Artlover

These were taken just before and after the horrific event. Probably shouldn't even show the after picture. Before: After:

I personally find nothing wrong with emulation of older systems like 2600, 5200, Colecovision. I think the only emulation that suffers is the intelivision because of it's weird 16 direction controller disc. But generally speaking, they are more then close enough for me to not bother with real hardware. Besides, didn't Atari dabble around with gamepad later, like for the 7800. I'm pretty sure if gamepads were around during the 2600 era, the 2600 would have had them, atleast as an optional accessory.

From what I've been reading by miffed users of Knology, it's probably impossible for them to exceed any undefined limit because of slow speeds, high latency and high packet loss. Of course, it depends on where you are. Some areas are better/worse then others. Either way, of the things I've been reading the last few hours, I'm sure not impressed with them and all the more happy I am to have Comcast. I'm surprised your happy with them being in Alabama, which seems to be a huge problem area for them and where most complaints are comming from.

I think you need to read their Terms & Services aggreement. Edited for length to focus only on relevent points. As I said, pretty much all ISP have some convoluted drivel in their contracts that amounts to much the same thing as a cap, only it has no defined size to give anyone a guild line to follow. It's simply a vague condition that allows them to come in at any time and say you're using too much bandwidth per their discression.

Yes. It doesn't directly read the contents of .cdi files however and only shows an empty track 01. Anywho, never mind. It ended up just being a tag-team of using several apps at once. Namely, Alcohol to mount the image, then IsoBuster on the virtual drive to extract the contents.

Nothing wrong with caps so long as they are reasonable. As far as caps go, Comcast's 250Gig/month is decent and better then most. To that end, whether they say so or not, most residential class service, no matter who your ISP is, it probably has a cap of one sort of another. Convoluted as a vague term like fair-use. It's funny, in Japan where formerly a lot of their ISP's were unlimited, they started putting caps into place over the last few years. Get this: 1 TB/Month caps, the worse yet is NTT's 30 GB/DAY (yes, DAY or 900+ GB/Month), and people were/are still bitching about it. Seriously, as a long time professional leech, the hardest I've ever been able to hit the net is 700 GB/Month. What the hell are individual people doing that they need more then 1 TB/month?

Eh? It looks right/the same to me.

Ok, let me ask this... How the heck can you extract working files off a DC CDI file or burned CD? I'm trying to pull the VMU games off this to copy over to the xbox for it's VMU emulator. PC reads everything as being 7.8k and is reading the same 7.8k worth of data from somewhere else on the disc/image that is unassociated with the fies. Pain in the butt. Wasted several hours today working on it. Don't seem to recall having problems doing this kind of crap 10 years ago when I used to rip the music & movies out of images. Grrrrrr.

Force feedback was really nothing new, and I don't see anything over-complicated about this concept. It really could have been just about as simple as attaching a motor directly to each of the shafts, a protection circuit to prevent motor generated voltage backfeediing into the motor controller, and a fairly straight forward basic motor controller driven by the code. All you need are two i/o bytes to drive it. Simplest coding application would be to break them down into nybbles and use straight binary for a 16 step resistance level for each direction. If you want to do a bit of bit shifting math, you could make it 128 steps. Mechanically all I could see being needed is for the shafts to be rubber coated to prevent slippage which might make for jerky movement.

Ya know, I never played around with this kind of stuff. Just did real quick tho, telnetted into a C64 site running Image 1.2. Oh, the good ole days. What I need to do now is explore Vice64 a bit and figure out networking on it so I can run CCGMS and have it all telnet out.

How about a link to this auction?

My oldest one is 29 years old, and it still seems fine.

Yes, and IIRC, he has done it before. I got a chuckle out of it The dividing line gives it away tho if you look close enough. Wrong font!

Any idea why intermissions don't work on the modes with less then 4 ghosts? Cool. Thanks for that info. Quitter! I reiterate, QUITTER! But seriously... Quitter! You should atleast look at it again. Time away helps clear the mind, and gives you a better chance to maybe pick up on what's wrong. Didn't you save earlier builds as you were making the hacks to Hack'Em? If so, do any of them work on real hardware? That would help narrow down what you need to look at right there. If not, start over then, and keep builds as you go along. Or just say screw real hardware; it works in emulation, that's good enough. But seriously, you're a 2600 Pac-Man God, Hack'Em proves it! To leave Ms.Hack unfixed & unfinished is criminal. Criminal I tells ya! You can't let "it" win and give up (you quitter ). I wish I knew something about 2600 programming so I could give you an extra set of eyes to look it over with. I know 6502 assembly and junk, did lots of programming on the C64 & 128. But the 2600 I can't wrap my head around. I was reading your assembly code for Hack'Em and was over some of it.

One of the key features and selling points of Armor All is that it does shine. It's even specifically listed on the label and their website. "Clean, Protect, and Shine". It's even on the back label too and shown in the picture you took. Take a look at the ingredients: water-based silicone emulsions, surfactants, and ultraviolet light inhibitors, humectants, dispersants and gloss enhancers. Lets go back to the ingredients a minute: water-based silicone emulsions. - IE: Silicone oil, because that's what water based silicone emulsions are made from. Also that it says (quoted verbatim from their website): "Attention: Not for use on floors, vehicle controls (pedals, grips, steering wheels), bench or cycle seats, cycle tires, brake drums and other surfaces where slipperiness may be hazardous."

Believe this or not. Today was the first time I ever tried Hack'Em!. I know, I should be beaten. Anywho.... WOW!!!!!!! This is amazing. Arcade maze, mostly arcade close sound, intermissions, even the arcade self test screen garbage on start up. If this isn't the BEST 2600 Pac-Man out there, then I don't know what is. Now, I have some questions and comments. I'm using the most recent version (per the link in the first message). 123,618 bytes, dated 10/4/2006. Also, I'm running this on the xbox port of z26. Questions: Are the difficulty switches used? (If not, I have a suggested use for one). Pressing Reset cycles through what seems like 16 game variations. 4 each for Hack'em, Hack'em 2, HanglyMan and HanglyMan 2. The only difference between each of the 4 variations appears to be the number of ghosts (from 4 to 1). Correct? (Edit: I notice intermissions only work on the games with 4 ghosts, and not the ones with only 3,2 or 1.) Comments: The speed seems a tad fast at the begining? The game seems to be finished as best as I can tell, so put auto-start back in. I would like to suggest a difficulty switch (if they aren't being used) instead of the Color/BW switch for the toggle. I say this because not all emulators have the Color/BW switch (IE: z26 on Xbox doesn't, or atleast the function isn't mapped in any user selectable way), but they all have difficulty switches. Anywho, again, this is freaking amazing and excellent. Now go finish Ms.Hack!

This is proving to be a really good read so far. Regarding Marble Madness Whoa! THAT would have been f'in awesome!

Sure you do: A buzz and a bladder full of pee.

Yeah, the DC is picky too. Per "my personal experience" I would rate the DC as a very close (just short of a tie) second place. Yes. For sure. I'd actually take some masking tape or painters tape and tape the disc in place too.

Hahahaha!

I suppose that could happen, but the game was near perfect, I would think a game would work even with a few minor scratches from accidental shipping. I pack things pretty well, so i wouldnt think that would happen. To add my two cents in reverse order. How you pack it doesn't matter in a case like this. All good packing does is prevents an item on a whole from being damaged, it does not prevent loose things inside said item from being knocked free. Abusive shipping forces are still being applied to the item. - IE: You could be trying to ship an old tube radio. You pack it very well in padding and bubble wrap. That protects the unit itself from damage (case/frame won't be dented/crushed/broken), but the tubes inside could still pop out all the same. I have "never" bought a CD in the mail that was still attached to it's locking mechanism when it arrived. And I'm not talking used stuff either, but new factory sealed directly from reputable companies and manufactuers. They have always been loose in the case. Of course how much damage the disc will get depends on the size of the disk and the size of the case. A music cd in a regular music case for example, no so much since the disc can't move alot and the spindle stays around the hub. But just about anything comming in a dvd style case, yeah, there is a lot of potential for scratching if it comes loose since it can move alot inside the case. This is very true with the GC which uses those damned mini discs and has a whole world to slide around in. To that end, the Gamecube is very picky, and it doesn't take many scratches to make a disc unplayable. One of my RE games on the GC has just two tiny little super light scratch marks on it, not even across the entire disc. So small and light, I'd practicaly call the disc immaculate. It's unplayable. DRE's before even getting to the title. Most consoles tend to be kinda picky here, but out of all the CD based consoles I own (SegaCD, Saturn, Dreamcast, PS1, PS2, Xbox, Xbox360 and Gamecube) the Gamecube is the worst! Not that I'm trying to defend the buyer. His approach to handling the situation does make him an a-hole, but I do absolutly believe what he said about it not working and why.

To someone contemplating a single system, the comparison would be ridiculous on any basis other than cost. I'm sorry, that makes no sense at all. If one is contemplating a single system, the ONLY logical basis of comparison would be does it have the games you want to play. If it doesn't, it's a waste, no matter how cheap it was.

Unless you store your consoles outside in the sun, Armor All is not going to do anything to make them last longer. What it will do is make it greasy, glossy and turn it into dust magnets. Not to mention the jury is still out on the overall effectiveness of the product at all, even for it's intended use. Just about every car forum has a few long threads about how it made things worse, not better. From causing dashes to crack to discoloring plastic. I'll vouch for the discoloring plastic myself, as that's happened to me. Back in the 70's when it first came out, before they changed the formula, the product was so horrible and causing so much damage that they were paying people upto $500 for repairs. Armor All is right up there with Rain-X on my list of products you couldn't pay me to ever use again.

Only because it is the arcade version, and it's "equal" to all the other rom emulator versions out there. Be it MAME or some complilation disc for a modern console. To that end, I think it's breaking the spirit to consider them when talking about native mode console games. We can use them as a bench mark for comparing how good consoles versions are to one another. But to simply say they are the best goes without saying and is unfair. With all that said: Ms.Pac-Man on the 7800 is the best native console mode version of Ms.Pac-Man out there I think. But then, since it was designed by the same people who designed the arcade version, it's no wonder.