epobirs

Sorry but the GS was horrible. It was the most painful platform to support of that era. Users expected results comparable to the Amiga and Atari ST but that was simply impossible due to the crippling and astoundingly stupid design of the video memory. It was a static page, locked in place. The simple page flipping that was the mainstay of Apple ][ games could not be used, along with numerous other techniques reliant of freedom to move video memory location. This made simple scrolling a major undertaking. The Courtland upgrade for the //e that was supposed to make it into a GS? Garbage. So wildly incompatible that nobody supported it. The sound chip was impressive but in the first generation of the GS it too had a crippling RAM implementation, making its usability very limited. Developers had to decide if they were going to tell first gen GS buyers they were out of luck or essentially write their games with two different audio forks, one of far lesser quality than the other. At Cinemaware we felt pretty sure this was all intentional sabotage. That Apple wanted to be done with the ][ as a platform once and for all. It would have been more reasonable if they had a board for a low-end Mac to run ][ software, especially in schools making the transition. This is exactly what they eventually did in the Mac LC but only after inflicting the GS on the ][ user base. This was just one of numerous incidents that drove me away from Apple. To this day I've never bought into any of their platforms. I'll use it if somebody else is providing the gear and wants something done but it won't be my money.

Taken in context the paragraph is correct. Keep in mind, the C64 GS (and the Atari XEGS) were not treated as cut down versions of old 8-bit systems. They were marketed as new platforms with a lot of emphasis on new game titles rather than existing ROM games using miniscule 8 and 16 KB cartridges. These machines supported bankswitching schemes that allowed the content to get into the range previously associated with games sold on floppy disk. Some old favorites were repackaged but generally the idea was that given much larger capacity to work with the developers could squeeze more life out of these platforms if the complexity of dealing with tapes and disks were eliminated. This might have been a viable business if mask ROM cost and capacity had improved at a much faster pace, allowing cortridge only systems to be pushed while these platforms were still driving the market. But the Amiga was already several years in the market when this was launched. The big problem was another part of the console market they didn't understand: Nintendo's publishing model for third party products. This was the entire basis for the resurrection of consoles as a viable business. The reason Sega struggled for so long before enjoying a few good years with the MegaDrive/Genesis was their own failure to adopt the publishing model for almost a decade after it first appeared with the Famicom/NES. It is because of this model, by which software production is closely controlled by the console maker and a royalty fee imposed on third parties for access to the platform, that manufacturers can sell a console for minimal or even negative margin and still make substantial profit in the long term through software sales. If Commodore had understood this they could have launched a games focused version of the Amiga much earlier than their eventual CD-32 and perhaps been a serious player in the console realm.

It was kind of absurd to release a new 8-bit console at that late date. The hardware was so terribly dated and while mask ROM prices allowed for much higher capacity and porting of disk-based games, the amount of bank-switching hassles involved was non-trivial in the extreme. But then, it was hardly any better on the Atari XEGS. I don't think either company really understood where the console market was going at the time. The PC Engine (TurboGrafx16 in the US) was already making a big splash in Japan, briefly becoming the dominant platform. The Sega MegaDrive (Genesis in the US) was just launched, and Nintendo had already run some technology demos for what would soon be known as the Super Famicom. The only place the existing 8-bit computers might have been worthwhile is in a handheld format but that would have been prohibitively expensive.

http://archive.kontek.net/jlounge.classicgaming.gamespy.com/junkman.html Looks like it was a clone by a garage coder. Like a lot of TI and CoCo stuff. But if you can find the files and a good emulator, give it a try. There are a great number of hidden gems out there in clones of popular games. I find the differences in implementation fascinating, and the added twists or features the cloners often introduce can be a lot of fun. This is true of some commercial games as well. The Jak & Daxter series were great but only available on Sony platforms. Mainly the PS2, with an HD remake collection now coming to the PS3. If you wanted more of that gameplay or didn't have a PS2, the great alternative was the Ty the Tasmanian Tiger series from EA. These were on the Nintendo GameCube, the Xbox, and the PS2 and were priced at bargain levels. They can still be played on all but the most recent Wii models and on the Xbox 360 under emulation.

For magazine scans to searchable PDF files, the default settings in ScanSnap Organizer are probably a perfectly good starting point. My main use for the SnapScan is feeding through paperbacks that had the spine removed to make e-book versions. I've done a bunch for Jerry Pournelle. Three volumes of Imperial Stars anthologies, High Justice, and Exiles to Glory are the ones that will appear on Amazon and B&N next. I've just started on the Endless Frontier anthology series with four volumes and then there will be the There Will Be War anthologies with nine volumes. For that job the bundled software with the S1300 had some annoying deficiencies that greatly added to the workload. I got ahold of the coprorate desktop edition of ABBYY Finereader and that was a huge improvement for e-book work. Generally, though, I'd rather have a plain text file and format that than try to retain any formatting from a book scan because so much crud sneaks in and makes for more work.

Like I noted earlier, I have six boxes of BYTE that I am willing to donate, but they are located here in Australia. If you are able to arrange their transport you can have them. Darryl I'm afraid my budget is far too constrained for that. It would probably be cheaper to send you a scanner via a retailer serving your region! Which might work out if enough people wanted the project to continue and there was somebody at your end to do the manual labor.

Is anyone else scanning Byte issues? Unfortunately, Thumpnugget's amazing effort didn't cover the era I really need for a project. I'm trying to gather up all of Jerry Pournelle's old Chaos Manor columns for a retrospective e-book. (I've been helping Jerry get all of his out of print material up on Amazon and B&N. I just finished the Imperial stars series of anthologies and started work on High Justice today.) I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap these days, which is really useful for e-book conversions. I could do magazine scans if anyone has sacrificial copies available to reduced to loose pages that can pass through the scanner.

Drive alignment can be a big issue. We ran into it a lot at Cinemaware. Some of the copy protection schemes were really abusive of the drives. Of course, this wouldn't have been possible of the firmware were better designed and didn't allow a drive to seek a track outside the range of the format. Slam!

I agree, the Crush series is the standard for this kind of fantasy pinball genre. There was a third game on the Super Famicom in Japan that was never released here. Every copy I ever saw was priced far too high for me to justify buying. Another good one in the same vein is Pinball of the Dead on the GBA. It's themed on the Sega 'House of the Dead' series.

A friend of mine liked to hack games to change the graphics. On the ST version of Rogue (Epyx) he changed the Bat to be an attacking Bob Dobbs head. On the Atari 800 he made a very clever disk sector editor with the special feature of displaying the sector as player-missile data. It made it very easy to find objects in games and alter them.

I probably still have one in a box in my storage locker. I really need to get rid of most of that stuff.

You'll need to consider that the European ones use a different power supply and default to PAL video mode. Neither of those are show stoppers, but you'll want to get an external A1200 or A500 powers supply from the US or Canada. Plus, if you get a PAL monitor for use in the US, make sure you set up in a room with no windows or good blackout blinds. The disparity between the scan rate and the lights in the room can give you a headache. It's really bad for some people. We use to playtest in darkness with a little desklamp we turned on when we needed to make a note, when we were testing for UK/Euro releases.

I'd strongly disagree there. There is a immense number of Amiga games that are unique to the system or the only other version was on the Atari ST, which would frequently be inferior if the game really took advantage of the platform. (Sometimes, oddly, the ST version would be better due to the talents of the programmer or it being the originating version and the person doing the Amiga port having a poor understanding on how to adapt things. A good example of this syndrome was the Xbox port of Metal Gear Solid 2, which should have offered improvements but was mediocre in execution.) Yes, many of these games are knock-offs of arcade titles but very often those brought new twists to the concept that added some fun. Further, there a ton of games that had no version on later consoles, leaving the Amiga as the best version. But I wouldn't bother with the hardware other than for the pleasure of getting acquainted with what it felt like in action. I still have a 500 w/monitor and accessories packed away in storage but if I had a yen to play any of that stuff again I'd go to the emulator on one of my PCs. The issue of the original media is hardly pertinent at this late date. Buy a pile of ancient floppies at a garage does the creators of those products no good, and that is what copyright is for. At this late date, if you were to meet one of the game programmers from that era, the best you could do is buy them lunch or something. That is at least a tangible benefit. It's been a looong time but you'd be surprised how many games can be made to work from hard drive, although emulation makes that moot. When I was at Cinemaware we'd get letters from people telling us how they'd manage it with games that had shipped before there were any hard drives for developers, never mind end users! Unless this is something you've dedicated yourself to doing, just run it from a virtual floppy in the emulator. Life is too short to go back to systems where transferring a 100 KB a second was considered high performance. And yes, I'd let the 500 and all of my Amiga stuff go fairly cheap if someone would just come and get it. I just don't have the space and I really need to empty out that storage locker to cut expenses. I've no idea how functional any of it is but if you can come out to Castaic (North Los Angeles County just off the 5) and have a hundred buck for some vintage gear...

Hooray! The scans live again! I'd given up but checked in today on a whim.

Exactly! But they're fun tools to use to get information about old computers (ones we care about) and game consoles! I think JackB doesn't appreciate how we got where we are today. Perhaps he doesn't realize that radio didn't start in the 20s and TV didn't start in the 50s. That is just when they gained widespread acceptance as devices for distributed packaged media. If you look at hobbyist magazines of the WWI era, you'll recognize a lot of the same interest and excitement found in vintage Byte issues of decades later. It was the hobbyists who drove the developments that made the ubiquitous products possible. In each case there were early observers who couldn't imagine these becoming items in the possession of nearly every citizen rather than costly and rare tools of government agencies and large business concerns. Imagination matters.