Alex

I've had the same problem. Unless there is a better way that I don't know about, z26 is not that great for taking screenshots. Stella is better, but it also has problems with certain games. In fairness, that's not the goal of z26, but it would be nice if that had better functionality.

Ah yes, Devin Knight, the "Ultimate Gamer" as he used to refer to himself back in '96. Those were the days of r.g.v.c! Many of his top gems were sold to different members of rgvc, in particular I remember the Feuhring brothers being involved, and being among the first to report that he was for real. The bulk of the collection was bought by Larry Laurence (aka Nibbler), who rented a uhaul, drove to Devin Knight and loaded up the trailer. I think he bought it for several thousand, and I understand he eventually resold it all at a tidy profit. Some of the rare games Devin sold? Video Life, Eli's Ladder, Magicard, and Cubicolor. Not bad! That's one of the best stories in collecting lore, IMO, you can go back and read the whole thing on Google Groups by search for "devin knight atari".

quote: Originally posted by Scott Stilphen: If it works the same as Magicard and it works with the current Z26, then why not release it now? Scott, The current release of z26 (or any other 2600 emu for that matter) will not autodetect the game correctly, so it will not work unless you use a command line option. The next version of z26 will autodetect it. So to avoid countless people asking why it doesn't work (even if we make it clear), we would prefer to release it with a version of z26 that supports it natively. It should be soon. I've been trying to get this dumped for 2 years, I can wait a few more weeks to do it properly.

Okay, I fixed the Foot Craz static page, the database entry will show up in the next update. Also fixed the manual links, we don't have those scanned and the icons weren't supposed to be there. Thanks!

Thanks, fixed!

One reason we don't want to do it right now is bandwidth. We are already getting killed on this, if we had thousands of people downloading 10MB files, I don't even want to think of the bill. When we move to our own server, this won't be an issue.

If so, can you scan it? Or at least show a picture of it? Thanks!

Recently realized we were missing entries for Sears Night Driver and Canyon Bomber (both picture labels). So were adding the entries for the next database update, but we don't have the carts themselves. Anyone have scans of these? If someone sends them in, I'll follow up this post so you all know the status. Send them to [email protected] Thanks!

Even having a model number doesn't ensure that a game was ever even begun.

To be honest, I'm not much of a PAL expert right now, so I can't tell you. The reason I am skeptical of other games being sold by Zellers, is that I have seen numerous boxed examples of the titles in our list. I have seen numerous loose examples of some of the titles you have mentioned (Scuba Diver for example), but never boxed by Zellers. I find it unlikely that certain games would repeatedly be found boxed, while others wouldn't. That said, I would wager that there are other games that were sold by Zellers, but I've not seen the proof yet. Scuba Diver would be the most likely candidate IMO. So where did they come from? I don't know. They're black market items so it's pretty hard to trace. Hopefully we'll figure it out one day. Hmmm, maybe it's time to add that "Unknown" category for NTSC carts.

Scuba Diver I've seen a number of times. I'm more inclined to think that one is a Zellers, but until I see a box... As for where they came from, I'm really not sure. Did you find them in the US or Canada, or did you get them from overseas? PAL or NTSC? We'll start adding that kind of thing eventually as "Unknown", and hopefully someone browsing the site will have a box.

Don't worry, we welcome any suggestions or criticisms, that's how the site will improve. If we're missing a Zellers game that can be proven, we definitely want to know about it. We're just trying to avoid guessing at things. I'd rather add something as "Unknown" than guess at its origin. As for the scans, that would be great! You can send them to [email protected] Please try to scan at a high quality, we'll compress and crop them.

Nice find! Just to clarify, it's not a prototype, but it is very rare. Apollo only made it for a very short while, then they changed the name to Shark Attack to avoid legal problems conflicting with the movie "Jaws". The game itself has some very subtle differences, but the value is really only to the collector, as Shark Attack is pretty much the same thing. We should have a scan for our archives soon, as someone just offered to send that in.

Yes, thanks for the suggestions. Hopefully we will be able to integrate the UBB profile with sitewide preferences so that everyone doesn't have to reregister. We will also be changing the main system link so that it goes directly into the system database instead of the system intro page. Then there will be a "History" link that goes to what is now the intro page. I don't think most people return to the history page much after reading it once, so it doesn't make sense to force people through it. We have wanted to implement searching from the start, but it's tricky to create a real search engine on our site that includes the database, so we postponed it. One way is to create an index, but that requires significant server storage which we do not have right now. So the question is do we set up a limited search feature on the home page, such as you find on the database page? Or do we wait until we have a serious search engine that is capable of searching everything on the site? Obviously this can be done, we're just not sure of the best way to do it yet, hence the postponement.

Ack, Flash! While it has its place, I don't like it for most applications. It's currently a thorn in my side because I can't for the life of me get it to install on my laptop. I've never had a problem before, but I simply cannot install it. I've been unable to access quite a few web sites because they don't provide an alternative form of navigation. It's very frustrating, and I've certainly learned the lesson of using Flash only as an enhancement and never rely on it. And some people just plain don't like it and don't install it. I would agree with Pitfall Harry's comments for the most part. We considered the same ideas that Glenn suggested actually, and settled on scans for accuracy, compatibility, and that good old warm feeling look at a real (digital) manual.

Okay, here's the thing about Zeller's carts. A lot of companies used the Zellers style label, not just Zellers. In fact, all these companies may have gotten them from the same source, and put them in their own boxes. But we're not adding any games to the Zellers list unless we see the box - it's the only way to tell if it's actually a Zellers game. I have personally seen boxes for all of our Zellers games, I have scans but they're too small and low quality to put on the site. As for the DP, I think they just list everything with that label style as Zellers. But unless you have the box, there's no way to tell. I seriously doubt all those games were sold by Zellers. I've done quite a bit of searching for boxed Zellers stuff, and these are the only ones I've found. If you have a box, we'll be happy to add it. Otherwise, they'll have to wait until we can figure out what they are. One day we'll just be able to add stuff as 'unknown' until we figure it out, but we don't have the server space right now.

We'll have more details on Venture2 soon, including screenshots. You can buy the regular edition from Hozer now (or very soon). It's very similar to Venture with new monsters, treasure, etc. Tim did a really nice job with the box etc, and I can see why he only made 20 copies.

Can you give any specific examples, or is it everything? I'm using 5.5 without any problems. What OS are you using? If you can right-click on the broken image, then copy and paste the URL here, we'll see if we can figure out the problem. Nobody else has reported any problems, and they work fine for us, so I'm not sure what the problem is right now. I know Fireworks uses PNG, but that shouldn't have anything to do with your browser. The only thing on our site that uses PNG are the screenshots, and if that's all you can't see, that seems like the problem to me. Maybe try a search on Google for other PNG images on other sites and see if they work. Try this page: PNG Home Site The very first logo at the top of the page is PNG, can you see it?

Quick update - we dumped our own EA cart, and it goes to the second screen and you can move the character around, but the screen is garbled. So it looks like the dump that's been floating around is bad. We still have some tweaking to do to get it to run, but we're on the right track now.

AtariAge recommends Tomorrow's Heroes. They've been around for years, Tom's a good guy.

Yeah, they did make a couple D&D games, and they appear pretty much finished. I played em at CGE 99, and took some photos that you can see here, just a few entries down the page. It's a shame we can't play them, because they seemed pretty good. Intellivision Productions is in possession of the ROMs, unfortunately we'll probably never see them because of the D&D license.

I saw that on AGH a year or so ago, and never heard anything more about it. I have no idea what became of it.

We'll talk about doing this, but it's several months away in any event. We really can't add anything to our current server for storage and bandwidth reasons. Once Al moves down here, we'll be setting up our own server and then we can do whatever the hell we want.

We're working on it. It may be a good dump that just requires something specific from the emu. We do have the cartridge and a dumper, so we can redump it if necessary. I'm working with one of the emu authors on functionality, we'll let you know when we have something. Same story with Thwocker.

Yeah, I considered that. I'll take a look at their site though, just to see what kind of services they offer and what it would take for us to program it. My apprehension is that it might be at cross-purposes to the message board. One nice thing about the message board is that posts are archived and you can refer back to them. Anything said in a chat rooom will disappear pretty quickly I think. Anyone else have comments? Would you like to see a chat room? [ 08-16-2001: Message edited by: Alex ]