Nebulon

Trashing issues of Electronic Games magazine would be very unfortunate. In my experience, good condition copies are quite rare. It was also one of the best (if not THE best) pre-crash video gaming magazine).

I wouldn't recycle or trash them. You're better off finding someone who wants them. I've been reading a lot of PDFs of old computer magazines, but it makes my eyes go buggy. That and I'm tired of zooming in and out to see the details. A friend of mine gave me a couple of issues of Electronic Games recently and I quickly re-discovered how nice it is to read the real hardcopies again.

Not sure about the ST, but on the Amiga PAL is better. In fact I've hard-wired one of my Amiga's to default as PAL (switchable to NTSC). I also do NTSC video production and I can safely say that PAL is the better standard.

Well, here's an odd one. I'm running the Kiel Color Computer 2 emulator on a Windows 98se box with a Soundblaster Live card. The sound works fine for a bit, then it stops working. So if I load a CoCo game, I hear a bit of the music or sound for it, and then it goes silent. Same thing for the CoCo 3 Keil emulator. However, sound works consistently for other DOS-based emulators (like the ColecoVision emulator for MS-DOS). ??

I went from consoles in the 80s to PCs in the 90s and back to consoles today. Three reasons: 1) I don't care about outputting super-high resolution. I'm more interested in sufficient polygons at a reasonable resolution. 2) Consoles are less hassle and are standardized. 3) Few or no hardware updates required per machine.

First off, I love the "Hammer Time" UNIX avatar GIF for your profile. And second.... Just wanted to send respect out to all assembly language programmers out there. Thanks for keeping real computing alive (and for doing what I just can't seem to get the grasp of).

For MIDI, yes. For sampling and sample playback -- not so much. It really depends on the type of audio work. The Amiga can play four samples simultaneously to the STe's two (unless there's a hack out there that I don't know about).

I used to do audio on a 16MB Amiga 2000 (later a 4000/030) with a Digital Sound Studio 8+ sampler/software combination. It worked well for sampling, looping, and editing, so that would be my recommendation from experience. The Amiga MIDI side was handled by Music-X and a cheap parallel to MIDI interface. Of course, there's also the ST with its built-in MIDI and the fact that Cubase is available on that platform. For sampling that's closer to the Amiga, maybe find an STe with a hard drive. As others have mentioned, it depends on what you want to do. If you're planning to audio multi-track within the computer itself, you're looking at a Pentium Pro or Pentium II machine with a SoundBlaster Live card, Windows 98, and something like Sonic Foundry's Acid Music 1 or 2 (about 5 years beyond the year-range you mentioned). If you just want to mess with audio though, the older 16-bit machines are fine. As a side-note, I started out sampling on a 512K CoCo 3. However, 512K will restrict you to very short samples.

Are there any cases of classic games (arcade or console) that have been re-released with new levels added? I'm not thinking of things created in a level editor. Instead, I'm thinking of games with more levels, screens, or stages actually coded into them (kind of like what the original programmers would have liked to have done, given more time and more ROM space). I can think of plenty of great candidates out there: Donkey Kong Donkey Kong Junior Zaxxon Venture Frontline Congo Bongo Space Harrier ...

I keep (naively?) hoping that someone will eventually figure out a way to scale-down a suitable infrastructure for the transmission of light. Here's a neat article with a number of approaches to optimizing processing (and includes technologies that you mentioned): http://www.kavlifoundation.org/science-spotlights/next-life-silicon#.VEGeVmctCzk

Real-time rendering systems use a lot of 'tricks' to display what they do. For heightened realism, we really need to be able to push wayyy more polygons, instead of relying on bump-mapping and other image-based techniques. Full-on real-time ray-tracing would be nice, but there just isn't enough CPU power available to the consumer for that sort of thing. It's funny that I'm even writing this, since ray-tracing is as old as the hills and it still takes its toll on even the most modern computers. Of course, the other half of it is to make sure the people who model the geometry do so in an efficient manner. We need a CPU and VPU revolution and a move away from copper. There were plenty of articles on the limits of copper back in the '90s. Looks like we've pretty much hit the limit.

Bioshock 2 (finished it a long time ago, but like to re-visit it from every once in awhile). Galagon (Galaga) - Color Computer 2 Thexder - Tandy 1000

Just an update on this one. I finally got around to trying this again. The MODE commands didn't work on this machine, because someone updated DOS (it isn't running Tandy DOS anymore). What ended up working was to hold F12 until it beeps. Then release the F12 button and let it finish booting to DOS. I tested it out with Thexder and it worked great. The BIOS on this machine reads v. 01.01.00. Thanks everyone.

If you do decide to go the PC route, here's a nifty page that might help: http://www.computerhope.com/ac.htm Although I still think that for a classic '16-bit' experience, the Amiga or Atari ST are the way to go.

Lunar-Rover Patrol (Moon Patrol) Hall of the King II Ice Castles (Crystal Castles) All on the Tandy Color Computer 2.

And the winner is... Thomas Jentzsch DMA solved it. Looks like it was reset to 'off' during the re-install. Thanks so much!

TurboGrafx-16 for sure. I had temporarily sworn off of consoles at the time. Otherwise I would have gone for one of those.

I don't own any of those systems either, and I'm not surprised by the numbers. Sony and Nintendo are synonymous with consoles. And if a person wants a console today, most are going to think of one of those two companies. With MS taking what's essentially a PC and trying to market it as a console (again), I think it's a tougher sell this time. The original XBOX did well because a lot of people didn't realize it was pretty much a PC and because it actually had a console performance lead at the time of its launch. The 360 did well because it was a pretty solid console at a competitive price (using non-PC hardware). I think Sony gets away with packaging what's also essentially a PC because of their image as a console-designer/gaming company. That and because they have the best specifications this time around.

Fatal Interia was released for the 360 and PS3 in 2007/8. Pretty low scores for modeling (ships and terrain) and for the physics side of it. But the score was pretty darned cool. It feels like it was rushed. Cool enough concept though (floating cars on a 'track'). Sort of like Star Wars Pod racing.

Also want.

Lots of arcade games used the 6809. And the controller on the Vectrex is almost exactly the same as the one on Tailgunner.

Fatal Inertia - terrible in-game mechanics with excellent music.

In the late-90s, I stopped by an arcade vendor to get a replacement battery for a TRON coin-op. In the back they had HUNDREDS of cocktail units stacked up. I was broke at the time, so I couldn't afford to buy any of them. Now the machines are all gone. Where they went is anyone's guess (the people there aren't exactly friendly).

All installed programs are intact. It was just the Windows files that were replaced. That, however, isn't the core issue in this case. The issue I'm having is that the D: drive is slow to access or copy to/from. So that's completely separate from running apps. This is just Windows operations that I'm referring to. To simplify things, just forget that I mentioned that any apps are installed on the machine and go with the premise that it's a fresh install of Windows 98se on a PC that has a 20GB C: drive and an 80GB D: drive, with no hardware changes made to it.

The budget could be an issue. I'd say go for an Amiga 500 or an Atari STe. You shouldn't have much trouble finding an STe in Canada, since plenty of them were sold there. The STe can plug directly into a TV using an ordinary RF box (or a RCA to COAX adaptor). If you get an Amiga 500, be sure that it has an extra 512K RAM in it (you can tell from the RAM expansion bay under the machine). Game compatibility on the Amiga 600 is not as good. You'll also want a second diskette drive. You'd need a Commodore A520 adaptor to hook the Amiga up to a TV. The gaming experience on both machines is smooth and less hassle than on a 486. If you choose to go the 486 route, then be prepared to deal with a lot of fiddling with DOS to get things running. I won't go into details here, but -- despite people claiming that it's pretty straight-forward -- it isn't. During the DOS years, I helped thousands of customers configure their PCs and I remember it well. If you enjoy that sort of thing, then go for it. It also depends on what types of games you like. If you're more into point-and-click adventures and pixel-scaling FPS games, then perhaps the 486 is for you. If you're more into games that actually scroll smoothly in 2D (like platformers) then go for the STe or Amiga. All systems have great programming tools -- if you decide to go that route. Here's a page on AmigaDOS basics: http://www.blitter.com/~nebulous/amiga.html And here's one for PC-DOS: http://www.blitter.com/~nebulous/msdos.html