oky2000

For me this game was one of the most fondly remembered, not only did it make your jaw drop at what you thought was impossible on your humble 8 bit but it is a damned fine game. I find it more enjoyable than even Starfox on the SNES really. Sadly EA never released this for the A8 which I presume is because the original programmer did all 8bit versions and nobody could take on the mammoth task of converting it. Now that we have the excellent Space Harrier by Sheddy who has shown us just how impeccable 2.5D can look on the A8 I wonder if anybody is working on or thinking about converting this awesome game?

The absolute fastest I know (always <2 minutes for 300mb files) is Putlocker but never uploaded to it so no idea on their restrictions regarding file types because I've only seen uploads for video files. Most of the others have popups riddled with spyware trackers no doubt but freakshare is usually fast (up to 12 mins for 350mb files).

Lost had an ending? lol it was more like "screw it we will never be able to explain all this mystical bullcrap we hinted at for 5 years so let's just stop making it" Hmmmm 3 is a difficult number, and it also depends if I am stranded on the desert island alone/fat minging bird/a bloke or with a gorgeous young sexy bit (with very low standards haha) Vanguard is defo #1 Then it gets tricky.....but after a lot of thinking I would say Star Raiders #2 And then E.T. #3 <joke> Number 3 is really tough because there are plenty of games I like but would I be able to play them for ages and ages. I love driving games but Enduro and Pole Position are nice enough but not really going to give me my driving game fix in the same way as Colin McRae Rally or Lotus Turbo 2 (Amiga NTSC of course) so........ I will have to think a lot more about #3 or just pick anything from the remaining 20 or so games I really like but do not have much longevity. Two players or one player games obviously make a difference too but if there was 2 of us then maybe Combat because it's a nice 2 player game I think. Possibly the co-op mode in Space Invaders. If I am alone...then I can't decide now.

Well Atarisoft were no better then, Galaxian on VIC-20 is much better than the C64 port for example (and there are others too which are obviously nowhere near the potential of the machine) so if that is true it's nothing new.

They're the same scans, the scanner gave permission probably to have them there. They're nowhere near as bad as The Games Machine ones but still you will not be able to type in most of the listings which is a real shame as there's plenty of games still not typed in for many different formats. It's fine for the ST/Amiga and SNES/Megadrive years really though. As for that site, the downloads are rapidshare links and one magazine has taken about 8 hours so far and still not finished (and could crap out at any time) so great effort but really these sites need to use FASTER free download sites like Freakshare or Putlocker etc etc or just put them in a torrent and up them on TPB (which is what I would do probably). I can't see the FBI hunting me down for scans of old retro computer magazines

And if it looked like this guess how many they would have sold to unsuspecting Mac lovers (or people buying them presents more precisely) (yeah it looks kinda ugly I know but can only work with images on the net, this was just an SM124 and Mega ST image photoshoped to make an All-in-One like the PCW but ended up looking like a deformed 128k Mac haha oooops)

Yep that's the one. There were versions of BASIC, other business apps and even games e.g. Rainbird's The Pawn was converted to the PCW. The last machines (PCW10) were 3.5inch drived machines with a much more GEM/MAC OS look. In the UK they were VERY popular due to the fact even medium businesses didn't want to waste cash on an IBM XT class machine when you could get 5 PCWs and give them to 5 secretaries which makes much more business sense really. Wouldn't get one for my collection but I can see why they sold and I know Atari explored a LOT of different markets so they must have thought about it. Just wondering if they were going to effectively use a 130ST in an all in one case and have the word processor on a rom. The 520STM was 249+sales tax by the time of the 520STFM and mono 24 pin printers were cheap enough for manufacturer joint projects (this is what Commodore did for their peripherals when Jack was running it).

Tommy - Excellent find. Perhaps we could get in touch with them and ask them if they have any more on the to do list for STF or have run out of magazines and fill in the blanks to get a complete set of STF done once and for all. I can't see The ONE ST magazine and IIRC only 2 issues are missing to complete that set (The ONE is done already before the split to Amiga/ST and dumping of PC gaming). Trouble is I don't know where they are now. I haven't checked scans for The Games Machine but if they are the horrible ones from Zzap64.co.uk forget that (they're really over-compressed and not that high resolution) and we need to do those again (ditto for their CVG scans which again are too highly compressed to type in games listings from scans). SubFunction - I don't think any one person should have to pay all the P&P costs etc for scanning of donated magazines as this could get expensive. How about I set up a specific page with a Paypal donate button and then anyone in the community can offer whatever they wish to the cause and we can take from that pot to pay people's P&P costs whenever needed (showing the balance and what amounts were used for which magazine's P&P)? Perhaps this could also be used to purchase job lots of missing magazines too on the off chance they turn up on ebay (I got a whole set of ACE mags in mint condition for £40 including postage last year) if everyone agreed? Although I rarely see them, maybe twice a year. We could also make a list of people who are willing to do some high quality scans? The greater the number of countries the less the P&P is to get the mags to the scanners then. I could also sell my duplicate issues of ST Amiga format on ebay and put that towards P%P costs. (Also IIRC isn't someone over at Atari-forum doing scanning, or was anyway)

The Calamus/SLM804/Mega 4 bundle was cheap for such a system (bundle cost less than a similar spec Postscript Laser Printer alone!) but the Amstrad PCW8256 was intended for small/medium businesses who just wanted to write letters and nothing more (it came with a daisywheel printer initially I think and the OS was DOS/CPM style crap). I wonder if there was ever a basic machine with built-in-Wordprocessor intended to be bundled with a 24pin printer for basic WP tasks that got beyond the 'back of a cigarette packet idea' stage It may well have grown into the DTP bundle but that's half a decade later and not a competitor for the £499 Amstrad rubbish...like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer comparing them two setups lol Actually an SLM804 printer was something I always wanted for my collection but I've given up hope on that now

This was 1986 though

So I was watching Microlive and the episode mentioned the UK launch of a new games console by Atari and this was the time of the 1040STF and 520STM (it was said to be £70 so is this the 7800 or 2600 Jr I dunno) However they also quoted Sam Tramiel as saying they were also going to be launching a dedicated Word Processing machine to rival the cheap and nasty Amstrad PCW8256 setup. Now this is news to me for sure so was wondering was this simply another vapourware product they announced intended to judge market response OR did they actually do any work towards building such a machine. And if they did do any work on such a machine was it a non-68000 based machine, a 68000 based machine not compatible with the ST or a stripped down ST+SM124 setup with Wordprocessor in ROM? Would be interested if anyone has any idea about what this machine was about and if it even got designed fully on paper let alone prototyped. The episode in question was early 1986 (whenever the first Atari UK show was held).

I think a few years ago the C64 projects scene was limited to new games from TND etc but lately there has been a hive of activity (Donkey Kong Jr, Bruce Lee II and others) as more people feel the need to do *something* on the C64. Don't know if we will see anything as technically excellent as Sheddy's A8 port of Space Harrier but there is plenty going on so on a par with A8 scene lately. As for WTF are we talking Amiga vs PC in a C64 vs A8 thread on an Atari-centric forum I don't know lol. I guess it came out of the incorrect statement that in the early 90s you couldn't do shit with custom chips and PC was the future (despite many many machines between 520ST and Playstation 1 proving both the NES and x86 PC were the fools choice both technically and price/performance wise). As for expansion possibilities well...if you wanted fancy toys you should NEVER have tried to expand an A500 or STFM really. As I've said in 1990/89 I had a top end A2000 that no PC or Mac set-up could replicate in either memory or capabilities at any price sorry. I even had a 16bit Sunrize sound card (in/out) for that machine. What a machine and with a 486 bridgeboard could run shitty Win95 well enough to convert files etc I will say this for the A1200...I got one on launch day (no regrets for my uses) and used it the next month to print out some technical drawings using full overscan Hi-res lace mode to preview a page 4 times this size. To put it in perspective that's a resolution of nearly 1500x600 which is something no £2000 PC could display even in monochrome off the shelf and many people were stunned by these pin-sharp ultra hi-res drawings which I printed at the native resolution of my Cannon Bubblejet and they asked how did I do that on a PC (haha). So even a 'shit' A1200 on launch day could do some things no PC could do. Sadly unlike the Amiga 1000 in 1985 it was not 'does everything 10x better vs PC' so yeah. As for people buying PPC accelerators to play Wipeout....LOL why? Get a friggin £100 PS1 by then of course. Don't fight the deficiencies just use the advantages of each machine. Deluxe Paint 5 can't do Photoshop style editing but then Photoshop is shit for pixel art compared to Dpaint 3 so horses for courses really no? I still personally think the machines are too different because they concentrate on fundamentally different areas to achieve their goal (a machine that can produce great games is just one aspect of it). The worst thing about the C64 though is the disk interface, that stupid bodge to make the faulty IEC on C64 work is shit and I'd rather load games from tape to be honest lol So for the A8 I'm constantly looking for carts and disks but rarely tapes and on the C64 the only disk games I look for are for multi-load games like Sky Fox or the Cinemaware games.

Cheers. Is leaving Terramis the Gauntlet/Alien Syndrome type game? Think I remember checking that one out a couple of days ago when I saw a cheap copy on ebay. I don't have either game as original floppies but might have it on a crack disk (got 1000s of them lol lost count). I just keep it around because it's cool to have a 2+ megabyte STFM in the collection.

Atarimania has the only scans I know of online for downloading and apart from ST Amiga format I don't have anything else that isn't scanned already Nobody donated any mags and 99% of the time mags are for sale individually only on ebay which is too expensive which is a problem for all machines I am trying to source magazines for not just the ST...but the ST is one of the least supported for scanning preservation projects etc. With the difficulty in sourcing the mags (cost me a fortune to end up with ST Amiga format 1-13 full set in the end then someone scanned them and published them the day I was scanning my last issue!! Shame they are really shit quality though) I started concentrating on owning all issues of CVG up to about 100 which at least covers everything from CBM Pet to Amiga 1200 (wouldn't collect the Playstation/3DO era though) and along with ACE and The Games Machine I plan to rescan them properly. I missed a couple of bulk collections due to pondering over the buy it now button for a bit too long as both times it was a bad month and there was wayyyyyyyyyy more rare things to purchase in those weeks. Always the way lol when you're loaded up in your paypal account there is FA bargains on ebay worth buying

I've got one fitted to a second generation 520STFM with 720kb internal drive and it's nice to have but floppy games have never said they used more than 1mb when I ran them (yet). It was free for me though, I bought an STFM years ago and it wasn't advertised in the auction so went for peanuts.

Exactly, Nintendo/Microsoft and Apple all had their own private monopolies to survive if one of their products being released being below par for the market (Gameboy, Windows + MS Office, iPod revenues propping up N64/Xbox1/OS 9 overpriced PowerPC Macs respectively) BUT Atari, Acorn and Commodore at the end had only one product to survive with and were not exactly loaded with profits from the early 90s sales. Sega is the ultimate example, there was NOTHING wrong with the Dreamcast but by then they had burned a lot of customers with 32X and Mega CD fiasco's and they had no other market to fall back on after leaving the Saturn out in the wind with no 3D Sonic game released EVERY (would Nintendo ever not release Zelda/Mario games for any console, not bloody likely). Also Playstation 2s had the Sony logo on the box and Dreamcasts had Microsoft logos and were concentrating on existing console buyers not new potential markets. But basically PS2 would have been a bit of a damp squib too if it wasn't for the combined DVD player and game console functionality out of the box (something Microsoft/Nintendo and Sega failed to predict would be important for 21st century box under the telly when looking to expand the total userbase to new demographics)

And even if not in the shops you could get some amazing systems via mail order from people like White Knight Technologies. Commodore UK even set up specialist groups for people wanting to do professional things like 24bit desktop video in realtime digitally. Window's 95 was just about good enough (yet vastly inferior to OS2 Warp) so big companies didn't have to throw away x86 architecture, for home use the death of Atari/Commodore and Acorn was a much bigger factor. You had 2 choices left...Macs (as Gordon Harwood mail order pushed) or PCs. It's easy to compete when you have only one competitor and they are hell bent on only selling to overpaid fashionista twits who want to check their emails on £2000 machines than real users like those that were praying for the missing link between Amiga 4000/030 and Amiga 1200 (which was actually in the works but they chose to try and get back in the black with the CD32...not enough money for both machines). Amiga 3000 case, A1200 + 2mb FAST ram + 28mhz 020 + 3.5 IDE drive space and detachable keyboard for £500 as proposed would have wiped the floor with that £999 386 shit on PCs, WIPED THE FLOOR. I saw the demos in 1995 running on Win 95 showing multitasking....they were MORE JERKY than the Fred Harris demonstration of multitasking on the Amiga 1000 in 1985 lol it made me laugh but also sad as I knew with no competition other than overpriced Macs that home computing fun was DEAD FOREVER now

Well if that is the case then perhaps you could explain why Super Stardust on Wintel requires over a 120mhz Pentium CPU and £200 audio ISA card and £200 blitter equipped VRAM PCI card to match the gameplay experience as well as audio visual sophistication of said game running on a £299 Amiga 1200 with no enhancements? It is even hard drive installable too so you can't even poke your tongue out at the disk loading times. This is ignoring the fact that most technical people were still pulling their hair out trying to get the game to work on Windows 95 with CD-rom access drivers and sound card drivers conflicting each other lol. An Amiga 1000 from 1985 runs Lotus Turbo Challenge II perfectly, and on NTSC models it is faster and smoother than Outrun on Sega Genesis. And yet to run that game on a PC you need a 1992 32bit 486 25+ Nhz CPU ie a machine costing £2000+ released 8 years later. At what point is a PC port of Shadow of the Beast 1 perfectly done possible for the same price for new hardware as a £399 Amiga 500 512k machine? Exactly The Amiga's load balancing is far superior to any Mac or PC commercial OS sold at any time before the turn of the century (and for most of that they didn't have multitasking at all in most cases) and cutting and pasting between the clipboard with Digi-view and Digipaint 3 was a real creative persons dream that could not be replicated in the late 80s on any other platform, Mac's were still overpriced monochrome units for under $4000 in the 80s and forget PCs and their ZX81 user interface DOS with totally stupid File Manager/Program Manager interface of Win 1-3 kludged on top. Deluxe Paint 3 did things no other paint package ever done during the life of Commodore or ESCOM by integrating the animation, the 2.5D operations and the painting operations into one package at the initial design level (and what else would you expect from the man who wrote 3D studio right after because he knew he had created the perfect pixel art and animation package and could never improve on its perfection...his quote not mine). I think you are getting caught up between the talentless products written for Amiga by greedy software houses most of the time and the actual hardware capabilities. I can play a MOD of Zoolook that is indistinguishable to 99% of the population from a 128kbits MP3 rip from CD...1985 technology this is going up against next century technology! So how can a machine that can animate at 25fps, reproduce any 4 sounds you can record simultaneously, display to full broadcast resolution in 1985 in multiple territories, time itself to the electron gun of a CRT tube even more accurately than a 2600 VCS, include a GUI multi-tasking OS that before XP MS had no answer for in any way, at the start have defined multimedia formats for audio samples, music, still images, animations etc fail? Dumb consumers buying inferior EGA PCs costing 500% more that's how. The fact Commodore were stupid enough not to market it for most of summer 86 to summer 87 at all is the reason it failed in the USA (in the UK we buy on specification not brand names hence many A1000s went to doctors, professionals and art studios here in the mid 80s who would rather use pen and paper than a PC with Windows 286 for quadruple the cost). DTP via Atari's genius SLM+Mega being the exception which is EXACTLY where the 90s 'windows laser printer' idea was stolen from. Postscript laser printers alone cost more than a Mega 4+SLM804 package and this custom way of printing using the computer's memory and CPU was a massive price performance advantage. Now if you were trying to expand your A500 to something worth thousands in the Mac/PC market with internal slots then you bought the wrong machine and is as futile as trying to use Mario Paint on a SNES to do the work of a Quantel Paintbox lol. In 1989 I had a 9mb Amiga 2000 with 030 card and realtime digitizer and genlock and was making 250 frame anim brushes via Dpaint 3 75% size of the full screen and making my own fighter battle sequences from grabs of Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in COLOUR overlaid on live video backgrounds and dumped back to YC capable semi-professional analogue video recording equipment. There wasn't a single $10,000 PC on the planet that could match my A2000 in 1989 even for the memory inside it alone. I even had an internal flicker fixer too so it was perfectly useable for every possible serious or gaming use. The auto-booting drives were lightning fast too and it was a dream system to use for everything. Sure it cost 50-60% of the price of a similar Mac but it was seriously more powerful in any way than any Mac II. IIRC also the first 128mb capable desktop PC was actually the Amiga 3000 (or 4000 but the cards work in 3000s too) and even if a PC in 1990 could have it installed the OS could not use it full stop. Ditto for Macs too I bet. Also the first example of games like Kinect does was done with a similar setup using two Amiga 1000s and some custom scripts to allow kids to swat the huge cutesy bugs on the screen which they can see themselves on whilst standing in front of a camera. Only an fool would call a machine that can replicate Kinect style gaming 3 decades earlier would argue otherwise. The only problem with the Amiga way of doing things (ie revolutionary custom hardware....something even late 90s PCs needed to compete with the PS1 for 3D performance) was Commodore sitting on their ass for 6 years and then needing to pull out a similarly revolutionary chipset for the next decade after all the chipset designers had left in disgust at how their 'baby' was treated. NOTHING ELSE. The Hombre chipset by Dave Haynie would have given you a computer as powerful as the Sega Saturn BUT with the accessibility of something you can program at home thanks to the fact it was not a console but a home computer. The Amiga was the intelligent/creative users dream in the UK due to the hardware, the OS and some revolutionary packages for the machine like Dpaint 3. Today nearly 2 decades after the death of Atari and Commodore it is not viable to use custom hardware (because development in the home computer market stopped with Acorn/Atari/Commodore in mid 90s) but playing Doom on a Jaguar proved even in the mid 90s a well programmed and designed chipset in a bespoke architecture pissed all over x86 in £/performance. How much was a 1994 Pentium 75 and how much was a Jaguar? Exactly How much was a Voodo 3D equipped Pentium 166 PC vs 1995 PS1 on launch day to play Colin McRae Rally?

Always nice to see new games coded for the real hardware

You have to give respect to the guy who INVENTED this market without a doubt and there are only so many times you can make legendary businesses. He was indeed part of some not so amazingly selling products (CDTV being the one I remember....which would have sold had the software companies had the talent to match their greed to make 700mb games in 1990 to maximise the technology). I can't see Nintendo ever going bust however, there are billions of Zelda/Mario lovers. Nintendo's problem has always been sales of their third party games rarely matched their own games produced in-house so publishers quickly lost interest with N64/Gamecube. The Wii was the right product at the right time but with tablets/phones getting accelerometers built-in and the games costing less than 5 bucks for the best titles that casual gamer market has dried up. I played the Wii Zelda game and to be quite honest it was utter cock! The controller added nothing to the game that you couldn't get playing Law of the West on a C64 using the Le Stick controller lol. But like I said they can do no wrong, their fans are very loyal (right back to those dark days of putrid Pokemon GB/GBC games released bi-monthly used to prop up the huge losses of the N64 trainwreck which otherwise would have bankrupt them in the face of the much more fun PS1). Microsoft will still be around in 2020 and so will Nintendo (as both hardware as well as software producers), I would bet my half million euro house on it to be quite frank What IS clear though is the Xbox One is the PS3 of the next generation (OTT price, no performance advantage, dumb ideas for extra features nobody gives a shit about) and will get a rude awakening by Jan 2014 and rely heavily on their OS/Windows business apps monopoly to ride it out just like Nintendo and Gameboy + N64 dichotomy.

Try removing and reseating all the removable chips. My original ST did this sometimes and was cured with the old 4 inch drop onto the desk pretty quickly too.

Still looking for it, not found the "Atari Pix" directory yet though so it may actually be on the internal drive in either of my 2 old laptops I am not using since Xmas 2012. As soon as I find it I will part zip it and send it to you though via email attachments. I'll PM you as soon as I've found it. I definitely had it though because I viewed most of them in some little Windows program that loaded the native files which is on an old laptop (hence I am now thinking they may also be on the internal hard drive in one of those 2 laptops).

I did a search on Archive.org Computer Chronicles episodes for the usual suspects and found quite a few interesting episodes which you can download I'll check them out as I don't remember the one where he is holding the Plus/4 at the start though.

Hmmm was there any others from federated store videos that's a bit longer?

I voted for the big lairy yellow boxed original! Why? Because I don't like the scrolling on Jr Pac Man and Ms Pac-Man didn't do much for me at the time so out of those three the nostalgia factor being a huge part of enjoying playing on my VCS I plumped for the iconic original (you may not like it, you may call it infamous but to me it is iconic ) The hacks are nice sure but in this day and age I have many many ways to play Pac-Man (emulated or converted) so just like if there was a better version of Gauntlet made for the Amiga I would still play it via Mame or on the Sega 16 bit because it won't beat either. Of course other people are voting the newer versions for different reasons and that's cool too