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pocketmego

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Posts posted by pocketmego

  1. Posted

    LOTS of games, too many to list. One of the reasons I collect the 2600 is for the large number of games I really like on the system. I seldom have a set of games that stay the same, rather, I tend to focus on a group of games for six months or so and move on. Currently, it's Raiders (heh), Stellar Track and Xenophobe. Six months or so ago, it was Lazer Gates, Subterannea, Phoenix and Star Fire.

     

    One of the great things about collecting is the sheer variety of great games you get to play. :cool:

     

    Amen to that BROTHER!!!

     

    More and more addictive games keep coming to my mind to add to the list. The sheer quantity of good games on the 2600 truly does outweigh the bad and that is something a lot of systems can't boast even today.

     

    -Ray

  3. Posted

    Looking back, there are only really a few games that seemed to be universal purchases, that everybody seemed to own. Obviously Combat was the first, but also I don't remember anyone not owning Donkey Kong, Pacman, Asteroids and Defender. I seemed like you could pretty much count on everyone owning those - so I'd say the arcade ports were likely the cash cows.

    This is very true, but at the same time you could count on almost everyone owning Pitfall, River Raid, and Adventure as well.

     

     

    Plus, there are many arcade games that I never knew existed before I came here like Defender 2, Pooyan, and both Mr. Do games.

    I never did have Donkey Kong back in the day, nor do I remember knowing anyone who had it. If anyone did, they didn't play it much. The other 6 games mentioned (through Adventure), my brother or I did own.

    Regarding the last four titles, AFAIK there was no Defender 2 in the arcades -- it was called Stargate (and released as such for the 2600 before they gave it a name change). I had seen Stargate, and played Pooyan and Mr. Do! in arcades (not very well, I admit). I'm not sure whether I ever saw Mr. Do!'s Castle there, though a vague feeling makes me want to say that I did.

     

     

    I should correct myself, I meant to say "I never knew they existed as 2600 games". I knew they existed as Arcade games and I certainly recall Stargate.

     

    -Ray

  4. Posted · Edited by pocketmego

    How on Earth did MAD make any kind of top ten list?

    did the makers not ever play Spacechase, Commando Raid, the Earth Dies Screaming, Outer Space, Commie Mutants or anything like that!?

     

    Commie Mutants should be way up there, and it's not even on the list at all!

     

    That's OK, get this BS quote...

     

    "The VCS port had some downgrading like watered down graphics,"(Space Invaders)

     

    Watered Down Graphics? Is he on drugs?

    If anything Space Invaders had better graphics than the Arcade version, with actual color and some of the creatures had individual moving parts. The graphics aren't at all what makes the Space Invaders on the 2600 and inaccurate port. And where are Gorf and Galaxian anyway?

     

    This man is a fool.

     

    -Ray

  5. Posted

    The Atari fans love to bring up the clock speed difference between it and the C64 but in an old Compute Magazine they benchmarked the two in assembly and the C64 was the faster of the two there. Both beat the Speccy by a wide margin and the BBC micro was the fastest of the machines tested. However... I haven't been able to track down the magazine the original benchmarks came from so I don't know if they were flawed. If any Basic was involved the Atari's lack of integers in it's Basic really slow it down.

     

    I'd love to see the article if you could dig it up, but I can't help but feel that it would have been flawed. I can't think of any reason why the Atari 800 wouldn't be a fair bit quicker than the C64; the CPUs are almost the same and the former is clocked a lot faster. Unless there are some horrendous memory contention issues that I'm not aware of, it's an open and shut case. In any case, if you want a realistic benchmark, just try playing Mercenary on both machines.

     

    Even the Spectrum ought to come out faster than the C64; A 3.5:1 ratio in CPU speeds ought to be more than enough to compensate for the efficiencies of the 6502; I know for a fact that the Spectrum has 32K of uncontended memory, so the only possible explanation would be a naive translation of code without any re-optimization and that would work both ways. Again, you can play almost any 3D game on both machines and the Spectrum version will have a visible edge in speed. By the way, the Spectrum's CPU power might not be that great overall, but since the screen only used 6.75K of RAM, where most of its competitors had to address around 16K, that gave it a huge advantage in games where the hardware implementation couldn't do most of the work. It also gave programmers good reason to break out of the sprite/scrolling trap and develop more innovative graphics engines.

     

    Anyway, the BBC was definitely the fastest machine of the era with a 2 MHz 6502 CPU and no memory contention. It was just too expensive to compete against the other machines in the marketplace and the attempt to produce a cheaper model ended up with the flawed and incompatible Electron. You can't knock the games for it though; Elite is almost synonymous with 8 bit gaming in the UK.

     

    Edit: I think I've found the article and, althoug the CPUs do get a mention, its just benchmarking the BASIC implementations on the machines:

     

    http://www.gondolin.org.uk/hchof/reviews/yc-atari800xl.html

     

    Is that the one?

     

     

    Absolutely no question. When you play those Isometric games the Spectrum is famouse for, it wins in speed hands down. But, it doesn't win for loading speed, the C64 loads much faster.

     

    Also, in other types of games the C64 has comparable if not superior speed. Defender on both systems will show that the Speccy was jerky and had slow down in the midst of gameplay more than once, the C64 didn't.

     

    -Ray

  6. Posted

    This thread and this news item seemed to be a pair. Classic Computer geeks needed to crack crime!

     

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/austria/article/0,,1865500,00.html

     

     

    I love this quote...

     

    "Officers have been surprised to find that the kidnapper, Wolfgang Priklopil, a communications technician, appeared to have relied exclusively on a Commodore 64."

     

    He relied on it. Like it was his PC of choice. LOL

     

    I'm thinking that if they researched his vast librararies of files they would fine themselves with hours and hours of great gaming experiences.

     

    Bastard gives the rest of us a bad name.

     

    -Ray

  7. Posted · Edited by pocketmego

    What would the premise be?

     

    Fembots and the Venus Probe!

     

    And of course Sasquatch!

     

    Thank you for making me feel way less geeky. I thought I was bad remembering the bionic woman but MAN! :-o

    Did you google that or did you actually remember it all on your own??

     

    I do remember the fembots and sasquatch now that you mention them. :rolling:

     

    Lots of clips here from all the episdodes you guys mentioned and then some...

     

    http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type...p;search=Search

     

    It was watching these that made me think of this thread to begin with.

     

     

     

    -Ray

  8. Posted

    To me GORF for the 2600 is like Pizza...

     

    When I'm in the mood for it, there is not much better. A cool game, that I think captures just enough of the arcade gaes feel to work and is generally colorful and fun to play over and over.

     

    However, I've always beena bit confused about the loss of the Galaxian levels in the home versions of this game. Surely when the original game was created Namco knew that the possibility of home versions was logical. If they were going to license the Galaxians for use in GORF in the first place why would they not allow the use of them in any version o the game produced?

     

    Secondly, has anyone here amongst all our talented game hackers and homebrewers considered the idea of porting over levels from the 2600 Galaxian into Gorf to make a complete game?

     

    Is it even possible to do that?

     

    Just some thoughts and questions.

     

    -Ray

  10. Posted

    Flash Gordon is actually a Thorn-EMI produced movie. The game itself is Sirius' Spider City for the Atari 8-bit personal computers.

     

    How odd. I wonder why they decided not to make an orginal game more based on the movie? Because I really despise the Flash Gordon 2600 game.

     

    Can you imagine one based on the duel scene from the movie with the moving platform and spikes.

     

    -Ray

  11. Posted

    Looking back, there are only really a few games that seemed to be universal purchases, that everybody seemed to own. Obviously Combat was the first, but also I don't remember anyone not owning Donkey Kong, Pacman, Asteroids and Defender. I seemed like you could pretty much count on everyone owning those - so I'd say the arcade ports were likely the cash cows.

     

    This is very true, but at the same time you could count on almost everyone owning Pitfall, River Raid, and Adventure as well.

     

     

    Plus, there are many arcade games that I never knew existed before I came here like Defender 2, Pooyan, and both Mr. Do games.

     

    -Ray

  14. Posted

    I remember when I was a kid (keep in mind I was maybe 6 or 7), the first game I absolutely HAD to have for my Atari was Donkey Kong jr.

     

    I remember having games and enjoying them prior to DKjr, but never did I actively want a game until that one. I think it was that live action commercial with that weird Mario...:D

     

     

     

    -Ray

  15. Posted

    I'm still working on the Fonz, but I've lost a little bit of code since the version I posted earlier and I'm working on getting it back (got back most of it), so it might be a little while (a couple days or so) before I post a new version. Thanks very much for the compliments, but I have a question: Is "Fonz" a trademark?

     

    I would imagine so. I think the reason the cartoon was called The Fonz was to trademark the name, just in case. I would also imagine that they tradmarked as many iterations of the name as possible.

     

    Calling the game Jump the Shark is actually illegal as well as jumping the Shark is the title of a book of which the phrase originated.

     

    I'd definately check on those trademarks, its hard to tell after almost 30 years what is trademarked and what isn't.

     

    -Ray

  16. Posted

    This was a great post, thanks for the thurough and very enlightening run-down of various machines of the era. Good Job!

     

    -Ray

     

     

    Well, of the systems listed I'd have to say the C64 overall but to be honest, it really depended on the game.

     

    For some types of games sprites are almost required and the C64's are flat out better than the Atari Player Missile system because no memory moves are required to move an object up and down. Just left and right and it doesn't matter. MSX and other Z80 machines with sprites do ok as does a Ti99. The Ti99's CPU was slow though since the architecture wasn't really designed for it. The Amstrad 6128 Plus was probably the best Z80 machine hardware wise and even had DMA to drive the sound chip.

     

    The Atari has more colors so between that and the coprocessor it's possible to make some really great looking screens that make the machine appear to support more colors in a gfx mode than it does. But the more of this stuff you do the slower it becomes because clock cycles are taken away from the CPU to do it. Same goes for sprites on the C64.

    The absolute worst culprit at that is anything with a Z80. MSX and CPC machines suffer a bigger penalty for the stolen clock cycles than the 6502 with cpu clock cycles times a minimum of 4 cycle intervals on the 6128 Plus.

     

    As for sound, more channels vs analog filters vs more machines with the same chip. The Atari has more sound channes which is better for music but you can multiplex channels for more on the other chips so it's not such a big deal. The analog filters on the SID give it the most control of ANY of these old chips... but game developers turned out the same boinky warbling crap anyway. The General Instruments AY chip turns out as good of sound as the Atari but with 1 less channel. Speaker toggling on the Apple II and earlier Speccys sucks and who wants to spend as much on a sound board as one of the other machines? The Mockingboard wasn't cheap!

     

    Speccy? Uh, no... strictly low end and doesn't benchmark anywhere near the other machines. And the 6502 is way faster for moving bitmapped graphics around. I've programmed in assembly on the 6502 and Z80... no comparison speed wise for this sort of thing. However, I could probably finish a Z80 program quicker. I posted a sort routine on the Speccy forums last night and it didn't take long to modify the original routine it was based on. 15 minutes or less and I haven't touched Z80 assembler in years. In 6502 it would take much longer to get it right unless I spent a lot more time on the 6502.

     

    The Speccy does have some cool games you won't find anywhere else and a very large game catalog.

     

    The Oric wasn't the best gamer but it also had some unique titles that were pretty cool and available on no other platform. It's odd display layout made action games a bit of a challenge but more static graphics could be pretty good.

     

    The C116, C16 and Plus/4 were somewhere between the Speccy and the C64/Atari as far as capability and were 75% faster than the C64. Pretty good as a competitor to the Speccy but much more limited as far as custom audio/gfx hardware goes than Atari or C64. In recent years several C64 games have been hacked to run on the system and even SID music has been emulated on the built in TED sound. Not as good but pretty impressive anyway.

     

    I learned to program the 6502 on an Apple II. The screen memory map is evil and the color generation method (artifacting) sucks. You can do quite a bit with it anyway but it really limits what kind of games you can implement or how good they will be. A really large number of games helps it out though. It works pretty well for games that have static text or minimal motion like RPGs or simulations. One arcade game Space Eggs took advantage of it's color generation quirks to make the bad guys change colors as they moved. The Atari version just didn't have the same feel. There were several of the Sirius titles that were excellent. Other games took advantage of the Apple Pascal's ability to swap subroutines in and out of memory making it possible to have very large games in a small memory footprint. Something I didn't see on any other 8 bit system. The IIc+ was also the fastest 6502 system short of aftermarket 65816 upgrades. I have one and it's pretty fast for the time.

     

    The Atari fans love to bring up the clock speed difference between it and the C64 but in an old Compute Magazine they benchmarked the two in assembly and the C64 was the faster of the two there. Both beat the Speccy by a wide margin and the BBC micro was the fastest of the machines tested. However... I haven't been able to track down the magazine the original benchmarks came from so I don't know if they were flawed. If any Basic was involved the Atari's lack of integers in it's Basic really slow it down.

     

    Now, I personally had a TRS-80 Color Computer and thanks to color artifacting (similar to the Apple) it could do pretty well. I've heard 4 channel music generated through it's built in DAC that is pretty good. Way better than Apple/Speccy speaker clicks but not like a sound chip either. It's 6809 CPU stomps the 6502 and Z80... don't even argue that. It didn't receive as much game development as the Apple II or Speccy but I'd classify it's games as similar in quality and the same resolution as the Speccy. Games like Time Bandit originated on the CoCo and made it to the 16 bit systems later.

     

    The Color Computer 3 however was a totally different beast. 320x225 resolution with 16 colors from a pallette of 64 colors. 640x225x2 max resolution. You could change color pallette registers for color cycling, for placing more colors on screen at once, etc... It had built in hardware for horizontal scolling games so you just change the scoll register to move the screen. No sprites but with it's high CPU speed mode enabled the 6809 can drive over 8 sprites with masking just in software. Some people have managed 16 software sprites which is pretty impressive. The best version of Pac Man I've ever seen on an 8 bit computer is on the CoCo3 and Crash, Crumble, Stomp looks almost like the arcade. The Speech and Sound Pak added an AY sound chip, speech chip and a PIC microcontroller to drive them independantly of the main CPU so a music track doesn't have to steal as much CPU time as any other 8 bit. A common upgrade is the 6309 CPU which is even faster than the 6809. It's kinda like what the 65816 is to the 6502 or 64180 is to the Z80. Sadly Tandy's attitude of protecting their PC line pretty much sealed the fate of one of the best 8 bit game systems ever made. Better hardware, not many games.

     

    The Apple IIgs was also an excellent system but it was a later design than the others so that's no surprise. No sprites but a 2MHz 65816 gave it similar capabilities for software sprites as the CoCo3. It had the best built in music/sound of any 8 bit machine. The new graphics modes did away with the old evil graphics memory map and color by artifacting. It had 4096 colors, color cycling, etc... and ran most older Apple II stuff. But you could buy a C64, Atari 130XE and Color Computer 3 for less than what it cost by the time it was released. I picked a nice complete one up off of ebay for $12 + shipping last month. That's less than most C64's go for.

  19. Posted

    Fast Eddie is one of my favorite games.I also enjoy Worm War 1 as well.Alien is so much like Pac-Man am surprised that they didnt get sued over that game.I just ordered M.A.S.H today at a request by my best friend who is a big fan of the tv show.I guess Porkys,Spacemaster X-7,and BeefSteak Tomatoes are next for me.

     

    Mash is an odd-ball game. it is part chopper rescue style military game and part Operation (the board game). It is not a bad game by any means, though I often wonder how well it sold at the time. I remember a lot of my friends actually had this, but it wss not a game we played often. I never owned, because it simply didn't appeal to me.

     

    -Ray

  22. Posted

    I didn't see this one above, so I've uploaded another Centipede 5200 commercial. This one is "Club Centipede":

     

    For some reason youtube cut off the last 2 seconds when they converted it.

     

    Atariboy: feel free to move that into the top post if you want.

     

    HOLY CRAP!!!

     

    Proof poditive that Atari's Marketing division was enjoying some HARD DRUGS when the money was flowing during those boom years.

     

    -Ray

  23. Posted

    I now this question has been answered probably about 60 BILLION times, but I am new to this and I could use the advice.

     

    You favorite 7800 game is?

     

    And why?

     

    Thanks

     

    -Ray

  24. Posted

    Congrats.I have a 7800 and i love it.If you get a chance get yourself a copy of BeefDrop its great.

     

    Well Im not getting the copy of Beef Drop untill I or some one fine away to rename it to Burger Time.

     

    Yeah don't let the name stop you.

     

    It's a great game

     

    Beef Drop and Go Fish! are the two games I've been playing non-stop since the day I got them

     

    Well worth picking up

     

    So what Homebrews are currently avaible for the 7800 all said and done?

     

    -Ray

  25. Posted

    To me the whole point of buying modern Atari 2600 Homebrews is to recapture the nostalgia of being able to buy new Atari games back when the system was still in production. It is a special feeling and one that makes modern homebrews special in a way that is hard to explain.

     

    Well, Simon has managed to double that grand sense of nostalgia. Not just with a new Homebrew, but one that is based on a game I played a lot in my developing years. The game was Aztec Challenge and it was a pretty regular fixture on my Commodore 64 computer.

     

    So a game that combines my 2 great childhood loves of Commodore and Atari is one that I had to have and I am THRILLED that I made this purchase.

     

    This is a fine game with graphics that are incredibly detailed, bright, and impressive. It looks good even by current graphical standards.

     

    In terms of gameplay, its been improved considerably from its source material. Aztec Challenge was a HARD game with NO learning curve. However in taking the first two stages of the original game and allowing for a increas in difficulty per stage the Gauntlet and wall stages of the original game become endeering and addicitng to play. I want to work just a little harder to make it to each new level.

     

    I can't leave out the Pyramid designs either, which offer a visual treat that makes you want to complete each level so you can take a few moments and admire the beauty of the design. My favorite being the "Atari" Pyramid.

     

    Great stuff and a fantastic game that is well worth time in anyone's collection.

     

    -Ray

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