Mindfield

I was on my way to work this morning when a thought occurred to me. Is it just possible, Atari's historic lack of advertising aside, that the 5200, 7800, Lynx and Jaguar failed because Atari had no "signature" title or franchise? Consider Nintendo. They have Mario and Pokemon. Sega had Sonic. It could even be said that to a lesser degree, NEC had Bonk. Atari had ... um ... Atari had ... well, Atari didn't have anything really, did they? No cutesy, cuddly, merchandisable, franchisable stuffed toy or lunch box material. Nothing to tie a familiar and recognizable character to the Fuji. Now sure, the VCS was without a doubt the granddaddy of all video game systems and left all competition trembling in its wake. But those were different times. Times when Atari ruled the home video game planet. Times when Atari set the rules of engagement by which their opposition fought and ultimately lost. After the crash though, the slate was wiped clean and Nintendo and Sega both took the van in the video game arena. And they set the rules, then. And the rules were: Make it cute, cuddly, merchandisable and franchisable. Thus were born the twin legacies of the Italian plumber and the blue hedgehog. Characters that ultimately tied their very images to their creators. Thought of Mario and Nintendo were simultaneous and automatic. Ditto for Sega: See Sonic, see Sega. But Atari didn't have that. Perhaps in the beginning of their life the ubiquitous Fuji was as recognizable a symbol as the Coca Cola logo. But a logo alone is hardly exposure enough. Nintendo and Sega knew that. Did Atari not? Or did they just completely fail to come up with a character that worked on a long term basis? And in the end, could this have been one of the various reasons Atari ultimately died at the hands of those they could have otherwise held dominance over as they once did over their predecessors?

Wow... never had that happened. Chances are you either got a really strong potion of Inebriation, or you unwittingly quaffed several of them -- or one of those plus potions of spirits, beer, etc. That would get you nice and toasted. :-) I guess you could say I had an opposite experience -- becoming next to immortal. In the process of building up an 18th level character, I went through a great deal of adventuring. Mostly, I liked to hang around the south-east quadrant of the City, around the hidden Thieve's guild, particularily at night during the rain, which was where you had the best chance of finding a Gremlin, who themselves seemed to carry more Red/Sweet potions than any other creature. Unfortunately, it was also in the opposite end of the city to the healer, so whenever I quaffed a red/sweet potion that ended out being Deadly Poison, I'd have to trek to the other end of the city to patronize the healer. I always survived though, having built up enough hit points to sustain me until the healer (who kept the odd schedule of being there every other hour) could see me at a reasonable price. (His prices also changed every 10 minutes) Well, I did this often enough that in the end, I actually developed a resistance to Deadly Poison. After that, I could quaff Red/Sweet potions with impunity, knowing that Deadly Poison could no longer affect me. [ 10-19-2001: Message edited by: Mindfield ]

Probably because tapes were pretty well it in the UK at the time. Consider the market in the UK: Sinclair Spectrum, Sam Coupe, BBC Micro ... all primarily tape-based systems. Microdrives were available for them, but not terribly popular due to the cost involved and the fact that no commercial vendors were supporting games on disk. I suppose this is largely because the Microdrive was the "big" idea over there, while the North American market stuck with the more standard 5.25" floppies, which enjoyed much better success, particularily with commercial companies making games for them.

Dang! I'd no idea you worked in such a large software house. I rather liked Deus Ex, actually. It was a nice change of pace from traditional FPS games, and the levels were laid out beautifully -- it added tremendously to the realism. Somehow I can't imagine it on the PS2, though. But then I have trouble imagining most FPS-style games on the PS2, mainly because I can't imagine playing FPS-style games without the mouse/keyboard combo. :-) (Even dual analog sticks can't replace a good mouse. :-)

'Course, there's also this site (which works better through an FTP client) if you don't feel like picking through the pages one by one. (Not that I'm knocking AtariAge, of course, but flipping through multiple pages to download one file is a pet peeve of mine. :-) [ 10-19-2001: Message edited by: Mindfield ]

Classic: Alternate Reality. This was a game I was able to get so wrapped up in that I lost all sense of time and space. Although there wasn't much of a cast of characters, apart from yourself, the very idea behind the game and the rich world in which everything took place was exceptionally crafted with fine attention to detail everywhere, and a full musical score. The idea of being captured by an alien space craft and transported to a new world (which ultimately would have been revealed to be the craft itself, had the series been brought to completion) to fend for your life and build your character was fascinating to me. Modern: That one's a toughie. I think it would be a toss up between Half Life, Max Payne (a modern graphic-novel style backdrop with a decidedly 1930s gumshoe paperback flavour), Red Faction, and for some reason, Oni. This last I think I liked because it had that Anime charm mixed with great scenery and a great storyline.

Mine was rather fond and providential memory. It was the summer of my 11th year, not long before my 12th birthday, and my father and I had just moved out of our apartment and into a townhouse, rooming with some mutual friends. The move itself was a little on the chaotic side. Everything was packed in boxes and, when we ran out of boxes, green garbage bags. Among the items in some of the garbage bags were my Colecovision with driving controller, my Coleco Gemini, and the scant few carts I owned. Unfortunately, amid the chaos, these particular garbage bags somehow got confused for real garbage and were thrown out. On arrival at our new home, I was quite distraught to have discovered this. Only a few short weeks later, my birthday arrives, and in a completely unexpected turn of events, our neighbours, friends of those we lived with, gave me a gift. In fact, they gave me three. Three boxes; one large, two small. Upon opening the first -- the large one, of course, I discovered, much to my completely amazement, a 4 switch 2600, complete with two joysticks, a a set of paddles, and two Y connectors. However, as uncontainable as my joy was, the best was yet to come, for in the remaining two boxes were adjoining cartrige holders, each of which held 20 carts, and both were near to brimming with games -- some 36, all told. Some were rather dull: Golf, Backgammon, the sort of things a tot of 12 would rather eat than play. Some were cool: Both Pitfall games, Frogger, Q*Bert, etc. Some were of the odd, budget variety: Beanie Bopper, Lost Luggage, that sort of thing. All in all, it was a tremendous haul, and I made a point of booking my weekends off from school to fully explore each of these games. Even Golf, if briefly. The whole setup was used, of course -- something our neighbour's kid had outgrown. His growth spurt however was my ultimate gain, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I even discovered Toys R Us, and for about a year after went faithfully every weekend to buy a new game with my allowance.

Possibilities include: 1) Improper voltage 2) Improper and/or damaged pinouts 3) It isn't a sleek and sexy Epyx 500XJ Yeah, okay, so I loved the Epyx stick. :-)

I can only verify that it worked on the Coleco Gemini and the 4 switch "darth vader" model. Never had a heavy sixer, unfortunately... but I can't see any reason that it shouldn't work. The circuitry isn't really that different -- the chips are the same, anyway.

quote: Originally posted by Ze_ro: Oh no, it's not actiplaque (Do Imagic labels even get this? I've only really seen this on Activision and Epyx games). The whole label is covered in rough deposits of some kind, that I can scrape off with my fingernail if I try hard enough. Ahh. The Food of Ages. Funny thing, I can remember getting stuff like that on my records, my books, whatever... but never on my carts. I suppose that's because I never ate before I played. Usually I played 'til I was emaciated, then I ate. :-) quote: I also unscrewed the copy of Grand Prix I got (Normally I can't bring myself to break labels, but this one was in such pain, it was begging for death), and there's rust inside the cartridge, and all over the metal shielding. I have no idea how someone would manage to get all their cartridges wet, but apparently, it happened. Sounds like it might have been condensation or something of that nature -- storing it in a warm, humid area, perhaps. That would be a particular problem for those cartriges that had the protective door that retracted when inserted into the console -- a perfect moisture trap. Not air-tight, scant enough opening to allow moisture to enter and remain. quote: ... But then there was that time my brother dropped a couple of cases of his Amiga disks in the snow while on his way to a friend's house... I suppose accidents do happen (Though that still doesn't explain deliberate label tears... grr... ) Label tears -- well, y'know. Those are the same kids that built My Little Pony Abbatoirs...

Considering the major innovations Atari was responsible for, and the fact that Atari pioneered pretty well most of the most basic concepts we now take for granted in video games, I think things would be so different as to be unrecognizable. - Without Atari, Computer Space would never have flopped in the arcades. Then again, Pong wouldn't have jammed the coin box at Andy Capp's, paving the way to its own monumental success. - Without Atari, Steve (Jobs) and Steve (Wozn iak) would never have gotten a job at Atari, and subsequently probably would never have started Apple -- at least not as we know it. - Without Atari, the Magnavox Odyssey and Fairchild Channel F would have been the premiere consoles of the day. Depending on their success, we may never have seen the Connecticuit Leather Company reform into Coleco and release a video game system, and Mattel may have just kept on making Hot Wheels and action figures instead of hiring the ever-stuffy George Plimpton to peddle their Intellivision. And without the fierce competition in the console market, Nintendo may well have simply chose to continue producing Hanafanuda cards. Service Games may have stuck to Pinball machines, and never have shortened their name to Sega to produce video game. - If Atari didn't exist, fantastic and long-lived companies like Activision, Imagic, and others would never have existed. - If Atari didn't exist, Commodore would have been the computer of choice, from the PET on upwards -- that is, assuming Commodore evolved in that direction, which they probably would have. - If Atari didn't exist, there probably would have been other competitors for IBM and Commodore -- but we can only guess at who. In all, I think the industry would be vastly different than it is today to the point where it's impossible to even imagine how different and what those changes could be. There can be no doubt: Atari shaped the industry and laid its foundation for generations to come. [ 10-16-2001: Message edited by: Mindfield ]

Sounds like your Atlantis cart might have succumbed to the dreaded Actiplaque. Unless it really _was_ water, in which case -- damn kids. :-) Actually, I look back over my old vinyl records that I still somehow managed to save from my childhood when I was turning them into MP3s for preservation. I was shocked at the poor condition I'd kept them in. The sleeves were fine, but the records... I'm sure there are small clumps of 18-year-old Jam petrified in the grooves of some, while others show obvious manhandling from the obvious fingerprints on them, and still others show the wear and tear of carelessly dropping the needle on them. Some I'd put on a turntable I'd borrowed from a friend for the conversion process and would hear more static than music. many others would skip no matter how high I set the anti-skate weight. In the end, many were unsalvageable. Now, my 2600 collection was different. I guess because they required nothing more than picking up and putting them in a slot, and because it was near impossible to get any goo or anything inside the cartrige or on the edge connector (unless you were really clumsy), my carts were all usually in pretty good condition. I still have a few remnants of my old collection, and apart from a tattered Star Raiders box and some other squished boxes (okay, so I wasn't gentle with the packaging or manuals) the carts themselves are still in pretty good condition.

I'd agree with Montezuma's Revenge; it was a fantastic game that I played endlessly, and they really crammed your money's worth on that 8k cart. The 8-bit version was even better -- visually (of course) and in terms of scope, but the 2600 version held its own exceptionally well. I'd also have to put in for two others, both CBS titles: Tunnel Runner and Blueprint. Tunnel Runner was an exceptional game for its time, bringing realistic 3D maze action and suspense-filled gameplay. Very avante garde for its time. Blueprint too featured some great frenetic action as you went from house to house in search of the pieces to build the rocket to destroy the nasty chasing after your girlfriend -- only to come up with a bomb you'd have to rush to the bomb pit before it detonated. Both of these games saw a lot of slot time in my 2600.

Nicely done indeed! I'm presuming that the moving coins on the normal levels are generated in realtime (rather than sprites) which is why they can't be converted to actual coins from the spinning Vomit-on-a-Cracker that they are currently, and making platforms that would actually rise in response to bumping it from below would require reprogramming -- no easy task. But the rest of it looks great! Mario looks like Mario. Shellcreepers no longer look like walking mucous, and crabs actually look like crabs. :-) Nice job overall. It's the Mario Bros. that should have been...

Are you using PCAE or PCAEWin? I've worked quite a bit with John on tracking down and elimiating the bugs in PCAE/Win, and so far, up to version 2.5, I've managed to track down quite a few for him. I have to admit to not having experienced any slowdown in the emulator on loading successive ROMs. (And believe me I've loaded hundreds in succession to create screenshots and edit properties to add the proper info in the INI) What are your system specs? (CPU, OS, amount and type of RAM, chipset, video card and sound card, DirectX version, etc.) And does it happen consistently?

Sur la pont d'Avignon is also one of those songs sung in Canadian schools during French classes, along with the usual traditionals like Alouetta and ... well, the rest of those tunes I tried very hard to forget. :-) (French is taught in Canada the same way Spanish is taught in the US)

Actually, Crazy Taxi isn't all that new an idea. A similar game came out in the early 90s for the PC called Quarantine. Though it took place in a Mad Max-like post-holocaustic environment, you nevertheless played a taxi driver, and the goal was to get your passengers where they wanted to go by any means necessary -- taking out any opposition along the way and picking up various powerups as you went. As you made money you could upgrade your car with new weapons, armour, etc. It was pretty fun and had a biting sense of humour to it. As for games I'd like to see ported -- well, there's this rather dry but strangely addictive puzzle game I played on the Atari ST years back. I can't recall its name, and have never found its duplicate, but the idea was thus: You started off with a blank grid and four randomly coloured square tiles in the center. There was also a cache of enough 1x2, 2x2, 3x2, and other shaped objects (similar to Tetris) which you'd place on the board in an attempt to try and fill as much of the board up as possible. Points were awarded for large contiguous blocks of the same colour; the larger a contiguous area of the same colour you were able to piece together, the more that area was worth. The real trick to the game was to create two separate contiguous areas of one specific colour, then join them up. That scored exponentially larger than simply creating one large congiguous area. It became rather challenging, as there were four colours to work with, and trying to fit together adjoining areas of contiguous colour such that you had kind of cordoned off portions of the grid to be dedicated to a specific colour became very challenging. I think something like that could be doable on the VCS.

It's gotten quite huge. Particularily with some independent MAME versions that feature Capcom System 2 support (since that opens the door for the rather large CPS2 ROMs). I don't personally collect CPS1/2 or NeoGeo ROMs, so that does cut down on the general size of the whole collection -- but it's still pretty huge. One day I'll go back to mame.dk and grab 'em again... when I feel I've got the free time to spend playing all those old classics I kept well fed with quarters all those years back. :-)

I'm not sure what you mean by game codes. As it cheat codes, or level codes? [ 10-13-2001: Message edited by: Mindfield ]

I was definitely a big fan of Major Havoc in the arcades. Just the whole gameplay and concept was great. It had a good balance of action, reflexes, and strategy, and had pretty cool vector graphics to boot. I think the only games I ever wasted more quarters on were Robotron and Space Ace. :-)

BE WARNED! Once you start collecting MAME stuff, you may never stop. It's bloody addictive. I actually deleted my entire MAME dir to make room for other stuff, promising I'd later set GetRight on KILLER MASS LEECH *.ZIP mode when I've got the room, the time, and the CDs to burn the now-4+ gig collection. :-) Believe me, the addiction is insideous. You'll find yourself saying, "Oh, I remember that game." Then, "Oh, wow, I spent tons of quarters on this one." And then, "Oh my god! I totally forgot about that game!" and "So that's what that game was!" By that time, of course, it's too late, and you've already dedicated an entire hard disk partition labelled MAME. :-) [ 10-12-2001: Message edited by: Mindfield ]

It's not all THAT different. However, you do need to collect the relevant software, which starts with the STiK2/STiNG TCP/IP stacks. With STiK2/STiNG and a SLIP or PPP dialup connection, you can then use some of the various web browsers (CAB), FTP clients, E-Mail (AntMail), IRC clients (AtarIRC), news clients, and even basic ICQ (AtarICQ or mICQ) clients to surf the net any way you like. Of course, surfing the web looks a lot nicer on a TT030 or Falcon030, but you can get by with medium res on an ST/e. Don't expect support for Java/script, DHTML or any other such modern web development platforms. You'll get basic HTML 1.1 spec, pretty well. Still, it's enough for most ST users. It's been a long time since I've surfed on the ST; most of my surfing was done through Lynx on a Unix shell account. :-) I only started using STiK/CAB near to the end of my ST days. So, it's possible if you don't want/can live without all the bells and whistles of a Netscape/Explorer experience. Your best source of information on this sort of thing: Usenet: comp.sys.atari.st IRC: #atari (EFNet, mostly) Web links: STiK2, CAB, : http://www.netset.com/~baldrick/stik2.html STiNG: http://www.ettnet.se/~dlanor/ GlueSTiK and AtarIRC: http://www.bright.net/~atari/html/software.htm General Atari site with loads of links and news on current developments: http://www.atari.org Hope that helps. [ 10-12-2001: Message edited by: Mindfield ]

Actually, it worked just fine on my old Gemini. It was the only VCS console I had at the time, and I had the Spike's Peak/Ghost Manor double-ender, and played both of them to death.

For starters, Activision already given Battlezone the once-over -- twice, with Battlezone, and Battlezone II. Neither of them really have that much to do with the original, though, but they're pretty good games in their own right. Hasbro's Atari already redid Centipede, Pong, Asteroids, Breakout, Q*Bert, and Pac Man. And of course, Activision also gave Pitfall a sequel in The Mayan Adventure back in '95. Defender got a pretty good one-up on the Jaguar with Defender 2000, not to mention Defender II on the Atari ST (both of which done by the inimitable Jeff "Yak" Minter), and I doubt anyone could forget his frenetic-psychedellic Robotron sendup, Llamatron. If I remember correctly, a remake of Star Raiders (titled Star Raiders 2000) was scheduled for the Jaguar a handful of years back. I don't know what became of it, or if it had even progressed to the proto phase, however.) Montezuma's Revenge got a 3D facelift a few years back, too. Wasn't too bad, but it really didn't feel anything like the original. Rampage has gotten a few 2D improvements, the most recent being Rampage World Tour. Lode Runner's recieved a few upgrades over the years, too. Personally, my wish list (Atari and otherwise) would be: - Crystal Castles - Dig Dug - Mr. Do/Mr. Do's Castle. (Didn't really like the rest) - Adventure - H.E.R.O. (I was making a remake of this on the ST way back...) - Keystone Capers - Mountain King - Pitfall II - Raiders of the Lost Ark - Spike's Peak/Ghost Manor (Yes, I liked 'em. I had this particular double-ender combo way back) - The Swordquest series - All the Tron games - Tunnel Runner - Vanguard - Venture - Xenophobe

I forgot about Wolfenstein! I used to love that game, too, though I never did finish it. The graphics were very simplistic redefined characters in graphics 0, but it was still cool. But back to E.T., it would have been nice if the town's layout changed. Would have added some additional challenge to the game. Even so, I still liked it for all that. There was just something unique about it that set it apart from other games.