Cammy

Without any tricks using the LCD, can't the Lynx display thousands of colours onscreen with palette slicing? Having a separate 16 colour palette for each line?

Hey akator, that's pretty neat, I'm glad you're enjoying your pins. I'm really curious about the sound effects, the Star Wars pin I own is different to yours and only has generic sounds. Always keep an eye out for better ones, because it seems even these toy ones never go down in value too much and you can usually sell them for what you paid when it's time to make room for something bigger. I'm not sure of the name of the company who originally made the design for your Darth Vader pin, but they also made a larger scale machine with more features on the playfield (although I have never seen a larger Star Wars or Darth Vader themed one in this style). For example, this machine and the playfield is the same as yours except for the artwork and backboard (and possibly sound effects): And this is the larger model. It has a spinning bumper which smashes the ball into the spring bumpers and around the playfield, adding a bit more action to the game, inlanes and outlanes, a better ramp system with a skill shot and more targets to hit. My Batman pinball is the same as this machine: Although I haven't played the smaller version, and I'd probably still get the Darth Vader one because I'm a big Star Wars fan, it doesn't really look like much fun to play in comparison with the slightly larger machines. I have had some smaller, simpler pins in the past and once I got the larger ones, those smaller ones barely got played by anyone again.

Road trip time!

This is a very cheap source of 6-button Sega pads. I've bought several from them with no problems, they work on my Segas, Commodores, Amigas and Ataris: http://dx.com/p/addi...sku-28970-30530 There are price reductions if you buy in bulk. I've also used Alibaba before, I bought my little notebook computer from there, and although the process was different to eBay, everything went smoothly and I received my computer in reasonable time. I think it's worth using if you can source the screens much cheaper there. As for the layout on the Sega controller for the Lynx adapter, this is how I'd imagine being most effective: X = Option 1 Start = Pause A = Option 2 B = B C = A Y = Rapid-Fire B Z = Rapid-Fire A I figure since two buttons are unused, why not make them have a rapid-fire option to help out in games like Zarlor Mercenary. If rapid-fire is too much, making Y and Z still act as B and A is still logical since the layout is still the same as the Lynx (two sets of B and A buttons). Oh, and for anyone who ends up using this, swapping the A and C buttons around inside the Sega control pad is easy and might look better.

Some lucky Americans have the chance to pick these two machines up! One is the best home pinball machine you can get, the second generation Zizzle Marvel Superheroes pinball and it's going for a great price! http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?ff3=4&pub=5574883395&toolid=10001&campid=5336500554&customid=&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fitm%2FMARVEL-ACTION-HEROES-PINBALL-MARCHINE-%2F200909969821 There's also a much cheaper game, not as complex but still a fun pinball machine to have at home. I personally own the same machine but with a Batman theme, however this Hulk one has the same layout and sounds so plays just the same. http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?ff3=4&pub=5574883395&toolid=10001&campid=5336500554&customid=&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fitm%2FIncredible-Hulk-Marvel-2003-Electronic-Pinball-Pin-Ball-Machine-%2F130877407222 Both of these machines are larger than the previous ones I found on eBay, with the Zizzle being the larger of the two.

Poor little snake. I've had a lot of spiders build their homes and pass on inside my computers over the years, but thankfully nothing that was zapped by the electricity!

I'd love to participate if this ever gets started up again, I have stacks of Master System games and the consoles set up and ready to play, plus any games I don't have I can emulate on my Amiga and play with a real Sega pad anyway.

All of the ones I've played have one ball, apart from the Sonic one I can't think of another with more than one. I actually found a better machine than the Darth Vader one, it's the newest design I've seen going around and it comes in a few different colours and themes. It's also bigger than the other one, roughly the same size as my Star Wars and Batman free-standing pinball machines. This is a red Transformers one, it has ramps and other special features: http://rover.ebay.co...4d068a639a#nogo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_C0AZGFpLc

The best machine I can find on eBay at the moment is this one: eBay Auction -- Item Number: 221195171346 These ones are pretty basic though, they're smaller than most free-standing models but do sometimes come with legs. It has Darth Vader on it though, which I think is so cool! This is a video of the exact same machine, but with a different theme and smaller backboard design:

Toy pinball is one of my favourite hobbies. I wish I lived in America where there were a lot more machines available, but I think I've done alright living in Australia and keeping my eye out for bargains. My hobby started when I was given a little tabletop Star Wars pinball machine. It's about the size of the smaller Tomy machines, but nowhere near as complex, there are no intricate mechanics inside, just some flashing lights, sounds and the score dial. I still fell in love with it, and soon found some other, generic versions of the same machine with space and racing car themes. I soon moved onto free-standing pinball machines which are my current obsession. I've been wanting to start a blog site to review the different ones that are available so I've been doing research for years. I'll get around to the reviews eventually, but until then here are some hints and pics. The most advanced home pinball games in terms of game modes and accurately recreated parts are the Zizzle machines, which use solenoid-powered bumpers and flippers, have special modes and games with specific targets and timing just like real arcade pinball machines. They unfortunately only have a backlit LCD score display so it looks a little harder to read than the generic LED ones. There were four models released, two Marvel Super Heroes machines and two Pirates of the Caribbean machines. The second generation were improved and much more preferable to the original ones, and I think look better too, especially with the new lighting. There was a fifth model in the works but Zizzle went bust before it could be produced. Years later the "Star Galaxy" appeared, which looked like a hybrid of a Zizzle machine and a regular, budget pinball machine. Some design improvements and additions have been made but the machine doesn't contain the Zizzle's computer, so all the targets just add to the score and there aren't any special modes, just like a regular, budget model. Anyway, here are the pics: And the unreleased prototype of the most awesome and appropriate one of all, Atari Arcade Classics pinball And the more recent Star Galaxy machine: I wish I had one of these machines! Any of them, the Zizzles or the Star Galaxy, although if I had a choice I'd get the Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End machine, it's the most beautiful home pinball machine ever made in my opinion. I have read that they can all be a bit faulty over time, and require maintenance just like real pinball machines, so that might be something to prepare for. The cheaper, electronic machines with mechanical flippers don't tend to break down as easily, but they do still get faulty so it will be handy if you can solder and operate a screwdriver. Oh, and here's my YouTube playlist of home pinball videos:

This is all I needed to see to want these systems... one can kill cyborgs and the other makes androids explode!

If you have both an A500 PSU and an A600 PSU, I recommend using the A500 PSU with the A1200 and the A600 PSU with the A500. WHDLoad on a 2MB machine is torture due to the screen flashing and long loading times. The A1200 is far more useful with some Fast RAM, preferably on an accelerator card but you can still do plenty with just the RAM. 8MB RAM is enough to run a nicely pimped Workbench, Doom and MacOS all at the same time. You'd want at least a 40Mhz 030 for Doom to run at a decent speed though. There are also plenty of Amiga-only FPSs and other games that take advantage of the faster CPU and extra RAM. Strife, for example, was just ported to the Amiga.

I've had the same, strange 1/3 darker or 1/3 lighter section on a few Lynx screens, it's an odd problem that I've not been able to fix, but I haven't done any soldering either. Good luck with it! I'd be curious to know how long the Game Gear will last on fresh batteries with the LED mod, I've read that the LCD mod in a Lynx gets 32 hours out of six batteries!

Together with some friends, we've been putting together a Workbench distribution which would be ideal for your setup. It's based on Workbench 3.1, so it's less resource hungry than 3.9 but includes a lot of updated libraries, datatypes, commands and extra programs to make it much more functional and updated. All work has been done on real Amigas instead of WinUAE, and we designed it to work and look optimally on OCS, ECS and AGA Amigas. It's still in the testing phase, but you're welcome to install it and give it a go if you'd like. Here's how it'll look when it's installed: That's in 16 colours, with a special 12bit palette designed for all Amigas. The installation is provided as an uncompressed Lha file inside a Zip file. The reason for this is so you can download a smaller, compressed file, which can be extracted on a fast PC, then transferred to the Amiga and extracted again, but being uncompressed it will extract as fast as copying files. So it's a 78 meg download but will take around 175 gets of HD space on the Amiga. I can PM you a download link if you're interested.

Thank you, LocalH, that's very considerate of you!

What Kickstart and Workbench version do you have in the 2000? I assume it has a SCSI card in it (with 8MB), do you have a SCSI multi-card reader for it? They fit in one of the floppy slots and let you use SD, CF and other types of cards as removable drives, great for swapping files between the Amiga and a PC or something. What kind of display are you using with it?

Good Game reviewed this new Tomb Raider game last night and both reviewers praised it, giving it 10/10!

There's this much more current project, but I'm unsure if development on it continues. http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/195704-motivated-pixel-artist-game-designer/ I'd really like to know if the Lynx can handle this kind of game!

I have been thinking about making a cross-hair shooting game for years, although for the Amiga rather than the Lynx. But I always considered how to adapt the phaser or mouse controls to a D-pad, for a CD32 or CDTV version. I had the idea that one of the buttons should act as either an accelerate or decelerate button, depending on the option you choose. I imagine B being Fire/Shoot, and A being the "Speed" button. You would need an option in the menu to switch between methods, or turn it off completely. One option would make the cross-hair move fast all the time, but holding the A button would slow it down for more accuracy. The other option would do the opposite, always moving slower until the A button is held down, speeding up the cross-hair. Another option you could add is drift, where the cross-hair would continue to drift in the direction it was pushed even after letting go of the D-pad. It could have some deceleration time before it stops perhaps, but it would help make the movement feel more fluid. Another option to try is something I've seen in other cross-hair games, the shakes! Make the cross-hair shake around a bit on the spot to represent the fact that hardly anyone can hold something completely still. I'm not sure if the Opt1 button is used, but I think it should be the one for throwing a grenade or something. I'm sorry but Handy doesn't run so well on my computer and I haven't had a chance to play Lynx Ops yet, but I dream about game ideas all day long.

Amiga released Snowman Maker, a mobile app which let you build snowmen. It was about as far as they got in the mobile market after all their grand plans to create a digital environment to run on phones. Several years later they were licensing the brand name out to Chinese manufacturers to put on their TVs and tablets. Commodore USA also licensed the name from Amiga to put on some PCs which never came out. Now Amiga is dealing with Blackberry to release a bunch of classic Amiga games on Blackberry 10 devices. Aros is being ported to ARM at the moment but it's a long process when only one or two developers are working on it. I think the current target platform is the Raspberry Pi, so eventually there will be a way to run it on phones, although I'm not sure how suited it is as a mobile OS using the current desktop, someone would need to write a Wanderer or Ambient replacement. Amiga OS4, developed by Hyperion for specific PPC systems developed by ACube and Aeon is still going, development continues and doesn't seem like it's going to stop. MorphOS now runs on a variety of PPC systems including G4 Macintosh computers. It's the most advanced and stable Amiga OS at the moment. There are also a few homebrew FPGA projects to recreate the Amiga hardware, various versions of UAE that run on phones and tablets to play old Amiga games with, and there's still a very dedicated community making software and hardware for the original Amigas still.