mos6507

Yeah, some funny sh*t there!

What was the idea behind the marketing ploy? That since Superman was a character license (albeit owned by Warners itself) it was supposed to appear as if it was a limited release or something?

Well, Curt is posting here. Send him a PM.

The XEGS succeeded in what I felt its goals were, which was not to win the battle but to make the most of the last years of an aging and badly managed platform. Had the Tramiels NOT done the XEGS they probably would have EOLed the 8-bit years earlier.

Not to mention the O^2. I think the tank-like shielding on the 400 had more to do with its cost than anything else.

15 years of homebrewing. Wow. I first started on Stella Gets a New Brain around then too. That's when I first got onto the internet before I even moved to California. How times have changed.

The drones in the version I had would sometimes cross over. It depended on how close they were when you cross, because they would decelerate once you wrapped around and sometimes made it across before they came to a complete stop. I agree that major havok is hard. I can't navigate the base at all. Gravitar is even harder, IMHO. Slow paced, perhaps, but hard.

I think I'm a little late to the party and my instincts tell me this startup may not be around too much longer but man, this is the most fun I've had since Software Automatic Mouth. LINK I swear I've laughed more in the last couple days than I have in the last 20 years combined. A news article on it. If this company goes out of business I am going to be so pissed. After all these years I've finally found a way to make movies in a way that gives me near instant gratification. If this company goes under, something else better take its niche.

Why is it you can have so many Amiga people in one place like that and nobody sees fit to correct him? That is a vintage interview from before Jay passed away so the memories can't be that faded. I don't get it.

To do that would require Atari to have in-house R&D that actually understood how the chipset worked so they could extend upon it. They didn't have that. Not by a longshot. They shot themselves in the foot by losing Jay Miner's team in the first place. The only thing that passed for R&D since then were various attempts to repackage, cost-reduce, and add peripherals to the existing chipsets. The brain-trust was simply not there. It was there in coinop, but not in consumer. I just got done watching some making-of-Amiga videos on Youtube and the people behind the Amiga claim that Atari nickle and dimed Amiga and that's why they went to Commodore. To make matters worse, they claim that Atari only wanted the machine, but did not want the Amiga workforce. The idea that Atari would pass up an opportunity to bring Jay back in is inexcusable. I don't see how any preferred alternate reality for Atari would propose that Atari lose the Amiga and do something on its own. Once you get into the Tramiel era it's a comedy of errors on so many levels. There was no way Atari would regain its former glory with those guys at the helm.

It's my favorite Vectrex game. It's Star Raiders underwater, basically. It has the best 3D vectors of any Vectrex game I've played including homebrews. I love how stuff fades in from the distance (like a fog effect). It does take a while for the difficulty to ramp up, though.

+1 It's about time LucasArts dusts off the X-wing franchise again, for instance, this time without Wing Commander style scripting.

Space Invaders arcade was the crossover point between bronze-age and golden-age gaming. Remember that it was still black and white. So just presenting the game in glorious color with the magenta UFO going by was a big deal. I can still vaguely recall the slobbering envy I felt when I visited a friend's house who were playing Space Invaders on a big console TV in their den with the sound pumping DUN DUN DUN DUN. At the time all I had was the bloops and bleeps of a Coleco Telstar Ranger. But after experiencing Space Invaders, I had to have an Atari. There was just no negotiations. So you can surely analyze other coinop ports but Space Invaders was really a unique case from a historical angle.

I think for a game like Suicide Mission or Stellar Track that couldn't have been pulled off any other way, the flicker is acceptable. But for this game I think you're introducing a distracting effect where you could otherwise avoid it with the fixed interleaving. Flicker is much better employed on sprites rather than the playfield. Not only do you get a comb effect with horizontal movement but certain speeds of forward and reverse animate themselves in sync with the interlace, hence the gaps become visible across multiple fields. This is just the nature of interlace, and it's the reason why interlaced displays were not really used on videogames until systems like the Dreamcast where the displays were more organic with very few right angles.

The easiest way to cancel out the comb effect is to only update the playfield 30 times a second rather than 60. But what will have been gained here? Adding flicker and dropping the framerate is not worth it just to give the illusion that the checkerboard is solid. The mind is perfectly capable of seeing the board as "shaded" by the fixed lines. That's how dithering works.

In Chimera we had limited board real estate, even with a 4-layer board, since so much was packed together, especially with the peripheral ports on either side. By using MicroSD we could squeeze it on one side and not interfere with the endlabel. MicroSD really isn't that much of a premium anymore, especially for the small capacity sizes you'd need for 2600 games. The bad thing about microSD is that it is fragile. The sleeve hardware is so teeny and thin compared to SD. The metal is about the same thickness as a disposable razorblade. This would have worked with it well fitted in the case, but on the proto boards there was so much wiggle room that I wound up wrecking one slot mechanism with all the flexing.

The problem with interlace is it creates a comb-like effect with horizontal scrolling. It may not be worth the tradeoff. I mean, the fixed interleave w/antialias is fine as it is. Look at games like Thrust (or my incomplete Death Derby). The fixed interlace is not that uncommon for 2600 playfields. It's not criminal.

That's an SD isn't it? You don't want to go with microSD? It fits so much better in a cart form-factor.

Very good. I see the horizon gradient is back. Been waiting for that.

Thanks. That's not much better than the old VHS footage I have, but at least other people can see it.

I tried scouring youtube and couldn't find any clips of people playing the Death Race that was there. This is the best I could find online: Photostream If anyone finds a youtube clip with it, let me know.

I see too many color changes per scanline on the playfield to pull that off, but considering what's going on with Ballblazer, who knows?

Atari was getting really good at title screens. In the case of Swordquest, the title screens were just about the only thing good about them.

Sorry, ET is not THAT complicated.

Yes. We live in a disposable culture. There is TOO MUCH CHOICE in entertainment. As a result, people never stay attached to anything for any length of time. It's out with the old, in with the new. The good stuff just gets sequelized or remade anyway, so why ever revisit an old game?