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raindog

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Posts posted by raindog

  1. Posted

    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

  4. Posted

    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

  5. Posted

    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

  6. Posted

    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

  9. Posted

    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

  10. Posted

    I'm really in love with Space Instigators right now and tempted to call that my favorite 2600 DFA game, but Commie Mutants has historically held that title.

     

    I also spent a lot of time playing Gorf as a kid, and really liked it (maybe because the arcade game seemed so unpolished to begin with.) Sure it's missing one out of five screens (supposedly because Atari wanted to have Galaxian out first) but it played more or less like the arcade, with only a few missing elements (the disappearing shield on the first screen for example).

     

    Now, I just fired it up in Stella because I couldn't figure out what you guys were ragging on it for, and it was flickery as anything, but I don't remember that at all from my 2600 days. I'll have to try it on the Cuttle to see if it's one of those games that just doesn't work in an emulator.

     

    Rob

  11. Posted

    This is probably the wrong thing to say on AtariAge, but it's heartbreaking to see them spend half a page talking about reliving arcade experiences and Ferris Bueller and other nostalgic stuff, when refurbed and shrinkwrapped NES consoles that had much better arcade conversions (especially the earlier arcade stuff that seemed to be the 7800's stock in trade) and A/V out can be had for $30-50 at random chain video game stores around the US, and much less at thrifts and garage sales.

     

    Heartbreaking because their site might make it into some random small town newspaper and some hapless thirtysomething waxing nostalgic for 1986 might shell out $200 for an inferior experience.

     

    Rob

  12. Posted

    A 2600 playfield can represent 20 peak-valley transitions in a single line. That would require 40 sprites to smooth out the scrolling of each side of each pixel.

     

    I don't think there's anywhere in Scramble or Super Cobra where there are more than 3 or 4 peak/valley transitions on any given scanline, and they could probably be altered as necessary to work with something like this:

     

    http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archiv...01/bin00005.bin

     

    (from Chris Tumber's post to the Stella List on 2 January:)

     

    http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archiv...1/msg00022.html

     

    Maybe if someone aspires to replicate the Adventurevision version of Super Cobra this will actually happen ;)

     

    Rob

  13. Posted

    You can knock Pacman all you want guys :) but we all played the bugger and enjoyed it in our youth.

     

    Speak for yourself, I played K.C. Munchkin!

     

    (and my friends and relatives who all had 2600's and all got Pac-Man seemed to tire of it pretty quickly....)

     

    Rob

  16. Posted

    Around January 1997 I decided I needed to do my every-few-years search to see if Mappy had ever been released for any systems (I imported the Game Gear version which I think is the best version of Mappy due to its "arrangement" version, but I still had an itch to play the original.) I searched for Mappy and discovered MAME, and from there Atari emulation, and then kinda went nuts.

     

    I have no problems with emulation itself; the physical differences can be addressed with a little bit of money and effort. I bought a HotRod SE and think it's great, but now I've discovered that I kinda prefer playing arcade games standing up. I certainly don't have the space for an arcade cabinet in my apartment (which broke my heart when someone 15 miles from here was selling a Mappy cabinet on ebay last month) so now I'm thinking take one of my old PC's and an LCD monitor and mount it somewhere in my apartment so I have sort of an "invisible arcade cabinet." I'm partaking of the current flood in alt.binaries.emulators.mame and have pretty complete sets for the 2600, INTV, Colecovision and other systems.

     

    But one weird thing is, after doing my little hacks and demos for the 2600 a couple years ago I really yearned to see them on the real hardware, and the Cuttle Cart was just the first step. (Actually the second step, since I bought a copy of my own ABPM from Hozer and someone else was nice enough to make carts of my other stuff for me at no charge.) Now I have a box in my living room with my 2600 (given to me by a friend when she heard I was doing 2600 coding), about 24 cartridges, and another box with half a dozen joysticks (some from my C64 and Amiga days), driving controllers, keypads and a Star Raiders touch pad. (And a pair of paddles I got on ebay that have a little rattle and a LOT of jitter to them... can't play the Marble Craze I just bought.... caveat ebayer, I guess.) I have found that recent versions of Stella look and play great in a window or fullscreen mode under Linux so I don't really NEED the 2600 per se.... but I keep going back to it.

     

    I don't know what the gist of this really is so I'll make one up: Emulation is great. I'm probably more comfortable with controlling games using a PC keyboard than an Atari joystick or Nintendo gamepad these days, all things considered. But sometimes you need the real thing, and it's out there and at the moment it's really not that expensive if you're careful. So there's no need to feel guilty either way.

     

    Rob

  17. Posted

    Well, I just ordered a GBA Flash Advance Linker Extreme (parallel and USB connections) from gamegizmo as well as a "Game Wallet" (unfortunately named if you want to google for it) which allows you to store more games on standard SmartMedia cards and transfer them onto the Flash Advance cartridges. So with any luck I'll be messing with GBA homebrewing soon.... hope this stuff still works on the GBA SP because I'll have one of those as soon as it's out in the US ;)

     

    Hmmmm, I wonder if playbin/makewav would be portable to the GBA....

     

    Rob

  18. Posted

    Actually, I was able to feed some pretty thick card stock through my old Canon printer, which has a straight paper path. It has a little lever on it somewhere to adjust for thicker or thinner paper, IIRC. I think most Canon and Epson printer still print this way, as opposed to HP units which have a U-shaped path.

     

    But the "full page glossy sticker applied to thicker cardboard and then cut" method might not suck too badly either, depending on how it's done.

     

    Good luck...

     

    Rob

  19. Posted

    You guys really need to consider having a domain or a home page. As you branch out more people will begin to wonder who you are. What better way then pointing them to a site with the XYPE mission or quality statement :D

     

    Oddly enough there's a company in the UK called Xype who has xype.com. Xype.net is also taken but seems to be "the digital playground of samo korosec" and must be only viewable in some plugin that my Linux box doesn't have.

     

    xype.org is still open, as are all of xypegames.com/net/org. :)

     

    Rob

  22. Posted

    Ha!!!! Well If I didn't live in California, I might have tried them out :-) I can't order boards from overseas :-) I want to release soon :-)

     

    Things are actually not that bad with overseas shipping anymore. My last Lik-Sang order (which came from Hong Kong to here in upstate New York) took all of 3 days from ordering to arrival. And I had a package fedexed to me from Ireland last month and it arrived the next morning! It's all amazing and totally cool to me.

     

    Of course you have to deal with the PCB guys' internal turnaround time, but I don't see any reason that should be worse for overseas companies.

     

    Rob

  23. Posted

    Feh. I was just looking at G4's program lineup last night on my cable company supplied PVR, and saw a couple of Icons episodes but all G4 shows have the generic description "Computers" and I don't have the hard disk space to just record all of them.

     

    And I can only program the thing six days into the future, so now I have to remember on the 24th to set it up to record the Atari episode on the 30th. :P No Nolan or Activision episodes on the schedule till at least the first week of February....

     

    Rob

  24. Posted

    I feel pretty hypocrisy free because my opinion is the same now as it was during the Hozer thing, and that is....

     

    When did you all grow vaginas, anyway? It's like high school in here all of a sudden. Take off your whiny bitch colored glasses and get back to writing or producing games, or selling them on ebay if that's your trip. This is a rather inbred hobby centered around the nostalgia of a bunch of slightly maladjusted but fairly well off thirty- and fortysomething men, not Silicon Valley garage dwellers circa 1980. You are just not going to become the next Bill Gates by doing this, and when they write the erroneous footnote in the video game archaeology textbooks in a hundred years indicating that the first console was technically the 2600, not the NES, neither your name nor mine will be included, just some guy named "Nathan Bushel".

     

    Further, it really doesn't amount to a speck of flyshit who owns what copyrights because not one of you has the stones, cash or time off from your day jobs to actually sue another of you, save for Activision (and perhaps Infogrames) who have the legal team sitting with their thumbs up their asses all day looking for something to do. It costs real time and money to sue someone and this hobby just doesn't pull that much in, and of course there's always the danger of "he who lives by the C&D shall die by the C&D". Throw in the fact that we're scattered from Massachusetts to Tasmania and it's more than a little embarassing to even consider.

     

    Once you remove the likelihood of actual legal action, it comes down to ethics, and many people here have never subscribed to the whole imaginary property thing. So then it all comes down to politics - you make a polite request of the offender, and if he doesn't acquiesce, you carry on a PR campaign against him (or let other people do it for you.) Then it's your reputation against his, pure and simple. Last time it was pretty clear who had the better reputation from the get go. This time.... does anyone even give a crap?

     

    If the party of the first part is really serious about making the party of the second part his bitch, the party of the first part should pay his lawyer to write up a big ol' nasty cease and desist letter and then stuff his monster dick back into his trousers of the first part. If the party of the second part is really not afraid of his daddy of the first part, he needs to continue doing what he's doing and not put his poop-stained underwear of the second part up here on Atariage for us to admire. Like I even want to see either of those two games ever again now.

     

    Just..... grow..... up.

     

    Please.

  25. Posted

    I have a pile of 8.5x11 labels (basically a whole page with no scoring/perforation) which I used to make my own cart label years ago. It's not glossy though, and I don't think unlaminated inkjet prints are acceptable as packaging to begin with. Of course there are also full-page laminating sheets which could take care of that, but would make the box tougher to glue together. I've also experimented a little with spray shellac in lieu of laminating sheets but at the time (3 years ago, with an HP Deskjet 560) the shellac and the ink didn't get along very well. Plainly some variation on this theme can work because I have a number of PC game boxes (the kind with a separate lid, like a garment box) where the design was blatantly laminated on and the flaps folded underneath the lid. I've bought "limited edition" CD boxed sets that were much the same.

     

    I've put some thought into making my own boxes just as gags, but haven't come up with any really good short-run solutions yet. So I'll be interested in seeing what other people come up with too. Honestly, though, I haven't even wandered around a craft store to brainstorm yet. I have a feeling an acceptable solution is waiting at Michael's or Moore's.

     

    Rob

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