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ATARI7800fan

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Posts posted by ATARI7800fan

  16. Posted

    Hopefully it has the same innovative character as the Wii because if it is only slightly more powerful then the PS3 what is the point of buying it at all.

     

    Technically, the Nintendo games alone are worth it for many Nintendo fans.

     

    But, Nintendo needs innovation. Luckily, they are very good at that. Not necessarily the first ones to do something, but the first ones to really do it right. Just look at motion sensing, touch screen gaming, AR games, 3D gaming. Nintendo didn't invent those things, they just did it better.

    good point. When I said it needs to be innovative and just not slightly better then the PS3 I meant that for non Nintendo fans or fans that left because of how the Gamecube and Wii went.

  19. Posted

    MIDI was an immense selling point to the professional and hobbyist markets but there was a hope within Atari that it would also save them from the expense of creating a decent sound chip for the original ST. The hope was that something like a Casio CZ-101 (we sold those at the Atari store I worked at when the ST launched) would soon be cheap enough that people would commonly add one to their system just for the audio from games and such, even if they weren't inclined to make their own music. If it had been viable to do a keyboardless version for under $100 in 1986 that idea might have flown.

     

    Later, when I was working at Cinemaware, the severe difference in audio capabilities was a sticking point when it came to porting the Amiga-originated games to the ST, along with the difference in graphic hardware capability. This was a real problem not unlike the situation today where many PC gamers feel the quality of new games is being severely constrained by the need to give primary consideration to the PS3 and Xbox 360. The Amiga was the place to knock people's socks off but the place to make money was still in the Commodore 64 and the PC was in ascendence at the time the company died. To an extent, the Amiga was held back by being too far ahead of everything else. But even that was ultimately doomed in the face of the combination of Windows and the open PC architecture. In it's waning days, Commodore like to talk about Retargetable Graphics (RTG), but so much of the Amiga's character and identity was tied up in that original chipset that it couldn't really walk away from that. It just lack the appeal of the complete package wrought by a relatively small crew of creators.

     

    The PC has given us the benefit of free market competition, with companies like Nvidia and ATI/AMD competing intently to advance the same platform. But no matter how cutting edge your box today, it's very hard to ivest the same passion the platforms of yore drew from their users.

     

    One fo the best takes on this era of games ported across platforms of wildly varying abilities was in Terry Pratchett's first of the Johnny Maxwell books, Only You Can Save Mankind. It opens with a magazine advert for the game central to the plot, perfectly in tune with UK game mags of the day. In the small print at the bottom it reads: Screenshots are of version you didn't buy.

     

    Do you think in a way that this constraint to make the game for consoles could be slowly killing of PC gaming or do you think it is still going strong.

     

    There is a question of definition to consider. By virtue of being an open anyone can play platform, how could PC gaming actually be killed off? The real question is whether it will remain a worthwhile venue for big budget productions to produce ports that make full use of the PC's cutting edge assets.

     

    The answer for a lot of companies is no. But that has been their answer for decades.

     

    Back when Cinemaware was circling the drain, the Ad Lib audio board had a small amount of support and its clone, the Sound Blaster was just entering the market. A year or so earlier Cinemaware had a guy doing a design for a PC audio that would be cheap enough to use in our games without universal market adoption. Sound Blaster eventually became a standard basis for how audio was done, at least until Windows provided enough hardware abstraction to make it a non-issue. But it took years before every game developer saw the Sound Blaster as something they had to do in their PC games. Just like it took years for sucessive generations of video cards to gain support. CGA was the one universally support video mode, followed by EGA, then growing support for Tandy 1000 mode (which was really PCjr. revived), followed by VGA. Again, until Windows provided sufficient hardware abstraction, it was all modifications of VGA.

     

    We were really excited about VGA back when it first appeared. Finally the PC could be a kick-butt game platform without the stigma attached to brands like Atari and Commodore. But it took a long time before anyone would ship a game that solely ran in VGA due both to the time it took to grow the installed base and have that coupled with a PU of sufficient power to get things moving. (Keep in mind VGA didn't include any hardware acceleration for line draws and blitting. That didn't really happen until ATI became a force in video chips and even that was driven by the need to speed up Windows rather than gaming.)

     

    So consoles and console-like computers had a big advantage for game developers since the earliest days of the industry. If you had 500K Atari 800s in the market, you knew what every single one of those machines would reliably do. The only concern might be how much RAM was installed. By comparison, a like number of PC can be wildly divergent in what capabilities are included. This was especailly a hassle in the DOS days when every hardware asset had to be addressed directly the memory map could change depending on the combination of installed hardware. This continues today. A PC produced since the launch of the Xbox 360 could have any of a dozen generations of GPU technology, plus numerous generations of CPU. This is why whatever graphics solution puts in their chip set, or now in the CPU itself, is so important as it sets the minimum developers can depend upon being able to use.

     

    10 million Playstation 3s are ten million identical machines you can use to the best of your ability. Ten million PCs are... a whole bunch of platforms that just happen to have a lot of compatibility.

     

    On the other hand, consider Minecraft. You can be one guy plugging away after work and on weekends on your PC game project. You can walk into any store and buy the hardware and download numerous development tools, many of them free. No permission from a corporate gatekeeper required. For distribution all you need to do is upload to a wid range of hosting choices, once more , many of them free. Then go on some forums and tell people, "Hey, check out my game." Within 24 hours you'll be getting bug reports from places you never knew existed. You may even have some paying customers without having invested a fortune in advance on producing discs and manuals, etc.

     

    PC gaming can never truly die. It may not command the attention of companies spending tens of $millions and employing dozens of people on a single game, and those games that do get ported may make the fullest use of the latest hardware. But it will always be the place where new talent can try out an idea cheap, show themselves to the world, and start something great.

     

    Good points.

  21. Posted

    Pandora's Palace -

     

    Arabian -

     

     

    Arabian was even licensed by Atari in the arcades, and I believe neither were ported to any game system. Both could potentially be fantastic on the 7800, and different than any other previous offerings.

    Those both look fantastic, I bet the 7800 could pull them off to.

  22. Posted

    Next thing you know, George Lucas will sue Glen Larson over Battlestar Galactica!!!

     

    not like it would be a big loss. The new series is a big soap opera compared to the original show, why can't studios just leave good shows alone and not screw them up.

  24. Posted

    Disregard the email sent to those who received it, just pay attention to the Status Page please....

     

    Did they start going out the door as planned last week?

     

    If so can't wait.

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