JB
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Posts posted by JB
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If I recall, Genny2s pretty much all have bad video out. Genny 3s are even worse.
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Yeah. Screen shake was pretty much the first thing I messed with after I met it.
Kisrael, I did that too for a while. Hell, clearing easy mode gets you the almost-best, actually-worst, really-cool laser sniper rifle.
Carries 3 seconds of charge, and isn't reloadable. But for those 3 seconds, it is OBSCENELY powerful. 100 damage a shot, 60 shots a second.
You may want to take your guns from later normal/easy levels and go blast some early hard-mode bugs, though. It'll make life MUCH easier on you(I actually HAD to do that to dig out enough firepower for the later normal mode stages).
D3 has a list of guns, along with when they start dropping, at http://www.d3press.us/files/Earth%20Defens...sc_EDF_2017.doc
I love that they left their press sites accessible to the public.
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The RF shield doesn't just protect the picture quality of your system (but that's mostly it) it also protects other stuff from being interfered with.I know Atari (and everybody else, for that matter) has this obsession with putting 57 and 1/2 tabs on the RF shielding to hold it into place, but really only a couple of tabs are needed to keep it in place (just make sure one of the tabs is touching the grounding circuit, or it's not really accomplishing much by being there)
Thank god the computer's RF shield is the case (that's the only thing I get into much)
The only REALLY bad one is the Intellivision. There's like 2 pounds of solder welding it shut.
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I tried the spider intro level on Harder and then Hard and couldn't get anywhere. Not sure if my health and guns are up to snuff yet :-)I used the spider intro on hard to farm items. Sniper rifle or rocket launcher, plus an assault rifle. Blast the closer ones, then start sniping the big mass of bugs at the end of the street. They'll just sit there for a LONG time before they start looking for you.
Use the tank, if it seems viable(I can't recall if it's still useful at that point).
I didn't beat the game past normal, though.
Stages 1-16, plus 18 and 19 on hard.
I REALLY liked listening to the sidekicks shout, though. Almost as much as the bowling noise when you killed a spider.
SEND 'EM ALL TO HELL!
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
EDF! EDF! EDF!
The laser rifle you get for clearing easy would be a LOT more fun if it was reloadable.
Also: Gunpods are completely, irrefutably awesome for the stage where you have to clear out the spider hive.
You know, the one where they warn you not to fall down. Just walk up to the edge, throw some gunpods down, and activate them. No muss, no fuss.
Vehicles are also grossly over-rated. The tank is useful on the lower levels, but everything else is near-worthless.
And once you get a few items under your belt, your guns are more powerful and your armor is thicker than the tank's.
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That would be great! I wonder why it needs it's own power supply? Do most usb hub's have that?There's 2 classes of hub in the USB spec, powered and unpowered.
Powered hubs are better because, when connected to the wall, they can support more curent draw than the USB host device can supply.
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Fairchild Channel F vs. Sony Playstation 3discuss.
Identical. Both suck.
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It used the DE-9 connector on the end to make installation accident-proof. (Have you ever bent or broken a pin inserting an IC into a DIP socket? I sure have and did not enjoy it. The Apple II and II+ had such a socket as the only game I/O option.)They did? I thought it was card-edge connector.
I admit to not owning one, and having only very limited time with anything older than a 2e.
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Fine, free-scrolling parallax. I KNOW that eliminates Crisis Force, and I'm betting the Battletoads levels concerned are the bike levels.
Without the free-scroll, it's just an animated background. That's much easier.
I admit to not playing the others you named(well, not for long in CV3's case).
Another one I've seen tossed out is the Ninja Gaiden train level. Which isn't. It carefully layers the mountains to avoid overlap between the tile layers, and just scrolls different stripes at different speeds.
The illusion also breaks down when you're in motion, and some of the mountains start scrolling BACKWARDS. It's funny, but not effective.
The same illusion is used on home versions versions of Moon Patrol, but with far more effectiveness due to the game's control of the scroll rate.
The arcade one uses a fully animated background to simulate parallax, like Crisis Force does.
True parallax effects are rather rare. Fake parallax isn't quite so rare, though it's still uncommon.
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In terms of system RAM, the 5200 has more ... 16K, vs. 2K of memory and 2K of video RAM on the NES.Yes, but they handle video in different ways. To the NES, everything's a character or a sprite and those are all stored in the cartridge. All you need to create is a list of what goes where (this is also a limitation in some ways). While the Atari can generate graphics in a similar way, many things are still done with a regular bit-mapped screen and that takes RAM.
To add to the discussion... the NES RAM isn't static. It was designed to be expanded.
Cartridges can, and usually DO, have more RAM inside them. Or ROM mapped into the VRAM area.
Parallax is possible, though rarely coded. If I recall Ninja Gaiden 3(select levels only) and Metal Storm are the only examples of it.I know that NES does not have shared VRAM architecture. Is it still possible to have paralax scroll like on 8-bit Atari or C64 (Crownland, Flimbo's Quest)? Does it require additional chip in cartridge? Which game would be finest example?Metal Storm is the best example, as it features THREE background layers.
I looked into the prospect of coprocessors once, and became FAR more impressed with the NES. About the most advanced you get is a programmable interrupt generator.
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It shouldn't.I know that the powered one that comes with Rock Band works for multiple peripherals. You might just need a powered USB hub. I was thinking of adding an additional 500gb hard drive to mine off of a hub (I already have one full of movies). If you find one that works, please let me know.maybe the members of this forum can post what usb hubs they tried.
and we can post them here in a list.
here's the one i tried:
Radio Shack Cat. No: 26-139
illuminations Mini USB 4-Port 1.1 Hub
reading that now for the first time, i see that it's only a 1.1....
I bet the 360 needs a 2.0 usb hub, Am i right? would that make a difference?
-rick
Keyboards are USB1 peripherals. Always.
While the 360 controllers MIGHT be USB2, there's no sane reason to do it. They don't need even a fraction of the additional bandwidth. I'd bet they're USB1 as well.
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This the PS2 version?
Because I don't see how you CAN run low on ammo on the 'Cube. It throws bullets at you like popcorn.
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I got one of these for Christmas this year and i have a problem with some of my 2600 games playing on it.Is this a common thing or is this something that just mine does? Most of the games did work just a few didnt(Midnight Magic and King Kong are the two that quickly came to mind that didnt).
Kool-aid man is the game I have problems with. The game comes on in the module, but it does all kinds of crazy things. And it's not just some fluke cart. My other Kool-aid man does the exact same thing!
KoolAid Man doesn't even work on all 2600s.
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just you. My system boots to the game in the drive, by the time the game is running, i'm already logged into my profile automatically, logged in to live, so all I have to do is go to the dashboard and i'm good, after the startup 360 logo, probably takes me 10-30 secs to get into arcade to start playing. You have to be doing something horribly wrong if it takes you that long.Well, I wasn't specifically talking about the XBox 360 either. All that waiting is a problem on systems as old as the Colecovision.
Reminds me of my Vectrex. As I turned it on, my finger smacked reset, so I never saw the startup logo. I had it down to a science.
Became instinctive pretty fast, once I figured out it was skippable. If only there was a similar trick for the game title screen.
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That has to be the most awesome failure mode in gaming history.
I hope to never see it on my own baby, but...
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Sounds kickass to me. But a few years too early for Robotech.Not if you went to Japan in 82 (Macross, Mospeda, etc.)
Peace
Which isn't the same as Robotech.
All 3 shows were rewritten to make a semi-cohesive whole.
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Oddly, I remember reading somewhere that Japanese kanji (or is it katakana?) is much more meaning intensive than English, which means it takes fewer characters to relay more information. Of course, I also remember reading that those endless text boxes all us RPGers love so much (sarcasm) are more or less pre-defined by the game. So translators need to make the English translation fit into a space intended to convey much more information. So, despite those boxes going on forever, we English readers are getting less information than was intended. Scary, ain't it?There's actually a lot that can be done to get around text length restrictions. Especially when the game is coded from the start with an international direction.
As long as there's enough space to insert the needed dialog, it shouldn't be an issue. THAT'S the big catch.
As you noted, japanese text has a better info-to-character ratio. Certainly kanji, which uses single characters for entire words. Katakana uses characters for syllables, so it depends on the specific words involved.
But anyways.... in the old days, people did what they could with the ROM space available.
Then they started adding compression schemes to cram more text in.
Now? Who cares, when you have an endless plane of aluminum foil to store your data on? Space restrictions are dead and gone, as far as text is concerned.
The length of a given text box is usually defined by non-printing control characters in the text itself, so it's really not a problem.
Anyways, that's almost certainly the reason the old 8-bit software text was so slow. They were too lazy to adjust the printout speed during localization(or just couldn't find where it was in the code, if they weren't given well-documented source).
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That's.... lame.
If you have to redesign the Genesis to make your hack work, you've done something wrong.
They need to rework things until the whole ROM image is <4 MB, since there's no Genesis bank-switching scheme that I'm aware of.
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Love Berzerk on the 5200. On a good day I can make it to 10,000 on my first life, but typically lose all my lives shortly afterwards. The difficulty just ramps up so much at 10,000.Can't stand the 2600 version, it's just too easy and repetitive. The 5200 keeps you on your toes throughout. Just be sure to play it with a digital stick
Yeah. I can't fire on a diagonal worth crap with the stock stick, and it's not an ability I'm willing to sacrifice.
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Well, as co-owner of the company, it's hard to off him.I'm just trying to figure out how George Broussard still has a job.I've never figured out how 3D Realms has remained in operation, though.
They must have some good investments somewhere.
Max Payne, Max Payne 2, and Prey (all of which are great games) helped I am sure.
Okay, but what did they do between Max Payne and Duke3D?
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It's full title is "Euro Scart"... it's a connector built in as standard on European TVs. Supports composite, S-video and RGB though usually not all at the same time. As RGB has no PAL or NTSC signal type, then you can plug anything into it that support an RGB output and get a colour picture.SNES SCART only carries RGB and the switching signals.
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Well, as co-owner of the company, it's hard to off him.I'm just trying to figure out how George Broussard still has a job.I've never figured out how 3D Realms has remained in operation, though.
They must have some good investments somewhere.
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And there's no guarantee the channels will be the same width as TV channels, or that they'll line up properly.So while the option of 2 and 3 or 3 and 4 may CURRENTLY guarantee a clear channel, there's no guarantee that this will be true in the future.
Indeed. There's that FCC notice on most RF devices, explaining how they 1) "must not cause interference" and more importantly 2) "must accept any unwanted interference".
By the wording you'd think it'd prohibit shielding altogether.
1 means it can't get out. Since you can't stop it from generating it, that means shielding is required.
I think 2 means unwanted interference can't make your toy go kerblooie.
It's possible they just mean it can't activate a small minigun to blast the source of the interference.
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2. Wendy: Every Witch Way - She has two spells: Reverse gravity and make people explode. That's enough for the storyline provided.I am suddenly compelled to get this.
Haven't played a good gravity-control/explodey-death game since Metal Storm.
It's a perhaps-unsurprisingly small subgenre.
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If you don't remove the bezel first, you can very well damage a good flex circuit. I've seen evidence in more than a few controllers I've found that someone probably ruined it by opening the controller the wrong way, then cramming it back together again the wrong way.Also there are two kinds of bezels. One is more easily removed and is therefore better. When you have more bezels than good controllers, just throw the crappy bezels into your junk pile.
Is the beveled one the easier one to remove?
I remember having trouble pulling the straight-up ones out, but I went with beveled for aesthetic reasons.
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Is the Genesis 2 supposed to have crappy video?
in Classic Console Discussion
Posted · Edited by JB
It is, but it's only part of the equation.
There's several parts between the video encoder and final output.
Edit: Okay, I was double-checking stuff, and it looks like the primary difference IS the video encoder.
MOST Genny2s had the Samsung clone, but a few early ones had the Sony part.
If I recall, they're completely swappable. I'm not certain, though.