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almightytodd

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Posts posted by almightytodd

  2. Posted

    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.

  4. Posted

    post-12574-0-92141200-1396662549_thumb.jpg

     

    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.

    • Like 9

  6. Posted

    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.

  7. Posted · Edited by almightytodd

    Hello AtariAge!

     

    I'm 20 years old, never played anything older than a Nintendo 64, and I'm really interested in picking up an Atari 7800 (or a NES, but this isn't a NES forum). It looks like a wonderful system with an active homebrew community (assuming backwards compatibility with Atari 2600 games), and phenomenal pick-up-and-play games (all I really have time for in college, unfortunately).

     

    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.

  8. Posted

    I've been looking at the 6809 and I'm still puzzled at how it's stopped during a badline. Since !HALT has an indeterminate delay and you can't stop the clock for a whole DMA line without losing the CPU state, what was the final solution? The datasheets don't seem to indicate that TSC acts as a halt.

     

    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...

  9. Posted

     

    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?

     

    Oh, I guess that's on the way...

     

    OpenEmulator

    This 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.

  10. Posted

    No, you don't have to compile it. That was only true for the pre 1.0 release.

     

    The interface is still quite buggy at the moment. It crashes fairly often when adding roms and can randomly stop downloading covers. I plan to submit multiple bug reports and hope other people do as well, as this has the potential of being a really great app.

     

    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?

  12. Posted

    Sorry, this is not an answer to your problem but I have a problem also in case anyone can answer. I change to phosphorous for a game to solve flicker problem but Stella doesn't save the change for the game when I exit. I would also like to save globally for all games but it doesn't seem to have an option to do this. Thanks.

    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.

  13. Posted

    he actually never said that BTW

     

    that "quote" popped up in the early 90's like a goblin fart and as a "quote" there is a hundred different versions and not a single shred of evidence outside of myth.

     

    I am sure he said something that involved 640K at some point in history, but whoever started this little meme at best was half drunk on a ultra loud convention floor looking at some other booth when it happened to hit their ear half sideways as it never existed before computers had multiple megabytes of ram standard

    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.

  14. Posted

    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...

  16. Posted

    When did the PC market get "stupid"?

     

    I would say right around the introduction of Windows 95 and the Pentium MMX. Up till then, the PC was all serious business and productivity oriented. But once those super-gay MMX commercials and dumbing down of the interface (Win95) came to pass - all went to hell...

    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"!

    • Like 5

  18. Posted

    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.

    • Like 3

  20. Posted

    You can't have a ROM / ROM set for this game, unless someone ports it to run directly on a particular hardware platform. If someone did that, ideally it would run on arcade Donkey Kong hardware (since they obviously used DK as a template for this game), which could easily be run in MAME with the DK driver, or burned to EPROMs and run on original hardware.

     

    ...

     

    I don't know how a port of this game to arcade DK hardware would come out. It looks to me that whoever wrote this game didn't pay a lot of attention to details such as whether or not the graphics they drew or the audio they used would even be precisely possible on DK hardware. It looks like they just winged it for the most part, coming up with graphics and audio that were generically "retro", but not a specific match to the capabilities of any particular classic hardware platform.

     

    It could probably be ported perfectly to e.g. the SNES and Genesis, and probably pretty closely ported to the NES and SMS, but it isn't ideal for any of those systems, because, like DK, it is a vertical game, and no home console (aside from the Vectrex) outputs a vertically oriented display.

     

    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...

    • Like 1

  24. Posted

    ...Then they could follow that up with a Pro Flashback with 7800 games...

     

    The original Atari Flashback was styled like a miniature ProSystem and included five 7800 games with 15 2600 games. It was developed by Curt Vendel using a NOAC design and ported Atari games. It proved that there was a market for these kinds of devices, and led to the development of the Flashback 2, also a Curt Vendel design, which was done "the right way" using a reproduction of true Atari 2600 circuitry, such that the 40 included games (plus two "hidden" games) were simply ROM files of the original games. It was also designed to be hacked, with locations in the circuit tracings for adding a cartridge reader to allow it to play original Atari VCS games.

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