JB

A straight 2600 port fits the computer's controller better. 'S the same reason the computer Missile Command has one turret. The keyboard isn't a good place for gameplay buttons, and one fire button greatly limits your options. Demon Attack, though... no excuse. Honestly, I'm still wondering why Microsurgeon only appeared on the INTV and 99/4a. Did it require 16-bit math somewhere?

Both use a standard RCA cable, actually. I'd be inclined to bet that the 4-port more or less requires a thicker one like the one it ships with, though.

My numpads tend to work just as poorly as the rest of the controller. In fact, you're the first I've heard of that doesn't have the same problem with his numpads. Odd. In my limited experience, the only numpad keys to cause trouble are * and #, and those behave far better than start and fire, which just don't work.

Wouldn't that IMPROVE the system? Seriously, we've got a Studio 2 floating around here somewhere. But I've never felt the urge to dig it out. Morbid curiosity is defeated by dust.

Actually, it's not even an abuse problem. It's a chemical reaction/oxydization problem. If you pull apart a modern soft-key keyboard, you'll find a very large flex circuit underneath. However, this circuit is usually constructed out of about three sheets. When put together correctly, these sheets are effectively sealed to prevent exposure of their delicate circuitry to the elements. The 5200 controllers, on the other hand, use the flex circuits as if they were PCB boards and exposes the circuits directly. The circuits gunk up or oxydize, then stop working correctly. Abuse-wise, I'd say the 5200 stick was about as long-lasting as anything else Atari produced. Save for the boot, that is. The boot was not particularly well designed and never should have been used to center the stick. If it's just a construction problem, why does the issue seem to hit fire and start, but leave the numpad largely unaffected?

Track ball is far lower maintainence than the joysticks are. As I understand things, it uses circuit boards and dome switches, similar to the 2600 joystick. Most of the 5200 controller issues are because the flex circuit used just wasn't up to the level of abuse it would see in a game controller.

My cousin had one. Hell if I know how he got it(it pretty much just fell in his family's lap). I don't recall if the sticks were analog, but they had a knob mounted on top of them. Dun recall if it was a paddle-style fixed-rotaton deal, or a spinner knob. Maybe it was one of these? That's exactly what it was. I know what an MBX controller looks like, I just don't recall the specifics of the stick functionality.

My cousin had one. Hell if I know how he got it(it pretty much just fell in his family's lap). I don't recall if the sticks were analog, but they had a knob mounted on top of them. Dun recall if it was a paddle-style fixed-rotaton deal, or a spinner knob.

No. But... all they really need is cleaning. A pencil eraser can do that. A more permanent fix is to place a metallic coating on the buttons' carbon dots. I've seen rear windshield defroster repair kits recommended for this sort of thing, but I've never seen the kits, so... The CHEAP way to fix it is gluing foil to the dots. The EASY way is buying the gold-plated buttons from Best Electronics. Are the controllers hard to take apart, or do you need to in order to place the metallic coating on the button's carbon dots? How about using cleaning with the eraser, or putting in those gold-plated buttons? They aren't har dto take apart, but until you get it down, they're hard to put back together. You have to snap off the frame that holds down start/pause/reset. Then you lift the buttons up and lift the flex circuit strip there. Then you flip the controller over and remove 3 screws. Now the top will lift off the bottom. Center the stick before you do this. From there, the fire buttons slide out of grooves in the sides, exposing both the carbon dots and the flex circuit. And the keys over the phone pad lift off. As for putting it back together.... Drop the fire buttons back into the slots. Set the phone pad back on the flex circuit(there's a pair of holes that sorta kinda help with alignment, but not much). If you messed with the joystick pots, return them to their centered positions(pointing left on one and down on the other, if I recall). Now here's the tricky part.... With one hand, hold the stick centered and vertical. Apply upward pressure so the little plastic slider plates don't move around. This keeps everything in position for when you lower the top onto the bottom, and ALMOST guarantees the stick lines up with the pots. Get the top near the bottom, and lace the start/pause/reset strip through the slot it came out of. With luck, the phone pad won't have moved, and you can proceed with lowering the top onto the bottom. Once it's firmly mated, you can let go of the stick and screw it shut. Then you slap the start strip buttons down on top of their flex circuit strip and snap the bezel on. It takes a bit of practice. Especially the centered stick part.

That's pre-launch news. The encryption keys have been there since day 1. So reading between the lines... either MS doesn't want the XArcade, or XArcade isn't willing to pay the licensing fees MS demands.

Not true, according to Jay Smith himself, what RevRob said is what he said. Hasbro thought the selling price was too high for the public, even though the Gameboy ended up launching for me. The project was scrapped more than a year before anyone in the West had heard about the Gameboy. Oh... Learn something every day. HASBRO! YOU SUCK! The Vectrex itself is about as portable a console as it's going to get while still being a 'Vectrex' Remember that vector CRT displays (like the Vectrex, the original arcade Asteroids, etc) are very different from all other forms of displays. Actually, for black and white displays, only the driving hardware is different. The CRTs used are the same for raster and vector. I'm much less sure for color vector displays. But it certainly won't adapt to LCDs, which are a basic requirement for a "true portable."

Saturn pads wouldn't be highly useful for the 5200, as there's no adapter available. Seems an absurdly silly amount of work to take a Saturn pad, gut it, rebuild it as a Master System controller, then hook it into a Sega adapter and hook that into a 5200. ... Or to use a device with 9 buttons when you'll only be able to use two(unless you design your own adapter, which has the added benefit of bringing start, pause, *, and # out onto your controller).

You've got the wrong vectors. That's the definition for Adobe Illustrator-style vector drawings. Vectors in gaming are different. All the software stores is endpoints and directions. It's up to the display hardware to translate it into a viewable image. A vector display works like an EtchASketch, directly tracing the image to the screen, whereas a raster display scans every part of the screen every frame, and you lay out an array of pixels to create an image, more like a LiteBrite. The big advantage to vector displays is that the small number of points could be manipulated very easily, and since the display would redraw the entire object, it was freely scalable and rotatable for very little processor time. And CLEANLY, too! Even today we haven't escaped aliasing, which never happens on vector displays. The DISADVANTAGE, which ultimately killed vectors, is that the more objects you have, the longer it takes to draw a frame. Past a certain point, you just can't draw screens fast enough. You can actually see this in Vectrex Berzerk when there's a lot of robots on screen. The game will start flickering, and maybe even slow WAY down, depending on how many robots are in the room. As processors got faster, the uniwue attributes of vector displays became a curse rather than a blessing. A. I'm fairly sure the Vectrex could do Battlezone as-is. B. There IS one known color prototype. http://home.earthlink.net/~jmorg/vectrex/VecColor.htm Actually, the rights reverted to Smith Engineering when the Vectrex was discontinued. And Smith authorized non-profit distribution of all copyrighted Vectrex material, including games . Way I've heard it is they were designing the handheld when they heard about the GameBoy. Brawling with Nintendo was deemed a bad idea, so they scrapped it. The Vectrex is love. EVERY original Vectrex game had an overlay except for the three 3D Imager games, which had a color wheel. Two. Most of the original games support trading controllers between players. Only 2-player simultaneous games require a second stick.

They're supposed to be obscenely rare, regardless of where you are. I wish I stumbled onto things like that.

ColecoVision and INTV used side buttons too. Vectrex is the only console from that period to NOT use side-fire. Anyways, that's a dangerous argument to make, given nobody even used JOYSTICKS after the 7800. Or left-hand fire. Your logic can easily be applied to ANY pre-NES controller design(everyone pre-Nintendo pretty much designed a new controller each time, with everyone post-Nintendo gluing bits onto the NES pad each time). But... the motion to press the 5200's left fire button is EXACTLY the same as the motion to press the 2600's fire button. At least, the way I use it(bend the thumb at the knuckle). The big difference is that moving the buttons to the side places your the stick over your palm instead of your fingertips, which is a MASSIVE improvement. I vastly prefer start on the controller. I'd say it''s the single biggest upgrade in console controllers after 2 fire buttons. Of course, it doesn't do anyone any good when it doesn't WORK... Ironically, I think Missile Command controls incredibly well with the stock 5200 controller. It's one of the few games that actually makes good use of the analog stick. Qix. 5200 does it better. In fact, it has the best non-emulation port available, far as I know. See, here's the (largest of many) problems with using a joystick designed in the mid-70s... you only have one fire button, and no amount of 3rd-party redesigns can change that. Qix REQUIRES 2. Single-button Qix is Qix in name only. If you haven't guessed... I love the 5200 sticks. Reliability is my only gripe. Self-centering I see as a non-issue, since I got in the habit of hand-centering sticks well before I met the 5200. Side-mounted fire buttons never gave me any trouble. Not that I advocate the construction of anti-Redemptions to use 5200 controllers in place of the barbaric monstrosity that is the VCS stick, but... I DO advocate using Gemini controllers in place of the barbaric monstrosity that is the VCS stick.

Sure, but does anyone still have dial up? My DSL provider gave me dialup access as a backup. I've used it twice ever. Both times with the Dreamcast.

There's a lot that look really similar. Was your's one of the ones that "added stereo"? I gather a few of the ones with headphone ports had some gimmick where they adjusted the audio to the left or right depending on which direction you pushed the d-pad.

Pitfall 2 most certainly DOES scroll, at least vertically. Can't recall if there's proper horizontal scrolling. Jungle Hunt does horizontal scroll, though. As does Defender. And Super Cobra(too bad the game is coded to be unplayable with stock controllers). And undoubtedly a few others.

From what I've heard, it's actually one of the best players on the market. Sony's admitted semi-publically they lose money on each PS3 sold(it's been stated in their annual shareholder informational thingies that I forgot the actual name of). Yah. PS3 was a shitty DVD player. Even after the software upgrades, it wasn't very good. Double-sided disks aren't very popular in general, with floppies being a notable exception. Aside from the interruption of playback, which breaks the flow of the media(imagine if you were watching Alien, the egg opened, the guy leaned over, and... the screen went blue and said "please flip the disk"), it makes the disk that much harder to care for, since you can't place your fingers anywhere on either side of the disk. That and people like labels.

Yeah. I'd go so far as to say it HAS to be.

This dude has pulled more than one "fact" out of his ass. I think it's safe to say he has an un-natural love for Blu-Ray. Also, I think it's disengenous to attach Microsoft to this video format war, because MS doesn't really have a stake in it. If Toshiba is forced to cave and give up HD DVD, this really won't hurt MS much. MS will simply license it's VC-1 video codec (the advanced codec currently used in HD DVD) over to Sony and make money on BD. Actually, BluRay has had VC-1 as an option since day 1. Both it and HD-DVD support your choice of MPEG2, MPEG4, or VC1. But from where I sit... MS doesn't want EITHER format to succeed. They don't make money from HD-DVD sales or BluRay sales. They DO make money from downloaded "rentals" on XBox Live. Right now they're one of the few companies with everything already in place for online distribution. If other companies set up networks, they'll probably wind up buying a good bit of MS software to support it(Yes, yes, I know Linux/MacOs/Amiga Workbench is infinitely superior and Windows sucks. Thank you.). If they don't set up a network, they'll probably go to MS for distribution since it beats the heck out of making a deal with Sony, who they directly compete with. If you were in their shoes, which horse would YOU back?

*squints* Can you tell what kind of connector is on it? It doesn't look like an NES connector. I THINK it's a 15-pin D-sub connector, which makes it a FamiCom pad. But I'm not sure, and if it's a 9-pin connector, it's a Famiclone pad.

Far as I know, Best is mail-order only. And replacement 5200 controller buttons aren't exactly the sort of thing people usually stock. Like I said, it's usually just a matter of cleaning it with a pencil eraser. At least, short-term. The most common issue is just that the flex circuit's tarnished on the button contacts. It doesn't take a lot to render it inoperative with carbon dots. Downside to just cleaning is that they fail again fairly fast. Adding metal to the button side of the contacts pretty much removes the issue, but it's a mildly more elaborate project(I used superglue and aluminum foil, because I already had both). If the cable is damaged, you have a much bigger problem and replacing the controller is the easiest fix. That depends on the game. Some games work well with digital control, others demand analog(I gather the modern adapters avoid the bugs triggered by older designs, so we can focus purely on gameplay). I'm a large fan of the 5200 stick, but I'll readily admit that some games would benefit from an alternative input device. Qix is the most notable in my opinion. I'm weird, though. A more normal person might say something like PacMan. Once you have a digital adapter, it falls to the classic joystick vs d-pad debate. Personally, I don't think the 5200 library is well-suited to a d-pad, but some people swear by them. If you want to go digital, the best solution would probably be a Sega controller adapter. Then you can use most standard Genesis controllers, be they sticks or pads. No reason to lock yourself in to one solution. Missile Command and Centipede do, for a rather obvious start.

I don't think calibration would cause intermittent jumps, though. It should be constant if it's a calibration error.

No. But... all they really need is cleaning. A pencil eraser can do that. A more permanent fix is to place a metallic coating on the buttons' carbon dots. I've seen rear windshield defroster repair kits recommended for this sort of thing, but I've never seen the kits, so... The CHEAP way to fix it is gluing foil to the dots. The EASY way is buying the gold-plated buttons from Best Electronics.