Any plans to implement cart support for the PC Jr.?

Images are in a *.JRC format. I would especially like to see Pitfall II and River Raid in all it's PC Jr glory:

Its already supported, and game cartridges seem to work. Pitfall II and River Raid aren't very good on the PCjr. Pitfall II doesn't have any music and River Raid is bland.

You need to have machine=pcjr in dosbox.conf (using dosbox 0.65),
then you can use "boot xyz.jrc" to load a cartridge.

Thank you both for your quick and prompt replies. I honestly tried searching through the documentation several times, but came up with nothing in respects to PC Jr cartridge support.

Although, it does appear I did not miss out on much. How especially disappointing there is no music with Pitfall II. The music it produces is suppose to be one of the highlights of both the game itself and the machine itself. Nonethless, thanks again to both of you for your help.

-Trebor

Uh i'm happy that some games run at all, didn't care anything about
music or sound (don't have anything to compare it to anyways).

It's not yet documented because too few cartridges have been tested yet.
Most games should be playable though, more or less.

Pitfall II and River Raid aren't very good on the PCjr. Pitfall II doesn't have any music and River Raid is bland.

Hey Great Hierophant,

I just tried both games and I'm going to have to disagree with both your points. Ptifall II does have music and plays very well. I also like River Raid as well. If it is too bland for you, maybe starting at at higher difficulty level may 'spice it up' for you...🤣.

Anyhow, River Raid is purely a subjectional item. Some may like it, some may not. I do like it, and find it to be just as playable as the Atari 2600 port. Pitfall II on the other hand is a different story. You may have a bad dump of the cartridge, or sound is turned off (?) The dump I have plays music throughout the game just like most (all?) of the other ports.

-Trebor

Hey Great Hierophant,

I just tried both games and I'm going to have to disagree with both your points. Ptifall II does have music and plays very well. I also like River Raid as well. If it is too bland for you, maybe starting at at higher difficulty level may 'spice it up' for you...Laughing Out Loud.

Anyhow, River Raid is purely a subjectional item. Some may like it, some may not. I do like it, and find it to be just as playable as the Atari 2600 port. Pitfall II on the other hand is a different story. You may have a bad dump of the cartridge, or sound is turned off (?) The dump I have plays music throughout the game just like most (all?) of the other ports.

I was running Pitfall II at too many cycles, which is why the sound didn't work. Its better with the sound, but still can't hold a candle to the Atari versions. Ditto for River Raid, although the difficulty level select is nice.

PCAEwin runs the atari versions of these games flawlessly (close to it). Although for the real experience, buy an Atari Flashback II. I own one and its great, very authentic. Pitfall (only 1) and River Raid are both on it.

I use a true Atari 2600, six switch model (and a heavy sixer at that.) I have an actual Pitfall II cartridge, which uses a special chip to generate the generate extra sound. You can't get a purer experience than that.

4-switch "Woody" model still hooked up and in use, right next to my ColecoVision (Which both sit beside my PS2...🤣). Absolutely, the 2600 versions are the best and most nostalgic for me; However, I love trying different ports of the same game on a variety of platforms.

If you never tried it before, I own and strongly recommend trying Pitfall II on the C64 as well ('Best looking' version). Additionally, try the 5200 version for the extra levels (Second quest).

-Trebor

I also still own the 4-switch "Woody" Atari 2600 that was my second game console (the first being a Pong console, which disappeared long ago). I bought River Raid II but didn't acquire the first until after I had moved on to newer consoles and was acquiring Atari 2600 games just for collector purposes. I also only own Pitfall 1, but I've played Pitfall 2 on emulators and I seem to remember that the Coleco version was superior to the Atari version.

I didn't know so many ports existed until just now: http://www.mobygames.com/game/pitfall-ii-lost … rns/screenshots

River Raid was one of my favorite games on the Atari 800XL, but unfortunately I can't get the PCjr version to run under DOSBox 0.65. All I get is a black screen, with no messages or sounds. Am I doing something wrong? I checked Pitfall II and it works perfectly, so what can be the problem?

No other version of Pitfall II has the opening background where the sun sets, difficult enough for a 2600 to do, but presumably easier for other systems.

Great Hierophant wrote:

No other version of Pitfall II has the opening background where the sun sets, difficult enough for a 2600 to do, but presumably easier for other systems.

On some systems I don't know if I'd call that easier; the Atari systems are more flexible palette wise, commodore/colecovision and other systems have a more limited palette. the Atari 5200 and 8-bit should have been able to do that, don't know why they didn't; they all can change palettes each scanline. But commodore/colecovision/pcjr have a fixed 16 colors you get, so the total 2-3 shades of red you have available can't produce that same gradient as well as the 2600 is capable of. Some of the other platforms (Apple, coco, speccy) have even more severe color limitations. For that one particular effect the 2600 is more powerful than you think!

The Atari systems generally relied on scanline tricks and such to make much more complex games than the hardware was supposed to be capable of. Originally, it supported a single color background, a single color playfield, two players, two missiles, one ball (what we would call sprites.) But this was not per screen, but per line. This is timing crucial, but it shows the possibilities when real programers are willing to explore the performance depths of the hardware.

Right, that's what I was referring to; this trick wasn't possible on other systems which had a grand total of 16 possible colors. Atari had a total of, what, 128? colors so by utilizing that trick the gradient could be made smoother than was possible on some more powerful systems.