JamesD

Frankly, I really don't have any interest in any of the new systems. Once they are selling for a reasonable price and have more than a handfull of titles I'll think about it. But then I'm still thinking about the last generation models so I won't hold my breath. I see the Wii as a turbo Gamecube with a funky controller that has no track record as far as reliability goes and it makes you look like an ass when playing games. If I want to go fishing I'll go fishing instead of couch fishing... thanks anyway. Besides, you know it's going to go left when you want it to go right and you'll die, get mad and throw down that expensive controller because it's crap and then you'll have to buy another expensive crap controller that nobody else makes. I think I'll sell a bungee cord that hooks to your clothes and the controller (patent pending) so when you throw it down it doesn't hit the floor. I'll make millions. The XBOX 360 makes Microsoft money. I hate Microsoft. The more anti-piracy they put into Windows the more attractive I find Linux. But hey, I'm still pissed at them for that copy of WindowsME I bought that they never got working right. The new Playstation is an excuse to force Blue Ray on us and external cooling add-ons so it doesn't crash. But hey, it's got the highest specs... you just have to pay extra for it... unless you are in Japan. Anyway, I hate sony worse than Microsoft and thats not easy. Can you say memory stick? Standards! HAH! We want you to buy our crap! To be honest, I'll buy a faster CPU, graphics card and some $9 PC games for my PC at Walmart that were best sellers a couple years ago, play them for a week or two and not touch them again because once I beat the game it looses it's appeal. Then I'll go back online and play some stuped free puzzel game that could run on anything and be totally addicted. Do I really need an BoxStationCube to run a stupid Gemarblecritter puzzel game?

I have a Yobo and just use it. I do have an actual NES that someone was going to be trash but I have to clean it up before I'll let it in the house.

Given the state of Atari in this Time Article I'd say he did pretty well.

If you do inventory or change weapons or whatever on the other games the action pauses anyway. Not sure how this would be so different. I guess you were thinking while action continues. BTW, if you get into Champions of Norath it lets you configure 2 weapons and swap between them at the press of a button (newer releases). That way characters that use a bow/spear can switch to a backup weapon in an instant if you run out of arrows/spears. Man I like modern gamepads.

You could press any key on the keyboard and a menu would pop up. Moving the Joystick to diffent positions to select the icon for what you want to do and press the fire button. Not as simple but it's very portable.

I've noticed a lot of "refactoring" going on in MAME and MESS lately and it has broken all kinds of stuff in various emulations. I think it's going to take a few releases to put features back in that someone decided needed to be taken out.

I don't have a Ti99 but I won an ebay auction with 15 carts for $9. I figured I'll eventually buy a Ti and if I won them cheap... why not?

FWIW, keeping the keypresses to a small number of keys will make it easier to port to the 5200 or other target I mentioned via pm.

In reference to the original topic of whether or not the 5200 was a success... Given the time it was left on the market I don't think it did badly. I do think a lot of people were waiting for more titles before they purchased one. If it had stuck around even another year there would have been some unique titles that people would have been willing to buy it for. Just look at the prototypes that were in the works. In the end I wouldn't call it a failure but not a hit by any means.

The people voting for Japan obviously haven't seen a lot of the titles that never get exported.

It's Maddening.

There were so many contributing factors I don't think you can pin it on one donkey... er... person.

There was a similar topic here: Link.

So you were generating items only when picked up? That's not what I was expecting. I figured items would be pregenerated (also making some loadable) and assigned to characters at the start of a level. Then you can have special weapons like the cleaver assigned to the butcher. No need to appologize. You are the one writing it. I should actually write a sample based on my way. You'll find it to be less difficult than you expect. But first I have to finish something else I've been working on first. Yup, that's why I mentioned it. I thought it was a much better game than Diablo myself. Make sure you check out the sequel as well. It has a few improvements over the original. I've made it all the way through Champions with some friends and have started at the next level of difficulty. It's HARD on upper difficulties!

I used to work in a computer store and I saw a lot of weird stuff. Pop was a common machine killer. We refused to work on those because it was nasty and could cause too many parts to fail to make repair affordable. We just told people to rinse it in the bathtub until the pop was gone, then rinse it again with alcohol and to dry completely with a hair dryer. It seemed to work for a lot of poeple. Someone tried to dry a machine in the oven once and it melted. An 8088 computer from a metal working shop came in because the floppy drives stopped working. I'm not kidding... the thing was filled to within an inch of the top cover with iron dust. It wasn't like a solid layer of dirt, it was more like thin black cotton and you could partially see through it. I took it outside and dumped it out, removed the board and repeatedly rinsed it with alcohol until the dust stopped running out from under the chips. I put it back together, replaced the floppy drives and it worked fine! The worst thing I've seen from normal(?) wear and tear was a computer from a bar. A half decade of tar from cigarettes can't be removed. I refused to work on that. The worst thing I've ever purchased was an Apple IIc Plus off of eBay and the keyboard had some keys that weren't working well so I took it apart to clean it. It was obviously a former school computer and had never had the keyboard cleaned. It had about a decade of nasty finger crap from hundreds of kids. Hair, grime of every imaginable color, and a slime like substance I was unable to identify in a layer about 1/8 inch thick under the space bar. I guess that's not game related though.

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Apple II game sites page

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<comment deleted> the virtual Apple II link I posted has games but no screenshots. I thought you were refering to the lack of responses.

This is the "AtariAge" forum... who do you think would be around to vote first?

Or it could be that this forum is called "AtariAge" and they had Apples.

These are typical of the Apple II. Space Eggs Screen Shot 1 Space Eggs Screen Shot 2

The Apple II generally had slightly higher res and more colors on screen but it used color artifacting to produce color and it definately looks different than the C64. Some of the colors produce dots that aren't quite centered as a result. If you look at Apple II graphics... look for the color red. The real advantage of the Apple II was how common disk drives were. Think tape piracy only faster. That also lead to a lot of multi-load games... something much less common on other platforms. Apple II animation was less than stellar thanks to a strange screen memory layout. Sound was clicks or a sound board. The Apple IIgs on the other hand had great graphics and sound. Wiki Apple II games list Virtual Apple 2 IIgs Emulator

If you are going to add any new hardware I'd go for more RAM, 65816, DMA driven audio like the Amiga has, a blitter and a 256 color mode. See the C64 DTV if you want ideas on the last two items. They have to be like real hardware and not some 1024x768 super mode that wouldn't fit in an 8 bit.

LOL... well... this is rather primative as far as objects go. Here it just means the data structure holds data *and* pointers to routines for dealing with it. Instead of struct item { int hit_points; int weight; int whatever; } you have: struct item { char *subtract_hitpoints(); char *check_weight(); ... int hit_points; int weight; ... } And then the routines lie elsewhere. Just put pointers to routines common to all items into the structure and call those addresses instead of fixed ones. They could point to common routines in the main program or routines unique to that item. If the first item in the structure is a size of the structure and the sructure contains all the variables needed by the item to know it's state then saving a level is as simple as saving the structures and loading it again is as simple as loading a standard level and then loading the saved structures over the top of the loaded ones. Once you get your head around the concept it's pretty cool. Objects reduce the size of your code... but at the price of speed. That's where the design doc comes in. Set limits on how far to go. For what you are currently doing you could simplify it to get the pointer to the item. No stack push at the start and no rts to set call the routine. Just load it and hard code the access using the pointer to the structure.