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Herbarius

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Posts posted by Herbarius

  2. Posted · Edited by Herbarius

    But it is possible to get all 4 of them stuck in the tunnel...bouncing in and out for the duration of the current level (i.e. you are basically invincible as you eat the remaining dots, since none of them chase you). IIRC, that is due to an unconditional branch failing.

     

    Yeah that happened to me once, it was quite funny...

     

    Also I think if you enter the warp tunnel from one direction and a ghost at the same time enters it from the other direction you won't die (and neither will the ghost if you're "under the influence" ;) )...

  4. Posted

    Buy full version of River Raider II ($19.95 USD)

    :-o

    The downloadable version is limited to 40 minutes!

    I guess they won't sell a single copy... 2 minutes of gameplay were enough for me to know that it's crap!

     

    And there are propably way better games in a similar style out there that are Freeware.

  5. Posted · Edited by Herbarius

    Here on AtariAge two "cheats" for Pac-Man are listed:

     

    Move through walls

    Enter the warp tunnel and quickly and repeatedly press Up, Down while inside. Make sure Down is the last direction pressed before Pac-Man re-appears to wipe across the screen. You may move Pac-Man up and down through the walls, but will not be able to move from side to side.

     

    Unlimited lives

    Eat a ghost on maze 1, two ghosts on maze 2, three ghosts on maze 3, and four ghosts on maze 4. Then, press Up, Down, Up and intentionally lose a life.

     

    So, just for some fun I tried both, but they don't seem to work at all.

     

    The first one about moving through walls isn't really precise... How often are you supposed to repeat pressing Up, Down? I guess you're supposed to enter the bottom warp tunnel, because it says to press down before Pac-Man reappears... Or should you enter the upper warp tunnel and then press Up,Down a couple of times but exit the upper tunnel again? It's not like it's a timed delay that you stay off-screen, but in fact by repeatedly pressing Up,Down while in the warp tunnel you could stay there forever, because you can actually change direction in the warp tunnel. However I tried both variants and I could not move through any walls.

     

    The one with unlimited lives isn't really easy to pull off, however I switched into an easy mode and followed the instructions... First maze, eat only one ghost, second maze eat two, third maze eat 3 and in the fourth eat 4. Then I moved Up, Down, Up and waited for the ghosts to catch me... To try if it worked I intentionally ran into the ghosts until all my lives were depleted and... Game Over... I tried this a couple of times already, didn't work in any attempt... Maybe you have to finish level 4 first and on level 5 move Up, Down, Up and let yourself be killed? Didn't try that yet.

     

     

    So, what about those cheats (or merely exploits). is it a joke and they don't actually work? Am I doing anything wrong?

  7. Posted · Edited by Herbarius

    I'll give Centipede a test in the next few days, I played it last week and noted nothing unusual

     

    I'd like to add that it's not just Centipede that has problems like I described, however it's most noticable with Centipede. Every game seems to have it more or less, although the "patterns" of those fuzzy lines are different. Also, depending on color, it may be hardly visible (e.g. green) or not visible at all (e.g. blue)... On black and grey it's the worst.

     

    At first I thought it was all part of normal interference, but noticing it has consistent patterns and is different from game-to-game made me to believe it has some digital cause.

  9. Posted

    Just because you are a Sega FANBOY

     

    I'm not a Sega fanboy. As I said I never had any console, of course I played some SNES with friends who had one... My first console was an Atari 2600 which I got like 8-10 years ago and didn't start to use until a few weeks ago. If anything, then I'm a PC fanboy...

     

    But even that's not true... in fact I don't like "fanboys" of any kind, because of the kind of arguments they're starting on the Internet... Instead of "civilized" discussion they'll start fighting about everything, don't sepeate between objective facts and subjective opinion, making it hard to discuss the subject for everyone else.

  10. Posted · Edited by Herbarius

    Also of note, if one the of the "trouble carts" is actually running/playing successfully in the 2600, and I accidently bump or tap the console, the screen/game goes bad, sometime to just a black screen, or sometimes to vertical lines of various colors.

     

    I actually have the same symptom, but its with all of my carts. However I've nomally no trouble at all to get the games to work in the first place, I plug them in, activate the Power switch and voilá, they work... But if I bump against the cartridge or against the power cord at the back it goes to the black screen / vertical lines exactly as yours. Maybe my console needs complete resoldering, as I've some issues with the picture too...

     

    donssword, I'd like you to try some things out to see if you generally may have similar issues as I have. If so we could cooperate to help each other, share solutions if we discover some.

     

    If you have the game Centipede, I'd like you to try this: Put the game in and get it to work, just let it remain in Idle Mode. Then turn up the brightness on your TV and see if you've wavy, dotted lines in the picture... Mine does that, I don't know how to describe it better. When it shows the playfield, you can clearly see a difference n the black borders above and below the playfield compared to the background of the playfield itself... in the borders above and below there's approximately twice as much of that "stuff" than in the playfield itself... Also it looks like another angle. On the titlescreen its even weirder, in the space between the colored Centipede and the ATARI logo there's like nothing of that stuff, the part below the copyright and above all the mushrooms is like the borders when it shows the playfield, while in between the mushrooms and next to the ATARI logo and copyright it's more like straight vertical lines. Note if I turn the brightness of the TV down enogh they'll vanish, however if I play other games I'll have to turn it up again, because it's really dark! As far as I understand how the console works it seems as if that is some byproduct of the CPU working??

     

    But I noticed another thing too... I've looked at the bottom of the mainboard and noticed that some of the conductors - not the soldering joints, but where you can see what way the conductors are laid out - are not perfectly flat, like they should be, but appear slightly crumpled, as if they're loosening... I'm sure that can't be good. Maybe you can open your console and see if it's the same on your board?

  12. Posted · Edited by Herbarius

    Saying the PS2 killed the DC is like saying ET killed the video game industry.

     

    It wasn't the PS2 that killed the DC, but the PS2 HYPE!

    The PS2 wasn't even out, just its announcement was enough to let the DC sales "almost stop"... Be aware that technical experts in magazines et cetera did praise the Dreamcast like nothing else... the PS2 didn't need that, it was just the name "PlayStation" that somehow did the job.

     

    Honestly I never understood the sales figures of both the PSX and the PS2. How could they have been that high? Okay, the PS2 was a cheap DVD player when it came out, that surely helped a lot. I've always been a PC gamer, never had a console, but even before I got into emulation I could've listed like 10 memorable SNES games. Where are the memorable PlayStation (2) games? From my perspective the PSX library is some kind of blurry mess (no pun intended) of mediocrity. Same thing with the PS2. Okay, there's the Grand Theft Auto series, but they were on the PC as well and had better graphics on the PC.

     

    Some people on this thread wrote something to the extend that it's all about the dumb masses. Maybe that's not entirely wrong. Maybe SONY did a good job at marketing.

     

     

    One last thing, I read a couple of times that the PS2's backward compatibility would help selling it to customers who already have a PS1. I seriously don't understand how that would do? Suddenly all PS1s broke down when the PS2 came out? In my opinion it could only be a plus for people who DON'T already own a PS1, because they'd know they could get a couple of games for their new system dirt cheap (PS1 games).

  13. Posted · Edited by Herbarius

    I got only 12/50...

     

     

    Wii Sports

    Super Mario Bros

    Tetris

    Super Mario World

    Super Mario Land

    Brain Training

    The Sims

    Super Mario 64

    World of Warcraft

    Super Smash Bros Brawl

    Half-Life

    Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

     

     

    Not a single PlayStation game... ^^ btw. is that fair to have the

    Grand Theft Auto

    series listed as Playstation games? Are the numbers sold PC and PS versions added together? Or is it true the PS versions sold so well and the PC version so poor, they aren't even on the list...? (Propably because of piracy... The only PC games in the list are online games, with the exception of

    The Sims and Myst

    , propably because people who play/ed them are/were too dumb to pirate it :D )

     

    Yeah it's weird to have pack-ins in the list too. Took me a while to figure "wait a minute, 41 milllions, that means like almost every Wii owner..."

     

     

    Where is House of the Dead?

    Asteroids?

    Pac Man?

    Dig Dug?

    Tempest?

    The data is taken from VGcharts.com. Although they list 486 Atari 2600 games, as well as 130 Atari 5200 and 7800 games, they don't sem to have any data on sales for them. Also remember even the most succesful Arcade games cannot rival with any home games in terms of "sold units" ;)

  15. Posted · Edited by Herbarius

    The PlayStation 1 originally released with standard controllers without analog sticks, the DualShock controllers introducing the analog sticks, which have been standard for the PS2, were released later.

     

    I wonder if there somewhere is a list of all PS1 games which can be used to see which PS1 games only use the standard digital controllers, which support the analog sticks but don't require them (if such games exist) and which can only played with the DualShock controllers. It propably doesn't require a lot of research to find it out for a single game (most can be looked up at Wikipedia), but it would be nice to have a list to easily pick them out. I read on Wikipedia that "Ape Escape", released in 1999, was the first game explicitly requiring the Analog controller, so you can know all games released before do not require them... however this of course doesn't mean that all games released after automatically require them too...

     

     

    I hope it's okay to post this in the "Classic Gaming General" board, since there is no clear definition on where "Classic" ends and "Modern" starts, especially with the PS1 being exactly in between. If this should be in the "Modern Gaming" board instead, I apologize; in this case maybe a moderator can move the thread.

  17. Posted · Edited by Herbarius

    But the fact is E.T. was a tough technical challenge that I feel I met reasonably well. I made that game start-to-finish in five weeks. No one has ever come close to matching that kind of output on the VCS. It could definitely be a better game, but it's not too bad for five weeks.

     

    I agree that it's a very good game for a development time that short. Also he propably was only able to do it because he already had the experience with the Indiana Jones game and maybe he could even re-use some of the code. I don't even hate it like a lot of people do, I think the reputation of the "worst game ever" has to be put in relation to the hype it got (the TV commercials, the success of the movie, ...) and the resulting disappointment.

     

    But there's a little thing that blows my mind: somehow he had enough time to cram not one, not two but three Easter Eggs in there... He had only this ridiculous short amount of time to finish the game, but yet if he'd used the time he "wasted" implementing the Easter Eggs to polish some of the controls, I think it could have been slightly better... Or maybe if he'd settled with one of the Easter Eggs...

  18. Posted

    On a side note, I think the business previously mentioned about the Odyssey being a "failure" is silly. A failure compared to what? It was the first console on the market, and sold 330,000 units, which is a lot for a brand new and unproven technology - a success. In contrast, the total number of Pong machines Nolan sold during the time was about 38,000 yet he calls PONG a success and Odyssey a "failure". We can take that a step further and say "Ok, maybe people mean a failure compared to consoles that came after it" which would still be silly to compare but I'll bite. Lets do the same argument on Pong (since its considered "successful") vs. Space Invaders, which in this case is 38,000 vs. 160,000+ (100,000 machines in Japan, 60,000 in the US plus unknown in the rest of the world). Using the same logic being applied to the Odyssey's sales, PONG would also be seen as a "failure" even though we know it was not. Once again, it comes down to a concerted effort by certain individuals to downplay others achievement to play up theirs.

     

    I think you should compare the Odyssey to Home Pong, not the Arcade.

  19. Posted · Edited by Herbarius

    Hey Tempest, I just looked at your site AtariProtos.com, it's awsome! It's fun and informative to read the descriptions and stories of each single game... Kepp it up!

     

    However I think I noticed a little mistake...

     

    At the page describing the E.T. game you state that they produced more games than Atari systems, because they thought they would sell additional Ataris just because of E.T. ...

     

    But as far as I am informed, that's not true, although it's messed up by people quite often.

    The game they produced more cartridges of than there were systems was Pac-Man. They produced 12 million copies, but there were circa 10 million systems out there. So they expected 2 million 2600s to be sold just to play Pac-Man. That was as your site correctly (I assume) states in March 1982.

     

    E.T. came out for christmas 1982 and they produced "only" 5 million cartridges. That's still a lot, but because there were propably still at least 10 million systems out there it's not more carts than systems...

     

     

    So, you may want to fix that and put the correct information to their respective game...

  21. Posted · Edited by Herbarius

    The same certainly can not be said on Pong, almost everyone will state Atari, Nolan, Alcorn, or some combination of the above.

    I'm not sure that's true. If you ask gamers, people who've invested more-than-average time in video gaming, yes.

     

    But if you ask the average guy, they'll propably remember Pong, but not who invented it.

     

     

    And especially in the younger generation, I've even known people that consider themselves as "gamers" who would, when asked for the first commercially succesful video game would state something like Tetris or maybe Pac-Man.

  22. Posted · Edited by Herbarius

    He thought it was satisfactory enough to steal.

    I thought we all agree he didn't exactly steal it. He was propably inspired by it - maybe unconsciously.

     

    But at least he put some effort in it to turn it from an unsatisfactory game into a satisfactory one.

    Like seeing someone invented flat Coke (not satisfactory) and figuring out to make it sparkling (hence make it satisfactory).

     

     

    Also Baer got his revenge with Simon - which basically was a portable version of an Arcade game made by Atari before. Bear gets most if not all the public credit for it, like Bushnell/Alcorn got the public credit for Pong.

  23. Posted

    Nolan's funniest has to be when he stated that the Odyssey was already a failure when he saw it in Spring of '72. However it's hard for a console to fail on the market before its even been released!

    Maybe he didn't mean "failure" in a commercial sense. Like he said "I felt it was not a satisfactory game device."

  24. Posted · Edited by Herbarius

    I'm not sure what would be ill about the designer himself stating its a digital system

    Sorry, I did not make my point clear. There's nothing ill about it being a digital system, but about Ralph Baers patents, at least some of them.

    Or, propably there's nothing wrong with the patents at all. However the "infringement" by Atari and others seems to be far-fetched at least.

     

    and tried to get out of it in '85 by suing Sanders in court to invalidate the patents - which they lost.

    Do you have any link with more information to this court case? What was their reasoning?

     

    Considering how many people went to court trying to get rid of the patents and/or their obligation to pay license fees shows there's some moral clash... Okay, you could argue "hey, they just didn't want to pay", however their lawyers would not have pursued the case if they had not thought there was any chance of winning, because if would've only caused additional costs for acchieving nothing.

  25. Posted · Edited by Herbarius

    Its not analog, that's a misconception that Nolan tried to put out there, which this article explains more about.

    Sorry, my mistake, I got things wrong here. I wanted to say it didn't have a CPU. Of course it could be digital nonetheless... But I'm glad to hear that it's a common misconception, so I'm not alone :D

     

     

    EDIT:

    Interesting read BTW... However I can't help but feel there's something very ill about all this. I'll take a look at the patents and

    What about today? Do Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo still have to pay license fees to Magnavox, because they're still displaying stuff on a TV screen which can be controlled by the customer? Why don't they have to pay that if Magnavox' claims were legitimate back then? Okay, with the advent of digital TV I could see why it's different, but AFAIK you still connect your X-Box or Playstaion by analog means, maybe digital connection is availabe too, but its optional...

     

    Patent issues seem to leave behind this "something's wrong about all this"-feeling quite often... The patent system as a whole may posess some fundamental flaws, however revising it would most likely upset a lot of people who get money from their patents which could be rendered illegitimate by a revision of the system...

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