the antithesis

Now that I've had some time with it, I can say with certainty that the CXStick is indeed atrocious. Maine thing I've found is that squirreling away the extra hidden buttons means they're in locations where you can accidentally hit them. I tried Berzerk and kept hitting the click rim and exiting the game. That's... just where I put my hands, activating forty-year-old muscle memory. I am definitely going to seek an alternative or simply hack this so that functionality isn't in my way.

That would be a bit above my pay grade, unfortunately. Most I plan to do to this thing is tho make a functional keyboard on it. This will be difficult because the keyboard sticker is under a bezel that is glued into place and removing it risks breaking it or damaging the sticker. So I may not even do that much.

Okay, so mine arrived and I beeped out and confirmed most of what I said above. The upper unpopulated USB port connects to the ribbon cable and, therefore, the USB hub for the four ports. The lower unpopulated port by the lower left corner of the board appears to be free. So, if it's still connected, it should be usable. Internal storage or whatever. The pins for it are duplicated on the bottom edge of the PCB between the screw and the ribbon cable connector. The back USB is similarly duplicated on the pinouts just below it. I have not had time to test any of these this to see if they function as expected. Has anyone tried plugging a USB stick in one of the front jacks? I could be it'll only read a USB stick in the back? One thing I also wanted to check was the USB hub and if you could support more that four. Sadly, no. I found a datasheet for the FE1.1s chip on Adafruit, of all places, and it only supports four. One additional thing I notice is a tiny button in the lower right. It is not pressable when the case is on and it connects to the "UBOOT" pin on the header on the lower right edge. This header has the following pins: GND UBOOT RECOVER VCC-10 or VCC-IO I don't know what these things are, but I'm noting them here for those that do. So, there's a start for people who like to hack these things.

Also appears to be an unused USB connection on the main board. Aside from the the two unpopulated USB sockets, there are pinout headers in various locations, but each seems to be directly connected to a socket. The header directly below populated plug in the back appears to be directly connected. One of the unpopulated plugs on the side looks like it connects to the USB hub. Which leaves one unused. Have to wait until mine gets here to beep it out for sure.

So, I got one of the 128K Harlequin board which is a clone of the ZX Spectrum. My question is since it says the whole board only uses 5v, can I just replace the whole power circuit, which apparently knocks down the 9v center negative that comes in to 5v, with a micro USB plug an then use a cell charger like on my Raspberry Pi? Personally, I can't think of any reason why not. Closest problem I could find was the amperage, but the center negative PSU I've found supplies just under one amp, same as the 5v charger. I just don't know enough about electronics to be confident that this will work or that I'm not missing something that is blindingly obvious to someone competent.

I'm posting this because it's the main thing that still has my interest about this device. I like games and this thing plays games. But I do have one question: How? There are no controls in evidence on this thing, so how do you control the ship in Asteroids? It mentions motion and voice, which would be hideous. Imagine being on the bus waving your arm around shouting "Shoot!Shoot!Shoot!Shoot!" It's possible this is where the smartphone link comes in and you can play with virtual buttons on that screen while awkwardly trying to look at your wrist, but that isn't in evidence here. At the end of the day, this isn't a product that would interest me. Which is not to say I'm not interested in game watches. I used to have one back in the day. God, that was terrible. But I played the hell out of it. I'd been thinking before these smartwatches came out that the next evolution would be to bring back watches, but I was thinking more of pocket watches.I could see the hipster kids latching onto the style of a pocket watch and it just seems to make more sense to me as a functional device, since to can still swipe and tap the screen with the thumb of the hand that's holding it but you still have the other hand if you need it. It would make more sense as a gaming smartwatch if it had physical controls on the edge like a stopwatch. Imagine if under the thumb was a d-pad, A and B buttons on the side under the first and second fingers. I think this would work. But that's not what Gameband is offering. So, oh well.

That sounds like a good idea. There were thousands of those stupid things and there should be enough room for a Pi Zero, I would imagine.

Yeah. I was planning to revisit this thread once the full unveiling occurred because the shilling is painful to behold. I really don't understand this product. What is a smartwatch and why should I care? I don't even have a smartphone, personally. I may learn how to make one out of a Raspberry Pi someday... They really missed a trick by not making the Atari one black and woodgrain. In either case, it doesn't appear to be like the Minecraft one that was a glorified thumbstick. It's a full Smertwetch. Woo hoo.

So I got a tantilizing email today from Atari's newsletter. It had a picture of an Asteroids Deluxe cabinet with the words "Remember how you used to game?" After that, it reads Now, my first thought was that the Coleco Chameleon was back again, but after a bit of research, I don't think that's the case. I had never heard of this Gameband company, so I looked them up and found a Minecraft Gameband which is a glorified USB thumb drive you can wear on your wrist. To be fair, it is different tech than typical flash drives as, allegedly, you can play Minecraft directly from the Gameband, which would kill an ordinary flash drive. Even so, whoop-de-skip, I say. So this has me wondering what Atari is doing with this and if the reference to classic games means anything. We won't know until February and in February we will all be underwhelmed.

A handheld game system with removable controllers. That sounds vaguely familiar. Everything Nintendo has done in the last decade or so has been an update of something they did thirty years ago. The Wii was the Power Glove. the DS was the Game & Watch Multi Screen. I'm still waiting for the update of R.O.B. the Robot.

You can get AAA titles on Gamecube. Just take some nice poo, wait for it to start turning grey and then put it on top of your Gamecube. The problem here isn't Nintendo but with that so-called AAA market you mentioned where they went from males aged 16-30 being the people most likely to purchase a video game to being the only people likely to purchase a video game. This laser focused the market and eliminated a large percentage of the possible consumers out there. Have a vagina? Video games simply are not for you. Younger than twelve or older than 35? Video games are not for you. It's the same kind of focused marketing that brought us all those Fast and Furious movies. In a more robust market, Call of Duty would be a B title at best. This is what happened to Nintendo. A large electronic conglomerate that could give a fig about video games as an artistic medium or as a business and found out how to maximize their profit in a short-sighted move that shrank the audience so that what should have been a game with niche appeal became the biggest tent pole franchise.

Yep. I wonder if this means other Parker Bros games will be included...

Ah, intriguing... Were I to guess, I'd say Vanguard because of the tune ripped from the Flash Gordon soundtrack. Japan had different copyright laws in the 80's so they'd rip off stuff wherever. I'm trying to think of what games have music that would be likely to cause a problem. The 2600 wasn't known for it's musical abilities.

Oh god, I'd forgotten about that. I'm glad it failed because that looked so ugly and, honestly, who wanted this? It reminds me of Retro Atari Classics for the DS "3 graffiti legends tag 10 Atari classics" the box says. Why?!? How does one become a graffiti legend and why would anyone want Atari games with stupid graphics?

I am an American, but I think the ZX Spectrum is cool in theory. Haven't tried it in practice. I did watch the episode of the Ben Heck Show where he made a pocket version of the ZX and during the teardown found out some interesting technical aspects. I think the appeal is it was a cheap computer you would buy for your kids back in the day, so many Brits had one and are now nostalgic for it. So a new ZX machine is just capitalizing on that. No different from the Atari Flashback systems. Frankly, I find the output I have seen thus far rather appealing. I like the look of it better than, say... oh the Colecovision. I'll have to take a closer look someday.

Wait. So they needed to include a different, non-2600 version of Space Invaders, but not Jungle Hunt, Front Line or Polaris? I'm sure there's more to this story but I doubt if they'll admit it to anyone. Were I to guess, it may be a means for Taito to maintain the copyright on Space Invaders. Weirder things have been done in the name of copyright preservation. It might also be that Taito would rather have had non-2600 versions of all their games, but the hardware could only do Space Invaders well.

I'm trying to teach myself electronics (yeah I know) and was wondering if anyone had done a teardown of the hardware in the flashback consoles, with the possible exception of the FB 2 since many have modded that one to accept cartridges. I'm working with a FB4 and find the PCB laughably tiny. So much space... I'm not having much luck finding out what some of the components are. There's tons of surface mount resisters, capacitors, a few inductors, transistors, etc. But I'm more interested in the main chip. I looked up the numbers and think I've identified the SDRAM and Flash memory chips. I assume the games/menu software are stored in the flash, which might be bad as I've heard somewhere that flash degrades over time. I've had no luck finding out what's under the black blob, but that did give me a chance to learn about chip on board manufacturing. Has anyone done a breakdown of the hardware specs? I am curious what's in there.

Heh. I had a similar experience with some guy in the paper & dice RPG scene. He was publishing a fanzine for an old school RPG but was using art assets from other sources without paying for them, like Games Worshop art. I even contributed a few articles which were crap. He never paid me for it, although pay was never the point as we were all enthusiasts. He did give me a PlayStation with a bunch of games. Worries me that he had my address to send that to me. It was actually kind of weird. Glad I haven't heard from him in forever.

I'm going to second Super Mario Land because it did what it needed to do, make a small version of Super Mario Bros on a portable game system. I'm not as thrilled with the later games in the series because the sprites are so big and detailed, the games is super cramped. I suppose you could say that about most of the games on the Game Boy because of the low resolution. I'm going to have to dig through the catalog and determine which games make the best use of the small screen and low resolution and which games tried to ignore it and it didn't work out so well. Off the top of my head, I can say the besides SML, the Castlevania series did well with making small sprites. LoZ Link's Awakening also did well IIRC. Kid Icarus and Metroid were not so hot because they had the cramped/large sprite problem. I tell you, it's almost enough to make me want to learn to program the Game Boy to remake some of these games with small sprites for a proper viewing angle. There are worse reasons to learn to program in Assembly.

Back in the day, I had seen a Mr Do arcade game where the main character was drawn like Yukidaruma on the instructions. I always wondered why it was like that. Must have just used the instruction art from the Japanese version with English text. Basically this, only where you see the clown it was the snowman instead. I'm sure there's a thrilling story behind it. Remember to wipe out the lucky diamond because it makes for a terrible surf board.

I wonder if anyone else has noticed the similarities between the NES classic Wizards & Warriors and the arcade title Legend of Makai. Wizards & Warriors: Legend of Makai: There's quite a few similarities in the gameplay. According to Wikipedia, there is further connection. Wizards & Warriors was developed by Rare in 1987 and published in Japan by Jaleco in 1988. Legend of Makai was released by Jaleco also in 1988. So if the similarities in the gameplay are not a coincidence, then Legend of Makai is essentially a port of the NES title. Jaleco has done this sort of thing before. The Ninja Kid series, which was practically the company mascot at one time, was originally created by UPL. I just find it interesting and haven't managed to find anyone else comparing these two games.

Definately. The game is a graphical version of Hunt the Wumpus combined with the map from the Hobbit.

Good luck. All I've been getting in response is that newsletter. So, at least they have my email.

Really. Could you do it again so I can get mine?

I'm just patiently waiting while making my Pac-Man latch hook rug. If I don't get my overlays by the time it's done in May, I'll be pissed.