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eegad

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Posts posted by eegad

  1. Posted

    The first time I can recall playing a videogame would be Breakout in an arcade. Was maybe 10 at the time. Played pinball and skeeball there.... But then, what's this thing with a dial and tv screen? Decided to try it. Anyway, I kinda recall being a little intimidated by it and not liking it so much.

     

    First videogame I owned. Coleco Telstar. Probably a year after my experience with Breakout in the arcade. It was The Must Have Christmas gift that year, that all my friends wanted, so I jumped on the bandwagon as well.

     

    And then a year or two after that, Space Invaders hit the arcades and I fell in love with videogames and have spent the last 40 years addicted to them.

    • Like 1

  2. Posted

    Thanks for posting those ads....I always get a kick out of seeing old stuff like this. But it doesn't really surprise me to see Adventure (or any game) advertised, with box shots, a month or two before it was actually available for sale. I definitely remember a couple of times back in the 80s when something was advertised in a weekly flyer from a store, but when I went there to buy it was told that it wasn't yet available. It definitely happened to me with Atari (2600 and 800) videogames a couple of times, but it also happened with handheld electronic games and other toys, videotapes, whatever.

     

    Come to think of it.......I kinda recall Mattel Electronics Football II (I think) was being advertised in a Sears flyer or something and I got my mom to take me to get it......only to find they didn't have it in stock yet. We stopped at Toys R Us or somewhere else and were told the same thing. Kids at school had the same stories. I don't think it actually hit the shelves til a few weeks later.

    • Like 2

  5. Posted

     

    Very interesting.... I had no idea. I know back in the 80s when I used to play around programming on my 800xl, using paddles was easy as can be. Read a memory location for the paddle value, and just feed that to the horizontal register for your player. I never would have imagined it was so tricky on the 2600. Then again, any time I read anything about programming the 2600, my head spins.... So little ram... Such limited cpu time...no image/video buffer. It blows my mind how anyone can make a game more complicated than Breakout on it. Anyway, thanks for the explanation.

    • Like 1

  6. Posted

    For many years I have rarely played paddle games. There are only a few that I really loved back in the day (Breakout, Kaboom) , and all my paddle controllers have suffered from jitter forever. Last weekend I was really in the mood for Breakout and so *finally* decided to disassemble, clean and fix a pair of paddles. They are now silky smooth. I spent the afternoon playing assorted paddle games, and then...

     

    Started wondering why more games didnt use paddles. And wondered, with all the hacks and homebrews these days, if anyone had hacked a game to use paddles. Certainly driving games like Enduro and Pole position would be great with paddles. Also Gyrus, or maybe something like Phoenix, Beamrider or Juno First? (I only just found out that Astroblast can use paddles...previously I only ever played it with a joystick but its so much better with a paddle). So.... Any paddle hacks out there (or maybe a driving homebrew that I missed?)

     

    • Like 3

  7. Posted

    Apologies if this has been asked before...

     

    I was just playing Space Invaders and was wondering about the same thing I recall wondering about as a kid. Most times when you shoot an invader, it explodes/disintegrates in a burst of tiny pixels (high res effect for 2600). But sometimes an invader just disappears when shot. Why? I assume there must be some type of timing conflict going on, but just wondering if one of the programming wizards on here could say precisely why it happens.

  8. Posted

    I never knew about game 4 on Casino when I was a kid, I just played blackjack and poker with my family. Game 4 is a one-player solitaire where the player tries to arrange 25 random cards in a matrix

     

    Sounds like a good one - that's what I was looking for....a game variation that plays very differently from "game 1". I'll have to read the instruction manual and check this one out.

  9. Posted

     

    How is that book so far? I looked it up and it looks like it would be worth reading since it isn't like all the other books going game by game.

     

    I'm roughly halfway through it and I've been enjoying it. On the one hand, having lived through it, and being an atari fan for so long, there's not a lot of information that I didn't already know. But little tidbits I hadn't heard before are nice - such as the "paint" game in surround, or that Actvision games never had those little black lines scattered about on the left side of the screen because they made *every* scan line have a have a black line, thus making one solid bar that looks more clean. Or why the pieces in chess have visible lines in them.

    • Like 1

  10. Posted

    I've just started reading Jamie Lendino's "adventure" book about the 2600. In the part about the Surround cartridge he mentions game variations 13 and 14 which are simplistic "paint" programs. I never knew about that until now.

     

    Back in the day I had maybe 30-35 game cartridges, and whenever I got a new one I always read through the manual so I'd know about all the game variations on the cart. When I got back into playing with my Atari 8 years ago or so, I ended up getting a Harmony cart and filling it with roms of just about every game. While I've played every game at least once, I rarely looked to see what game variations there might be...I just played whatever the first game on that cart was when you load it up.

     

    So the paint program thing in Surround got me wondering what other interesting game variations are on other carts that I probably never knew about. And along the same lines, what carts have multiple games on them that are very different from the first game (ie - canyon bomber has the depth charge games which are very different from the canyon bomber games)

    • Like 1

  12. Posted

    I've actually been shocked by the longevity of my own disks. Most of the time I play games on my 800xl via Maxflash carts, so I only very occasionally hook up my 1050s and mess around with real disks. But so far, anytime I do dig out the disks, they all work just fine. Then again, my disks were never stored in hot attics or damp basements. They've always just been in closets at regular room temperature.

  13. Posted

    Have been reading this the past couple of days and enjoying it. The one part that made me burst out laughing? When you mention sending in the reader reply cards to get catalogs, brochures, and best of all free demo disks. I too received multiple copies of Managing Your Money and the Buick disks back in the day. I just had to go down and dig through my old Atari disk boxes to see if I still have them. Yup, still have multiple copies of each... Of course reformatted and filled with pirated games.

  14. Posted

    Does anyone have a .bin of the fireplace?

     

    I was actually wondering this myself. I own a Stellas Stocking cart, but it frustrates me every year that it only works on one of my 2600s (the heavy sixer). I have my fave game from the collection, Stay Frosty, on my Harmony Cart. But I think it'd be great to have the fireplace with some of the holiday tunes as a nice little demo thing to have on my Harmony as well.

    • Like 2

  16. Posted

    Totally forgot about Major Havoc, I'll have to play that some more.

     

    Does Major Havoc only work with the spinner, or does it also work with the trackball? Because honestly the game should play better with the trackball. I used to play Major Havoc at the student center in college all the time, and the original version (not the tempest refit) had a cylinder spinner, not a dial spinner. A trackball would simulate that movement MUCH better than the dial.

  17. Posted

    For many years now I've been playing MAME via a PC hooked up to an old 32" CRT tv in my basement. I don't need a real "authentic" arcade experience - for me, sitting in a chair and using an xbox controller works fine for many games. For some games that used just a joystick and one or no buttons (like pacman, q-bert, galaxian, etc), I have a repro USB Atari 2600-style joystick that I'm perfectly happy with.

     

    My gripes are with trackball and spinner type games. Using a mouse for the likes of Centipede, Missile Command, Tempest, Major Havoc (a fave of mine) etc. just doesn't work well. Does anyone have a recommendation for a reasonably priced trackball that works fairly well for these games? (and perhaps also let me know what settings you use in mame for analog control sensitivity and speed).

     

     

    Yes, I know a few companies sell real arcade style controller boards designed for use with mame, but I can't justify spending $400 for a controller.

     

     

     

    Also, while I'm at it - any recommendations for steering options for Pole Position, Turbo and Outrun?

     

     

  18. Posted · Edited by eegad

    No, Atarivox is not required. It's most likely the version of Stella as Darrell suggests above. :)

    Thanks. Just upgraded Stella and it works great. Very impressive - excellent job on this game! Back in 1982 or '83, the CBS release of Wizard of Wor for Atari was one of my Christmas presents. Having just played it now one time only, I'm going to put it on my Harmony cart and hold off playing it again until Christmas day - I think it's pretty cool that I'll be able to play a better version of the same game (on the same light sixer console) as I did 35 years ago as a kid!

    • Like 1

  20. Posted

    Excellent game. I always liked DoodleJump on my phone/tablet. When I first saw this post I didn't think it would translate well to the Atari. Then I spent an hour yesterday afternoon playing "just one more time" each time I died. Great job!

    • Like 1

  21. Posted

    I've got 2 heavy sixers and 1 light. Only incompatibility I've ever come across was with Stella's Stocking - it works on the heavies, but won't get past the title screen on the light.

    (if anyone happens to know exactly why that is, I'd be interested in reading the explanation. I don't just mean something like "a different version of the TIA chip"...i mean like exactly what the technical difference is between the 2 chips. Just curious.)

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