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JeffVav

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Everything posted by JeffVav

  1. 100% true. We were the devs on the Rare Replay emulation and the only reason that line was originally there was because, basically, back in the day (and this is still essentially the model for consoles today) Nintendo licenced the game, and did the manufacturing of the carts, etc. Without that physical process of bringing the game to retail on the NES, Nintendo is out of the equation, and the copyright owner has no longer has any business using their trademark. We even had to replace the letters you collect that spell "NINTENDO" in RC Pro Am with "CHAMPION" for the same reason: the game was Rare's but Nintendo owns the trademark to their name and gets to determine who uses it, when, and how.
  2. Actually, Dark Chambers and Solaris do have licensing issues. Take a look at the fine print on the box scans in AtariAge. Not sure how AtGames resolved the issue, but, like Activision, whatever they managed to do doesn't extend to Atari's console/desktop iterations.
  3. Afraid not. The car has more than 8 directions it can go in so a d-pad implementation wouldn't give you the full range.
  4. 1977 was when the Atari 2600 debuted. Didn't feel like a crash to me.
  5. Math Gran Prix was bought by Tommo Inc. There is a thread about it (albeit incorrectly titled): http://atariage.com/forums/topic/214738-math-gran-prix-bought-by-humongous/ Edit to add: I cannot answer the "why".
  6. My experience is that companies really don't like licensing their content to someone else to publish on platforms that they themselves publish to. They'd rather sit on it on the chance that they might want to do something themselves some day, no matter how unlikely. e.g. I would bet Activision licensed to AtGames for the Flashback hardware because plug n' play hardware is not a space that Activision is in, but they would very likely not licence to Atari to publish to PS4/XB1/Switch/PC because that's a space they are in. Same would likely be the case for WB. e.g. if they'd licensed the games out, it may have blocked their idea to use them in Lego Dimensions, or for the Ready Player One promotion, etc. It's also a Catch-22 to approach any competing publisher about licensing their IP that they didn't seem to care about, because as soon as you express interest, they wonder what you know about its value that they don't, and take a second look and/or they start asking around internally whether they might do something with it and the answer they get is "maybe?", which stalls the whole thing. The best chance of getting an Atari Games compilation would be to lobby WB themselves. Anyway, homebrews, maybe, since the author might be more amenable, but other publishers' IP is almost certainly a no-go. And, unfortunately, Battlezone is also legally "another publisher's IP" at this point. Just to show how strict that can be, notice how Math Gran Prix was removed from Atari's Greatest Hits on iOS after Atari sold it. (As a matter of public record, since it was part of the bankruptcy proceedings in 2013, Battlezone had a grandfather clause in its sale to Rebellion, but it was limited only to products that had previously shipped, which is why it stayed on iOS but never appeared anywhere else. Math Gran Prix didn't have that grandfathering clause and so it was out immediately.)
  7. Like I said, I don't think licensed games are likely. We can't even assume the licences AtGames secured necessarily extend to a console/PC context. For example, I'm quite certain the Activision licences would not. If Atari Games titles were published, it'd undoubtedly be WB doing the publishing, not Atari. Edit to add: Adventure II is already in Volume 3.
  8. This is not a stealth marketing research thread, nor any form of official inquiry, just more of a personal curiosity: For those who've been following the Atari Flashback Classics Volumes the past couple years, short of licensing third party content (Pitfall!, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Superman, etc.), is there anything you think would merit a Volume 4 of Atari Flashback Classics? 150 games is a lot of games, and covers pretty well all the mainstream brand-recognition titles. Volume 3 was already getting a bit more into hardcore collector territory. So, thinking about what's not been highlighted in Atari's legacy yet, I figure there's probably 7800, Lynx, Jaguar, some 400/800 games that didn't have 5200 equivalents, and a dozen or so more of the arcade games (mainly '70s, but a few later ones like Food Fight, Quantum, maybe Missile Command II). Thoughts?
  9. There is. You just need to follow us (@CodeMystics) on Twitter. This one is minor. There was a potential crash if you launched and aborted multiple 5200 games in a session. Plus the direction buttons now do something useful in 5200 Super Breakout and 5200 Missile Command. The update before that was more involved: https://twitter.com/CodeMystics/status/1093024130981552130
  10. Feeling a little guilty hijacking the topic but AFAIK digital bros. bought Pipeworks only, not all of Foundation 9. They acquired Pipeworks in 2014. F9 shuttered in 2016 after selling off or shuttering all the remaining studios. Backbone was shut down. Griptonite was sold to Glu. Double Helix (Shiny and The Collective) went to Amazon. Sumo bought its own freedom. And it even sold the name Digital Eclipse to Other Ocean. After that there was nothing left of F9 to sell save for some boxes. It doesn't seem likely anyone would've bought F9 itself in 2016.
  11. Technically Backbone Entertainment. They'd retired the Digital Eclipse name by then. I left the company before that one was complete, but I'm quite certain those assets were lost with the demise of the Vancouver studio in 2009. Certainly there was no trace of them by the time Code Mystics was revisiting Frogger in 2013. (Side note: we tried to buy what was left of the Digital Eclipse code archives when the parent company Foundation 9 dissolved in 2015, but they were already long gone to the landfill. The only thing left was the name itself, which Other Ocean acquired and started publishing under as a label in 2015.)
  12. Though the original Frogger music is gone for good for the rights issues you mention, Code Mystics actually worked with Konami to produce a new "official" Frogger back in 2013, with replacement music tracks (but identical game play). The cabinet art suffered from a similar problem, so new cabinet art was also created at that time. http://www.codemystics.com/products.shtml?22if anyone is curious.
  13. It doesn't matter who the licence goes to, lawyers get involved, so they have to lift a finger and there's still some level of opportunity cost by way of the lawyers' fees. With the disclaimer that I have no special knowledge on this, it's not uncommon that companies are more willing to licence things to third parties for markets they aren't already into themselves than to markets they do. e.g. they might licence their games to AtGames because they don't make plug n' play TV devices, but they mightn't, say, licence their 2600 games to Atari because they do ship directly on any platform that Atari would ship to (console, desktop, mobile). Presumably they don't licence out work they can do themselves, but can't justify the cost-benefit of doing it themselves all the same. On that theory, for example, Hallmark has a better chance of making a Pitfall Harry Christmas ornament than Atari does of getting Pitfall! added to Atari Vault as DLC.
  14. Atari Flashback Classics uses the touchscreen to simulate trackballs and spinners/rollers, complete with inertia.
  15. There are three different control schemes simultaneously available. The one you are expecting is on the D-pad buttons. Left turns the car left, right turns it right. The analogue stick works more like the Time Pilot controls. The car will seek the direction you point the stick in. It does it by turning the wheel for you, as it were, in the direction that's less distance. As an emulation everything has to map back to the original wheel. Finally there's the touch control steering wheel in portable mode. Drag left or right to turn the steering wheel left or right. The first and last options have sensitivity settings under the control options. Personally I like the touch controls best for trackball and roller games (Centipede, Tempest, Major Havoc) and the stick control slightly better for driving games. Once you get used to it you can be very precise driving with the stick.
  16. Not yet. Tempest was a bit unique because of how vectors scale. It is our intention to add portrait mode to Tempest in a patch though.
  17. Me? I ran the Vancouver studio where the emulation teams were based, which is what became Code Mystics. We did a lot of colabs with Emeryville on Game Boy stuff though. Both Emeryville and Vancouver did Game Boy.
  18. 32 arcade games. Games list here: http://www.codemystics.com/products.shtml?59
  19. Yes and yes. Edit to add: it does have scanline effects, but they're turned off in these screenshots because scanline effects don't look good when browsers scale the images.
  20. There are two ways to control the Atari 5200 keypad: 1. You can assign any controller button to any Atari 5200 keypad button as a dedicated function. 2. You can summon an on-screen Atari 5200 keypad with the right stick, highlight the button you want, and activate it. The touchpad in Atari 5200 games mimics the Trak-Ball.
  21. ["Off Topic" Alert] Yeah, mobile. That would be my "when allowed" caveat. Patching console and Steam doesn't have as much of a barrier to third party developers (i.e. those not in control of the account) as patching mobile. But beyond that, I think Atari's Greatest Hits was built for iOS 5, before Atari's 2012-2013 bankruptcy? At this point iOS requirements and platforms have moved so far on that -- if it weren't for the need for full-on touch screen support* -- in many ways it'd be easier to port AFC to iOS than "patch" AGH to the current requirements and feature set. We're still waiting to find out what Atari wants to do about it. Meanwhile, on the Activision side, it doesn't look like the company that sees the kind of revenue they do from Call of Duty saw much value in advancing Activision Anthology or Lost Treasures of Infocom even beyond the 32-bit barrier. (*don't worry: AFC does support touch screen on devices that have touch screen, but it expects you to at least have a D-pad, stick, and buttons and relegates only things that make sense to touch screen -- i.e. things where touch screen would be an improvement over physical sticks and buttons, such as trackball and driving controllers... basically anything that used the touchpad on PS4.)
  22. Hey, we made an entire Vita version "for fun". We've been known to issue patches on our various games (when allowed) in response to fan requests and even to provide improvements no one ever expected. We're not just in it for the money. But if anyone wants to make a hardware spinner or trackball for the PS4 that doesn't require any patching, the Dualshock 4 touch pad is directly mapped to the trackball/spinner/wheel etc. behaviour, so a controller that mimicked that would get the job done.
  23. The story is that we at Code Mystics have always been a fan of the Vita and appreciative of the Vita community, and when we had a client unexpectedly cancel a project we were working on, our staff decided to bring AFC to Vita "for fun" while we waited for them to be reallocated. (They included a number of people who had worked on AFC for the Switch.) When it was fairly far along, we showed it to Atari. We know the Vita is in its twilight but on the chance we could get it released, we considered it a "parting gift" to the community. "One more for the road," as it were. (Get it? Because the Vita can be taken on the road... ) We'll see where Atari takes it from here...
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