tool section
On this page you will find some tools that I have created for myself to
help me program games for the VCS 2600 and the VCS 7800. All of them were
designed to work with MS-DOS, but they should also work fine in a DOS
shell window under MS Windows 9x. Those tools that come with source code
require Borland's Turbo C++ 3.0 to compile.
-
Atari VCS 7800 development system (second release)
This file describes how to modify an Atari VCS 7800 console so that it can
be used as a development system and cartridge reader for 2600 and 7800
games. Basically you need to replace the OS ROM in the console with a
new OS on an EPROM chip and to build a simple cable between one joystick
port on the 7800 and the parallel port of your PC. Also you need to change
an old 7800 game cartridge to take a RAM chip, so that you can test your
games on it.
New in this version are:
-
complete source code included
-
plans for a 48K RAM cart
-
faster transfer routines in the 7800 OS
-
support for more bankswitching schemes in the cartridge reader
-
some bugfixes
-
Atari VCS 7800 development system (first release)
This version contains the plans for the 32K RAM cart. Since these were
replaced by the plans for the 48K RAM cart in the new release, I still
leave this file here.
-
Atari 7800 ROM signature key generator
This program can validate and generate signature keys for ATARI 7800
ROM images. A signature key is nessessary, if you want to burn your
creations on EPROM cartridges for use with unmodified NTSC 7800
consoles. A7800sign was written by Frank Palazzolo.
-
TIA Sound Editor
This program allows you to edit music and sound effects on your PC and
to play them back on a 7800 or 2600 console. It requires the same simple
cable as the 7800 development system for the playback feature.
-
PCX2GRP graphics converter
This program allows you to design the graphics for the player objects in
your VCS 2600 games with any graphics program that can edit PCX files with
256 colours, as it converts those files into assembler data tables to be
included into your game source code.
-
Binary to C-style hex values converter
I use this program to convert 2600 or 7800 binaries into C-style hexadecimal
value tables. Those can be included into the C source code of those tools
that need to transfer some 6502 code to the console to work properly.
[home]
[tools]
[texts]
[pictures]
[links]
last modified 02.03.2003 -
© Copyright 2000 by Eckhard Stolberg (
Eckhard_Stolberg@web.de)