batari

USPS has increased prices - yet again. Most markedly is international shipping - USPS prices have went up as much as 30%! The order page now reflects these increased prices. The website changes came a week late and I lost a small chunk of change from this week's orders

I have also added an order FAQ to help answer the questions I often get.

Lastly, a new board revision allows me to build a Harmony cart with a microSD slot. This is a stopgap measure as the SD slots are no longer available and I want to extend my supply a bit (once out of SD slots, I will need to redesign the board again for another brand of SD slots.) If there's any interest in this special Harmony cart, you can buy one here:

http://harmony.atari...HarmonyuSD.html

These are standard edition only. The cost is the same. Shipping is also the same as the regular Harmony (reflecting the new, increased shipping costs.) We do not have a new manual for this special cartridge yet, so for now we will include an addendum so you can note the proper insertion of the card.

I need common cartridges to continue to build Harmony carts.

This is what I need:

• Atari- or Sears-branded cartridges ONLY (no Activision, Imagic, etc.)
  
• Picture, black, or red-label carts - NO silver-label carts
  
• No Combat carts (these use brittle plastic and break too easily when cutting)
  
• Carts must be in good condition, no scratches, gouges, chips, cracks, or markings
  
• Lots of at least 30 carts, please

I will pay for shipping - USA only, please, otherwise it's too slow and expensive.

Instead of cash, I can offer a standard-edition Harmony cart in trade for 100 carts.

PM if you can help! Thanks!

As I hinted at earlier, I need some money in my Paypal account as one my suppliers takes it exclusively and I need to place an order with them in a bit.

The reason I quit accepting Paypal in the past is because they limited my account. It's been long enough, though, and Paypal is getting another chance.

Order page is in the same place as before - http://harmony.atari...com/order.html . Please let me know of any issues.

I was thinking of an easy way to allow four joysticks on the 2600. It would have to be simple enough so people could create their own cables, and at least one joystick would be reverse-compatible with existing games so it could be left plugged in. It should require as few parts as possible.

So my thought was that two joysticks could be connected straight-through to a single port with a DE9 splitter cable (these are available for just a few dollars.) The cable would only need pin 8 to each joystick snipped, and the first one could be wired directly to pin 5 from the console (with a pullup resistor), while the other would need an inverted pin 5. To do the inversion, you could use an inverter chip or an ordinary bipolar transistor with pullup (pin 5 to base, emitter to ground, collector to pin 8 on the second joystick, with the pullup resistor on this line.)

Normally, the second joystick would be active and would work with most existing games. To read from the first joystick, you will need the paddle cap discharged by writing D6=1 to VBLANK. Doing so will briefly enable the second joystick by putting ground on its ground pin. You need to read SWCHA once and store the value as the joystick won't be enabled for long since the pullup on pin 5 should be sized such that cap will be rapidly charged, as once charged you can read the other joystick.

Do you think this would work? Is there an easier way to do this (that is, with fewer parts?)

Finally, it looks like Mono supports VisualbB. To run VbB, type "mono VisualbB.exe" and it should run. It isn't perfect (it tries to access a non-existent Windows registry) but so far most things seem to work.

My distro already had mono, but to get vbB working, I had to install mono-vbnc, which are Visual Basic libraries. Other distros might need the full mono package installed.

It does not work in Mono for OS X, unfortunately, and it appears to be because of the internal browser in the start page, which is not supported in OS X. There is currently no way to fix this unless Jeff is willing to build a version without the internal browser.