coming back into style, etc. Even the good old music has come back into style. "Death metal" such as Slayer is being phased out in favor of lively swing music and much more upbeat music such as the offerings from the Backstreet Boys and Jaci Valesquez.
Can this be a sign that the declining moral values of this nation have started to make a U-turn and head back in the right direction? Perhaps. I do know one thing for certain: in NO Atari 2600 game were you able to graphically rip your opponent's spine out or "gib" somebody into a thousand pieces with a grenade. Kids today need a little bit more Pitfall and a little bit less Quake. This fascination with the technology of yesteryear is a step in the right direction.
Right now, the best way to do a portable 64 is via emulation. Frodo exists on multiple platforms, and Power64 on the Mac is damn good; it works well enough to run GEOS 2.0. Now if I still had my floppies full of games and a way to get them onto my PowerBook...I miss that 64!
-jon
Remember Amalek.