FastRobPlus

One original Xbox revision (accounting for about 25% of all Xboxes) cannot support progressive mode in some games, unless the game took a special update. 480p was released mid-cycle to the console and some games like Arctic Thunder, Battle Engine Aquila, Fable (first release),Commandos 2, GunValkyrie, Jet Set Radio Future, Panzer Dragoon Orta and others can only play in 480i on these consoles. Technically not a bug since the console wasn't officialy marketed as 480p.

The main sprite is a major improvement!

Several years later this is still one of the coolest Atari computers ever made.

I'm kicking myself for not asking KJMANN if he could show this to me when I saw him in Portland a couple weeks ago.

You are thinking of Links, the predecessor to LeaderBoard. Bruce Carver's son did a port of the game to the Amiga, and it was a 4,096-color HAM mode game(!) It didn't sell well at all (when I managed the transition of assets from Access to Microsoft I took a look at their sell-through for various titles) The Amiga version was very, very slow and somewhat rough. You needed almost at minimum an Amiga 3000 (68030 processor) to get playable speed from it. It may even have been hard disk playable only, which was the first real limiting factor for Amiga games... I've probably written about this before, but there was a lot of good will toward Amiga in the late 80's/early '90s and many companies wanted to release games for it if possible. Many dev houses like EA still used Amiga for a lot of the creative work and already had a deep toolbox and lots of best practices for porting stuff to Amiga. But again, hard drives were the big limit. Amiga generally needed a custom host controller and often a more expensive SCSI drive, and worse yet, the 500 and 1000 needed external enclosures. New World Computing made Might and Magic III: Isles of Tera for the Amiga and it would have been fairly trivial to release the sequels as they used the same engine. The issue was that these new PC games all required hard disk installation, and this was the one thing that the PC world had that the typical Amiga user did not. Several companies (like Dynamix) went as far as to release revised game engines that used the Amiga's 64-halfbrite mode to reasonably emulate VGA. While VGA was 256-color, you will find that a typical Sierra/Dynamix game like Longbow uses only around 50-90 colors on any screen. It was pretty easy to use an image processor to cut those screens down below 64-color and have a game that looked identical to VGA, if just a bit washed out in places. The final nail in the coffin was the shift from walkabout adventure games to real-time 3D Doom clones, since those games really played to the PC's chunky-graphics strengths and were tough to pull of on the Amiga planar graphic architecture.

I won't miss 'em

Sorry to dust this off again, but it appears we may be getting a small bit of well-deserved justice: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/23/wikipedia-bans-editors-from-gender-related-articles-amid-gamergate-controversy?CMP=share_btn_tw Wikipedia has apparently forbade further interference by the tightknit group of editors who have been up until now curating and effectively locking down Wikipedia's GamerGate article to make the controversy appear to be about bullying women in gaming rather than about journalistic corruption.

I think all of us find it funny that an exclusive license would preclude development of any games for the Amiga (or VCS, or C64, INTV, etc.) But I do get your point that corporations who treat their IP as a curated commodity are too myopic to appreciate that distinction. Still, if the Smurf guys did intend a new video game flurry, it'd be awesome if they had marketing smarts to reach out and solicit a few retro platform versions of their games. It might be a cheap and effective way to catch the fleeting attention of mainstream video game bloggers who otherwise would not have bothered to report on it: "Smurfs push new games on multiple platforms: Xbox, Wii, PS3, and wait a minute: Atari 2600!?!"

I don't disagree with what you say here. However, there are shades of "illegal" and shades of "full responsibility" that have to be considered. For example, when a new Harry Potter or Star Wars movie comes out, it's not uncommon for fans to dress up like characters using home-made costumes. They are often praised by the studios and IP rights holders, even though they aren't officially licensed. If we apply the standard that it's "important to realize that doing so doesn't justify your actions and you must take full responsibilities for your actions should you be caught." it implies that these homemade costume designing fans can and probably should be fined. And if this were a Smurf movie, perhaps the fans would be fined. I put this homemade Smurf game creator into the same category as a parent that will sew a Harry Potter costume for a kid, or make a Mario-themed cake for a birthday party. The "punishment" that fits the crime is that the IP holders should ignore the act or give it a thumbs up for the sake of publicity. Certainly, that's what Rare did when my wife made Viva Pinata costumes for the kids. The Smurfs braintrust is just stuck too far in the past. Consumers need to (and are) turning away from these kinds of dinosaurs and migrating to properties that fans can participate in within reasonable limits.

Yeah, we've all asked him to do that. He apparently also got more formal documentation sent directly to his home by this firm.

The label is legit at least. I've seen a bunch of CA Pacific and that's definitely the plaque patten they get. Its possible that this game started life as a Akalabeth but was then overwritten by another, two sided game. That's the kind of thing CA Pacific was known to do. I had an Ultima 1 from them once with a far rarer game label underneath.

I think keeping your IP trolls on a short leash is a particularly good idea when your IP brand is all about goodness, or togetherness, or lightheartedness as I think the Smurfs are supposed to be. I and others have been cross-posting this to a bunch of places. If it gets legs, it won't do much damage, but it might do enough that when some retro gamers see an actual Smurf product they immediately think "Hmm, I don't remember why, but I think there's something wrong with the Smurf company. I'd better avoid this"

I'm not convinced anyone is to "blame" in this particular case. It looks like he just likes Smurfs and used that universe to make a game as a training exercise. It only just barely meets the definition of a "product" if you go by the dictionary definition of "something that others will derive use from" But if we are looking to assign blame percentages, I'd assign most of the blame to the copyright holders. I know little about Smurfs, but I do know they have some kind of song that goes "la-la-la-la-something-something" and I seem to remember the characters sing it all the time and encourage others to sing along. This means if a person were to hum the song while walking outdoors, it ought to be fair to sue the person humming for damages associated with the public performance (the product). I get how that works, but I think they are culpable for leading the impressionable person into humming in the first place without sufficient warnings prior that reproducing the sound could be infringement.

That's unfortunate. I hadn't heard of the Sharknado game. There are two things that might make this a more sympathetic story: It was released as a "look I can make a game!" type release - not even a homebrew to be sold at cost to a few enthusiasts. He did remove the game immediately. The patent trolls are saying "not good enough, you owe us for the damage you already did by allowing the game to exist."

I waned to get your guys' thoughts on this: A month or two ago a retro Amiga user made a game called Smurf Rescue with a quick and easy game creation tool. It's a PD-quality game side scrolling jump game. Looks okay, but basically unplayable. He's apparently gotten a large stack of Cease and Deist papers from the Smurf IP owner's patent trolls demanding that he pay €2000 for use of their characters. Here's one of the original threads (from English Amiga Board): http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=76750 I'm wondering if retro gamers publicize this story if we can perhaps shame them into a bit of mercy.

My wife is super excited about this event. I think she imagines I'll sell off a bunch of stuff that's taking up storage space in the garage. She hasn't realized this is a swap meet.

I second Fable, but I may be biased Out of curiosity, have Battlefield Pizza Girl or the Kameo demos ever been leaked?

Is it out yet?

All kidding aside, I was also thinking that these would be the best mice to match with an Incognito-powered FJC GUI Atari 800. I'm wondering if I could find a yellow plastic dye that matches the color of one of the A8's function keys, to paint the mouse buttons.

I still have the Amdek Color I