raindog

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

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

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

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

Ms. Pac Man has never held my attention for long (I always go back to Pac Man, it just seems less cartoony and more "zen") but I probably like the 2600 version best too. Though the Namco Museum version for the GBA is the closest to the arcade version that I've owned. Rob

I thought Asteroids was the original (regrettable) pack-in for the 5200. What was? Rob

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

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

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

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

Yeah, the underwear pic was almost Fark-worthy

Nor do they call it one in the article. Curt mistyped.

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

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. No Nolan or Activision episodes on the schedule till at least the first week of February.... Rob

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.

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

As many of you know, I'm no collector, so with one exception all of the below were bought new while they were still in production. Listed in the order in which I acquired them.... Vectrex (with light pen and 3D goggles) Colecovision Two C-64's, one dead NES Genesis Game Gear Gameboy Color Gameboy Advance Atari 2600 I had a number of other consoles/classic PC's too but they died or were given away. The 2600 I got from my biz partner's girlfriend, and it's a four switch one from when she was a kid. Ironically, after a buying spree over the last month, I now have more accessories (and possibly carts) for it than I ever did for any of the other systems. The people at Game Stop keep trying to convince me to buy a used X-Box, PS2 or at least a Dreamcast.... but I have a PC to play emulators on, and I've discovered I have very little interest in playing full-range-of-motion 3D conversions of 2D games (and no interest at all in new games that use more than a joystick and two buttons, Robotron-style games excepted.) You wouldn't update Monopoly by making the player select what special weapons he wants in his thimble, and then require him to use a hat controller to look around at what the other players are doing or shift the view of the camera. Why 'update' games like Sonic or Frogger that way? They're games, not simulations. Er, sorry, I seem prone to ranting about new systems lately. Rob

We just got G4 at the beginning of the year and I set it up to record a whole bunch of shows including Cheat.... went a little nuts, my PVR ran out of space, and I didn't end up getting the Adventure episode anyway. Not a bad network but definitely stuck in rerun hell, sort of like TechTV in its first year. (Not that it's that much better now but at least they have *more* shows to rerun.) Rob

Kernels are more like the main loop in Pascal programs. Or more specifically, the timing sensitive part of the main loop - you don't want to call any other procedures (JSR's) from within it if you can avoid it since you're too busy changing the color shooting out of the electron beam as it makes its way down the screen. Can't remember what the syntax/idiom is because it's been about 10 years since I wrote Turbo Pascal code - procedure main() maybe? Rob

Pac-Man Plus? The only one of those I know is a hack of the arcade ROMs to make it harder. Got a link? Rob

I know I had a reason for doing that at the time, but I have no idea what it might have been. Maybe pore over the inscrutable notes I included in the original zip file.... Rob

Well, on the "dead system clearance" topic, I've noticed that occasionally in the second tier discount stores (Mr. 2nd, Grossman's Bargain Outlet, Big/Job/Odd Lots, Family Dollar, etc., the places just above dollar stores and just below K-Mart) they'll get in a slew of early 90's games (usually Genesis and Game Gear, but I've seen SNES, Saturn and even Lynx occasionally) which leads me to believe that the mainstream retail outlets are selling off their unsold inventory to whomever is the distributor for these closeout stores. They're never advertised or anything, they just occasionally show up. I picked up Woody Pop for my Game Gear for 4 bucks a couple years ago that way. Sometimes they'll even get re-wrapped used NES games. No 2600 stuff yet, but I'm sure some JAKKS Pacific product will end up there sooner or later Though come to think of it, those 3D remakes of classic games from 5 or 6 years ago (the first ones... Frogger, Asteroids, Pong et al.) are staples of their PC software clearance sections, both the official ones and the "supermarketware" knockoffs that install spyware on your computer. I think I've seen the first Activision PC collection there. Okay, this is pretty far offtopic now, I apologize. Rob

Now that you mention it, we have two Toys R Uses here and the ickier, more urban of the two has moved to this "R Zone" thing, with the airport-like security and all. It seems to have less of a selection and things tend to get into disarray really quickly, especially at xmas, so I never go to that one. The one I do go to is not arranged significantly differently than it was in 1990, except instead of NES/Genesis/Gameboy/Gamegear with random old Atari, INTV and SMS stuff strewn about it's PS2/GC/XBOX/GBA with random Dreamcast/N64/PS1/GBC/SNES/Genesis stuff strewn about. And instead of the C128D's and Nomad's behind the glass they have the above consoles and a whole bunch of little portable screens for them. But it's still a comfort to shop there. I'd sooner go to EB, Babbages, Game Stop et al. (or really, even Target or Wal-Mart's game section) than that "R-Zone" thing. Rob

Actually, I bought Defender for the GBA at Toys R Us today and the "take the ticket, pay, and wait for surly customer service dude to find it in back" procedure is very much still the way things are. I love that Combat artwork. Very stylish and altogether different from the standard videogame art thing. I've been thinking about making some boxes for a few of my loose carts (like my comps of SI:A and PM:A) as a design exercise but I've been thinking about a lot of things.... Rob

Thanks! That was exactly what I'd been looking for. Rob