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cloudmann

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About cloudmann

  • Birthday 08/31/1975

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    Prime is having trouble pooing...
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  1. Yup... all three intermissions work great, now. Awesomeness!
  2. All three intermissions are corrupted in Stella, actually.
  3. This is the only one I know of: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/155326-acceptable-flicker/ Seems there's been no work on it in over four years.
  4. Sounds like the onboard RF converter. These were designed to work in 1986 (when the Jr. came in to the scene) and don't have to meet today's finicky televisions' needs. If you open the unit, the RF modulator has a couple potentiometers that can be adjusted a bit. Just make small moves. If you're going to open it up though, I'd just go whole hog and try your hand at the Svideo mod. Did mine fifteen years ago and it still works great, even on new televisions...
  5. On any systems with even remotely similar hardware, I'd argue that there's no such thing as an unportable game save for those that require additional hardware on one platform that isn't available on the other (Atari POKEY and NES mapper chips, as examples). Even then, workarounds are doable. In the case of a game as plain-Jane as Pole Position (or Hang On II for porting arguments), no additional hardware was used. Even porting a Z80/TI game to completely foreign architecture like the 7800's 6502C cpu and Maria graphics controller are doable. The sound would suffer since the 7800's TIA chip is sorely lacking in capabilities. Even then, some pioneering individual could work out something with POKEY. It's a WHOLE lot of work to effectively reprogram an already programmed game like that and is kind of pointless, on that system, though, as there's already a perfectly serviceable port of Pole Position II available. But it's doable.
  6. The biggest difference in hardware between the SG-1000 and the ColecoVision is the RAM. Where the SG-1000 has 8K RAM, the CV only has 1K. This certainly would create an issue or two in porting a game directly over. That said, most games probably don't fully utilize the 8K the SG-1000 has and with optimization could potentially do fine with 1K RAM. All of that being said, though, these are still different systems. The similar architecture helps in porting titles, but lots of work would still be involved. Just like the Atari ST and Amiga 500 wore fairly identical computers, so are these systems. And just as with those two computers, sometimes the translations are spot on, sometimes, it just won't work. It's the small differences that make it difficult. In the case of the computers, slightly different chips here and there and the differing operating systems made things a challenge. In the case of the SG-1000 and CV, it's going to be the RAM difference and the different flavor of CPU (CV uses a NEC variant of the Z80). Still quite doable, though... in the right hands.
  7. And it was done on the 7800, too... very well, in fact. The Colecovision has superior specs to the 7800 in most regards, so this should be quite doable on the system.
  8. Not sure about "Sara", but how's this song? (Music Video).bin
  9. Tin, go ahead and get the newest Stella. It supports some newer homebrew (like Star Castle) and probably runs better than what you've got. Also 32 and 64 bit binaries are available for Windows. As far as the speed in the game, yep it's the difficulty switches. Read through this thread for a breakdown. For the flicker, in Stella, go to the game properties and enable phosphor (simulates the phosphor lag on an old CRT television). This reduces flicker GREATLY in this game and in other hacks/homebrew like Galaxian Arcade.
  10. Count me in. Love these open source machines. Got my Dingoo about a year ago and have been giving it a workout ever since. This looks really promising.
  11. I've had my EZ-Flash IV for a while now and am very happy with it. Couple of quirks though. It WILL support 32megabyte (256 Megabit) games, though not on the fly like games 16 Megabytes and below. For example, for large games (like Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, just as an example), the cart has its own 32Megabytes of NVram (turn the system off, the binary loaded in stays there). This is seperate from whater miniSD you put in the cart. So if you load your SD with 2GB of games (the largest SD size the cart will accept), you have to do the following for larger games: they'll be accessable through the main user interface, just like the smaller roms. Unlike the smaller roms (that load up in 4 to 10 seconds before the system reboots), the larger games are copied into the NV ram. Takes about a full minute for large games. However, when you reboot the system, the rom image stays in NV ram, so you don't have to do a lengthy reload every time. if you have more than one large game, well, you'll need to do that every time. There are some hoops to jump through (initially, anyhow). The cart comes with software that'll convert the roms for compatibility with the cart. Then it generates save files (just like ones used in emulators) for saving on the SD. It supports these operations in batch, and you can set up directories for alphbet, genre, whatever. But the process is a bit slow and tedious. Start to finish, I seem to remember it taking about 2 and a half hours to load my 2GB card with roms. Once I did that, I was set, though. I only repeat the process to upload newer dumps (haven't seen one in quite a while, nor do I expect to) and homebre (LOTS going on there). Great cart that DOES in fact support 32 megabyte games, with a bit of a workaround. Just make sure you have an MINI sd card. This does not use micro. Also, a GOOD quality mini to SD adapter is recommended. Very pleased with mine for two years, and haven't had to replace the watch battery in the cart (used for menu settings and the NV Ram).
  12. Even when these games started coming to the stores sealed, lots of shops (especially at the local Mall) would cut open the plastic, remove the contents of the box, and put all the empty boxes on the shelves. That way, 1) no one could run off with the game and 2) the staff and customers could just look at the shelf to see what was left for sale. Lots of time, a brand new game could be opened. Back in my youth, I bought maybe 5 games out of 50 that had the shrink wrap intact.
  13. I always see that one around. I've wondered about it, but I also wonder if I really need yet another Namco compilation... Well, if you have the Remix edition, I'd say this isn't worth it, but if you don't, it's a nice $10 package. Pac 'N Roll is worth the admission alone.
  14. Actually, you can plug just about any USB keyboard into the Wii and it'll recognize it. There's only a couple of official Wii programs that'll use it (like the Internet, I think?), but I know homebrew like DOSBox will use it. True, but it's not something that comes stock with the system... and most folks don't want to fool around with it on the Wii. On the other hand, a nice Sega Saturn pad and adapter for homebrew fighting games via emulator..... nice!
  15. Well, here's the thing about homebrews (and hacks and re-releases, for that matter). Since the PCB's aren't being produced directly, anymore for Atari 2600 carts, newer carts are all built from donated (in other words cannibalized) components from older carts (including the plastic cover, etc). These aren't officially published, and with today's technology, anyone can reporoduce umpteen million copies of Man Goes Down, provided they have the (fairly) inexpensive equipment to burn a binary to a new EPROM, the fairly simple knowhow to desolder and replace the old chip, a good quality color laser printer for the labels, and a can of spray adhesive. That's it. No difference between me doing that at home and an "official" company doing this. So long as the binaries match (not difficult to find an exact match), the source image files for the labels, manuals, and boxes match 9again, easily found for these titles), and the person constructing the cart works slowly, cleanly, and efficiently, the end result is identical. Because of that capacity to reproduce potentially infinite numbers of a title (provided donor carts don't run out), their "rarity" is non-existent, hence the rating guides here at Atariage. Rarity applies only to the original titles, since those were mass produced on machinery in the 70's and 80's. Their boxes, manuals, labels, and general construction of the carts are all obviously machine made, the PCB's themselves were generally unique to the game, and replicating this exactly (for purposes of counterfeiting) is pretty tough. That's why their rarity ratings still apply for collecting purposes.
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