ZylonBane

I imagine that would be great for people who walk around with a PS3 controller in their pocket.

BTW, only attempt to play action games that use on-screen virtual controls if you really, really hate yourself.

The answer to your question depends entirely on what type of games you like, which is information you haven't disclosed. So I'm just going to say Angry Birds.

You know once that auction disappears from eBay, people will have no idea what you're talking about.

But DOSBox handles the vast majority of DOS games just fine, so the Windows version is irrelevant.

This survey is inherently flawed since OP didn't make even the slightest attempt to define "retro computing" (instead just belching out "Title"). What exactly does he mean by retro, and what exactly does he mean by computing? Does he mean gaming, or running old versions of Visicalc and WordPerfect? Does he mean running DOS software, 16-bit Win 3.1, or Win32?

You're not going to correct the thread title, are you.

Dude, even people who grew up on the VCS know how terrible its Defender was. They know better than anyone.

I assume this is one of those things that gets filed under "Because I Can" rather than "Actually Useful".

Riiight, the annual AtariAge body count year in review thread. What a lovely idea for a tradition.

This is hands-down the most morbid, depressing thing I have ever read on AA. Sounds like someone has a death obsession.

The reason Berzerk's audio was so expensive was because it didn't take a lot of space. The expense wasn't the audio digitizing (which is technically trivial), it was converting the speech to LPC coding for playback by the speech synthesis chip.

See, this is why I get cranky around here, because of the seemingly-endless supply of people who post without thinking. Berzerk: player, 2 enemy types, 2-bit color, very simple animation Wizard of Wor: 2 players, 5 enemy types, 4-bit color That's a heck of a lot more sprite data to deal with. On top of which, WoW has significantly more complex game logic.

Err, no. Arcade Blasteroids most certainly did not use 3D acceleration. The "3D" spinning rocks were just pre-rendered sprites. All you need for that is memory for storing all the sprite frames. 7800 Asteroids does basically the same effect.

Because digital speech takes a ridiculous amount of memory (by 80s standards) to store. Berzerk and Realsports Baseball have rather minimalist graphics, so they had ROM space to spare.

Honestly can't tell if this guy is trolling or retarded. Kind of leaning toward the latter though.

Of course not. Anything beyond 8-bit and you have the 16/32-bit Williams Arcade Greatest Hits versions to contend with, which are basically arcade-perfect emulations.

The 5200/Atari computer version of Defender is the best of a bad lot, really. There was no truly great 8-bit port of Defender. 5200 Defender is certainly playable, but technically it's a bit of a janky, flickery mess that doesn't use any of the hardware's advanced graphic features, and the sound effects are wimpy at best. Dropzone showed how fast and fluid a proper Defender port could have been.

So has anyone dumped all the graphics into a ZIP file yet?

"Optimizing the gameplay" is meaningless nonsense. If you're enabling the player to move faster than the game was designed around, you're cheating, full stop. Don't try to weasel-word your way out of it.

Okay, we get it, you like to cheat at games by radically changing the control scheme.

Incredibly cheesy, yes. This is like arguing that Space Invaders should have used a paddle controller. Time Pilot was designed and balanced around the player ship having a constant movement speed. Being able to scoot around the perimeter as fast as you like completely throws off the difficulty.

Since Java is an "enterprise" language, and thus utterly horrible, I'm thinking eww, ick, oh god no.

And, y'know, Schwalker said right in this thread that he'd played it.

Of course it's possible. Why wouldn't it be possible? Graphically Gyruss is little more than a bunch of sprites moving around on a black background, which is exactly what the 7800 was built to do. You'd probably want to use an on-cart sound chip though.