Matt_B

Maybe not then. Most versions of the game (and yes, that includes the Spectrum one) feature a PETSCII mode though. I've never seen it in operation in the Amiga version.

Besides, Dave Murray is the 8-Bit guy, not the 16-Bit guy! Seriously, given the comments here, I can see why they went with the Amiga version and they've all got identical gameplay. Still, the PET was the primary platform for a reason, so that he didn't get too bogged down on the graphics and sound, and it'd be nice if they could throw it in as an Easter egg or something.

"Do you guys not have three phones, a portable WiFi router, and a USB to HDMI cable?" 😀

Apparently not. With some work, I'm sure this could become an Amico meme too.

My take on the Diablo Immoral situation is that ActiBliz are a particularly egregious money grubbing corporation, even by the standards of a games industry that also includes Ubisoft and EA, and that their fans acted like a bunch of crybabies when they started to figure that out. There you go, you really can have that one both ways.

Aaargh. My eyes. Look at that terrible color palette, the low resolution, the flickering and disappearing sprites, that weird corruption going on just above the status bar and what on Earth is happening at the right edge of the screen when it scrolls?!?!? How could anyone even play that game? 🙂 Seriously guys. That's how you're coming across when you're nitpicking over games that are incredible programming achievements that far surpass the design limitations of the platforms they're running on. Also, the idea that computers aren't games machines if they've not got X, Y and Z is just ludicrous. Even the Commodore PET had a games scene in spite of being monochrome, text-only, with no sound and having keyboard-only controls; there's some pretty good stuff for it in spite of those limitations too. After that, practically every computer since was going to be used for games and everyone knew it.

I thought they cried over Diablo because they didn't have phones, or something along those lines. 🙂

Physical media is one of those weird fetish things. 🙂 I'd think that if you're after modern Atari games in cartridge format, you can just get them on the Switch. Most have been released that way, albeit usually only in limited runs.

There's your answer Bill. 😉 Seriously, it's not like the Spectrum scene needs an Evercade cartridge for validation or anything. There's so much quality homebrew coming out these days that it's hard to keep track of it all. The thought that Blaze might not want to tread on its toes has crossed my mind. Given that we already have VCS, Intellivision and 70s arcade carts, I seriously doubt that the issue would be primitive graphics either. If that was the issue, there are Next-enhanced versions of a lot of games now with Amiga-style graphics. Maybe Vradark's Revenge or Aliens: Neoplasma could make a future cartridge? The latter might need a rebrand, of course. On the whole though, the Evercade treads a fine line between supplying a good variety of games, while keeping the quality high, and the library relatively small. That's all to make it worth the while of those collecting a full set to continue doing so. Delving into the less mainstream platforms isn't something they want to be doing too often and even then it'll probably be for a deep cut on on a cart with more obvious attraction, as is the case with Sword of Ianna.

I'm pretty sure it would be either C64 or Amiga, possibly a bit of both. They're the systems that Thalamus were most at home on. While I'd like to see the Spectrum come to Evercade at some point, this isn't it. A collection from Ocean, Hewson or Ultimate might hit the spot though.

I'm wondering if Tommy was also persuaded to sign a personal guarantee on that loan from Sudesh. Things could yet get very spicy if he did.

I believe that five years is also what it takes for the revenue sharing agreements with Fig and Republic to expire. They're basically just running down the clock on their liabilities while selling off their assets in ways that they can argue aren't raising revenue that they'd have to share.

It's based on the GFLOPS compute performance, i.e. the theoretical limit of floating point operations it could manage in a second expressed in the billions. For the Chromecast this is around 20, for the Amico it's 120. For comparison, the PS5 scores around 10K and the Series X 12K. The Adreno 506 was indeed OK by mobile phone standards a few years back. Here are some examples of what it can do: I don't think you could pull that off on the Chromecast. However, a flagship Amico game looks like this: It's certainly got a few performance issues but I don't think that pushing the GPU to the limit is the cause of them. For some examples of what the Chromecast can do: You be the judge, but I'd reckon that it's in with a shot.

Go on then. What are these more demanding games that you don't think the 4K Chromecast would be capable of running? Astrosmash? Evel Knievel? Farkle? Did I miss something? While I have seen some fairly impressive games running on an Adreno 506 phone - and it was a very decent mobile GPU by 2016 standards - there doesn't seem to be anything in the Amico catalogue that would require its full capabilities. As before, there are more visually impressive looking games that you can already run on the Chromecast.

I'd be surprised. A Chromecast can already run the likes of Just Dance, Asphalt, Deer Hunter, a crapton of board/card games, as well as emulate anything up to a Dreamcast and stream practically any other modern game. It's obviously a lot less powerful than even a half-decent 2023 smartphone, but then again the Amico would have been too.

I'll go with James Morgan. He was the guy brought in to be the hatchet man after Kassar's failure. While some dead wood probably needed cutting away, it would have been a lot better to have had someone who knew a thing or two about technology rather than a marketing executive straight out of the tobacco industry whose reaction to everything he didn't get was to freeze development and fire everyone involved. The Tramiels are somewhat infamous for doing that, but he was far worse than they were in his short tenure. Also, the guy was later CEO of Philip Morris for three years, which I'd reckon gives him an actual body count. At least, if you know anyone who died of lung cancer, you've partially got him to thank for it.

You'd think that, at the very least, they could have loaded it onto a Fire TV or a Chromecast.

I'd think that all it showed is that the bar to getting retail pre-order listings is extraordinarily low. Tommy must have been so disappointed when he found out that none of that would count towards getting manufacturing credit too. 😄

What's truly amazing is that the car isn't even the biggest fake in that picture. 🤣

A "hardware recreation" would be one that recreated the consoles at the logic level, most likely using an FPGA. When someone can do that well enough to work with one cartridge, it's going to work with pretty much all of them. Whatever the 2600+ is, it's definitely not that, and the problems arise from trying to create a ROM dumper without an encyclopedic knowledge of bank switching schemes and an exhaustive collection of cartridges to test on.

Atari weren't just looking at creating a regular casino, subject to all the usual licensing regulations, but one that ran on cryptocurrency and was offshored to the laxest jurisdiction that they (or at least their partner company who would be running it) could find. Out of all the things they were ever involved in, I'd say that it was far and away the shadiest, and I don't find it in any way compatible with a company that wants to be a respectable brand in video games. Thankfully, they backed out of the project. That was in July 2021. https://www.thegamer.com/atari-cancels-casinos/ Much though I'd like to write it off as being the last gasp of the Chesnais era, it really hasn't been that long since then.

You're sweeping under the rug a whole bunch of far more dubious projects there that were still pursued post-2017, such as their online casino, crypto and hotels. I'm all for a more gaming-focused Atari, but let's not try and pretend that all that other crap never happened, and heaven forfend anything like it ends up on the front page of AA.

The problem is that technology doesn't always make things smaller, faster and cheaper in an inexorable progression. Sometimes they just become obsolete and you can't get them any more. To cut a long story short, the era of cheap ASIC plug-n-plays is over, and the modern equivalent of a Flashback 2 would be an FPGA-based device that'd have to sell for around six times the price. Well, either that or an ARM emulation device, which is what we're getting.

A quick check on the USPTO site suggests that the Atari Jaguar trademark was abandoned as early as 1996, before Hasbro even got their hands on the system. Basically, they didn't mention the trademark because they didn't have it.

I'm not saying that there wasn't cautious optimism from some quarters, just that there were people questioning the concept pretty much from the moment it was revealed at the PGRE. It's not like we had to wait for the era of rigged demos, crowdfunding u-turns, missed release dates, astroturfing, atrocious modding and trying to bury the entire discussion before anyone expressed skepticism. Anyway, I found a post of mine that was in a different thread, so it hasn't been stricken from the record. As of October 23, 2018, I said: Well, that's my cards on the table for being among its first critics, and you can find a few other familiar names alongside me there. Any advances on that? 😄