Mindfield

For the longest time I had the Epyx 500XJ. It was probably one of the most comfortable sticks I ever used, and the microswitches were clean and responsive. Other joysticks I liked: - The joystick/paddle combo that came with the Coleco Gemini The corrugated, hard joystick dug into the hand after a while, unfortunately, but despite that it was comfortable, and the integrated paddles were a great idea. - Colecovision's joystick Really comfortable; the flat-topped joystick made controlling with the fingers or the palm of your hand just as easy. - The Wico SlickStick Fairly comfortable and very solid and reliable, but I could never get used to the fact that the stick had almost no play to it. It was kinda the joystick equivalent of a membrane keyboard; very little tactile feedback. Still, it was built like a tank.

Cafeman: Infogrames didn't buy Hasbro, they just bought Atari's assets from Hasbro -- for about 14x what Hasbro paid for it in the first place. I believe Hasbro just decided to divest themselves of the PC interactive market. As for Infogrames' ownership of Atari -- well, I can't say whether or not it's good for the Atari name, but it *can't* be worse than Hasbro's unfortunate ownership, which amounted to little more than pimping the Atari name around to sell a few cheap games. Infogrames produced some very fine titles on the 8 and 16-bit platforms, as well as on the PC. I enjoyed most of their releases, quite honestly, so that, at least, bodes well for them chucking the armadillo-on-acid and donning the Fuji. Only time will tell how well they treat it. I do know that they're planning to have a token release of some classic Atari games for the PC -- some anniversary release which appears to have absolutely nothing different about it than Hasbro's previous release of the same package. *shrug* Just shopping the name around I guess, keeping the Fuji well known 'til they have something original to show for it.

Oh, go on. Give us the full wraith. I'm not afraid of ghosts... I AM afraid of you reproducing, though...

I'm wondering if this multicart will include Atari-copyrighted-only titles, or whether they have the rights to include third party titles (Activision, CBS Electronics, M-Network, etc.) I'm hoping the latter, but I have a feeling it'll only be those games for which Infogrames, through ownership of Atari, hold the copyrights to. Nevertheless, here's my list of things I'd like to see on the multicart: - Tunnel Runner (One of my faves) - Spike's Peak - Ghost Manor (yes, I liked the Xonox games :-) - Crystal Castles - Montezuma's Revenge (I LOVED this one) - Mr. Do! and Mr. Do's Castle (despite being bad conversions) - Haunted House - Adventure (B-Side? I can't see Infogrames wanting to do anything with this...) - Star Raiders (Probably not a B-Side, but I can wish :-) - Combat (This would be _great_ linked) - ANY Activision title (they were all good) - Dark Chambers - ANY Imagic title (these were also quite good) - Dig Dug - All the Supercharger titles - Jungle Hunt - Mario Bros. - Miner 2049er - Mousetrap - Night Stalker - Pole Position - Popeye - Pooyan - Porky's (I dunno, I liked it. :-) - Q-Bert - Quest for Quintanna Roo - Raiders of the Lost Ark (Yeah, yeah. I liked it) - Superman - Swordquest: Earthworld and Fireworld - Vanguard - Venture - Yar's Revenge

Hmm. Exactly how bad do you have to be in order to be "not very good at" it? I kinda sucked at Crystal Castles, though I loved playing it. (It really needed that track ball) On the Colecovision, I absolutely *loved* destructor, but I was horrible at it -- mainly because I'd no idea how to play it. (I borrowed the cart from a friend; I already had the driving controller. I didn't have the manual tho... heh)

Probably just to shop the Atari name and familiar logo around, just to let people know that the Fuji hasn't died yet, and that Infogrames are at least doing *something* with Atari. But anyway, yeah... they're all from the little Atari kiosk at E3. And that's all that was at the kiosk. Whoever's trying to peddle it on EBay is a nob.

Fi: Well, like I said, we have the space on our server to host your Atari 2600 site. You're welcome to come aboard, or even just set up a mirror. There's no banners, advertising, or any of that sort of thing, you have full FTP access to set your page up, there's access to server-side includes (Perl, et al.), Java, whatever you like. No catch. It's sort of a part of what EmulationNET will be all about. Just upload your pages (editing paths where necessary) and you're all set. (And no, we don't get money for it. We just want to have a nice sort of community of like-minded people who share a common interest for the benefit of emu-holics, retrogamers and technological nostalgia buffs alike. Plus, we ourselves are hosted by Infinity Technologies, who are quite friendly towards retrogamers. :-) Think it over and let me know.

Fi: For a Homestead page, those aren't that bad. Particularily the 2600 memories page -- I like that you've integrated what's new in theatres, on the radio and TV, and in the arcades along with the release dates and notes about 2600 games of the times. It really sort of puts things in perspective and adds greatly to the nostalgia factor. All you need are Atari commercials and it'd be complete! :-) (I've got loads of those :-) Really there's nothing I can complain about with the page. It's laid out well, not at all busy, the images are clean and the pages are formatted quite well. They load quickly and it's easy to find what you're looking for. Nice job! If you'd like to chuck Hoimestead for some real hosting -- free, bannerless, ad-less hosting, let me know. I'm currently working with a few other emu nuts in setting up a couple of web sites, and the main site (EmulationNET) will be hosting some websites. E-Mail me if you're interested.

Heh... I'd never thought about it that way, but that works, too. I've always viewed such sites as amateurish, being someone's first attempt at a web page and therefore in posession of no sense of style, grace or, for that matter, sense. Particularily offensive are those pages littered with loads of generic animated GIFs -- y'know, like those animated explosions, or the little stick figure banner that waddles over and piddles on some logo... yeah, they were cool or funny once upon a time, but the 756th time I see it, I start getting just a tad bored... Good use of accentuating images that go with the theme (preferably not animated or, at least, not so obviously animated as to distract your attention from the real content), a good layout, and good colour schemes will get me coming back more often than pages that look like a carnival exploded all over them. In fact, usually when I start seeing a page load that wouldn't look out of place being displayed outside a cheap Las Vegas casino, I go elsewhere. Another thing that bugs me is when I see a page with images that have been anti-aliased for use on a background colour other than the one on the page -- y'know, the ones with white fuzz around 'em meant to be placed on a white background but, in fact, are on black. Yecch...

Just a few I've sort of picked up on through the years... BACKGROUNDS: - If you're going to have a busy background, at the very least use an art program to fade it and give it that washed-out look. This makes it easier for text to be readable overtop of it. - Make sure your backgrounds tile properly (edges line up seamlessly). Few things are more distracting than a strong background with jarring seams. Use a program such as Repligator or similar such programs to create or generate seamlessly tiling backgrounds. - Create a site colour scheme that compliments your background; for dark backgrounds, use light text, and for light backgrounds, dark text. COLOUR COORDINATION: - Whenever and wherever possible, try and avoid using default colours. Custom colours always add a touch of professionalism and flair to your site that sets you apart from others. I dunno about you, but I grew tired long ago of sites with cyan text on black backgrounds. BROWSER COMPATIBILITY: - Nothing's worse than going to a site that caters to a specific browser because of its capabilities. Some people may think DHTML effects are cool, but I find it irritating, and don't use IE myself anyway. The best way to draw the greatest audience is to make sure your site works in the major browsers -- Netscape and IE primarily, but feel free to test it in Opera or Mozilla. If you want to ensure compatibility and know a little Javascript, write some compatibility code into your pages that can detect what browser is being used and then display things or run scripts accordingly. If you want some compatibility code, or want to learn about how to detect browsers and respond appropriately, try www.javascripts.com IMAGES: - If you want to make an image transparent, choose a background colour that is not featured in the main body of the picture and use that as your transparency colour, otherwise you may end up with parts of the main body of the picture being transparent. - Don't use DHTML to place pictures on a page. This can have unexpected and often eye-jarring results in different browsers, especially with those whose users have altered the default font size. FRAMES: - If you're going to use frames, use them properly. Always point links to their correct target frames, and when a link points to an image, or someone else's page, always use the _top or _new targets so that the pages do not open up inside your frames. - Size your frames with a slightly generous margin of error. Tightly sized frames that, on your machine, just fit what you want, may come up short on another machine with a different font size or browser. This becomes even more problematic when you disable resizing and/or scrollbars within that frame. ORGANISATION: - Organise your page. Having a single page with everything on it is fine from a functionality standpoint, but having buttons pointing to specific, separate pages of interest makes things neater and easier to wade through, especially when there are a lot of images involved. COOL OR UNCOOL? - Okay, I've seen far too many pages that have loads and loads of images and Java applets that either have nothing to do with the page, are just on the fringe of the page's theme, or are simply there because they look cool. Yes, they may look cool by themselves, but frankly, when you start to overpopulate your page with stuff like this it becomes annoying and makes the page load even slower. Java applets like that ubiquitous "water reflection" applet have been used and overused so much that having another page with it just becomes trying. Think "less is more." A tastefully understated page says a lot more about its content and its webmaster than a busy, overdone site loaded with "cool" stuff. It loads faster and looks cleaner. Feel free to make it as stylish as you want, just remember not to overdo it. Just my 2-1/2 cents.

Sounds like one of the Fanda games, actually. Y'know, Bert's Brew Biz, Scrolls of Abandon (that was an isometric, get-the-dots kinda game, though exits weren't strictly up and down) and so on. I always loved Fanda's stuff. They always played so well and were exceptionally well done.

Considering the current Killera craze, I can't see it being that difficult or far off to see it appear in a C++-based A2600 emulator. Give it time and we may see, say, z26 or Stella released with Killera integration for netplay. (I doubt we'll see it for PCAE -- unless Killera gets ported to Delphi)

YEah, I remember this one... by GS1. I have it in 3 different formats on my FTP site(DiVX, the original QuickTime MOV, and a converted MPEG that I did which is quite large and not perfect due to the odd frame rate of the original MOV which MPEG does not support. I only did it because the resulting quality when enlarged was better than the DiVX and MOV)

Well, that's certainly a disappointing start; Infogrames re-releases the exact same collection of 12 Atari games that Hasbro released over a year ago? Please tell me there's more to Infogrames' master plan than repackaging Hasbro's stuff!

It was probably a hoax. As far as I know, Turbo only existed for the Colecovision, for use with the driving controller. (I used to have it, and man, did I ever spend hours on that game. I could drive forever... :-)

Just a bit of a note here. While software written for NTSC machines will work on PAL systems, they may function differently or, in some cases, erratically. Any piece of software that uses vertical blank interrupts (VBIs) will typically run slower. Most of the time, routines controlling music use the VBI, and so music will playback at a slower rate. In the case of demos that use the VBI to control other things -- scrollines, rasters, whatever -- may not function at all, or will look corrupted, because the demo is expecting something to happen at a certain rate (60 times per second) but finds it's only happening at 50Hz, and so may not look at all correct. Just a few thoughts...

As I recall, Atari was either unable to secure the rights to use the Last Starfighter license, or could not afford/did not want to pay the licensing fees, so in the end had taken the game as it existed in the state they'd already worked on, modified it a bit, and released it as Star Raiders II, although it bears only a passing resemblance to its adopted predecessor. Either way it was a great game; as much as I played the original Star Raiders (I think I even still have one of the keypads in storage!) I think I actually got into Star Raiders II even more.

My vote is for Tunnel Runner. One of the few first person games to appear on the 2600, and brilliantly executed I thought. Excellent use of colour, wonderful gameplay, even if it was a little simplistic, and FAST! I was quite amazed at the 2600's capabilities when I first got this cart; CBS put that extended RAM to very good use.