mos6507

The funny thing about the 2600 is that, in the end, the impression people had of the console had more to do with the games that were written for it than the hardware specs. If you wanted to trash the 2600, as George Plympton did, then you line up the original sports games like the flickery baseball with the Intellivision offerings. But then you had Realsports Baseball (or M-Network) and then Pete Rose Baseball. So even when the competitors like Mattel or Coleco were trying to trash the 2600 as dead and gone, new games were coming out for it that were truly competitive with them. I don't think we've ever seen a console since then that had worse specs on paper that held its own for so long in which first and last gen games for it look so radically different.

So it autodetects the controller type?

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).

I'm assuming the menu display looks weird because the capture card won't deal with the flicker? I love the yin/yang standby icon. Who did the menu engine?

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.

It would have to be a high quality MP3. I would never store them in that format. It's like storing them on cassettes with dropouts. Maybe it will work but it kind of defeats the purpose of going digital.

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.

What did they need it for? They had Doom running on an abacus?

Ageism is rife in the computer industry.

ROFL!

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.

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.

I always wondered why they bought Epyx. That solves the mystery for me.

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.

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

Wow, this is the way emulators should be done!

BTW, this is an aside, but does Stella have the ability to rotate the display for games like Merlin's Walls?

How about Beat em and Eat Em

Star Raiders was already an amalgamation of Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica. Plus, we already had a Wing Commander movie which didn't do too well.

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

I thought it had capacitive touch-switches buttons like the iPod. Is that not the case?

I think the closest we've seen to a game that sits between the 2600 and the 7800 is the rerelease of Save Mary that Video61 did, which uses the dev cart memory layout.

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.

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.

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.