oky2000

Cool, an STFM with blitter would make a good project.

Gauntlet 4 on Sega is full of awesome

There are various options for the Amiga world (none particularly cheap though) to use CDs but I wondered which, if any, machines I could use a CD or even DVD-rom drive on and exactly how (SCSI external ones?) Is there any way to fit a drive inside a 520/1040 case format too? Also which machines had a blitter socket as Atari promised, only the early Megas or did the 1040STF ever get a blitter socket included on the motherboard?

Cheers I was reading up on AMOS game making book PDF I downloaded and it mentions the loading of oversized screens and the memory pointer to place the real screen window inside it. If STOS has this can anyone tell me if having a blitter equipped ST would be able to scroll the screen faster or if I need an STE with the scrolling specific hardware? As soon as I find a cheap Mega STE I will start doing some test coding and STOS compiling for blitter equipped machines and see how the Micky mouse thing goes.

Sony did that for colorblind people I suspect, telling them to press the yellow or red button just like the SNES pad is an insult, SEGA used ABC (and DEF too for SF2 pad) but typographically it is easier to not get printing errors if you use symbols and assign each one a colour. Dyslexic and colour blind people can then read the instructions on screen without any additional problems

The youtube videos are of the Amstrad CPC version of the Windows conversion so I'm not 100% sure without downloading the actual game but yeah there are too many shades of certain colours for a C64 palette but not the 27 colour Amstrads I assumed. I can't play games on PC like this so would be nice for conversions to real retro machines, without a Zipstick or TAC-II it doesn't really work for me. 360 pads are fine for Colin McRae Rally games but not retro remakes IMO.

And here is a couple of 16 colour mock-ups from my favourite level of my favourite 80s arcade shmup...Vulcan Venture A fair bit of manual pixel swapping to map colours by hand to fit a 16 colour palette but I was surprised how good it could look so decided to tack these on too. I think we can all agree they look a million times better than Venom Wing by Thalamus lol

Would be nice to see the game come full circle back to the A8 where it all started first IIRC. I'm not 100% sure but I believe the C64 version program code was done from scratch rather than modifying the code from the C64 version of Bruce Lee 1. All the 6510 assembler source is printed in the scene section of the Lemon64 forums if anyone fancies a look through it. Would love to see some screens of it Jose

One of my favourite quick go sort of games is level 1 section 3 of the Sega Genesis/Megadrive game Castle of Illusion with a certain disney character in it. This game uses a lot of colours and has a neat parallax effect but I have whittled it down to a mere 16 colours and converted the sprites of Mickey down to just 4 colours (leaving 12 for the background/foreground) and it looked so good I wanted to share I plan on doing this section of the game for 3 different machines and all have to be done in a completely different way but this is how it could look on a regular 520ST launched half a decade before the 16 bit Sega console and it would still look as cute as the 64 colour version

Too many gameplay compromises on the 16kb version then so I will have to try and find the 48k version. The sooner the better because although the C64 UK version looks OK it sounds stupid with the gun sound being more like horses hooves going clippety clak on a cobblestone street in wales!! I wonder if there is any CASS file or something that I could turn into a WAV and run on my 800XL in the meantime?

I have some of that fake wood effect sticky back plastic on a roll and thought of doing the same thing but my 2600 vader is boxed and mint so it felt wrong to do that. Plus I have a few spare case tops from failed machines (but 6 switch versions so no good for 2600 vader case swap).

Haha nice one, my Egyptian cat was watching me play Desert Falcon with quite an interest

The lack of the cartridge port is probably down to costs on some of the Flashback models but it did make me smile when I bought my Flashback 3 for like 5 bucks in boxed as new condition and I found a couple of joysticks I could use on a real 2600 or even my VIC-20 haha Atari still have a lot of IP and can do such things until such time as the company is broken up into little pieces as happened to Commodore and Amiga specific Commodore IPs. A company doing a reboot of a mini C64 would not be able to put D9 joystick ports on it because Atari own the patent on that connector (which Sega had to pay through the nose out of/in court resulting in Sega buying a share of Atari in the 90s when Jack was still running the show). If Atari is split up it will be quite sad because things like the Flashback may not be possible due to royalties/financial implications of using various IPs in the product owned by multiple companies after the sale of Atari. It's just the way it is though really, a hell of a lot of kids had older systems from late 70s to before the crash and so there must be a massive market for things like the Flashback and other systems. If someone comes along and mass produces PCs that even just looked like C64s/Amigas/STs/Spectrums they would sell millions even if all they did was run Windows/Linux and played games via emulators and crappy Speedlink Competition Pro USB Joysticks IMO. I didn't like Flashback 4 version of Space Invaders (which saves me 50 bucks now) because it isn't the VCS version but something that could have been written for the Acorn BBC Micro etc. What's other peoples opinions of the generic Space Invaders on Flashback 4 vs the iconic looking/sounding/playing first of the killer apps that is VCS Space Invaders? (C= USA's C64x was nothing more than a general approximation of a C64 keyboard, keys caps were flat, set on a straight line of about 20 degree angle and not an arc, no PETSCII chars on key fronts and the case was even more uncomfortable to type on due to the higher breadbin case height. I could pick the phone up tomorrow and get an identical keyboard made by a few companies and it would look identical to the original...but feel nicer to type on like a PET/A800...so it's not a technical issue at all)

Possibly, but that's due to a spacious casing over a diminutive motherboard so another plus point

Yeah the styling was well suited to 70s decor and 70s electronics. I remember huge microwave with woodgrain, black plastic and polished aluminium switches and dials like the old TVs

I'm going to see if I can find it in an Atari magazine but I think 1st Word was a replacement for GEM Write which was previewed as the one to be originally the pack in WP application (together with GEM Draw IIRC.

I'd forgotten all about to 'programming it to within an inch of its life' aspect of utilizing what technology was in the machine. This is a big part of it, if some of those awesome slick coded games had not been programmed so expertly and efficiently things would never have gone ballistic as they did and worldwide too. Just so we are clear, I use Stella emulator maybe once or twice a year, my comments are about owning and playing on real CX2600 (my one is from 'Atari Ingersol'). It doesn't hurt that if someone with grandchildren who had bought an Atari 2600 right at the start of the revolution and introduced them to Atari VCS gaming early enough he could give his grandchild birthday money to go out to the stores and still buy an Atari from the same retailer as the grandad did in 1979 etc (even if it is a Flashback 3 or 4 only, still an awesome thought for me)

Lands of Havoc by Steve Bak for Microdeal was a launch title for UK release of the 520ST IIRC

Lately I've been going through my collection and have recently set up my 2600 permanently and getting awesome vibes playing through the classics (especially those ones missing from Flashback 3 I bought too) and started to wonder what makes Atari just so awesome. I know it is but I can't tell you why so maybe some others here can share their thoughts on it (assuming you agree). Some of the reasons that contribute to it being the coolest of all consoles for me are listed below. 1. Game art and packaging - The VCS has such awesome box art and labels/manual covers. This really was one of the greatest times for me because those Atari carts from the start had better artwork than 360/PS3 games today IMO. 2. The simplicity - Let's face it most of the best games are just instant on fun with no menus or stalling. Plug-in [press fire] and play for real. It's like there is no chaff clogging up quality gaming time being racked up with silly messages/menu screens. Games were somehow fun with just 4 directions and one action button, people designed around this joystick and the games never seemed lacking for extra buttons most of the time (Star Raiders of course being one time it works hand in hand with the video touchpad) 3. The sound - There is only one word to describe the SFX on the 2600 games....epic! Everything is just so awesomely bass heavy and thundering when required but also clean and crisp in straight tones. To me 2600 sounds are the equivalent of fuzz guitar to musical instruments. 4. It was the first and therefore it can never be bettered, only equalled. It is the console equivalent to Raiders of the Lost Ark in the Indy franchise, it was first and it was excellent at the time so can only be equalled and never bettered in the future. 5. The palette - let's face it in the late 70s how many colours did other machines have to play with? The attract mode on the 2600 games with a veritable rainbow of colours being cycled to display the onscreen graphics is just gorgeous and no other console did this or could even if it wanted to. I think it's some mix of all of the above for me but I wonder what other people think about this?

I don't own either yet but when I do search for it I seem to only find the 16k version on tape or cart. Can anyone tell me what the differences are between the low and high memory versions are as screenshots via google image search don't look different? Also is the 32/48k version available on tape or is it a disk only title?

On the C64 there is quite a few parallax games, both DLI style non overlapping like Nebulus bonus level and full screen overlay, underlay like Parallax, Enforcer or Menace (usually just redefining the same character dynamically to give simple geometric pattern scrolling like boulderdash title screen). I'm going to see how well this works myself with a little bit of coding soon. Are UDGs easy to do on the A8 to do it the same way?

Bounty Bob cart today, lovely game + instant loading

I do that too although only exclude things like t-shirts,adverts,replicas,PC CDROMs etc as I like to see the prices on all BINs for vintage Atari stuff Have on for consoles from G7000 to 3DO

Evolved is the word alright, until Intel made the 486 their CPUs were pure shit, substandard rubbish FACT. 486 came out with the 040, a superior piece of silicon. Pentium 1 60/66/75mhz small improvement, only PCI was a notable upgrade, which is well after the death (forced by US creditors) of Commodore Int'l. Between the 486 and the next decent CPU (Pentium M clock doubled internally CPU....which is what the 060 does...2 instructions on the rise and fall of the clock pulse) Intel again got ass screwed like a rent boy having a going out of business sale by IBM, AMD and Cyrix. The i7 is hardly something to champion the rise of the PC given that is 2 decades AFTER the fact (death of Amiga computer development in 1993). How about the fact that Windows 8 STILL doesn't load balance as well as a pre-emptive multi-tasking and multi-processing (sharing of single and multiple tasks across multiple executable autonomous custom chips) as well as an Amiga 1000 in 1986 hmmmm so regardless of how good the PC hardware is today (and it is good finally if you can find an OS worth using on such high power hardware...not Win7/8 bollox) it is no justification for any purchase of the PC in the home during the lifetime of Commodore machines. Like I said we are talking about assholes playing boring shit on their $4000 CGA PCs in 1986/87 or even 1991 when technically the Amiga 4000 on launch was the fastest and most colour rich high resolution desktop computer (albeit for maybe 3 months) so yeah. And we all know about the 90s hilarity where intel chips couldn't do addition and scientist the world over ran a mile from ALL x86 machines and stuck to PPC/060 based workstations. You really should know your history in the world context a lot better. A £499 Acorn Archimedes vastly out performed a £1500 386 'home PC' in 1991/92 with all the benefits of the PC byte per pixel video memory layout and none of the drawbacks of having to use Windows or using the weak limp wristed 386DX (which AMD rung the neck out of not Intel who gave up on it). Like I said I know PCs inside out especially when they had to use Win95 and Win98 and our IT Dept was one of the few worldwide that forced Microsoft to fix Win95 on pain of massive fines in court for product unfit for purpose sold/described. It wasn't my court case but I was their when those talentless head honchos were shitting bricks over it and refunded something like 10,000 COA licenses and paid a sweetener to keep things out of court as well as putting out the first service pack to attempt to resolve the ridiculous GDI resource leak in their crappy '32bit' OS . As for today's PCs, are you really that retarded that you think the Amiga architecture (which on its death bed still was significantly more sophisticated and effective as even a business machine than Windows 3.11/DOS 6.2) would not have improved as much in 20 years as POS PCs? Look at how Apple improved their crappy OS8/OS9 machines to shit all over Windows Vista PCs with their OS X which finally killed home sale monopoly Wintel had despite costing 50-75% more. For fucks sake in 1994 PCs had LESS characters to label files than a 1980 Commodore VIC-20 and the filesystem was less efficient than the last revision to that of the Amiga in OS 3/3.1. Be serious will you. When PCs failed even in the mid 1990s their environment ie DOS was less sophisticated than even a Commodore VIC-20 (ie like a Sinclair/Timex ZX81) which allows FULL screen editing like a word processor...so if you type something wrong you don't have to use extra programs like DOS key to save typing it again UNLIKE 1980 8 bit computers with 3.5kb RAM intended for use by kids Come on mate to be that retarded would mean your mum is probably typing this for you because someone that stupid would not able to type or use a mouse to click on stuff LOL

Tell me about it, you see maybe one disk based copy a year but I went on ebay one day, did my custom search which searches the entire site from the root (and has many exclusions to remove things like "atari teenage riot" or "opel commodore" etc) and one just popped up for an £14.99 buy it now. No box but I will use a good condition box and print the glossy cover for the top and the box looks the same as the manual cover.