DragonmasterDan

The cartridge slot in the Saturn is notoriously bad. I own FIVE Saturn's for that very reason. It has nothing to do with how well the CD drive will last. the cartridge slot was made cheaply since Sega mostly expected people would buy a memory card or the modem and leave it in their throughout most of the systems life. If you are like me and switch between cards, action replays, RAM carts, the netlink etc it becomes a problem and the pins on the cart slot wear out.

I know this sounds obvious but gently wipe the lens of the drive with a q-tip. My older Saturn (the model 1) requires that from time to time.

Just in case anyone wants to pick up one, can you tell us how it does? Quality and feel wise? Nathan The D-Pad is 8 way directional and is a little bit looser than I would like. It feels alright. I'm certain the Hori controller is probably better but when you consider the difference in price this may be a better value. Added in edit: Here's a picture of the Pelican.

I thought they put up a display at an electronics store in Southern California to assure investors it was in production but didn't actually sell any units (or something like that)? I know at least RDI Halcyon branded laserdisc players made it out there-- I've got one, and they were absurdly common a few years ago. At the time I bought it, I was told that RDI was liquidating the (still useful) players to recoup their investments in the failed test-marketing of the full Halcyon system. Combined with the plurality of Halcyon game discs out there, and the fact that at least a few complete systems are out there in the hands of non-RDI-folks (such as laserdisc collectors), I'd feel safe in claiming that the Halcyon system (as a whole) was at least test marketed to the general public RDI was liquidated at the request of its creditors in 1986. There were hundreds of RDI branded Pioneer LD700 players that were sold in lots at auction in San Diego at that time. In fact, Pioneer required a minimum order of 1,000 players and according to the documents I have, at least 750 were sold at auction. Pioneer did the rebadging to the LD-700s using the art RDI provided and also custom printed a version of the standard LD700 box that was big enough to hold the entire system including the computer and laserdisc portion. Quite a few of them were purchased by a Laserdisc player repair shop in northern San Diego County and he sold them as standard LD-700s. Others ended up on Ebay or sold at swap meets by individual purchasers years down the road. I still have not gone through all of the RDI documents I own, but my general sense is that they hand produced maybe 10 complete systems and used a couple for the trade show display at CES in 1985 (I believe I own these two units) and the remaining units were either used to test the system or shipped to the 5-6 individual investors (including Quinn Martin) who made significant ($100K+) investments in the company. I have seen absolutely no evidence that the system was ever sold or demonstrated at anything resembling retail. Certain parts were obviously produced in some quantity (keyboards, bezels for the system, cartridge stickers, overlays, etc...), but others like the headset and cables, as well as the cartridge casings were pretty standard parts that they just bought from electronics dealers in San Diego. Even the manuals were just printed at a local print shop in small quantities. In short, the system was never released in my opinion and is certainly the rarest non-prototype classic system I know of. Were you the guy who bought all the old RDI information. I vaguely remember you posting on the DLP forums years ago about it. Yes. I own roughly 25 large boxes of documents, original art, scripts, computer code, prototype discs, 1" and 3/4" masters, 35mm film masters, magnetic tapes and pretty much everything that was left over after RDI shut down. The remaining parts for the Thayer's Quest arcade machines and the aforementioned laserdisc players, as well as office furniture and other general assets were liquidated separately from what is included in the collection I obtained. Yeah, I remember you posting about some of this on the DLP forums 3-4 years ago.

Are you getting anything besides static noise, like do you see the image or is it just too much static? The image is crystal clear,just static noise.When i turn down the tv volume way down,the noise goes down,but whats the use in not being able to turn up the volume loud?Im sure theres some reason for it. Sounds like an issue with the cable or maybe with the system and interference.

I thought they put up a display at an electronics store in Southern California to assure investors it was in production but didn't actually sell any units (or something like that)? I know at least RDI Halcyon branded laserdisc players made it out there-- I've got one, and they were absurdly common a few years ago. At the time I bought it, I was told that RDI was liquidating the (still useful) players to recoup their investments in the failed test-marketing of the full Halcyon system. Combined with the plurality of Halcyon game discs out there, and the fact that at least a few complete systems are out there in the hands of non-RDI-folks (such as laserdisc collectors), I'd feel safe in claiming that the Halcyon system (as a whole) was at least test marketed to the general public RDI was liquidated at the request of its creditors in 1986. There were hundreds of RDI branded Pioneer LD700 players that were sold in lots at auction in San Diego at that time. In fact, Pioneer required a minimum order of 1,000 players and according to the documents I have, at least 750 were sold at auction. Pioneer did the rebadging to the LD-700s using the art RDI provided and also custom printed a version of the standard LD700 box that was big enough to hold the entire system including the computer and laserdisc portion. Quite a few of them were purchased by a Laserdisc player repair shop in northern San Diego County and he sold them as standard LD-700s. Others ended up on Ebay or sold at swap meets by individual purchasers years down the road. I still have not gone through all of the RDI documents I own, but my general sense is that they hand produced maybe 10 complete systems and used a couple for the trade show display at CES in 1985 (I believe I own these two units) and the remaining units were either used to test the system or shipped to the 5-6 individual investors (including Quinn Martin) who made significant ($100K+) investments in the company. I have seen absolutely no evidence that the system was ever sold or demonstrated at anything resembling retail. Certain parts were obviously produced in some quantity (keyboards, bezels for the system, cartridge stickers, overlays, etc...), but others like the headset and cables, as well as the cartridge casings were pretty standard parts that they just bought from electronics dealers in San Diego. Even the manuals were just printed at a local print shop in small quantities. In short, the system was never released in my opinion and is certainly the rarest non-prototype classic system I know of. Were you the guy who bought all the old RDI information. I vaguely remember you posting on the DLP forums years ago about it.

Are you getting anything besides static noise, like do you see the image or is it just too much static?

A few notes, I also have the Pelican GB controller, I think I paid 6.99 for it. Anyway, I went to Frys Electronics today. they had about a dozen first party GameCube controllers. No Wave birds though. While they may no longer be manufactured. They're not difficult to locate.

Does the Saturn boot screen come up? Or does it just get power and do nothing? Also did you just do a region mod (the switch)?

I have a CRT HDTV and it can play my old systems. You do need a tv switch adapter and then tune the tv to the channel set on your console.

Yep. I've got a complete setup with both games. Not a whole lot of fun to play, but cool to have in a collection. There's a few more pics of the system itself here: Halcyon Pics You could always just hook it up to a video capture card and play.

Do you actually have a Halcyon and the disc?

I thought they put up a display at an electronics store in Southern California to assure investors it was in production but didn't actually sell any units (or something like that)?

Mine has been used maybe three times and has a line on the display that conked out. It's made extremely cheaply.

I see regular wired GameCube controllers quite a bit, ToysRus, Frys and a number of other stores still seem to have them. I haven't seen a new wavebird in a while.

Yep, Road Avenger/ Road Blaser is also known as Road Prosecutor for Laseractive.

Dragon's Lair Project has videos of the games themselves, usually short clips but no gameplay videos. Just stuff vidcapped off the discs usually. http://www.dragons-lair-project.com/

The motor goes bad as well. Still the original models are a lot more reliable than the side loaders or any of the combos (CDX, E-eye or Wondermega)

US Neo Geo or Japanese Neo Geo? Thats a factor. Also which controllers. There's two variations of the joystick the preferred original and the second cheaper models.

The main problem with the Neo Geo CD wasn't even the drive speed though (though that was part of it) it was also the fact that there wasn't enough RAM and cache to load enough of the game code into memory which lead to the need for more loading times, since the games were mostly designed to have been run off cartridges. You're right, early games run pretty well because they didn't require as much space. But later games had awful load times because they were bigger. I don't know the size of the average Atomiswave ROM but I'm guessing it's decent sized which makes me think there would be problems running it on the Dreamcast in that fashion. On games with lower sizes it wouldn't be as much of a problem. But I'm guessing most Atomiswave games use a good amount of the available RAM AND were designed for running off of a ROM. That's why it's a problem.

I certainly won't defend FFT on that point. But saying Tactics Ogre has a better story than FFT is damning with extremely faint praise. But I know what you mean, and I agree. Tactics Ogre's story (what I saw of it) was readable and actually enjoyable. And the dialogue is coherent

So for the past year or so on days that I have been home during the day I would hear two electronic sounding chimes coming from a shelf in my room. I had always tried to narrow it down, eventually I determined it was always happening at 1:00 PM. I couldn't figure out what it was. Until just a little while ago. After finally growing tired of this I started isolating different items on the shelf to see what could be causing it. My first guess was a box with Growlanser Generations Deluxe since it had a watch in it. But that wasn't the culprit. Nor were any of my portable systems which might have had clocks. Today I found out what it was. I found that the noise was coming from a bag of loose Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. The sound was coming from an oddly shaped game called Robopon which I bought for around 2.00 that has an internal clock and lithium battery. So, finally After a year the mystery is solved!

You mean how the Neo CD doesn't work. It's a horrible way of doing things in that instance. In all fairness though a lot of old CD based games load things bits and pieces at a time. But it's because it was designed with that in mind and was done with the intent of minimizing load times. When you see games that were converted from ROMs to CDs is when you see ridiculous problems with load times.

Tactics Ogre definitely has the advantage of army size going for it. More units in your army means more ways to diversify things. Final Fantasy Tactics definitely loses some points there because of the 5 man team setup. As for the size of the battlefields, I found the Tactics Ogre battlefields to be too large and have too much wasted space. I'd say most of them I played only involve the actual practical use of about 1/4th or less of the board. FFT has smaller boards, but I feel the space is better spent, and the size is beneficial to the game it's attempting to be. The place where Tactics Ogre really loses points is in that training mode. For those unaware, instead of providing enough battles for your characters to properly level up, or even randomly generated AI opponent encounters, the game simply has you split your army up into two teams and you get to manually beat on your own men for a few hours between each battle. It's just as boring as it sounds. But I will admit, the memory card issue prevented me from getting very far in it. The game kills Sony brand memory cards. I had some luck with some cards which were either pirate cards or Japanese cards. I've tried the game on three Playstations of various models and had the same results. I'm too scared to try it on the PS3 for fear of the game wrecking the whole hard drive instead of a mere virtual memory card. That's totally bizzare. I actually dug through my old memory cards. I have my clear save on two cards, one is a Sony card, the other is a 360 page Interact card. I never had any problems with saving in it. I also like the training mode, it allows you to build your characters up for important battles and not lose members of your party (or be forced to restart) if a battle goes awry. It has a much better story and localization as well. To me it's just a more polished product. While it isn't as aesthetically nice it's just more fun to play.

I hope you're not talking about the SNES/PS1 game. That one has some serious issues, namely the "training" mode which really boils down to the most pointless grinding I've seen in anything that wasn't a MMORPG. However, I've never been able to play much of my PS1 version. The game tends to corrupt its own saves and kill memory cards. Yeah, I'm talking about the PSone game. I've never had any problems with it corrupting memory cards. The SFC version (along with the Saturn version) were both Japan only releases. You had much bigger battlefields than Final Fantasy Tactics, it was just a lot more fun. A far far better localization as well. Final Fantasy Tactics is a poorly translated small scale version of Tactics Ogre with the Final Fantasy Brand on it.