bcombee

There's an article about the making of Pitfall II in the latest Retro Gamer (UK) magazine. They say that because the Atari 8-bit version was a straight port of the Atari 2600 version, it went through testing in one day without any glitches, giving the programmer an extra month of development time in which he added the second world.

I just picked up both a Caplet and a Tablet at my local Walmart for $15 each last night. I like the Captlet a lot. The screen is very nice, and many of the games are fairly playable. I like the Buster Brother's clone, and there was also a Bubble Bobble-ish game using a hammer instead of bubbles that was fun. The gamepad isn't great, and the battery life seemed pretty short. The Tablet I got had a hardware problem -- the screen wasn't in full color, but just green and purple and had lots of glitches. I disassembled it and wasn't able to see any problems with the flat connector, so I expect it's in the LCD hardware. I might try to exchange it tonight. The games I tried on that unit weren't as well done as the Caplet, but it has Frogger, so I'd like to have a working unit.

All of these are fairly easily available at Fry's Electronics (at least the one in Austin). I've also seen lots of copies of Sudoku Mania there -- they were even trying to get rid of them for $10 each a few weekends ago. Break 'em All and Bust a Move DS have been easily available in Costco, and I got my Whac-a-Mole from Circuit City online clearance. Polarium is in clearance bins at many Toys 'R' Us stores right now.

If you wanted the 2600 to handle the Chance and Community Chest cards, you'd need a bit-per-card to store the "drawn/not-drawn" status and a routine to pick a random bit and show the message. There are 16 cards each, so you'd need four bytes of RAM for that info.

I saw Jamie Fenton talk about GORF at CGExpo a few years ago. One of the reasons the game existed was because of a change in the legal understanding of copyrights. She said that it wasn't until late in 1980 that congress amended the copyright act to make it explicit that computer programs had copyright protection. Lots of people had cloned the idea of Space Invaders, but GORF allowed Bally/Midway to reintroduce the graphics and characters from the Space Invaders and Galaxian games under the new rules, asserting their right to use those and preventing others from using them.

I'd certainly pick up a couple of FB3 units -- one for playing, at least one for hacking. It sounds like a really cool idea.

I've got a 20" LCD TV that doesn't handle most video game inputs -- the frame buffer hardware inside doesn't handle non-standard interlacing and freezes on a single picture with lots of "venetian blinds". Alas, this affects not only the 2600 but systems like the Super NES, Nintendo 64, and Dreamcast. If I had to do it again, I'd probably not get this television because of this problem, but it works well in progressive video mode for watching DVDs and the cable tuner works well too. However, AFAIK, even though it can't show those signals, there's not been any damage to the set by the attempts to watch them.

My guess is that on ROMs where you see assembly or computer commands, you're actually seeing the uninitialized memory from the dev system -- the assembled game didn't take up the whole space, and the assembler didn't clear memory first, so the chunk of memory saved to make the ROM just has what happened to be around in RAM earlier.

I think that if you did a homebrew version that rotated the mazes by 90 degrees, the obvious title would have to be "Rally Y".

Remember that if you lack the booster grip, you can also use a Colecovision controller. One button will fire and the other will apply thrust.

The 20" LCD TV I got earlier this year from Costco, a Vizio model, doesn't work with most of my video game systems. So far, the only thing it's handled has been a Jaks Pacific Namco plug-and-play unit. The Nintendo 64, Super Nintendo, Dreamcast, and Flashback 2.0 all don't sync -- it looks like the frame buffer that samples the video signal doesn't handle non-interlaced composite or s-video -- the screen ends up showing half of the lines of the original signal, mixed with half of the lines of the current signal, with occasional resyncs. It's very disappointing.

Thanks for the notice! A friend and I are going to roadtrip up to the fest on Saturday morning from Austin. I hope it will be worth the seven hours of driving (counting both ways).

My best find was a copy of Glib at a yard sale back in late 1995 -- it was one of about half a dozen carts, but I went ahead and got an extra Ms. Pac Man and Moon Patrol from the seller so it wouldn't "stand-out". A few months later, I found a loose Crazy Climber at a Goodwill in south Austin, then a copy of the pirate Harbor Rescue about a year later. Nothing else really rare has popped up since then, just the occasional mid-level game like Subterranea, Sky Skipper, or Laser Gates.

I just picked up issue #17 at the local Austin Fry's Electronics. Hopefully, they'll get in issue #18 -- I'll look for it in California on my trip this week too. It was always a fun read, and I really learned a lot about the European computer scene.

There's a Boggle-like game already in the form of Glib: http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html...wareLabelID=213. It was done by the Scrabble people and also requires two players, since there wasn't room for a computer opponent or word list.

After missing the last two years, I'm returning to CGExpo this Saturday... I've got a 6:20AM flight out of Austin to San Jose, then return back here on the 6:30PM flight on Sunday. It's going to be a rushed weekend for sure!

Albert, the Fry's Electronics up in north Austin gets a lot of issues of Retro Gamer in. That's where I've been picking up my fix.

April 10th works for me!

Yes... Aaron Ardiri, the main developer behind this, wasn't sure when they would hit stores when he issued his press release; it showed up sooner than expected.

Actually, the MDM Atari Retro collection supports Palm OS 5, Symbian 6, and Pocket PC systems with versions of the emulator for each platform. All of this is on one MMC card. I've seen copied of this locally at Fry's Electronics here in Austin, and the price for the package is $30. IMO, that's too much, but there's a buy one, get one free offer from MDM until Christmas, so you could get this and then get another game collection by mail, making it a bit more reasonable.

From what I remember, Activision's Freeway is a loose adaptation of Atari's 1973 Space Race arcade game, their first video game after Pong. http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter...=S&game_id=9681 Of course, Freeway is the superior game, with much better defined graphics, a one-player mode, and cluckier sound effects.

I'm also attending, and I'm even donating a spare TV for the day to some video game tournament.

BTW, PILOT stands for "Programmed Inquiry, Learning, Or Teaching".

Shannon, I think you were describing Logo, not PILOT. While both had turtle graphics support, Logo was a much better language, being based on LISP, and would let you define commands that could call other commands or themselves. PILOT was a BASIC-like language with line numbers and commands that were all single letters. For example: 10 T: Hello, World! 20 G: 10 It was designed for writing educational programs, and had a command to get input from the user and see if any of the words in that input matched a word list. The language was pretty limited, and there's no real reason to persue it.

My vote: the famous Saturn V moon launch sequence, where you see the engines light up, then the rocket slowly rise into the air. Advantage: good color, and a vertically oriented scene that wouldn't suffer too much from the 40-pixel horizontal resolution of the clip.