Nickel Arcade in Rockford, IL

[Nickel Arcade in Rockford, IL]

Has anyone else visited the nickel arcade in Rockford, IL. I checked it out yesterday and its pretty nice. You pay $1.75 admission to get in, then there is a wall of classic games (pac-man, DK, scramble, etc.) all set on free play. There are about 15 newer games for a nickel to 20 cents to play, and a bunch of play for ticket games if that is your thing. It was very nice. I plan to go a couple time a year. If your're in the Nothern IL area I recommend giving it a try.

 

Cheers

[Crystal Mines II - Level 17?]

Standing in the upper left hand corner, the exit is 2 spaces to the right and 3 spaces down. You will have to move/destroy blocks to expose the exit.

 

Cheers!

[Bug in Viking Child.]

Acually, if I understand your description correct, I think this is a known shortcut in that stage.

 

That makes sense. Its hard to believe it was a bug. It was very disconcerting to fall through the ground, however. :wink:

 

Cheers!

[Bug in Viking Child.]

I was playing Viking Child last night and I came across a bug in the castle stage. I jumped off of a tower and fell right through the ground and kept falling until I reached an underground tunnel. I was quite a shortcut through the level. Has this happened to anyone else?

 

Cheers!

[Lynx problem...]

If you decide to throw it away, I would gladly pay shipping and handling for it.  I need the spare parts.    Good-luck getting it to work.

 

I have a semi-working lynx 2 (board only), that you can have for the price of shipping. It powers up but there is no picture and the sound is just white noise.

 

Mitch

 

Hi Mitch,

 

Does it still have the button membranes and the plastic clips to hold them to the board? If it does, then I am interested. Send me a PM.

 

Thanks,

Rob

[Lynx problem...]

If you decide to throw it away, I would gladly pay shipping and handling for it. I need the spare parts. Good-luck getting it to work.

[Atari 2600 PacMan reeks!]

Thanks for the topic name change.

[Best Lynx Game Box Art?]

I would have to vote for Joust. That cyberostritch is pretty awesome. What is your favorite?

 

Cheers!

[Atari 2600 PacMan reeks!]

I don't want to sound like a prude, but I am tired of seeing the phrase "sucks a bunghole" on the Atari2600 page. Could the author or a moderator please change the language in the thread title?

 

Thanks!

[Most accurate and most inventive arcade conversions?]

I think Battlezone is a pretty creative adaptation that is only like the arcade original in its basic concept

Umm, excuse me? The differences between arcade and 2600 Battlezone are purely cosmetic. The biggest change is that the camera is a few feet above your tank instead of inside it. Hardly significant to the gameplay.

 

Award for most creative interpretation has to go to Zaxxon.

 

 

I have to disagree. The 2600 version of Battlezone does not include the obstacles present in the arcade. It does change gameplay. For example you can move in reverse forever in the 2600 version and never hit an obstacle. That won't work in the arcade. Also you could use the obstacles for defense.

 

I would vote Moon Patrol for best arcade conversion. It has almost all the gameplay elements of the arcade and it includes the music during gameplay. I think the only thing missing in thet conversion is traveling uphill and down avoiding rolling boulders.

 

Cheers!

[Atari 2600 Dune Prototype Discovered!]

I came across this picture on Worth1000.com and couldn't resist.

[Beat THRUST contest! (FINISHED!)]

I'm going on vacation in 2 weeks. That's when I am beating Thrust ... in theory

[Othello]

What you area asking for is not impossible, but it would require a complete rewrite of the display kernal. The reason you are finding no graphics is because the pieces are made with sprites set to $FF, and with missles set to width 8. The kernal assumes uniform sprite graphics and uniform missle width for each scanline resulting in the squares you see. To get a different shape will require different code as well as the new graphics image.

 

Sorry.

[fuzzy picture and static for sound, help!]

This thread may be helpful too:

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=33451

[fuzzy picture and static for sound, help!]

Both the ideas given above are good. You may be on the wrong channel. Or need a new switchbox. I have found an ideal setup that may or may not help you. I do not have cable TV or a TV antenna on my house. I have a pair of amplified Rabbit Ears for an antenna (from Kmart, but any department store or Radio shack has them). I use an F-connector converter from Radio shack to connect the Atari 2600 to the cable-in jack of the Rabbit ears. I then switch the rabbit ears to cable mode and set the TV to the right channel. The atari picture and sound are crystal clear. I was shocked the first time I did it. There must be some sort of noise filter built into the antenna to strip out the noise in the signal.

 

Cheers!

[Best MAC power pc games?]

I recommend trying Escape Velocity by Ambrosia Games. (Link in previous post). I found it very entertaining.

 

Cheers!

[It's official. I'm a Lynx addict.]

I tried to deny it, but I just bought 17 games new in box so I think its time to admit I have an addiction to Lynx....

 

and its a good thing!

 

As an aside, its sad that Sega owns the rights to Space Harrier. The built in bitmap zoom hardware in the Lynx would have made creating a great port of the game a snap. I suspect that it was never done because Sega favored their own Game Gear handheld.

 

Cheers!

[Donkey Kong Jr. is damn near unplayable!]

DK Jr for 2600 is nothing special.

 

Here's a quick tip.

- To get off a vine you must double tap the joystick in the direction you wish to get off. I had a hell of a time playing the game until I figured that out.

[A perhaps-fun little idea...]

Game of the month, maybe? I have whole weeks where time is not available for gaming.

 

Cheers

[Beat THRUST contest! (FINISHED!)]

Okay I received my copy of Thrust and I played it for the first time last weekend. It is an awsome game. I have a questions though:

 

1. Is it possible to get the 300 points for fueling from a fuel pod partially, and then 150 points for shooting the partially filled fuel pod? It doesn't seem so to me, but I wanted to double check.

 

2. If we start with Game #3 then there are 24 planets total to finish the game?

 

3. To win the contest, do you need to finish the game before anyone else, have the highest score (game finished or not), or finish the game AND have the highest score of all people that finish the game?

 

Thanks!

[Department Stores Remembered.]

Sears

Johnson Hills

 

 

- Hey, does anyone else remember when Sears even had full blown video arcades inside their stores. That was truly the peak of the first video game boom. Everyone wanted a piece of the action.

[I always wondered]

And only ~Jet~ turned out to be a dude

 

Oh! So that's what the hub bub was about. I missed that little piece of the controversy

[On the flip side...]

RE: Adventure and Pitfall,

 

I think the reputation of these games comes largely from their time of release. I bought both of these games when they were first released, and when I plugged them in I said WoW! They both pushed the 2600 to new limits that had never been seen before. Sure there are games now that make these games look weak, but back then they rocked!

 

- Adventure brought to the table a large world to explore, and randomization to provide more shelf life.

- Pitfall had an even larger world (256 unique screens in a 4K cartridge!), and graphics to die for. I mean Pitfall Harry was the very first VCS (and first maybe in consoleland) character to actually animate running beyond the 2 frame twitch walk common to many games, and he had 3 colors! I believe it may have also been one of the first games to use the missle/ball(?) to draw a line on the screen, aka the vine... Not sure on that one.

 

These games raised the bar for games that followed. Many games since have raised the bar higher, but at one time they were the standard benchmark for showcasing the abilities of the VCS.

 

On topic: I don't like VCS Asteroids.

[Finally! Its done! Whew!]

I finally finished the game Crystal Mines II. Its been haunting my freetime for far to long now. It is an awesome game. Has anyone else beaten this game. The only level I didn't finish was Bonus level 28 "Tar Maze". What a nightmare.

 

I was happy to see that the game has an ending.

 

 

Cheers!

[Karateka 2600 - Mockups]

I have been thinking about this some more. I had planned originally to try and devise a sort of DMA controller in the cart to speed writes to the TIA, but then Paul suggested self modifing code. Looking at that possibility I could get 14 register writes per scanline plus an HMOVE. That would be enough for my purposes.

 

Therefore, I propose to put two 4K byte FIFOs into the cartridge. I will give these FIFOs each two 64 byte spaces in the memory map for reads, and writes will be mapped to somewhere in zero page. The program will push a frame worth of custom code into a FIFO. Then pass control to the head of the FIFO address space to draw the screen. The code for a scanline will execute, and then a JMP instruction will put control back at the start of the FIFO memory space for the next scanline. At the last scanline there will be a RTS instruction to pass control back to the main program.

 

Each FIFO has to regions in the memory map. Reading from one region empties the FIFO as each byte is read. Reading from the other 64 byte block will push the read byte back into the FIFO. This will allow the same code to be saved for display the following frame or be thrown away.

 

I figure it will take 2 to 3 frames to render a screen image into a FIFO. So the game would run at 20 or 30 Hz. That's okay since the action in Karateka is paced slower than most other games.

 

cheers!