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FifthPlayer

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Dragonstomper

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  1. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I don't think of Crownland as much more than a tech demo. The game is really short, and the control scheme is so unlike that of NES-style platformers I find it really hard to get into. The A8 does have several well-known platformers - Miner 2049er, Jumpman, and Henry's House come to mind - but they're all single-screen rather than scrolling. Scrolling platformers didn't become a big thing until the NES, and by then software houses had largely given up on the A8. Not sure why more homebrew developers haven't jumped on the opportunity since then - maybe the level design is too much work?
  2. Certainly not, but a USB card has the potential to open doors to modern computing, in much the same way as recent hardware projects like Fujinet have done. It could be a "killer app" for the 1090. Whereas a serial/parallel card will let you connect a vintage printer, and ??? (The big use case for a serial port that comes to mind is a modem, which isn't much feasible nowadays and gets lets so with each passing day). Agree.
  3. In this day and age, a USB card makes a LOT more sense than parallel/serial. Unless the goal of this project is to realize the 1980's vision of what this expansion bus was to be. Maybe parallel is useful for connecting vintage printers, but I can't think of too many uses for a plain serial port today.
  4. The soft-sprite animation is marvelous - smooth movement, no flickering, tearing, or clash with background or other onscreen objects. Very well done!
  5. Also all the hardware register memory locations for graphics, sound, etc. are different between the two.
  6. Why can't you order it directly from Atari?
  7. Also, it seems like a missed opportunity that none of the games currently sold here on AtariAge are part of the lineup. Adventure II XE, Castle Crisis, and Tempest 5200 all come to mind as great games that could have appeared in the lineup with relatively fewer obstacles regarding licensing. (In fact, Castle Crisis could simply be renamed Warlords).
  8. Good point. Yes, it does support 4-player simultaneous, probably unique among all versions of the game Atari has released.
  9. And this may be the reason why Atari doesn't offer an all-in-one unit. Few people are interested in every one of Atari's platforms.
  10. Probably, but Jaguar emulation is probably beyond the processing capability of the "mini" units. (We are talking all-in-one, here)
  11. Yes, that was my point - there isn't an "official" all-in-one emulation machine from Atari.
  12. Nope, if you want 2600/7800 games you're looking at the Atari 2600+.
  13. I think Encounter! is a little duplicative of Battlezone. Asteroids is a great arcade game, but I was never all that impressed with the A8 conversion and they didn't improve it on the 5200, so while it deserves its place, it's still a bit disappointing to see a lukewarm conversion in the lineup. And while Centipede and Millipede are both great games, I would have left one of them off in favor of something like Caverns of Mars, for the sake of variety. Assuming of course that 25 games was a hard limit decided upon for the product. Overall, though, I'm nitpicking. It's a good list of games, considering the nightmare that is licensing.
  14. In terms of file formats, right now we don't have a good idea what will be covered, so all these are just guesses. But it's pretty safe to assume that any .ATR file will work, as well as .XEX files. I'd expect the vast majority of .CAR/.ROM files to be supported, for example 5200, standard 8K, 16K and XEGS carts, but because the 8-bit computers had so many different bank selection schemes in ROM carts, there will probably be some carts that either aren't supported, or not properly recognized. That's something that's easy enough to fix with firmware updates, but I wouldn't expect 100% compatibility at initial ship.
  15. Are the levels randomly generated, as in a roguelike game?
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