My el-cheapo 5200 trak-ball arrived last night (with bonus 5200, power pack, and controller -- all to be used for parts).
I plugged the trak-ball in and....it worked! Well, the buttons all work great, including the keypad and Start|Pause|Reset. The ball did sense all four directions, but it moved very roughly.
So I opened the case and cleaned off the bearings and the ball itself. The corner bearing was the worst of the lot, with rust and crud galore. I cleaned it up, and it does sp
This winter, I picked up a Genesis, an Atari 5200, and an Atari 7800. Here's what I learned:
Sega Genesis: Genesis is a very nice game system, even better than I remembered from '89. The arcade style controllers rock, and there are a lot of really good games for it. Oh, and right now, they're all pretty inexpensive -- and it's not hard to find them CIB. Since the boxes are hard plastic, most of the time they're in good shape. And no console modding is needed - all versions do composite
The One True Game: The best Rosetta Stone game anyone's come up with is Frogger. So I won't bother with getting Donkey Kong or any of the others for every system. I'll keep an eye out for Frogger, though. I think I'll just need it for Intellivision, Colecovision (if and when), and 5200.
Randomness: I'm looking through my list of 450 or so games, and finding very few games that use randomization of enemies, treasures, powerups, etc. That's so strange.
But of course many of my favorites
It's sometimes very costly to recover from mistakes of the past.
Back when I was trying to keep the number of consoles to a bare minimum, I bought some games for some systems that I never should have. For example, Pitfall for the Intellivision. The game was designed for and works best on the 2600. I should never have wasted the money on the Intellivision version. Same goes for Coleco brand titles for the Intellivison and other systems -- they all look and work best on the Colecovision (wh
There are so many bad ports of games out there.
Take Donkey Kong, Jr. on the A8. It's a pile of poop! The feel is wrong, the colors are wrong, things are squished up too much, and it's incredibly easy to accidentally walk off the side of a platform. It's virtually unplayable, and it's the reason I never liked the game all these years.
Or take the same game on the CV. Again, the colors are wrong. And the sizes of objects is wrong. And the behavior of the beasties is wrong. But at l
Ran into a little road bump.
It seems the late model Genesis 1s, all Genesis 2's and all Genesis 3's are incompatible with many of EA's early releases. Including one of my favorites, and one of my biggest reasons for owing a Genesis -- Budokan. So now that I have two working Genesis 2's, I have to go hunting for an early model Genesis 1. Oh, and an A/V cable since they have a different port. D'oh!
On the 5200 front, I placed an order with Best Electronics. I included a lot of cartri
I'm sending off my remaining loose carts to Albert today -- eleven VCS carts and two 5200 carts. I hope he's able to turn them into something good! I'd really like to buy about half a dozen games listed in the Atari Age store, but they're all currently out of stock.
Anyway, as I was packing those loose carts for shipping, taping up the box really nice, I was thinking about how much I enjoy restoring old video game stuff. Not just the hardware -- although I do enjoy that quite a bit -- but
I'm just trying to sort some stuff out in my own mind. There are lots of more interesting things to read on AA. Don't waste your time.
I've recently purchased an N64 and an Odyssey2 and now I'm wondering how to fit them into my existing gaming spaces. The N64 is an easy one, since my wife likes several games on that system. It will be hooked to the TV in the loft. The Odyssey2 poses more of a challenge.
I have no more room for consoles. Both TVs in the game room/library have as
I brought out the Lynx last night and played some games.
I still enjoy the games I always have, but that's a small minority of the games I own for it. Most of them are not to my taste. I do like Battlewheels, S.T.U.N. Runner, and the classics (Robotron, Asteroids/Missile Command, etc.).
So I'm still undecided as to what to do with this system. Maybe I'll unload a bunch of the games at some point.
The more I think about it, the more appealing it sounds to clear out the games I disl
I recombined the two broken 5200's into one good one. One had a good motherboard, bottom case, and storage compartment lid (and a smashed case top), while the other had a nice case top but a bad motherboard and missing lid. So I took 'em both apart, cleaned everything up, and then assembled the good stuff into a pretty nice looking console. Since I already had another good one (that I polished up nicely with Novus scratch remover and polish), that makes two -- one to use, and one to store in
I remember liking the Atari 5200 just fine the first time around (1982), but this time, I've really been enjoying each and every game I bought for it.
Of course, it was expensive to get the Best Electronics Gold controllers, the trak-ball, and the testing equipment to make sure everything was as good as it could be.
It was also a help that I made sure to buy games that benefited from the controllers. (Plus a few that were never released for the Atari 8-bit computer.)
For example, pl
Looks like I'll definitely be getting rid of some 2600 carts, thanks to Mirage1972. And over the next year, we'll go through the 400+ games in the closet one by one, play them, and decide whether to keep each one.
But what I really need to do is decide what to do with the stuff in the basement. It's really wasteful to have all that stuff down there. So much of it is Atari 8-bit stuff (hardware and software). Do I really need an XEGM? A MIB XMM801? I mean, can you even get ribbons for t
Looks like ColecoVision is about all that's left now.
My collection as it stands is:
Atari 8-bit Computers and 130 games
Atari 2600 and 88 games
Mattel Intellivision and 58 games
Atari Lynx and 54 games
Sony Playstation 2 and 19 games
Atari 7800 and 16 games
Atari 5200 and 14 games
Atari Jaguar and 14 games
NEC Turbografx-16 and 14 games
Sega Genesis and 12 games
Nintendo Entertainment System and 11 games
Nintendo Super NES and 8 games
(Nearly all the games are CIB. Ther
Next year, I plan to buy a Colecovision and perhaps a dozen or so games. There are also a couple of dozen games I'd like to buy for the rest of my consoles next year.
But my game closet is nearly out of room. Yes, the game closet I just reorganized this year, adding 16' of new shelving to it!
The easy thing to do would be to get rid of the Lynx and games. I find it uncomfortable to play. And I have all the boxes, so I could just store it all in the basement for some other time. But i
From time to time I like to step back and take a look at how my collection is shaping up. It may be that I find holes in my collection where I need to spend more time finding one or more great games for a system. Or it may be that, like earlier this year, I find that there are several games that I just do not play, and I sell those games off.
At any rate, here's the number of CIB games I have for each of the systems for which I collect:
Atari 2600: 87
Atari 5200: 39
Atari 7800: 7
At
I got lots done with the 5200, and played some games as well!
The biggest deal to me was figuring out how to separate the shaft from the ball bearing in the idle assembly of my second-hand 5200 trak-ball. I don't have proper equipment for that, but I know you need some way to carefully and forcefully press the shaft out of the ball bearing (and to put it into another one), all without "mushrooming" the bearing. One morning, it came to me: a drill press vice and a piece of wood with a hole
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