raindog

I was just about to make a link to the two Jakks Pacific products (joystick with cloned Atari games and gamepad with cloned Activision games) in the Atariage Store, but they have disappeared without a trace, as if they were never sold. I assume this means you've run out of them and don't plan to sell any more, but is this going to happen with everything you run out of? It makes it difficult to link to the products you sell. Rob

I don't have much in the way of non-playable gaming paraphernalia anymore, so I guess the closest thing would either be my Cuttle Cart, Hotrod SE or brand new Flash Advance Linker Extreme for the GBA. Rob

You know, the 2600 and the Intellivision actually had the same resolution (the 2600 has more now that we know how to do interlace ) so it's really just the number of objects and colors per scanline thing again. Obviously some games like Deadly Discs and a few of the sports games would be direct translations, Astroblast with the paddle is much cooler than Astrosmash if still just as easy, I can't remember Ice Trek specifically so I don't know how well that would translate. Rob

Although, looking at http://www.jcec.co.uk/X68list.htm , I'm not all that sure I have much more than what's on that page. I think I assumed at the time that it was a system with a very brief lifetime and the only games I remember actually playing on the emulator were Galaga 88, Ghouls'n'Ghosts and Pacmania.... maybe TNZS too.... Rob

Someone posted an x68k flood on alt.binaries.emulators.misc a few years ago, and I archived it to CD. Unfortunately, I lost my CD catalog database in a recent hard disk crash and somehow I don't seem to have kept a backup anywhere (not that I'd be able to find it if I did.) But I'll certainly PM you if and when I find it. For what it's worth, there's a TOSEC list out there for it which means a complete set of known dumps is bound to get posted somewhere around the net from time to time. Rob

My son has one of those for his GBC, but I don't see any difference, of course that could be because the bulb burned out...? Hmm? Worm lights use white LED's which have a lifecycle well over 10,000 hours, so unless it was DOA I hope there's an interesting story about how it got burned out (They blew one up on TechTV one time by plugging it into an AC line or something.... I'd hope it was at least as much fun) Rob

There are a number of devices that use the GBA's remote boot thingy (that lets you play some games multiplayer with only one guy having a cartridge) to let you upload little games that fit into the GBA's RAM. I've never seen any for $10 though. I'd think it'd mainly be useful for writing homebrew games, especially for those of us with more of a retro bent. But my Flash Advance Extreme 256Mbit and Game Wallet (that lets you put games on dirt cheap Smartmedia cards and upload them to the FA cart with no PC involved) arrived today and I expect that'll be my choice of development tool, personally, assuming it actually works.

People always say that. Thing is, it *was* Pac-Man. There was no other Pac-Man for the Atari at the time. That was all Atari owners had. For once (and only once, and briefly at that!) us Odyssey2 owners could lord it over our VCS friends It'd be kinda like if some young girl's parents gave her the pony she'd always asked for and it turned out to have some congenital defect and died right in front of her as she blew out the birthday candles. 2600 Pac-Man isn't quite as tragic, perhaps, but not exactly an easy thing to forget and there were a few million kids affected. Rob

I bought the Arm Light (I think that's what it was called - two white LED lights on silver "robot arm" looking things that you position over the screen, and fold down over the screen when not in use) and it had the best light of any of the half-dozen lights I bought. But I was still able to improve it by duct taping two cheap knockoffs of the Photon light (white LED keychain flashlight) to the arms. When they're turned on, they're so bright you can turn on the Arm Light itself and not even notice any difference. CompUSA and Best Buy sell the Photon rip-offs or you can get the Photon Light people's own cut-rate lights for 8 bucks a pop at http://www.photonlight.com (their stuff is highly recommended in general.) Rob

I've bought a couple dozen GBA games (mostly from half.com, great way to build your collection up fast as long as you're careful of people selling games with no box or manual as "like new") and I'd say these are the best I've played: Duke Nukem Advance (just seems more playable than Wolf3D or DOOM) Super Monkey Ball Jr. (part Marble Madness, part 3D adventure, part puzzle...) Sonic Advance (the Mario SNES ports are good too but this is better) and as far as the classic arcade ports go.... Namco Museum (since you already have Pac-Man Collection) One more thing: no matter how cheap it is, STAY AWAY FROM DEFENDER. Maybe the Midway classics version is okay, I haven't tried it, but the Defender cartridge itself sucks - you have your choice of the completely useless new game that has little to do with Defender other than the name, the "classic version" with a decent control scheme but "updated" graphics, and the totally original version which foolishly tries to recreate the "one joystick and seven buttons" sort of interface of the arcade game on the GBA, with no option to redefine keys (and they must have known it was a problem because there's a screen where you can view the bindings for each game, but not change them.) Seriously, stay away. And once you try some commercial games, head over to gamegizmo.com or one of the other places that sells RAM cartridges for the GBA (sort of like the 2600 in a Flash project due to be released soon) so you can get in on the cool homebrew scene that's grown up around the GBA, including a number of really interesting emulators (check out the one for the NES.) Finally, don't ignore GBC or GB games just because they're older or only available used. Donkey Kong for the Gameboy (actually "Super Gameboy" which means it plays using a limited amount of color) is a real classic, an example of how to take a good original game and extend it vastly (from the original 4 screens to 100 increasingly large and puzzle-like levels.) There are others like it out there, too. Rob

I think Commodore was very dead in the US before its half-assed attempt to sell the CD32. I never saw a single one, since by the time of its release the only way to buy an Amiga in my area was to find a bookstore that still sold one of the two remaining Amiga magazines, and mail-order from the back of it. Toys R Us, Babbages and EB never bothered selling it, electronics stores around here were in a state of flux (there was a period of 3-4 years where you literally had to go to places like Sears to buy home electronics) and PC stores were sure not going to touch it. Rob

I like your Version 1 better as well.

See that "STORE" link in the upper right hand corner of the page? Click that. Rob

The closest I've ever come to winning an ebay auction was an attempted snipe - I misread the clock, and bid 1:05 before the end of the auction rather than 0:05. Added to that, I was still a newbie and had bid on the auction early, tipping the bidder who eventually won that he'd need to be paying attention in the last moments because I might be back. It used to be you could bid early if you were only sorta interested in something, snipe if you really wanted it. Nowadays I'm convinced that no matter how mundane the auction, the only way to win at all is by sniping. You can't be glad or mad or sad about it, because that's just the way it is and you can always go to one of those "other" auction sites, right? I'm not the sort to stay up all hours to snipe someone's auction so I haven't done it yet, but when I next see something that I have to have and there's no BIN, I'll be there at 0:03 clicking Bid. And if there's someone else already in there and their proxy bid is higher than my snipe, or the seller's reserve is higher than I'm willing to pay.... them's the breaks, but I think I'd have a better shot with the "one click, one win" method.

I find it less alarming than the "Internet access, $7.95 a month" box that's been on the front page for a while. At least Philly Classic is "on-topic". But neither one is exactly intrusive. Rob

Having seen the other parts of Randy's website I'm betting he would have been more inclined to make the latter! When I ordered my own copy of what's now called Pac-Man Arcade from Randy, I made him leave the cartridge unlabeled and did the design to the left of this message myself and applied it (using the inkjet label covered by laminating film method) myself. At the time he was unwilling to do any labels without Annoying Tiki Guy on them, or so he told me. Obviously by the time Xype came into existence he'd lightened up a bit on the one-offs, but he seemed pretty reticent about generating potential fake rarities at the time. Of course anyone could take a razor and some goo-gone to any label and apply any other label they'd designed themselves. So it's really a case of caveat ebay. Rob

Yeah, I think Atari did the game an injustice by making Evil Otto not appear on the default game setting. As if people are going to like the game MORE if it sucks the first time they play it. Berzerk VE on an appropriate difficulty setting is maybe the most authentic arcade conversion for the 2600, though. I was never a huge fan of the arcade game but BVE is right on. Anyone trying to complete the "AtariAge Arcade" series needs to have that one. Pac-Man is obviously the king of Atari disappointments, so much so that it drove some of us to absurd mid-life-crisis-level activities to correct it, but I knew a few kids who actually cried in disappointment the first time they played ET after seeing the movie. I thought the movie kinda sucked so I wasn't expecting much. Donkey Kong is also pretty bad, but we played it a lot more than we played Pac-Man, if only because we wanted to see if there was a third or fourth screen after you did the first two a few times. (A disappointment within a disappointment, there...) Like Pac-Man I'd want to either start from a different game or write it from scratch, to correct its awfulness. Rob

There are actually more aliens onscreen (if not moving) at any given time in Galaxian than in Galaga. I think it'd be totally doable on the 2600 though of course it would have to be to arcade Galaga as 2600 Galaxian (the Jess Ragan hack) is to Galaxian. Whoever tries it would have to pick a new name though - "galaga.bin" is already out there as a stupid hack of River Raid Rob

They did air at least one commercial in my area, but the song they played in it was almost a complete ripoff of the Matchbox commercials around the same time. "Vectrex, its name is Vectrex..."

My phone has crabs. Seriously, instead of the snake game my phone has that "crab catching bubbles" game that was sort of popular as a game and watch motif in the early 80's. (Sort of like the game you used for your avatar, really.) And I think the G&W variety of game (where you press a button to move your player one "block" instead of moving it around joystick-style) is a lot better suited to the current breed of cell phones than Astrosmash or Monkey Ball.

The bigger question is, is there any relation between the company (or the name change) and the "Spectravision" pay per view pr0n systems in hotel rooms Rob

Yeah, I only ever saw the Arcadia at places like Zayre (discount department stores that themselves went out of business during the game crash.) I was always sort of curious about them because they were so cheap, but there never seemed to be any carts for them in the stores. But Emerson was smart enough to cut their losses pretty early, I think, and they still sell much the same level of stuff (generic Asian crap stereos and TV's) as they did before the Arcadia. It wasn't a company destroying move like the Adam. The Vectrex was everywhere when I was a kid, and I knew a LOT of people besides me that had one. I figure that's because Milton Bradley was based in my hometown and they just flooded the market with them somehow, but it was nice even when they were being remaindered to have my choice of any title as an overstock cart with manual and overlay in a Ziploc bag at TRU for 5 bucks a pop. I think the reason the Vectrex didn't make that list is because it certainly wasn't a "what were they thinking" product, it was a great machine that just appeared at the wrong time. Rob

Ben Heckendorn, the guy who designed the portable VCS called the VCSp (among many other fascinating portables) released his designs for the VCSp this past week in various formats including DXF: http://www.classicgaming.com/vcsp/Downloads.htm The ZIP file itself is hosted on fileplanet, so those who don't want to give Gamespy an excuse to spam them may PM me for it as I've already taken the hit. As an aside, I see from his blog that he's making a movie, but I know if I were doing one I'd certainly want him for props master! Rob

You know, people always talk about how Nintendo is after the kids' market and yadda yadda yadda. I think you guys all have it backwards. As a matter of fact, Nintendo is the only one of the big three who ISN'T after the acne-stained teenager market. It's true. What self-respecting 35-year-old guy would actually play Dead Or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball? What kind of grandmother would spend a whole Saturday sitting there chainsmoking and playing Vice City? I was in Toys R Us a couple weeks ago exchanging a duplicate xmas present I'd gotten for someone for GBA Defender (ouch! shame it'd clog the toilet or i'd flush it....) and when I came back around the corner, I found my partner - who is 62 years old and hasn't played a videogame since Kaboom 20 years ago - COMPLETELY engrossed by Mario Sunshine. Neither of us could figure out the stupid controls for the first 5 minutes or so, but he was having a grand old time running around, swimming, and talking to the same egg-shaped guy 10 times in a row. If we ever have a current console in the house, there is zero chance that it will be anything but that one. And considering how much I've spent on GBA games, I'm thinking us old farts with disposable income just might be the other half of Nintendo's audience. Ironically, when we got home that night he said to me, "I really liked that Playstation. I thought all the games on it were dark and violent, but that Mario one was great." Rob

My local Gamestop only opened around Thanksgiving, and as far as I can tell they don't have Genesis stuff at all. They do have SNES consoles and carts, but not many. They have one fairly large bin with NES games in it, but it was mostly empty when I got there and I bought about a quarter of their selection in my one trip. Interestingly, their ads in the current video game magazines seem to be pushing the NES and SNES (can't remember if they mention the Genesis or not.) Overall, while I like their GBA selection a little better than EB Games (which also has the annoying habit of not differentiating between new games and used in-box games), EB Games is definitely the place to beat as far as chains selling 10-year-old games goes. Both of them near me have piles and piles of NES, SNES and Genesis. Rob