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You may be aware from updates to the Intellivision development history that I’ve been in contact with Joe Jacobs and Dennis Clark for a while. They have provided some background to the creation of their PlayCable development system and the subsequent work on Bump ‘N’ Jump. This posting details the story from Joe and Dennis’ perspective and I’d like to thank them for helping me to put it together, and allowing it to be shared. Joe Jacobs & Dennis Clark Circa 1980 Joe Jacobs and Dennis Clark are engineers who worked for Jerrold, the cable television division of General Instrument and manufacturers of PlayCable. Dennis joined Jerrold in the summer of 1978 working in Hatboro PA. Back then, in the early days of PlayCable development, Jerrold anticipated that, like Mattel, it would write games for the Intellivision to be distributed over PlayCable. In part, Dennis was recruited to go into arcades and scout for titles suitable for conversion. As it turned out Jerrold never wrote a game for the PlayCable, and Dennis did not make it to an arcade on company time. Instead, he worked in the Software Department writing firmware for cable boxes and PDP-11 software for Jerrold’s cable head-end infrastructure. Development of the PlayCable hardware was well advanced by the first half of 1979, and over the summer Dennis worked to develop the firmware for the PlayCable adapter. He was also responsible for the music tracker used by the PlayCable menu program, and he arranged the version of The Entertainer that can be heard playing on the splash screen of the menu. In early 1981 Joe Jacobs left Siemens, where he worked on automated test equipment. He was hired by Jerrold to work in their Head-End Division as a Project Engineer to develop hardware and software associated with the distribution of cable services. This equipment was used by cable companies to distribute and control their subscribers' access to channels. The systems that Joe worked on communicated with the converter boxes installed in customers’ homes that Dennis helped to develop. Whereas Dennis is primarily a software specialist, Joe is more of a hybrid engineer, his focus is on hardware development, but he also writes software. Although Joe and Dennis looked after different aspects of Jerrold’s products, they worked in close proximity to each other, and became good friends. Dennis recalls how Joe nicknamed him “Grumpy” because he always had a determined look on his face. Joe explained that “In the early 1980's, Jerrold was still a small to mid-sized company and most of Jerrold's engineering was in one building”. Dennis says that, under the management of Charles Dages, Jerrold’s engineering department was very supportive of engineers’ creativity and fostered collaboration. It should be noted that when Mattel partnered with Jerrold to develop the PlayCable the two companies had a symbiotic relationship. Jerrold brought hardware knowledge specific to the cable industry and Mattel supplied access to the secret sauce for the Intellivision. This included the APh assembler and linker, and details of the EXEC and how to use it. Joe describes a “HUGE listing called the Mattel 'EXEC'. This listing was an assembler list file generated when Mattel compiled the library routines that went into each and every Mattel Intellivision main unit. It was dot-matrix printed, on that wide paper with the holes at each end and was about two-inches thick. It described each and every routine available to the game developer, calling conventions, parameter passing, object creation and interaction, etc”. Dennis noted that the interrupt driven model of the Mattel EXEC was unusual for the time and something he thinks was very innovative. Although General Instrument could provide Jerrold with information about the Gimini chipset on which the Intellivision is built, it needed these Master Component specific resources to write software for PlayCable. Remember that Jerrold had to write the firmware ROM in the PlayCable adapter, the menu program used by customers to select games, and potentially original Intellivision titles. Therefore, Jerrold, like APh, was one of a small number of trusted partners, and Jerrold engineers like Joe and Dennis had an inside track on writing software for the Master Component. Interestingly, Dennis recalls that during the development of the PlayCable he visited APh in Pasadena to learn more about the Intellivision, a trip that led to him meeting Glen Hightower and the Intellivision developers. It seems that at some point in late 1979, one of Dennis’ colleagues, possibly Joe Rocci, realised that the head-end infrastructure could be used to create backups of Intellivision games that could be played at home. PlayCable games were transmitted from dedicated microprocessor controlled cards, housed in a PDP-11 minicomputer. These same cards were also used by cable company head-end systems to communicate with consumers' cable boxes. A side effect of the encoding scheme used to transmit PlayCable titles was that the game data could be recorded directly off the transmission cards onto a regular audio cassette. The image below shows one such a DCX11A (Dual-Channel Xmitter) card connected to an audio adapter that was used to record Intellivision games. DCX-11A DataChannel Transmission Card with Audio Adapter Jerrold engineers could load games into the transmission card, connect the digital output to a tape machine using the adapter box and record the resulting stream. At home, they could then connect a regular audio cassette tape machine to a hacked PlayCable adapter and play the recorded game directly into the PlayCable’s memory. To make this work required some changes to the PlayCable adapter firmware, and for the digital board within the adapter to be connected to an audio input, rather than the normal cable receiver. These hacked PlayCable adapters were based on the earlier, limited-production Jerrold model which, unlike the later PlayCable branded units, had their digital sub-system implemented using standard off-the-shelf components. This made them much more hackable by exposing their inner secrets to those in the know, or with access to oscilloscopes and datasheets (see Sections 8.1 and 8.2 of the PlayCable Technical Summary for more information). Jerrold’s engineers christened these audio backups “PlayTape”. This innovation gave unrestricted access to the entire Intellivision PlayCable games library and was shared amongst some of the members of the engineering department. As Joe says, “all of us engineers had a modified PlayCable setup so we could play Intellivision at home. Remember, at the time, Intellivision was the ‘cat's meow’ of video games, handily beating the Atari 2600; Colecovision had not yet come on the scene”. Dennis believes that the management of Jerrold’s engineering department were probably aware of what their engineers were up to, but turned a blind eye, not seeing any harm in it. Title Screens for the Standard PlayCable (left) and Joe's PlayTape (right) On joining Jerrold in 1981, Joe quickly discovered what was going on and got involved, contributing to the modified firmware that ran on the PlayTape adapters. Before joining Jerrold, Joe had put together a small PDP-11/03 “Frankenstein” system of his own at home. This was compatible with the computers that were used to develop Jerrold’s cable head-end software and write Intellivision games. Through the summer of 1981 Dennis continued to tinker with Intellivision development, stripping sounds from Mattel games and building a sound board application to play them back. Joe’s interest in video games led him to start reverse-engineering the Arcadia Supercharger following its release for the Atari 2600. He figured out a way to read some of his Atari game cartridges and transfer them to the Supercharger replicating the “game-backups-on-tape” principle behind PlayTape. Catalogue of PlayTape Titles Through the fall of 1981 the library of PlayTape games was extended as new titles were released for the Intellivision, the pair also wrote diagnostic programs, and started to investigate the inner workings of the Intellivision’s EXEC. Joe realised that it would be possible to use a specially-modified PlayCable adapter, along with his Frankenstein PDP-11, and the tools he had access to at Jerrold, to develop rudimentary Intellivision games. Inspired, Joe suggested to Dennis that they "try and write a game for the Intellivision". Dennis was up for the challenge and explained the methods Jerrold used for Intellivision development. Joe recalls that the process was pretty simplistic. “It wasn't a whole lot, in my mind, it was basically EPROM burn and crash and burn and crash and... development". By this point Dennis also had a PDP-11 at home, put together from spare Jerrold equipment. Building such home systems was supported by Jerrold, as it allowed engineers to continue to work on company projects in their own time. In the meantime, Joe had started to think about how to improve the development tools, “I was, and still am, an in-circuit emulator kind of guy and prefer to do my software debugging in that environment if possible”. According to Dennis, testing was done using “something like ROM simulators to load the code from the LSI-11 to a modified Playcable type adapter”. This allowed test code to be uploaded from their development machines directly to the PlayCable, bypassing the need to use a broadcast card and audio cassettes. Joe says that “the whole concept was loosely modelled on the then-popular Motorola ExORciser development environment”. In the spring of 1982 Dennis and Joe concluded that they needed a demonstration to showcase their maturing Intellivision development capabilities and grab the attention of Mattel. They tossed some ideas back and forth and settled on writing Clone-Man, a homage to PAC-MAN. At the time PAC-MAN had just been released on the Atari 2600 and was at the forefront of public consciousness. Unfortunately, this next step in the journey coincided with Dennis suffering a back injury. Despite this, Joe and Dennis pressed ahead with Clone-man over the next two or three months whilst Dennis was off work recovering from his back injury. This led to Clone-Man initially being credited to “Bedside Productions”. Within the team, Dennis’ focus was on core software, with Joe sorting out the hardware necessary for their development systems and providing some additional utilities. Dennis says that he saw porting PAC-MAN as “just a challenge to see how to copy an arcade video game onto Intellivision”. Clone-Man - a Glimpse of Dennis and Joe’s homage to PAC-MAN The resulting “Demonstration Program” was a pretty comprehensive recreation of the game, with a landscape version of the original maze, power pellets, bonus fruit, and sound effects. However, the algorithms that drive the movement of Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde were not replicated and there are no intermissions. Overall, the game is clearly superior to the Atari 2600 version, but is not as polished as the Atarisoft version for the Intellivision, for example the sound effects are not replicated as accurately. As Joe says, Clone-Man “came out pretty good. Not good enough for commercial appeal, but good enough”. Dennis’ opinion is that “it would have been hard to tell it from Pac Man”, which is probably stretching things. However, with its more accurate maze, it clearly attempts to be more faithful to the arcade original than either the Atari 2600 or official Intellivision ports. Throughout this period, Joe and Dennis continued to enhance their PlayCable test systems. The modified adapters were linked to their PDP-11 computers using an RS-232 serial connection, and ran enhanced firmware containing a debugger called CYBER. The pictures below show the results of Joe and Dennis’ alterations (see Section 8.3 of the PlayCable Technical Summary for more details). Joe and Dennis’ Development Kit PlayCable Receiver Board Joe and Dennis’ Development Kit PlayCable Digital Board In addition to modifying the PlayCable adapters to support RS-232 communication, Joe added what he calls a “vector” board to their development Intellivision Master Components. These enabled breakpoint and single stepping features to be added to the CYBER debugger being developed by Dennis. A video showing CYBER being used to debug an Intellivision program can be seen here: The modifications made to the PlayCables were pretty extensive, and together with Dennis’ CYBER debugger, they led to the early MAGUS-like ROM emulator turning into a system that had similar features to Mattel’s Blue Whale test harness. This can be seen in the following list of CYBER commands: CYBER Debugger Command Crib Sheet Once Clone-Man was complete, Joe says he “did some checking with Jerrold management about our intentions of writing something for Mattel; they didn't have a problem so I went for it”. He used a Betamax video camcorder to record Clone-Man running on the Intellivision and sent the tape to Don Daglow at Mattel. At this point Joe says that “evidently, the crap hit the fan at Mattel”. Joe doesn’t really remember any fallout at Jerrold over Clone-Man, but the Mattel people were clearly “spinning in their seats”. Given Mattel’s paranoia over industrial secrecy, this was perhaps inevitable. Many phone conferences ensued over the next couple of months as Joe negotiated a deal with Mattel to write a game. This led to an agreement in December of 1982 that Technology Associates, the fledgling computer consulting company founded by Joe in 1981, would write a port of Bump N Jump for the Intellivision under contract to Mattel. Effectively, Technology Associates became a second-party developer for Intellivision, like APh. As might be expected, Mattel seems to have been concerned that Joe and Dennis could take their skills and knowledge to a competitor. However, Joe and Dennis are clear that this was never an option for them and, despite what is reported elsewhere, they did not threaten to do so. In fact, Jerrold was aware that Joe and Dennis had approached Mattel, and seems to have been supportive of their entrepreneurial streak, as they both continued in their day jobs. The reasons for Jerrold’s lack of concern over their game-writing endeavours are unclear, although Joe explains it like this, “We did not work on BNJ during our work hours at Jerrold for obvious reasons. Jerrold was aware of the situation and left us to it. At the time, we were pretty valuable employees... Besides, there was absolutely no negative karma, letting us do our own thing at the time. A benefit of working for a smaller company”. Regardless, like Clone-Man before, the Bump N Jump project was to be an extra-curricular activity for Joe and Dennis that occupied their evenings and weekends. What would have happened if a deal had not been struck? According to Joe and Dennis, they would have continued working for Jerrold at their regular day-jobs, and would have explored the Intellivision on their own time just for fun. Having landed the contract to write Bump N Jump, and with the dust settling, Technology Associates purchased two new PDP-11 systems from Sigma Information Systems, complete with 8” floppy disks and enormous 20MB hard drives. These machines would be used to do the bulk of the subsequent Bump N Jump development. Up to this point, Joe and Dennis only had a single PlayCable development system to test Clone-Man. Joe took the opportunity to rectify this by building a second test harness to use while creating Bump N Jump, and the pair set to it. In all, development of Bump N Jump took around six months of intensive work in the evenings and weekends. Joe suggests that “Dennis was, no question, the brains behind the code. While he worked on game play such as object generation, object interaction, scoring, etc. I was responsible for the entire background”. Dennis agrees, explaining that “Joe did the background and track work”, effectively being responsible for the accurate reproduction of the levels. To help with development, Mattel shipped an arcade version of Burnin’ Rubber (the international variant of Bump ‘N’ Jump) to Dennis' house. Once installed in the basement, Dennis' girlfriend's son played the game for hours and became an expert at it. Joe used his camcorder to record the teenager’s games for use in development. By watching the recordings back, over and over, ad nauseum, Joe was able to transcribe the levels of the arcade game using a level designer written by Dennis. Joe says, “The background of Bump ‘N’ Jump is basically a gigantic table of ‘cards’, with the presentation of those cards handled by Dennis’ level designer code”. As a consequence, the Intellivision port has a faithful reproduction of the playfield of the arcade version, including the track layout, bridges and other obstacles. Meanwhile, in addition to the core game mechanic, Dennis wrote more tools, including a music generator and an animation designer to support development. As Bump N Jump took shape it became clear that the 8K of RAM within their PlayCables was not going to be enough to hold the full game. Sadly, the limits of their homebrew development kit had been exceeded. So, Joe “contacted Mattel to ask what was available to get past the 8K limit, and their answer was a board called the 16K Megas board". Mattel sent a couple of Megas (aka MAGUS) test harnesses for end-to-end play testing and Joe sorted out the hardware necessary to interface them to their PDP-11s. This he did by customising a Heathkit parallel interface board. Joe explains that during use “you had to tell the Megas board to 'freeze' the CPU from accessing the Megas ram, load the RAM, un-freeze the CPU and then tell the CPU where to start executing. Basically, it was a RAM-based burn and crash idea, but instead of burning an eprom or rom, you 'burned' the Megas RAM and it was pretty quick. A lot quicker than burning chips. The Megas wasn't really for troubleshooting/debugging but more an end-to-end play/test of the game you were working on”. As was mentioned by Keith Robinson at Classic Game Fest in 2016, David Warhol acted as the liaison between Mattel and Technology Associates. Unfortunately, the relationship between the two organisations was not easy, as Joe observed, “I think the Mattel developers were definitely leery of us and certainly didn't voluntarily share anything on their own. If we had a particular question [that] needed answering they did answer but only the exact answer, nothing more, nothing less. We were still 'outsiders'”. Mattel’s attempts to limit the flow of information to Technology Associates can be seen as part of their ongoing attempts to hold their cards close and prevent third parties developing games for the Intellivision. Joe and Dennis finished the core game of Bump N Jump at the end of May 1983 and shipped the source code containing two levels to Mattel HQ in Hawthorne. Once there, it entered the Intellivision QA process. A BSR review meeting in the first week of June highlighted that game play tuning was required. The most significant points raised were that the game required a greater sense of speed, with the enemy cars needing to be easier to bump and kill, but also requiring more personality and aggression to increase the intensity of the game. A number of developers requested the inclusion of an engine sound, to provide auditory feedback of the player’s speed. It was at this point that Mattel decided a change to the title screen was also required. The original received mixed reviews, with some confusion about whether it depicted a road or a mountain. Regardless, it was felt to be too similar to the introduction of Buzz Bombers and needed an update. The final animated titles were developed by Daisy Nguyen and seem to have been added sometime in early July. As always, there were also some bugs found that were subsequently fixed. Although Joe and Dennis don’t recall Mattel requesting much work after the code was shipped, a message from David Warhol suggests that the updates were split between Mattel and Technology Associates, with Mattel looking after graphical tweaks and Daisy’s title screen, while Joe and Dennis focused on game play tuning. It’s clear that not all Mattel’s suggestions were included, for example, music wasn’t added to Daisy’s title screen, and the requested engine sound isn’t present in the released version. The final game with its full set of levels was accepted for production by Dale Lynn and Traci Glauser on August 1st 1983 as can be seen in the QA report below. Mattel Bump N Jump QA Record At around this time it normally took Mattel about three months to get from acceptance of the final code to a game hitting the stores. Roughly two months of this time was ROM production, with the last month typically being consumed with finalising printed materials, packaging the game and distribution. The advert below for Bump N Jump was run in the October and November issues of games magazines across the US, and according to The Video Game Update, the title was one of the last games Mattel released when it hit store shelves in November 1983. Bump N Jump Print Advertisement Joe and Dennis are rightly proud of Bump N Jump and they feel that the title really pushed the capabilities of the hardware. The game play is very similar to the arcade, with the original levels and background music both faithfully reproduced. Unfortunately, interest in the Intellivision dwindled rapidly with the closure of Mattel Electronics at the start of 1984, and there seems to be very little about Bump N Jump in the press after its release. The Video Game Update did review Bump N Jump in their January 1984 issue, giving the title two and a half out of four stars for both graphics and gameplay, rating it as fair to good, but questioning the game’s depth, and therefore not recommending it. Video Game Update Bump N Jump Review However, history has been rather kinder to Bump N Jump, the title is now consistently rated amongst the Intellivision’s best games. This includes the current generation of Intellivision gamers placing it in the top 10 Intellivision titles in 2014, and the top 15 games in 2019. Reviewers such as The Intellivision Library, Intv Funhouse and Video Game Critic all rate the game highly, noting the quality of both graphics and sound, and the accuracy of the conversion. Overwhelmingly, the prevailing wisdom is that Bump N Jump deserves a place in your Intellivision collection. In late June 1983 Mattel Electronics announced the first round of redundancies that would mark the start of a death spiral for the division. Unsurprisingly given the timing of the completion of Bump N Jump development, Joe and Dennis didn’t receive offers of additional Intellivision work. With hindsight, the decision to continue to work for Jerrold whilst developing Bump N Jump on their own-time can be seen as an excellent one! Later, at the end of September David Warhol wrote to Joe and Dennis explaining the situation, and expressing the hope that more projects might be on the horizon with Mattel’s new focus on software; unfortunately, this future never materialised. Although they were initially unaware of the turmoil at Mattel, it was clear to both Joe and Dennis that they would always be considered outsiders at Hawthorne. In addition, Dennis explained that he enjoyed his work at Jerrold, and whilst writing Bump N Jump was profitable as a side-line, the money they made writing it wasn’t good enough to tempt the pair into giving up their day jobs. They also decided against pursuing opportunities with other games companies. Instead, they continued working for Jerrold and went back to just hacking for fun. Having grown tired of his lengthy commute to Hatboro, Joe left Jerrold in 1984 for a new role working for Omnidata (later Singer-Link Simulation) on power plant simulators, used to train control room engineers. However, Dennis continued with Jerrold, rising through the ranks to become Director of Project Management before retiring in the mid 2000s. So there we go, the story of the development of Bump N Jump and the mythical PlayCable development system from the perspective of Joe and Dennis. Incredibly, their whole Intellivision adventure lasted less than 30 months. It would be great to get the recollections of Mattel people like Don Daglow and David Warhol, and the management at Jerrold to complete the picture. Hopefully one day. One last thing before I go… A little birdy tells me that there is an Easter egg buried in Bump ‘N’ Jump that has gone undiscovered since the game’s release. Can the players and developers of the Intellivision Brotherhood find it? The challenge has been issued, just for kicks. Once again, thanks to Joe and Dennis for giving their permission to share their story and for their help in putting it together.

** If interested, please send me a private message.** What is Norseman about: As a Viking warrior, it is your duty to guard a precious relic: a golden helmet with magical powers! Unfortunately, the forces of evil are coming for it. Endless waves of bloodthirsty creatures are quickly converging to your position. You have no choice but to prove your worth on the battlefield. If the helmet is taken then all will be lost! Protect it with your life! This Intellivision version was created from scratch, and it is based on GST Video's original game which came out on the Videopac+ and MSX. All aspects of the game were revised: all the way from basic gameplay to the much improved original music by Anders Carlsson, a real Norseman himself! (just kidding) The Norseman Digital Bundle for Intellivision includes the following: - game rom: not encrypted nor copy protected, so you can play it anywhere! Rom is not tied to your LTO Flash or any hardware. - manual in digital format. - prototype content: assets include graphics, music and alpha roms. - buying this game in digital format will also give you access to any eventual updates or enhancements to the rom. - not happy with game? I will refund you. Price: Norseman Digital Bundle only: USD 15 plus Paypal fees. For a limited time: combine and save! Valid only until Sep 19th, 2021. Silver package: Norseman plus 1 game: either Antarctic Tales Enhanced Edition* or H.E.L.I.* USD 20 plus Paypal fees Golden package: Now is the chance to get all 3 games! Norseman, Antarctic Tales Enhanced Edition* and H.E.L.I*. USD 25 plus Paypal fees * Antarctic Tales Enhanced Edition and H.E.L.I. digital regular price: USD 10 each. Thanks in advance for supporting the release of new Intellivision games in digital format with affordable price points (much below CIB). Supporting this new release will help ensure future ones will also happen! ** If interested, please send me a private message.**

One of my favorite Garfield strips with Irma. I bust out laughing every time.

The ending theme to 'Spaceballs' has been stuck in my head all morning.

Here are pictures (and some video) from the VCF Midwest 2021 show. Amis, Paradroyd, and myself were fortunate enough to get to attend this year. Amis was kind enough to setup a message thread at his website (you don't have to create an account to view them): https://southernamis.wixsite.com/website/forum/general-discussions/on-the-ground-at-vcf-mid-west It was a great show and I personally had a wonderful time!

And regarding the lack of buttons on joysticks for Atari ST... I was a big fan of Chase HQ but I had to use my chin to press the space bar for turbo! ?

My Mom got a Covid19 test and it came back negative. She had been to a club to see a band and one her friends who was there tested positive a few days later, so my Mom had to get tested.

Remember, Munch Man had a smile, too!

hi everyone, I also posted this in the thread for the ram board but it really belongs here so I am putting it here too. please excuse the double posting. just a quick update, I have mostly assembled a 1090xl board and am happy to report it works, at least as far as I have tested. all power rails are proper voltage. leds light up. so things look good so far. there are numerous fixes I have applied to the board since these were made. enjoy. Ken

Now I've finished the song, and have now tried that one trick of keeping the phase still, with an occasional shifting. Of course, because of the emulation wobbling emkay mentioned, in order to keep some of the instruments from sounding too thin, I have spliced two recordings to fill in a part which went silent (at about 1:58). I did try moving the phase shift instrument around, but it would make a different part silent in the tracker. Eventually, I just settled on splicing out the silent part just to give you all a listen to the proof-of-concept. Hope you enjoy!

Made a little routine for moving enemies around, maybe the start of a 2022 10liner

I’ve got two jaguars and one jag cd, only use one but I keep telling myself it’s never a bad idea to have a spare. A controller might be useful.

Yeah the 7800 launch library was already kind of dated when it was supposed to release in 84. But when it finally released in 86 with the same titles, it was EXTREMELY dated. But by then Atari had separated from their arcade division and no longer had the pipeline of current games they had prior to 84.

Well, a few weeks of "I don't have any time for games" later and I finally got a bit in! MZ-80K Numbertron - 157 minutes I finally remembered to get a picture of something, check out that Sharp! The MZ-80C earned a place on my computer desk within a week of buying it, I've been absolutely loving programming on this thing more than any other Z80-based retro computer I own for reasons I have yet to even understand myself, and this week it just got better. I found out about Sharpworks a while ago, Numbertron was actually part of why I bought that computer, and a physical copy of the game made it to my mailbox on Thursday! I love my simple arcade-y puzzle games, this definitely falls into that category, and it's been an absolute blast to play for the four days I've had it. My scores haven't been too amazing, I think 1,052 has been my highest and I've yet to actually clear more than half of the screen, so I'm hoping to do better over the course of this next week. Speaking of this next week I finally did things like buy a power adapter and controller extension for my PC Engine, my PC-9801VX is coming home after four years of being lent out to friends, and I managed to find an original model PC-9801 (plus a PC-9801E) for a price I'm willing to pay (under ¥10,000 for both) after six years of searching! It should be a pretty fun-filled / NEC-themed week, that's for sure.

If any of you also want to take a look at the module, here's the .rmt and visualizer .obx (thanks, VinsCool!): Agent_X_II_-_Level_1.obx Agent X II Level 1.rmt

Funnily I bought it recently to play on my Mega Sg. I remembered it having good reviews and I was always curious about it, even though I don't really like that game to begin with. I only remembered screenshots with black backdrop in magazines so I was kinda floored by the first level; it's way closer to the original game than I thought! There's even some kind of parallax scrolling indeed. Alas the gameplay is still dull and difficult though. ?

I have a Jaguar for every room in my house. Every laundry room that is. So one. I have one Jaguar.

Looks like the board is already designed to handle 256K. Just plug in some 41256 DRAMs instead of 4164s, and plug a 74LS153 into U20 and you're good. (This will also require the newer ANTIC.)

How could you not enjoy an exciting game of badminton, or curling?? I find them especially uplifting after championship bowling. You are simply not living, my friend.

Well, the Japanese are even more baseball-crazy than most Americans, so that one did escape the island. . .I just found a simpler personal solution: I ignore all professional sports and pretty much any other level of sport. I will sometimes humor my friends when they are in a game of some kind, but that is about as far as I can push myself to endure the torture of watching a game (or match).

Ugh! Awake at 5am because I went to bed too early.

Dedicated to @Kiwi on this Garfield strip that I found for him.

404770 level five Intellivision hardware There's a bit of a cat and mouse aspect to this game. It's fascinating.

Hyperdyne: Side Arms (PC Engine) 21 mins A great horizontal shmup on the PC Engine... just wish it had unlimited continues, but the way the continues work in the game it would be kinda cheap. Other console shmups with continues make you restart the level... not in this game, you keep going.

My times for the week: PlayStation: Disruptor - 17 min. Nintendo 64: Centre Court Tennis - 174 min. Penny Racers - 9 min. Rat Attack - 225 min. Beat Centre Court Tennis on Normal difficulty -- though, since the game doesn't seem to have an ending, I've adopted "reach world #1 and win every tournament once" as a win condition. I also tried out a couple of other games, and made it through six of Rat Attack's eight levels on Expert difficulty.

From my personal perspective, the 7800 came out too late and offered more of the previous same types of games from Atari. It was confusing from a consumer perspective, that had clearly moved on to the next big thing. As a kid that was around ten when the console came out, it was only offered in a few stores in my area that I remember, and not marketed that much at all(Montgomery Ward had a few). I have come to LOVE the 7800 in my adult years, and feel that the homebrew support of the console makes it much more appealing NOW. Back then, I can tell you that it was only sparsely offered in rural Northern California.

I twisted my ankle badly on Saturday, so a busy weekend of little gaming suddenly became a weekend of heavy gaming. Almost all emulation this time around. Game Gear: Arena Maze of Death - 65 minutes. Played through the first ”world” repeatedly on normal then changed it to easy and almost finished the second. Notably the difficulty setting doesn’t change the actual hard parts (timing the autogun fire, running off the edge of platforms into instadeath), it just cuts out unthreatening enemies and also cuts HUGE chunks of content out of the game. It’s a way to see more of the art in a hurry but normal mode seems more fulfilling. Played on a 3DS SMS/GG SD cart. Tintin in Tibet - 20 minutes. More like “Tintin is suicidal”. Played on a 3DS SMS/GG SD cart. Alien Syndrome - 35 minutes. Man, I can’t get enough of this. Sega of America really messed up by not bringing it over. One of very many catastrophically stupid decisions that kept the Game Gear an also ran. Played on an Analogue Mega SG. The BerlinWall - 15 minutes. Rarely has a Lode Runner like game felt so claustrophobic. It’s not bad, but it’s CRAMPED. Played on a 3DS SMS/GG SD cart. Daffy Duck in Hollywood - 20 minutes. So beautiful. So full of amazing animations. So cheap. This was probably made as a Master System game and cropped down. Something keeps bringing me back to it, though… James Bond 007 The Duel - 15 minutes. I always thought this was a APB-like or Chase HQ-like racing game, having confused it with Test Drive the Duel. I think my idea would be better. This is just alright. Sensible Soccer European Champions - 20 minutes. I can’t say I really know what I’m doing but it’s fast and fun. I actually won a game… Monster Truck Wars - 20 minutes. It’s not Micro Machines, but this clone isn’t bad if you want something a little (and I mean a LITTLE) different. The tracks are tiny compared to the sprawling maps of the Galoob/Codemasters classics, but that is truer to the source material. Big moguls will throw your vehicle around with subtly impressive animation to back it up. I don’t hate it. NES: Flea - 60 minutes. It’s a really great game. But some levels make me want to throw my Evercade out the window. Played on Evercade Indie Heroes cart. Star Soldier - 15 minutes. I don’t like this game. It really doesn’t have anything in common with the series that bears its name, which takes a lot more from the Aleste playbook. Life Force - 105 minutes. Beat the game one time. This is one of the only shmups I’ve ever beaten legitimately, and I’ve beaten it multiple times, despite not loving the NES one. Played on 3DS. PC Engine: Salamander - 35 minutes. I love this game but it doesn’t love me back. So much nicer looking and more exciting than the NES one. Then again I was playing it on a FunKey S… Genesis: FoxyLand - 25 minutes. This game is so close to being really fun but the plethora of cheap deaths really reduce the fun. It would be really easy without the cheap deaths and rough edges, though, so maybe it was their idea of “balance”. Played on Evercade Indie Heroes cart. Alien Cat 2 - 30 minutes. Not the most original “move multiple characters through a maze of death” puzzle game, but really well done. Played on Evercade Indie Heroes cart. The Indie Heroes cart is one of my favorites, and given that the Evercade has a great 7800 emulator it makes me hopeful that out of print homebrew unencumbered by unofficial use of trademarked characters (read: Rikki & Vikki) might be a possibility on the next one. Game Boy: Pinball: Revenge of the Gator - 15 minutes. Sometimes you just gotta whack gators with steel balls. Virtually.

Just percentages but the XEGS is not even featured:

Faxanadu (NES), Xanadu (RUSH), Xanadu (Movie Starring Olivia Newton John and Gene Kelly), or Xanadu (Soundtrack to the movie)?

SAP already supports multispeed! FASTPLAY Number of scanlines between calls of the player routine. A scanline is defined to be 114 Atari clock cycles. FASTPLAY defaults to one frame: 312 scanlines for PAL (about 50 Hz), 262 for NTSC (about 60 Hz). Most songs don't include this tag. Common values are 156 (twice per frame), 104 (three times per frame) and 78 (four times per frame). ASAP 3.0.0 and above supports FASTPLAY up to 32767. Other SAP players may limit the value to 312. ... TYPE R The data part is a raw dump of the POKEY registers (D200-D208) in FASTPLAY intervals, instead of an Atari executable. No mainstream SAP player supports this type at the time of writing. Never knew that, even though I implemented pokeyrec based on intervals

In Night Driver: Who are you? Where are you going? What town are you passing through? Why?

Will you believe it? Never played them too LM 12330 HT 6742

Even before.. the decision to not put a POKEY inside the 7800 itself apparently came down to not enough space on the motherboard. Spending a little more to redesign the board in the beginning would have paid off in the long term.

Yeah, I know it’s just a hack of Ms. Pac-Man and yeah, I know there are several homebrew ports out there, but lately Pac-Man Arcade has been my preferred way to play Pac-Man on the 2600.

And yet Japanese computer manufacturers quickly moved away from 1 button joysticks pretty quickly. ASCII Corporation made the MSX compatible with not only multibutton joysticks but control pads. For all of Atari's bleating about how the Japanese were coming, nobody ever paid attention to how Japanese companies were improving QOL for consumers.

True, but the 7800 released ahead of the ST with two-button sticks that maintained backwards compatibility with the original single-button controls. It's a puzzling design decision, particularly given that at a minimum the 5200, ColecoVision, and Intellivision had been on the market with 2-button controllers for a few years before the ST showed up. More accurately, the Jaguar used the STE's joystick ports - they predated the Jag by about three years or so. It always pissed me off when an ST programmer decided that what their game really needed was for player 1's joystick to be plugged into the port that the mouse was usually connected to. Thanks. Thanks for that. You're a real pal there, ol' buddy. Yes, I also hated the joystick port placement.

The only one with a helicopter, tunnels and water that comes to my mind is "Buried Bucks" aka. "Chopper Hunt".

I suspect it is the Helmet of Neverending Booze, but I'm not quite sure. It is quite telling that the protagonist will walk slower when wearing it.

Just got home - sorry for the delay. Yeah - all normal DVD features the Nuon chipset was invisible, just decoding and playing back as any standard player would. Any other features, be it smooth zooming, hi speed FF or REW, or even other stuff like playing games, was the realm of the Nuon chipset - only needing the DVD to load the program into "RAM".

Watching the MST3K episode of Danger! Death Ray. Who builds a death ray for peaceful purposes?!

Fireball (Firetrap) : 6,917

Fair question. So far there is nothing locked. I'm not opposed to it.

On second thought I’d have to go with the Posterior from that cheeky butt-plug simulator.

Fun fact: A Link to the Past is one of the few Zelda games where Link does not go to the past.

During the show, I said that this could be a candidate for a tenliner, James proposed it for 2022's contest, and someone commented that I'd have a first version by tomorrow. Last night I took that glove and coded the basis in a couple of hours. I updated it today to include one more element, and the result was this: There is no score (just a count), no increasing speed, no background, no bitmaps, no sound and no two players version. I think it is feasible, but I'm not sure if I'd continue this. If I do, I think I'll try to follow the C64 version, as this one from Ken is fantastic, with lots of colors and animations, it is just waiting for its sounds and music.

In 1992, the Master System did better than the ST:

Farmer Owen (Maybe that'll get him back more! )

Let's say I'm persistent rather than good, and I played in the second easiest difficulty.

TROPICAL TROUBLE - '5' VOLCANOES - 6,450 POINTS