Herbarius

Even that old B/W TV I spoke of had the normal coaxial plug - being optional as it also had and included antenna (that telescope-style antennas you know from radios). So regardless if you have cable TV or still use "air waves", you had the same coaxial RF plug. No, you didn't. I just told you that wasn't true, and I showed you a picture. Why are you arguing? Sorry, I didn't mean to argue. I meant, HERE in Europe, you had the same coaxial RF plug.

Yes, I really think the D-pad is quite nice. It doesn't seem to prefer the diagonals at all. It rather prefers the straight directions (slightly), but IMO there's nothing wrong with that - if you think about it, it would only cause problems if the diagonal directions have completely different functions than the straight directions, and what kind of stupid control scheme would that be?

I would like some kind of strategy/tactic on how to memorize where the more important power zones are... Yes they are different each game, that's the whole point. I would like a strategy to memorize them within one game. Of course it shouldn't be too hard to memorize the location of the "Phone Home Zone", as there is only one, but I mainly think about the "Send Humans Back" zones, as when you desperately need them you can't really afford to search for them again. Also when watching your videos, I noticed you seem to have some kind of special way to dart around and "scan" the environment for power zones, maybe some video about that? I.e. Some kind of tactic how to "search" each screen? I could imagine both questions could go well together, because after looking for the power zones you'll have to "save" them in your mind as good as possible, so maybe it could be one video that explains both in a combination.

Well, that sure is interesting, I never heard of that before. May have been simple ignorance, combined with the fact that (before USB printers got common) the parallel port was often dubbed "printer port" in conversations

Even that old B/W TV I spoke of had the normal coaxial plug - being optional as it also had and included antenna (that telescope-style antennas you know from radios). So regardless if you have cable TV or still use "air waves", you had the same coaxial RF plug. Yes, that's the thing I wondered about... Obviously in the USA everyone really sticks to the channel scale, and as you say it's even made sure there are no adjancent channels... That's not really what I expected of the "land of the free" - please don't take this the wrong way, but all in all it seems that certain kind of regulations that exist in many countries won't exist in the USA "out of principle"... [The prime example would be (compulsory) resident registration/personal ID cards... although I have heard it's discussed to be implemented...] But from what you say I get that the FCC does indeed assign the channels, not only regulate and certify devices - as I thought before. What about the assignment of number to station? Are those constant (assuming the station doesn't cease to exist) or do they change sometimes? Here every few years they'll shuffle them all around for some reason and you've to reprogram your TV - the cable provider will send out letters a few weeks in advance... (including some blabla to explain why they changed it, but it sounds rather like made-up reasons if you ask me...) I don't really know what you mean with 12-button or 16-button tuner... But you are right, here we have large "chunks" of unused frequencies you could as well skip over when searching for channels. This of course is rather a problem with the nature of RF in itself - surely one of the reasons why the FCC has so strict regulations about it. It's obviously damn hard to shield anything against it. You'd think a real "switch box" should completely lock out you normal TV programme, but in reality I never seen one that really does that. I also wonder how such a device really would look, maybe a big and heavy lead "brick" or something like that. Even that might not suffice, as equipment like the console or the TV itself seem to unitentionally act as "antennas" catching enough RF "out of the air" to provide noticable interference... E.g. If I disconnect my TV cable and start tuning I will find some TV stations. And while neither picture nor sound are of watchable quality, it's sometimes good enough to understand words that are spoken... Note I'm not talking about the old-style B/W tv with the included antenna, but about a newer TV which does not include such "feature".

Generally, to make a game based on a movie license, and to go the safe route, has always been and still is, to take an already established and popular gameplay concept and adapt it for the movie, like including the movie characters, locations and so on... Look at the very popular movie games that came out the last couple of years, especially the different "superhero" games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and some more... notice something? Yeah, they're all basically the same game, but they are fun to play, easy to pick up... I would even say that goes a little too far, being a no-brainer... like having puzzles but giving away the solution (if you go to "tactical vision" or whatever it's called) instead of letting the player try until he gets it - that too is of course so no one gets frustrated with the game, so you see they're going the safe path. So, concepts like "make a hack of Pac-Man" or "make a hack of Haunted House" aren't really that far fetched, given the time period.

I'd say "A Link to the Past" on the SNES... the original "Legend of Zelda" on the NES is a little hard to get into... you're just dropped inside this huge world and left on your own, while "A Link to the Past" guides you through your first steps. I'd recommend playing Legend of Zelda and Zelda 2 next, so you're through that "chronological trilogy"...

We as Europeans can only laugh about your whining about that "channel 13" thing... This whole "fixed channel scale" thing you have seems to be US-/NTSC-only. Here we don't have that "luxury", we would have to tune in to the correct channel on the TV manually - and then "save" it as a channel number (very old TVs, e.g. black/white ones, don't even have that "save" feature, so you'll have to tune into your favourite TV shows manually each time). I don't know if you in the US can manually tune in to the channel, in case you really want to - or in case the console you got or some obscure TV channel did not stick to one of those predefined numbers - don't know if such things ever happened. I once had a black/white-TV that had that "channel wheel" which looks like what you had on American TV sets, but none of the channels did recieve any program, you'd have to set it to "U" (maybe for "user"?) and use the manual tuning below. Well, I am not really complaining about it either. Yes we have to tune, but it isn't really that much a deal (newer TVs/VCRs - meaning from the mid-90s on - of course offer "auto-search" features) and as I already said offers a broader range of compatibility, old TVs don't easily become obsolete if the number of TV channels explodes, like they did in the 90s... (again I'm not familiar enough with your situation to tell if something like that ever happened in the US, or if the scale was large enough and fixed, and everybody really sticked to it - which is hard to imagine, but maybe...) Also we have some other advantages... You seem to desperately need those TV/game-switchboxes or at least some kind of adapter to connect your old consoles, because for some reason the plugs don't just fit... Well, we have the same kind of standard RF cable for everything... for plugging your TV to the wall mount that connects to the "cable" (or your house antenna) to plugging your game systems / home computers (that still used RF) in... Switchboxes like that do exist and also came shipped with some consoles, but they're simply for convenience, not having to plug out your normal cable and plug in your console each time you want to play. Of course now everything is changing, You already don't plug in your games via RF anymore since, yeah the SNES I think (as far as I recall it still offered both options), and also with the advent of digital TV. RF may not be around for very long anymore... But we'll see, I think most people are still reluctant to pay the extra fees to get digital TV...

That's already in the game...

Just because you got it "for free" with the system isn't a reason you can't complain about it... (Furthermore, I wouldn't say they were free, but included in the price)... Just look at what a huge market of third party controllers evolved, so you can see they're surely not the ultimate sticks... However, I agree that compared with other stock-controllers they were quite okay. But what exactly are the problems with it? Well for one thing, your hands get tired/cramped very quickly. I could never play anything with the CX-40 for more than, say, half an hour, before my hands start hurting. I now don't have a CX-40 anymore, I've got three controllers I use depending on the game: for games like Pac-Man, Centipede, ... this "Arcade stick" (Sigma 2100 Multi-Function) for games like Enduro, Star Master, ... this "Flight stick" (Spectravideo Quickshot II) for games like Dragonfire, E.T., .... the Atari CX-78 Joypad

I fear that's not really feasible for the Atari 2600, because of the relatively small ROM sizes, the extremely small RAM size and the fact it doesn't have any built-in capabilities to handle text... stuff like that (story etc.) belongs into the manual. About my own suggestions, I already posted them in that other thread, but here they are again: One other improvements that I thought about but "dropped", as I thought it's unrealistic/hard to implement on the hardware, is to make the collision zone of E.T. with the wells around his feet only... I think that's the reason why many of the "haters" talk about "falling into the wells all the time", because they see E.T. in side view, but the terrain is from a birds-eye perspective... so you might expect E.T. can move along below pits as long as his feet touch the ground. However, it may as well be that people "back then" didn't have that problem, because games in general weren't as sophisticated graphically and really a lot of games used this "environment is birds-eye, but characters are side-view" approach.

It could be the Harmony Cart just works like normal, but those games which usually don't work with a modded FB2 won't work if put on the Harmony Cart, either... But, like Thomas Jentzsch said, before someone tested it, you can't tell.

You know you invested too much time into C64 stuff... ...if you read this and what first comes to mind has nothing to do with currency

I guess that's from the (late) 80s, not a recent thing? Hmmm, "Bit Corporation", I wonder if that's the same as the pirate game company...

You could have put extra fees on the carts with numbers like 23 or 42

I don't think it would have needed removal of the wells or other big redesigns to ensure no one would have called it "the worst game of all time"... Minor modifications that would properly have helped: reverse order of game variations from easiest to hardest (i.e. switch variation 1 and 3) after levitating out of wells, when you are to place E.T. on solid ground, you should be allowed to push "up" as well proof-reading of the manual (correcting false statements like about the number of candy pieces) including a "reference card" alongside the manual which provides a handy overview of all the "power zone" icons. I could think of other improvement but those would propably stretch what's possible on the 2600, especially in the short developement time. About that E.T. Pac-Man, it reminds me of the obscure game "Go go Home Monster!", released under several different titles as well, including "E.T. Go Home", which, if you look at the gameplay, is kind of a crossover/mixture of E.T. and Pac-Man. All in all, the sheer existance of a title like that is proof (twicefold!) that E.T. is not "the worst 2600 game"... (Once because it's in itself of much lower quality than E.T., and second because it obviously rips off E.T., and why rip it off if it's that bad?)

Youtube-Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLpu-aQ4HNI Link to full video: AVGN Ep.#84 - Winter Games

I've got one of those: Thrustmaster Firestorm Digital 3 It's not expensive, but made very sturdy and comfortable to hold (at least for me... For once, it's much bigger than the PSX controllers - and I always wonder how to hold those comfortably...). It has the d-pad and 4 front buttons you see plus 4 shoulder buttons (2 on each side). As you see it does not have analog sticks, which I don't really need... However there's a Dual Analog version, too: Thrustmaster Firestorm Dual Analog 3 (on the German site, amazon.de, you can still order it, while amazon.com says "We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock." But I guess there are other vendors that have them...)

Well, there's a Tennis game for Nintendo Wii which I heard is lots of fun. Never played it, though. But apart from that, I agree, gameplay propably didn't improve much since Activision Tennis. The gameplay may even have suffered one way or the other - prime example on the 2600 itself: RealSports Tennis - Vastly improved graphics compared to Activision's version, but worse gameplay (I'd assume due to lack of polish).

serial printers? I thought (at least for "IBM compatibles") printers are always for the parallel port. (disregarding USB printers)

Does anyone have any theories on why so many of these pirate carts have artwork that's completely unrelated to the game that's on it? Even misleading in many cases, i.e. there is indeed a Star Wars, Ghostbusters and a Raiders of the Lost Ark game, but the pirate carts sporting these pictures are completely different games. Kinda related are the games which don't have a title on them at all. Why did they do that?

About "The Swirly Unit", maybe it's just a very "sensitive" one in respect to it's RF modulator? I kinda now these "thumbprint lines" as you call them from my own unit, although not in that strength, and not generally getting stronger while the unit is powered on, but it rather appears randomly, like if the console is in a "good mood" or not... Also depends on the game, Activision carts have more fuzzy lines than original Atari carts, not counting the "32 in 1", which is the very worst in this regard. The only explanation I have is it's interference on the RF signal - from within the Atari itself. What I want to say: If you do an S-Video-mod or AV-mod, it propably would be fine. In fact, an S-Video-mod or AV-mod could be tried on the other two as well and it might just fix them (or rather circumvent the problem).

As per Wikipedia, the 5 screw carts have 2 longer screws and 3 shorter ones, while the 3 screw carts have only the 3 shorter once... so the short screws should be the same on both, but the 2 longer ones from the 5-screw-version are different.

Oh, sorry, I mixed something up. I was actually thinking about that some carts have 5 and some have only 3 screws.