raindog

Man, you spend so much time promoting the Xbox and ragging on everything else. Are you, like, too poor to own all three or something so you have to rationalize your choice through the vilification of other choices? I plan on buying a GC this summer for the express and sole purpose of playing my GBA games on the TV set without having to hook up a computer with emulator. So the whole console debate just looks silly to me. (OTOH, as I've said previously, my over-60 partner was drawn into Mario Sunshine at the store like an 8-year-old on Ritalin, so Nintendo has what it takes to appeal to people who don't like videogames.) The X-box has the best hardware, the PS2 has the most games, the GC is most appealing to people without acne. Different audiences, different design philosophies, different consoles.

Unlocking is just an unimaginative alternative to hidden games, probably thought up by marketing people who realized players were playing games just to find the hidden stuff so why not just put it up front and require them to play a certain amount to "unlock" them? Ironically, the stuff you unlock is frequently gimmicky, play for 2 minutes stuff and you have to play for hours to unlock it all. I got Monkey Ball Jr. for the GBA because Monkey Bowling and Monkey Golf looked kinda fun. I have gotten far enough in the game to unlock the bowling and it was indeed worth a couple minutes of play, but games just don't hold my attention for long. It should have been "start with the minigames and when you get good at them, you'll unlock up to 100 levels that you'll actually have to be good to beat!" Sad thing is, with things like Pokemon having gotten as popular as they did and a whole generation of kids growing up with the concept, it's probably here to stay.

Or even not so carefully. ZIPping over to google and searching for two fairly obvious words in quotes turned up five hits, four of which were hosting STARPATH games.

Maybe not Solaris per se, but Faceball 2000 impressed me a lot. http://www.mobygames.com/game/shots/gameId,5388/

I think the Game Boy actually still has another year to go before it runs as long as the 2600. And considering the Game Boy Advance compared to the Game Boy is sort of like what the next generation after the 7800 would have been to the 2600, you might as well say the 2600's still "running" since nearly everyone owns some device nowadays that'll play Atari 2600 games

It's worth noting that unless an author has specifically placed his code in the public domain, someone still owns the rights to every video game ever written because no copyright has expired in like 80 years now. It's just a question of whether anyone is interested in defending their copyright, and for most of the original developers of 2600 games it's either not worth their time, not worth their notice or they're actually happy to see people still playing their stuff. I could see Bridgestone being slightly more interested since they have been made aware of a market, however slight, for the Starpath games in this day and age, though it seems to me that market has been saturated once again.

The way that sort of thing has always been done on Usenet is, a new group gets created when the volume of posts in an existing group on one particular subtopic starts to dominate the existing group. So, why not just start talking about the handhelds in the existing Classic Gaming forum? The Vectrex and Adventurevision have definitely seen some discussion there and I'd think that VFD/LCD/LED games would be fair game too.

With every Atari 2600 and 7800 game, hack, demo, alternate version, and what have you not even filling a 32MB MMC card, I'm trying to imagine the utility of wanting something bigger than 128MB. As for SD, last I heard (and unlike MMC) you had to pay license fees and/or royalties and sign an NDA to implement something using it (since the whole point of SD over MMC from a design perspective is hardware enforceable copy protection and Sandisk doesn't want its licensees to be able to help the digital rights restoration movement.) I can't imagine that being a good thing for such a limited run homebrew product even if it'll let us store the entire 2600/7800 collections 16 times over instead of only 4

Geez, I've thrown out P100 and P2-233 machines already because it didn't seem like anyone would want them even for parts. Now I have a Celeron 400 motherboard (in a case with a failed power supply) sitting in storage because I figured I could use it in some hardware project sometime, and bought my new motherboard and processor (Athlon 2100) for all of $150. Or you can get a whole new 933MHz PC (well, if you don't mind Linux) from Wal-Mart for 200 bucks. Anyway, even the P100 ran Stella at a perfectly acceptable speed. I sometimes get the sense I'm talking to people in Romania or somewhere else that's 10 years behind techwise Rob

I had an Odyssey2, so except for the few months K.C. Munchkin was hot stuff, I pretty much envied 2600 and INTV owners equally of course I envied Apple II and Atari 800 owners more, and even Coco owners I guess, but then I got my CV and C64....

I actually think a gradient for the floor and/or ceiling would be more than acceptable as a tradeoff for getting a realtime 3D engine up and running I can even understand how they propose to do this: make a cart with enough RAM to store two unrolled kernels, generate your screen in however many frames of vblank it takes (apparently they've decided on 5) and write the code to the RAM, then use that kernel for your display while your vblank stuff is generating the other kernel. You could probably get away with just a generic asymmetric playfield kernel that reads its data from RAM, and if you made the display blocky enough (and 40x25 would be blocky enough only if your entire rendering algorithm somehow only used 3 bytes of RAM) you could fit all your playfield data in the 2600's RAM, but fitting two frames' worth would be tougher, I think. At that point if you want to add up to two players you can position them however you like at the top of the frame and just leave them there till it's time to draw them. Sounds like a job for the Cuttle Rob

The GP32 is 320x240, so would be just about ideal for playing Atari games. Of course it's also got a 133MHz processor so an emulator would probably be the more ideal approach, sorry to all the purists out there There are plenty of unauthorized devices that plug into the cartridge port available for the GBA, and the only ones that Nintendo have actually cracked down on are the ones that let you dump GBA games. Not saying they wouldn't threaten a homebrewer with a lawsuit just because they figure they won't be able to afford to defend themselves, but historically they have not done this yet. Finally, you could emulate the 2600 at full resolution by turning the GBA sideways. The aspect ratio would be screwed up but considering that most 2600 games have sprites that appear horizontally stretched due to the rectangular pixels, it might actually be better that way Someone else besides Andrew has done a similarly unfinished 2600 emulator which has an option to play sideways as I described, and it seems to me they may have even released the source. I'm new to GBA programming though (waiting for my Flash2Advance to arrive, since my Flash Linker Extreme cart isn't compatible with my Smartmedia GameWallet and I run Linux so the Extreme's USB support does me no good anyway) so I don't think I'll be the one whipping that into shape. For what it's worth, though, the NES emulator I've played with on the GBA has a number of modes for fitting the NES' 192 lines into the GBA's 160, and one of them is a flickery mode that looks poor on an emulator but great on the real hardware. It plays at full speed despite the NES being faster than the 2600 with an otherwise similar processor. I think that's another option if software filtering proves too expensive. Don't know if that thing's 6502 core has source available or not. Andrew is doubtless aware of this emulator since he's active in the GBA world. Rob

Since it's not that clear from their web site, those 12fps AVI's are mockups of what they think they'll look like, not actual Atari 2600 output.

Wow, sometimes you listen to a song and you immediately know you're going to buy the album. I played this game for about 5 seconds and realized I was gonna be buying it. That I can play it natively under Linux rather than Wine just makes it even sweeter. If it weren't past my bedtime I would be pulling out the Hotrod SE right about now. Rob

You can tell sweeps are over, here come the reruns.

It's almost impossible to find now (I had to order it through an importer when it was new) but Mappy for the Game Gear is the best home version of that game hands down, IMO. Graphics and sound are closer to the arcade than the NES version, and it includes a "remix mode" where the house scrolls in both directions. It's just great. I kinda wish I could get a flash cart for my GG as I could for my GBC and GBA.... there are a lot of obscure games out there I'd like to give a whirl without having to resort to ebay, because some GG games make the GBA look weak and others are just completely worthless. Same goes for SMS games played with the Master Gear thingy. And that passive matrix display makes trying stuff out in an emulator kind of a dodgy business, because what looks great in an emulator might be washed out or invisible on that screen. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather have a washed out backlit screen than a non-backlit one.... but just the same, I'll be picking up a GBA SP and hoping someone releases a Game Gear emulator for it that actually works

hmmm, wonder how hard it would be to write a linux joystick driver for the amiga 4 player interface....

The 2600 picture might work better as a 40-pixel-wide playfield "chronocolor" thing or the 36-pixel-wide pseudo-HAM thing I haven't gotten working right yet than the 48 little pixels in the middle of the screen thing, but either way you'll lose a lot of detail in the switches (the air grill should come out pretty well though, assuming you shoot it dead on ) I think an Atari joystick could be rendered more acceptably by drawing it by hand with a 6-character-sprite without any use of the pseudo-interlaced-chronocolor method; the only colors are really black and orange. You could probably use the ball somehow to do the orange for the fire button and you could probably animate the whole thing like I did with my Boing26 demo. For that matter you might be able to do most of it with playfield graphics instead of players and make it that much bigger and more impressive. Note: I'm not volunteering at this point in time Rob

I played a lot of Spy Hunter, Roadblasters, Super Sprint and PC Road Rash. Not sure which I like best since they're all basically completely different. Oh, I guess I played a lot of Bump'n'Jump too but when Spy Hunter appeared I switched my allegiance.

Wal-Mart, Target and Toys'R'Us around here still have a handful (a dozen for TRU, maybe 3 or 4 at the other two) of games for the GBC, at full price. The video game stores have a lot of used GBC stuff but also a lot of overpriced new GBC inventory that they don't seem ready to clearance yet. Me, I go to half.com for GBC/GB games.

Thrust DC+ works beautifully with either driving controller OR joystick (or foot pedals, or booster grip, or some combination of the above....) I wouldn't suggest waiting any longer because every moment you spend before ordering Thrust is one less moment you have to play Thrust. And since you'll spend the rest of your life trying to get past the second level, every moment counts!

There are still a couple niche alternatives to the GBA for sale in Asia. None is a serious competitor but none were ever meant to be. Two that I've actually contemplated buying are the GP32 and the Game Axe. The GP32 is a pretty generic looking GBA/Lynx type machine, except it has a 133MHz processor (8 or 9 times faster than the GBA) and takes software on standard SmartMedia cards - it's intended as an open-ended gaming platform, and is priced accordingly ($150ish, which is actually fairly low for the hardware, I think.) Wireless multiplayer, 8MB of RAM, stereo speakers, built-in TV-out port (though I guess you need an adaptor), it's technically superior in every way to the GBA but doesn't stand a chance once you start talking marketing, and Game Park knows it. The original games are weird Korean stuff, heavy on the incomprehensible RPG's if I remember right, but the whole point of the system is the emulators - as far as I know, it's the cheapest way to play MAME on the go for example. It even plays DIVX and MPG movies. If someone ever gets a GBA emulator up and running on it I'd probably switch without a second thought - they have NES, SNES and GB/GBC already so it could be possible. Certainly it's the most promising looking possibility for an Atari emulator with that much processor speed and a higher resolution screen than the GBA. The damn thing even has a USB port, though I don't know if anyone's done anything that uses it yet. Oh, and to pull things back on topic briefly, it even emulates the Wonderswan The GameAxe is nothing but a Famicom (Japanese NES) clone with a 4" screen built in, packed into a case only a litle clumsier looking than the Sega Nomad and with a NES adapter in the box so you can use all your NES games onit. But then I realized I have a GBA with a flash card, and the GBA is emulating the NES pretty well these days.

12.4" and counting here just north of Albany, New York. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

I haven't touched MASM but I've sure built a lot of SDL apps, so I'll be giving this a try sooner or later. But I was just amazed to see a really good 2600 emulator on my screen for the first time since fdisking the ol' windows drive Rob

Let's see..... the last recordings of maybe the most popular and influential rock band in history.... versus a not-quite-playable Miss Piggy's Wedding. Hmmmmmmmmm.