Thorsten Günther
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Posts posted by Thorsten Günther
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That is easily explained: the magazine is stamped as a letter (postage EUR 1.45), the book's envelope only bears a EUR 1.00 stamp and is labelled as "Büchersendung" (lit. "books' sending"). This is a second class service and thus may be delayed if the local postman is already fully engaged with the more important stuff he has to deliver.
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Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, German, English, etc. are all Germanic languages, yet English has much earlier and thus deeper Romance (i.e. Norman) influence (e.g. words such as vessel, pork or beef) than any of the other Germanic languages (sometimes it is thus referred to as a "bastard" tongue/language). German has inherited some French words mostly from the Napoleonic period, but not to the same extent - and several of them have become old-fashioned (Chaiselongue - instead of Sofa - or Fisimatenten, e.g.).
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The tough part is to sort them correctly...
1) Iron Soldier 2
2) Iron Soldier
3) Doom
4) Rayman
5) Tempest 2000
6) Power Drive Rally
7) Attack of the Mutant Penguins
Protector SE9) Zero 5
10) Raiden
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Bought it off eBay for 40 dollars plus shipping.
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That's a puzzling fact: even for systems without any regional lockout or incompatibilities such as the A8, Vectrex, Colecovision, Lynx or Jaguar, prices vary a lot even on eBay. For systems that have some primitive regional lockout such as the PS1, this is even more obvious: a boxed PAL Castlevania SotN will cost about 70 to 100 Euros, while an NTSC JP Akumajo Dracula X (which is the same game) can be had for 20 to 30 dollars.
Similarly, sequestrated (such as Wolfenstein 3D or MK3) or "youth endangering" (such as Die Hard Trilogy, Area 51 or Aliens versus Predator (i.e. the PC title, also by Rebellion)) games that can easily be bought in the UK or the Netherlands still are considered of high value to German collectors.
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I now have a cheaper Scart to HDMI converter that I use with my RGB modded N64. I think i'm just going to get a Jaguar Scart cable and give that a try.
Its this one:
Seems to work well enough
This one doesn't work with the official SCART cable though (black picture, only showing a single frame from time to time). I have read of a solution somewhere (adding a resistor to one/some of the lines) but ... ah, found it:
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I would second the recommendation for Iron Soldier 2 CD.
Additionally:
Rayman
NBA Jam T.E.
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Subject says it all... would pay 40 dollars (shipped to Germany) via PayPal.
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Strange. Most modern TVs available in Europe should already support NTSC (via AV) out of the box, in fact even my old Panasonic TX-29 back in the 1990s did, and all my current ones also do. The MEOS DVDM-133B portable TV/DVD combo even displays NTSC in color via RF, yet sadly (supposedly due to a firmware issue) without any sound (which reminded me of my time in the navy when we had a perfect terrestrial TV picture of the world cup games with white noise as sound when our mine sweeper squadron had landed in Falmouth and Southampton - our workaround being turning down the TV sound and turning on the radio additionally).
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I can recommend these:
https://icomp.de/shop-icomp/de/shop/product/competition-pro-retro.html
I have heard they are way better than the Speedlink Competition Pro knockoffs - haven't bought any myself since I already own a lot of old ones and a lot of replacement switches.
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My problem is that arcade machines were practically banned here in Germany in the mid 1980s, being restricted to locations where persons under 18 were not allowed and/or present (video rental stores, specialized arcades in red light districts - e.g. Vegas World at the Reeperbahn in Hamburg - and slot casinos).
So from first-hand experience I only know the machines that were there before the ban (Asteroids, Battlezone, Q*Bert, Amidar, Time Pilot), those illegaly used by me prior to my 18th birthday in a video rental store with "tolerant" employees (Gyruss, Bosconian) and those I was able to play when I was finally 18 years of age (Double Dragon, Starblade, Space Gun, Test Drive, R-Type, Time Traveler (does this even count as a game?), Vampire Night, X-Men (the six-player brawler game) are those I can remember).
Making a top 10 list of these few titles seems impossible.
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The PAL TIA is wired differently, so if you have the PCB, examine e.g. pin 12 of the TIA. If it is connected to pin 13, it is an NTSC machine (only NTSC TIAs have a separate audio output pins for each channel and can be stereo modded).
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There really is no comparison between those machines:
- the C=64 is a slow 8-bit computer with a chipset (VIC-II and SID) intended for 2D arcade style gaming with very good (for the time) sound
- the Atari ST is a cheaply built, very fast (for it's time and cost) general purpose computer with no stronger emphasize on gaming than on word processing or MIDI controlling
The main disadvantage of the ST if you are on the wrong side of the pond it that many games have a default (some even fixed) 50Hz screen refresh rate because the vast majority of them was written in Europe (mainly in the UK, France, Germany and Spain) and the best quality video output for gaming (the only available one on pre-FM models) is RGB, so west of the pond one will need e.g. a NEC 1970VX (that despite its official specifications will display the ST's low resolutions) and an adapter cable while east of it a SCART cable is easily available and good CRTs are a dime a dozen (some cheap modern TVs will have issues with the ST's video signal, though).
Depending on what style of games one prefers, either machine will be "better". The ST has it's strenghts in classic text adventures (The Pawn e.g.), early 3D/pseudo 3D games (Starglider, Carrier Command, Vroom), RPGs (Dungeon Master), strategy (Populous) and puzzle games (Oxyd), while it's 2D titles are a mixed bag (there's a ton of lackluster titles and only few good ones, often by the Bitmap Brothers, Gremlin Graphics or Thalion). For 2D titles, the Amiga is clearly the better choice.
The C=64 will struggle with even primitive 3D (e.g. Elite C=64 vs. the ST version), but has a ton of excellent arcade style 2D games (Mayhem in Monsterland, Katakis, Pitstop II, Great Giana Sisters, etc.).
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Not even the first next-gen consoles survived the shakeout. The 5200 was outdated at the time of its release.
Sorry, i just read this. But the 5200 was based on the 8-bit computer hardware, and these computers were continually produced until 1992 (ten years after the 5200 failed), although after 1989 the vast majority AFAIK were sold in former Warsaw pact countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia. I think the 5200 mainly failed because of a) the non-centering, easily breaking joysticks and b) the intended(!) incompatibility with A8 cartridges and peripherals (esp. joysticks). In this respect, i consider the XEGS to be a 5200 done right, but way too late.
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Raumpatrouille!
Seriously now, i prefer B5 to both.
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I am selling off some of my Jaguar titles incldudng a Barkley Shut Up and Jam! proto/beta plus several (PAL) Dreamcast games and some PS2:
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Low-fidelity: 8-bit programming is a skill modern programmers don't have. Anything fancy on the Lynx requires fresh experience with bare-metal 6502 assembly - 25 years ago, it wasn't too bad to find that skill, today it's a needle in a haystack.
IBTD here: 6502 based machines such as the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 computers and even the VCS still attract several programmers today, and the resulting games show a lot of prowess.
The cost in money to write a program for the Lynx is negligible (buying one FlashCard to test on real hardware), but programming on the Lynx requires studying the graphics and sound hardware and preferrably already having the knowledge to write 6502 assembly, meaning the cost in man-hours may be quite high depending on the complexity of the project, making this platform infeasible for any but hobbyist projects (which - like Zaku - may very well have the quality of commercial ones).
Publishing is another issue, but this has been nearly perfected during the last years, usually Lynxman doing the card hardware and some other guys producing the package and manual (Zaku has a professionally made Lynx card, but the rest of them are PCBs with SMD part soldered to them, so these won't fit into the Lynx 1 very good).
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Please explain what part of 14 years of support is a failure.
The Dreamcast and SMS had longer lives than the Neo Geo? The DC was released in 1999. You're telling me games were commercially released for the system until last year? Wow.
The most current DC release I own is this one - you may want to check the release date.
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I beg to differ. There are titles that were improved back in the 1980s like the Temple of Apshai Trilogy and benefitted a lot from it.
I did never consider the slowdon in Star Raides to be a problem though (just as I don't consider the bullet time scenes in The Matrix to be one), instead,
I would prefer the following titles to be improved:
Crush, Crumble and Chomp (complete overhaul)
Racing Destruction Set (fix the awful scrolling)
Pitstop II (should look and feel like the C64 version)
Arkanoid (fix the ball and brighten up the colours)
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Comparing any Jaguar 3D racing game to Rage Racer/RR4/GT/GT2, any Jaguar 3D FPS to Quake II, etc., reveals the Jaguar is miles behind the PSX - the only area where it even comes close is 2D, so Atari officials' "no 2D" attitude did not exactly support the Jaguar.
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5
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I don't know whether the TT touch and RTS/have had identical rubber caps. The RTS rubber caps were dark orange, and the key caps were completely different from the standard ones:
http://www.stcarchiv.de/tos1990/images/st_tastaturkappen.jpg
I only have one keyboard with this upgrade - I didn't pay the extra amount for the yellow and orange key caps though, so mine is just grey and ivory.
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I got a CIB Air Rescue I, a boxed Atari(!) Cavelord (the Ariolasoft/Axis Komputerkunst version is more common) both loose copies Flip and Flop and Boulder Dash.
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The Spectrum' CPU is much faster and has a load more of registers to do the 3D arithmetics. Just compare the Domark C64 Star Wars to the Speccy version:
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The Return key should only have one rubber cap BTW despite the mold providing space for two of them, but if you try adding a second one, its a lot harder to press this key than any other. This was mentioned in the manual to the (much better) RTS replacement rubber and key caps I once purchased.
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Atari ST stuff on eBay (games and pixel painting software)
in Auction Central
Posted
I have put a lot of stuff up on eBay, no reserve, low (free within Germany) shipping - mostly games, but also three pixel painters:
http://www.ebay.de/sch/thorsten_guenther2/m.html
I will try booting all the disks during the next days to ensure they at least can be started.