8605 West Douglas Ave.
Milwaukee, Wi. 53225
December 21, 1985

ARCADIAN
3626 Morrie Dr.
San Jose, Ca.95127

Dear Robert:

Thanks for responding to my 8 June and 7 June letters sent to Don Gladden, whom 
I have not received a response from.

I have a lot of information that I would like to share with the ARCADIAN. 
However, I question some of the information that I have as to whether or not 
you can publish it due to possible infringements on copyrights or perhaps 
patents. What I will do is send my own creations (tutorials, upgrades, 
whatever) to Don Gladden and to you I will send any questionable material 
indicating the source(s) of info for you to do with as you desire. It is my 
desire that support of the Astrocade home computer will continue.

Right now I have doubts that the ARCADIAN will continue publishing issues. Upon 
receipt of the next issue (Dec. ’85?), I will send an article to Don detailing 
a power transformer substitution for the Astrocade computer. After receipt of 
each future issue of the ARCADIAN, I will send to Don a tutorial on programming 
the Astrocade computer in machine language. I have already written several 
tutorials on this subject just waiting to be submitted to the ARCADIAN. Further 
material on other subjects will be sent to Don or yourself, of course at my 
discretion.

You asked me if I was aware of the Balchek program. Did you know that there 
exists a Balchek II? Yes, there is! Balchek II is an improved version of 
Balchek enabling its user to also check a RAM add-on. I have gone through the 
disassembled listing of Balcheck, have made some changes and deleted some of 
the useless routines to allow room to check a RAM add-on. Yes, Balchek II does 
exist, although not quite finished yet. I have a copy of it on tape. Wish you 
could see it.

There is something else I wish you could see. That is, the Astrocade home 
computer running with a high resolution map (320x204 pixels). What a 
difference! I have resolved the high resolution glitch problem described in my 
June '85 letter I sent to Don. I am currently writing an 8K byte software 
package to be eventually burned on an EPROM. The package will contain an 
improved 2K byte high resolution version of Bit Fiddler’s MLM, 2K bytes for 33 
high resolution subroutines (similar to the onboard subroutines) and 4K bytes 
devoted to extended high resolution graphic subroutines. My Astrocade computer 
can now operate with a low or high resolution map. Unfortunately, modifications 
were required on the motherboard to get the on-board custom address and data 
chips to operate in the high resolution mode. I can't see any way of getting 
the on-board custom chips to operate in high resolution without making some 
modifications to the motherboard. You mentioned John Perkin's efforts.

What did he do? Perhaps a second set of custom chips and associated circuitry 
could be utilized as an add-on, but where would one get the custom chips from? 
Or perhaps the circuitry could be provided as an add-on and then the 3 on-board 
chips removed from their sockets and placed in their respective add-on sockets? 
It would be nice to come up with a simple means of providing any Astrocade 
user, how few there may be, the option of high resolution graphics, but it 
doesn't look like that's going to happen. Any comments?

Sincerely,
Michael C. Matte