oky2000

I think if Lemon64 still had the game downloads it would be better than GB64 for most people. There is no way to weed out cracks/hacks/duplicates(ie overseas release)/PD/magazine listings from the GB64 results which can make searching there too much of a chore sometimes. So as it stands they compliment each other perfectly especially for casual browsing to find hidden/forgotten gems IMO.

£3,500 is a lot! Just to compare in summer of 1990 I bought my first Amiga 2000 after selling my first business (and why not?! lol) and the 2000s were never a bargain. My machine had 9mb of RAM (1mb Chip 8mb Fast) and a very fast SCSI 48mb HDD on a Supra hard card. I even tacked on Dpaint 3, Dvideo 2, Digi-Paint 4, 1084SD monitor (the one that looks like the curvy original A1000 monitor) a Rombo Vidi unit plus colour splitter and internal Genlock etc etc and the whole lot cost £2,700 before negotiating a discount. The things you could do on this machine was so far ahead of any PC at the time...like grabbing 200+ frames of a scene from Battlestar Galactica and using them as animated brushes to paint with to make my own space battles I don't have any musical talent myself but my friend built up a home music studio with a 4mb STE and Cubase and with the money he saved vs Mac/PC system he could spend it on some very cool MIDI instruments too. And both machines were much nicer to use with Spreadsheets or WPs too. The reality was most people chose not to buy these machines due to the logo...more fool them! I mean Windows printers (dumb laser printers using the PC to do the processing pre-printing) is not even a new thing...Atari were doing this first with their SLM/Mega ST packages too and ditto CAD stations based on Amiga 2000s using flicker fixers and the newer 1280x576 resolution of the Amiga ECS chipset. People say to me 'but computers today are much faster' and I say to them if I throw turds at you at 150 mph not 50mph does it make it a better experience? You can't improve a turd like Windows by polishing it (Vista/7 AERO GUI) OR by moving it faster a la chucking turds at people...if anything you get even more of a mess

I never really understood the whole CGA PC + NES combo that 90% of households settled on in the 80s. I was at college in 86-88 and we had an EGA 8086 class machine (Research Machines Nimbus PC). Now we all know that even a 512kb Amiga 1000 with colour monitor and 2 disk drives was half the cost of a basic 256k PC XT clone so there is no excuse for that. However many people have said the NES was cheaper than the ST but then ST games were £20 in the early days and if you had a family member with a business you could get the 520 STFM for £260 in 1987. Now pick 4 games which were far far superior on the ST like Commando, DotC, Ghosts n Goblins and Gauntlet 1 and subtract the £80-90 saved over the NES cart prices and the two cost the same so far...so when you buy a copy of something intellectually stimulating like The Pawn you're already better off with both the machine and the cost of ownership IMO.

Sorry if this is in the wrong place. I got a 2600 Jr and it didn't have the correct PSU with it but I pulled out an Ingersol one from my other light sixer and connected it all up. I put in a few games that came with it and they all worked after dusting off the cart contacts no problem. However when playing Defender II after about 20 seconds of that the game stopped working. Now whichever of those three games I plug in they all come up with random noises and the sort of glitches you get before blowing on the carts. Tried about 20 times with all 3 games and the 2600 will not run the games, just the same random patterns/noises like games you need to blow on to get working. Opened up the console and plugged the carts directly into the connector like that after cleaning it a little and it does the same thing still. Never seen this fault so thought I would ask some advice here. I really hate to throw away anything vintage so would appreciate any advice. I know it's probably only worth a tenner or less but it's the principle of the thing...if we keep junking PCs and keep repairing retro gear maybe the world will be back to how it should have stayed haha

Probably said this before but I had a 520STM months after release, and Neochrome was probably the finest bundled app that people have never heard of/don't remember If all you wanted to do was play games then shoot me if you like but I felt the C64 was a more polished game playing experience due to some horrible coding in ST or Amiga games vs quality of % of machine's potential extracted in C64 games (which seemed to push the barriers constantly from birth to death and beyond for Commodore Inc). The two absolute worst machines you could own in 1985 was PC XT (and compatibles) and of course the NES which is hilarious because neither sold here in the UK at all! When people tell me the ST was terrible for games I point them to the £40 NES carts of Commando, Defender of the Crown, Ghosts and Goblins and Gauntlet 1. and in 1987 the 520STFM was only £100 more than the crappy NES deluxe set I also laugh when people tell me computers were slow and unreliable then too. My Amiga NEVER crashed unless I ran badly written PD utils or games not tested for 1mb A1000 Amigas vs 1mb A500 Amigas. XP being the closest MS ever got to writing an efficient useable OS needs reboots every few days....my Amiga running 3 professional Apps was on for weeks and boots up faster than my phone even today The original ST (not FM models) with the expensive Fujitsu feeling soft touch keyboard is also one incredibly nice professional system in use, I have one I am building a studio around. If Tangerine Dream could make such iconic albums with just an ST then clearly there is no reason why you can't use it today...because music today in the charts is pure and utter crap...bit like Windows 8 on an i7 for professional use

I've got the graphics from Lotus II ripped for some levels and I can see all the scaling is pre-calc'd on ST and Amiga I am hoping one day to change the Lotus cars to Dodge Charger and Challenger options along with a Camero even if it means dumped memory freezes for each level into a hard drive image.

I really wanted one again but got burned on the last sale...which that seller then cost me the option of picking up the mint in box non-yellowed one from Germany which went for 100 euros (yeah crazy low price!!!) because I didn't even know if I would ever see my money again. I have given up ever finding a nice one and only sold mine as it wasn't a repair I could get sorted here in the UK at the time. To be honest I only really want it for coding (HD essential!) and games playing (in 16mhz mode).

Lotus II/III fits each race course in RAM so I don't see why it wouldn't fit each track of Pole Position too.

I agree, with 512k you should use precalculated graphics IMO not to waste CPU cycles. Also why no faded colours in the sky like Windows port?

Flashback 4 is definitely emulation core (look at the included version of Space Invaders) and seeing as even today there isn't a single finished Atari Jag emulator for the PC you can forget that being squeezed into a crappy little FPGA this decade It's a nice idea but the best you could hope for is inclusion of Atari 5200 (and hence 800XL) cartridge games. So 2600, 5200 and 7800 in one box is quite feasible I think. Probably cost $200/£100 at best with mass production though *ouch* The link for the flashback mod for a cart slot is for v2 of the hardware btw.

I like the pencils picture because it legitimizes the case for 8 bit graphics as an art form even using very early 1980s tech in peoples homes. To me it's no less amazing as the pictures from SiGraph 80-83 created with mainframes.

It's a really effective way of showing programmers how they should have viewed the facilities. Most converted games never used anything like the amount of DLI palette colour swaps that would have benefited regular bitmapped colours IMO. You have the palette colour choices there, if you don't use them they are wasted. I've attached the image (300% pixel resize for viewing comfort) so it won't get lost now

Thanks, managed to run it in the emulator, take a screenshot and convert the PCX to PNG

All I can see is the flickr banner saying image is no longer available for the horizontal pencils

Hey does anyone still have the A8 picture of the coloured pencils drawn horizontally?

Can I just say that on the audio front MM A8 is something special so far. Whilst the C64 has excellent in game music the title screen music would turn any normal person into a knife wielding psycho so looking forward to it

I just had to hook up my 2600 to my 36" CRT and link that to my amp and speakers....and well....Atari 2600 is just awesome at 100 watts RMS

Near Dark is both an awesome soundtrack and movie. But again if you watch the various 13 episodes of Street Hawk you will hear how awesome Tangerine Dream are. Such a shame the DVDs are in f%#king mono I also had Underwater Sunlight which was very nice despite the limitations of compact cassette technology To be fair however even today you could use any ST or Amiga midi packages to produce high quality retail level music....the CPU power may have increased this decade but the talent seems to have decreased for music in the retail music environment lol

Me and my friend were quite into Tangerine Dream in the 80s as teens, and who wouldn't be with their absolutely stunning soundtrack to all 13 episodes of Street Hawk? But yes we both had STs in the mid 80s and it was fun to read the inlays of each cassette album we got and that they went out of their way to mention they used STs for composing music. ST Midi packages (Cubase/Steinberg Pro etc) are to music what Amiga + well known graphics packages (Dpaint 3 or Digipaint 3 etc) are to pixel art and digital photo-montage. It was a great time for people, truly a bedroom revolution with musicians, pixel artists and programmers all born from tinkering with 'toy computers' at home. I'm not a musician but I'd be interested to know the thoughts of people who used it on STFMs to Falcons and how it compared with Cubase PC and Mac (including issues you may have with crappy Windows or Mac OS at the time compared to efficient and fast GEM on Atari's not just the actual Cubase package, in both eras)

It was a tongue in cheek post yes. I'm just saying if we could at least have a version to play a few levels not necessarily the whole finished game it would be great because I am planning on doing an ultimate comparison of the game on all 8 bits for youtube and this looks like the nicest version for me so it would be a shame if it doesn't appear in the video. I especially like the rendition of Hall of the Mountain King on Pokey here.

Very interested in this. Is the video output nice quality still? Also do you have any of the packaging or manuals at all or is it literally just the machine and PSU?

This is the sequel to Silly Putty on the Amiga (or Super Putty on CD32) but there were never any Putty games planned for the C64/8 bit as far as I can tell.

Just release the game as is for the community, enough already with tinkering

Very interesting, I have never seen hardware sold with that game when I find it on ebay so never even knew about this. It's one of those games on my 'will play it on real hardware one day' list but now I have to make sure I get the full release version not just the disks hmmmm. As the ST has a cartridge port it is probably quite do-able to put a soundchip on a cartridge (like the SID chips carts for the Commodore 16/Plus4 etc) but like others have said if you have an STE and a Roland MT-32 (LAPC-1??) then it's probably good enough not to warrant a bespoke soundchip implementation. It's funny isn't it, the early games like Gauntlet 1 and Technocop etc didn't seem to have a problem using just samples via software 68000 based routines, it's only the later games fuelled by greedy CEOs that were technically inferior in implementation vs what is possible IMO.

I managed to find 142 and 136 of CVG but other than that I think 127-16? is missing so will concentrate on those whilst looking for my missing 1984-1988 issues too. I might have to start selling off my spares on ebay to fund this though looking at completed listing prices. Why can't I just find some sap on a car bootsale stall selling complete sets of CVG or ST Format etc like other people gnnnnn all I get is silly PS1s and pre 1977 technology (AKA old crap) lol I have CVG guide to consoles 1 and 2 (4 is available on the internet) if anyone needs them, so that also just leaves no. 3 which I haven't seen on ebay for years. They should cover the Atari Lynx anyway.