BurritoBeans

Space Dungeon - Man it's just fun, one of the few reasons I still even get out the 5200 and definitely the game I have with the most playtime on it. Missile Command - It's not the arcade but it's still really fun - I finally got a trackball controller and that made it so much better. Star Raiders - I still don't even know how to play it properly, should probably look at the manual, but it definitely looks cool and I love most of the old space games. Moon Patrol - One of my favorite games on a ton of systems and even one of my favorite arcades, no clue why but it's just cool. Jungle Hunt - I couldn't think of a fifth but I do break this out a bunch so I guess it goes up there. If this tells me anything it's that I should probably look more into the library, maybe check out some homebrews, so I don't just go slapping Jungle Hunt on random lists.

Well, it's pretty much PDP week here and it's going to stay that way for a bit. PDP-11 Barmen - 20 minutes Dungeon - 74 minutes Tetris - 104 minutes Super Star Trek - 55 minutes VIC-20 Omega Race - 22 minutes So, after a bunch of digging around I found that some of the old classics - Zork and Tetris - had some amount of start in the PDP-7 and PDP-11s, neat-o. Barmen is Tapper except I can't figure out how to actually get it to play... it started working somehow but I still have no idea, maybe another time? Dungeon is pre-Infocom Zork and neat at that, my build is from '78 anyways and plays just nicely under RT-11 - I couldn't get it to run for the longest time, turns out I just needed to go back from v5.7 of the OS to v5.3 as it takes up less RAM, whoops. Tetris is Tetris, I never knew but the Electronika 60 that it was made on is just a Soviet clone of either a LSI-11/03 or -11/23 down to even running RT-11, so yeah it just worked fine for me as I'm using a -11/23+ with RT-11 as my only operating system. I pulled up Super Star Trek, I'm just starting to get the game but it's definitely fun even if I don't get it half the time. Reminds me of the Compucolor version, probably the same game with some changes, but I'd have to take the Compucolor out to actually tell if that's any true. Finally the VIC comes up with Omega Race which is just fun so I don't have much else to say on it. So yeah, as I said above, basically just a PDP week for me - I should be getting a disk controller in the mail tomorrow which could run something like four floppy drives and another four MFM hard drives once I get the breakout board for it. I'd love to have actual hard disk storage so I could start trying things like UNIX - at the moment I'm using an emulated serial-based tape drive, but with this thing using old Winchester disks I'm a bit weary about buying in as the price seems insane on most of these Seagates - so I need to look into drive emulators soon here. Expect some X68000 for next week as I'm getting three more in that I found super cheap to fix up, one will be a birthday gift for a coworker who's wanted one and the other two will probably be sold to fund my new thing for minicomputers as I already own more than enough 68Ks and should honestly be cutting down on them instead of getting more.

Didn't have much work so I got a good few games in this time. 2600 Crystal Castles - 11 minutes Demons to Diamonds - 5 minutes Galaxian - 30 minutes Midnight Magic - 3 minutes Video Pinball - 20 minutes Wizard of Wor - 35 minutes 3DO DOOM - 30 minutes 5200 Space Dungeon - 65 minutes 7800 Xevious - 45 minutes PC (DOS) Realms of the Haunting - 85 minutes VIC-20 Omega Race - 15 minutes Ultima: Escape From Mt. Drash - 25 minutes So yeah, nice little lineup for older titles this week. For whatever reason I decided I wanted to go revisiting some old consoles, namely Atari stuff, as it's been a while. Brought the 5200 down to my setup, had to clear a ton of space to fit it, played Space Dungeon, then realized it was the 7800 I actually wanted to mess with - whoops. Can't say I got too into many of the games but it was the first time in a long while I had given Xevious an honest attempt and that was pretty fun to do. For the rest of the systems it was mainly testing hardware out. Got a new 3DO Blaster in the house so I gave that a test with my usual "let's try to clear the first episode of DOOM" and realized that the game runs so slow it got a bit painful, I guess I'm too used to the Jaguar version for consoles now. VIC-20 got a new power supply that isn't just a 5V phone charger spliced into the output of the old brick so I had to try both a tape and cartridge game, bot were happy so I was also happy. Finally I got a nice little (moderatly capable) DOS "laptop", a Toshiba Libretto, and had nothing else nearby so I got Realms of the Haunting on it and found out real quick playing that game sucks on the tiny screen - oh well, it's a neat little thing. The RS232 to USB adapter ate itself, I was hoping to get some more stuff with the PDP-11 but that failed and I really don't feel like keying in the ODT bootloader (still haven't got a ROM for it) so next weeks goal is to get that going again and also work on some old Gottlieb EM pinball machines - I doubt any of it will get done but ah whatever, it'll be fun to do as much as possible.

Well I see forum the layout changed since last I was on here, neat-o. Atari 7800 Xevious - 25 minutes PDP-11 Adventure - 35 minutes VIC-20 Omega Race - 40 minutes Yeah, nothing too exciting because the weather has been amazing out so I've been making it a point to get outside. Finally got the PDP to work reliably and upgraded it to having 256K of 22-bit RAM instead of the previous 64K of 16-bit stuff - no advantage for me past more to use but whatever. Adventure is always fun, I think I beat the Apple II version a few years back but it's cool to play it on something closer to what it was made for. The 7800 came out to play some Xevious as I finally found the stupid cartridge, I thought I lost it as it's my only 7800 cart but it was just sitting with the stack of all the no-end-label 2600 games - I don't like the 7800 joystick at all and I suck at the game but hey, it looks nice and that's always cool. Past that just Omega* Race on the VIC as I needed to test a new video cable I had made and a joystick I fixed, surprisingly both worked fine and the game like always is fun. Someday I need to get more than a few cartridges for the thing, maybe break out the tape drive and get a bigger RAM expansion to try out some newer stuff anyways.

32X: DOOM - 21 minutes Virtua Racing Deluxe - 6 minutes Genesis: Sonic the Hedgehog (6-Pak) - 30 minutes Splatterhouse 2 - 55 minutes PDP-11: Super Star Trek - 11 minutes Lot of Sega. With Sonic Mania coming on the PS4 for free thanks to me paying $100 for an online service I never use, I figure "ah let's try to beat the other 2D Sonic games"... yeah that was a mistake. Turns out I'm real bad at the first and can't get to the second zone without a lot of luck, so maybe that idea will be shelved for a bit. Did get to play with the 32X again and that's always cool, I just recently got my own Jaguar so going back and playing 32X DOOM gives me another comparison on which port I think is best. The PDP-11 is also starting to see some time, I got it to (very slowly) boot an operating system (RT-11) off of an emulated drive via a 2400-baud serial connection. I have no clue how to play SST but I keep hearing that it's one of the big classics so maybe I'll actually read the manual and figure it out another day.

...well, been a while since I posted in here... PC (DOS): Dark Castle - 25 minutes Sharp X1: Gradius - 109 minutes Nothing too exciting but hey, they're games. Got Dark Castle in while I was fixing up an old IBM PS/2 30-286, makes a pretty nice test game to play with the keyboard and mouse on a system like that anyways. I've always sucked at it, never got farther than the first few screens, but someday I'd love to try and beat it. The X1 is a similar situation, my X1 Twin had a floppy drive go so I wanted to test it on a game I had on floppy. Gradius is really cool, I've never actually beat it until just the other day when I played this version, as man do I suck at shmups. It was cool but I'd say go play a version with an actual controller, this one was nice and fast but you use the numpad like arrow keys which works but I'd imagine anything else is better. So yeah, I guess it's time to get back on this thread for me... going to keep up the odd stuff just because odd computers are about all I play on nowadays past some newer stuff. I hope by the end of the year I'll be able to log some time for the PDP-11 as that means I got my -11 I'm working on building up and going with a proper storage drive.

As a push for myself to get back to making something in my spare time, I decided pretty recently that building a new old computer would be cool. Making a homebrew Z80 board was my first choice but I realized my S-100 setup has a pretty homebrew Z80 CPU and whatnot anyways, so I went for the second choice and picked up stuff to start my own PDP-11. The setup so far looks something like this: CPU, Serial IO: M8189 - 22bit F-11 CPU with MMU and boot ROMs, optional FPU and CIS chips available to be put in, 2x serial ports, jumpered to boot to ODT RAM: 1x M8044-DB - 32K, 16bit Backplane: H9276 - 22bit, 4x9 slots Power Supply: A cut-up Corsair TX850 Cooling: Some random 120mm PC case fans hot-glued to the shelf this sits on Terminal: IBM 55SX running Kermit ...and with all this I can really just run the On-line Debugging Tool as I don't have any form of storage for it. Part of me would love to get something like a proper old RX02 drive setup, but it seems unless I manage to do what I did with the PDP-8 I own again and find it from someone who's looking to trash the thing/sell it a a low enough price and within a reasonable drive in the truck... maybe I'll re-purpose an old serial CNC paper tape reader for now? So with that, I'd like to ask, does anyone else on here have this type of stuff and if so what things have you been able to do with it? I'd love to get this rack-mounted, add some form of storage, and maybe run something like BSD or RSX11M+ on it when I build a capable-enough setup but for now it seems that may take a bit of time and cash. If anything else this is just real cool for me as I always love the old minis, the PDP-8 has been one of my favorite cabinets to play with, so this is a cool next step to me.

Always was a fan of N, I remember wasting time on the original flash game when I was supposed to be doing work at school and N+ on the DS was another fun challenge. Never knew they had it for the Switch so I may have to check it out - I currently have it on Steam anyways as it makes a really good use of the Steam Link and controllers for couch co-op.

I'll be going for my second year. Sucks to hear that the arcade tournament isn't going to happen, even if I didn't compete it was still at least neat to see going on like Pinburgh. Past that I like what they have listed so far, I'll be interested with the seminars as yeah turnouts last year weren't very big with it not being trouble to come a bit late and find a seat but they still were fun - there's a few people on the list who I'd like to hear anyways.

DEC Alpha: VAXMULC - 55 minutes Nevermind on whatever I said before because I got all of one game that counts in this week! So the plan was something like "Activision Patches, look at S-100 stuff, derp out" or whatever, yeah that fell through. I finally got my old DEC Alpha up and running which is cool to me, or so I thought when I realized that I needed to run between two bootloaders and a lot of crap to get it off of whatever old version of UNIX it was on and back to VMS which I like more. Well, I got my OpenVMS hobbyist license off of my old DECUS account and got the Alpha to *actually* run which was cool. So yeah, VAXMULC, pretty much textmode Tron Light Cycles with multiple players made for VAX systems, I'm amazed it runs on the Alpha because it was made for an 11/780 but I'm not going to complain as it runs fine in VMS. Pretty much just played this one with some dudes for a while and then we all got bored, whatever it was fun to connect to other people just to play Tron even if it took ages to work. So, more plans? Nah. I kind-of want to play with VMS some more but I really have no use apart from the Eisner messageboard which isn't exactly the most active, whatever it'll be entertaining for a bit anyways. Maybe I'll actually start on the patch stuff, I've got all week and nothing better to do apart from two days of work anyways.

PC: Broforce - 47 minutes DEADBOLT - 15 minutes Deus Ex - 30 minutes Deus Ex: Human Revolution - 732 minutes Risk of Rain - 25 minutes Strider - 5 minutes Woohoo, more random PC games. Alright, so going in alphabetical order... Broforce is a game I had on PS4 before my brothers took said PS4 so I got it again and yeah, what can I say other than that I love it? Well, not much - it's a great local co-op title, it's entertaining, and it doesn't get very boring. I wanted to play a level on the Steam Link while I was waiting on some sausage to cook and I ended up having to throw the controller on the couch because I realized that I burnt the onions with said sausages, it's just that fun that I forgot about my dinner. DEADBOLT is like Gunpoint if you ever played that but zombies and talking fires instead of people and detective work. I beat it forever ago and wanted to play it so I did just that and it's still fun mind you I didn't want to put a ton of time into it. Deus Ex was like $1 on the sale so I said screw it and bought it, yeah I already have a copy on CD but whatever it doesn't hurt to have a digital one, too. Still fun but I have to beat Human Revolution first before I go back. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is an interesting one, I pre-ordered the special edition when it came out on Xbox 360 and loved it but I never got past Tai Yong Medical, well I just got through that a few hours ago so you could say that I'm having fun with it. I haven't had any similar games recently so this is a lot of fun for me. Risk of Rain I bought purely because I heard it's good for the co-op and a bit hard, yeah it's a fun one for those two bits but we got confused and quit so whatever, next time I guess. Finally, Strider... I had zero clue what I was doing but it was fast and there were swords and jumping on walls but then I ran into a boss and died. Yep, that's as much as I know but I will say it looked fun while I had it open. So yeah, that's the week. I know the Switch and some other stuff will come out for next week so that should be cool although I think I'm going to beat both these Deus Ex games first before much anything else goes down.

Nintendo Switch: Mario Kart 8 - 44 minutes PC: Clone Hero - 35 minutes N++ - 179 minutes Pit People - 237 minutes So this week was couch co-op week for me featuring the Switch and Steam Link. The Switch got used which was a welcome sight for the thing as it's been just sitting on the dock for a while now - what can I say, I really only find use for it when it's multiplayer stuff as I just haven't had many singleplayer titles that I really want on that I can't have elsewhere/haven't beat already. Mario Kart 8 is always good fun on the thing though so I can't complain, did a bit of Grand Prix with some friends and I ended up getting crushed like usual as while I'm not bad they're a lot better than I am. So yeah, Pit People. I always liked the Behemoth titles - I probably have ~200 hours in Castle Crashers as friends and I used to just sit down and run the game over and over on different characters a few times a year since the game came out and BattleBlock Theater was amazing/I want to buy it again on PC so I don't have to hook up the Xbox 360 anymore. Pit People is no different and I really like it - it's a solid RTS, it's got the same odd and somewhat random but still pretty funny (to me at least) humor, the art is done well, Will Stamper (like usual) provides some good voice acting, and at the end of the day it's a ton of fun to play with another person. I specifically bought this game when it came out to play co-op and finally got to do just that, man I'm happy that I bought that. N++ is like any other N game, fast-paced precision platforming that ends in some frustration but a lot of fun. After a while of Pit People we had a third person want to join in so we swapped to N++ as it does up to four players and just like Pit People we spent a few hours just on this one clearing co-op levels. Being that the guys I were playing with were a bit older than me they didn't have the same experience as I did (growing up playing N on flash game sites) so they took a while to get used to it but hey, it's not much of a learning curve as much as it is trying to communicate with each-other and not get mad when you keep failing. Finally just a little bit of Clone Hero sneaks in as-usual with any couch co-op session that involves the PC with me wanting to play the really hard stuff since it's all that gives me challenges anymore while the others were struggling along on what they picked - probably not the best way to play but whatever, letting everyone else pick the songs keeps it fun for them. So yeah, couch co-op is always a lot of fun for me as it gives the Steam Link and big TV a use for me. I have zero plans for the next week with modern games, I mean I'm still trying to install stuff from the sale which has been proving to take way too long but at least that'll get done eventually.

VIC-20: Cheese and Onion - 25 minutes Pentagorat - 25 minutes Spaceship Minus One - 25 minutes Yeah, VIC-20 week I guess. So this was cool, for christmas I gave one of my coworkers a VIC-20 I found for dirt cheap that I cleaned up and got working right, well I haven't even touched a VIC-20 since then but the other day he brought the thing in with a cartridge I've never heard of, the "Penultimate Plus", which is a 3-35K RAM expansion alongside having something like 70 games built into ROM with a pretty clean menu to get around it all. Cheese and Onion was a neat little platformer with some nice graphics to it, I really had no clue what to even expect with a name like that but it was a lot of fun to mess around with for a while. Pentagorat looked like something off the ZX Spectrum, a little adventure game with what seemed like a bit of a horror theme to it - I've never seen graphics like that on the VIC-20, I'm used to blocky stuff that looks a bit "eh" at best, so this one was cool. Finally Spaceship Minus One was a flappy-bird type game where you just have one button and have to try and get as far as you can in a level without blowing the spaceship up by hitting too much stuff. There were a few more games but I put little-to-no time on most of them/was too busy thinking how neat the cartridge was so I don't have them in here, whoops. Well, the Activision Patch Quest thread started up for this year so I guess I'll be breaking out the 2600 (or some emulators at the very least) and getting some of those patch requirements. I'm not sure if I'll be crazy enough again to try for gold on Decathlon but hey, maybe I'll ruin another joystick just to do it. I looked into the S-100 project a bit and wow, that's going to be a lot of work and a chunk of cash but it's neat what's going on with it all. I'm thinking that maybe next time they do a group buy of boards on their google group (I'm not paying $300+ for four or five PCBs when I can pay $60 and just wait a week extra) I'm going to at least buy the PCBs to make a backplane and basic Z80 system and then over the course of time populate it all - it would be cool to buy an old box but I really don't have the money to try and buy an old IMSAI or Cromemco box and expand the thing so DIY is the way for me. Finally, well I'm thinking of breaking out some handhelds again so maybe those will pop up if I have the time, maybe the Wonderswan will get some attention again.

PC: Jet Set Radio - 179 minutes Yeah, one game. So Jet Set Radio on the PC is something I love and hate - I love it because it's a good port of the game but I hate it because without a controller it's near-if-not-actually unplayable. The current issue is that I'm out of USB ports on my PC and the one hub with open spots is way up the wall so that my wireless receiver for my VOIDs can reach around the whole house - it's rare that I say this, but in this situation I can say that I'm happy I bought the Steam Link as that saved me the "hassle" of unplugging stuff, the couch is pretty comfortable compared to my chair, and the game looks surprisingly nice on the new big TV. Speaking of the Steam, well I said that I'd put $50 on because the sale and grab a bunch of stuff so expect to see more when good 'ol DSL feels like downloading stuff at more than 100KB/s. I was going to go buy a Switch game or two but eh, I figure if I can get 10-20 PC games that I wanted for the same as one or two Switch games that I don't know much about (and get an equal if not greater amount of hours of gameplay on the PC ones) then that's probably the smart route to go.

Atari 2600: Demons to Diamonds - 20 minutes Cromemco Dazzler: Chase! - 30 minutes Gotcha - 30 minutes Life - 10 minutes Game Gear Ninja Gaiden - 37 minutes So this week was a first for me as I finally got to mess with one of the old 70s-style homebrew computers that I've always heard of but never used, anything S-100 based. Turns out one of my uncles up in Rochester NY who I rarely ever see has his own S-100 setup running of an 8088 card is managing his HAM Radio setup and some other stuff, so after a wedding they had up there I went by to see the thing. The star of the whole system (for this thread at least) was the one set of cards, a Cromemco "TV Dazzler" board, which I guess was one of if not the first bitmapped graphics card for computers. All the games are what you'd expect - Chase was a maze chase game with two players, Gotcha is like the Atari arcade counterpart, and Life is the standard Conway's Game of Life - but all running on a massive set of boards with wires running everywhere. I have a soft spot for the 70s homebrew computers, I mean heck I built my own Cosmac ELF and a few others, so this was definitely cool to me. I wasn't sure if the games should go under "S-100" or Dazzler so I put them on Dazzler as you need those cards to run the titles, if it needs to be changed by all means go ahead as I'm not sure if this stuff has shown up before on the tracker. The 2600 comes out for the first time in a while as I found a copy of Demons to Diamonds for all of $0.50 at a store while I was out looking for records. It's not exactly the most exciting game but hey, for the price and being that the labels were still on it I can't really complain all that much as it's something more to play with. Finally I played a bit of Game Gear as I found a copy of Ninja Gaiden for a few dollars. I always knew there was the NES version and that the Master System had a version, I guess it makes sense that the GG had a version if the SMS did but I was a little bit surprised at first when I saw it. Like expected it was really basic and I beat it in less than an hour but hey, it wasn't bad so I can't complain. So yeah, crap now I'm back to looking at old homebrew computers but I also want to go with the CMVS idea - I could do both but I really don't think that breaking into my money I saved so I can get stuff ReplayFX is a good decision, probably going to stick with the CMVS as it's cheaper and easier if stuff goes wrong but hey either could be done. Past me wishing I could do more, well SGDQ 2018 started a few hours ago as-of the time of this post and I really like speedruns so I'll probably just be watching games for next week, not playing them, but at least that can also be entertaining. If anything this will get me wanting to play more games for speedruns and TASing but once I saw how much time my friend and I put into Lawnmower Man I almost wonder what I was thinking at that point in my life.

Wait, no time on the switch? I'll start it off lol PC: 7 Days to Die - 112 minutes Clone Hero - 429 minutes Switch: Rocket League - 20 minutes Well, there's some Switch time - I was going to post 20 minutes ago but whatever. I really do like the system but the games cost so much and I only have four so it's that thing that I enjoy for parties with stuff like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe but doesn't get much use past that. PC was simple this week, bit of 7DtD tonight with friends, we're getting boned over and over again so we're thinking about moving where we're located to somewhere better than on the side of a hill. Clone Hero is Clone Hero, I downloaded all the DLC songs from Rock Band 2 and 3 to slap in there so I ran through most-all of those and then did a bunch of charted out Scar Symmetry stuff since there's no metal like death metal or something like that. I ended up buying XIII on Gamecube and I would put time on it tonight but I'm going to wait and count it for next week since it looked cool and I want to see how it is over the course of a week.