Csonicgo

Mario Kart 8, Game & Wario, and NintendoLand are amazing party games. That's all my friends and I play now, and use a PC for everything else. When Smash and Hyrule Warriors comes out, that'll get a ton of play at the house, too. I'm gonna get Wii U Party this week, but I really want to play Mario Party 10 already.

I'd buy one in a heartbeat.

I really cringed watching this video, but I'm not going to take this from a cloud-yelling perspective. I think that it's showing an underlying problem with anything old, even if presented as new to them, to a child these days -- is seen with scorn rather than admiration and wonder. It seems to be a side effect of technology and the "User Experience" - Computers didn't start off as appliances, but now they're seen to be as disposable as a washing machine (and in some cases, used as long as one, facilitating any repairman's job), so if the refrigerator doesn't have an ice maker, or the computer doesn't have a GUI with easy-to-use interface, then it's rarely used, and seen as "worthless", as one of the older kids said in that video. I was afraid this stuff would happen to the new generation, since mainstream technology has been nothing but handholding. Not saying that's bad, but you can't help but draw parallels to other things that aren't even based on technology. If it requires a modicum of effort, it's not worth it to that person, so it has no value, even though we see it as valuable because we took the effort to learn how to use it and learn why it's important. http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/ This blog article has a funny take on this:

To be honest the Pentium Pro did start a lot of conventions we still have today: a "RISC style" CISC processor, conditional moves to complement the conditional jumps, Out-of-Order Execution, and 36-bit PAE. However, it sucked when it came to new features that had to be turned on manually with programs like FASTVID for Quake and Doom, and it was slower than a Pentium with 16-bit code, which still dominated the industry at that time. Personally, I've always liked the later P5s, such as the Pentium MMX, when it came to DOS programs, but the Pentium Pro is what started the ball rolling that gave us the new Core series. Now if this lot were Pentium 4 processors, I'd totally be in agreement with smelting them, that is, if they aren't already melted from the insane temps they had.

Yep, those guys! It would be cool to have seen a texture-mapped maze in a 2600 game, but the framerate was so terrible that it just wasn't that feasible to make into a game (unless you have a lot of patience). Edit: Since I sadly worked with raycasters, I'll give some "mansplaining" insight: The tradeoff of raycasters is speed vs memory. Basically, the less memory you have, the more real-time procedural work you will have to do, which slows the performance down dramatically. However, if you have enough memory, you can generate fixed procedures based on the viewpoint (and the resolution of the viewpoint) and keep the memory offsets stored, thus speeding up rendering. Basically, a simple function-based LUT for each column slice you have. That's going to be a Herculean effort to fit in VCS RAM, if it were even possible to generate these at all - it'd probably be best to statically set them in the code.

Since my browser is being wonky and won't show all replies: There was a crude raycaster in the works by the Ebivision guys, and all that I saw of it was an old Quicktime movie file. I have no idea if it was even real, but he claimed to get around 5-7 fps with a 8x8 1-bit texture-mapped orthogonal maze. Not very good, but not bad either.

Someone surprise us with real-time decompression and make a real 2600 Jeopardy! game.

Apologies for the HUGE necro-bump of this, but I took a copy of this to a convention last month and no one could believe what they were playing! There were a few weird issues popping up here and there though with constant play over hours and hours, and here are the most notable ones: The intermission music is a little off in places, but this is no big deal at all, and no one really cared. Somehow after almost an hour or so of play, the game starts to roll. I'm not sure how to trigger this or why it happens, but it only happened once or twice, and everyone played all day, so not a big deal here either. On an Atari with sub-par difficulty switches (some of the 4 switchers and the jrs) the game would spontaneously reset on itself after awhile. This really isn't a bug software wise, but dang did it ruin a few games. Thankfully my Sixer has no problems with this, so that was the console of choice after running home to grab it that morning. Someone suggested to add the pac-booster that was in the Tengen versions, because as is, it's either on or off and nothing in-between. Again, not a big deal, but some were used to the "new" Ms Pacman ports, and got whooped. All in all it got more play than Super Mario Bros. and that alone made me happy.

Ms. Hack has been shown at all the gaming cons I staff ( I make sure of that). the only complaint with the ROM is that it should have been an actual cart release. It's that good.

Raspberry Pi should be getting adequate SDL2 support soon (officially) so when it does I'll be sure to compile this and test it out.

This with a superzapper wired to the select button on play would be pretty rad.

Do you guys think Tempest could be done on the 2600 given the advanced tools we have now? I talked about this a little in my status blurb the other day, but given that it's 2014 now, I'm sure someone could come up with something using that new DPC+ or something of the like... Or, is this something that should never happen, and Beamrider is about as close as it gets? Not saying that someone should make it, but just as a technical feat, if it could be done or not. I'm pretty sure that one attempt would be something like is used in the Activishawn/Juno First logos. I have no idea how much space those logos take, several of them would probably exceed the 32K limit for a traditional homebrew game. Any philosophers wanna wax on this a while? I'd love to hear what our homebrew guys have to say.

I love that music so much.

I'm attempting to compile stella on the Raspberry Pi. Looks like the debugger and the cheat functions do not compile, and gets stuck on AtariVox.cpp. Looks to be a GCC bug. Edit: nevermind. it's just "Working" now. I guess I shouldn't overclock so much.

It's pretty well known that it wasn't a very financial success. Then again, the measure for success by then was "survive the crash".