Cammy

I didn't realise how close Supanova was, I hope I can save up enough to get there this year, I've never missed a Brisbane Supanova yet, thanks for the reminder! I'll probably be too shy to say anything again if I see you at your booth, but I will definitely try to pop over anyway.

I found this at the op shop (thrift store) for $1.50! It's back-lit and colour, I've never had a LCD game like this before, it's pretty fun and has some cool tunes too.

Programmers are a dime-a-dozen, good pixel artists are hard to find so I thought providing people in the competition with some tiles and sprites made by professional pixel artists, which they have provided free and open source, would help some of the programmers who can't find a pixel artist to team up with. So tell me, what is wrong with the artwork on OpenGameArt.org? It's free for anyone to use in their games, and even if you plan on doing the graphics yourself or teaming up with a willing pixel artist the graphics would still make good placeholders while the game is being coded. I thought since I've successfully run a few game making competitions for classic systems before that my insight might be appreciated, but I guess not.

I love programming on the Amiga. It's a computer and a games console in one. It has the most advanced Operating System of its time, so using a 20 year old Amiga can feel as comfortable as using a modern PC or Mac if it's set up right. Being able to run multiple programs at the same time with no slowdown really helps with games development, you can instantly switch between your coding environment, a paint program and a music tracker, compile and test your programs and get back to work without needing to reboot or restart everything (unless you code something really unstable). The kind of games that the hardware can handle is on par with the Genesis or SNES in many cases, and it can run PC/Mac-style games too. And once you have a game made, you can distribute it digitally, on floppy disk, or on a CD which can work on the CDTV and CD32 consoles too.

I already offered to download sprite and tile sheets from that site and convert them to 12bit 16 colour images but the idea was shot down pretty quick. I think these guys are expecting a pixel artist to just come along and make new graphics for them for free.

I didn't suggest it to prevent anyone from making their own graphics, but to help out those programmers who might not find someone to help them out. I was going to do this myself, but if everyone disagrees then I'll leave you to it.

I think a good idea would be to grab a bunch of sprite and tile sheets from OpenGameArt, create a universal 12bit 16 colour palette and start resizing and remapping the graphics to this new palette. Then any of the objects can be used in the same game without needing to be remapped again, and the palette can always be changed afterwards.

Good luck to you, I hope someone has one to sell. But I'm curious, how come you wouldn't prefer one of the more modern IDE solutions for your A500? You can easily fit a 8GB CF drive inside an A500 these days with a CPU socket IDE adapter such as the IDE68K or the ACA500 from Individual Computers.

I use my real Lynx II every day, and yesterday while I was in Cash Converters I saw and bought Joust for $5, so if no one minds, I'd like to also join this competition and see if I can get a decent high score myself.

I was waiting for Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure to come out on the Amiga, which it never did. The game was ported and almost complete, but like so many other good games that were to come out at the time, the publisher pulled the plug on the Amiga version because of Commodore's bankruptcy. I have it on my Gameboy Advance now, as well as Pitfall: The Lost Expedition and love playing them both.

Yep, that's pretty much exactly what I meant. I'd like to know if a game like Sonic would be possible on the Lynx. Also, could a pinball game be faster and smoother than Pinball Jam, because I was surprised how slowly it scrolls. I assumed it could be to prevent blurring. I think it would be awesome to have another pinball game on the Lynx, like Obsession on the Atari STe and Amiga, which looks great in 16 colours (with palette slicing which the Lynx can handle) and would probably still look nice when scaled down to the Lynx's screen resolution.

I have been wondering exactly how fast can the Lynx scroll backgrounds and sprites around the screen? Are there hardware limitations preventing the system from handling really fast-paced action games? Would the screen simply blur or ghost too much for the action to be visible, even if the system can handle moving the graphics around fast? I started looking through my Lynx games to find the ones which seem to have the fastest scrolling. At first I thought Batman Returns might be as fast as it gets, but I think Gordo 106 might be even faster. Does anyone know of a Lynx game which scrolls backgrounds around as fast as Gordo?

Really? Well I don't know for sure, it just seems like the screen itself is right there, rather than having a clear plastic window over it like the Lynx II. Perhaps it's just a different type of plastic, but it seems more scratch resistant anyway.

I have small hands and prefer to hold the Lynx II, but my friend has normal sized hands and prefers holding the original Lynx. I have seen Lynx IIs with more scratched screens than original Lynxes, probably because the plastic is easier to scratch than the glass screen. I think the + shaped D-pad on the original Lynx is the best of all three D-pad designs though.

I use HandShake on my lower-end Amigas. Also, using MultiLink I can connect to the internet through a null-modem cable hooked up to an online PC and use Amiga internet software without the need for a memory-hungry TCP stack to be running on the Amiga. You could chat on IRC from your A2000 for example. Anyway, here's HandShake and MLink: http://aminet.net/package/comm/term/Handshake http://aminet.net/package/comm/net/mlink132

I think it's a fantastic idea, I have picked up many damaged SMS and Mega Drive boxes over the years which I'd love to try this with. Thanks for showing us!

RGCD has become quite a good retro gaming publisher, with several C64 games available to purchase on cartridge and plenty more games are linked from his blog for you to download and play. I really like how professional his cartridges and boxes are, and they even come with stickers! http://www.rgcd.co.uk/ Not sure how limited his runs are, but I don't think he's likely to force unavailability on them to increase collectability.

I learned how to cross six lane highways without getting hit by cars, and how to skip between logs and avoid crocodiles.