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mos6507

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Posts posted by mos6507

  1. Posted

    You'd never know this was batari basic. Very promising. I can see ways for this to go in an Oystron direction as far as blending gameplay aspects from different games into something that feels original.

     

    There are a ton of things that could be added to this game for depth. For instance, the castle doesn't do anything yet. Maybe you could include the ability to move your knight into the castles (or cave or other icon) and have a whole other wave underground. And you could add powerups, obstacles to trip over (thin Moon Patrol or Steeplechase).

  3. Posted · Edited by mos6507

    use an mp3 player, it would look much better

     

    Yeah, the fascination with the 2600 having a CD-ROM hooked up to it has become, in a weird way, retro, because CDs are also obsolete compared to MP3 players. Once you put the games on an MP3 player then you might as well use a multicart with flashrom. Then you can use more than just 2K, 4K, and Supercharger games.

     

    I admit that the visual of the 2600 loading games off of CD has some appeal as it makes the 2600 seem "modern" in a 1990s sort of way. It's just not the most practical solution.

  5. Posted

    All three systems are architecturally similar. They have a similar color palette, for instance. They have something like a display list (manually generated in the case of the 2600). So there is a clear evolution going on. The problem with the 5200 is that it came too late when the hardware was otherwise done in 1979 in the form of the Atari 8-bit home computers. So it was no longer bleeding edge. By the time the 7800 was coming out, Atari was on its way down.

     

    If Atari had distributed the NES, now that system would have stood out like a sore thumb as not being "Atari-like". I guess I'm a purist to think an Atari-branded NES would have bothered me.

  9. Posted

    i still prefer the original space invaders to all that have come since. i prefer 2600 space invaders to the arcade game, so really, everything since has been a pointless waste to me, but nice for the collection.

     

    I think INV+ and Space Instigators were mainly technical exercises to see if the 2600 could generate more than 6 invaders per line. The use of playfield in INV+ is very innovative and I was cheerleading that project bigtime on Stellalist, giving suggestions on how to draw with such blocky pixels. So I don't see them as a waste of time in the least.

  10. Posted

    I like Space Instigators a little better than INV+, but I think they both suck compared to original Space Invaders. I'd rather play a hack of the original game (with the original sounds) that was a real, crap-your-pants improvement than either of those games you mentioned.

     

    I think the original space invaders coinop is pretty stale, actually. It's really the crossover point between bronze age and golden age videogames and contains many bronze-age details like the B&W raster display and the slow screen redrawing of the Midway-derived architecture. It's quaint, but many other shooters improved on that formula, not the least of which was Atari's original port with the color and the variations. While it's nice to go for authenticity, I don't think having 11 aliens per row is necessary to make it play well.

  12. Posted

    I know this is off topic, but where did you get the Spectravideo keyboard?

     

    I don't have one. I just hit up Google image search to find a pic. They show up on Ebay now and then. I don't think they are ultra-rare.

  13. Posted

    I'd be happy if the rotation were added but only available for OpenGL (ala TV effects). It's a pretty nichey feature but is a good finishing touch to support all the games.

     

    One of these days you have to try to add Compumate emulation also ;)

     

    compumate1.jpg

  18. Posted

    That's the difference between "heavy sixer" and "light sixer"... The heavy sixer had extra shielding than the later models.

     

    Aesthetically I actually prefer the light sixer. The base of the heavy sixer just looks too thick to me, boat-anchor-ish.

  21. Posted · Edited by mos6507

    With this and the AtariVox I plan on having pile of inventory built and ready to go before I start taking orders. So nobody is going to have to sit around once I start taking orders. I can handle tying up the overhead. It doesn't have to be just-in-time.

  22. Posted

    I had to buy another 2600 on Ebay as the two I have now are in disrepair. One of them has an A/V mod hard-soldered to it, but otherwise works. The other one looks to be a dead motherboard. So I'm waiting for the console to arrive before I can test the mod.

  23. Posted · Edited by mos6507

    CRT TVs are headed for landfills at an amazing clip. If you want an old TV, that's the first place to go. If they haven't been rained on to oblivion (not a problem when I lived in Southern California) they should still work since people are largely getting rid of them due to obsolescence and nothing else. Now with TV having fully switched to digital I would expect CRTs to be thrown out in even greater numbers (despite converter boxes).

     

    I have a 13" TV I got this way. I like the late-70s-early-80s TVs for style but they don't have RCA inputs. I won't subject myself to RF anymore.

  24. Posted

    That's cool, all you'd need is a PCI FM transmitter for your PC, and a good deal of games to put on a loop broadcast, that would be sweet :P (and then FCC would be banging down your door wondering why your transmitting low range gibberish over the airwaves and interfearing with the neighbors fridge :P O

     

    The whole idea of doing this is multicasting. Unless you have a lot of 2600 users in a given radius, and a major radio network doing the broadcast, it hardly makes sense.

     

    Now, in the late 90s there were many projects to use leftover bandwidth for digital data transmission. Larry Wagner had a company pushing emails and other IP type traffic via the VBI on TV signals. I worked for a startup that was using the WebTV for Windows specification (for things like the ATI all in wonder cards, not necessarily the standalone WebTV boxes, Windows terminology can be confusing). With analog it's a pain to do this. Now with digital TV this kind of thing I think is built into the spec. Program guide material and probably CC goes through at least.

  25. Posted

    Bill Heineman also claims to have worked on a similar device that got data streamed in through cable TV. I have yet to see a proto of that.

     

    ist that the same bill that won the first atari national space invaders competition in 1980?

     

    :ponder:

     

    Yes, and the same one that had a sex change operation recently.

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