almightytodd

The bottom line is, the game was rushed. It wasn't a completely horrible game, but it wasn't a great game either. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to the game's acceptance was unrealistic expectations. With a little extra time for testing and a few tweaks, it could have been widely accepted as a good game at least. In case you haven't seen it, this thread discusses a few changes that could have pushed it in that direction...

I'm just a little surprised that in all of this, no one has posted a link to this music video...

Well, as I stated in this thread, there are some new features in the FB4 that make it arguably an improvement over the FB2 - there are almost twice as many games, a simplified alphabetically sorted game selection menu, and wireless controllers that allow you to reset and return to the game selection menu without having to turn the console unit off then on... ...all for a lower cost than the original FB1. For the less enthusiastic retro game fan who may have passed on all of the earlier iterations of the Flashback, 75 games and wireless controllers may have been the tipping point to get them to buy. And then there are people like me, who bought both, along with having original gear (I have two 7800's and our family's original 1977 Heavy Sixer), and being heavily into the emulation scene. I don't want to speak for Curt, but my recollection was that after creating the epitome of VCS replication accuracy, he was ready to move on to other projects (...a hand-held? ...the 7800 XM project? ...some kind of Atari 800 Flashback?), plus, he and Marty did the Taco Bell CDs (which I have); Curt developed an Atari USB stick (I have one of those); they were working on their book (I also have that) and to top it all off, Curt ended up in the hospital and almost died, partly due to how much work he was putting into so many projects. So in the context of all that, I'm perfectly satisfied with how things worked out. The success that AtGames had with the FB3 and FB4 have given them the opportunity to do Sega and Colecovision units, and I believe I've heard something about an Intellivision FB in the works? That being said, there isn't a single retro-gaming product that I would rather have, than the knowledge that Curt Vendel is alive and well. That's my perspective...

To me, that's really the point. Call the FB1 a "proof of concept" to allow Curt to move ahead with the FB2 project and "do it right". The FB1 had fewer games and cost more than the FB2... ...but it sold enough units to prove that this genre was a viable commercial product.

I'm still wishing there could be a Macintosh Flashback... ...a monochrome LED screen (behind a curved, plastic view plate to simulate a CRT), a few classic software titles; a recreation of the 1984 $2,500 Apple computer ($5,595 in today's dollars!) for under a hundred bucks. How cool would that be?

I have both the FB2 and the FB4; each has advantages. The FB2 has Activision titles as well as some very interesting hacks. The "vector style" Asteroids is interesting, and "Asteroids Deluxe" is fun, as well as "Yars' Return". Also, the "Save Mary" prototype is an interesting addition. The FB2 includes some Activision titles, which are historically important. The accuracy of the hardware reproduction is quite impressive. The FB4 has A LOT of games, plus the wireless controllers. Some might complain that the controllers seem "loose", but to me, it reminds me of the original VCS controllers, which had springs in them, and had a different feel from the more "stiff" 2600 controllers that came later. The menu systems are different; with the FB2 dividing games into categories such as "Adventure" and "Space". The FB4 lists games alphabetically and shows graphics and box art previews. There is some irony that the FB2 was engineered by the same people responsible for the first Flashback; which utilized a Nintendo-on-a-chip. But the original Flashback proved the concept, and demonstrated that this type of device was a viable commercial product. I have no regrets that I have both systems. They each have strengths and weaknesses.

Here's my Flashback 4... ...and an Intellivision plug-and-play Here's Space Rocks ...and the Space Rocks attract screen ...and a Star Wars plug-and-play Now I just need to find the time to play!

I have a three-way composite switch and a VGA-to-NTSC converter so I can run MAME and other emulators to the TV as well as connecting my plug-and-play games and Flashback 2 and 4! I was watching the movie "Jobs" earlier today, and I saw the scene where Jobs gets Woz to solve his engineering problems for the Atari "Breakout" game he was working on (...the movie took a lot of liberties with the historical facts in the incident, but that's a discussion for another day...). I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be cool to travel back in time to those days, knowing what I know now about the future of technology"? For me, my little "man-corner" is really more like a time-machine, where I can experience an 8-bit fantasy world in glorious NTSC cathode-ray-tube goodness! I'm very excited. I'll try to get some better pictures during the day.

Combat; Christmas 1977.

I find myself agreeing with a lot that has been said here - the original Wii promoted a new kind of gaming that got people up off of the couch with the sports titles and Wii Fit; but it was treated like a fad and became unsustainable. I think that's true not just for the Wii, but also the genre of games that use something other than a controller with a bunch of buttons you push with your thumbs... ...has anyone played "Guitar Hero" lately? In my opinion, one of the most significant features of the "U" - and perhaps the most underutilized, was the move from standard definition to HD. For game systems like XBox and Playstation, that extra detail was used to make their first-person shooters look increasingly more like this. Of course, the photo-realistic combat-zone genre has never been a big seller for the Wii. If Nintendo had come up with some kind of new and exciting use of the extra detail and screen real estate made available with an HD screen, that might have been the "hook" to attract new gamers or give a reason for those who went with Nintendo the first time around to come back for more. I don't know exactly what kind of innovation that would be; maybe split-screen two-player games that might have been done with two screens in the arcades back in the day, or maybe some kind of a resurrection of the concept used in that old PC game "Lemmings" - where you have a lot going on all over the screen and you need to try and pay attention to it all. In any case, my family still uses the Wii we got back in 2008, before we had an HD TV, and we see no compelling reason to move on to the "U" now.

Wait a second... ...You're a college student? You must have access to some kind of personal computer then, right? Have you ever considered a little thing called, "Emulation"? There's an easy to use 7800 emulator called, "ProSystem" that does a decent job of recreating the classic video game experience. You can even download the game files (called, "ROM" images - "Read-Only-Memory") from right here at Atari Age. For playing Atari VCS/2600 games, there's an even better emulator with cool video effects to make your computer screen look more like a TV than an actual TV... And accessing Atari games this way has the added advantage of letting you participate in previewing exciting new games that are still in development, or games that are no longer available due to copyright actions. If anything, even for the die-hard enthusiast who MUST play classic games on real hardware, emulation gives you a chance to "try-before-you-buy" so you can feel better about your purchase. And please, now that you've found Atari Age, hang out and read through these forums. There's a vast wealth of technological history here as well as a lot of entertainment, even if you're just wasting your life one GIF at a time... ...Welcome Angband.

I'm always amused when a necrobump happens to a topic thread that's been dormant for a year-and-a-half with no explanation whatsoever...

Oh, I guess that's on the way... OpenEmulatorThis is OpenEmulator, a cross-platform emulator of many legacy computer systems. OpenEmulator is currently only fully supported on Mac OS X, with support for Linux and Windows operating systems being developed. For compilation and installation instructions, refer to INSTALL.md.

So if the source code is available, does that mean it can be built on Linux boxes as well? Or has someone already built deb packages for it?

This is video shot from an LCD screen on a computer running Stella with CRT video effects enabled. It's definitely worth figuring out the right drivers for your system... http://youtu.be/njr4ZJEPahU

If you're using "Alt P" to toggle phosphorus, it won't save it for the next time you play the game. Select the game you want phosphorus and push the "Tab" button to access the menu. Select "Game Properties" and then go to the "Display" tab. Set Phosphorus to "yes" in the drop-down. Click "OK" and then exit the menu. Exit the game to the game selection menu, and when you restart the game, phosphorus will be set. I don't know if it's possible to set phosphorus to "yes" for all games.

And the other thing about that... ...in the early 1980s, the data that was stored on IBM Personal Computers was all text... ...not audio, no JPGs, no video. A typed page of text used about 2K bytes of data. To be able to store 320 pages of such text IN MEMORY would have been sufficient for most imagined scenarios. Remember, a Commodore 64 having access to 64K bytes of memory was sufficient to make that machine one of the best selling computing devices of all time. The first iterations of Macintosh and Atari ST computers did not have 640K of RAM, and those were computers with GUI Operating Systems, in contrast with the IBM compatibles which were text-based computers.

I graduated high school in 1978 so I feel like I was "right there" at the dawn of the micro-computer age. To me, there was something about a computer that used a dedicated monochrome monitor that made it more like a "real" computer. I felt that way about the PET and the TRS-80 computers, compared with the Atari's or even the Apple II. The offerings by Apple and Atari were clearly superior to the PET and TRS-80, and part of the way they achieved that superiority was in the "bring-your-own-monitor" strategy of having it hook up to your TV. But still, hooking something up to your TV is what you did when you wanted to play video-games. I only found out about Stellar Track recently and have only played it via emulation. I find it difficult to stay interested in completing a full game, but that's true for me on any platform (I've also played it via emulation on Atari 800, and PET). I do think it is somewhat novel to implement a text-type game on the 2600, so I'm in the camp who considers the game to be underrated. But then again, I'm also one of the nerds who actually likes Atari's 3D Tic Tac Toe game...

Wow, that looks great. Even without the elevator stage it is already a great achievement. Well done!

I think some terminology definitions are in order to have a meaningful conversation on this topic. If you mean "stupid" in terms of engineering elegance and designing hardware and software to get the maximum use out of a limited number of bits, bytes, system bus, clock cycles and available display technology; that's one discussion. But if you mean the ability to engineer systems that are available to the masses and allow people with no prior computer experience to have access to the World Wide Web, make purchases on Amazon and eBay, and make hotel and air travel reservations themselves rather than going through a Travel Agent, that's a completely different discussion. There were a whole lot of personal computers sold between 1995 and 2000. If the measurement is in profits generated through computer sales, these design engineers and marketers were "dumb like a fox"... The other question that needs to be asked relative to any discussion like this is, "Compared to what?". Are you comparing the IBM format computers with other computer technology available for home use at the time? In 1995 that would be pretty much limited to Macintosh, as offerings by Atari and Commodore were all gone by then. Are you comparing PCs to "legitimate" science and business equipment such as IBM Mainframes, Unix systems, Sun Microsystems, or Silicon Graphics Inc? The costs for those kinds of systems were orders of magnitude greater than a PC clone - and in 1995 a state-of-the-art PC wasn't cheap. I would hope that a company spending $74,000 on an SGI IRIS 4D system would get something slightly less "stupid" than an IBM PC clone. Even before there were IBM clones, the IBM format PC was never meant to compete with "real" computer systems. At more than $4,000 1982 dollars for a full system when they first came out (...which would compare with something like $12,000 of today's dollars), many of the first IBM PC customers were corporate business executives (Sr Vice President and above) who wanted a PC as a status symbol in their office, or a means to get access to information without having to submit requests to the IT and reports departments, or Preston Tucker wannabee entrepreneurs starting up new businesses with loans and investment money who wanted to have their own personal computer "system" to "run their business" and be on the cutting-edge of the new technologically-bound way of doing business in America in the 80s. ...I'm wondering if every post in this thread should be concluded with, "Get off my lawn"!

Here: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/432240/january-16-2014/nsa-software-implants

I've been following this thread for the past week. It's interesting how our perspectives are different depending on what part of the world we live in, and what the circumstances of our lives were during the 1980s through the mid 1990s. I'd like to say, "thanks" to everyone who has contributed to this discussion. There is a lot of valuable historical information in this thread.

Some really good examples of modern retro-style game programming here: http://www.locomalito.com/index.php

Oh, I'm sure Bob Decrescenzo could figure out a way to make it work on the 7800 Pro System... ...He's ported many vertical games already. But it would have to be something he was interested in...

Thanks for sharing that. I like chatting with a more modern chat bot called, "A.L.I.C.E.". On the website there's also a link to a chat with fake Captain Kirk. He speaks and his eyes follow the movements of the mouse cursor...