oky2000

Nah isometric scrolling games with scenery and objects of Zaxxon is not possible IMO

I have seen it so it was out there on the web but can't find it now. Anybody got a link?

To me it just seems like a Game & Watch game engine running on a full blown micro computer I have it for the 7800 too without even ever looking for it lol guess that's just how it is when collecting back in the past when job lots were cheap lol

There is a process that can be done on most CRT tubes which they call 'boosting' but it does shorten the life of the CRT tube(think making a 200bhp Turbo engine produce 350bhp) but if the screen is dark already you might as well see if anyone in your area can boost the tube for you. It requires specialist equipment from the 80s era of TV repair however so not many engineers could do it. Failing this then I'd say either get a 1040STFM or get a new monitor I would say. That way you have spares that will be useful in the future (driving electronics for the SC1224 or a fully working 1040STF etc). Cables and converters are not really worth much used whereas a working 1040STF is worth something and probably will appreciate in value over the years as these machines start to fall off the ebay listings. Possibly sell the 1040STF to fund the purchase of another machine?

Somewhere on my 7 terrabytes of storage I had a huge archive of ST pictures which I downloaded years ago (no idea where from, possibly underground gamer) so I will see if I can find it and will zip them up into smaller packages and could email them to you. They are in .NEO/.PI1-3/.SPC etc as I had to install an viewer for Windows on my old computer to see them. Sadly it is almost impossible to find this stuff now, and it is no less easy to find the iconic Amiga pics either I remember seeing at user groups in the late 80s for both machines.

Atari never released their CD-ROM unit so no CD games ever happened for the ST. To be fair the immense resources for Artists/Coders/Musicians was way above the budget of your average publisher. Technically a missed opportunity, if there was a way to use Blitz Basic with CDTV native track/disc controls then with todays tools it would be an excellent way for a small group of talented people to do it justice (and by do it justice I mean make Cinemaware style games but with masses of speech, music, animations and complex gameplay/huge amount of levels. Ditto for STOS and CD access although it's harder to get CD-rom going on an ST without a standard IDE interface built in or a stand alone machine. I think Jack probably would have realised this and backed out of the CD based machine market (it's not like the CDTV flew off the shelves even with Nolan Bushnell involved, shame really).

Focus ST is a pretty nippy car

I had assumed I could take one out of a faulty motherboard from a 520STE (motherboards really are not repairable sometimes) but maybe they are not quite the same as the ones inside the regular Mega ST?

Vanguard Good luck!

So even with the STE extensions you think would not be easy to do 320x200 screen smooth scroll via STOS extensions then? Does number of colours being scrolled help, for example the parallax overlay spiders webs can easily be reduced to just two colours (3 with transparent area included)

If we are talking original games in packaging (have 1000s of ST/Amiga cracks on disk) then.... Amiga 170+ games (including every Cinemaware game in big box release, sadly only 3 popcorn box releases) Atari ST 250+ games C64 approx 2000 games excl compilation contents 200+ VIC-20 games 200+ MSX games 200+ Amstrad games (including 2 CPC+ cartridges to go with the 464+), 100+ ZX Spectrum games, 30+ Intellivision, 20+ Coleco, 60+ Atari VCS (but half are unboxed), 26 Atari 7800 200+ Atari 8 bit games, 23 CD32 games 50+ Memotech MTX (the most painful collection to acquire!!) 50+ BBC Micro games 18 G7000 Videopac/Odyssey 2 games. 75+ Commodore 16/Plus4 games 5 ORIC 1 games, 7 Dragon 32 games, 3 TI99/4A games, 7 Mattel Aquarius games (4 on tape) Hanimex TVG-3000 2 cartridges 4 Acetronic/Prinztronic/Radofin cartridge console games SNES 3 games (only 3 I want haha) NES 15 games N64 9 games SMS 7 games Gamegear 21 games Megadrive 18 games PC-Engine 4 games Acorn Archimedes 4 games (don't laugh!!) (excluded PS1 and onwards because for me this is not retro and no different to PS3/PS2/Xbox)

I never had Yars Revenge as a kid but played it about a year ago for the first time and it was pretty damned fun.

Plenty of great ideas here to get my teeth stuck into, keep em coming For the record I loved Berzerk, Phoenix, Defender, Space Invaders, Pac-man, ESB, Atlantis too.

You're not missing much, the perfectly acceptable port to the C64 by Ocean software proves that, compared to other C64 games at least, Mario Bros is a game that is a £1.99 budget game at best and even then it is vastly inferior to 100s of superlative £1.99 C64 games like Thrust/Slicks/Park Patrol/Panther/Action Biker....etc etc It's worth a fortune but I will never load it up again in my life lol

There are 100s of vertical OR horizontally scrolling shoot'em up games from Gradius/Nemesis backwards chronologically and its progressive weapons upgrade system rather than it's scrolling background are the greatest improvement to gameplay in Gradius (and this is the spin off aspect of Gradius) including limited shielding (seen in Vanguard first). Salamander however is different to gradius in a few areas. 1. The play area although horizontally scrolling in Gradius/Nemesis does allow some 20% vertical movement if you move your vic viper to top or bottom edge and continue doing so, Salamander does not provide this extra breathing space, the screen width is the play area width too. 2. The weapons upgrades are generic tokens in Gradius which you accumulate and use with strategy (multiple or laser first etc) in Salamander they are specific instant upgrades for specific weapons/feature upgrades so you literally pick up a ripple laser pack upgrade instantly. 3 Salamander is the first one I know of after Vanguard (there may be others) that has a specific map which requires the game to be changed from horizontal to vertical shmup sections combining two previously separate game types and alternating back and forth between H/V scrolling again many times in order to play through the entire game to completion. 4. Salamander and Vanguard have speech, Scramble and Nemesis/Gradius do not. 5. Scramble has no shield power up, Vanguard/Nemesis/Salamander do however (even if Vanguard's is time limited and Konami classics are hit sustained limited) So for that reason whatever Wikipedia says Salamander has nothing more in common with Scramble than it scrolls the screen SOME OF THE TIME from left to right (although technically Scramble like many early arcade machines is using a monitor rotated 90 degrees in the cab so it is technically a vertically scrolling game too as far as the executed machine code goes). Like I said Scramble is a single celled organism and Vanguard is the equivalent of the mammal that outlived the dinosaurs if Salamander is the modern human in gaming style evolutionary terms. YMMV and we shall agree to disagree methinks

Hmmm well after getting thoroughly bored playing combat alone (who thought a 2 player only game would be a good pack in!!!!!!!!!!!) I got Space Invaders and boy was that game nice. I prefer it on VCS to playing it on MAME today that's how nice I think it is. Berzerk is good too for sure. Star Raiders was also nice not sure if that is early enough for you though? It's on the list of NISB games on the original blue box version I want to get if I ever see another one again. Worst....hmmm Pele's Soccer looks kinda shit, Air Sea Battle didn't impress me, Combat is nothing special (no AI for 1 player gaming and pretty basic looking, 2 player only games are kinda useless...I can play 2 player only board games like Monopoly lol no need for a games console then) there's probably loads of early simple games I would never buy.

Salamander alternates vertical and horizontal scrolling shmup levels, so Scramble may be the single celled Amoeba of all shmups but Vanguard was the first shmup I know of that alternated between vertical and horizontal scrolling levels.

VCS has many awesome games but every system has one game you will play forever and for the 2600 for me it has always been Vanguard, it's like the granddaddy of Konami's Salamander and I prefer the colourful VCS graphics to the 5200 arcade carbon copy graphics. I will still be playing this in decades ahead How about you?

Yeah true, computer game Mr Wiz by Superior Software cassette tape got worn out more than the cartridge contacts on any console version me and friends had in the 80s tbh.

Exactly, I'd buy a dead 800 or 400 in mint condition for the designs

Simple answer is no if you have no need of a 4 joystick ported 48kb system. Personally the 800 is my favourite machine so I would rather have that than another XL or XE (I have 130, 65, 800XL so technically no need for one either) and am always on the lookout on ebay UK for a nice 48kb setup. Atari 800 + 810 disk drive = excellent looking and capable setup on desk IMO

I don't even have a soldering iron at the moment but will take you up on that in the future if I find either of my FMs have the blitter socket space reserved on the board I forgot to say, those slimline laptop CD drives are also standard IDE you just need to get an adaptor plug that converts it to standard 44pin ribbon cable layout (the same connector you use to install them inside Amiga 600/1200 models and we all know how crap their PSUs are for wattage). They use next to no power also but are IDE only so would need an IDE interface that fits inside the ST casing etc. I'm not sure what software is needed, if any, to access the CD filing system (on Amiga you need to install a program to actually read the CDs IIRC)

Lotus II on ST is definitely not worse than Lotus RECS etc (and better than any proper 2.5D racing game on the SNES) but sadly there is no STE enhanced version of Lotus Trilogy to improve the music/SFX. One thing though that you have to remember whilst putting aside the more advanced custom hardware of the Sega, and this goes for comparisons with the Amiga too, is for some reason the Japanese pretty much programmed everything to 99% of the Sega hardware's capabilities....on the ST maybe a handful of games approached that sort of level of technical expertise or graphical talent (this is just as true for the Amiga too) so it is an unfair comparison. If you check out my screenshot for Level 1.3 of Castle of Illusion Mickey Mouse game in 16 colours it gives you a great idea of what kind of quality is possible on the ST (STE for sure) and yet you can bet your ass if US Gold had converted such a game it would look nothing like that. Also remember my Golden Axe 16 colour mockups on ST and you can see they look better than the Amiga version by US Gold let alone the ST version that was produced. And this is me, a small time pixel artist not even that amazingly talented...just hard working and a perfectionist It's also worth noting that the Sega console had the same sort of FM based sound hardware as many mid-late 80s arcade games that even Atari made like Road Runner etc so the ST version can not sound the same using an AY/YM chip. On the plus side the soundtrack on Stardust for the STE would be very difficult for the SEGA to replicate. Arcade conversions are on both, Shadow of the Beast too and Zoop plus other big selling non-arcade conversions (as Ocean got involved in the console business too as well as a few others like System 3's Myth and Risky Woods by EA) The best way to look at it though is that the ST is a 16bit Amstrad CPC (very flexible system where the fast screen memory access and CPU is used as the programmer wants), the Amiga a 16bit Atari 800 (OK not strictly true as sound hardware is fundamentally different and the grunt of the graphics work is done by a very nice blitter but closer than any other 8bit I can think of YMMV) and the Sega Genesis/Megadrive is essentially more like a 16bit C64 than any other 8bit machine (powerful sprites, very distinct sound with some sample capabilities and restricted palette usage conditions on screen area but ultimately high colour resolution but YMMV).

You mean we geeks can have girlfriends?

Zaxxon 2600 vs Zaxxon Colecovision aged the console as badly as Amiga AGA Doom clones vs Doom on 486SX25