Ryan Witmer

Happy... but sad.

I'm only missing nine of the official releases, so those are the games I most want. Gorf Bounty Bob Strikes Back Meteorites James Bond Death Star Battle Zaxxon Frogger II Krazy Shoot Out Quintana Roo I'm not really collecting homebrews/conversions, although I do own several. The only upcoming one that I'm anxious to get is Mr. Do, whenever that happens.

It's not a popular opinion (mine rarely are!) but I actually think Kaboom! plays better with the 5200 joystick than it does with 2600 paddles.

Just got done listening to this, a fun listen as always. One thing I swear I read in the Ballblazer manual, and I don't think you guys mentioned this, is that the awesome music is also part of the universe. There's something about how the music plays in the arena and every champion gets to add a new section to the music. I really need to take another crack at Rescue at Fractalus. Maybe I'll dig it out this weekend.

I would say that RealSports Baseball is built for the analog stick, the rest of the sports titles might be as well. I can state with certainty that RealSports Curling is. It's been a while since I played them, but I feel like Ballblazer and Rescue on Fractalus are designed for it as well.

Yeah, but who would want to play those? I do have some more plans for those 4-ports. Hoping to have something new for them in 2021.

All those new games and only one 5200 title. Come on guys, start making more 5200 games! Baby Pac-Man is awesome, though.

Just out of curiosity, which 5200 games haven't been ported yet? It seems like all the games that weren't 8-bit ports already should have been done by now. The homebrew stuff might be trickier. I know my two games were ported by some talented person, but I release my code so that process should be relatively easy.

As I've mentioned before, Phantasy Star isn't just amazing, but so far ahead of anything the NES offered, it's ridiculous. I mapped every dungeon in the game back in high school, and I still have that pad of graph paper to assist me with my semi-regular playthroughs (Baya Malay tower without a map? Would you believe I actually used to have the route memorized?). SMS Space Harrier is my favorite video game of all time. I've been playing it for years, and I will never get sick of it. Despite owning the 32X and Saturn ports, which are basically arcade-perfect, the SMS version just keeps me coming back. I don't think Missile Defense 3D gets enough love. This is one of the few titles you can point at and say "there is nothing like this on any other system." At least, not that I know of. I love light gun games, and even without the 3D gimmick Missile Defense is a great one. This game makes better use of the 3D glasses than any other game I've played (I still haven't tracked down Outrun 3D yet, so that may be better) and it's just a blast to play every time I dig out all the hardware.

This was the only other explanation I could think of, but I thought the PAL thing was more likely. Some code did move around with the addition of the region check, so I can totally see this happening. So it sounds like as long as I only touch the parts of the BIOS that you're supposed to touch, like the interrupt routines, all should be well.

Another topic came up mentioning this, and it's been bothering me for a long time so I'll throw this out there. Does anyone know specifically why some games are incompatible with the 2-port BIOS? I'm asking this from the perspective of a programmer because I'm paranoid that I'll fall into whatever trap the incompatible games got stuck in. I don't have a 2-port 5200 to test on, so this is of great importance to me. I've seen disassemblies of both BIOS variants and as far as I can tell, the only real difference with the 2-port is the addition of PAL detection code. This code will lock the system in the case of a region mismatch and it's long been my hypothesis that the incompatible carts were being misidentified as PAL carts. So, what is it about the 2-port BIOS that causes some games to not work?

Wow. This is one of those things where I just have to try to figure out what's going on. I'm guessing the starfield is done with two missiles. The enemies appear to all be playfield, and the player ships might be all four player objects. I reckon the player's shots are also using the players, and the enemy shots use the other missiles. Is that about right?

I need to stay on his good side. I live really close to Sea-Tac airport and he probably flies over my house on a regular basis. I don't want him dropping anything on me.

Super Fairy Princess? SUPER FAIRY PRINCESS?!

I don't know, it's going to be really hard to top the previous episode.

It could be that the problem isn't the controllers, but the console itself. If a game tries to read a controller value from a port with no controller connected, a very large value is returned and this usually corresponds to a hard press to the right, or down on the other axis. If something is wrong with the controller ports themselves and the controller can't be scanned, you would get this large value.

I just want a universe where my beloved Sega Saturn dominated its generation.

I absolutely love this game. I think I mentioned to Bob at the show that this was one of my long-term "dream" projects for the 5200. I was beaten to it, and I think I'd be hard pressed to do a better job than this. I think I've already put more time into this game than any other homebrew game I've purchased, excluding my own, of course. This is good stuff.

You might want to avoid Baby Pacman. If I don't deliver Magical Fairy Force on time, Baby Pacman is the reason why. I can't stop playing this thing.

I would love for someone to pull off a conversion of that amazing Space Harrier port that showed up a few years ago. It will probably never happen, but Space Harrier is my favorite game ever and I still dream about that one happening.

That's me on the right, and @sramirez2008 on the left. I'm pretty sure this is when I was getting ready to sign his copy of Ratcatcher.