patroclus99
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Posts posted by patroclus99
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Qix, because it was a very good port, and a console exclusive like Countermeasure.
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If I had a nice A-8 computer and collection, I would be content with that. Plus, the A-8s seem less... problematic.
My experience with the 5200 is that it needs constant TLC; it was a lousyly put-together product from the get-go. There is always something wrong with this thing. I just got done soldering sockets for the controller chips, they are very failure prone, now i can just swap them out . And, although I haven't done a comprehensive trace, I feel like the voltage is erratic across the board. It lacks the solid performance and reliability of its predecessor. It also has crappy 'fit and finish'; the form-factor is cool, but it's flimsy and brittle. No need to discuss the controllers, that's a dead horse. Once you've rebuilt them with the quality components, they're great. But, the potentiometers will need to be refurbished at some point, as the carbon-coating deteriorates. It's all very... off-the-shelf, but that's what kind of makes it interesting.
Activision cartridges are problematic; the cartridge-board and contacts do not align with the console cartridge-port; I had to solder some light beads on the cartridge-pins to get them to work reliability.
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On 9/11/2022 at 11:23 AM, Keatah said:
We stopped playing 5200 because the controllers stopped working. Such a hassle. Then we realized everything on the 5200 was available on the 400/800 anyways. No need follow the console or discuss it during recess. Too much IP rehashing then, and even now.
Awwwww, c’mon now… don’t be such an ol’-stick-in-the-mud. We live for the 5200 drahhh-ma.
But seriously, a lack of fiduciary vision kills a lot of companies, especially companies focused on innovative products… Soda-pop, condiments, men’s underwear, supermarket-beer, anything organic or environmentally friendly… a baboon with a BMA can run those lines. But, imagine Apple without Jobs, Tesla without Elon, Chrysler without Iacocca, Martha Stewart without… Martha,
Or,
Jeffree Star Cosmetics
without Jeffree Star!
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Ballblazer
Rescue on Fractalus
Zone Ranger
Dreadnaught Factor… because I felt like these third-party titles were not lazily rebadged VCS titles, you actually needed more powerful specs. to play them. Lucasfilm/LucasArts titles (the first two above) were nigh always a class-act... excepting the trash Disney reboot. Dreadnaught Factor was very good on the Intellivision, but I like the 5200 version better.
Xari Arena
… because it has a really nice arcade-vibe, but it’s not a port. It is a fresh, arcade-title to the SuperSystem library. Great presentation, great sound, great gameplay… probably one of the best two-player titles ever. You can play it with two trak-balls, fluid and precise… although I find trak-ball interface overrated; it’s easier to be precise, but awfully slow vs. the lightning-pace responsiveness required. It works better if you flip it upside down and roll it around all over the floor… use one of those office-chair floor-mats so you don’t scratch-up the floor… and you get a really good workout… but it’s flimsy and it breaks… I’m still waiting for a “5200 Trak-ball Mod!” post-submission. I’m surprised they didn’t make something like this for the Wii.
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Some newer system-boards for this thing would be nice, with all the chips in a socket; the ones I have, some are socketed, some are soldered... the most failure-prone chips seem to be soldered... naturally. The controllers are okay, they're pretty easy to work on/modify. And really, given the high rate of component-failure on these boards, I really feel like there's something wonky with the power-supply/regulation or something. It seems I work on this thing far more than the 7800 or the PS2. I know it's old, but we're not talking about a System/370 here. I think I saw someone on YouTube mod a Vader 2600 into a power PC with emulation for everything Atari; I'm kinda gettin to that point, especially with that big-ass form factor, heh.
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On 7/25/2022 at 9:09 AM, Punisher5.0 said:
Yeah but the PS4 wasn't released during a pandemic. The world is unfortunately completely different from then. Im surprised they were able to sell many as they have with all the global wide material shortages.
Cool avatar btw. I love that movie
Thanks! Yeah, that makes sense.
I reckon I'll hold out for the "slim" version, heh; I have to admit, as someone else stated, the loading screen-duration in these highly instanced games can be annoying on the older system.
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5 hours ago, Punisher5.0 said:
Sony has sold over 20 million PS5's in a little over 1.5 years. They are doing just fine.
Oh, I was under the impression that many folks still couldn't acquire one. I believe there were as many PS4s, sold within the same time-duration when it was released, and there was certainly a high demand, but after 1.5 years it was relatively attainable at "asking"... except at Christmas or whatever.
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I don't think many studios and publishers are going to wait for Sony to deal with its zzz...zz...z... production-problems on the PS5, and the number of exclusives for the PS5 since its "attempt" to debut are not impressive... not at the consoles current MSRP... plus the hurney-hurney markups by retailers and scalpers... if there's actually a difference between the two right now. Inflation will kill this thing before it even becomes a conversation-piece.
Studios/Publishers will continue to optimize games for the PS4, for them, that's where the market is; they're not going to make a lot of revenue making exclusives for a console most folks can't have, and consequently won't.
Studios/Publishers will also port titles to other consoles folks have... Xbox... Switch... and particularly PC... or vice-versa to PS4. Microsoft's Game Pass is also an incredibly powerful inducement right now.
It also appears we're reaching that infinitesimal curve of diminishing returns with each new console release.
It's not a coincidence that most new titles can be played on a Xbox One/PS4. So, we'll just stick with our PS4, we already have a WiiU.
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Flag Capture on the VCS; I don't think that title left its faux wooden cartridge caddy for years after I played it once.
Modern games...
Castlevania Judgement on the Wii... seemed like another lame, license-franchised, cash-grab Nintendo game... played it for about 3 minutes I think.
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Playing COMBAT with my grandmother and bopping her all over the playfield, but she didn't care because she just enjoyed spending time with me, even when I was a bratty, little ass.
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Yes, list it on ebay with a reserve contingency of... 3999.99 USD!
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There were actually some mobile game-titles released which were very good... way back when, say around 10-15 years ago. Hero of Sparta (I & II), Galaxy on Fire, Lost Winds, Waking Mars, etc. But, the whole iOS game library kind of degraded into a bunch of mediocre, data-mining cash-grabs full of microtransactions... sort of sad, really. Apple will sell anything on their Appstore as long as they get their 30%... basically a messy amalgamation of non-curated crap these days.
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Oh, definitely Dark Tower, and most of the 3M bookshelf games (Bazaar is my favorite). There was also King's Court. And... let's see... oh, the How to Host a Mystery/Murder series. Recently, we've been playing Ticket to Ride and The Night Cage.
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Yeah, that's pretty slick; the holder provided only seems to work for me if I use my thumbs to move the sticks, which takes a lot more practice. Thanks for posting!
Yes, AFAIK, the rhymes end at level 11; I know they did on the arcade cabinet... I think I got to level 19 or something.
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Retro-dank for fools.
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Anyone remember that goofy ST: TNG episode where ditzy Wesley Crusher takes a spill into a flower bed and gets the death penalty?
That's how asinine this topic-discussion is.
Jack's requesting a ROM to a coin-op game he saw on a hobbyist website, presumably because he wants to play it, probably in MAME or something. I don't think anyone who's an actual preservationist has a problem with giving a copy of an unalterable ROM, except for the copyright implications. . . is it fair use. . . his SNES version broke, he's looking for a comparable copy. . . so on, so forth; interestingly, no one here even addressed this. "Uh, you'll be blacklisted in KLOV… Well, uh, it's like pissing on the carpet at your folks; you don't want to do that! (This is the most vapid analogy I've ever seen.) … 'An elipsis [sic] is usually three dots [sic] not two.' " You folks are deadly serious, and you've managed to render the entire discussion a meme. . . friggin' embarrassing th' house. Do you expect someone less than half your age to take you seriously?
Anyway, Jack, here are some links which might be helpful:
This is at archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/arcade_relief
I think you can actually play the game here… not sure whether it'll work on a tablet-browser. Maybe try Firefox for iOS. This is a really good 'phone/ tablet browser anyway. You can find many legacy baseball games here.
There is also a SNES version by Tengen I think. Here's an article:
https://snescentral.com/article.php?id=0575
It looks like it runs around twenty bucks; read some reviews, see whether it's any good, most SNES ports were pretty good. Your mom might get this for you if you have an old SNES; I think you mentioned having some old consoles in one of your videos.
Here's another service which might be okay with your mom:
http://www.consoleclassix.com/
Here are some links re. ROMS: What constitutes fair use, what doesn't. It remains a grey area. 20-30 years ago, a lot of it was abandonware, a really grey area; some publishers and authors even threw it out there when there wasn't money involved. Now retro-gaming is an industry, and there's lots of money involved… and folks aren't quite so… charitable. I don't condone piracy, but you can't steal something that was just sitting out there on the curb, which metaphorically speaking, was often the case many years ago. There's also been a lot of copyright-creep over the years; Project Gutenberg will probably be sued eventually for that free downloadable copy of James Joyce's Ulysses...zzz:
https://fossbytes.com/downloading-roms-emulator-illegal-alternatives/
https://www.howtogeek.com/262758/is-downloading-retro-video-game-roms-ever-legal/
https://kotaku.com/in-defense-of-roms-a-solution-to-dying-games-and-broke-1828340811
Sites which host ROMS bounce around the web from one cease and desist order to another; a few get sued, shut down, and then resurface under a different moniker.
Well enough about all that… hope this helps. I really enjoyed your video with the squirrel on the porch-step! Was that your mom in the background? She sounds like a trip! You're very lucky! Good luck and happy gaming!
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6 hours ago, Zoyous said:
This is basically the crux of your whole dilemma, man. You hate ??something or someone?? about Portland, but it's got everything in your bulleted list that you're missing out on in whatever Applebees-assed rural soul-crusher you're holed up in.
Riiight. . .
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Space Dungeon
Defender
Robotron 2084
Berzerk
Tempest
Qix
Star Trek SOS
Vangaurd
Night Driver
Super Breakout
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I really had to think about this; I also started thinking about other diversions and leisure activities that were fun and popular in the 80s but not now:
*Going to the movies
*Going out to dinner/coffee houses
*Going to the roller-rink
*Going to the bookstore, going to the second-hand bookstore
*Going to the movie-rental store (where your rented consoles/console-games too!)
*Going to King's Island (Six Flags, Disney Land/World, whatever)
*Going to the mall
Oh, and going to the arcades. All these things had one aspect in common, the word going. Folks don't seem to be going anywhere these days. . . I mean, going somewhere for fun. . . they go to Wal-Mart/Target, grocery centers, and, I dunno, Chinese take-out?
I watched Blade Runner 2049 a few months ago; while I was watching it, I thought 'wow', this would've been awesome on the Big Screen in THX stereo. . . in the same sense that Star Trek: The Motion Picture was in '79-'80/Bladerunner '82 (daaay-um). . . great photography, great music/sound. We still have movie theatres. . . of a sorts. . . but they are pale comparisons. . . it's not magical anymore. . . just nostalgic. I didn't even enjoy the last time I went (Star Trek, J.J. Abrams); the sound was not so good, the snacks were crap, and everyone was playing on their phone. . . they weren't ringing or anything, which made it all the more unpleasant for some reason.
Going out to dinner. I can't think of any places nearby, or anywhere really, where going out to dinner is really something to look forward to; I think folks these days pretty much go to Applebee's/Red Robin to get buzzed and pass time; it amazes me how people will stand 30-45" in line for this crap. I seem to remember, when I was younger, that going out to dinner was really a fun activity: at Charlie Brown's, you could get the best prime-rib in town, but it had also books, wall-to-wall, and when you dined there, you could just take a book, as long as you replaced it with a book; at China Inn, you went inside, and there were all this plant decor (real plants) and water-fountains and pools (they also sold some hand-held Nintendo Game & Watch at the counter as you paid-out) and the meals were served beautifully, family-style; at LexItalia, everything was dark and red inside, ambiance/presentation was everything, comfy red leather/vinyl booths, candles everywhere, stained glass lighting. . . everything staged for the dining experience, and the food was great. So on, so forth. This was casual dining. . . now you have to go to the artsy-fartsy side of town in a major metropolitan area to experience these things at exorbitant prices . . . like friggin' Portland. . . who wants to go to that dump?
Going roller-skating/ice-skating. Nope. I'm not sure what happened here, maybe it just wasn't cool anymore.
Going to the bookstore/movie-store. . . download/stream. Redbox/Netflix/Amazon.
Going to amusement parks. I haven't been to one in 20 years. . . and I loved going!
Going to the mall. Mall's are kind of a thing of a past. . . greedy leases, plus you can put all that chintzy crap in a Super-center and sell it. There was no reason to go to the mall really if the quality of the merchandise was the same as Wal-mart or K-mart.
Going to the video arcades. You heard and saw things found nowhere else, a feeling of immersiveness. . . like being at the movie-theater. This was prior to what I call the Golden Axe/Altered Beast era of arcade-gaming, which didn't have the same flavor to me. Playing Star Trek: SOS in the sit-down cabinet was probably one of my more memorable experiences, sound was really cool, especially when firing a photon-torpedo; I took it for granted. . . things are supposed to get better with time, right? I also took for granted the presentation of vector-graphics, even in the 64/128 bit era, this experience is hard to duplicate.
So, we stopped going to a lot of these places, places where there'd also be arcade-cabinets other than the gaming-arcades themselves; I actually argue that arcade-cabinet manufacturers made more money selling their products to all these other venues than the arcades themselves.
Folks stopped going anywhere, other than one-stop shopping retail-stores; and I think a lot of it has to do with time. People are running out of time. And, people keep running out of time, because they keep running out of money. . . inflation in goods and services, deflation/stagnation in wages. We spend, or typically spent, a lot of time at work, I think people are driving farther to work, we spend a lot of time in traffic. Income isn't really increasing vs. inflation with a massive labor surplus; we are working a steady job, and then a a gig-job, either side-jobs or part-time service-jobs. Even if we have the time, we're too tired to go anywhere. We completely misunderstood labor-saving devices as a benign convenience: labor-saving devices reduce labor-costs, as one person can now do the job of 2-3 people these days. . . or they completely eliminate labor altogether. We just keep our tired asses at home, and have things brought to us, and dread going to some strip-mall Super-center, bee-hiving ourselves silly against throngs of people.
So, I don't think at-home game-consoles killed arcades; I think there was a complete shift in incomes and life-styles, in which diversions became cheaper and cheaper. . . and so did the experiences in an increasingly isolated world where we selfie & sound-byte one another and consider these expressions meaningful interaction. Social-distancing started long before Covid; we'd sooner avoid the world in which we're living and escape and stay as long as we can in Tamriel. We are also quite content to watch something in 4k with mediocre LCD TV speaker-sound.
The contemporary quarter-muncher these days is the micro-transaction model that comes with just about every other major AAA title. . . how much revenue can we leach from a single sale. Freemium titles are, ironically, the most expensive purchases for many people; it's amazing how many hundreds, even thousands, of dollars people pay to play free-to-play. . . and most of these games are utter garbage. It's interesting how we started with pay-to-play. . . to at-home gaming. . . to at-home gaming pay-to-play.
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I feel like this might still be power-related. . . you replaced the 7805 and the capacitors. . . if you haven't already, try a different power supply.
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Oh frabjous day! Callooh. . . Callay! I've been waiting for DONKEY.BAS Redux for years!
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How did you get the job for Yars' Revenge? Did Atari need a clone of Star Castle and you simply came up with a better game?
"Yes, I was the next person on the list to get an assignment and Atari needed a Star Castle clone. I went back to them and said "I don't think this is going to work." But I analyzed the game and found what I thought was fun about it. I reconfigured it and made a few modifications in a way that would work on the 2600. And they were cool about it because there weren't to many arcade hits at the time and Star Castle wasn't all that."
-Howard Scott Warshaw, Atari Times
I couldn't make it out clearly, but it seems this version sounds really authentic. I always like how this game sounded in the arcades, and it was pretty fun to play.
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Whelp. . . now that everyone is done smacking one another with folding chairs. . .
Looks like the region-code is specified in the product description now, so that's good. Most folks are using LCDs these days anyway, so it's not terribly important; most LCDs have multiple region-code options.
Yes, at this point in Atari's history, Atari had a more or less lackadaisical, uninspired, off-the-shelf approach to merchandising this thing and respective titles; I have a Mario Bros. with an upside-down label on it. They just wanted their inventory liquidated as far as this unit was concerned. . . just kind of mixed and matched everything (better than a landfill I guess). They probably just ran out of NTSC boxes, and used a box for all regions. SECAMs/SCARTs were probably packed in the same generic box.
I'd probably just toss the box anyway, and store the unit in that Vera Bradly Crossbody bag you're selling ?
Interesting, so this was a NTSC unit with stock joypads and Asteroids Deluxe PIB? That's cool. Good luck with your sale!
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Is there a way to clean up the RF Interference on my 5200
in Atari 5200
Posted
Although there's a metal shield on the board itself, I believe the interference is caused by the poor shielding on the power/RF cable itself. RF interference is a much bigger culprit today because we use so many wireless devices. A cable with a foil-braid shield would be best.
McMaster Carr sells some RFI sheathing which you can wrap around the cable for extra RF shielding.
Also... it's kinda tacky... you can try some aluminum foil... see how that works.
Both of these applications can be easily removed if you like to store/display your console in its original state.