deadmeow

I remember back in the old days, when I got my Apple IIgs, moving a lot of DOS 3.3 games over to UniDos on the 3.5 inch disks. Much more convenient that way.

Apple has always had good quality products, but overpriced. I had an Apple //e, and later IIgs, and they were great machines. The IIgs was purposefully given a low 2.8 mhz speed as not to compete with Macs. So the IIgs was sort of a dead end machine. I would have preferred it if Apple had continued the Apple II series, without any Lisa/Macs in the picture. Many IIgs friends jumped over to the Amiga, which was a great machine. However following the 16 bit era, computers do not have personality any longer. The 8 and 16 bit computers were the best.

It is a nice system. I got mine cheap in the 90's when it had been out a while. When they stopped making them, I picked up a CD-ROM for super cheap, and bought a System 3 card to play Turbo Duo games. It has lots of good games that you won't find on SNES or Genesis. As far as HuCard games, Bomberman is great, up to 5 players with multitap, Military Madness is a simple strategy war game (1 or 2 players), Davis Cup Tennis, and Pac Land is a great arcade port.

That little dude in Venture just moves too slow. Otherwise its a nice looking game. I had that for my Intellivision, which was awesome. I think the Intellivision version might be a little smoother with the movement.

When the Colecovision came out, it killed the competition. It was like having the arcade at home, just like the commercial. Then it came with Donkey Kong, which was huge at that point. Atari 5200 finally came out, and it had horrible joysticks. Super Breakout was fun, my friend had that and Galaxian. However, he didn't like the lack of games and returned it for a 2600. Another friend bought a 5200, and now it had Pac Man as the pack in game, but Pac Man was old news by this time, and impossible to play on those analog joysticks. Overall they are both good systems. I like the odd arcade ports Colecovison had, as many were favorites of mine. Atari 5200 had some good games, but the joysticks made it frustrating for the average person. Had the Atari 5200 had digital joysticks with the same layout, and if they had been able to get or share rights to a home port of Donkey Kong, it could have been just as good possibly. I must give Atari credit for getting the rights to Mario Bros. I did enjoy playing this for hours 1 on 1 vs my friend on his 5200.

I have both a Wiz and Dingoo A330. Both are nice little machines. If you buy a Dingoo, in order to get the most out of it, you have to install Dingux, but after that it has many great emulators. The native emulators on the Dingoo are good to below average, but Dingux fixes this issue. The controls on the Dingoo, especially the direction button, is very cheap, so you have to push it more exact and be careful. There are no volume control buttons, this is done through the software. If the Dingoo crashes, you must use a needle to push inside a pinhole to reset the machine, as you cannot turn it off, or press any buttons. It is a cheaper machine, and can run every emulator decent enough. The Wiz costs a little more, but seems much sturdier. All the emulators I have tried seemed to run full speed, with the exception of PSX emu, which doesn't fully function. The volume controls come in handy, and SNES emulation is much better on the Wiz compared to the Dingoo. The Wiz doesn't seem to crash as much as the Dingoo, if it does, you just turn it off, and back on, no big deal. I use both of them to play mostly Atari2600, Genesis, Mame, NES, and sometimes Atari800, and a few others. If you can fit the Wiz in your budget it is the better machine, but if not, you can be just as happy with the Dingoo.

It seems the only way to get a good picture on an LCD monitor or television is through a digital or VGA connection. Analog connections (s-vid, rca, composite) look blurry and lag. If this is true, it seems the best ways are through emulation. Obviously the PC is one option. Another good option is a Dreamcast, since they can play CD-R without a mod. Right now I have my Dreamcast connected via VGA, to my 46" LCD television. Most of the emulators are very good, and the picture is perfect. Sometimes I use the PC, but the Dreamcast is more convenient. I still play emulators on the computer and LCD monitor, but when I want a bigger screen, I use the Dreamcast and LCD television. What does everyone think about this? Does anyone prefer using the original console on an LCD? The consoles always sound better than emulation. Is it worth the trouble??

I had the Colecovision version of James Bond, and it was very good. I was very surprised to see what they did to the Atari 8 bit version of it.

Montezuma's Revenge is the best. All those different screens in one 2600 game was amazing. Good quality, comparable to A8/C64/Colecovision versions.

The Intellivision ECS was my first "computer", before my Apple IIe. Basic language programming was pretty simple on it. The major problem was that it only had 2k of programmable memory, (the ECS memory itself), and you could not use the 8k of the Intellivision unit. Even the basic commands I remember were shortened. For example PRINT, was PRIN, I believe, haha. On the plus side you could pull sprites out of cartridges and animate them in your own game or program. It was a lot of fun to learn Basic language on the ECS. This prepared me for my Apple IIe. Assuming you received the manual with your ECS, you should be able to toy around with Basic language a little bit. My favorite games for the ECS were World Series Baseball, the best baseball game of that time, and Mindstrike, which was maybe my fav Intellivision game of all time.

Applesoft Basic!!! My favorite programming language! Integer Basic was more limited, but ran faster.

On a side note, I was able to play Donkey Kong and Venture a handful of times on my Intellivision II, by slowly pushing the cartridge in, to about 75% to 90% of the way, and a small number of times, like hardly ever, I could get the title screen and get into the game. If you tapped the cartridge at all, or even not, the game may blank out. It wasn't worth the trouble though, but Venture was always one of my favorites.

When I upgraded from my Apple IIe to an Apple //gs, I had very few if any compatibility problems. However there is a setting in the control panel called something like "alternate display mode", which is designed to work with the few pieces of Apple II 8 bit software that might have problems on the IIgs. Among my favorite games were John Elway QB, (IIgs and IIe versions), GBA Basketball (IIe and later IIgs version), 4th and Inches (IIgs), International Hockey (IIe), Hardball (IIgs), Moebius (IIe), Castle Wolfenstein, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, Mario Brothers. I must say that me and my friends spent many hours playing Castle Wolfenstein/Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, and many hours waiting for it to load as well. The Apple II versions of Wolfenstein were perfect, and very easy to control with the Apple II joystick having 2 buttons. If someone wants to do only 8 bit gaming, then an Apple IIc is the way to go. If you want the wider experience, an Apple IIgs (with a tiny Apple IIgs keyboard), and RGB monitor is the way to go. You can probably put 75 to 85% of the IIe games on 3.5 inch disks, which makes it much easier to use. One of the last versions of an Apple DOS I used, treated an 800K 3.5 floppy like 4 separate DOS 3.3 disks, and this basically let you use DOS 3.3 on a 3.5 inch disk, which is good, because many old DOS 3.3 games would not run under PRODOS or GSOS.