Issue 37: Nov 2003
Features
- | Foreword
- | MyAtari Survey Feedback
- | Tip of the day
- | Atari Is Underground Computing!
- | Jaguar Connexion 2003
- | Introduction To The MiNT Operating System
Review
- | Zombie Apocalypse
M@ilbox
News
| M@ilbox VCS troubles I hope you don't mind me contacting you, but I came across your email when searching for info on the atari vcs. I recently bought a vcs (in its box, all the packaging, it even has its bubble wrap), but for the life of me I can't get any TV to perfectly tune into the signal from it. I've tried three TVs, a two year old 36 inch Sony wide screen, which tunes in the picture more or less ok (tested with space invaders), but has no sound, then I tried an old Sony portable (probably 80s), which again tuned in the picture but no sound, but also tuned in the sound with no picture! Lastly another TV about 10 years old, that wouldn't tune into it at all. Now I'm not sure if the vcs is faulty, or it's just my TVs not being able to pick up the signal well enough. I've noticed that there's some tape over a part of the TV lead, if there's a small break in that, would that affect anything? Make the signal weaker? And if so how could I fix that? If you don't think its that, any other ideas? Sorry to take your time up, but it would be a shame to just box it up, and stick it in the loft! Phil Maxey, UK Shiuming Lai replies Too right, it would criminal to box it up, but before I could even start to answer your query, the rest of the MyAtari team beat me to it! Matthew Preston replies I always find it's a good idea to check the leads of such a classic piece of hardware. Over time the coax tends to break down and become unreliable. The same I'm afraid can happen to the electronic componenets inside the VCS console. Another thought occcured to me as well, is the VCS PAL/SECAM or NTSC? If the console is a different TV standard to the country you live in, then you will have little chance of getting anything without a converter. A modern television is capable of dealing with most TV standards, however it may be a manual setting. Also remember that the VCS never won any awards for picture quality, age has also not been kind to the RF stages of these consoles. If you still feel that you are getting nowhere, then you can give your VCS a new lease of life with a new plug-in board to give it S-Video. Check this link for more details: http://www.atari2600.com/news.php Uncle Harry replies Please check the video system of the VCS: NTSC or PAL. There are different sound carrier frequencies in the composite video signals of these systems. For instance you might get a black and white picture but no sound when plugging a NTSC VCS to a PAL TV. When slightly de-tuning the TV you can get the sound but the picture is bad. If it is a defective cable only, there should be at least the sound even with a bad picture. The worst thing possible is that your VCS is defective. Maybe this can help you. Thomas Wellicome replies You could try changing the TV lead, in the early VCS it's just a normal lead which is actually connected inside the console. Unscrew the case and swap it for another, it's pretty simple. Also you could try cleaning the contacts on the cartridge and the console itself, this might help. Finally try it with another cartridge, Space Invaders may have had it... Christoph Brincken replies Tune in, get the channel and enjoy the vibes. There is only one wire cable transporting everything together, color and sound. The thing is, the channel on the TV set has to be tunned in correctly. You might for example get a perfect picture - without color. Same thing with sound. Find the right channel in with the TV set and you are fine. It cannot be the cable, if you get a picture, the cable must be OK. Love, peace and ColdFire Atari clones. PS: Upgrade from punched-card technology, get an Atari ST 16-bit computer with a graphic environment manager (GEM), with mouse, 512 Kilobytes or even more and 3.5" disk drive which holds over 360,000 bytes, or even a thrilling 720,000 in the double-sided version. No tape drives or plugging cartridges any more! Atari Chimera portable gaming device I stumbled across a thread on myatari.net posted by one of my lecturers at college, regarding my current project, the Atari Chimera. While my designs are pretty much finalised and in production, I have to start thinking about my next assignment which is an advert for the Atari Chimera. In your initial reply you said "if you like I can dig out some Lynx advertising material and scan it for you to study" would it be at all possible for you to send me this, I would find it very useful and it would be most appreciated. As it is not too late for last minute adjustments to my system specs I wondered if you wouldn't mind having a quick look at them and pointing out anything that I could possibly think about improving or implementing. Specs: 128bit 733mhz Processor 64Mb Ram NVIDIA graphics 8 GB hard drive 4x Mini DVD drive Bluetooth compatible (multiplayer) Headphone socket 2.0 Speaker (mono) 2 joy sticks 8 analogue buttons (6 + 2 Shoulder) Backlit flat screen mp3, div-x, mpeg2, compatible Li ion battery Special Atari Mini DVDs are needed to play games, these are high density and will retail at a premium price, writable once only, you download 1 game onto a disk via internet. Standard Mini CD, DVD can be used to record mp3, div-x, mpeg and will be read by the Chimera as raw files. Games: All Atari (and subsidiaries) games will be available for download as well as many others. I have included my logo in jpeg format (see attached) again, any feedback would be most appreciated. Thank you for you time. Tom Long, UK Shiuming Lai replies Wow, you've really given us food for thought! Taking your points in order, first of all, no problem about the Lynx advertisement scans, watch your mail box soon. Now let's have a closer look at the system specifications. While I realize this is a product design course and not computer system architecture, I'll comment anyway. At a glance, the specs read like a recipe for the Microsoft Xbox! With respect to the NVIDIA graphics, I'm reminded of drivers who put stickers on their windows telling the world what make of car stereo they have. I personally think creating a strong brand identity and image that will make its own case is more important than who supplied the graphics chip. The number of people with a true appreciation for the technical details are a drop in the ocean of the mass market. What purpose would the 8 GB hard drive serve? A bit further down the list you mention various digital media formats - is your device intended to be multi-functional and compete with the likes of Nokia's N-Gage and Apple's iPod? What's a headphone socket 2.0, or did you mean USB 2.0? One thing I found lacking in the original Atari Lynx in both incarnations was a TV output. Various third-party upgrades have been rumoured or shown in prototype form, but none have made it to the market due to the cost of the development work needed to integrate the solution with the complexity of such a miniature device. It should be easy, if done form the start, and a necessity to incorporate some form of general purpose A/V connector, because a portable gaming device is no longer just portable in a compromised fashion. Modern technology allows vastly superior processing speed and resulting graphics and sound, to deliver very sophisticated gaming capabilities indeed. That means it's not just something you play under the sheets in bed or on the back seat of a car, but something you take around and connect to other entertainment systems to expand the scope of its usefulness. Will your DVD media be the same as those used for DVD camcorders? Will they be protected in a hard shell like Mini Disc or Sony's proposed UMD format for its forthcoming PSP hand-held? Screen technology is very important, what sort of resolution are you thinking about? In the past, portables have had resolutions to match the available screen technology (in terms of cost - no point putting an ultra high resolution screen on a portable if it quadruples the price and/or chokes the graphics processor in keeping up generating pixels) but once again, things have moved on. Back lighting is great for playing in the dark but the opposite conditions should also be considered. The reflective colour LCDs used on the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance were disastrous, as were back-lit screens for the battery life of earlier machines, but better technology is available now. How about a hybrid, transflective screen? 4:3 aspect ratio? 16:9? The aforementioned digital media formats shouldn't be set in stone if you have a very powerful media processing engine (with a suitably imaginative name!), which can adapt to different formats through software. Of course, compatibility with the most popular formats could be a selling point, for example, the ability to play MP3 music files would be an attractive feature, but by no means the limit of possibility. Lithium ion battery technology is a smart idea. What form factor will it take? A proprietary shape, or one that can be filled with off-the-shelf AA or AAA cells when you're not near a charger? Finally, I like the name Chimera, it suits the idea of the project. The logo could probably use a little more exploration. First thing is the Atari logo is out of proportion - the Fuji symbol looks way too large for the Atari lettering. Usually, the form would be the Fuji on the left and the Atari name on the right. Refer to the article on the Atari logo in issue 32 of MyAtari, published in June this year. This is important if the feel and image of Atari is to be retained. On a more general note, with respect to your combining of the Atari Fuji symbol into the Chimera logo, this is a nice idea but maybe it could be more subtle. I think this would only work well if the letter you're replacing with a symbol is very close in style to the symbol itself. Otherwise generally, if you study lots of different corporate and product logos, you rarely, if ever see the manufacturer logo combined within the product logo. The product name is made into a brand of its own. PlayStation is a good example - its branding consists of its own name in a special font, and the combined "P" and "S" symbol. Another clever branding move was using the four shapes on the right hand buttons of the controllers. The manufacturer logo simply isn't used. Atari might be a little different in that it's known primarily as a games company, and won't have this image diluted by other product lines, but I still think it's cleaner to not incorporate the manufacturer logo in such a way. This would also liberate you to be more creative with the style of the product name logo. The Courier style font you used looks a little dated and not especially bold, high tech, or more importantly, fun. What do you think? Enter the Matrix PC I wonder... did you have any difficulty moving around in Enter the Matrix PC? I recently bought the DVD version of the game, and not only can't I patch it yet, but I can't move forward or backwards in first person, and I can't even escape first person view. When I go to try and rebind my keys, the game refuses to recognize my keyboard inputs. I'm wondering if you had the same problem... I've e-mailed Atari tech support, and the reply I recieved was an insult to my intelligence; even though I clearly stated my problem whenever I tried to. Anyway, please reply if you find it isn't a total waste of your time, I'm just curious to see if, perhaps, the DVD ROM version was a waste of money. Stephen Schnare, Canada Matthew Preston replies Hi Stephen, firstly I must say that replying to any member of the Atari community is never a waste of my time. It dis-heartens me to think that Atari tech support are just reading off cards and don't know their own products anymore. I don't own the DVD version yet, but methinks maybe they do listen a little. After all I can't be the only one to think that four CDs to install a PC game is a bit much! The problem of re-binding the keys is a curious one and I had the same problem. I checked the support web site and found nothing, but I see that the problem has not gone away. The process is not as straightforward as they make out. In fact I gave up to begin with and just used the key maps they provided. I just did the usual and pressed loadsa keys until I found the ones that worked okay, the manual is a little wrong in some of the bindings. My advice is this at the moment: remove any joysticks, game-pads and anything else that you have, including steering wheels as the game will try and use these before a keyboard input. Make sure you have the latest working updates for your sound card and video card. Sometimes the latest drivers are not always the best and the conflicts mess up the game. When I first installed the game it would not run at all, let alone play it! You know you're an Atari nut when... I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine about Atari, and it soon went like, "Is this thing still steam operated or did they put a diesel engine in it?" or, "How many bits?" And other similar questions. Of course it didn't take time to me to show how wrong he was, but this is not the point. The point is that I believe we Atarians know how to laugh at ourselves, so here are the Top ten signs you are a true Atarian 10. Every time you hear the word "landfill" you think of "E.T. - the video game" 9. You can't name more than 16 colours 8. You are a busy bee 7. You just need cartridges for games and floppy disk for progams 6. Your mouse pointer is "mind driven" 5. Jaguar isn't a car company and Lynx isn't an animal 4. One fire button is more than enough 3. Your PC is only needed for boiling water and reaching high shelves 2. Your MIDI keyboard only accepts MIDI flows coming from your ST ...and the number one sign that you are a true Atarian is: You can't wait for those "system shutdown" procedures to complete, so you just turn off your PC. Paolo De Felice, Italy Shiuming Lai replies Ciao Paolo, quello e veramente cool!
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