rivercityrandom

It's such a pity Jack Tramiel split off Atari Games from Atari Corporation; otherwise Tengen might have been talked into making good 7800 ports of Atari arcade games instead of spending so much time trying to reverse-engineer Nintendo's lock-out chip.

The rarest games I had as a kid were Frogger II: Threeedeep and Track and Field. Both of them are 6 on AtariAge's rarity chart. I saw Pigs in Space complete in box at a thrift store once in the 90's for $1 and I am very sad I didn't pick that up.

I got all my items from him last week. Thanks!

Wow... that's a set of feelies to put all Infocom games ever to shame... Sure beats "the thing your aunt gave you but you don't know what it is."

I have PM'ed.

http://www.technobuffalo.com/2014/04/28/france-claims-it-is-the-second-most-important-producer-of-video-games-in-the-world Apparently, according to a report released by the French government, France is the "second most important producer of video games in the world." As much as I love France and the French, I am struggling to find some truth in that. Just like the article says, the only major French studio is Ubisoft (and the late, departed Infogrames/Atari) and most of their hits are made in Montreal. Am I missing something here? Can anyone name a good French video game besides Rayman, or possibly Beyond Good and Evil?

I dunno, if you look at the Colecovision, NES, and Sega Master System specs side-by-side, they look quite comparable. The Sega Master System even uses the same Z80 processor and Texas Instruments graphics and sound chips as the Colecovision. If Coleco had survived the crash and had innovated in different genres of games like Nintendo and Sega did, you might have gotten third-gen quality out of them.

Seriously, how hard can it be to make a Call of Duty game? You take the same game you made last year, add a few more maps and textures, and remove more features to be purchased as DLC. I don't understand why this takes millions of dollars and hundreds of programmers.

Can I vote for the Vectrex?

I have a soft spot in my heart for Mac OS 7-9. The interface was more quirky than it was elegant; but it got out of your way so you could do stuff. But sadly, today's OSes seem more interested in thrusting eye candy (or worse, targeted advertisements) in your face than doing what an OS is supposed to do: be a go-between between your hardware and your programs. Of course, right now, I run Ubuntu, which tries to be a poor man's Mac OS X as far as eye candy is concerned, but it's relatively simple to install a new desktop environment and window manager. The freedom of choice and the lack of viruses are the main reasons why I am going the Linux route, although I do run Windows 7 on my games machine and... it's not awful. Windows 8 on the other hand, I have heard nothing but bad stories about.

Yeah, I'd say Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is more of a $39.99 lobotomy than a $39.99 brain transplant, being as it was a dumbed-down RPG created for the North American market (the Japanese title of the game is even "Final Fantasy USA"--how's that for a kick in the nuts?) I did love the music in the game though.

That ad for NES Shampoo with Mario and Peach hovering over a bathing child kind of hovers on creepiness. Were they less sensitive to things like that in the early 1990s?

I always thought the Sinclair ZX81 (Timex Sinclair 1000) was a beautiful-looking piece of kit, even if it only had 2 KB of RAM and using the keyboard was like programming the world's most complicated microwave oven...

After playing the awesome Ducktales Remastered, I have been going back and playing some of the Disney games on the Genesis, namely Castle of Illusion and Quackshot. Since my childhood, they've impressed me with their colorful graphics, fun gameplay, and sense of charm you just don't see in games these days.

Sometimes it's okay to sacrifice your green dinosaur pal in order to jump to a higher ledge.

I'm just impressed that an Atari VCS game from the late '70s could display text at all. But yeah, my favorite version of this type of game is the excellent EGA Trek for MS-DOS, mentioned earlier in this thread. This might have been pretty neat at the time, but it's kind of clunky to play today.

What awesome artwork! I'd want to stick them on my laptop... that is, if they weren't rare collectibles.

My first video game console was a 2600jr that I got for Christmas from my parents back in 1987. I was eight years old. They got me three games to start with: Jr. Pac-Man, Haunted House, and 3-D Tic Tac Toe. I loved the heck out of Jr. Pac-Man... wasn't so impressed with the others. This was around the time that retailers were liquidating their entire stock of Atari games for pennies on the dollar, and people were selling their old carts at yard sales for literal pennies. I racked up a collection of over 100 games before I got a NES around 1992 or so. I had to sell my entire Atari collection a few years ago for rent money... it's so sad. I had such good memories playing on my Atari.

Maybe it's a homebrew port of Droids: Escape from Aaron for the ZX Spectrum. But that wasn't released until 1988...

I stand corrected. Huh. You learn something every day. I need to fire up my old Tandy 1000 and try that out.

Yeah, that was my point. IBM BASIC didn't support PEEKs and POKEs. Even in assembly language, you pretty much accessed the hardware on an IBM PC through the BIOS and the device drivers. Writing to direct addresses in RAM was severely deprecated after the 286 was released with protected mode, and very much unallowed if you wanted to run your program in a multitasking operating system such as Windows. And on modern x86 chips, all x86 machine code is converted in the processor to RISC micro-code, so you're not even accessing the registers directly! And I wasn't even thinking about drawing lines and shapes in BASIC. I was thinking that on my modern computer, I can fire up Photoshop or even Microsoft Paint, pull out my Wacom tablet, and draw something that would have made everyone in my computer class jealous in 1982. I remember making everyone jealous when I figured out, after an hour of sweating, how to draw a filled circle in Apple II LOGO... but you can do that in two seconds on any computer that came out after the first Macintosh.

The classic computers booted up quickly, to be sure, but if you had to load anything from floppy disk, or god forbid, cassette, it took forever and mistakes and data loss were common. And while you had full access to the underlying hardware, you could only run one program at a time. Great for playing games, but I wouldn't want to do anything resembling work on an Atari 800 or a TI-99/4A. I handle hundreds of emails, word processing documents and spreadsheets on a daily basis. If I had to read all of those in TI-Writer, Multiplan, and whatever people did for email back then, I'd shoot myself. And while my modern PC takes 2 minutes to boot up, it starts up again in about 10 seconds from sleep mode. And I can program in more languages than BASIC and assembly. I don't have to know a myriad of PEEKs and POKEs in order to produce graphics on my PC. And if I don't want viruses, bloatware, adware, crapware, and shovelware, I can run Linux. As if there weren't plenty of viruses and crappy programs in the 8-bit days too. They didn't charge you for day-one DLC or "speed packs," but spending all your Christmas money on a game that sucked still felt like a kick in the nuts. And there was no internet back then; you had to have a magazine subscription or know friends with the same computer you did to know what was new or good for your machine. Yeah, there's plenty about today's computers that sucks, but I'd rather have my Thinkpad than an 8-bit machine.

The only early 80's home computer I experienced first hand was the TI-99/4A, which I was lucky to receive for free from a friend of my mother's back in the early 90s. It came with the 32K expansion, the Peripheral Expansion Box, a disk drive and a bunch of other goodies. The system was easier to program for than the others, especially Extended Basic with its built in sprite graphics commands. I also loved programming in TI Logo, which gave you even more control of sprites. I mostly used the TI-99/4A to create short demos with animated graphics and 3-channel music for my high school's weekly television broadcast. I was able to learn everything from the included manuals and from the programs printed in the 99'er magazines that I owned. Sadly, there weren't very many people selling anything for the TI in the early 90's, and before the internet and eBay came along, there wasn't a lot of information available to me. So I traded it to a friend for some NES cartridges when we upgraded to a 286 PC. *sigh* I wish I still had my TI.

I passed up a copy of Rampage for the 7800 to buy Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. Little did I know that would be one of the 7800's rarest games. And this is not Atari 2600 related, but I saw a MIB copy of Tengen Tetris at a flea market back in the early 90s and I regret not having the $20 the guy was asking for it.

While they were (reasonably) new, I had the Atari 2600, TI-99/4A, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Playstation 1 and Playstation 2. I had an Xbox 360, which I mostly used to play Dragon Age: Origins, but I sold that for rent money. I've picked up and passed on numerous classic gaming consoles since then: Intellivision, ColecoVision, Odyssey 2, an Atari Stunt Cycle console with the motorcycle handlebar controller, several pong consoles, an Atari Touch Me handheld "Simon" clone, and a triangle-shaped unit from Coleco that I believe had pong paddles, a steering wheel, and a light gun on the sides. Always wanted a Fairchild Channel F--I always thought the 8-track-looking cartridges with Sesame Street-like numbers and the one-handed controllers were very cool-looking... but never found one in the wild. Nowadays, I do most of my video gaming through emulators on my laptop, as my apartment's way too small for a collection... *sigh*