KiwiArcader

What is with media companies like Sony when they design a console that can't play MP3's? Seriously, they want to position these new consoles as media center's to replace everything else and they them drop the ability to play THE major music format? And where's MKV support? They can put it in their standalone Blu-Ray players but not in their consoles? With a Blu-ray Home theatre system that plays everything I use without the need for transcoding there's no way either company is going to get my money for a new console unless they get with the play and provide the same level of playback support as everything else on the market. Until then I'll stick with the PC for real games and the Xbox-360 for other games.

That sort of information would be good to pass on to the Retro Gamer team so they can take it onboard for the next time they reprint something on the Jaguar. People tend to write about what they have heard/believe to be the case at the time they write the article and as there are often real problems actually getting valid information even from people who worked at a company after such a long period of time there's always the probability that some 'facts' may be incorrect. Even those people working there may not be totally correct if they weren't privy to other area's of the business for instance. That's why I tend to cut people some slack when dealing with old PC companies etc. It's not like it's life threatening or anything like that if there were two runs of Jag CD units made vs. one although it's always better to have the correct information. I don't know they story around this particular writer so can't comment on the level of error with his particular articles. 7+ Jag CD units you say? Wasn't that like half the total number Atari made of those?

If those in-1's I've used are running FPGA then the code used in them is not good. I ran one beside MAME and the sound on a couple of games was bad compared to that from MAME. Can't recall the games offhand but it was enough to make my mind up on keeping the in-1. I didn't. I do think FPGA is the way to go (IF the hardware emulation is complete) for standalone arcade machines. Think of all the SEGA and Atari vector games using X-Y monitors. Those monitors are getting harder and harder to maintain. When they die that's it for the original PCB as they can't be reworked for any other display type. The only way these will be able to be played is via emulator/FPGA at some point in the future. Sure, using a normal LED monitor won't be the same but at least you'll still be able to play those classics. Oh yeah ... those 2000-in-1 bootlegs use Windows 2000 and a MAME variant from what I read as people have been hacking them to include more games so those ones are not FPGA. I call them bootlegs because I've never seen anything anywhere validating their license to use those games. They were pulled from EBAY because of that weren't they?

Why has no-one mentioned cost? Emulation is pretty much free if you already have a decent PC. Additionally, if you have a wireless Xbox 360 controller it supports analog and d-stick controls and in the case of Dreamcast emulation decent throttle support. FPGA requires the purchase of the base hardware (not exactly cheap either) plus controllers in line with the type of ports the PCB is setup with. Ones I have looked at seem to have the Amiga/Sega style controller ports so if you don't have those lying around it's a small additional purpose but analog joystick support seems lacking at the current time. Then there's the fact that FPGA is a one shot emulator. Load the system and that's it until you reprogram it again. I do see an obvious place for FPGA though. Older arcade machines. With rom rot and general wear and tear knocking over real arcade PCB's more and more the FPGA is perfect as a PCB replacement. I'd rather have a FPGA system than one of those crappy 60-in1 Asian rip-off boards in a JAMMA cabinet. Man those things have bad audio.

The N64 had Mario, the Jag had an emergency toilet if you were rich enough!!!

Indeed. Thanks ThumpNugget. Last time we spoke it was about your rescanning Antic or STart and then you disappeared off the face of the earth. Great to see you back around here with or without your amazing contributions to the preservation scene.

Are we talking hair on their head? Or hair on their .......?

Most C-64, Spectrum and Amstrad magazines have indeed been scanned previously and are available on torrent sites but I think you would agree that the quality of most of those are absolutely crap!! I cannot believe that someone like Mort could release essentially raw scans and think that they are adequate from a quality perspective. My view is if you are going to do something then do it right. That's why I purchased an A3 scanner, scan content @ 300dpi and spend hours processing them. My site hosts my own contributions and those that visitors/members of the site are happy to contribute. I am 100% behind getting magazines preserved in good quality and out there to ensure they aren't lost forever like numerous Doctor Who episodes. However, I don't trawl other sites, ripping off their content without their knowledge and then subsequently re-host that content on my website. And where I do download a file from another site for my personal use if there is a method/means to thank them I happily do so as I believe a simple thank you can make a person who has spent hours scanning/processing a magazine feel like their efforts have been appreciated. With over 1300 magazines in my basement I tend to scan content there appears to be an interest in and there was so little indication of interest on this forum I dropped scanning ST Format as a priority. I don't classify anything Atari as rare in regards to magazines. Try finding Personal Computing Today from Argus Specialist Publications anywhere other than on my website.

True ... but they say the internet is 90% porn and the other 10% lies and rubbish

I created my website to host my magazine scans. What is the point of doing that if I just make all my content available on other sites? The fact that someone has taken my existing scans and made them available on Atarimania without so much as a thank you or acknowledgement (really ... how difficult is it to leave a comment on my site?) is irrelevant. If you wait long enough someone with a Rapidshare account will end up doing that anyway by the look of it. PS. It sounds like you just tried to get the files during a high use time on Rapidshare as other free users report getting files at several hundred KB/sec so try at different times is my suggestion. As my site/hosting is paid for by myself and I have received no support in the way of donations from anybody I don't feel I am beholding to anyone to change file-hosting providers etc and most others have just as many issues as Rapidshare in my experience.

Hmmm ... how you can say it's a better retro magazine when it hasn't even been produced (or funded even) is a little bit strange. As for Retro Gamer , well, it's here now and even if some journo's have personal preferences so become somewhat biased the fact is it is makes for an interesting read for those into playing the old school games via emulators or even just seeing what was happening in the gaming scene two or three decades ago in their "What happened this month in 1982/1992...." articles. Personally I prefer Games tm but I get both of those plus Play tm and X-360 on the iPad for a paltry monthly fee through Pixelmags Readr app so I can't really complain when I am getting them all for less than the print price of any one of them. And I get to read all the back issues in that monthly cost so it's a pretty good deal as I see it. That new magazine MIGHT turn out better. Then again it MIGHT just wither and die quickly like many other magazines have done over the years. Time will tell .....

Whatever happened to Gaming on Batteries magazine that I thought you guys were producing?

I am the owner of OldGameMags, the site you are referring to above. All the issues I have of ST Format have had the covers scanned and added to my site. As stated earlier, issues with "Link: Rapidshare" denote those issues I have scanned to date while the others are those issues in my possession still awaiting scanning. To obtain files more quickly from Rapidshare create a free-user account as it speeds up file downloads dramatically. I stated over a year ago in a post on this forum that I was looking at scanning my ST Format issues but there was so little interest shown at the time that I moved on to scanning other content. I have no idea why McAfee would state that a WordPress site with NO advertising/flash etc would be considered a virus threat. Mind you I never liked that p.o.s software. My telco provided it for free but it came off my PC as quickly as it went on.

Personally, I find Archive.org pretty awful. There seemingly is no quality control on the content available there. I was really pleased when I heard Omni was being archived there until I read one of the issues and it was frankly an utter abomination.

Amstrad CPC464 with a green screen (quickly upgraded to a colour screen) is the first computer I owned. Plenty of cool games etc. and tape loading was way faster than my in-laws Atari 800XL. Still, I think I actually spent more time on that Atari truth be told.

Sega = the Commodore Business Machines of the console world. Poor marketing outside of the USA, lack of resellers coupled with low numbers of machines being made available in non-USA markets put them on the back foot from day one. While the PS2 was a juggernaut on the horizon when you saw the shoddy graphics on some of their games compared to the Dreamcast SEGA could have easily held its own with the right advertising. Having a dedicated gaming console was no impediment to Nintendo after all. Piracy wasn't that big a deal to SEGA themselves as they didn't exactly flood the market with software for the console. Besides that, with the black sports branded consoles they plugged the MIL-CD piracy hole anyway. No, what killed the Dreamcast was SEGA's bottom line caused by poor management and a rapidly declining arcade market and the Dreamcast was an easy target. Still ... when you put Windows on a console (Windows CE on the Dreamcast) it was only a matter of time before someone would find ways around the protection scheme.

The early days of arcade gaming are littered with vertical screen games, some of which are truly classics... Phoenix, Moon Cresta, Pleades, Space Invaders, Gyruss, Galaxians, Galaga … the list goes on. I'd say nearly all of my favorite games are actually vertical. Then there are modern day vertical shooters which still rake in the money … Raiden and variants etc come to mind. While someone may have made a decision based upon getting something cheap at the beginning there are still companies adopting the format so it works pretty well for specific types of games. Contra … now that was a weird one. Putting a side scroller onto a vertical monitor was just wacky even allowing for the up screen stages.

Having owned several Dreamcast's over they years I have found that units produced in 1999-2000 invariably can run copied games on CD-R but the GD-Rom unit itself is the issue in terms of reliably reading CD-R's and that some disc's were far more troublesome than others. All three of my units would run the Imation Forcefield disc's perfectly while every single one of them balked at Sony CD-R media. Given the only unit's known to have been altered to prevent Mil-CD access are the black sports editions I'd be surprised if you stumbled on one that couldn't. You can't make direct copies of GD-R's on standard drives due to the wacky format making them unreadable. I looked at GD-Burners ages ago and the only way to obtain them is by purchasing a Dreamcast Dev-kit which last time I looked is usually really expensive. Even if you obtain one of those Sega officially stopped producing GD-R media ages ago, shifting all Naomi arcade gear to ROM in the process, so good luck getting readily available supplies of those disc's nowadays too. The big problem with the retro scene is the fact that computers/consoles with non-standard drives like the Amstrad CPC6128, Dreamcast & Xbox slowly become useless after the drive manufacturers stop producing the parts which prevents their being able to be repaired. At that point emulation becomes our only option.

You really believe web-based file hosting was better? It may have been simpler for more people to comprehend but, just to demonstrate: someone posted Retromags scans of Nintendo Power #4-26 about 1000 days ago.in 2009. I just found it before typing this and, ignoring the 1st listing from a.b.ath which is an obvious virus, it took two or three clicks and about 6 minutes (totalling 930+ megs) to have all of them. Seems pretty good to me. But whatever. If a suitable web-based file hosting replacement for Megaupload is out there, heck it works for most folk. It's been ages since I've been on Retromags.. didn't they used to go down the Torrent route? I've actually scanned a few magazines over there (the 1st issue of EGM aka "Electronics Game Player" was from me. As well as the EGM with Fabio on the cover.) I'm supposed to have scanned the EGM 1988 Buyers Guide as well, but oh man is it a chore to scan an entire magazine. Usenet sucks big time is based upon my ISP's hosting of usenet files with pathetic retention rates before they dumped it for good. I hated how every file seemed to have one piece missing and I don't think any ISP in New Zealand provides Usenet any more. All the USA Usenet hosting I looked into is priced higher per month than filehosting services hence my comments. That and the fact most people nowadays probably don't remember usenet or even know what it is.

Problem with torrents for anyone residing in New Zealand is they recently implemented new legislation allowing fines up to $15000 for filesharing violations as well as removal of your internet access for a year. Pretty draconian but the only way they can identify you at present is via torrent peering. Only takes one publisher to decide to act on magazine downloads and it could be messy for someone like me. I think opting for an alternate filehosting company with servers outside the USA is my best option at the present time.

Yep ... costs for hosting are generally based upon traffic volume and are not cheap. That's why dedicated filehosting services like Megaupload have become dime a dozen over the last few years as they have offered better pricing based upon user numbers/subscriptions rather than via storage volume. Unfortunately it seems that ligitimate uses for these services are not taken into consideration any more. They should be targeting the uploaders rather than the hosting sites themselves imho. Usenet sucks big time and I wouldn't even consider it as far as file hosting is concerned.

OGM = my magazine preservation website http://www.oldgamemags.com All the latest releases of NGC magazine and others now have filesonic links. All are PDF format. Should be something in there you are interested in

With regard to that comment I think you probably should have said "The copyright owners of the mags OoPA has wouldn't request their removal". The reality is that if the Feds took down Filesonic or any other hosting company like they did with Megaupload then your files, even though they may be legal, would still be taken offline if they were hosted on their servers. Retromags and OGM, like many others simply had their files disappear as we had chosen megaupload as our preferred file hosting company. I am getting my magazine submissions uploaded to Filesonic at the present time .... the latest mags are already available again over at OGM ... but if they take more hosting companies out of the game then things will get problematic for everyone whether legitimate or not.

The Amiga has a soul The Atari ST has a soul But the IBM PC can be both an Amiga and a ST so it must have 'Double soul'.

Are you purchasing through the Zinio app? Or have you downloaded the Video Game Trader Magazine app? Also. Issue #19 is live on the Video Game Trader App and print version will be out in a few weeks. The new version of the price guide app is still waiting on Apple approval. I believe if you "update" the app after the changes, you will need to subscribe after 30 days. I downloaded the Video Game Trader app as opposed to using Zinio. It appears in my Newstand so I am guessing it's the correct one to get.