Skippy B. Coyote

Thanks! I've always really liked Trinitrons, since they were generally the best consumer televisions available during their time, but the truth is that all consoles with standard definition analog video output will look and play great on any standard definition CRT TVs. Sony's WEGA Trinitrons may be the fanciest of the bunch but any Panasonic, RCA, Samsung, Sharp, etc., etc. CRT TV that you can find for free on Craigslist will work wonderfully with retro game systems. I just like sticking with ones in the 20" to 24" size range so that I can actually lift and carry them myself.

Any 480i CRT TV in the 20" to 24" size range that says "Trinitron" on it would be my preference for all pre-HD era systems, Atari 2600 included. My current retro gaming TV is a Sony KV-20FS120 WEGA Trinitron and it's my favorite TV to date.

Hmm... do you by chance own a Wii? If your computer isn't up to running Stella and a Harmony cart is out of your price range then a Wii is probably your next best option. They're quite easy (and free) to soft mod even for someone with zero prior experience and they can emulate all non-DCP+ Atari 2600 games really well. You can find more info on the Wii soft modding process here.

If you're dead set on not using emulation and only playing on original hardware then you might want to consider investing in a Harmony Cartridge. I've got a Harmony Encore for my setup that I use to compete every week and it makes everything super simple. Just download the ROM for the game being played each week, drag and drop it to an SD card, stick the SD card in your Harmony cart, then pop the Harmony cart in your Atari 2600, select the game you want to play from the built in menu, and away you go. That said, my computer's hard drive died this weekend and I'm currently limited to accessing the internet from my tablet, so I have no way to get this week's game onto my Harmony cart and may not be able to compete this round unless I can get my computer fixed before Sunday.

I've got a strong preference for vertical scrolling shmups as well, and I know I can play them much better than horizontal scrolling ones in general. That said, I won't turn up my nose at a really well made horizontal shmup and have found a few that I really enjoy. Thunder Force III is one of my favorite shooters, but I still prefer Xevious, Raiden, and the like if I have my pick. My all time favorite game in this genre is Solar Striker for the Game Boy though (thus my user title) so I'm not exactly the best representation of your average shmup fan.

I had the same problem when I tried emulating GBA games on the Wii with Visual Boy Advance GX. The picture was always a bit grainy and the slowdown was pretty horrendous. It handled original Game Boy and Game Boy Color games fairly well, but Game Boy Advance games were a "no go". If you really want to emulate GBA games on a television I've heard that a Raspberry Pi 3 setup with RetroPie is a good option, but I've never looked into it since I already have a pretty extensive collection of GBA cartridges and a Game Boy Player for my GameCube.

Agreed. I use my GameCube's Game Boy Player on a 20" CRT TV all the time and I have never experienced any lag at all with it. The way I look at it is that you could spend a small fortune on upscalers or system modifications to try and get older systems working properly and providing a good picture on the newest televisions, or you could just pick up the kind of TV that they were made to work with for free on Craigslist and get the same experience with way less headache involved. Plus you get to play light gun games. As far as emulation goes though (and it should be noted that the GameCube's Game Boy Player is not emulation, there is real honest to goodness Game Boy Advance hardware inside it) I really like it as a supplement to collecting and playing games on original hardware. I have a few systems that I love collecting games for, but for the rest that aren't quite as special to me I'm just fine with experiencing them via emulation. Emulation is also great for participating in High Score Clubs, since chances are you're not going to own every game being played any given season and you might not want to shell out the cash for a quality flash cart for the system being played. Or as in the case of the Atari 7800 there might just not be any flash cart option available at all.

The family computer's hard drive died on us this weekend so I'm posting from my tablet this week, but I still managed to snap a picture (albeit a rather low quality one) of the games played this week with the tablet's camera. Ineligible --------------- Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights (GameCube) - 106 minutes Star Fox Assault (GameCube) - 303 minutes Arcade ------------ Defender (played on Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits for Game Boy Advance) - 71 minutes Ms. Pac-Man (played on Namco Museum for Game Boy Advance) - 23 minutes Robotron 2084 (played on Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits for Game Boy Advance) - 11 minutes Atari 2600 ----------------- Alien - 55 minutes Centipede TB - 68 minutes Defender - 8 minutes Defender Arcade - 76 minutes Millipede TB - 26 minutes Q*Bert - 14 minutes Quadrun - 108 minutes Stargate - 29 minutes PlayStation ------------------- Alien Resurrection - 558 minutes Alien Trilogy - 124 minutes Total Video Game Play Time This Week --------------------------------------------------------------- 1,580 minutes (26 hours 20 minutes) [1,171 minutes​ eligible] Individual System Play Times This Week ----------------------------------------------------------------- PlayStation: 682 minutes GameCube: 409 minutes Atari 2600: 384 minutes Arcade: 105 minutes Towards the end of last week a friend gifted me copies of Star Fox Assault and Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights as "get well soon" presents, and I think they must have helped because I sure felt a lot better this week than I did the last few weeks. Both were games I had been wanting for some time, and while Night of 100 Frights is arguably the best Scooby-Doo game ever made (it's a toss up between this, Scooby-Doo Mystery on the Genesis, and Scooby-Doo! Classic Creep Capers on the Game Boy Color) I was really itching to play Star Fox Assault after having played through Star Fox Adventures last month; so that's where the majority of my gaming time went this week. At this point I've completed 9 of the 10 story mode missions in Star Fox Assault, so I'm sure I'll finish the game over the next few days, but I do really want to unlock the NES version of Xevious that's included as an unlockable extra on the disc so I'll probably replay the story mode another 2 or 3 times until I've gotten high enough scores in every mission to unlock Xevious. Star Fox Assault definitely ranks high up there as one of my all time favorite spaceship shooters, and Xevious is hands down my #1 favorite, so having both together in one game is just ridiculously awesome to me. Namco even went the extra mile and included the little yellow extra life flags from Xevious in the main Star Fox Assault game, which is just way too cool if you ask me. Getting on to tracker eligible games, this week I played quite a few Atari 2600 games and a few arcade games as well; with special attention given to Defender and it's sequel. The reason for all the Defender time was that the misses and I watched Howard Scott Warshaw's documentary Once Upon Atari this week, and when the VCS game designers and programmers interviewed in the documentary were asked what their favorite video game from the time period was at least 80% of them said "Defender!" without skipping a beat. Having not had much experience with Defender before both the misses and I played quite a few different versions of the game to see what all the fuss was about, and I think we both totally get it now. I liked the original arcade version the best with Defender Arcade on the VCS coming in a very close second (especially when played with the Edladdin Super Twin 78) and the spousal unit was in complete agreement. The only other games that I spent a good bit of time on this week were Quadrun for the Atari 2600 High Score Club and Centipede TB, the latter of which was played just for fun but ended up nabbing me another HighScore.com world record trophy with a score of 500,000+. I wasn't intending to play it seriously but the analog trackball control was so nice and smooth that I just kept going and going! As far as the misses' gaming time this week goes, she divided it between the survival horror first-person shooter Alien Resurrection on the PlayStation and a small variety of Atari 2600 games. For most of the week she was getting in a few games of Defender Arcade or Q*Bert in the afternoon followed by a couple hours of Alien Resurrection in the evening, but sadly at about 10 hours into the game she decided to call it quits on level 5 of 10 and give up on Alien Resurrection. Having sat back and watched her play the whole game up to that point I totally get why she gave up too, since to put it simply the game is impossibly difficult (and apparently it was almost universally panned by critics for that very reason). Imagine playing Doom on Nightmare difficulty with 50% health and the pistol as your only weapon and you'll have a good idea idea of what Alien Resurrection has to offer. To the game's credit it is right up there with Silent Hill as one of the most genuinely frightening games of the pre-HD era, to the point that I lost track of how many times it made me jump just watching my wife play it, but even on the easiest difficulty setting Alien Resurrection is so hard that it seems like the developers didn't even play test it. I think my wife probably spent more time reloading her save files after dying every other room than she spent actually playing the game during the 10 hours she put into it, and when I tried helping her out to see if I could get her past the parts she was stuck on I didn't fare any better. So, having given up in frustration halfway through the game, the misses decided to list Alien Resurrection for sale on eBay and move on to a couple other Alien games that were a little less graphically impressive but vastly more enjoyable. Tonight we took turns playing Alien on the Atari 2600 for about an hour (because what's not to love about Pac-Man with flamethrowers?) then she started in on her yearly play through of her all time favorite first-person shooter: Alien Trilogy for the PlayStation. She usually waits until around Halloween to play through Alien Trilogy, but she decided to play it early this year to help get the bad taste of Alien Resurrection out of her mouth. This turned out to be a much longer post than usual so I'll wrap it up by saying that with any luck we'll have our computer fixed up with a new hard drive by this time next week, and there may be some Atari 7800 time in our future next week as well. Other than that next week looks to be another week of xenomorph annihilation for the misses and another week of furries in space for me. Until next time, best wishes and happy gaming to you and yours!

lol If you are joking you probably​ shouldn't be. Never fear though, I've had a good few months to miss having a 7800 and find out that it is one system I definitely want to have as a permanent part of my gaming center.

Wow! Second place is all yours this round my friend, I concede!

It's no worries at all masschamber. I actually found just what I was looking for on eBay this afternoon: http://www.ebay.com/itm/142334626313 They parted out the lot a bit for me and sold me just the 7800 system with power supply, composite cables, and Asteroids, Centipede, Dig Dug, and Ms. Pac-Man for what I thought was a quite reasonable $125.

I may toss in a bid on the 7800. Are there any chips or cracks in the housing?

One more score update from me! My computer's hard drive died tonight so I couldn't upload a photo with my usual higher quality point and shoot camera, but hopefully this lower resolution tablet camera picture will be fine. Quadrun (B/B Difficulty, Default Settings): 71,840

Oh wow, that was really close! I played for another hour or so today and got to 65,000 three more times but for some bizarre reason I always seem to choke and start missing my shots as soon as I hit 65,000. I think it's just nervousness making me lose focus, but I'm still really enjoying this game so I'll play at least another​ hour or so of Quadrun before this round is over.

Thanks for thinking of me masschamber! Good luck on the buy and just let me know if you happen to find anything good 7800 wise.

Sparing you all the backstory I'm once again in need of an Atari 7800 system. I'm hoping to find one in very good condition with no chips or cracks and minimal scratching on the chrome bezel. I would prefer a composite video modded system but would settle for a system with regular RF output if the system was in exceptional condition. Price wise I'm pretty flexible and am open to negotiation but I would prefer not to spend more than $120 shipped on a compsite modded system with power supply or about half that for a system with RF output. Again though I am open to negotiation based on the condition of the system being offered. Thanks for taking the time to view my ad and feel free to shoot me a PM if you happen to have a system that you think I might be interested in.

I was wondering what that was about! Every time I made it to the last wave it always said "Woita Wave" and I was curious what Woita meant. Now I know!

Thanks Kosmic! I figured as much, but hey, it never hurts to ask. I'll still be picking up a copy of Centipede TB for the 7800 in the not too distant future since I enjoyed the 2600 TB hack so much.

Out of curiosity I was wondering if anyone who owns a copy of Centipede TB could tell me if it has joystick control support as well as CX-22 trackball control support, or did the hack completely remove the option for joystick controls? I ask because it looks like a fun game for co-op play but I only own one trackball (a CX-80 that functions as a CX-22) and don't fancy shelling out the money for a second trackball, so I was curious to know if one of the players could still use a joystick while the other played with the trackball or if joystick control support had been removed entirely in Centipede TB.

Sweet! I'm looking forward to getting back into it after missing the last couple rounds. Pole Position II works for me (even though I know I'm not very good at it) though I would like to toss in a request for Xevious for a future round.

Centipede TB for Atari 2600 (B/B Difficulty, Default Settings): 500,774 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJOFBYnjYLM

I had the time to play a little more before breakfast today, so here's a score update from me. Quadrun (B/B Difficulty, Default Settings): 65,640