Keatah

Useless indeed. But when I was a kid I liked the orderly arrangement of ICs on those monster-sized boards - in that special-ed kinda way you know? It was all so very futuristic and me and my buddies would count the pins on the parts for fun!

SFS Walletsize!

Apples didn't even have a graphics chip. Let alone hardware sprites. They had software shape tables as a firmware function, software sprites if you will..

To answer this question directly - Good.

Well if it isn't a multi-million dollar production. And if it's affordable.. Then I'm all for it. $100 for a rom isn't. And you need 2 accounts to purchase it.

Yes it feels, looks, and sounds sticky & tacky. Slow even. Lax programming encouraged by the extra functionality of custom chips. A custom chip feature can't be optimal for every use case, but a custom written program routine can be. Chip features set in silicon and can't be adapted to the moment, whereas a program can. And I don't believe the programmer(s) put in the necessary effort from the ground up. Relied on those inbuilt features too much. I would guess that a buttery-smooth Asteroids version could be made for the 8-bit machines.. It was done on the Apple II several times and it doesn't even have a graphics chip to begin with. And there's the Asteroids emulator for the 8-bit. It struggles to play fast and smooth. But it's somewhat better. And it uses the arcade roms. Such an emulator on a 6502 is a technical achievement if nothing else.

The thing with the VCS is that it does so much with so little. The console hardware is simplistic. A cut-down 6502/6507, 128bytes RAM, no ROM, and limited signals to the cartridge port. It's basically the ROM interacting with the processor and scratch-pad-sized memory. Nothing else to get in the way. Many challenges in VCS games come from speed and reaction times. The VCS'es bare-metal programming style is good at enforcing a solid 30 or 60 FPS. Everything is based around the CRT's electron beam scanning left to right. No slowdowns like framebuffer based computers - where programmers always push the limit of what the processor can do at expense of smoothness in gameplay. This extends to ARM games too.

Wait a minute! This Circus Convoy costs $100 for just the ROM. Holy moly! My original assumption about past developers riding high on laurels and coattails is correct after all. Unless I'm missing something?

Intel was running rather efficient with the Pentium III, but certainly not with the Pentium IV. The industry wouldn't really take note till the Banias & Dothan cores came out, Pentium-m for the Centrino mobile platform. Mixes of P3/P4 features. 2004 era.

Never thought it important to have the bus = cpu speed. I mean sure there were some performance advantages and such, but it was untenable long-term. I used to be a flunky for clock speed. Thankfully that stopped with the Pentium IV. Worst processor in the Intel lineup. Especially with the early requirements (thanks to legal agreements) that RAMBUS be used exclusively. Also untenable long-term. Today I don't even look at processor specifications beyond the Generation number, like 8th gen or 11th gen. I'll consider the sub-branding like i7 or i9 and take solace that later and higher is better.

Generally yes it is. If I was interested and bidding I'd have put down $600. Maybe $650.

It did not.. It didn't have consumer-marketing behind it. And it ran 8/16-bit code slower than the Pentium., clock for clock. P-II had a huge consumer push with the all-then-important MMX. And it was affordable at $775 introductory price. I was smart and waited till first drop, and paid $655 for it! I thought about getting the DX-50. But the EISA system I was eyeing from Gateway 2000 was too expensive at $3,200. I had to settle for the DX-2/50 at about $2,200 give or take. Either way I was thoroughly impressed and blown away by the article I read in Byte about clock-doubling. Never heard such an idea. This was sophisticated stuff. And since most of my uses back then didn't involve continual disk-access the slower bus wouldn't bother me. 25MHz was tons faster than the Amiga & Apple II I was beating on at the time. https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1992-05

Mostly yes. And a good thing too because some of my floppies are rotted out. In the early BBS era there were some select downloadable upgrades or binary patches for 3rd-party Apple II software. Novation Com-Ware was one. BBS doors and modules and the next version (of BBS software) was another. Anyhow..that predated the PC shareware craze by a good 5 years at least. But for-sale digital goods as we know them today. Pay online and then download or stream? I don't recall any.

I have my own collection of digital goods dating back to the mid and late 1970's. It's the only one of its kind in the world. Pretty sure of that. And while it may mean little or nothing to someone else, it sure means a lot to me.

The computer you always wanted to build but didn't. Not long after the Pentium became popular there was the PentiumPro. I was totally taken with the magical idea of out-of-order execution, and thought it the epitome of "anything computers". It was the mid-late 1990's and I was still beating a 486, overloading the cardcage, hooking up 3 hard disks, and doublespacing them into like 9 drives. All the while dreaming about building a super-uber mathematical graphics powerhouse around the PentiumPro. 200MHz was unheard of and the chip itself was monstersized. It even had onboard cache and a real FPU. I spent weeks and months collecting the specs and diagrams and datasheets. Adding up the prices to a towering $4000+ or more. 256MB RAM an incredible 4MB graphics board, new PCI bus.. The VS440FX motherboard - solid, intel, conservative. Alas this computer never saw the light of day, not even in present times. I have most all the parts and such, but just never assembled it. In the very late 90's I did build a Pentium II 266MHz, which was better spec'd and w/MMX too. Since I've got the parts for the P-Pro machine I still occasionally look fondly on it and always wonder if it would have become a nostalgic machine I'd have treasured today, like my original 486. Tough to say. So what system(s) did you always want to build out but never did?

It is, a lot of hoop jumping.. Too much for any of these renaissance games. So much other material readily available.

480 games takes a LOT of power to run. Not surprised!

Anything including and past rev K is the better board.

These days I'd expect it to top $800 or more if we can get a proper bidding war going.

What's the title then? Was it a kilobaud publication?

Emulation of the MacOS.. I've not heard of anyone (first-hand) getting Applesauce going that way. The internet has anecdotal information saying so, but that's worlds apart from doing it for real.

Yes I can see that. These days I'm not really a purist or datecode chaser. I'm interested in capturing the experience like I had back in the day and bringing it forward - sometimes with reliability enhancements and perhaps in altogether new formfactors via emulation on SFF PC. Like the childhood dream of an All-In-One machine. The TurboChameleon cart would have interested me back in the day. But not so much today. BITD my buddies and I would've been looking for ways to practically use it to bring the platform into the modern era. Today I just use modern hardware and enjoy my Apple II (and other vintage material) for what it is. On FPGA. Yes I believe they will be necessary at some point and integral to keeping the old machines in working order. Especially for replacement parts. For daily use I still lean toward software emulation and all the side goodies it offers.