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There’s been plenty of effort to keep old-school games and platforms alive through emulators. Adaptation of old hardware is trickier, though, so there has been relatively little movement on that front. Homebrew cartridge purveyor Joe Grand stepped forward recently to fill a big gap. The Stelladaptor lets you convert any Atari 2600-compatible joystick, paddle, or driving controller to Linux, Mac, or Windows PC’s USB posrt. Game emulator developers are adding support as we write this. Don’t forget that Commodore 64s also used Atari-style controllers, so dust off that rock-solid SunCom TAC-2 stick and go plunder the Temple of Apshai once …
[ continue ]Wireless Systems Design
I met the Technical Editor of this book, Joe Grand, at the recent “Design Wars” contest that I hosted for the Wireless Systems Design Conference & Expo. Joe took part in the contest by building a crystal radio. His eagerness to jump into a technical project and “get his hands dirty” was very refreshing. It also suggested that he has a lot of firsthand knowledge about hacking into electronic hardware.
[ continue ]LinuxDevCenter.com
“Have you played Atari today?” was an ad jingle for the Atari 2600 VCS game console during its reign in the early years of the video game industry, from the late 1970s to early 1980s. That question that could apply even now, thanks to the passion of programmers who’ve continued to make new Atari games for the past few years. These “homebrew” games come in cartridge form (for use on actual Atari 2600 consoles) and have free public releases as code that runs on Atari 2600 emulators. (Homebrew developers use two of the most popular emulators, z26 and Stella, to …
[ continue ]KnowProSE.com
I was impressed by the the depth that was gone into with the Electrical Engineering Basics – which is basically electronics. But it’s a good brief overview in a way that an interested person can get a good background on electronic devices (resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors and integrated circuits) – that alone makes it worth having on a bookshelf for an aspiring tinkerer. It’s also got a good C/Assembly language primer at the end of the book. The projects themselves were interesting – I had no idea that the Atari 2600 Game consoles were actually designed to have speakers built …
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