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Andromeda Stardust

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Posts posted by Andromeda Stardust

  1. Posted

    While they are at it, they might as well throw in a "Teddy Bear" mode as well. I heard that Pacman 4k (4 ghosts) is just a little tougher than Atari Ms Pacman, but easier than Jr. I usually play Ms Pacman with 3 ghosts, and Jr Pacman with 1. Yeah, the ghosts are that relentless on Jr Pacman. It's like their hypered up on go-go juice or something...

  3. Posted · Edited by stardust4ever

    Dial up is one thing I don't miss about the 90s. I still remember downloading Sin and Punishment off Wii Virtual Console in 2007. About 3 hours of watching Mario run across the screen. In January 2008, we fnally got DSL for the first time after our ISP of over 15 years finally shut down it's dial-up service. All those old serial modems truly deserve to be buried in the bottom of a New Mexico landfill along with the ET carts.

     

    Still using dial-up in 2012? "That's a paddlin'..."

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFgR0m-9FmM

  4. Posted

    I did not preorder the Atari book from the Amazon website. I preordered the book directly from from the publisher, but used Amazon payments to send the money. When you preorder an item on Amazon, they give you a list price and a release date. When the item is officially released, Amazon charges your card. If the price drops, you actually get it cheaper, and if the price goes up, Amazon eats the difference. If the date gets pushed back by a month or more, Amazon will send you an email asking if you still want the item, giving you the option to cancel. Either way, you can cancel a pre-order through the website at any time prior to release date, and you are never charged for anything until the item ships. Even stores like Gamestop require a reserve deposit of $5 for games or $50 for consoles, but you are still free to cancel at anytime, and if you cancel or don't pick it up on time, they will refund your preorder deposit, so there is no financial risk. I would recommend only prepaying for products from companies that have a proven track record of quality customer service. The Ataribook publisher, fledgling company "Szygney Press" (whose name I can't spell or pronounce), was presumably created to promote the book. I wish it success, but the risk of failure is high, and I would like to recieve this book as much as anybody, but I also do not want to lose my money if the book never surfaces. Amazon Payments has a 60-day claims period, actually 15 days longer than Paypal, so hopefully, I'm in good hands. I pre-paid on July 24th, 3 days before the book was scheduled to launch, and it hasn't shipped yet.

  6. Posted

    Sorry to hear that. My local Game-X-Change has a 24-hour satisfaction guarantee that if you don't like a game for any reason, bring it back within 24 hours for store credit. They just opened a new location in my area (2 total), and you can return items to either store. They also have a 30-day warrantee for non-working games/systems.

     

    I'd also like to add, you should have checked the bag before you left. These guys seem like pricks, so I would recommend shopping at another retro games chain since you live in a large enough metropolitan area. That said, you may be able to shine up the "beaten" system by cleaning it.

     

    I assume the game you had reference to was Mario All-Stars. There are two versions, with and without Mario World. The combo cart is rarer ($25) and worth about the price of both separate game carts combined. I have the combo version.

     

    Also, with SNES games, it may be wise to replace the internal battery, as the button cell batteries are probably 20 years old by now and starting to lose charge. Otherwise, your saved progress may someday disappear and you'll have to start over. You will need a security bit to open the cart. The batteries are soldered onto the board, so replacement of dead batteries can be a pain.

  7. Posted

    There were many arcade ports to the 2600 that sucked, although many others got it right. Pacman was atmittedly one of the bad ones, but it was really ET that made people lose faith in Atari and contributed to the crash. Someone is currently begging in another thread to ressurect ET. Well, Pacman has at least been ressurected several times by now. I've got Pacman 4k and that Soviet Tetris clone whose name I can't pronounce (the story behind it is gold) ordered from the shop, just waiting for them to ship.

     

    At least we can all agree that Atari fixed their mistake by releasing Ms Pacman, the developement of which was outsourced to the same guys responsible for the original Arcade version. Ms Pacman VCS was everything Pacman should have been from the start.

  8. Posted · Edited by stardust4ever

    Wow, people really like to urinate in people's cornflakes around here.

    Nobody's deliberately using the thread as a pissing ground.
    10k or 30k, that's still a whole bunch of money either way.
    True dat!
    It's still a great find no matter what. Let's celebrate that this is an awesome discovery, and not get into some stupid vinegar attitude about how some people can see into the future, and that "There will be more found".

    [sarcasm]You had better sell it ASAP, as I've got about a dozen or so sitting in my garage, and I'm sure others do as well...[/sarcasm]

    Obviously, I was joking about having dozens of them in my garage. I even used the sarcasm tag. However, it is still possible that more of these may exist. I believe it's been established that the company did not have proper distribution channels, otherwise even if 99% of them were returned/discarded, stores would still have stocked them, and at least a few people would have bought the game.

     

    Obviously, if the merchant who basically gave it away to the OP's father, had a time machine or otherwise could see the future, he would have kept it for a few years, or possibly stocked an order and hoarded them, and retired wealthy. If everyone had known back in 1982 that by 2010 that these carts would be worth ten grand or more, then everyone would have gotten one, and the Air Raid cart would have ultimately become a still rare but <$50 turd and forgotten. The same could be said for baseball cards, stamps, and other collectables.

     

    What I find really ironic, is that virtually no one knows anything about the original company. It is possible, however, that a former employee of this company may even have a stockpile of carts, and perhaps when the individual is deceased, they might be discovered and garage saled by the family members, then the cats are out of the bag. I can't imagine that the guy who originally marketed these carts didn't have a pile of them laying around at some point.

  12. Posted

    I could have put my cat in front of the keyboard and she could have written better code than Sorceror or Star Fox.
    Starfox was a Nintendo game, and quite a good one at that. It wasn't first released until the 16-bit generation though.

  14. Posted · Edited by stardust4ever

    A timely topic. What do you do if there is so much lag, it makes games totally unplayable? Just last night my neighbor invited me over to try out my old games on his new TV. We hooked the Atari up to the VCR RF jack which was connected to the TV via either composite or HDMI (I don't remember). There was about a second's worth of lag. Seriously. I couldn't play anything it was so bad.

    If you experienced lag through the VCR-HDMI, then try hooking the Atari directly to the TV. I found that my DVD recorder was unusable for recording NES videos because there was a HUGE amount of output lag on the DVD player, like almost two seconds. My Happauge USB capture device is even worse. I imagine if your VCR has an HDMI port, it's likely one of those DVD recorder combo units. You need to hook the Atari directly up to the RF port on the TV set to minimize lag. Old-school analog VCRs have no frame buffer thus are lag free, if you need a composite source. Even a busted VCR that destroys tapes will likely work fine as a demodulator.

  15. Posted · Edited by stardust4ever

    Does a known manual even exist for Air Raid? If so, it's not CIB. Still worth a crapton of cash though. And if no manual ever existed, that means it is CIB and is worth a crapton more!!!

     

    Seriously, that's like thumbing through a box of NES games and finding a gold Nintendo World Championship cartridges. You have stumbled upon the holy grail, my friend...

    • Like 1

  19. Posted · Edited by stardust4ever

    I hate to say this, but I have filed a claim at Amazon payments yesterday. My deadline for claims is October 24th, less than a week away, and if this book never ships, I'll be out the $40 bucks with no recourse to get it back. If you have made a deposit through Amazon payments, I would advise you to do likewise and wait for this book to show up on Amazon. Sorry if anyone thinks I'm being untrusting, but I've preordered stuff before that never came to fruition and kept waiting and waiting and basically never saw my money or the product again. Even back in the pre-internet days, my mom ordered some stuff through a catalog once, and sent in her check, which did get deducted, and the stuff she ordered never came. Months later, she attempted to contact the company by phone only to find the number disconnected and the company bankrupt. The bank said they couldn't do anything about it since she signed and authorized the check herself. I'm just not taking any chances. If the book launches, I will buy it afterwords.

  21. Posted · Edited by stardust4ever

    I had the same idea as you a few years ago and i tried (and failed) to port the old C64 PD game Down the Chimney to the 2600. This is just an old concept-demo i made and i never got anywhere with it. But i think someone who actually can program could make a nice 2600 game out of it.

     

    Anyway, here's the ROM - have a good laugh! :lol:

     

    chimney006.bas.bin

    Judging by the one screenshot, what do you do, dodge the walls? I'll put this in my Harmony later... ;-)

  23. Posted · Edited by stardust4ever

    If you could enlighten me, without divulging in the inner workings of the AtariVox, how does the Atari send data to it? On the 9-pin connector, there are 5 digital inputs, 2 analog inputs, two power pins (GND and +5VCC), but no dedicated output pins to send data out from the controller port.

     

    EDIT: Dang, that speakjet chip is expensive!!!

  24. Posted

    Start a kickstarter project?

     

    Also, what kind of schematic does the AtariVox use? Maybe if no one is willing to assemble these, you could just submit the schematic and Al could just upload it in the Atariage "hardware" section, and people could build an AtariVox themselves. If it's made from off-the-shelf parts, then anyone with access to a credit card and knows how to use a soldering iron could go to Jameco or Digikey or Mouser, buy the components him/herself, and put them on a breadboard, patents or not!

    • Like 2

  25. Posted · Edited by stardust4ever

    Nintendolife is a wonderful site for reviews of Nintendo games. Their reviews range the full gamut from 1/10 to 10/10, though the median of all games reviewed is about a 7. They do receive advance copies from publishers on occasion, but I generally find Nintendolife reviews much more informative than IGN. Other review sites like Destructoid or RottenTomatoes are often more sarcastic for entertainment value rather than informative. Oftentimes a game that's praised by Nintendolife for being innovative or having a unique art style gets slammed by IGN for not being "mainstream" enough. As a retro gamer and modern gamer, I'm actually drawn to games that have a unique style. Also, any game that's a 1st person shooter for Xbox360 or PS3 automatically gets graded on a higher curve than other genres, and that is not fair or representative of gamers as a whole. Thank you, IGN. Sorry, but getting my butt blown off with a grenade launcher while traversing a dark, muddy brown wasteland and listening to a bunch of teenage boys cussing and swearing in the headset is not my idea of a good time. Driving a go-kart as Rosalina and shoving a Blue Spiney up Wario's butt right before he crosses the finish line, or hopping through space as a red-suited plumber who can somehow breath without oxygen, is epic!

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