raindog

It seems to me like any of the "console turned computer" attempts (Aquarius or Adam especially) could have made that list, or the Nuon (which seems to me like it was basically the same thing as the 3D0, except with DVD and lowered expectations of competing in the gaming market.) Maybe the Odyssey3. But it's not a bad list. The article was even more worthwhile for me in that it indirectly informed me (through a couple of links) that Jeff Minter is working on a game for the Gamecube! Between that and the rumored "play your GBA games on a TV without butchering your GBA" attachment for it, and the fact that even my partner likes playing Mario Sunshine, I may not be able to resist picking one of those up.... besides, if Minter's making a game for it, I'll be able to get Gamecube games really cheap soon Rob

I hate to say it, but after doing half a dozen attempted ebay deals and only ever succeeding by using BIN, I think sniping is just a way of life. I wouldn't even bother looking at an item now if I didn't think I could be awake and at the computer when the auction ended so I could snipe.... and since I'm pretty forgetful about that sort of thing, I stick with BIN's and half.com. Rob

"Video Olympics 16K", "Canyon Bomber 16K", "Pitfall 32K".... It's all just so..... odd.

I wrote a history of video games for a fourth-grade term paper, in 1979. And I credited Higginbotham with their invention, though I erroneously included the factoid that the first Pong machine died its first day because it was jammed full of dimes because I couldn't believe with the inflation caused by the gas crisis that videogames hadn't gone up in price. Britannica were always fairly anal about their fact-checking; I wonder if someone will clue them in. Rob

I'd rather play Astrosmash than Pong. PONG!? I can handle Breakout, but PONG? sheesh! C'mon, put something worthwhile on it! Still, it's pretty cool no matter what they put on the things. It SOUNDS like it's pretty cool, but it really isn't. I've played Space Invaders, Pac-Man (officially licensed and a better Java clone), Astrosmash and Monkey Ball (weird top-down version) on my Sprint Vision phone and all of them SUCK.... they look pretty decent (don't remember the sound effects, if there even were any) but phone keypads are NOT an acceptable substitute for a joystick or d-pad. At first I just thought I was resenting the idea of having to pay 4 bucks to rent a really common 20-25 year old game for a month, but even the free very accurate looking Pac-Man clone was just unplayable. I was talking to an EB Games droid who said someone had shown a phone at CES that could be turned sideways and used like a Lynx/GBA/Gamegear sort of game platform, d-pad and all, but smaller than any of those three of course. I could see gaming on something like that, but for now I'll stick with the GBA, and the GBA SP when it appears in a couple months and is just about as portable as my cell phone. Rob

Normally I'd tell you to go to www.adventurevision.com, but it's "down for maintenance", whatever that can mean regarding a site about a holy grail 20 year old system that only had four games, all of which are just as rare as the console itself. And those four games are Super Cobra, Turtles, Defender, and.... um.... some other space game I've forgotten. As for the game itself (since Jeff's site is down) it was a portable unit released by Entex in 1982, half the price of the Vectrex but nowhere near as cool. It was interesting in that its display was generated by a strip of LED's and a rotating mirror, so the display was 150 across by 40 down. The console and its four games are emulated pretty well in MESS (http://www.mess.org if I remember right) if you wanna find out what it's like - actually fairly fun in my book, but maybe headache inducing on the real thing. Rob

I'm actually not that much of a fan of Mario, and I think if I had given him a rim job I'd remember that. But ad hominem attacks aside, answering a question like "how did they look or sound so far off" is easy on the sound side (7800 sound = 2600 sound, and Paul Robson wasn't writing audio code for the Tramiels). On the video side I think a picture is worth a thousand words so here are 21,000 words. Arcade's in the middle, 7800 to the left, NES to the right. Sadly, to fit them in 640 pixels I had to shrink them somewhat, so the fine details -- like how the 7800 has no better resolution on these titles than the 2600, just more colors and objects per line -- are lost. For those with such attention to detail I left the OpenOffice Draw file I used to lay out all these images out there in http://www.kudla.org/nesvs7800. The sad thing is that the 7800 was probably capable of looking much closer to the arcade games than the NES was given a little more programming effort (maybe "Xype level", but I bet not even) and they learned to compensate for the sound with the on-cart POKEY chips... but from about 1982 till the release of the Lynx, Atari was a company who just didn't seem to care about their own products. You're right, it's not debatable - the 7800's arcade ports did suffer from lower resolution, less authentic graphics, and less accurate sound than the same ports on the NES. They seem to me very much like what could have been accomplished if someone had just made a 4MHz 2600 with enough RAM to buffer a whole screen, not too impressive for the mid 80's. Whether they played better was another issue altogether, but the 7800 lost me and perhaps many other potential buyers with the first set of screenshots. Rob

Never had an SMS, just the Master Base Converter for the Game Gear and a box of games someone lent me and then moved away. I never cared much for the SMS games, but that might have been because the GG's screen lost some of the detail. (As for the GG games, I liked them by and large better than any Gameboy games until the GBA came out.) I'm still hoping one of the SMS/GG emulation projects for the GBA pans out though, just so I can have the best possible portable version of Mappy Rob

If plastic cases are acceptable then it seems reasonable to just do what they did for Space Instigators, i.e. a modified VHS case. I'd want to try to mod it with some kind of foam cutout rather than sticking velcro to the cartridge itself, but that's just me. I think the people pushing for actual cardboard boxes are people who want to try to duplicate the standard Atari cartridge size box from 1977-1984 or so. Can't say I blame them but it's a subtly different goal than just something to protect the cart and manual while providing more space for art. Rob

In all seriousness, 5 or 6 years ago there was a European company that was selling the "new Commodore 64" which was a 486 box running off of a bootable ROM with Windows 3.1 and C64 emulation software, all built into a Commodore Plus/4 type keyboard. I don't think it went anywhere because it appeared after Win95 had already come out, but I bet a few Commodore enthusiasts bought them. Ahh, found a link to it, albeit with a different name ("Web.it") and form factor (curvy laptop without a screen.) This was from CeBIT 1998. http://net4tv.com/voice/Story.cfm?storyID=164 And from a Commodore history site: http://amiga.emugaming.com/c64web.html Unsurprisingly, the domain that belonged to the company who supposedly made those is no longer any good. Along the same lines, the "new Amigas" being built that are PC's running some QNX-based Amiga emulation software with a bootable CD Linux-based version of UAE for "compatibility mode". (Not to be confused with the other "new Amigas" which actually are new Amigas.) These are the PC based Amiga guys: http://www.amithlon.com/index-e.html but they seem to have shied away from actually selling preloaded systems. This sort of thing has definitely been tried, and as long as the manufacturers don't go into it expecting to compete with the PS2, they might even be OK. Or you could just hack a USB "cartridge port" *cough*dumper*cough* onto your modded X-box, sacrifice a few cheap gamepads to make Atari joystick interfaces, and have the same kind of thing for a bit cheaper and less work (OK, so the USB dumper might be harder than if you were designing your box from scratch.) Maybe you could even do something like that with the Dreamcast if the VMU's have enough RAM in them to save what you need to. A little creative detailing and presto, you have the (almost) universal Atari console. Rob

Looks like someone's found a brand new version of the BASIC stamp!

Well, the Jakks Pacific things (Activision gamepad and Atari joystick) are really 2600 clones as well, just with 10 licensed games instead of 100 unlicensed ones. So clones are still in production, even though as I understand it the Jakks Pacific things are more like a simulation or reimplementation than a clone or emulation. #include obligatory pining for 2600 on a chip gadgets Rob

Or get an even more current version (1.01) from http://o2em.sourceforge.net/ I built a Mandrake Linux package of o2em 1.0 (as well as Stella 1.1) which Linux users can find at http://www.kudla.org/rpm/ in case they don't want to spend time compiling software just to play K.C. Munchkin. It's just amazing how far o2em has come and Dan deserves a lot of credit not just for developing it in the first place but for putting the source out there. Rob

Huh? 7800 Ms Pac Man is usually rated the best console version and closest to the arcade version. Mitchhttp://atari7800.atari.org I agree with Mitch... I think the 7800 version of Ms. Pac-Man is exceptional... of course, I didn't know until just now that there even WAS an NES version. Yes, we all know you 7800 owners find all the 7800 arcade ports exceptional, and no doubt if you poll Atari enthusiasts they're going to pick some Atari console's version of anything most of the time. And maybe they actually play better on the real thing, I dunno. I can't get past the fact that they were releasing ports of 1981 arcade games in 1986 that looked and sounded so far off from the arcade versions. It's a bias I freely acknowledge, but if Nintendo had needed to, I think they could have gotten a lot of mileage out of a "here's our screen, here's Atari's" ad campaign like Mattel did for Intellivision. Rob

Nope. You loose too much necessary information in the compression. The correct answer is actually "Yes, but only 80% of the time at best." I made an MP3 CD of about 1500 Atari ROMs using LAME at the highest bitrate, and with a sample size of about 200, that's what I got. I'm pretty sure that I could have left the non-working ~300 MP3 files as WAVs if I had an MP3 CD player that also played WAV files off of CDR, so I could still have gotten it all on one disc, but I had no such player and still don't. I'm seeing three possibilities in the near future as a Cuttle Cart jukebox - my old vTech Helio PDA which has a 75MHz processor, a headphone jack and can be made to run Linux for which makewav exists already, my GBA for which I just ordered a flash card and whose sound circuitry is probably better than the Helio even though its processor is much slower, and this new Sony USB2 DVD/CDRW combo drive that doubles as an MP3 CD/MP3 DVD player that also plays WAV files, assuming I can score one when it comes time to get my new laptop - you could easily fit all the WAV files of all the ROM images on a DVD-R. I'm hoping the Helio will do it because you can get them for 40 or 50 bucks on ebay and that way all Cuttle or Supercharger owners could have a 2600 jukebox that needs no swapping of CD's. Rob

Isn't the Vectrex joystick basically two ganged pots? It seems like there's been a lot of Vectrex/2600 controller cross-pollination lately anyway.... I'd love to try Marble Craze with an analog stick. (In fact, I'd love to try Marble Craze at all.... paddles I got off of ebay are jittery as hell and both make a little rattling noise when you shake them....) Rob

I used mine towards Space Instigators, Thrust, Marble Craze and the Thrust foot pedal thingy. I signed up for Paypal just so I could pay the difference. From the looks of the upcoming release lists it's looking like this "spend your credit and then a whole bunch more" trend is going to continue each quarter Rob

I'm pretty sure that installing XP on that home machine with a 233MHz processor and 128MB of RAM would make you want to pull out the sledgehammer even more... Rob

I wasn't too worried about that because anyone still playing Atari games in 2003 can't possibly have 3 friends who also want to play Atari games Rob

well, I learned what I know about 2600 programming without any sort of official documentation, so I figured I'd stick with what's available at http://www.gbadev.org and similar sites. There seem to be any number of helper libraries people have written for the thing and documents describing the hardware and various API's. No one even mentions the official manual that I can see. Am I going to find out I need it? Rob

I should add that I never played Commando or Double Dragon at all, nor did I ever play a home version of Rampage, because I never cared for them (or most other mid-80's games.) My interest in the NES was purely its ability to closely recreate arcade games from before its time, and that was the standard I applied to the 7800 as well. In 1986, I was still looking for the arcade experience at home, and totally duplicating the games I'd had to suffer through awful ports of a few years earlier (plus dead-on versions of current games, like SMB) as the NES did was more impressive to me than still-not-quite-right versions of new arcade games I wasn't playing anyway since the arcades had all closed. If graphic comparisons hadn't clinched it, the NES versions of the few new games I actually liked (Atari ones, no less) like Marble Madness and Paperboy sure would have. But by then I had the Amiga, and I haven't seen a version of MM that beats the Amiga's... Rob

I actually haven't played NES Ms. Pac Man in years (being more of a Pac Man purist) but it sure looked better than the 7800 version. I don't remember that "pac-booster" thing either but there were two different Ms. Pac Man releases for the NES if I remember right, and mine is probably the Namco one. At any rate, 7800 Ms. Pac Man looks TERRIBLE, on a par with the awful C64 version. I'd certainly play Tengen NES Pac-Man over either one. I was pretty happy with the NES Donkey Kong/Jr/3 as well, and Mappy is great although nowhere near as good as the Game Gear version. Dig Dug looks like they used the actual sprites from the arcade ROMs, making the 7800 version look blocky and just wrong in comparison. The 7800 never even duplicated the Namco font so common in arcade games of the period, and judging by how many NES games used it I'm guessing the NES had it in ROM or something. The sounds and sometimes the colors would be kinda off (Dig Dug: Night Digger?), but by and large at the time the NES was the only system on which you could get pixel-perfect renditions of common arcade games. I wouldn't have wanted to play Robotron on the NES (I've seen enough NES games with flicker to know it would just suck) but for the Japanese games it was designed for and which are the important ones to me and I'd wager most other fans of old games, it was just better. In fact, in some ways the 7800 seemed almost a step back from the 5200/8-bits to me when it was released. It was released almost 3 years late, yet the games still seemed rushed and half-finished, the user still had to settle for low-res approximations of games the NES and SMS had no trouble duplicating exactly, and without any kind of genuine support from Atari or a home computer equivalent to refine their techniques on, programmers never got the chance to push it hard enough to make up for those early drawbacks. And even then, it seems to me that Atari fell back on "and you can play hundreds of 2600 games on it" awfully fast. Of course I don't think I ever actually played the 7800 back in the day either, since everyone I knew who was still into videogames went for the NES or a C64 (or both.) So maybe my poor memory of the 7800 is due to poor emulation, but looking at the screenshots on AtariAge, it was definitely behind the times upon its release. Truth be told, I think even my Colecovision was better Rob

They seem to have only put up today's edition in the last hour or two, and probably haven't moved yesterday's to the archives yet. This should be the URL to it when it does get archived: http://www.somethingawful.com/archives/dai...e-23-1-2003.htm Right now, yes, it's the fat kid. Rob

It's funny, I always thought a port of MULE to the 2600 would be possible if it weren't for the music... Rob

Also, now that I think about it more, there have been a number of companies selling modded GBA's with the Afterburner internal light installed, and some of them offered warranties, so I think that counts at least as much as a "homebrew console" as this thing. I think there might be a similar phenomenon eventually with A/V and/or stereo mods for the 2600, if not the eventual 2600-on-a-chip based projects. Rob