Albert
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Posts posted by Albert
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Combat or Pac-man. Which if you put them together, you get Com-man. It was all a conspiracy!Funny, when I did this I got "Pac-Bat". Hmmmm..
..Al
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For something Pac-Man and ET...they need a reviews section here at the Age. Reviews of the games for each Atari System.Reviews are something we plan on adding someday.
..Al
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I just grabbed my 2600 and ColecoVision Congo Bongo carts and took pictures of them.
Atari 2600 Cart (by Sega):
And here's the ColecoVision cart:
I've never seen a white Congo Bongo cart. Could it possibly have been a different game? The ROM you downloaded could also have been misnamed (which I've seen happen before). Since you're in Central America, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a version (either legit or pirate) of Congo Bongo was released in a white cartridge..
..Al
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Ha ha! I just read the article, pretty amusing. So he's basically blaming his slacker attitude on the fact that when you finished an Atari game there was no fancy fanfare or endgame sequence, but the game instead would either simply end or start over with more enemes, faster, etc.
What surprises me is the fact there are people in college today who actually played Atari when they were younger. I had an Atari when I was a kid and I entered college in 1988 (aiiigh! so long ago!) Heck, that was 13 years ago! Assuming someone is 18 when they start college, and that they *maybe* started playing videogames at the age of 5, that would put the year around 1988. So, yeah, I guess it's plausible in some cases, but by then most everyone had graduated to the NES and newer systems..
In 1988 I was still messing around with Atari 8-bit computers and around that time the Atari ST line debuted. I certainly wasn't playing 2600 games then..!
..Al
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Did anyone else notice that if you put your mouse over the AtariAge logo next to the news item explaining about the downtime, the tooltip text says: Do'hI was wondering if anyone would pick up on that.
..Al
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I'm generally leary of any sites that advertise, "UNLIMITED THIS!" and, "UNLIMITED THAT!" I feel that the use of the term "UNLIMITED" is rather dubious when the fine print almost always states that your site is limited to 200MB and 5GB of traffic a month. I don't know how these companies get away with it, because if you tried that in the material world your ass would be sued so fast it's not even funny.
Can you imagine if Ford advertised, "Unlimited Warranty!" on TV and then in the fine print of the contract it stated, "Warranty is 3 years/36,000 miles, whichever comes first"? They wouldn't get away with that very long. So I tend to think of these companies as somewhat scummy.
Unfortunately there's no hosting solution for us that would only cost $10/month. We'll be lucky if we can find a decent solution for $100/month (and we have potential candidates in this area). Our problem is that we're encroaching on the realm of higher-volume sites typically run by businesses that make money, so the hosting companies charge considerably more for these types of services. The $10/month plans are aimed at people who want to put up a fairly small site that's not going to draw 100,000 hits a day.
..Al
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Lord of the Rings was one of several games in the (one and only) Parker Brothers catalog that weren't released. The others were McDonalds and The Incredible Hulk (as you had mentioned). To date prototypes of these games have not been discovered, at least to my knowledge (someone please prove me wrong!)
..Al
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Do you have a definitive listing of every Starpath / Arcadia title?This list should be pretty accurate. If it's not, we want to know!!
..Al
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Here's a list of all the 2600 games in our Rarity List, sorted alphabetically by company. You can download individual ROMs by clicking on the little Pac-Man icon to the right of each title.
2600 Rarity List, sorted by Company
From this list, you can easily see which companies produced large libraries of games. Just from looking at it, the larger libraries came from:
- 20th Century Fox
- Activision (duh)
- Apollo
- Atari (double duh)
- CBS Games
- Coleco
- Data Age
- Imagic
- M Network/INTV
- Parker Brothers
- Sega
- Spectravision
- Telesys
- Tigervision
- US Games/Vidtec
- Xonox
If you need anything else, just holler.
..Al
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I'm glad you're back too. I thought I got banned. You guys thought I was Robsterman or Crazy Mom or something. But glad you're back.Ha ha! Hey, it's Crazy Mon, not Crazy Mom (to quote him)! Sorry for the confusion, hopefully that'll never happen again...
..Al
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You should do one of those PayPal donation things. I know I'd be happy to help.It's a possibility, but if we can keep costs under control then we probably won't have to resort to that. It depends where the bandwidth stabilizes. If it keeps going up then perhaps someday we'll have to co-locate a server and that's pretty expensive. At that point we'd probably have to find some way to make the site at least break even.
We don't want to resort to advertising (I personally can't stand banner ads) and we're not sure how people would react to some sort of (very minimal) subscription for enhanced access to the site. We'll probably sell t-shirts and the like, and maybe even come up with some unique Atari-related items to sell.
The road ahead certainly could be interesting.
..Al
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We had to upgrade our account before they would re-enable it. Needless to say, we're not pleased with the way they handled it, from turning off the site in the first place to how long it took them to turn it back on. We're presently shopping around for another host provider that can provide us with a reasonable price and won't shut the site off without warning should we exceed our "allocated bandwidth".
I need to post a news item describing what happened.
..Al
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I've personally used a simple glue stick to secure labels on several carts. I've reattached labels (both main and end) that have come completely off, as well as the ends of pesky Parker Brothers carts that always seem to pop up. Seems to work pretty well and I haven't had any problems with discoloration or mottling.
I like the idea of a spray glue, never tried that. Seems like that would be an ideal way to use just enough glue without having excess spilling out from the edges when you reapply the label.
Perhaps we need a "How to Glue Labels to Carts" FAQ.
..Al
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Crossbow -- The main reason why we're trying to keep the Avatar images down to a reasonable size isn't really because of page loading time. We've already received a warning from our host provider that we're going to far exceed our allocated bandwidth this month. So having 177K avatars that load on any topic you've posted on is a bit excessive. Someday when bandwidth is no longer an issue then we could care less how large they are..
Also, animated avatars are a bit distracting when you're trying to read messages, so that's another reason we prefer static images.
..Al
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Blackjax -
I've put your MotorPsycho box scan online and found that I already had scanned a 7800 Centipede manual (but will use yours in the future!) I gave a more thorough explanation in this thread:
Topic: Fresh off the scanner...!
The Yars' Revenge scan I'll use when I work on a DC Comics section and the cool 7800 Poster Catalog will get used very soon. You wouldn't happen to have the other side to that poster, would you? As for the 7800 Warranty Card, I'll probably create a page for all of those someday also (as I have a ton of them, especially for the 2600, that need to be scanned in!)
Thanks again,
..Al
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Hi Blackjax!
Sorry for the long delay in responding to this, it wasn't my intention to let this slip through the cracks. I have put the MotorPsycho manual online, which you can spy here:
As for the Centipede manual, as I was working on your images I realized that I had already scanned a Centipede manual. Turns out it wasn't toggled On in the database, and thus wasn't visible on the site. So I've fixed that and you can view the Centipede manual here:
The manual you sent me differs from mine in that the cover page is colored differently. There may be other differences as well, but I haven't looked more closely at them. At some point we'll figure out a good way to present manual variations and when we do, I'll use your Centipede scan (so it wasn't for naught!)
Thanks again for the scans!
..Al
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Has anyone found a CBS 5200 cart with the label on the right way? Form looking at the cart you can tell it was suppose to have the name o the end label and the main label, but they put it on upside down so you have two names on the main label and none on the end.Good question--I've wondered about this myself. Since it seems to be consistent maybe someone at CBS decided they wanted "CBS ELECTRONICS" on the end label instead of the game title. Or perhaps the first game was incorrectly labeled and to maintain consistency they labeled all their 5200 titles in the same (incorrect) manner. I bet the person who designed the labels was a bit miffed at this.
..Al
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are you guys ever gonna put up all the stuff I posted on the 7800 board?some of it's been up here since you guys changed over from the Nexus... including good scans of the Yars Revenge comic...
My apologies for not getting those items online. I have a large backlog of scans that need to go up on the site, including yours. I'll get all the manuals and boxes you scanned online this weekend. I'm not sure what to do with Yars' Revenge yet. What I'd like to do is have a section for *ALL* the various Atari comics created by DC Comics (Yars' Revenge, Centipede, Atari Force, Swordquest, etc.) here on AtariAge. That means I have a considerable amount of scanning to do, and I'm working on another project for AtariAge I need to finish first. After I'm done with that one, then I can concentrate on the comics.
Again, as I mentioned in my earlier post, I'll soon have considerably more time to devote to the site. With any luck, fewer items will fall through the cracks.
Thanks,
..Al
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Hmmm...that would mean they would have to be shown at actual size then...or at least the actual dimensions given so that they could be printed correctly.
Actually you'd want them at a fairly high resolution so when you print them out they don't appear pixelated. As long as you print them out at the same DPI they're scanned at, you should be fine. For instance, if I scanned some labels at 300dpi and you printed them at 300dpi, they should be the correct size.
The main problem with this is that images scanned at high resolution take up considerable disk space and, more importantly, bandwidth. The printed labels also wouldn't have the same quality as the original labels, which usually have a nice, glossy coating. And we won't even go into the whole issue about reproduction-label carts hitting eBay..
..Al
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I personally like the new ranking system because it enables people new to the site to get an idea for who the "veterans" are. On other message boards I've frequented, these people are often very knowledgeable about the subject matter, and are usually quick to share their knowledge (which is partly why they have so many posts!) So new users can "look up" to these older users.
However, that doesn't mean that I would disregard someone's posts just because they only have one star. Everyone has to start somewhere, and hopefully most people realize that.
..Al
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I need to hookup with someone in the UK (or elsewhere in Europe) to trade NTSC for PAL carts. I don't have very many PAL carts now, and it would be nice to start adding them to my collection. Of course, it's probably fairly easy for you guys to come up with NTSC carts, so trading with someone in the US might not be worth the effort. But someone could prove me wrong.
..Al
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Sorry to hear you got burned on eBay. I've been mostly as a buyer, I think only one time I never received merchandise and that was for a $10 Atari 2600 cart. As a seller, I've certainly had my share of deadbeats, but most people pay promptly. I'll be running quite a few auctions soon, in an attempt to get rid of tons of stuff before I move back to Austin in a few months. And not just videogame related merchandise!!
I have at least 30 Atari 2600 consoles sitting in my storage unit, along with tons of other hardware. At some point I'll go through them all, test and clean 'em, and sell them (probably bundled with games). Most of them will probably find their way onto eBay.
..Al
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Probably not any time soon. We first have to contend with the fact that we're using way more bandwidth than our hosting service provides. That's our number one priority at the moment. I think it's still a little too early to consider mirroring the site, and that would also cause problems with the message boards.
Is the site slow for you over in Wales?
..Al
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Weird Congo Bongo memories.
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