Vaughan

Game 16 I'm just start on this. It's.... DIFFICULT. 29640

427615 Guys - it's taken me all day to beat the high score here. Whether I win or not, I've given it a shot. Such an annoying game at times. When you're getting a high score you feel as though you could go on forever. I'm convinced I coudl turn the clock on this one. But then you make an error - and this is the sort of game where a small error costs you everything. Still, there ya go.

Tangerine Dream definitely did use Atari ST's - this is confirmed in the liner notes for their album Optical Race.

I'll try to stick it out, but to be honest there are very few games I'm any good at. I'm doing okay at Missile Command, but it happens to be one of my favorite games. I'll drop like a rock when we move on to another game.

Phew - another game where you just gotta enter the zone! 239370

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I did 179,000. To imagine the best ever score on this is 6 million is just madness. I'd love to see the guy get that, there has to be a trick! Ok - some things I've learned. You control where the bear comes out. He always comes out, on a regular basis, aligned on the screen to get you with the bee hive. You can use this to make him appear away from the next tree (pause a second, let him appear, then run to the tree). You can axe the beehives for 500 points. Trees go down after five hits. You can also deliver four hits, and a nudge to make a tree come down. Use this nudging when trying to get all the trees to go one way. Someone mentioned a doozy earlier - at level 4 onwards if all the trees fall the same way you get 5000 bonus points. I find this can be done for levels 4, 5, 6, and 7. On level 8 though it all happens too fast for me, and I can't manage it. I'd say try to get them one way on the four levels I mentioned, after that just hack away. The turkey is worth 1000 bonus points, and he falls out the top of the tree as it hits the ground. As the tree falls run to get him (but on levels 7 onwards I don't bother, there's not enough time). On the earlier levels (pre-5) you can be tempted to wait and just kill off a lot of hives. I've not found this scores any extra points though, since you lose the time bonus. Sometimes falling over a stump - which freezes you for a couple seconds - is the fastest way to the next tree. You do not need to be completely aligned with a tree to start hacking it, if you are slightly off the game moves you. The trees always fall in the same pattern, learn the levels. The log interlude is random, and gets you 1000 bonus points if completed.

But what is the point?

The PS4 announcement was really underwhelming. But the Xbox 720 name sounds like it can't do true hi-def. Xbox 4k anyone?

Huh? Of course not. OS's doing what? A box for say, SQL Server will have totally different requirements to a desktop running Office apps. It's nothing like a simple task. It'll tell me if it's faster than my last OS. The fact is though, most people buy a new OS when they buy new hardware because it comes bundled. Been like that forever. As I said, it makes no sense to try and put Windows 7 on a low spec machine and try to draw conclusions from it. XP is finished, what do I care how it performs? DOS would fly on my laptop, but I'm not sure what it proves. DOS might therefore be a "faster" OS, but it'd also be rather rubbish. Every OS has viruses. Every OS crashes. Every piece of hardware will eventually fail. tis life.

You can't have MS Windows without hardware. It would be rather silly to try and run Windows 8 on an XT, or with virtually no memory just to prove a point. If you know Perfmon well enough you could come up with some numbers.....

Windows 2000 was indeed a solid OS. Windows NT was fun, but the interface was old. If you ever used the Exam Cram series to get your MCSE for Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 then you might well have read one of my books

Indeed, building a PC back in those early days meant you had to have some real knowledge. Anyone hoping they could just buy a card, plug it in, and have it work were to be disappointed. All those damn IRQ's that had to be manually configured, and DMA addresses. Building your own PC only got easier - imo - when Pentium II's were around. The last system I recall building from scratch was a Dual-CPU Pentium Pro. Man that was a nice machine. But it wasn't the chip that made things easier really, it was the whole Plug and Play standards that came in. Once the OS got smarter than building PC's got easier. On the subject of branded PC's, I avoided them. Mainly this was because, most of the time, they used custom cases (or chassis if you prefer). This could limit upgrades. Some of those cases were built like a tank!!! Fun memories of getting a 5 and 1/4 AND a 3 and 1/5 inch floppies into one system - and then adding a CD Drive!!! I had one of the very early recordable CD drives too, which was a bitch. Fecking "Memory Overflow" the whole time. if you knocked the table while it was copying, it trashed the disc! Don't get me started on Modems, which went from pitiful speeds up to 56kb in no time - each time needing new kit. Back then I'd customize all the time, but today I don't bother. I doubt it's much cheaper to build your own now - back then it was cheaper...... If I recall correctly, the Pentium was the first chip that needed a fan - right? And remember the 386 SX? That was an upgrade that made Lotus 123 fly, but did virtually nothing else. ~

If you've been into computer gaming for any length of time you'll have tried lots of different OS's. At the end of the day though, I've found various flavors of Windows to be excellent. I've never been an Apple fan, and in fact have a dislike for them now. Windows XP was probably a high point. It was rock solid and I ran it for years. It was a JUST WORKS for me. Windows 7 though is excellent, and I've yet to have trouble with it. DOS was great, simple, lean. But I also have memories of fighting with it tooth and nail. The main problem was memory. Memory management really didn't progress from HIMEM.SYS and SMARTDRV. Installing Expanded Memory and/or Extended Memory to eek out a little bit more was a fun exercise for a bit, but when you just wanted to play a damn game it could drive you mad. Still, old habits die hide - when searching for a file i still find the DIR command to be the fastest way of finding it. I always start MS Word by typing winword into the run line. Come to think of it, I still tend to favor 8.3 folder/file names. I still have a set of floppies for WIndows 1.0 and OS/2 1.0 in storage.

Sadly I was in at the ground floor, and the first PC I bought was an XT. Prior to that I owned Atari (400, 800, ST etc.) It's not accurate to ask "Why was the IBM PC so successful". The ARCHITECTURE was popular, not the brand. While we sometimes called our PC's IBM, we weren't referring to the brand at all, just the architecture. At the time I don't recall anyone caring much about IBM as such. Right from the off, the architecture encouraged customization, which meant you could buy in now, and upgrade different bits. So standard disc controllers gave way to RLL, monochrome graphics to CGA, EGA, VGA, and Super VGA. Sound went from blips and bleeps to Soundblaster stereo. Monitors got bigger and cheaper. Memory went to 640kb, to a meg, to two meg! And so on. Upgrading was common, and we did it often as the latest graphic cards hit the market etc. As a gamer back then, it was a wonderlnd of excitement. Better than that - it was the same computer as we used in the office. So its introduction into the home could be easily justified. On the PC, everything just worked. Meaning, I could buy from any major brand, or build one myself (by far the most common option) and the same software would run on it. If you bought into say, the Atari, then you needed Atari software. The PC was much more open. So the market spoke. We loved going to computer fares, because we knew everything was compatible. Apple have not changed through the years. They had some good stuff out, but it was sold at a premium. It was out of the price range for most. PC's were CHEAP. Unless you wanted the very latest and greatest, of course. Oh for the days of a huge TURBO button on the front of the PC. To be honest I think published history is skewed by reliance on easy monikers. The victors write the history, so it's not always entirely accurate. It's easy to look at the term IBM and derive a view that the company itself was the major force in the success of the platform. But honestly, that's not right. We didn't care anything about IBM - but the platform itself was exciting. Swapping motherboards, modems, video cards was exciting. And this is back in the day when plug and play didn't exist, and you had dip switches everywhere, terminators, interrupts you had to control individually, and BIOS settings that actually did something. Hell, changing out a BIOS was normal too. Great days. Computing today is much simpler in so many ways.

Some thread title. To put it into words.... I recently bought a trackball for my PC, it's basically an upside down mouse. I bought it because I wanted to play Circus Atari, which was originally a Paddle game on the 2600. I found using a joystick or keyboard just didn't wotk for me. I mean, it WORKED, but the whole feel of the ghame was wrong, and I found things too "twitchy". Well, turns out Stella with the trackball works great. Circus Atri is now playable just like the old days - amazing job! But damn is that game DIFFICULT!!! But I digress..... I tried Night Driver, and once again, as an old paddle game things were much improved with the Trackball. Then I got to thinking about Mame. I loaded it up, and FINALLY I can play trackball games as they are meant to be played. Marble Madness, Crystal Castles, and the mother of all trackball goodness Missile Command! So I get a hankering to play the 2600 and Atarui 400/800 versions with the trackball too. Alas, that's when my luck ran out. On both Altirra and Stella I can get it to work just fine, I can move the reticle without problem, and I can fire. But... on both the tracking, that is the movement of the reticle, is very very slow. I've played with the sensitivity settings, but I can't figure out how to make it work properly (ie. fast enough to play). I guess in both cases I'm emulating the joystick with my mouse (trackball). That's probably the issue. But I wanted to check on here to see if I'm just missing something. Good job on Stella and Altirra guys!

Funnily enough I've just gotten around to doing some testing on a newish PC that I just nuked and did a clean install on. I tried a couple Atari 800 emulators, and personally found Altirra to be the best of them. Atari800Win Plus works fine, but it hates jumping from window mode to full screen for me - I lose colors, especially blue. Altirra though works like a dream. ANd what would an emulator folder be without Stella?!? Not Atari 800 of course - it's an Atari 2600 emulator, but despite its DOS based interface it just works in every way and is a terrific piece of work.

Yah! I tried it on Stella last night, and that does a fantastic job on this. I was never able to play the likes of Circus Atari with a joystick, it was just to twitchy for some reason. With the trackball though it's terrific!

Thanks for this, I have downloaded it. Sadly I was really looking forward to something - but it doesn't do it..... I have a trackball you see, and it would be perfect for Circus Atari, Breakout etc. But I don't see any way you use it (it's seen by the system as a mouse). Any chances?

Paulo - keep posting here, I'm sure we'll provide plenty of encouragement. What you have is terrific, and has lots of potential.

Makes sense, Stephena - there is a point where people working together can accelerate learnings, and get the job done for the community to a better degree than lone wolves. NJo disrespect to Stella, which is fantastic. If you two guys could hook up we'd have something outstanding.

Ohhhhhhh - this is seriously cool. I've been using Stella, which is itself on the great side of fantastic and deserves tons of kudos - but this goes to another level. If there is one criticism of Stella - and far be it from me to say anything remotely negative about it - it's the interface. This emulator addresses that big time. Really dig it, and will keep checking as updates come. Brilliant!

I voted "No", but then - oddly - had to say I'd donate $5 to $10. I just don't see the point in this at all. Original consoles can be bought easily for those who want them. For people like myself who want to play on LCD screeens, then emulators do the job just fine. I own the original hardware too, but to be honest I do much of my gaming with emulators, they're just simpler to use, and less hassle. They also work great with new TV's. I guess I just don't understand what a new console would do for me that I can't have already.

I use a 42 inch Sony Bravia TV for my computer screen. Works well. I also have an HP 24-inch LCD computer monitor, which has a higher resolution. But frankly, for emulation that doesn't count for much.

I'd definitely be interested. Have you any idea of a price range you're hoping for?