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!
![[Divider]](images/divide.gif)
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.
![[Image: Chimera logo]](images/chimera.gif)
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?
![[Divider]](images/divide.gif)
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!
![[Divider]](images/divide.gif)
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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