mos6507

What hurts the case for the DC is that Sega is porting all its franchise titles to other platforms (like Crazy Taxi). So some of the best games for the DC are not or will soon not be unique to the DC. Still, there will be some curiosities for the DC that aren't likely to appear again anytime soon. For instance, Typing of the Dead. That game is a scream.

I'm going to have to try this on a Cuttle Cart. It seems to me that the game is running really slow on StellaX on my system (athlon 700). That might be due to the hardware trick employed in this game or it might just be that the difficulty ramps up slowly, but it seems sluggish to me. Am I alone here?

I still can't get over the fact that Atari Corp would release something like this with obvious pirate games. It just seems so sleazy. I mean, it's like if Nintendo were to suddenly rerelease the NES in a foreign country with a bunch of 3rd party games built-in they didn't have the rights for. I know there have been knockoff NES devices like that, but I'm talking about Nintendo itself doing it. It really looks unprofessional and just opens the door to potential litigation.

>> But in some browsers, most notably NN4.x, the TD tag will not inherit style. << CSS is not supposed to make all tags inherit all the style of their container. There are various standard exceptions, Table being one of them. These are not bugs in the browsers. [ 03-21-2002: Message edited by: Glenn Saunders ]

>> You guys actually had to pay for these? I got the first two on one CD for free with a box of cereal, no joke. I didn't even know they were for sale. I thought it was just some giveaway to get you to buy cereal... geez! << I got one too. I suspect the cereal edition will be more collectable than the official one. It's a shame how slowly this runs on today's PCs.

It looks like late 80s early 90s to me.

>> Well, this puts to rest the issue with the Klax game I had made. The question now is: What is this SARA extra RAM chip I've heard about? Is it something that can be purchased somewhere? What about the schematics of a Klax cart? Are they available? It would be nice to have the NTSC ROM of Klax with the SARA chip in a cart to play on an NTSC machine, but I'm not sure if the effort is worth it... << The only entity that has managed to make a superchip cart is the one that made the Elevator Action carts and I don't think they are offering the board to the general homebrew community. I recall that someone else came up with a working board design but I can't remember who. Chris Wilkson was working on one for the longest time. It's rather tricky.

Action Pack is the mother of all 2600 emulators. As such I'm willing to give it some slack, as the target platform was for 486 class hardware (pre DirectX btw, looks like it uses plain old GDI graphics) but unfortunately, Livesay, the developer, went on to show his true colors with Activision Classics, which was equally horrible. It's pretty sad that there has yet to be a first-class commercial 2600 emulator package put out by Activision or Hasbro/Infogrames. They had every opportunity to do so, believe me...

The 2600 was never known to be the best platform for Sports. The Intellivision got that niche. They made an effort with Realsports, sure, but I still don't think sports were a high priority for Atari. I also think the original Basketball is hard to beat as far as 1st gen sports titles go. It isn't realistic, but the physics are just plain fun and that's what counts the most.

I own a real Star Castle machine. The ship movement is similar but not identical to Asteroids. The ship slows back down more abruptly in SC. Also, SC has a bug or a feature depending on how you view it. Ship movement direction is apparently quantized. What I mean by that is if you are pointing at 92' your ship flies at 90' which looks weird but it's part of the game's charm. I don't know how many directions it supports--probably 8 or 16. This must have been done to simplify the animation calculations. These subtleties did not get transferred well to the Vec port. Also, I don't think you can shoot the drones on the Vec either, which really changes the gameplay. I really don't think vector games make good candidates for 2600 ports in most cases.

Steve DeFrisco said Klax was the last contract awarded by Atari for a completed 2600 game. It may have come out in europe at the same time as Sentinel, though. Now, there were other games still in the pipeline. Save Mary was started earlier than Klax, though. Save Mary had a much longer than normal development cycle (2+ years I think).

This is pretty big news. I would guess that how limited the edition is has to do with how long they want to keep handling the fulfillment chores, and how many leftover printed materials they may have. The price is expensive but I really don't think they are gouging. This is a JIT model unlike their previous preorders, so they have very little economy of scale. When you consider the code tweaking and the rest of the bundle, and you compare it against the average cost of BS on Ebay, I'd say it's worth it to get BS Gold. Now if it were only possible to get some more Catboxes made...

I don't think it uses a CPU and ROM. I think it is a custom all-in-one chip like all the Atari dedicated home games (Pong, Video Pinball, etc...) which were like miniaturizations of no-CPU TTL-based arcade games.

You couldn't do the ring very easily. That's why Yar's revenge uses a blocky shield. That's the main problem. The Atari 400/800 is a different story. There is a game called Star Isle for that platform that does a fine job of Star Castle.

quote: Originally posted by Glenn Saunders:

>> I should clarify - I almost always use at least one table in every page. Setting style with body won't work across all browsers if you are using tables that contain text.<< Here is how you get around that. BODY, TABLE, TD { font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px; color: black; background: white; } Set your global fonts that way. Use named classes for most of your other stuff. Let's say you have a TD you want to be a different bgcolor: style2.TD { background:green; } The TD should still get the font info from the main line, and the background will be overridden by this new line. [ 03-13-2002: Message edited by: Glenn Saunders ]

>> I should clarify - I almost always use at least one table in every page. Setting style with body won't work across all browsers if you are using tables that contain text.<< Here is how you get around that. BODY, TABLE, TD { font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px; color: black; background: white; } Set your global fonts that way. Use named classes for most of your other stuff. Let's say you have a TD you want to be a different bgcolor: style2.TD { background:green; } %ltTD class="style2"&gt The TD should still get the font info from the main line, and the background will be overridden by this new line. [ 03-13-2002: Message edited by: Glenn Saunders ]

I think the older directors known for mainstream blockbusters get the more they feel the need to become Walt Disney and sanitize their work if they think kids are going to see it.

>> Far from state of the art, it is still a decent play... << The sad thing is with these emulations like this or Activision Classics for PSX is that to the younger crowd it gives them a really poor first impression of the 2600 (washed out colors, jerky framerates, inaccurate audio, etc...) If a kid actually saw a real 2600 after playing these emulations he'd probably be somewhat impressed with the improvement. [ 03-12-2002: Message edited by: Glenn Saunders ]

It's ironic that the Joystick is used as a symbol for videogames considering that no home console since the 7800 has been shipped with one. It's almost like when you hear the ubiquitous record-player needle scratch effect during punchlines in movie trailers. Who even recognizes that sound effect anymore who is under 30??

>> I'm just a purist for Atari History as so many get it wrong and generally frown on the Tramiel's Atari Corp. as some kind of cheap imitation of the real thing, << Let's face it, the Tramiels ran on the fumes of what went before and just slowly slid into bankruptcy over the next decade due to lack of resources and missed opportunities. The glory of Atari had to do with its braintrust. That was slowly depleted during the Warner era as everyone moved on to greener pastures. Nolan left, Jay Miner and company left, Al Alcorn left, the Activision guys left, the Imagic guys left. These were the people who had the vision, built the hardware and designed the games that gave Atari its reputation. When Atari became a huge company, Warner thought they could just easily replace these people and outsource stuff and not miss a beat. Obviously it didn't work as well then, and no better when the Tramiels took over either. Tramiel Atari was a hollow company. The only good stuff they ever got came from outside the company, like the Lynx. The Lynx was designed by ex-Amiga designers, and the Amiga was in turn designed by ex-Atari designers. Atari just did not have a strong core of engineers and designers anymore. So it was just a holding company. Hardly any more authentic than Hasbro or Infogrames when you get right down to it.

>> From the Lynx FAQ: << Just because it's in the FAQ doesn't make it correct. I'm sorry, but the 6502 in any shape or form is not a 16-bit CPU. Just because it has a 16-bit address bus doesn't make it a 16-bit CPU. If all 8-bit CPUs only had an 8-bit address bus they'd only be able to address 256 bytes of RAM or ROM so obviously no 8-bit machines are THAT weak. This spec must have originally come from some misleading Atari Corp ads which in turn might have copied NEC's TG-16 ads. We're talking about the era where bits are implied to be bytes, you know.

"Processor: two 16-bit custom CMOS chips running at 16MHz" The main CPU in the Lynx is a 65C02 which makes it no more of a 16-bit system than a 2600. It has a pretty fancy math coprocessor, though. I also don't believe that it runs at 16mhz. I think it runs at more like 4mhz. Would someone like to clarify all this?

>> Go get yourself Donkey Kong for the 2600. Whoever made the graphics for DK needs to be taken out back and shot. << You try making a good looking ape with only 8 pixels per line.

CSS is supported by all modern browsers (Mozilla, Netscape 6, IE 4+). Even Netscape 4.7 does an okay job of handling the font and color part of CSS. Even WebTV+ handles CSS pretty well. There is no compelling reason not to use CSS. As for absolute positioning, you rarely need it unless you want to do some sort of layering effects like DHTML dropdown menus or floating embedded ads.