Sabertooth Posted February 16 Report Share Posted February 16 Play full length movies on your 2600 with Movie Cart! We're truly living in the Age of Wonders. https://www.hackster.io/news/watch-full-length-full-color-movies-on-a-fully-original-atari-2600-06d2bad3762b TrekMD, DegasElite, socrates63 and 1 other 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RickR Posted February 16 Report Share Posted February 16 Incredible. Also incredible is that price point of $25. I've added myself to the waitlist. Sabertooth, socrates63 and DegasElite 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atari 5200 Guy Posted February 16 Report Share Posted February 16 Wow! The 2600 is getting to move into the modern times. Very impressive. Now if that could be done on the A8 computers. RickR, Sabertooth, DegasElite and 1 other 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DegasElite Posted February 16 Report Share Posted February 16 It probably could. I once saw a demo of a clip from "Tron" on a Side3 cartridge. So, video can be streamed on the A8. Sabertooth 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
socrates63 Posted February 16 Report Share Posted February 16 Cool! I wonder what Steam Boat Willie would be like watching on the 2600. Added to the wait list. DegasElite, Sabertooth and RickR 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RickR Posted February 16 Report Share Posted February 16 2 hours ago, Atari 5200 Guy said: Wow! The 2600 is getting to move into the modern times. Very impressive. Now if that could be done on the A8 computers. 1 hour ago, DegasElite said: It probably could. I once saw a demo of a clip from "Tron" on a Side3 cartridge. So, video can be streamed on the A8. It absolutely can...there are FMV videos available for 5200. DegasElite 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atari 5200 Guy Posted February 16 Report Share Posted February 16 7 minutes ago, RickR said: It absolutely can...there are FMV videos available for 5200. What??? DegasElite 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RickR Posted February 16 Report Share Posted February 16 (edited) This video is by @CrossBow, and I think there are threads over on AtariAge for 5200 videos. Edited February 17 by RickR DegasElite 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DegasElite Posted February 16 Report Share Posted February 16 Interesting demo. Very good for an 8-bit console. Thanks for showing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DegasElite Posted February 16 Report Share Posted February 16 I had heard of video demos for the Atari 5200, but never could find the topics about them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrekMD Posted February 16 Report Share Posted February 16 I've seen this on AA. This is such a cool thing with a cart to watch movies on the 2600, of all things! RickR and DegasElite 2 Quote 🖖 Going to the final frontier, gaming... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CrossBow Posted May 21 Report Share Posted May 21 (edited) On 2/16/2024 at 3:51 PM, DegasElite said: I had heard of video demos for the Atari 5200, but never could find the topics about them. The video demos as far as I know will only work from an AtariMax ultimate SD flash cartridge. That is because the movies are in fact being streamed off the SDcard as they play. I only have two videos that I now about. Bad Apple being the one that I think is out there publicly and a complete session of Dragon's Lair that was available briefly but then the guy that made it pulled it a bit later and as far as I know, I've not seen it publicly since. But back to the topic at hand. Have any here received their Movie Cart yet? I've got two of them but that is because I was a late tester of the cart since I have all of the 2600 hardware variants and quite a few 7800 consoles on hand for testing. So the earlier cart I have will work on most 2600s (Minus the PAL and Jr consoles), and after a FW update seemed to work properly on all the 7800s I had here at the time for testing. The second cart is the same as what is now being released and was sent to me as a final test for full 2600 compatibility. I've only really encoded two movies so far and they came out pretty good. I know that better results could be had if I was willing to spend serious time tweaking things for various scenes in the movies. Things like changing zoom and pan to focus better on what is happening in the limited window space that is able to be shown and especially changes in gamma/brightness to bring out more details. But for what you still end up with in the end, I'm find with just using the defaults most of the time. Now what I have been doing is taking movies that are 16:9, and created my own cropped 4:3 aspect version of them. In most cases I'm just whacking off the left and right side of the overall image. I might try using handbrake to do some auto anamorphic stuff but for now that is what I've been doing. I then re-encode the movie after the cropping to only be a mono audio stream since the movie cart only supports mono audio anyway in the final render. And then I do the final render. One tip I will suggest that you play with is the Audio Gain. I suggest always leaving that on, but the diffusion (I think it called) below that slider I would set from 1 to 0. When set to 1 on my setup, it is much more 'hissy' and can be hard to hear some lower volume dialog that gets lost in that hiss. When set to 0 in my final renders the hiss is a little less and dialog seems easier to hear. But that might vary from system to system. That is the only change I make from the default encoder.toe file that is loaded for the conversion. Most movies will come out to be about 1.3 - 1.5gb in size on the final rendered .MVC file that is played on the Movie Cart. As a result, you can store several movies onto a single SDcard. What I did on mine is to create a folder on each one called Movies. And I keep the encoded movies in that folder. That way I can pull out the SDcard, and whichever movie I have in the root of the SDcard is what the Movie Cart will play by default. Perhaps in the future, the FW can be changed to allow for a simple menu selector so that isn't needed but I'm not sure how much more software wise the author is willing to invest. And his intentions and idea of the Movie Cart was more along the lines of each cart being its own movie that might have been something you could buy back in the day to playback on your 2600. Similar to buying a VHS, BETA, CED, or LaserDisc version of a movie and also have the VCS format. So his idea wasn't really to make it be multi movie on a single cart. This is also why he didn't design the SD slot to be more easily access with a slot on the side. He wanted everything to be self contained within a standard cartridge as it would have back in the day. Edited May 21 by CrossBow RickR and DegasElite 2 Quote See what I'm up to over at the Ivory Tower Collections: http://www.youtube.com/ivorytowercollections Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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