Nebulon

I agree. I'm pretty sick of the same-ol'. However, if they can capture some of the spirit of Marathon, I might consider it...

Golgo 13 - SG-1000 Marble Madness - Arcade Moon Cresta - Arcade

One thing I've noticed is that there's something funny (and by funny I mean unpleasant) about how eBay calculates and displays their Global Shipping Service rates to both the seller and the prospective buyer. Much of it has to do with the pumped-up fees charged by Pitney Bowes and the fact that the seller doesn't actually see just how much the buyer is really paying for shipping in situations like these.

It sure would be cool if there was a way to mod the CV Flashback so that it could accept original ColecoVision cartridges. ... but I suppose that's likely impossible.

Hybris is better on an emulator that on an actual Amiga 500. Once you map the Enter and Space keys to a d-pad controller, it's a total riot.

R-Type - TurboGrafx-16 Pac-Man - Atari 400 Hybris - Amiga 500

This is a fun little article (and a neat way to get a bunch of legendary programmers in the same room): https://archive.org/stream/zzap64-magazine-012/ZZap_64_Issue_012_1986_Apr#page/n45/mode/2up

I was disappointed that the Atari 520ST came with a single-sided drive. Too many software houses released their stuff on single-sided disks because of that. Pretty unfair for the 1040ST owners. An unfortunate side-effect of the 'lowest common denominator'. Of course, we still see this support the lowest standard type of thing happening today The second thing that irked me was initially reading that the Coleco Adam would have disk drives, only to find out that they decided to go with tape drives instead. Even though they were random-access tape, that was still a disappointment.

A large porcelain coffee mug would be pretty awesome. The ultimate would be a mug done in black (like the ColecoVision ad campaign). That would look amazing with the color spectrum ColecoVision lettering. And if there's room somewhere, the "Your vision is our vision" tag-line would really complete it. http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=colecovision&qs=n&form=QBIR&pq=colecovision&sc=8-12&sp=-1&sk=#view=detail&id=33974DC57F646EACBF58E4067B297648E4D5CE44&selectedIndex=869

I'm not sure you're trying the version of Defender that I'm thinking of. The one I had in mind is located here: http://www.blitter.com/~nebulous/amiga-games01.html Your comment about 'power-on to playing a game in 10 seconds' tells me that you haven't even tried loading Blood Money on a real A500 yet. The time it takes from power-on to significant stuff happening on screen is pretty astounding. Seriously... take a look at it. And consider how much more data is being loaded and processed than in an Apple II game. Or consider that the music and animation is happening while the game data is loading. The time taken for the Kickstart screen on the Amiga is not wasted time. It's doing a series of diagnostics on boot-up. You use PCs and I don't see you complaining about the wait time for the BIOS to finish its job. Putting everything in ROM would make things faster. However, you'd also be forcing the end-user to have to upgrade ROMs for even minor OS upgrades. Fixing bugs in the OS would also have to involve ROM upgrades. More costly than a simple re-issue on diskette and more difficult for the user. I think you can see why that wouldn't be implemented. Then there's the comment about inefficiency. The Amiga saves data on disk as one byte of data for one byte of disk space. It doesn't suffer from the cluster size issues of FAT and NTFS. 1-byte data for 1-byte on disk is about as efficient as it gets. Of course, the trade-off is speed for large drives. And on the topic of speed... ...some real numbers as a point of comparison: You mention a LockSmith Fast Copy disk copy procedure on the Apple II as 30 seconds. That's 30 seconds for 140K of disk space. Now over to the Amiga running the Nib 2.0 disk copier. The copy procedure takes 2 minutes and 3 seconds (and there are faster Amiga copiers out there). That's 880K in about 2 minutes and 2 seconds or 220K in 31 seconds. Again, I think your perception of things might be skewing your take on the Amiga's real-world performance.

I think a lot of what you're nitpicking on is really just perception and programming issues. Rather than talking about how fast either machine could copy a disk, maybe it would be better to figure out how long it takes each machine to copy the same amount of data. After all, the Apple II is only 140K per side whereas the Amiga diskettes are 880K. I'd be happy to post some Amiga disk copy speeds for you, just to prove that it's as fast as any other machine at the time that used 3.5" DS/DD media. In regards to diskette access speed on the Amiga, I think you owe it to yourself to try loading the Psygnosis game Blood Money on an Amiga 500. Then tell me if you still think the disk drives are slow. And I can assure you that I've seen some pretty neat magic tricks done with an Amiga diskette drive (like copying to a write-protected diskette). The hard drive option for the Amiga 500 was SCSI (a superior interface to IDE). As for drives that start and don't stop.... You're actually describing something more typical of an Apple II (see Wozniak's original Apple hardware documentation for why that's the case). The issue with the AmigaDOS external commands paging themselves in and out of memory is also a user option. It's set that way to save on RAM. If you don't like it, just have the Amiga copy those commands to RAM on boot-up. Problem solved. It's not like it's hard-coded or anything. No harder than editing a batch file on a PC. Finally we get to the part about arcade conversions. Maybe check out Rodland, Bubble Bobble, Marble Madness, and the freeware versions of Defender and Star Castle... for a start. The rest of the answer to your question is simply "sloppy programming".

Galagon on the Color Computer II is pretty good.

That reminds me.... There was a contest at a local mall in the mid 90s for a competition on a Star Trek : The Strategic Operations Simulator coin-op. Whoever got the high score would get the arcade machine. My brother is a pro at that game, so I called him and excitedly told him all about it. Sadly, he couldn't make it there in time for the competition. Later on though, I was informed that it had to be cancelled because the system board in the machine fried itself. Hindsight being what it was, I regret not asking them what they planned to do with the machine and seeing if they'd sell it to me cheap. A year later, I found a great source for arcade machine parts. I now realize I could have fixed that beasty up nicely and had it running again.

Bee Ball - Atari 7800 Lunar Rover Patrol - Color Computer 2 Zektor - Arcade

Oooh! V-rally. Now that I know you can make your own tracks, I'm gonna' check that one out. Ikaruga's been mentioned, but I thought I'd add it here anyway. Oh, and Rez too. Your post reminded me that I'm about due for another viewing of the 1970s Solaris. I can't believe that the remake chopped the main monologue right out of the script. That's like removing the thesis from a paper.

What makes Mr. Boston Clean Sweep different from Clean Sweep? By the way, I love the Major Havoc and John Bigboote avatar images.

Flag to Flag, Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5, and Virtua Tennis. And yes, I'd love to try Looney Tunes Space Race some day.

Anyone know any links to sites that contain disk images of good megademos for 4MB 1040STe machines? Any recommendations on demos I should try out?

Beborn Beton - Another World

Not sure.... It's in the hardware reference for the Tandy 1000SX, so I kinda' figured it would work on a 1000HD as well.

Initially I was disappointed in the lack of colors on the Color Computer 2 (after all, it WAS called a Color Computer). The Atari 8-bit machines were always so much more impressive. Later though, I actually started to like the CoCo a lot. The Diecom games were really neat and the speech/sound cartridge was pretty cool too. Another thing that helped was the DIN-to-9-pin D-shell converter that allowed me to use conventional Atari joysticks on the Color Computer. Once I found the better games like Buzzard Bait, Marble Maze, Cashman, Shock Trooper, and a ton of text/graphic adventures, I was really happy with it as a machine. Plus, the 6809 was a good CPU to program on. My other disappointment was the graphics and sound on the first PC I had (a turbo XT). We spent extra to get an EGA card for it, and the graphics were still pretty underwhelming. Again though, the more time I spent with it, the more I appreciated what it was strong at (CAD, directory structures, word processing, spreadsheets, and -- of course -- Sierra games like Thexder and Space Quest II). When I first saw a Commodore 64, the person who showed it to me made the mistake of loading up Forbidden Forest. I thought the graphics in that game were crap. Now if he'd loaded something like Impossible Mission or Satan's Hollow, I would have freaked out at how awesome a machine it actually was. Hence I never did own a C64 back in the day. And lastly, I was disappointed in the lack of support for the Color Computer III. Thinking back now, with the Atari ST and Amiga available, there was no way the CoCo III could compete with machines like that (not for a lack of trying though).

Just for the heck of it, maybe try these Amiga OCS games and see what you think of them: - Hybris - Rodland - Assassin SE - Stardust - Pinball Dreams - Vital Light

Kickstart My Heart - Motley Crue

Well, I found this little blurb about using function keys to change video output modes: https://archive.org/stream/Sams_Computerfacts_Tandy_Model_1000SX_Computer_1987_Howard_Sams#page/n23/mode/2up However, either my timing is bad for pressing F2 or it just doesn't have any affect on my machine (a Tandy 1000HD). ?

I've tried both a Magnavox 1084 monitor and also a composite to coax converter hooked up to a color TV. Both display as monochrome. On the 1084, I can tell that the monitor itself is in color mode since there are two thin lines (one red and one green). They appear to be outside of the display area for the computer. So it looks like those particular lines are a product of the monitor itself. How do you enable color burst mode?