Retro Rogue

Read carefully, its not a Colecovision plug and play. Its a Coleco plug and play. The company marketing them does not have the rights to the Colecovision games, and is basicly marketing video game versions of some of the old Coleco LED handhelds (which originally were in single and head to head versions) along with a few other games. The case and look is designed to be similar to these old handhelds. Here's a pic of the original head to head and the new "video game" version -

Thought I'd post these on a new thread, as these are different the Coleco style ones brought up in the other thread. These are entitled the "Classic Arcade SEries" and meant to be like mini-standup cabinets, complete with a screw in joystick that comes with it. Graphics wise, they're the same LCD's as the previous MGA releases. Selling for $9 and change at Target, and they have Missile Command, Super Breakout, Asteroids, Centipede, and Pac-Man.

Of course they're excited. Its not often they play with something electric that doesn't need batteries.

How many FB2s have been sold already? ~500,000? So just 1ct/game and you have $5000. And it hasn't even brought to Europe yet. 969233[/snapback] Hi Thomas, not sure what you're trying to get at (looks like you're trying to say they could afford to license more because of sales?). Spending more on licensing more games would have meant the pos price would have had to been higher than the $30 target range (and as it is now, some stores are able to sell it around $23). It has nothing to do with how many wound up being sold to retailers after the fact. Hindsite is a wonderful thing, but target prices are initially set during the design phase by weighing development/manufacturing costs (which include licensing) with estimations of possible initial sales. The issue is not Atari being able to afford the licenses (which they surely can), but will the consumer want to afford the higher cost of the console (since the point is to make dev costs, manufacturing costs, and a reasonable profit back, which is what the retailer price (the price the retailer/store pays) and estimated POS price (the price the consumer pays) is set for).

Then you guys are talking about software specifically, and a few game at that - not the entire console. And as far as I know, all the hacks/homebrews were in dev already when I came in during early April. I still have the early dev revisions on those that I was provided to get down game play.

Where on earth do you get 2 months? When I came on in early April the hardware had been done and I was given a full games list to work off of to start working on the manual. That was the FB1 that was about 2 months of development. Of course Thrust+ was considered at the time. Spending bucks on licensing = higher cost to the console, as Curt wrote in another thread. Either way, from my understanding (and I can't go in to much) happenings for the FB3 design are going to take care of a lot of that.

I don't recall the FB2 being "rushed to market".

The original proposal was to include the manual on CD in html format, but Atari decided not to because they didnt want to create the feeling that someone had to set up the FB2 around their computer and wanted the small print manual instead. So the additional web site based manual (which was my idea) was the next best solution. Atari.com's web address is not changing any time soon.

They is me, at least for the manual content (not the design and layout). And it was left out because I was only given that many pages to work with by the higher ups at Atari. In fact, I was given less then that and pushed for what there was now because it couldn't be done in anything less. All I was told to give were short blurbs that gave the basic game play. How to solve the problem was the direction I put in the manual to visit the website which in turn has the full online manual.

I'll try and make one that's at suitable resolution. The letter in this thread isn't nearly clean enough for a full-page print. Then what would be the point? 964027[/snapback] The point is fair warning. I'm giving friendly advice based on past events where I know they've gone after someone to protect their trademarks. And staff from Activision do read this board.

Something tells me Activision wouldn't take to kindly to their name being reproduced and sold like that, as they're still pretty up on their properties protection. If you creat a patch like that, you might want to leave out the Activision name and ®.

I paid $400 for one in the exact same condition Falcon back in 2002 (it also came with a full Cubase package and SM124 monitor though), so I'm assuming its going to go somewhere around there with it being up to almost $300 with a good 8 hours left. It was actually from a closeout of a music store in Michigan. Although mine was truly stock, it came with only 1 meg of ram and no hard drive. Although As for the boxes being rare, I must have lucked out. I have 2 mint Falcon boxes. The store sent me a 1040st in an Falcon box first, and when I confronted them about the mistake they sent me the MIB Falcon I won and let me keep the 1040st for an additional $15.

Hmm, I just tested it under XP and it failed. Furthermore, it failed probably the worst possible way, without giving any error or warnings. I tried copying a simple disk formatted with TOS, single sided, and it produced and apparently correct image. But the image was completely corrupted (this was expected, as you’ll see below) without any of the files that were in the disk. I have about 300 disks that I used that program to back up, 75% of them TOS formated and the rest commercial programs (that could be either MSDOS or TOS formated). The only ones I had problems with were ones that turned out to be corrupt all together. No, I didn't think anything of the type. I have both single and double sided disks that went in to prefectly readable images. Perhaps its a problem in a newer version of WFDcopy?

Can you image with it disks with 10 sectors per track under XP? 958845[/snapback] I've never had problems doing any of my ST disks, including the non-msdos compat formated disks.

Actually, most don't, certainly none of the ones you mention does. I think the only one that read physical floppies is Gemulator. My mistake, I was confusing it with one of those emu's ability to create virtual blank disks. Pacifist reads physical floppies on the PC though, I've done it in the past.. You don't have to do it under DOS. WDFcopy (which is what I use), works fine under XP and other windows variants.

Just use any of the various ST emulators (such as Steem, Saint or Winston). Most read an ST floppy directly in your pc's floppy drive. They can also map a vritual st hard drive to your pc hard drive. So its just a matter of loading up the emulator, popping the disk in to your pc and copying files within the emulator like you would in a normal ST. The other option is to mak disk images of your floppy disks. That basicly involves copying the entire disk sector by sector in to a file on your pc. Once that's done, you can actually load it as a virtual floppy disk in ST emulators or rewrite it to an actual floppy. Here's a good resource for disk image makers.

And I haven't seen a pocketwatch worn since 1888.

Dam...I mean damn.

Never saw the final layout revision, but I checked the last text revision I have for the small manual (rev4). Didn't notice anything like what you're alluding to in the Skill and Action Zone.

Mike, I thought we were responsible for every FB2 unit in every store all over the country? My personal GPS linked tracker says box #5749 is sitting in the breakroom at the BestBuy in Natchez, Mississippi. And box #6431 is sitting on the target loading dock in Toledo, Ohio. And #4791 is 3...make that 2.5 miles outside Boston.....wait, now 2.45 miles.....

Curt would be able to answer that with certainty, but I think I recall that it was going to be vector based (like aracde asteroids, asteroids deluxe). Don't quote me though, that time period was so hectic. Changes every other minute, and for these games (arcade asteroids, asteroids deluxe, etc.) I had to write the first versions of the manuals for them before I even saw those games. I think I personally had a good 3-5 revisions of each and every game, plus there was the going back and forth with the layout people who didn't keep the revisions straight, which created even more revisions. Not Infogrames, Atari Inc. Different company.

That's a hs case bottom, any picture of the top of the unit? A light sixer top wouldn't fit in a hs bottom, they use different shapes for the edges/molding.

Yah, I felt the same way with the Galaga/Ms. Pac-man units and the Centipede/Millipede/Missile Command ones. Just doesn't look right on a big oversized monitor. If you want one of these though, they're sold as conversion kits all over the web. Just do a google search. There's also the defender/defender II one, Space Invaders/Qiz, and the Arcade legends (which seems to have the most conversion packs). To the original poster - that's a bit high. Places like this are selling them for $2899.

Surprise no one caught this - this is a series we ran a few years ago by someone who was actually in the arcade industry from the early 80's through to a few years ago. He explains what happened from the coin-op company and vendor side (rather than the player side that everyone else is posting here about): Arcade Fantastic Part 1 Arcade Fantastic Part 2 Arcade Fantastic Part 3

no disrespect but, didn't he steal pong? or did you mean 'Pong arcade' as in he put it in arcade form? 944616[/snapback] It's unfortunate that people get hung up on the Pong controversay. If you remove Pong from the equation, early Atari was still a clear innovator. 944655[/snapback] Yup. Pong, pong doubles, puppy pong, space race (pong in space), pin pong, quadra pong, super pong, rebound (basketball pong), volleyball (volleyball pong), goal4..... Oh, and then there's home pong that launched the consumer division in '75. With the Sears versions of Pong, Pong IV, Super Pong, Super Pong IV, Pong Sports II, Pong Sports IV, Hockey-Pong, Hockey-Tennis II, and Speedway IV (more pong). And the Atari versions of Pong, pong doubles, super pong, super pong ten, super pong pro-am, super pong pro-am ten, ultra pong, and ultra pong doubles. A lot of innovation going on there. Reminds me of the Monty Python spam sketch. And I think if you would have removed pong from the equation of the early Atari, you wouldn't have had an Atari judging by the above.