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JamesD

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Posts posted by JamesD

  4. Posted

    I noticed the part about Atari and Nolan Bushnell was very different from the previous documentary I saw. I think there were errors in both. The earlier one had errors in the time-line and this one made Nolan look a lot better.

    Some of the articles I previously read said Warner had a lot of cleanup to do after Nolan left but there was no mention of it on this show.

     

    Warner definitely looks like they caused the death of Atari by not catering to the engineers and through the entire ET debacle but I think engineers would have left anyway. There was no excuse for ET.

    Absolutely no mention of the 5200 or 7800 that I noticed.

    Either one should have come years earlier to even be noticeable I guess.

  7. Posted · Edited by JamesD

    ....and I also vote that the above quoted nobs have no clue this is how you show intrest to major corperations and improve the chances in getting a product to the assembly line and on store shelves.

    And the nob above thinks companies are stupid enough not to notice that the same people keep posting over and over.

     

    Some people seem to think that a barrage of posts will somehow get an FB3 produced this year even though the company probably has no budget because their parent company has serious problems. And if they were going to produce it they would have needed it ready over a month ago. Did anyone hear that it was ready or was development stopped?

  8. Posted

    This Nolan bashing is just blaming the messenger. He's not saying anything that isn't common sense to a lot of people.

     

    And BTW, had Atari not been managed the way it was initially, I don't think we'd have the things we love the most about it. They were products of a corporate culture that empowered its engineers, which largely went out the door in latter Atari. There was just as much "having fun" at other successful computer business like Apple and Activision. Work hard, play hard.

     

    Other systems like the RCA Studio II or the Emerson Arcadia are what you got when you ran an early game business by corporate committee.

    It's easy to say that the way Atari was organized was responsible for their success because there's no proof one way or the other. You could also say that if Atari had been better organized and focused that they might have done even more but we'll never know. Just how many million were waisted on useless ideas that were 'creative' but unmarketable?

     

    Saying that Atari was superior because other companies tried to rush to market with crap is by no means proof of anything. The same thing happened with computers from lot's of companies that accepted the first design they saw just to get it on the market. It *is* possible to have a better organized company without stifling creativity. Besides, RCA and Emerson outlasted Atari. It doesn't do any good to be creative if you kill the company. Apple managed to survive and I doubt their engineers complain too much.

  12. Posted

    I think you'll see some small evolution from Microsoft but not a total revamp any time soon. I expect a version with lower power parts so it runs cooler, built in HD-DVD drive and maybe a new controller. Smaller size would also be welcome.

    The thing with the 360 is that the API will be carried over to future game machines and porting titles to new machines should be easy.

    I'm not sure the other systems were designed for that.

  13. Posted

    I think the Gamecube will be done within a year. The Wii is cheap enough they think it will sell instead.

    The PS2 has a couple years left just due to the cost of the PS3.

     

    Fail? Have you been watching people on here hype their favorite brand? Game fanatics will give them enough sales to attract game developers.

     

    XBOX360 is already pretty well established. Wii is cheap enough it should do well. The PS3 is the highest in performance and a cheap Blue Ray player.

    I don't see any of them being a flop. Given time, prices will drop and sales will go up.

  17. Posted

    Hey, Atari was making money back when Nolan Bushnell was calling the shots. It was only after he left the company that things went to hell in a handbasket.

    Atari was making money because arcades were making money. Once the Arcades hit the skids the poor organization of the company almost killed it. Warner had a terrible mess to clean up. There were branches of Atari all over the place with each branch doing their own thing and one branch turned out to be a single programmer that liked where he lived and didn't want to move. Nolan was too busy partying to manage the company. Check the video on the web that tells the story. If the company had been well managed I don't think there would have ever been a problem.

     

    BTW... remember Chuck E Cheese? He started that and it was booming until he screwed up and the company had to file for bankruptcy. He is an idea guy but he has a habit of ignoring the numbers while he goes out and has fun.

     

    For what it's worth, I don't totally agree with him. The first million PS3 units will be a breeze to sell... practically every game system sells like hotcakes when it's first introduced, as the Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast proved. However, what's going to happen in a year? What about the year after that? When that new car smell wears off and consumers find a two hundred dollar difference in price between the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, sales are going to go downhill quickly.

    Well, you have the speculators that are buying them just to resell them, early adopters that just want the latest thing and hard core gamers. The first half million to a million are easy... after that you have to sell to mom n pop getting the kids a game system for Christmas and that's a lot of money.

     

    This generation is Microsoft's to lose. There's no guarantee that they can stay on top, but if they play their cards right, giving gamers what they want, courting third party developers more aggressively, and putting the heat on Sony in advertisements, they're sure to emerge victorious in 2011.

     

    JR

    Not going to argue with that. I think the games are what's important. If Microsoft can score some killer titles from new developers that aren't available anywhere else it could tip the scales in their favor.

    So far the Final Fantasy, Mario and similar unique titles have kept interest in Sony and Nintendo. The more Microsoft can chip away at the unique franchises the more they will gain market share.

    One problem with that is that the market in Japan will always favor Japanese systems.

  20. Posted

    The first game I tried cracking had 3 loaders... at least that's how far I got. One loaded and decrypted the next loader, which loaded and decrypted the next and so on.

     

    I was using a basic disassembler and creating a custom loader to replace each loader. The first two were pretty easy since I just used the code as part of another program but the last one was a nightmare. It used the program counter and the loader itself as data. I figured out what it was doing but I said the heck with it since I could copy the disk with a utility anyway. If I could have single stepped through it and snapshotted the data it wouldn't have been bad but I didn't have the tools to do that.

  21. Posted

    I don't have a 2600 but I've been moving all my game/computer stuff to plastic storage boxes. It gets expensive but it's worth it.

     

    You mean something like this? :ponder:

    post-4102-1162949428_thumb.jpg

    Looks neat. Just remember that if you have something like that in a basement and it floods the bottom drawers may fill with water. I try to keep stuff at least 1 shelf up and use the bottom shelf for stuff that's easier to replace.

     

    One nice think about the big Zip Lock storage bags (the ones for clothes and such) is that they are large enough to even hold a lot of the boxed computers/games which also keeps them dust free.

     

    One other thing I've done with my disk software is transfered the contents to 3.5" disks (TRS-80 and Apple) and place all the disks in zip lock sandwich bags. I'd still like to run a program on the disks that reads and rewrites data on the disks to refresh the data.

  23. Posted

    I don't have a 2600 but I've been moving all my game/computer stuff to plastic storage boxes. It gets expensive but it's worth it.

    I am using some CD and DVD containers and they work great for carts and disks. I keep boxes and directions in larger plastic file boxes since I don't use them often.

    For the computers that aren't boxed I put them in those large Zip lock storage bags and place a moisture absorbant pack in each bag.

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