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raindog

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Posts posted by raindog

  1. Posted

    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

  2. Posted

    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. :P

     

    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

  3. Posted

    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

  6. Posted

    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

  7. Posted

    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

  8. Posted

    yeah that was the classic distribution method, I think they stopped doing that a decade ago.  

     

    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

  10. Posted

    Look again, everything's on "back order" meaning they don't have any and don't know when they'll get any! There are lots of online stores like that out there (at least EB2K tells you.) They were in the same state when last I looked in November.

     

    But that new USB "XG Flash 128" they have on preorder looks pretty sweet if anyone ever writes Linux drivers for it ;) And if it ever really becomes available - the "Flash Advance USB Xtreme" came and went kinda quick last year.

     

    Rob

  11. Posted

    Yeah, I've found homebrews for a bunch of systems, but don't know whether they are useable outside of an emulator.  I'm not sure what to make of that.  Are you really programming for the console in that case, or just for a kind of function library?

     

    Well, the GBC and GBA (and probably the GB as well) all have flash cartridges available, though unfortunately since the interface to the PC also acts as a dumper Nintendo has done their best to make it difficult to obtain one. (I suspect they would do so even if the dumper functionality weren't there.) So they're at least as valid as the Atari games that only play on the Cuttle or Supercharger. I bet there are even more GBx flash carts out there than Superchargers despite N's efforts.

     

    Someone else mentioned Astrocade homebrews - as far as I can remember, people wrote and released Astrocade homebrews back in the day using the cassette tape intended for saving BASIC programs. I assume the games weren't all written in BASIC.

     

    Rob

  12. Posted

    I doubt this will be my last order from them (unless I just never hear from them again, as with 4jays) but I'll probably use Paypal or mail a money order next time.

     

    Let me add that I received my order the DAY AFTER I placed it. Doubtless that has something to do with being in the next state, but I'll certainly be ordering more from Collector's Cards and Games even with the security loophole in their order system.

     

    Rob

  13. Posted

    I would like to see an affordable 2600 portable so that I can play my 2600 games anywhere (and not just through emulation).

     

    I gotta think 2600 on a chip will finally come into being in the next two years and you'll get your wish, albeit expensively.

     

    Rob

  14. Posted

    I guess people are either going to choose to own this game or Space Invaders Arcade...or try getting both games for their collections.  Good work!

     

    If people feel for some reason that they need to choose between the two, I really hope they will choose Space Instigators. I've ordered mine and can't wait to play it on the real thing.

     

    Seriously, if I hadn't gotten a comp of Space Invaders Arcade I probably wouldn't have bought it after Space Instigators came out, and it's my own hack. ;) I encourage everyone who likes Space Invaders to buy Space Instigators because it will show support for Chris who is a genuinely talented homebrewer, and it's just a far more accurate take on Space Invaders besides.

     

    Rob

  16. Posted

    I got the GBA last July or so and have gotten about a dozen games for it, half used and half not. Only two were Nintendo games (SMA and MKSC.) But all of them were ports or updates of older games (Pac-Man Collection, Sonic Advance, Namco Museum, Doom, Wolf3d, Bomberman Tournament, etc.)

     

    I have a feeling I'm not exactly a normal GBA user though. Anyway, when I go to videogame stores everyone seems to love the GBA, but that could just be because I love the GBA and they want to sell me more games. ;)

     

    Rob

  17. Posted

    You'd need to go to 12 or 16K to add the intermissions into Pac26/Pac-Man Arcade. I used the space I gained from the three removed mazes for extra code (mainly sound stuff). Believe it or not, each screen only consumed 42 bytes of data (the playfield data for the maze.)

     

    I could have made more space (probably not enough for intermissions) if I'd had a disassembler and assembler that handled 8K carts, but I was hand assembling everything and entering it with a hex editor. This made doing things like removing the "decide which screen to display" code kinda impossible.

     

    I've heard that 8K-compatible versions of dasm and distella exist (and presumably more, since people have released 16K and 32K homebrew games) but I have no idea where they live. If anyone has links, especially to source, please post 'em.

     

    Rob

  18. Posted

    I'm searching through the forum threads trying to find the post where someone recommended Collector's Cards and Games. I have no reason to believe they're anything but legitimate and they come highly recommended. BUT, the online ordering service they use EMAILS YOUR CREDIT CARD NUMBER IN PLAIN TEXT. All the encryption in the world on the order form won't protect your number from snooping via email.

     

    I doubt this will be my last order from them (unless I just never hear from them again, as with 4jays) but I'll probably use Paypal or mail a money order next time.

     

    On another note, would someone who's ordered from them a few times consider adding them as a link on the AtariAge links page? I couldn't find them in my own bookmarks because their page has no title :P

     

    Rob

  19. Posted

    The Gameboy, Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance all have a ton of homebrews, just never actually released in cart form as far as I know. You can't release a homebrew GBx cart without either fashioning it to take an existing GBx cart piggyback style, or breaking Nintendo's copyright (as the unit itself checks for the presence of the Nintendo logo in the ROM image.)

     

    Rob

  22. Posted

    Coleco-tabletop-style GBA: Lik-Sang was actually selling a drop-in case for the GBC that made it seem very much like a Coleco tabletop game (actually, more like Epoch Galaxy II or the Adventurevision.) Except since the GBC wasn't backlit and the lights this thing used were two really dim flashlight bulbs, it really kinda sucked. I started messing with mounting my Photon light inside the thing with no luck. Too bad, because I think it would have been pretty effective. Obviously the GBA is the wrong form factor, but the GBASP (or whatever it ends up being called) seems even more amenable to that sort of thing than the GBC was.

     

    GBA with all manner of peripherals: Part of the hype when the GBA was first announced was that you would be able to get peripherals to do web and email (sometimes they said it'd be wireless), which to me means they would have at least been shipping a keyboard. Someone actually did make an aftermarket email cartridge for the GBC that worked by dialing up some proprietary service, but I haven't seen anything like it for the GBA, nor any of the PDA-like stuff they also were talking about at the trade shows. I did get the TV tuner for my niece from Lik-Sang and it works surprisingly well (and now they're selling them at my local Gamestop) and there are all manner of lights and rumble packs out there for the GBA, but Colecovision it ain't.

     

    Rob

  23. Posted

    With a Celeron 400 and 256MB of RAM, a 4K game took about 20 seconds to load. I have no idea how big Gyruss is but figure on a Celeron 300 it might take 10 seconds per K. Sorry, I know the loading is slow but it's pretty zippy on my new Athlon 2100 that cost all of $109. ;)

     

    I don't know if it'll be possible to write a reliable color editor for Atari 2600 games because unlike sprite data, there's no way to tell just by looking which data is the color data. You have to look through the actual code to see where it's storing a value to a color register and trace back to see where that color came from. Since all the objects are reused so frequently in many games you pretty much have to do a little trial and error to see what your changes do.

     

    Even then, it can have unintended consequences - I got an email this weekend from Albert mentioning that my Space Invaders hack does some unexpected color cycling in 2 player mode, and I sure didn't do that on purpose. So I could probably write something that looked for all the places where a game writes to color registers and traces it back and lets you pick from a color palette to change the data it's reading from, but the results could be nasty and you're really better off learning a little about programming than trying to point and click your way through it.

     

    Anyway, I wrote Hack-o-Matic as a way to entice more people to try messing with Atari games, not as a universal game construction kit. If you enjoy hacking sprites but find that you want to go further, you should do what most of us did and visit The Dig and start gathering your arsenal of 2600 coding tools and documentation. It's incredibly gratifying once you actually get your first bit of code working.

     

    Rob

  24. Posted

    I still like Oystron best, but I just got a set of paddles so Marble Craze and SCSIcide will have a shot soon ;)

     

    I'm probably more impressed by Thrust than anything else but it's a little too difficult for my reflexes nowadays.

     

    Rob

  25. Posted

    Don't know if this is your problem, but a 16K game will take four times as long to load as a 4K one.... it's possible it could be running out of memory of course (being that I'm creating a canvas with 131,072 little black squares, each an object, to edit a 16K game :) ) but it seems to me if someone edited Jr. Pac-Man you should be able to do Sprintmaster.

     

    Rob

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