Dauber

Earlier this week I went to two Salvation Army stores...one in Andersonville, and the other in Bucktown. Atari carts: none. However, the one in Bucktown had a ton of Sega Genesis games (boxed)...

Also -- Land of the Lost on Belmont, off Broadway. You walk in, and inside the glass counter in the front of the store you will find TONS of Atari 2600 carts and a few boxed games -- some never opened.

Okay, now that ECCC is over....party at Dauber's?

If what I understand is correct, the only thing you can say about the 7800 that's the same as the 2600, other than the controller ports, is that it uses the same audio chip, no? Heee heeeee!! I'm getting a 7800!!! Now to look into putting Jr. on eBay.

Well...looks like I have another Intellivision cart that does the almost the same thing -- Major League Baseball. The graphics got a little weird a couple of innings in, and the controls were outta whack....I was able to get through seven innings before a crash... Thankfully, Bomb Squad and MLB are the only two of the ten carts I have right now that have been giving me trouble...so it must be cart-related. Indeed, when I took MLB out of the slot, it was very warm....the console and Intellivoice were fine, though...wonder if maybe a heat sink would work. So I played Beauty and the Beast for several hours.

Honestly, though, some of the best games to play are the homebrews...

Combat Pac-Man E.T. Those are the most valuable. They go for $2000 a piece easily, but you can have mine for $40 each. Seriously, though, welcome aboard!

Just curious...I'm considering "upgrading" to a 7800...I haven't gotten any 2600 homebrews [yet], but I'm curious as to whether there are any 2600 homebrews that have been found not to work in any variation of the 7800???

DAAAAAHHGHHHH!!!! I never knew about that!!!! I sometimes go to Land of the Lost over in Boys' Town, but 1) they're slightly more pricy than I'd prefer, and 2) they're pretty much limited to 2600 (except for the random 7800 cart and the 5200 system I saw there once)....I'll have to check 'em out....thanks! And actually...it's south of me. (I live pretty far north in the city...still a ways away from Evanston, but north nonetheless!) Looks like it's almost due west by seven miles from my apartment...

Well, I guess I could understand the competitiveness with two-player mode -- I imagine especially after several dozen beers.... And you know what? With this thread and a thread about Actiplaque, I just realized something....during my original early-80s Atari phase, I never had an Activision game! With all the great games Activision had out -- Pitfall!, Oink, Kaboom, Keystone Kapers, etc. -- I never had one until many years later! I had almost exclusively Atari titles, a coupla Parker Brothers, a coupla Imagic titles, and Tax Avoiders....but no Activision....and a dollar-a-month arcade allowance at the mall. What kind of deprived childhood did I have?!!?

That's pretty much what I did....I searched for Bomb Squad on froogle.com and got an eBay Buy-It-Now for pretty cheap, just the cart... I never knew that about Intellivoice games, though -- I used to play both Bomb Squad and B-17 Bomber for hours on my cousins' Intellivision....

Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to be finding that there are a lot of Freeway fans here... I just gotta know: WHY?? I mean...when I first saw it over 20 years ago, my reaction was: "Why would you play this when you have Frogger?" (Frogger was out at the time I saw Freeway...) I mean....you guide a chicken up several lanes of highway....and that's it. Repeat over and over. Vertical only. What's the appeal??

Will it work in OpenOffice.org?

Saturday I went to the vintage store near where I work. I knew to expect to pay $4 each per 2600 cart, but I wanted to see if they had anything interesting or what I didn't have already -- they usually do... From the front counter loaded with games, I grabbed: - Fishing Derby - Wizard of Wor - Enduro - M*A*S*H The guy behind the counter said "Does it say over there what the price is?" Nope, no sign or price tags or anything. "How's three dollars each sound?" Better than the expected $4. Yeah, not much of a FIND, but it was nice to get the unexpected 25% discount.

Hey, y'all...I'm now the proud owner of an Intellivision, courtesy of a very well-respected AA member, and the package included both B-17 Bomber and Bomb Squad, at my request....two games I enjoyed immensely as an even younger youth than I am now back in the '80s on my cousins' system. Well....turns out that Bomb Squad is crashing at random times. I tried cleaning the cart with alcohol. I tried repositioning the cart. I even tried running the cart without its case. I tried both with and without the Intellivoice module, and I even cleaned the contacts on the Intellivoice and on the console's cart slot...nothin'.... I e-mailed the gentleman from whom I bought it, and he said that actually that's not the first time he's heard that about Bomb Squad, that apparently it's not all that uncommon a problem, might have to do with overheating or something...actually, that might be the case -- when I got home, it was the first game I played, and I managed to get far enough to guess the code wrong and accidentally blow up part of the city...then I switched to B-17 Bomber...then back to Bomb Squad, which crashed after a few minutes. After that crash I couldn't get it working again for more than a few seconds at a time...repeated the process -- switched to B-17 Bomber for a while, and when I put Bomb Squad back in, same thing -- it lasted a few minutes, then crashed, then seconds... Anyhoo...my seller suggested I post a message here regarding the problem. Suggestions??? Anybody know of any cooling fans that fit inside a Mattel cart?

Do you actually play this stuff too??

I used to find the dragons in Adventure kinda creepy. I've yet to play Haunted House, btw -- I never owned it until last week. (And I can't find my !@#% 2600jr!!!!) I was kind of scared away from trying Space Shuttle -- I remember back in the day my next-door neighbor got it and promptly took it back because it was just too complicated, and he told me the manual was the size of TV Guide. (Obviously, this was circa 1984, when TV Guide was still small...) I eventually did break down and buy it, box and all, at a shop a month or two ago...

Q*Bert Q*Bert's Qubes Vanguard (assuming difficulty switch set properly/improperly, depending on your feelings) The running-only games in The Activision Decathlon

I'm on record as saying that I loved (and possibly STILL love) the VCS Pac-Man, but even when it came out, I wondered: - why they didn't even TRY to match the color scheme of the arcade; - why there was a rectangle instead of a fruit/Galaxian man/etc. (I understand NOW, of course...) - why the scoring was arcade divided by ten (which actually makes MORE sense -- notice how it is impossible in the arcade version to have a ones digit of anything but zero) - why the sounds didn't attempt to sound remotely like those of the arcade - why the tunnel was moved to the top and bottom of the screen - why the ghosts were interchangeable - why games 2 and 6 were the same (is there a hack available that makes game 2 play as it's documented?) But you know what? I personally loved it and played the snot out of it.

Wow....I'd have to say: - A second joystick....CX-40 nice but not necessary... - A second pair of paddles - A second driving controller - Basically, anything I don't already have in the game collection. - A buyer for my Combat and Pac-Man carts - And off-topic, but...to build up a sizeable Intellivision collection.

I could have sworn there was a thread on this, but all I could find was printing manuals. Any recommendations on how to print replacement labels? I have a few VCS carts that are either bare or with labels falling off, and I'd like to print out fresh ones using either XP or Ubuntu... Or, if there WAS such a thread already, a link is all I need.

I only played "Reactor" a few times -- when I lived not far from where Inky currently lives, my next-door neighbor had a lot of games that I didn't have, and I borrowed stuff from him all the time..."Reactor" was one of them, and I LOVED it. He exchanged it for something else (don't remember what, though) because of static on the screen, and the guy at the store told him ALL copies of "Reactor" did that. But I loved the gameplay and the music. I've yet to see the arcade version ANYWHERE, so I'm only used to the 2600 version.... In fact...I recently won an eBay auction of one of those 2600 cart lots JUST because it had "Reactor." Just got it yesterday; gonna have to find my 2600jr -- it's still among about 300 boxes in the new apartment -- and fire that baby up! (especially because NOW is when they're using my suggestion in the high score club....arghgh....)

I'm all set. Thanks for reading!

There's a multi-platform PSX emulator called FPSE. I used it on my Amiga, and it worked fantastically...probably works as well (if not better) on Linux and Winblows...

iratanam -- Wacko or Whacko. Don't remember the spelling. It also had TWO joysticks (in addition to the trackball), if I'm not mistaken. I thought that was a cool game. I never actually played it, though, but I saw it on Starcade and at Alladdin's Castle (usually after I blew my allowance).