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zzip

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zzip last won the day on October 23 2023

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  1. He has been showing up more lately- In the game Atarimania, and also in the new Food Fight game that's in early access (Bentley manages the arcade)
  2. I don't exactly remember what the issue was with Denise, but I think it just ran poorly. Maybe I should boot it up again and see. I update my emulator setup every year during the snowy months and always try out new emulators that come along and add them if they are decent. Vice does annoy me at times, and I'd love a good alternative but I've yet to find one. Part of the issue with Denise is there's very little documentation, and no real community to help. But I feel like that's the way many of these newer projects have been heading unfortunately.
  3. I've tried it a few times, and always ended up deleting it. It didn't perform well for me, certainly worse than vice. Are there tweaks for it?
  4. Yeah most free emulators were community projects, some where abandoned in their infancy, some get infrequent updates, others have had 30 years of continuous development. So quality is all over the place. Fortunately most of the old systems I care about have at least one high-quality emulator available for it. My understanding is that not all FPGA cores are hardware-perfect either being community developed as well, so it isn't always going to deliver better results.
  5. I think it's actually a pretty small fragment of the community already.
  6. ok, well then the issue isn't emulation, it's selling underpowered devices. But people play these then start spreading the message that emulation is always crap. ARM processors get faster over time, so this should become less and less of an issue.
  7. Maybe that's the problem there? I've never used an AT Games device, but I've never experience the kind of lag people complain about on my emulation PC.
  8. I had grub installed until the December update. Atari changed something and my grub configuration was no longer able to boot AtariOS. I put rEFInd on until I could figure out a new grub configuration. But rEFInd is so much easier to configure that I haven't bothered fixing grub yet. Atari is/was doing something unusual with EFI/boot and it's never been fully explained to my knowledge. That's what made dual-booting tricky. It used to be that there were two bootable images for AtariOS, and booting one of them would trigger update mode. But it would occasionally "switch" and the image that always worked would suddenly trigger update mode and the other one would boot AtariOS. After the December update, I only see one bootable AtariOS image, and it always seems to work. If they are temporarily inserting bootable things during the update process that might explain the odd behavior I've seen in the past. I don't think I've ever triggered the update loop with refind, but I have triggered it with grub in the past. I'd love to see a definitive guide to dual-booting the VCS, so I'm happy to contribute any info I can.
  9. No. The FPGA guys remind me of the Plasma TV guys. They'd rant and rave in their video forums about how anyone who bought an LCD TV was an idiot when plasma was so obviously superior. But they'd focus on a couple areas - deep blacks and maybe better viewing angles. But they'd ignore how LCD was better in many other ways: thinner, lightweight, easier to mount, more energy efficient, worked well at any room light level. Yeah LCD did have some issues, but they made great strides over the years to improve viewing angles, refresh rates and contrast ratios (to give deeper blacks). The Plasma guys would act like no improvement was ever made to LCD. Plasma died a decade or so back, but at least the 'deep black' guys have OLED to fawn over now! I've watched the emulation scene develop since the 90s and it's made amazing strides. Lag isn't a problem for me, probably because if an emulator performs poorly, I don't use it, and I stick with emulators that perform well. If there's lag there, I don't feel it. I can't rule out that there isn't a tiny amount, but not enough for me to notice. Just like I don't notice that the blacks on my LCD monitor here are really dark gray. I don't think the vast majority of people buying them are going to be bothered that these retro devices are running emulators, many probably haven't heard of FPGA nor could explain the difference between FPGA and software emulation. And as for price, for just over $100 you get a $30 joystick and over two dozen games. I don't see how that's overpriced.
  10. The "touch every section of the level" and "power ups that let you destroy enemies" are basically Pac-Man mechanics, combined with the platforming of Donkey Kong. The gameplay of the two most popular games of the era combined into one. Now you know the secrets to the game's success!
  11. I did install ubuntu on internal SSD, it can be done Yes there is unexpected weirdness around installing OS'es onto m.2. But in the end I got around it by making the m.2 drive the default boot device, I created an EFI partition on the m2 and installed the rEFInd boot manager into it so I can select either Atari OS or Ubuntu at boot time. Since the December VCS update, some of the dual-boot issues seem to have been fixed. It used to be very easy to accidentally put Atari OS into update mode while dual-booting, but that doesn't seem to happen anymore.
  12. Not allows, requires. The people here who say that if you don't defend your copyrights aggressively, you will lose them are correct.
  13. That's a weird comparison from Wikipedia, comparing 2600 lifetime sales to 5200s first year sales. I wonder what the first year sales of the 2600 were? It seemed like it only rocketed to popularity after 1980 when Space Invaders came out. That was after it had been on the market for what, 3 or 4 years already? It was like Atari didn't understand that games sold consoles, not the tech or backwards compatibility. The 7800 wouldn't have solved the game problem since many of it's planned 1984 titles were rehashes of 1982 games.
  14. My question is what is the point? I've played around with the Aranym emulator which geared towards creating TOS "virtual machines". So you can set up a fantasy hi-spec TOS computer. But the problem comes down to software: - There's not a lot of well written software that can function in any resolution and color depth. And when it does exist it's usually not as good as similar apps for Windows and Linux - A lot of old software assumes an 8mhz CPU and specific resolutions be present and won't run correctly on a high-spec TOS system. So maybe it's fun to play around with that for a few minutes here and there to see what could have been, but overall it's not as useful as a Pi running in native mode.
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