Nebulon

Thanks! I was wondering about the analog controls. Good to see that they addressed that too. Very cool.

I sure wish they'd bundle a copy of a programming language with every operating system that's sold or included on a new machine. Sort of like how most of the old 8-bit machines were supplied with BASIC. Sure, only some will every use it, but at least it's conveniently accessible for those that are interested in giving it a try.

I had a similar experience in grade 2 or 3 (it was around 1979). A computer-savvy teacher introduced the class to an Apple ][ computer and proceeded to ask us if anyone knew how to bring up a file listing (he was smiling, thinking that no one would know how). A friend of mine put up his hand, went up to the machine and typed CATALOG. The teacher was pretty surprised by that (as was the class, because the rest of us had no idea). Turns out my friend's dad was a physics prof and they had one at home. I spent a lot of time at his house playing around on that machine. As for kids being more tech savvy today, I should mention what a present-day colleague of mine said about the course that he used to be an assembly-language T.A. for. The college he worked for changed its curriculum over time and got rid of its Atari ST machines and stopped teaching 68000 assembly language. In fact, they didn't really bother to replace it with a thorough grounding in how computers and interfaces really work at the code level. After a number of years of seeing students finish the course under the new curriculum, he told me that if he were to know of any mission-critical systems that the new grads has written code for, he would be sure to avoid the systems that they worked on (e.g. high-speed trains, hospitals, etc...). He just didn't trust their ability to come up with something remotely efficient or reliable.

I recall Space Hulk being pretty darned cool on that machine. And, of course, it has a descent version of Starblade.

Is it just me or is it impossible to map the original XBOX controller to the necessary keys to make Atari 5200 games run on the emulator? (as featured on the BAED for the original XBOX) I've tried everything on there, and have only been able to access the fire button, options, soft reset, and hard reset. No luck at all with movement directions or start.

Wow. Yet another Z80 offering to the market (at a time when there were tons of them). Starving the machine for RAM was a bit of a killer. Of course, now that I've seen the keyboard... yikes! And my rabbit would be happy to make short work of the hard-wired external power supply. What were they thinking?!? It seems that Mattel and Coleco were never meant to make home computers.

That looks fantastic. It's like the picture I used to drool over in the Radio Shack catalogs.

I think maybe a really detailed timeline of consoles and computers would help things a lot. Something down to the year and month of first release of each system (for the NES, I guess that'd be both 1983 and 1985). The generation thing just isn't working. If someone's really into making timelines, perhaps one for consoles and one for computers. I've seen quite a few out there, but none are complete that I know of (and not many mention months).

Hey, it's never too late. I'd say Tengen's Tetris counts. This is really interesting to me for two reasons: 1) I missed out on the NES phenomenon the first time around since I had shifted to computers from consoles when it was released in North America and 2) I'm obsessed with early 80s arcade games. I'm finding that -- for the most part -- the NES has some really great ports from the arcade machines of the early to mid-80s (and more ports than I thought there were). Of course, there are a few cases where they took a few too many liberties (like Gyruss). But there are other ones that are spot-on (like Donkey Kong Jr, Galaga, Popeye, and Star Force). As a result, this kind of changes my perception of the NES and tells me that there's more variety of game-play on that platform than I previously thought.

Chopper Command - Atari 2600 Rolling Thunder - NES Demon Attack - Atari 2600

Well said. I went back and played a number of Atari 2600 greats, and was reminded of how unique an experience it is playing games on that machine. The two consoles really do have a very different feel to them.

I'm curious to know which classic arcade games made their way to the NES. In particular, I'm interested in anything that hit the arcades in 1988 or earlier. So far I've come up with this: Bubble Bobble Bubble Bobble, Part 2 Bump 'n' Jump Contra Dig Dug Dig Dug II: Trouble in Paradise Donkey Kong Donkey Kong Jr. Donkey Kong 3 Double Dragon Elevator Action Galaga: Demons of Death Galaxian Gauntlet Gauntlet II Ghosts 'N Goblins Gradius Ikari Warriors Jackal Joust Mappy-Land Marble Madness Millipede Ms. Pac-Man Pac-Man Paperboy Paperboy 2 Popeye Punch-Out!! Section Z Super C Q*Bert Qix Rampage Rod Land Rush'n Attack Rygar Spy Hunter Ultimate Frogger Champion Vindicators

I'd have to say the SNES. It offers a different cross-section of the games scene and has some real gems (Operation Logic Bomb, Brain Lord, Metroid, Gradius 3, Run Saber, R-Type 3, ...).

Donkey Kong Jr. on the NES is pretty much arcade-perfect. Actually, a deserted island, a NES, a dev-kit, and an unlimited supply of electricity would be a workable scenario for me.

In answer to the OP, Yes -- assuming I had help moving the CRT. For retro-gaming, I'm not very happy with LCD screens and prefer CRTs. Plasma is good, but CRTs still rock the retro games.

Totally. Hence my link to the video about the Shover Robot and the Pusher Robot. Both do the same thing and are arguing over it. One thing's for sure, the two machines are unique and have a distinctly different 'feel' from one-another. So there's no way one could ever replace the other. The only real solution is to have them sitting side-by-side.

Frenzy in the arcade is good. Frenzy on the ColecoVision is a total blast!

"Do you have stairs in your house?" http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/terriblesecret

The thing about Stargate is that it's a really high-quality game. So, despite it's difficulty, I can't fault it. I mean, Eugene Jarvis is all about tough games.

I loved the entire comment. The last line (isolated here) is def my favorite! And it's SO true. I'm just glad that the uber-talented people that I work with are nice. Of course, if they were jerks, I guess I wouldn't be working with them (which just reinforces your observations).

Yeah, the ColecoVision version is AWESOME.

Thanks for the help! I managed to get it working. Turns out there's a bit of a discrepancy in the manual. The docs say to load BIN files through the Tools menu. In reality, they're loaded through [Cartridge] -> [Program] -> [Maxflash 8 Mbit Flash Cartridge]. As for the game -- it's truly remarkable. I've seen some fancy programming in my time but this takes the cake. This Atari 8-bit port may be lower-resolution than the arcade machine, but it plays very much like the arcade version. That and it really shows what the Atari's hardware is capable of. I was running it on a stock Atari 800XL on a plasma TV. I should mention that the flicker on the plasma was minimal and almost not even noticeable. I'm thinking this would be something that would go over really well if it were to be shown at some of the Demoscene shows in Europe. Bravo!

I suppose I'm going to get my ass kicked by my Gen-X peers for saying this, but I'd have to vote for the NES on this one. The Atari 2600, Intellivision, and ColecoVision were the machines of my time (with the CV being my favorite). I liked the VCS, but I didn't love it. When it came out I wanted just a bit more sound and graphics power. Hence the CV being the perfect choice. To me, the NES is like an amped-up CV, so I'm voting NES. Now if the question was NES vs. ColecoVision, I'd have to go with the CV since the good games on that machine are ones that are burned into my brain (and just thinking about them makes me smile). Having said all this, games like Yar's Revenge on the 2600 are really awesome. IMHO, the perfect retro console (just the right amount of graphics and sound processing power and not an ounce more that what it needs) is the TG-16. Ironically, I never owned a NES or a TG-16. regardless, they both gained my respect.

I'm cool with emulators as long as the game that's being captured is running at the correct speed and the audio is correct (and as long as obvious cheats aren't enabled). In a perfect world it would be the real thing with a video recording setup that captured it cleanly, but that's not always an option. For MAME, you could try enabling scanlines for the raster games. And for vector games, a setting of 1.7 for both the Gamma and Beam Width (with a bit of flicker) should come out looking pretty authentic.

Galaxian - Atari 8-bit Bolo - Apple IIe Gremlins - Apple IIe