mos6507

>> If you read in another thread you know I plan to provide a complete publishing service for Homebrew gamers. << Any details on the type of labels/box that you will be going with? I'd like to be able to duplicate 1st gen Atari packaging with the matte black labels with the foil underneath and the colored translucent layer in the middle but so far I haven't found any companies who can do that.

Tom Hunt's CGS was a really cool system. It allowed for a kind of X-windows like access to the Atari 8-bit's graphics to draw images in a programmatic way (draw line, fill, etc...). It's too bad it came around too late in the 8 bit bbs era. It would have been great for online games.

>> New hardware without software to support it is useless. Any new games coming out to take advantage of the Hercules card? NO. What do I need 3 printer ports for? It all just seems a waste of time to me... << Obsolute computers are mainly hacker's devices. In other words, roll your own software, period. That's why old game machines are really only useful anymore as game machines, because an old game doesn't age as badly as, let's say, an old non-WYSIWYG word processor. It's far easier to build new hardware than it is to build a software base for the new hardware, that's for sure. I think that's why a lot of old platforms are looking for ways to run LINUX, because it opens the door to porting lots of pre-existing applications. TCP/IP applications would be something interesting to see the 8-bit platforms be able to do. There is a project called LUNIX for the C=64/128 and I think what the 8-bit needs more than anything else is a port of that.

Pretty cool. Too bad it didn't come out in the mid 80s.

Whoever picked the color palette for the Disney games for the 5200 was color blind.

The style of a movie like The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca is markedly different from the types of films produced in the swinging 60s or the R-rated 70s. Every era is marked by a different style of media, and videogames are no exception. (Whether this will hold true for the future since technology has reached such a plateau in 3D graphics, I don't know. Aside from the eventual critical-mass of broadband multiplayer networking on consoles I don't see a next big shift in game design anytime soon.) For those of us who really like the '77-'84 style of gaming, I'd consider that classic in the same way that the output of Hollywood reached a creative zenith between 1937-41. To follow the movie analogy even more, when TV entered the scene, the prominence of movies as the dominant form of entertainment diminished. Similarly, the erosion of the arcade industry in the last few years (which gave birth to videogames) is symptomatic of the ever increasing shift of videogames away from "twitch" and more towards a more computer-game virtual-reality approach. So to say that all videogame eras are created equal really isn't true. Big changes have occured and while there have been surface-level improvements, there are game concepts which have also been almost completely abandoned for the sake of "progress". Just as nobody will every be able to recreate the idealistic 3-strip technicolor world of The Wizard of Oz, nobody will ever release a truly new minimalistic style game ala Pitfall or Kaboom (unless it's a remake or rerelease). And all 2D games in general are almost dead aside from the portable niche. Old styles are accepted within their historical context, and cherished by some such as us, but are pretty much confined to the past in favor of a new aesthetic. So I really think it has less to do with pure nostalgia keyed to a person's generation and more to do with the fact that styles change. By and large you can not get an equivalent gaming experience from a modern game as you can from a classic just as you can't get the aura of classic Hollywood from a crass modern ride movie like Titanic.

Did the Colecovision or Intellivision 2600 adapters have these glitches? If companies were able to clone the 2600 20 years ago don't you think if this were an attempt at a gate-level 2600 clone it would be a bit more accurate?

>> Too much greed on the part of Infogrames if you ask me. << I'm sure it has more to do with Digital Eclipse wanting to milk their emulation cash-cow as long as humanly possible.

I think you could implement a paddle-like device in miniature using something like a the thumbwheel on mice going horizontally, without the detentes. Or you could do a miniature trackball.

>> The develovpment system was actually sold as a product. i believe Ed Salvo did this a year after apollo folded. << Hmm. This is the READS 2600 system? Is there any more information on that? I remember something for the Apple II called "THE FROB" that would hook up to a 2600, like a ROMulator thingy.

I don't know why they stopped offering consumer controllers. They were the best, bar none. And there hasn't been anything that good ever since for any platform really. Talk about a wasted opportunity!

I doubt that Asteroids especially will look any good on a low res LCD display.

Analog or nothing, real analog, not the messed up way analog sticks were handled in Hasbro's Breakout. The world DOES NOT need another paddle-based classic game converted to a modern console without a paddle-like device available.

I was wondering, how expensive is it to make a masked ROM, rather than having to burn individual EPROMs?? Real ROMs would be more long-lasting than EPROMs, and making them all at once would be faster than burning them to order, and you could use existing board designs without the hex inverter.

If the PAL ROM images can't be found, and PAL carts can't be found to generate new ones, then we should patch the ROM to fix the logo back to its original state and use the pirate version.

It's got to be Enduro. I mean, really, it's a 3D driving game. It would fit into a modern gamers' taste really well. I don't know how many racing games already do the environmental effects of Enduro, but that's what would be the coolest via DirectX or PS2. Fog, volumetric lighting, sunsets and sunrises, etc...

quote: Originally posted by Tempest: I finally got my Art of Sears page up and running. Tempest This page is awesome! I laughed more than I have ever laughed related to anything classic gaming! Your commentary is so damn funny, and highly observant. I'll never look at this artwork the same way again.

You can also email someone at uwink.com to try to get in touch with him.

Pong and Breakout need paddles badly. The way the analog control was handled in Breakout was the wrong approach. It was done so that instead of each position on the analog stick representing a position on the screen, it was the further from neutral, the faster the rate of acceleration of the paddle. Classic out-of-touch remake-design blunder. Activision Asteroids was well done, though.

Cyberpunks created faux label, box, and manual art for Polo already. I'll see about donating this artwork to Atari Age.

There were a couple games in that genre in the arcades, neither of which were Atari, though. Midway Clowns Exidy Circus [ 11-06-2001: Message edited by: Glenn Saunders ]

Do Atari 8-bit emulators support tapes yet like VICE does for the Vic-20? It would be great if they did.

>> There is absolutely no shortage of O'shea 2600 games. Someone posted once that the owner may move into some other business and "don't expect the games to be there forever"<< Does this mean the games would be landfilled as a tax writeoff?

You need to add a bitcorp section. Since you are auctioning off Bitcorp games as we speak you must have some scans.

The 2600 has a 128 color palette vs the c64's 16 hardcoded colors. This makes a difference, don't you think? I don't think you could do Enduro on the c64.