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Minuous

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  1. Well, of course they want a Genesis/Megadrive, who would want to be stuck with a Nintendo?
  2. This poll isn't very good, the four that I had the most carts for aren't even listed 😞
  3. Actually the spite hardware is 4 independent monochrome sprites, any of which can be shown in any of the 8 colours, and which can be reused later further down the screen. The score digits can be shown at the top, bottom, both or neither. There's more information, emulators etc. for this system at http://amigan.yatho.com
  4. It sounds like the price already went through the roof a long time ago.
  5. Actually, the decision to use this instead of the actual Amiga operating system will give it incompatibility with a slew of classic Amiga games and other apps.
  6. I have no evidence that 3D Attack was ever released for the Arcadia, so no. As for the site design, there's about a dozen different major Signetics 2650-based platforms covered there (not counting variants within each platform) and several gigabytes. The icons are explained at the bottom of the page. If you have any concrete suggestions about how it could be organized differently I'm happy to consider them. That Grand Slam Tennis overlay is interesting, I had not seen one for that game before. The "player colour" button doesn't seem to do anything, the other buttons appear to be rather subtle in their effects too. I will have to have another try at finding a manual for this game.
  7. There are overlays for 3D Bowling in the Overlays Pack at EA2001 Central.
  8. One thing I'm curious about is why there were any never any 2622 NTSC USG + 2636 PVI combination systems released. All the known systems are PAL ones, which is different to the situation for the 2637 UVI-based machines (eg. Arcadia). Perhaps you could ask him about that.
  9. They haven't really evolved; SAS/C is still the best compiler for Classic Amigas.
  10. >I'm not going to dive into a history lesson here, but the Arcadia 2001 was developed by Universal Appliances Limited (UAL) out of Hong Kong and released under license in the US market by Emerson in May 1982 (more details on this here). It was only produced for about 1.5 years in the US. There are 22 confirmed US releases but due to UAL having issued many licenses for related systems (more than 30!) around the world, that number increases to around 50 or so. Actually, I'm not sure if there was any licencing required, as far as the hardware is concerned. There is no BIOS, and the chips are standard off-the-shelf components available for any company to purchase directly from Signetics, and the motherboard is basically the Signetics reference design. This may in part explain why there was such a proliferation of these machines from such a variety of manufacturers. The software is a different matter of course. >What has always befuddled me is why every sound that comes out of the system brings to mind the sounds of an animal in its death throes. I mean, the sound chip clearly had as much range as the primitive chips on my Odyssey 2 and Apple II, but while the sounds on the former were boring and the latter a bit scratchy, nothing this side of Tom Waits sounds as bad as an Arcadia 2001. Was there a technical reason for that? It's just an ordinary square wave generator, but there are restrictions in the choice of frequency, especially for higher notes. So music will sound out of tune. Specifically, only pitches that are divisors of 7874 Hz can be produced. The emulator has an option to force tones to the nearest equivalent on the even-tempered musical scale, which makes music sound better.
  11. The 2650 was rather expensive at first. From Microcomputer Digest magazine, December 1975 (prices in $USD): "The single unit prices for the 2650 were reduced by more that 50%, dropping from $165 to $72. A 25-99 quantity price of $62 was also announced. Signetics reports that the price decrease represents the first in a series of price reductions planned by the firm as the 2650 progresses from small to large volume production. The company also expects to further reduce the price to $30-35 in the early part of 1976."
  12. California Games wasn't bundled everywhere. When I bought my Lynx ][ in Australia the bundled game was Ishido instead unfortunately :-(
  13. I have never heard A-Max be considered to be anything than an emulator, but it doesn't do CPU emulation. So running guest code directly on the host without CPU instruction translation does not necessarily mean something is not an emulator.
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