ZylonBane

Best Pre-Millennial, Non-Extra-Chip-In-The-Cart 2600 Music: BMX Airmaster

Anyone else here familiar with the ColorView system on the 8-bit Atari computers? Basically it allows you to display 80x192 4096-color images by splitting the image into 16-color red, green, and blue images, then displaying them in a rolling interlace pattern, like so-- Frame 1: scanline 1: Red line 1 scanline 2: Green line 2 scanline 3: Blue line 3 Frame 2: scanline 1: Green line 1 scanline 2: Blue line 2 scanline 3: Red line 3 Frame 3: scanline 1: Blue line 1 scanline 2: Red line 2 scanline 3: Green line 3 And repeat... (Neep: Internally, what normally happens is that the R/G/B data is interleaved so that each frame's display data is physically contiguous. Save a lot of jumping around in memory.) So using this scheme on the 2600, you could realize a freeform (if somewhat shimmery) 48 x Y 8-color image. Those colors being: black, white, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow.

A better basis of comparison would be the 7800 version of Pete Rose Baseball. And AFAIK, Acid Drop is a clone of Columns.

Ummm, that's almost exactly what I did say. "Therefore I think it makes it look less like the arcade, not more", remember? That's not the reason I gave. I instead relied on the basic observation that "horizontal stripes != hollow". It is, it wasn't, and as already explained in this thread the striping was a side-effect of making the dots a different color from the maze.

I wouldn't mind taking this on. It's the sort of thing I do at work anyway, so it'd go quickly. I do seem to have trouble locating ROMs that work with the latest version of MAME though. Dagnabbit. Anyone have any suggestions now that mame.dk isn't hosting ROMs anymore?

Blargh. Perhaps I should have specified intelligent negativity. M&M needs to be introduced to the bottom side of the E.T. landfill.

And I disagree. The overall perceived effect of the arcade Pac-Man maze if one of hollow walls. The overall effect of Ebi Pac-Man is of striped walls. Therefore I think it makes it look less like the arcade, not more. If they'd been going for the hollow walls, we'd likely have ended up with something more like this--

Bah, negativity is underrated. Carlin, Rickles, Leary and Black forever!

Lord knows there needs to be. I find the current version to be practically unplayable.

Clarification: The Atari 2600's maximum playfield resolution is 40 x however many scanlines the programmer feels like using (usually no more than 200 NTSC, a bit higher for PAL). E.T.'s face in the picture you posted is actually made of players, not the playfield.

So you made it look bad for no reason? Ok, just curious.

The arcade version doesn't have blank horizontal lines running through the entire playfield.

Obviously. Why?

Aside from their both being maze games, Make Trax has nothing in common with Cat Trax. Cat Trax is a port of an Emerson Arcadia 2001 game.

I only complained about relative size, remember? My two shots are exactly the same width.

Not an arcade port, but a port nonetheless... Super Star Trek Stellar Track

Did someone say you were supposed to be?

Congratulations on making the 2600 ports look much worse than they actually are.

Bah, still not close enough. It could have looked like this! WTF is up with that backwards "2" in the Arcade Galaxian hack?

I don't think I've seen Frogger yet. Or Tempest. Or Ms. and Jr. Pac-Man. Shame about the image sizes. Tiny arcade/huge 2600 makes the VCS look much worse than it should.

Magic 8-Ball says: Management greed and stupidity BTW, you do realize that Pesco was originally a straight Pac-Man port, right? It was then modified (needlessly, IMHO) into Pesco to avoid copyright infringement.

How can an unreleased prototype have been someone's childhood toy?

On the first screen, you're supposed to touch the ghost as much as possible. IIRC, this earns you points, which in turn earn you... ummm... something useful. I forget what exactly. Extra lives? Airlock has an ending. Once you escape the flooding submarine, it shows you standing on top on the surface.

How big do you consider too big? I'd be happy to host an MP3 for you. Shouldn't be more than 100K, right?

Didn't Asteroids come out after Pac-Man? It was the first 8K 2600 cart, remember.