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almightytodd

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Posts posted by almightytodd

  1. Posted

    Oh, one other cool thing... ...while this is running, you can press "F2" and start playing any game while its attraction screen is showing. When the time runs out, the game will quit and then go on to the next game. Stopping it is a bit of a challenge. I used "ctrl-shift-esc" to launch the Task Manager. I then selected one of the running batches and pressed "ctrl-C" to stop the batch. You only need to stop the Launcher.

  2. Posted

    I figured out a way to use Stella as a screen saver! So what I wanted to do, was to have the attract screen for an Atari VCS game running for awhile, and then stop, and then start again with a different game. I know that Stella can be launched from the command line, but how to launch it, wait for awhile, stop it, and then start again with a different game? The solution I found, is to have two separate batch files running in two different DOS windows at the same time. One launches Stella with a list of games, and the other waits for a period of time (20 or 30 seconds works well), and then stops any instance of Stella that is running. I set this all up to run on a Windows XP machine.

     

    So here are the batch files. Of course, you'll have to change the Launcher batch to point to the folders where your games are...

     

    :: LaunchVCS.cmd - Launches a new game as soon as the game running is stopped...

    :LOOP

    "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\AATop100\001. Pitfall II.bin"

    "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\AATop100\002. Pitfall!.bin"

    "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\AATop100\005. Space Invaders.bin"

    "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\AATop100\006. H.E.R.O.bin"

    "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\Try\spacerocks20121129_NTSC.bin"

    "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\Try\SuperPongNew.bin"

    "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\Try\D.K.VCS_130617_NTSC.bin"

    "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\Favorites\Juno First.bin"

    "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\AATop100\009. Yars' Revenge.bin"

    "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\AATop100\010. Asteroids.bin"

    "C:\Program Files\Stella\Stella.exe" "C:\_Emulation\AtariVCS\AATop100\021. Centipede.bin"

    GOTO LOOP

     

    The key to this next one, is a utility called, "pskill" from Microsoft's SysInternals tools: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896683.aspx

     

    :: WaitAndKill.cmd - Let Stella run for awhile, then kill it...

    :LOOP

    :: sleep 30 seconds

    ping -n 31 127.0.0.1>nul

    :: Stop Stella

    pskill Stella.exe

    :: Do it again

    GOTO LOOP

    The one downside of doing it this way, is sometimes the DOS windows show in-between stopping and re-starting Stella. Here's a video of the result. I set the wait time to be rather short, so you can see a wide variety of games without waiting too long. I decided to use AC/DC guitar riffs for the sound-track...

     

  4. Posted

    Bumping an old thread, I know... ...but it's better than starting a new one. I bought a Timex/Sinclair 1000 in 1982, and stayed up until four o'clock in the morning playing with it that first night. The fact that I could "own" an actual general purpose computer was just magical to me. I found an emulator for the TS1000 a while ago, and wrote a short demo program. Here it is running on my Acer One netbook:

     

     

    This also gives me an excuse to show-off my guitar playing skills...

    • Like 2

  5. Posted

    I don't think Coleco foresaw dual pass dot matrix printers that printed letter quality being available by 1985.

    Put that in the letter you send them in the wayback machine and the daisy wheel is probably gone.

    With so many "what if"s" associated with the rise and fall of ColecoVision, it's hard to say for sure what might have happened if Adam hadn't had such reliability problems out of the gate. But let's pretend that they had Adam ready to ship; reliable, and marketed in early September for an October release well in advance of Christmas.

     

    The idea with a "video game turns into a computer" strategy, is that little Jimmy gets a home computer for Christmas that is also a ColecoVision, with the understanding that he is going to use said computer for his school-work. He starts handing in essays and research papers that have been written with a word-processor and printed with a daisy-wheel printer and suddenly his grades go shooting up, because he's competing with all of his classmates who are still turning in their work written in cursive.

     

    And since typing is about four times faster than writing in long-hand, he gets his work done in less time, and has more time for video games. From the standpoint of getting American households with teenagers to invest in their first home computer, it was actually a fairly sound strategy. The cost of the computer was way less than an Apple, and with an Apple, you still don't have any way to print out your work unless you buy a printer. And sure, that daisy-wheel printer would be obsolete within four years, but by then, Jimmy has graduated and is on his way to college.

     

    But as we've all observed, with every other Adam being returned as faulty during their rushed pre-Christmas launch, we'll never know if the "it comes with a printer" strategy might have paid off...

  6. Posted

    That's exactly why the computer enhancement to the ColecoVision needed to be done right. If the computer was a modular design that could be pieced together at the whim of prospective buyers, Coleco would have had all their bases covered...

     

    - ColecoVision game system for those happy with just gaming

    - ColecoVision with computer expansion module that provided only video, sound, memory enhancements, further expansion bays/slots, etc. to the CV for enhanced gaming to compete against future game systems

    - Add a keyboard and storage option(s) to turn the CV with the above expansion module into a full-fledged computer that could then compete against the likes of Atari, Commodore, Apple, etc.

     

    Then they could offer other accessories like printers, modems, memory expanders, hard drives, interface cards, etc. just like other companies did. Most importantly, make all the information about the system available to prospective software development houses unlike what they did with the ADAM.

    I strongly agree, but the first thing Coleco needed to do, was to make sure their product had a reasonable level of reliability before they shipped it. The one very unique thing about the Adam, was that the letter-quality printer was built-in. They were hoping this value-add would differentiate them from other home computers like Apple, Atari, and Commodore. It's difficult to know for sure if the Adam might have succeeded if it hadn't quickly gained a reputation as a machine that was about to break, and that the customer could plan on returning for service soon after making the purchase.

  7. Posted

    No love for Stunt Cycle or Sprint 2. :(

    In the case of Sprint 2 (or any of the sprint-type overhead view games) I have to agree with you - epic fail for the omission. However, when it comes down to playing the game and shooting video of the game-play, the fact of the matter is my ability to keep my race car on the track with anywhere near the consistency of the robot cars is so poor, I'd be embarrassed to share a video clip (...I guess I could have thrown in a still-shot). As to Stunt Cycle, that machine came out before they started utilizing microprocessor CPUs, so there's no MAME ROM for it. Computer Space suffers from the same problem, but someone wrote a "simulator" for it as a Windows program, so that is what you're actually seeing in my video. There are some YouTube videos of Stunt Cycle, but I don't think it would be too cool take someone else's clip and insert it into my movie without asking.

  8. Posted

    I've noticed that most video game histories seem to jump from Computer Space and Pong, right to Pac Man, Donkey Kong, and vector games such as Asteroids and Battle Zone. There are about eight years of black & white coin-op games that get skipped over. I made the following video to recall many of the B&W games I played as a teenager in the 1970's, and to share these games with a younger generation that may be unaware that they ever existed...

     

    http://youtu.be/1oONH3QeWpg

    • Like 14

  9. Posted

    TIA could sound better for games if it was done right and not rushed for games like Donkey Kong:

     

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVPDkQl7Nl0

     

    Compare 2600 DK VCS sound choices to original 7800 Donkey Kong and the difference is night and day.

     

    Not only that, the original VCS was designed to be in STEREO. The plan was to put an audio amplifier and speakers in the game unit and send only video to the television signal. Some of the original VCS games were programmed with that in mind. For example, the Tank games in "Combat" have the sound for the tank on the right going to the right speaker, and the tank on the left goes to the left speaker.

     

    Joe has taken advantage of these facts in his programming of DK VCS, sending the same sounds to each side but with a slight delay, causing a really cool "echo" effect. Put on some headphones and watch this video:

     

  10. Posted

    This is very impressive... it's much more palatable than the original 2600 game, although it's clear the machine is being pushed well past its limits. So much flicker!

    If you play it in Stella, use Alt P to enable "Phosphor Effect" and get rid of the flicker...

     

    I'd say it was fine as is, although there are a few things that vex me. The elevator stage is much tougher with only one lift active at one time...

    I agree that the elevator stage needs to be re-worked, but if you just ignore the elevators and jump across the platforms, it's easy... ...too easy.

     

    I made a new video of this game and posted on YouTube, since the other video there is several versions old. I shot video off of my computer monitor running Stella with TV effects so it looks like it was recorded off of an actual CRT. I recorded the sound directly though, and it is in STEREO.

     

    Well done Joe!

     

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njr4ZJEPahU

    • Like 7

  12. Posted

    I feel compelled to weigh in on this topic. Back in '82 I was a 22 year old struggling college student with a wife and a baby daughter. Five years earlier my family had shared an original Atari VCS heavy-sixer as a family Christmas present. Also around that time, I had purchased a BASIC language programming book for the TRS-80, and done some experimenting on the display machines on Saturday afternoons at my local Radio Shack. I was very interested in new technologies and had been following the developments of coin-op video games, and home console systems from Atari and Mattel.

     

    I was excited when the Atari 800 and 400 computers came out, and seemed to offer the capabilities of everything an Apple II could do, but for a few hundred dollars less. Even still, at an inflation-adjusted price of over $3,000 of today's dollars, there was no way devices like that could have been part of my life. I read about the 5200, which sounded something like the power of an Atari 400, but with no keyboard, and no expansion capabilities to turn it into a real computer. It was strictly the "gaming parts" of a home computer in order to get the price down. I have to laugh at my own description because in my opinion, that's what an Xbox or Playstation is now in relationship to a full-blown gaming PC.

     

    Anyway, at that point in my life, my experience with technology from Coleco was limited to some hand-held LED games they'd developed in response to the Mattel Electronics offerings, and the memories of some dedicated console devices from several years earlier that had been developed to compete with Atari's first home Pong machines. I feel I need to explain that Coleco had little prestige as a technology company at that point, because that was part of what made Colecovision such a surprising product when it was launched. It was a home product that just seemed to jump ahead of Atari from out of nowhere.

     

    The graphics quality of the 5200 was quite good, but it also had a sort of "familiar" aspect to it, because the fonts and colors "looked" like what we'd seen before on Atari's home computers. When the Colecovision would start up, it would show a rainbow-lettered default screen and then go into the difficulty selection screen with what appeared to be a built-in text font. The overall experience just "felt" more like what I'd seen in the coin-op machines in the arcades than did the offerings from Atari. This seemed puzzling to me, given that Atari was still a major player in the arcades, while Coleco had no presence there.

     

    I never owned a Colecovision or a 5200 (...I do have a 7800 as well as our original 1977 VCS), but I've played both via emulation. This, of course, removes the elements of the controllers which is a major win/fail judgement component for both systems. I don't think there's any way to easily make a quantitative statement of which was the "better" system, or which had an overall greater impact on the direction home gaming went during the 1980s. I just wanted to throw it out there that for me, I was blown away by the looks and sounds of the Colecovision, partly because it was just unexpected.

     

    After the release of the base unit, Coleco followed up with the driving controller, which seemed really cool, and with the compatibility unit that would let you play your Atari 2600 games on it. Then the Adam computer was announced, with the promises that the Colecovision games would all play on the Adam, and that a Colecovision would eventually be able to "grow" into an Adam computer. It was a lot of exciting, promising ideas that, as we all now know, fell apart with the rushed release of the very unreliable Adam computers. Coleco was riding the success of Cabbage Patch Kids, but with the failure of Adam, along with some other bad business deals, they crashed and burned.

     

    So maybe some of my amazement and nostalgia for the Colecovision is undeserved from a purely objective technological standpoint. I just have some fond memories of being surprised one day in a toy store in 1982, by something unexpected from the Connecticut Leather Company...

    • Like 2

  13. Posted

    Interesting, but I have a real problem with "adjusted for inflation" stats that I can't quite put my finger on. Thirty dollars still "feels" like thirty dollars today as it did twenty years ago no matter how long it took me to earn it...

    I get what you're saying, because over time some things (shoes, bread, gasoline) just get more and more costly, while other things (personal electronics, microwave ovens, TVs) seem to cost less. And then with things like laptop and desktop computers, the price seems to stay the same or decline slowly, but the capabilities increase dramatically over time. Consider that a very modest $400 desktop computer of today has the combined memory and processing power of thousands of Atari 800 computers.

     

    What I find interesting in the stats above, is that with the adjustments to inflation, the cost of every Nintendo console went down slightly with the exception of the Wii U. Consoles in the Xbox line on the other hand, become more costly with each generation, whether adjusted for inflation or not! It's as if Microsoft is making a "dare" to their customers with each new iteration, "I know you paid $300 for an Xbox a few years ago to enter into the realm of a Microsoft home gaming entertainment system, but now I "dare you" to pay $400 to get the "new" thing that displays high-def and can connect you to other players over the Internet".

  15. Posted

    ...The consensus was that the game was too hard to be enjoyable.

     

    I agree that it can be a fun game for a small niche of players who need something harder and more challenging than the typical 2600 game, but that niche was too small to have the game sell five million units, which Atari needed to recoup its costs...

     

    The thing is, there are actually three versions of the game on the cart: One where a scientist and an FBI agent chase you; one where just the FBI agent chases you; and one where there are no enemies chasing you and your challenge is to figure out where the items are to make the "phone" for E.T. to "phone home" and then get back to the pick up site in the forest in time.

     

    If you were to start by playing the "no enemies" game first and familiarize yourself with the game elements and strategies, it is a very playable game. But the no enemies game is game 3, so most people who try it out, start out with the most difficult version of the game and give up.

     

    But as was previously posted, there's another thread discussing this, as well as other aspects of the game that have been modified in the "corrected" version of the game, which could have been developed by Warshaw if he'd been given a reasonable development schedule.

  17. Posted

    I have a few computers now that dual-boot into Windows and Linux. I prefer Linux for most things (like this post I'm typing right now) but I've been using some of the Windows emulation programs for years now and have gotten used to them. In particular, Atari 800 Win plus, Altirra, Steem Engine (for the ST), and Pro System 7800.

     

    There are also several Nintendo emulators, but honestly, I just don't play those very often. My question is; would switching to a Linux solution using MAME, MESS, and Stella be adequate to cover all of these systems that I'm currently using dedicated Windows emulators for? (...I occasionally do Texas Instruments, Intellivision, Coleco Vision, and even Vectrex emulation as well as the Atari systems mentioned above).

     

    Are there any Atari Age members who have moved exclusively into the Linux realm for emulation? Or are most like me... ...booting back into the old reliable Windows XP in order to fire up the emulators?

  19. Posted

    Is that you in your avatar? For a second I thought it was Steve Lukather.

    I'll take that as a compliment, thank you! Steve Lukather rocks! His solo in Toto's "Hold the Line" is both melodic and edgy. I never noticed the similarity before, but if he's making a serious face, I can see some likeness in the eyes and nose...

     

    post-12574-0-61245100-1370137524_thumb.jpg

  20. Posted

    What bothers me about this, is that it perpetuates the myth of how E.T. was the "worst Atari game ever made" and it "was responsible for the collapse of the home video game industry". Quoting from the PC Magazine article here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2419808,00.asp

     

     

    "Atari reportedly ordered 5 million copies of E.T. ahead of the title's release but wound up selling just 1.5 million. What's more, a large number of purchased copies were reportedly returned by customers frustrated with the game's notoriously poor graphics, confusing gameplay, and all-around awfulness.

     

    Just how bad was E.T. the Extra Terrestrial? You can see for yourself in this video review from SmashAttackGames..."

     

    Okay, first of all, for a 2600 game of that era, the graphics are quite good; far from "notoriously poor". The gameplay is confusing, if you don't RTFM. But if you spend a little time learning what the game is actually about, and follow the tips from Random Terrains' web page, it's quite playable.

    • Like 4

  22. Posted

    Actually back in the earliest pre-PONG days, that's what they did. Video games got started by bored programmers tinkering with a mainframe computer. Ever heard of Computer Space? I'd really like to be able to emulate it just to see what the fuss was.

     

    Install program for a Computer Space "simulator" is here... It's "simulated" not "emulated", because Computer Space was done all in hardware without a microprocessor. Read Curt and Marty's book for the details... ...By the way, the first time I attempted to load this simulator onto my Windows 7 machine with Norton anti-virus, it was flagged as malware; even though I'd been using it for years on XP with no ill effects. I think the code had something in it that attempted to hook into the developer's web-page and report back to him how many times his game was installed. His web page doesn't even exist anymore, so I'm not sure what's up with that...

     

    If you really meant to talk about "Space War", I believe the original paper-tape binary has been translated to a ROM file, which can then be loaded into a PDP-1 emulator. The Wikipedia entry for Space War says this:

     

    Code simulating Spacewar! has been included with Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express.[8]

    The game is available as PDP-1 source code and in emulation on the web.

     

    A version of Spacewar! was developed by Valve and put on Steam to show the capabilities of the Steamworks API. The program is named SteamworksExample.exe, and can be downloaded by going to the url steam://install/480.

  24. Posted

    I just discovered this game in emulation today. I've played many versions of it including the MAME of the original and the Atari arcade version (Orbit), but the Vectrex port is the first one I've encountered with a single-player mode and an A.I. opponent. Some of the other Vectrex titles are interesting interpretations of arcade games such as "Rip-off" and "Star Castle". I find it interesting that the Vectrex designers chose the portrait orientation when most vector-graphics arcade titles were landscape.

  25. Posted

    With possible exception of the original 800; which in my opinion was just years ahead of its time, the XEGS is the one Atari 8-bit machine that I really regret never getting. It looked cool and had the ideal blend of "toy" and "real computer". At first release, it was sold for a reasonable price for the time, but at that time in my life I was unable to afford any personal computing entertainment device. A few years later when things were looking up for me economically, my son had reached the age where it was important for him to get in on the home video-game experience, and at that moment, the system to have was Nintendo.

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