oracle_jedi

I'd love to see XEP80 support in Last Word! Graham

I am thinking of getting a UK spec Playstation2 to play the European versions of Singstar (my wife... dont ask..) So quick questions.... I want to play Euro sing star - cant do that on a US spec unit right? Not because of any NTSC/PAL issue - but because a software region lock out. Is this right? If above is YES - is there a simple and reliable way to defeat this lock out? If the lockout cannot be easily defeated - where can I buy a UK PS2? Most Ebay sellers demand a Paypal verified UK address - that is going to be a problem. Amazon UK listed PS2s until last week - but now they list them as "no longer available". Cheers. Graham.

I thought the SV318 had a chiclet keyboard? Is this a mis-labeled unit? A replacement keyboard? Or did Spectravideo sell the 318 with the full keyboard in some markets?

I still wish Mid Westerners would discover Car Boot sales and do that on a Sunday morning instead. Let me know if you find any good flea markets in the Chicago area.

Wow lotharek, Thanks for the continued support - definitely interested in the 1Mb card when its available.

The best online retailer left is Tex in Treasures: http://texintreasures.com You might also check out Competition Computer who sells on Ebay. They have a lot of rare (expensive) cartridges. If you have a disk drive or a CF7, you can download alot of games from http://tigameshelf.net Another new download site that is growing is the Planet 99 website: http://www.planet-99.net I have also heard about a GPL Simulator that allows you run to many of the ROM games from a disk, but I don't know where to get it from. Hope that helps. Graham

Does anyone own a Yorky? I remember seeing the ads for them but I have never seen a picture of one. Are they memory compatible with the 130XE? Would they let an 800XL run software that would otherwise need the Claus B 256K upgrade? Graham

A 1090Xl clone? Or better? Cool. Allan Hopefully a production version of the Atari / IBM 8-bit ISA slot interface: http://www.geocities.com/dr_seppel/ Since there were so many cards made for this standard, such a product would provide quick access to 80-column cards (MDA), parallel and serial interfaces, MFM disk interfaces, hard disk interfaces, clock cards and so on. 8-bit ISA cards are getting harder to come by, but still infinitely easier than 1090 standard cards.

Timegate by Quicksilver on the Spectrum was similar to Star Raiders.

There is both an official Jet Set Willy from 1984 which is ok, and a new conversion of Jet Set Willy done in 2007 by very talented developers in Poland. I think the same guys who did the awesome conversion of Jet Pac ( Jet Boy ) - but I might be wrong. The 2007 version is better IMHO, the graphics and gameplay are identical to how i remember the Sinclair version - but it retains the Rob Hubbard music of the official release. I don't think Manic Miner has been converted.... yet :-)

It is. What is even more amazing is that there is no Atari 8-bit version. There are versions for the C-64 and Spectrum, the Apple II, the BBC Micro (and Electron) - and even a couple of home-brew ports to the Commodore Plus/4. Someone did port a lot of the game to the 8-bit and produced a running demo - but it does not go past the title screens. I still hope one day to fly a Cobra Mk III on my 1200XL.

Munchman is an ok game - like many of the maze-and-ghost games of the early 80s, it was an attempt to cash in on the Pac-Man craze without violating Atari's copyright. Whereas some smaller 3rd party operations might have flown under the radar with ports for European only machines, Atari did sue Commodore for Jelly Monsters and would have likely done the same to TI for anything that looked too similar to Pac-Man. So Munchman replaces eating dots with a complete-the-chain concept, there are monsters chasing you and there are power-ups. The game takes place against a white background, the graphics are small and the sound is mediocre. I would give it a 5/5. Compared to Pac-Man on the Atari, Munchman is an inferior game. The Atari game looks more like and sounds more like Pac-Man. But unlike Atarisoft's Pac-Man for the TI, the Atari version has the wrong colours - things look orange instead of yellow. The ghosts colours are wrong too and the eyes are just empty black squares. Pac-Man's mouth doesn't move correctly. The whole display looks squashed - especially on PAL computers. The Atari could have supported an authentic arcade conversion - look at Super Pac-Man to see what could have been achieved. TI Invaders on the other hand is a good implementation IMHO. Like many Invaders clones, it does not try to authentically replicate Taito's arcade version, but does retain all the key ingredients including bases that gradually get blown away, saucer ships for bonus points, invaders that speed up as their ranks diminish and each wave starts lower. The entire invaders graphics are replaced in later waves to keep the gamer's interest, and some of the ships at the higher levers are damn hard to hit. I would say TI Invaders is better than either Space Invaders or the home-brew port "Invaders 5200" on the Atari 800. Deluxe Invaders however is better as it is more authentic. Avenger on the Commodore VIC-20 is the best for me as it plays just like I recall arcade Invaders playing. Neither Munchman nor TI Invaders represent the best of TI games - but neither do they represent the worst. If anyone is interested, the following site shows some good examples of TI games in machine language, TI Extended BASIC and TI Console BASIC: http://tigameshelf.net/asm.htm

The TI did have very good graphics for it's time. The TMS-9918A (or 9929A on the European models) was capable of 256x192 graphics, 16 colours and bitmap scrolling. It also has hardware sprites. The TMS processor is the same one used in the Colecovision, Adam and MSX machines amongst others. The Atari machines could outclass the TI graphically due to their better colour palette and mult-directional hardware scrolling abilities. The Atari's display list and ANTIC processor provided alot more power than the TI could manage. No matter how much memory you added to a TI, I don't see it ever producing an Elektraglide, or a Ballblazer or a Yoomp. Several TI games are slow. TI Basic is notoriously slow due to BASIC being written in an interpreted language called GPL. However even machine language games tend to be slower. The TI's CPU is a 16-bit processor running at 3Mhz. But the rest of the machine is 8-bit. The CPU talks to the rest of the machine through a multiplexer. On an Atari or Commodore, both the CPU and the video processor can directly access the same memory. Not so on the TI. On the TI the CPU must access the 16K of video memory through an 16bit/8bit interface. That said, the TI does have a much better port of Pac-Man than the Atari. Several other games are also better on the TI including Donkey Kong, Ms. Pac Man, MASH, Star Trek. This is simply due to the TI versions being more carefully put together. I find it ironic that the Atari 800 with all it's power has one of the worst Pac-Man ports of any home computer. Even the VIC-20 had a better version (Jelly Monsters). Hardware aside, there is no substitute for a well written port of a great game.

I believe both The Pawn and Guild of Thieves were Enhanced Density disks.

I just looked again and it appears the stats are worldwide: "Table 1.1 US and Worldwide Computers-in-Use Growth". Note this info is 3-4 years old, but was new to me. I doubt this is World Wide. The European market saw dominance from Sinclair at the low end, and the Commodore PET in the mid sector from the late 70s to at least 1983. Acorn was also a major player in the UK market until at least 1986.

Other Games (non-runnable): Zone X Metagalactic Llamas - Battle at the Edge of Time (non-playable:) Elektraglide - on an NTSC system you dont have enough time to complete the sections - I have not found any version re-calibrated for NTSC. Ballblazer - yeah I know - it plays just fine. But the music!! - on NTSC it comes off as a frantic jig - but on PAL - its a wonderfully moody and sleazy piece that sets a totally different tone and atmosphere to the game.

Anyone know what happened to: http://atarionline.pl ?? When will it be back?

Flight Simulator II

Bob, where can I find this replacement ROM? Thanks

Does anyone have those instructions or a link to where they might be? I would be interested in picking up an XF551 if I knew how to mod it to support a 3.5inch drive. Thanks

I did send in an application to join that group. Its a moderated Yahoo group and so only approved applications can post. The application sat for 2 weeks before being automatically rejected by Yahoo. I've also tried many TI web sites, but it seems many of them are now little more than collections of broken links. Thanks Graham

Well I checked my un-modded 1200XL and it does run FS II on cartridge just fine. So from my collection of about 60 cartridges I cant any that wont run on the 1200XL. Sorry for the confusion. Graham

You're going to have 3 problems: 1. Not all carts will work - for example Flight Sim II detects the 1200XL as a 400/800 and refuses to run. 2. Not all carts will fit - notably the Parker Bros carts wont fit into the recesssed 1200XL cartridge port. 3. The video sucks. The 1200XL has the worst picture of any Atari machine. All of the above are easy to fix if you are ok with a little modding. As mentioned earlier the Bob Woolley PBI mod shows how to swap the OS and MMU chips for the 800XL ones and creates essentially an 800XL in a 1200XL case. The video problems can be fixed by applying the Clearpic 2002 mod plus the S-Video chroma fix, and even the cartridge port issue can be fixed by removing some of the plastic surround from the cartridge port guide. For all that effort you get the coolest looking machine Atari made with the best keyboard you will ever touch. With the Clearpic and S-Video chroma mods the video is the best possible from an NTSC machine. If only you could convert these things to output a true PAL picture..... Hope that helps. Graham.

Steve, thanks for the follow up. I will keep hoping Santa will be good to me and give us both the opportunity to obtain the expansion device. Graham

I'd like to buy a CF7 also - if you get a hold of Jamie - or anyone else who makes the CF7 unit, please let me know! Cheers. Graham