TwiliteZoner
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Posts posted by TwiliteZoner
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As some of you have already noticed, I zipped up the three directories (cds) of the Holmes collection and they are sitting on my webserver:http://www.langesite.com/Atari/Holmes/
Get them while you can. My wife and I are relocating from Denver to Miami and the bandwidth isn't currently being used (by us). At some point in the near future the web server will be coming down while our stuff is moved.
I expect it will be back up a month or so after it goes down, but the zip files will be gone and it will be back to downloading one .atr at a time ...
Regards,
Bill
Thanks Bill.
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Actually strike that.. There is a port of heretic for standard falcon (usual 1-2 fps). Try http://pmdata.atari.org. Wolf 3d is actually very playable. About the sharing part, it was my pleasure doing it. In my mind I wanted to make people excited about the falcon, but not excited to own one, but to create for it and with it. If I only manage to make people buy it, my goal has failed. If I encourage people to use it, have fun, create and share with it, I have succeeded. I don't consider that owning a machine, any machine, and putting it on display as fun. It may be for some people, but that is not why they were made for. They were made as a tool to help us be creative. Let's do that, shall we? </manifesto
>I thought the Falcon was a great PC. All it needed was the TT's casing and it would have been a bigger hit than it was. Talk about dropping the ball with it.
Btw, would you happen to know which site has the latest and most stable build of Wolfenstein 3-D? Would you happen to know the ST requirements by any chance?
Thanks again and please keep on sharing! People need to know what fun they missed out on.
This is the latest build as of last week.
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THANKS!This is old but effective:
http://www.komkon.org/~dekogel/adamem.html
You may have the best luck running the MS-DOS version in something like DOSBOX. I know, I know, using an emulator to run an emulator is just sick.....
I believe MESS also contains an ADAM personality but as usual, MESS is a jack of all trades and master at none. There are other Colecovision emulators but ADAM emulators are few and far between. Incidentally, Adamem does a good job on Colecovision too.
dam! it sounds complicated. All I wanted to do was play the adam roms like donkey kong, jr and dragons lair. is it possible to play the adam versions on a regular coleco emmu?
There is a link to a front end for the emulator off of the main page. It's pretty straight forward.
http://www.komkon.org/~dekogel/bcb.html#applications
If anyone ever finds the dsk/ddp version of Donkey Kong by all means please upload it.
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Posted using an Amiga 500 eh? Nice. How did you manage that? I have a few Amigas but thinking of centralizing on the Amiga 500.
Accelerators for the A500 are super-rare and then you need to get 2Mb Mini Megi chip to make it useful. I suggest you get an A3000. I just got one and it's great. I'm actually using a stock A3000 (but 3.1, more RAM) to post this. (...so ignore the misleading signature for this post;) Actually, Amiga is the only computer I've used on the internet since 2002.
Can you post a pic? I'd love to see your setup
Unfortunately, you can't. I don't have a digital camera and the crap analogue Sony video camera I was using to take pictures (with DCTV on A500) died last week. You can see an old picture of my A500 setup by following the link in the signature (then in the post), but it doesn't show all the other Amigas and Ataris.
I will say that my new setup has the 800XL and 1050 prominently in the centre, surrounded by A500, A1000 and A3000. (the unfortunately yellowed 1200XL, ugly A2000HD and faceless A4000 are discretely on the side.
By the way, I've been all across Korea but never made it as far south as Ulsan. Someday I might go back to Korea to teach English.
I need some ideas for setting up my systems. Anyone care to post some pics of your setups?
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I have a couple of C64s, too (but don't tell anyone!), and many other 8-bit machines. Don't worry, all can be forgiven if you return to the True Path.Just stick them in a cupboard somewhere and get back to the real thing.
Look on the bright side. It's one less person to have to outbid on ebay.
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This has turned into a really good discussion! Personally I never had performance issues with my Amiga (hardware or otherwise) and I've always found them reliable. Kick / Workbench 1.2 (and better) were very stable and the issues caused by Kick / Workbench 1.0 were eliminated.Kickstart / Workbench 1.0 (supplied with the A1000) were terrible and very unstable. In later revisions when the OS was chip based in the Amiga500, all issues were taken care of. I owned both the Atari ST and Amiga in my later years and found both very enjoyable.
My father and I used to repair Atari ST and Amiga computers in the late 1980s, early 90s, and both machines had their faults. I remember the 520ST (in the beginning) having grounding issues that would literally fry the computer if you somehow ' static shocked' the system. I remember my father -- when he opened a new Atari 520ST -- plugging everything thing in, turning it on, and when he went to use the computer, he got a static shock by touching a key on the keyboard. This resulted in an instant black screen and a dead Atari ST. I'm just saying that both machines (in the beginning) weren't perfect.
Most Amiga repairs were chip based (Paula, Denis, Agnus chip replacements) and ST repairs usually involved bad disk drives (the single-sided drives were the worst), dead power supplies (some early 520ST Power supplies had a tendency of frying ), and (sometimes) the occasional 'dead' system that was related to unintentional static shocks that a decent grounding / shielding system would have prevented.
From an end-user perspective, beauty is the result of personal preference. I have always felt that both OS' suffered from a clunky, lifeless design. From the Atari ST's puke green to the Amiga's nasty blue background, I have always felt that better colors could have been used. I have to admit that the ST's desktop was easier on the eyes. I can remember many nights staring at the Workbench screen in agony because the bright blue colors were causing bad headaches.
Yes, it is kinda cool to revisit this stuff. Those were exciting times and really great. We relished in the fact we were selling non mac and non pc computers and at the time is often seemed if you could talk to a random customer it was an easy sale. Both offered more and were superior in many ways. It really is a shame that the inferior products won out. But I suppose good enough is good enough. PC's of the day were really raw, with DOS etc and limited video and sound. I suppose the vindication for the st and amiga systems is that PC's eventually adopted better sound and better graphics. For my place though we were mostly games. 3000 sku's at opening and about 98% games. Import games that we could get weeks before EB and other outlets. It was an exciting time where most users were hobbyists and really enjoyed learning the system and quirks of each. Nowadays it just a tool. like a drill or a screwdriver. Something you use to get a job done. Not very exciting.
Great points, and something everyone can agree on. I think...
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Does anyone have the original Acid Burn demo? I'm also looking for a couple of cyber sequence animations like the 3d bee and the robot coming out of the swamp. Any help would be appreciated.Are you referring to the Cyber Bee from the Cartoon Design Disc that I created along with Andy Eddy? I bit of it is in the middle of this page:
I sure am. I loved those animations. I had most of them, and then discovered my disks were bad..
I have a bunch of SEQ files, including the Cartoon Design disc contents, and also another SEQ made with the Bee called BUZZBEE.SEQ. Attached is a ZIP full. Most of these are my work...one or two are not.
Thank you. Can't wait to take a look at these
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The green desktop was ugly. Professional isn't exactly a word that comes to mind either, although I guess it did stack up reasonably well to the Mac at the time.The Amiga dark blue was slightly less ugly.
It was always a mystery to me why computer makers chose such bad default colour combinations (A8 and C-64 included).
Guru Meditation was a pain, but like emkay said - the Amiga at least had a complex pre-emptive multitasking OS (and years before Apple and M$), and in general use wasn't much more unstable than something like TOS or Windows 95/98.
I hated the look of low res TOS, but the monochrome display was a thing of beauty.
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True. The games would sell just as well if they were sold under the Infogrames name.Infogrames has no need any further for Atari, IncNo, he means they have no use for that company - i.e. it has no value. Infogrames already owns the Atari name and properties, and they can continue selling it under the Atari name as they have been with their Atari Europe, Atari Australia, etc.
all along.
It was a mistake to think 18-25 year olds were going to be attracted to the Atari name in the 1st place. The people that name would appeal to were not the target audience for a lot of the games they released under the label.
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Yeah that is a great video. The only issue I have with it is when Jack makes the comment he took over Atari to destroy it.Yes, but he's laughing pretty hard when he says it. Does not sound serious at all. If he'd of kept a straight face then it would have bothered me too, but he didn't.
Yeah I know. He was working the room.
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I spent a good portion of last night browsing the Atari ST forums looking for good discussions. While browsing, I encountered a thread that contained a video from Youtube entitled "Atari ST vs. Amiga" in pictures. I have to agree that still pictures can't really help identify the capabilities of both machines. I decided to visit Youtube to find more videos done by this 'group' and encountered a game play video comparison of Shadow of the Beast for both platforms. They did a pretty good job; you can view it here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5ic3Fy-tVY
My thoughts on the video? I believe Psygnosis cut some corners when converting SOTB to the Atari ST.
Shadow of the Beast games are not a fair comparison. It was designed from ground up to show off the capabilities of the Amiga. They are comparable systems and both platforms have games that out do the other but even though I like them equally the Amiga had better hardware for gaming and in the end had the edge in gaming (for a while over any other mainstream system!).
Ofcourse it was a 100% fair comparision.
There is really no ST game outdoing the capabilities of the OCS/ECS Amiga.
Vice versa... many games are ported badly to the AMIGA, not using the given hardware abilities, while people like TEX did 100% Jobs on the ST.
It is a clear thing: You'd need 2 ST to put into one machine to have one Amiga. The Copper and the Paula chip are real working co processors. You cannot "emulate" them on an 8MHz 68000 and think that things go faster then.
Likewise, you'd need to put 2 amigas in one box to get the hard disk access, floppy access, and serial speed of an ST/TT. As someone pointed out it was a game box hacked into a computer. It seems obvious the I/O was an after thought. If you think the ST was rushed, please watch the Commadore 25th anniversary celebration and hear for yourself the words of the guy who was in charge of the amiga project. They had no real plan what they were doing either and it was also highly rushed. When they asked the guy about the worst moment of development, when he was the most worried, he discussed the amiga operating system coder. It's hilarious.
Yeah that is a great video. The only issue I have with it is when Jack makes the comment he took over Atari to destroy it.
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None of this changes the fact that SOTB ST is an extremely bad conversion of an extremely bad game. I won't say they could make it as an eye candy as on amiga (and no it pushes amiga too, not just the surface) but they could make it look and play decent. They didn't. I wonder if the release is an in-house joke by psygnosis that some how got away. If they had ISO, it would have been taken away from them.Hm...
What are the ideas of how they could have done it better?
Ok, the technical achievement got better later-> Some found the possibility for setting the screen starting adress to create 50Hz scrolling . But this doesn't help with a multi parallax scrolling-> the CPU has to do all the work.
Digi music? I don't see how it could be used in the game, thinking about the fact that the FPS are rather low.
Adding colours? Just again: Look at the possible FPS at the used "flat" colour mode.
I guess, the only way to make it smoother in fps and gameplay was to reduce the parallax more than it was reduced already.
Wings of Death (for example) is using no parallax. So it took benefit by the hardware adress changing.
Particular this game shows the real upper limits of the ST. On the AMIGA 50% stands still during the game.
In other words: While the ST was full busy with this game, in theory you could write a letter on the same screen while your friend is playing the game on the AMIGA with the joystick..
You mean to tell me I could have avoided all those arguments over who plays games or who writes letters if I had only gotten an Amiga earlier? Damn, I guess hindsight is 20/20.
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The STe is the machine which should have been released in the first place - but still has a shortfall against the Amiga.I was mystified about the choice of the pathetic YM sound chip back then and still am now. Amy or dual-POKEY (or even single POKEY) would have been the much better choice.
The bottom line is that the ST was a step backwards in many regards from the 8-bit line. Once the initial excitement died down, it became clearly apparent that the machine was lacking in many areas.
Also, with both machines, getting rid of text modes was a bit of a mistake. Games could have been even better with it's inclusion.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but it also didn't help that the ST had to be rushed into production after Atari lost out on the Amiga chipset after partially funding the venture.
You know it's funny, I always kind of considered the Amiga an Atari computer, all things considered with Jay Miner being the designer.
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I would imagine by 1984 with all the bad press Coleco was receiving from the debacle that was the Adam computer, it may have hurt sales of the Colecovision.Not really, bad "newer" products often simply drive demand for its predecessor and sell out its back stock. Such as the 1200xl's intro increasing sales of the 800. Or look at Vista.
Honestly, Coleco was great with pioneering add-ons (and the CV architecture was designed with a general purpose pc model in mind specifically for expansion), they could have easily extended the system's capabilities to NES/SMS level hardware support if they would have kept it going through the industry crash. They had Cabbage Patch to support them during that time. It was that darn late 70's industry goal of "Look, it'll turn in to a computer soon as well" that screwed it up.
How ironic that the computers of the era frowned on being labeled game machines, when all the game machines wanted to be computers...
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SOTB would be pushing the ST to it's limits, where the Amiga version barely scratches the surface.Doing MIDI tunes would have been pointless - why such effort when maybe 1% of owners would have been able to hear them?
Anyway - this argument has been done to death for 23 years now. Just watch the last 20 seconds of that clip for the reasons why the Amiga was clearly better at gaming.
Atari waited too long to release the STE which is more on par with the Amiga than a stock ST. I have an ST and an Amiga, but I still prefer the ST overall.
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The 5200 was said to be intended as an Intellivision-killer, but ended up fighting the Colecovision.The Colecovision itself was intended to be an Atari 2600 and Intellivision beater.
The 7800 appeared to be designed largely as a Colecovison-beater, but ended up against Nintendo NES (and Sega, and all the other stuff Atari threw into the market)The NES and SMS were intended also to be Colecovision beaters.
The Jaguar's design suggests it's meant to stomp all over the SNES and Genesis, but was largely smacked down by the Playstation (or even just the idea of its approach - but then almost nothing from that wave of consoles - CDI, 3DO, CD-32 - was all that successful.)Ditto ... the PSX was intended to move people away from the SNES and Genesis.
I think the issue here was not "fighting the wrong battle" but how that battle was fought against others with the same objective.
Would the 5200 have done better with better licenses, including a killer pack-in, like Colecovision had?
Would the 7800 have done better had Atari invested in platforming type games for its 1986 launch instead of waiting until 1989?
Would the Jaguar have succeeded had they released it with superior development tools and a lot of utilities to help the hardware squeeze out more incremental games in 1993?
Probably yes in all cases. Dominate? Probably not, but probably better performance all around.
The thing that killed the 7800 for me was the sound. I will never forget getting home and plugging in Donkey Kong and just staring at the screen like WTF is this.
The sound on the 7800 made the ST Yamaha chip sound like a high end synthesizer.
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To be fair, I had to return a 5200 3 times to the same Toys R Us before I bought one that actually worked.What was wrong with them out of curiousity?
The video on every one of them was bad. When you turned it on and the Atari logo appeared it was wavy and distorted. I tried them on different TVs and switch boxes to no avail.
This tells you how badly I actually wanted one at the time, as the 4th one was the charm.
ST reference here: I wonder if I called Atari in regards to this issue, if they would have asked me to pick up the 5200 about six inches off my table and drop it.
Years ago I worked technical support for IBM's mobility division and I can't even imagine some of the responses I would have gotten if I asked someone to hold their Thinkpad 6 inches above their desk and drop it.
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The C=64 power supply was utter shite, the thing just overheats and dies.The Adam was rushed to the market very buggy. Apparently the later editions of the computer had solved many of the issues but the damage was done... The strange thing with the Adam design is that the printer is required because it contains the power supply. There is a power supply hack that can bypass the useless printer so you can just play the games. For all its faults there is still an annual Adamcon for enthusists. Not bad for a computer discontinued in 1985.
Not to rag on the Adam, but back in the day I did purchase a late model at Toys R Us when they were basically liquidating them, and if they ironed out any issues you couldn't tell by the one I purchased.
To be fair, I had to return a 5200 3 times to the same Toys R Us before I bought one that actually worked.
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Well, it's a common statement from Atari websites to claim that "the 5200 outsold the CV at that point," but if THAT was really the case, why would Atari have dropped it when it was finally picking up some steam?The proof against this is in garage sales. Second-hand stores. I have found at least 8 CVs that way, but only ONE 5200- and it was broken (controller plugs) at that. Even asking around, I cannot find another one.
Even Atari at its pre-Tramiel lowest would not have been stupid enough to have dumped a system that was finally getting somewhere and thus generating much needed consumer excitement. The only explanation was that 5200 sales never reached what they had hoped for.
Incidently, by the first half of 1984 the "initial wave" of CV purchases would have cooled. The 5200 never even approached the peak the CV did.
But for all of that, I'm glad I have my 5200. Even if only one of the four plugs works (player 1). I like it better than the 7800, except for Joust, and the CV version would've matched the 7800 version (well enough).
I would imagine by 1984 with all the bad press Coleco was receiving from the debacle that was the Adam computer, it may have hurt sales of the Colecovision.
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Here's the self test one I found.Thanks, that's pretty cool. I have looked for the Fuji one as well.
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What is the compatibility out of the box with the ST or STE? These things are basically bringing in the same money on ebay that they did when Atari sold them in 93. Sigh....Games wise not terrific. Also the added annoyance of games that require an ST monitor and can't use VGA.
On the plus side dbug is building a great collection of games that have been fixed to run on the Falcon/MST's and run from hard drive. Yay!
Thanks. I forgot about the ST video compatibility. I figured games would be pretty much hit or miss.
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Does anyone have the original Acid Burn demo? I'm also looking for a couple of cyber sequence animations like the 3d bee and the robot coming out of the swamp. Any help would be appreciated.Are you referring to the Cyber Bee from the Cartoon Design Disc that I created along with Andy Eddy? I bit of it is in the middle of this page:
I sure am. I loved those animations. I had most of them, and then discovered my disks were bad..
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What is the compatibility out of the box with the ST or STE? These things are basically bringing in the same money on ebay that they did when Atari sold them in 93. Sigh....
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Why would this Kid sell his mom's trophy? This is a peice of history. One man's tresure really is another mans trash I guess
I was thinking the same thing. Kinda sad..
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Stella 2.5 released
in Emulation
Posted
Thanks Stephen.