raindog

It's a sad state of affairs that the only console nowadays I'm really interested in is the GBA for its relative lack of 3D abilities forcing game designers to "think different", and that 90% of my collection for it is either emulated older games or updates of them, but at the same time..... we were talking on lily, a chat system I use, the other night about who'd bought what GBA games and it seems like I've bought more than most people. So even though these game genres are "dead", they still sell enough copies to keep putting them out for us old farts to buy! Speaking of VR.... I'm pretty sure that at this point (almost 10 years after the hype) with a fairly cheap PC you could drive two 640x480 eyepieces AND render scenes fast enough to reasonably use HMD position tracking to match what someone would see in real life. Most people will have problems with this as the game is never going to quite match up to exactly what you see in real life, and you have the inner ear confusion of seeing the scene move when you turn your head, but also seeing the scene move when you "run forward" without moving at all. I think ultimately it'll end up a niche market and that the more prominent applications for it have something to do with meeting/talking to people and pretending to have sex with them. I don't think my heart would handle a fully immersive "kill someone before they kill you" situation, whether simulated or real Another option for true but non-immersive 3D is the new lenticular 3D screens they've started to show prototypes of at computer industry shows. I've heard they'll only cost about 20% more than a normal LCD screen but have this lenticular thing that causes one eye to see one image, the other eye another. Obviously there'll be focal point issues and you'll have to deal with what the lenticular layer does to 2D applications, but if they ever actually start selling them I'd probably want to try one. I'm not even really into FPS or other 3D games, but it just seems like magic.

I wonder if you could hack one of those Coleco tabletops to replace the VFD screen with a tiny LCD monitor and cram the guts of a GBA or Zaurus/other cheap handheld computer in there so you could have an arcade-perfect Pac-Man in a Coleco case The head to head wouldn't be there anymore though. Awwww. I suppose the Coleco games are rare and valuable enough that no one would want to cannibalize one of them in this fashion anyway.

I don't suppose he'll ever release a binary, for those of us who live far away from our Vectrexes but would like to try to play it on our Zauri That screenshot of "YASI" looks incredible too, though I gotta believe he took a long-exposure photograph to conceal what must be seizure-inducing flicker!

hmmm, it's 65 degrees here today and cloudy, perfect tagsaling weather and now that i live in beautiful suburban hell it should be easy to find some but rain is threatening

Things have kinda changed since then, though. The "interleaved chronocolour" technique would seem kinda ideal for displaying an arbitrary number of different colored bricks per line, though I don't know if I'd want to try to display enemies on the same scanlines at the same time (maybe have the bricks on "a different plane" than the enemies so they're obscured whenever they're on a brick level....)

Actually, your mockup was entirely the basis for my hack. The differences are only a function of limitations in the 2600 and/or the Ms. Pac-Man code I didn't know how to code around at the time. El Destructo and scottith have since done better, even if they still have some issues to work out

Glad you like my hack, though I'm reasonably sure it's NOT the closest the 2600 could get to Pac-Man; see other threads on the subject I agree that AtariAge's service is remarkable, especially for a small independent hobbyist service.

Except that the Cuttle isn't a cart copier any more than the supercharger was. A couple companies actually made cart copiers for the 2600 in '82 or '83. I could never see the point since by then, new 2600 games were often cheaper than the blanks (which were around 15-20 bucks a pop.)

Pretty much you can only run Starpath games on a Supercharger or Cuttle Cart. I say "pretty much" because Rabbit Transit was later converted to run on a cartridge but was never released as far as I know. I guess someone could come up with a cartridge format with 6K of RAM and 6K of ROM and a hacked Supercharger BIOS that instead of loading off of tape, copied the ROM to RAM and launched the game, but I don't know that enough demand exists for such a thing.

I actually have never thrown out a hard disk that I can think of; I don't know where my original 170MB drive from 1994 is, but I do still have my 2GB drive from 1996. Not because I'm paranoid, just because I'm a packrat

Actually, Nintendo controls 100% of the American handheld market, as none of those other consoles are even for sale here. Sure the NGPC was, and you can order the other two from importers, but monopolies are made at Wal-Mart, not Lik-Sang. And discontinued consoles are "vanquished competitors", not "competitors" If Nintendo decided to use the profits from their handheld operations to fund some kind of major change in the console market (like GameCube for $49 with a pack-in game and controller and BBA) and it gave them a majority share in that market, Sony and Microsoft would have a pretty good antitrust case against them; see my similar post about Sony/N vs. MS in the X-Box thread. Of the three players, only Sony doesn't have a monopoly to exploit, though Nintendo is too financially conservative to do so either.

http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.p...ighlight=midway

There've been a couple text-mode windowing interfaces over the years, like some versions of DesqView and TopView in the late 80's, and stuff like Twin which is still around today. I think this is the first one I've seen that even uses ASCII to simulate desktop icons though. (On the C64 native version they're graphical, but all the ports seem to use pure ASCII icons.)

Definitely the SP first, because I got a flash cartridge recently and things like the Matrix trailer made me really hate all the lighting solutions I've come up with, even my duct taped dual-Photon-Light approach that's twice as bright as anything you can actually buy. And of course I can play GBA games on any of my Linux boxes, despite the issues people refer to with emulators, but we can't play Mario Sunshine on a PC so that may be the deciding factor for a GBP + used GC.

Actually, they closed the last ones here in 1997. I remember the last time I ate at a Woolworths luncheonette a couple weeks before the last one closed. It was kinda sad, even the mall it was in is now a parking lot for a Target. I'm not sure it's the same company, at any rate.

I tried to assemble a complete Visual Pinmame collection myself last fall. I got to 1.2GB and realized it was just too big a project for me at the time. I'd love to see something a little less kludgy to simulate pinball games, but it seems to be the de facto standard already. Kind of irritating that it uses the MAME name since philosophically it's the exact opposite of MAME (closed source, only one platform, really difficult to get it going, authors don't seem to want to distance themselves from the actual tables...)

Again, it's been discussed in a few other threads, but what they were referring to was Midway West, since it was the Atari coin-op division prior to being acquired.

My little brother wanted to design an Odyssey2 game kinda like this (our prior rebuffs at product ideas from Lego notwithstanding), except prior to getting out on the street you had to go through a Dragonfire-like jumping part where you avoided syringes of tranqs being shot at you by a male nurse (well, a different colored Odyssey2 guy.) Once you got out on the street it was to be like Frogger except once you picked up a knife you could randomly murder people milling about on either sidewalk and an island in the middle. He was trying to come up with a "boss wave" when he finally got bored of it, being too young yet to conceive of the "track down that b**** who drove you insane and dismember her" concept that would have completed his far too disturbing game. Since he was about 8 at the time he called his design "Luntit Loose". He drew it all out on graph paper and everything. Meanwhile I was working on a design called "Lazer Base" that became largely obsolete when Attack of the Timelords got released. (It was basically identical to what I had in mind except I wanted there to be a lot more shooting going on and to be able to shoot in three directions, vertically and the two diagonals.) Feel free to use the Dragonfire part (or any of it, really) if you think it'll enhance your game

Actually, I think those game lists prove that ALL the current consoles suck. Why? Read down the list. Every other game is a license of some kind (once upon a time that would have been the kiss of death for a game, since inevitably the gameplay sucked) and the ones that aren't licenses are pretty much variations on the FPS or racing sims. Even Metroid has been reduced to a jazzed-up me-too FPS in its current life. The consoles now are stuck in the same rut as the arcades were 5 years ago.... anything unique simply won't make it, and you're forced to contend with hundreds of cookie cutter games. Instead of virtua kick the shit out of some japanese guy you have virtua sneak up on someone and blow their brains out. Yay. Been there played that bought the T-shirt over it. Now give me something that is as different and world-rocking as Pac-Man was in 1980, SMB was in 1984, etc. "Oh, well, in this game you can actually see the texture in the shadows and if you don't sneak up on the guy quietly he'll turn around and shoot you! It's nothing like Quake at all!" ...I puke, the end.

Microsoft certainly does have a shot at becoming the [videogame, set top box, personal video recorder] market leader, it does have to do with the X-Box, and it would absolutely not be possible without their PC software monopoly. Tivo, the closest thing to a newcomer in any of those businesses, has been on shaky ground for the last few years because they'd lose $3 million here, $2 million there..... Microsoft lost $350 MILLION on the X-Box over the Christmas shopping season in 2002, i.e. the strongest period of the year for videogame sales. If they weren't making the tremendous profits they were in their operating system and "knowledge worker" (MS Office) divisions, the X-Box would simply have sunk them. It is a textbook example of how to use one monopoly to fund a venture into another market, and it's only legal until you actually do significant damage to your competition. (In this case that would be Nintendo, since Sony has other fish to fry.) They don't dare push the X-Box too hard in Japan because if they did, and were successful, they know that both Sony and Nintendo would be able to carry off a successful lawsuit against them. Selling a product at a loss in order to kill off a country's native competitors is called "dumping" and is against every trade agreement in the world. The Tramiels briefly entertained filing such a suit against Sega and Nintendo before throwing in the towel with the Lynx and Jaguar, as I recall. Truth be told, Microsoft's own 10-Q and 10-K filings may be damning enough combined with the (toothless, but still in effect) second antitrust judgment against them that if the X-Box even achieved a majority share in the US, they'd be open to a third antitrust action. I actually suspect that when they were making deals with Sega back when the Dreamcast came out (all these games were going to be developed using Windows CE, Sega games were getting produced for Windows, etc.) they were actually trying to do what they'd done with IBM and the PC back in 1981, except this time they picked the wrong horse and decided to start over with their own, namely the x86. For a slice of life in Microsoft's books, see http://www.itworld.com/App/4201/030203xbox...es/pfindex.html - or the previous quarter at http://archive.infoworld.com/articles/hn/x...out.xml?s=IDGNS where it was much the same story.

Mountain King. Yeah, I know it was "ported" to a bunch of machines. I had it for the C64 but somehow it just wasn't as playable as the 2600 version. It was like stiffer or something. I guess what I'm saying is, I wish they'd ported the fun

Oh, I forgot to add, by "people with acne" I did mean "people who aren't the target market for videogames", i.e. people who aren't males 18-35. That would include people who have never had acne and people who have long since gotten past it. Truly, regardless of one's complexion, someone who can sit there and play Halo or Ghost Recon for 12 hours straight has acne in spirit

I apologize to theaveng for my embarassing mistake. I assumed that there could only be one guy on the board who was a foaming at the mouth xbox or die fan and when I saw a subject line that started with "XBX >" and was all caps I kinda snapped

That's not even completely true anymore. Going back to my MBJr example, you start out with the first 10 levels available to you. I've never gotten around to beating the 10th level so I don't know whether it only locks the 11th or the 11th through 20th (which is more in line with what GBA games seem to do.)

I have two copies of SGANB2 as well, though only one's shrinked (the one that came with the Cuttle.) The booklet impressed me a lot, much more than say the INTV Lives one or lack thereof.