ZylonBane

"I suppose that hating the 2600 version of Pac-Man is the vogue thing to do these days." As far as I know, people have been hating Pac-Man since the day it was released. And the dots go "bong", not "bonk". The sad fact is that it diverged from the arcade game in several aspects that had nothing to do with the 4K ROM limitation. Todd Frye should have been smacked, but instead he got millions in royalties.

Who hated Crystal Castles? I've heard nothing but good things about it.

And that was, in the truest sense of the term, a scripted sequence. The Queen moves and attacks the same as any Alien. It works in the confines of her chamber, but loose in the ship it would likely come across a tad silly (and rapidly lethal).

This would have been utterly ludicrous. Aliens slaughter, they don't set up cage matches. And Tyrant, what you describe is a) VERY commonly known, and b) not a bug. It's not even an AI issue. The developers specifically limited the Queen to the egg chamber. Having the Queen chase you all over the ship would have just been stupid. Killing the Queen in this manner just isn't fun anyway. In fact it's downright tedious. If you want a real exploit, try this-- Run into the egg chamber and save your game. Then reload. Apparently the Queen isn't "activated" until you cross the egg chamber threshold, and this isn't recorded in the save game. So you can pump the motionless Queen full of lead, and she won't even die until you wander over to the door.

I actually had a chance to buy an Atari Video Music for cheap at an Atari swap meet about 10 years ago. Didn't get it because seller wouldn't take a check and I didn't have enough cash on hand. (weeps)

The monitors of the 8-bit/16-bit era were manufactured before "S-Video" even existed. Back then they called it split video (or chroma/luma or Y/C), and used two RCA jacks-- one for color, and one for luminance. So your S-Video cable is useless for this purpose. A small S-Video equipped TV would probably look quite sharp though. Just make sure it doesn't have (or lets you disable) a comb filter.

WTF are you on about? Sure there were some duds, but for the most part Coleco's 2600 games were solid, technically-excellent efforts. And I liked Donkey Kong, BTW. Sure it only had 2 screens, but they both played well.

Atari published Ms Pac-Man, which is the basis for Pac-Man Arcade, so I think they already know how good it could have been.

Have you looked the articles? The "digitizer" is just around 4 simple component parts. Doing range-compression sounds like it would significantly complicate the circuit. Or it might be as simple as adding a resistor. Electronics isn't really my forte.

So when are they going to fix the WinAmp SAP plugin so that it plays tunes at the correct speed (60Hz) and doesn't crash on a lot of the SAP files?

Yes, it was for the Atari computer. They didn't publish a lot of type-in 2600 programs back then. I don't know why you think it would take any more CPU time than any other paddle application. In fact it would take less, since you'd only need very coarse precision to drive the video effects. Just sample ~16 times per frame, then keep a rolling average of ten or so frames to derive the current volume level. Yes, being responsive to intensity and frequency would be cool, but better to set your sights low and actually get something out there. Ah, found the articles-- http://www.atarimagazines.com/v2n4/talkischeap.html http://www.atarimagazines.com/v8n8/anticsa...mplingproc.html

This says more about you than it does about the problem. What it says isn't very flattering.

Hmm, I only had the base ATR8000. Pretty cool being able to use dual DS/DD drives years before the XF551 came out.

It's possible to sample audio through the paddle port using a fairly simple circuit. I vaguely remember an article in Antic or ANALOG on how to build your own.

Ugh.

Anyone who's actually programmed. How old are you anyway?

Ok, I officially give up on attempting to clue-ify you. You are clearly failing to grasp the magnitude of the numbers involved. Go drink your apple juice.

Actually I used 31,556,925 seconds (number of seconds in a "tropical year"). And parallel processing is irrelevant. Adding CPUs only increases your computing power arithmetically (linearly)-- adding bits to the ROM increases its complexity geometrically. Make it a million CPUs instead of one, and you've only divided the total time by an insignificant million.

No-one said that it was impossible. Just that the Universe would have either collapsed or undergone total heat-death long before it was done. Perhaps you aren't grasping the scale of the numbers we're talking about here. Let's assume a much-improved case-- instead of a 2K ROM, a 128-byte ROM. And let's upgrade our computer to process and validate a TRILLION (U.S.) permutations a second, complete with an A.I. incarnation of Nolan Bushnell to determine if the result is playable or not. With this smokin' setup, our algorithm would achieve completion in only 569666764065990557612728486945107843561429695365535955336047 733287488168779122056831292901074510700966967199370253576220 302801267279421624549437027338608322508507699735843987575792 697169467855690797132331762381058478133348995388116788670349 0306081380342048874679212193201563394991106272389 years. By comparison, the projected lifespan of our own sun is a paltry 5 billion years.

If it's using the Supercharger boot ROM, then of course it does.

Boo on Warlords. A good while-drinking game (as opposed to a "drinking game", which is something entirely different) should, for obvious reasons, provide a large margin of error for successful play. For example, Val d'Isere Skiing on the Jag is a perfect "drunk" game-- it lets you veer all over the course, and even if you crash you just get right up and keep going. Warlords, OTOH, requires pinpoint precision. After a certain amount of drinks it's just miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss... hardly fun.

Eh, just a little basic math and this.

I guess I wasn't paying attention when this happened. What debacle?

Just in case you don't realize how stupendously impractical this idea is-- For the simplest case of a 2K cartridge, that's 2048 bytes... which equals 16384 bits... which gives 2^16384 possible combinations. Now let's say we have a decent supercomputer that can run through (and heck, even validate) 1 BILLION full 2K combinations per second. You'd finish up your calculations in a jaunty 3770112250662039362471975094620300079185296688750599868246588 7320556782962233604411852187609300083576429434664018731522760 7780980342250528615993065972544855394139839152897469421416456 6476396058380061890407516371912144949055812582451282185979291 7533583390787866843367118478332578767929977207851708938889230 1173455703722964441029572037568391284450837717051761324638020 9352112309793721253293328318731168454446786631503075486023621 2200343073472800583053027176925295578650067066387659928371143 7706420949849114223903599103738811634067027576113606949948063 8950449149027272055347193807132105547048524865275583572463853 8596324480230218706200727744056745971831478333562151313810632 5339737771549094768862823258406097786245725972425728762038593 9616533422645002615884220294686554053261957487610590693910215 7441981797708524444579153036172912753368862021667328399713907 7024465339383809402042603232602058433003087965450995497324122 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0388133674891330322799159807567264021142442553654670067761412 691950634870022339545755587797621188 years.

"Modulation"? Uhhh...you mean, "emulation"?