mos6507

If I load stella and tell it to use OpenGL then it refuses to load if I close it and reopen it. I guess this is because I don't have OpenGL installed? Can't it just fall back or something?

Hah. For a minute there I thought you were talking about this.

Someone should finally add the mothership part from the Intellivision Demon Attack to the 2600 version.

If you want to get serious you really need the Stella debugger. Unless someone wants to write a debugger for JStella, it just won't be a very useful testbed.

That guy just earned the equivalent of climbing mt everest for geek cred. Reminds me of this guy.

It seems reasonable to me. If you don't do this the trajectory of the ball is much too deterministic. Being able to nudge the cab just right, but not so much to trigger the tilt sensor, is a real technique.

It's the film school grad in me.

I'm surprised the issue of his health didn't come up and how it impacts(ed) his career. He has macular degeneration. When I met him at Jim Nitchals' funeral he seemed quite depressed about it. That's a tough thing to deal with.

I couldn't get past the first few seconds where he attributes Adventure to "William" Robinett. Sorry, if you can't research the material well enough to get the programmer's name right, I'm not watchin'.

It's really not an either or proposition. I think classic games are a whole other animal from modern games, even more than can be described by genre. You almost need a different term for them. Kind of like the difference between electro-mechanical games and videogames.

What do people expect to find at Goodwill? I think the era of finding pre-crash consoles and games there is long past. Attics and basements have been cleared out and these systems are now in collector circulation. What little isn't is being sold on eBay as people generally understand they have too much collector value to just dump at Goodwill. If you're talking post-crash it's probably a different story.

It could have happened but that wasn't part of Starpath's business model. Maybe if the Supercharger had become more a success they would have opened it up, maybe even issued dev tools to the masses. You can't do this directly. You have to do Pitfall II sorts of things, which is what Chimera was going to be about. The demos I put on Youtube showed the ARM processor rendering text bitmaps on the fly. The 2600 merely spooled the data out to the registers each frame.

6K, but it's all RAM. Having that much RAM at once matters, not to mention multiloads. Games like Suicide Mission would be hard to pull off even on an Atari Superchip cart. Dig Dug certainly takes advantage of the extra Superchip RAM, but Solaris amazingly doesn't use it!

All the really good coinop ports Atari did before the crash were as technically impressive as anything 3rd parties were doing. Dig Dug, Stargate, Gravitar. A pity they had already blown their rep with Pac-Man (and to a lesser extent, Defender, which was fun but merely a reimagining of the coinop).

Blu-Ray may have won the format wars but the DRM is still a big impediment to it taking off. For instance, you can't play Blu-Ray movies on the Mac. You'll never be able to play it on any computer that doesn't have an HDCP compliant card and monitor. And the card/computer needs enough oomph not to drop frames. (Lots of laptops with VGA out, Mac Minis and similar nonexpandables are shit outa luck.) This protects you from piracy but it slows adoption rates as people still have legacy hardware, and with the depression, they will likely hold onto that legacy hardware longer. That's a hurdle DVD never had to deal with and it's a big one. Also, Blu-Ray needs a "killer app" movie to push it. LOTR Extended or SW trilogy would do it. Neither are slated for Blu-Ray anytime soon. LOTR Theatrical cuts are out and only have 1.5 stars on Amazon because of consumer backlash over the double-dipping. Right now the only Blu-Ray must-have I see out there is TOS Remastered.

What I always thought would be cool would be a half-mirrored Vectrex cab so you could do Warrior with the little blacklight glow in the dark diorama. Wouldn't that mess up existing games because of the mirroring? Anyway, making slide-in dioramas like that rather than flat overlays would be quite the cottage industry for new custom homebrews. No emulator would ever be able to simulate it properly.

That's because the letters are actually like an etching, showing the foil through a black mask with a transparent layer of coloring inbetween like a gel. On some of the carts you can make out the boundary for where they painted the coloring zones on top (kind of like the Tie Fighter matte lines in Star Wars: Pre Special edition). I've always wanted to find out whether any modern printing process could reproduce these sorts of labels exactly but haven't discovered anything. It was a very unique process and extremely durable. It's almost like Atari knew people would still be using these carts 30+ years hence.

If it didn't come out, it's still vaporware.

I plan to make these over the summer when my daughter will be away and I'll have more free time. More details soon.

I think the main problem with the 7800 is a lack of homebrews, period. New hardware is putting the cart before the horse, pun intended.

Think how exactly those sort of games crashed and burned in the marketplace. As far as laser games go, the ones that did overlay like Firefox I think were a cut above straight laser games like DL, because of the true interactivity (albeit mostly railed).

BTW, some coinop laserdisc games used an Amiga to control them. Mad Dog McCree was one.

The majority of us will be playing 2600 games in emulation of some sort in the future, whether it be software or hardware (think FPGA or flashback). Having "the real thing" is nice, but not essential. I don't think the main ICs on the 2600 really can go bad in a timeframe anyone should care about. The other parts are easily replaced. That's not to say a 2600 won't appear to break, but it should remain easily fixed (new powersupply, cap kit, switches). This is NOT the case with many other consoles. It's just that the 2600 is so much simpler than others that far less can go wrong. The traces on the chips are fat and the chips run slow and cool. It's just not going to break as easily as, let's say, a Nintendo64. The fact that they have lived 30+ years is a testament to their longevity.

I will probably send all my prototype hardware to Batari in case he can do something with it.

Just to get this out of the way. We may want to start a new thread for Harmony. There is something a little depressing about using this thread for it.