Keatah
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Posts posted by Keatah
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Cleaning up the town!! I say either do what Ian has done or get rid of all the crap.
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I have calculated the cost of a proper and complete 1st gen classic gaming collection, consisting of the following;
Atari 2600
Atari 5200
Atari 400/800/130xe
Atari 7800
Atari 520/1040st
Original MAC 128k
LISA
Odyssey^2
ColecoVision
Vectrex
Bally Astrocade
TRS-80 Model 1 & 3
TRS-80 Model 2
MicroVision (handheld game, with LCD)
PSX
Nes 8-bit
C-64
Vic-20
SMS
Apple ][ series
Aquarius
Times Sinclair
Amiga 500/1000
Ti-994A
Atari Video Pinball stand alone console
10 of your most favorite full size arcade cabinets in mint (restored as needed) condition..
A carton full of your favorite handheld L.E.D. games, with the first ones being the Mattel Auto Race, Football, Basketball, units. Perhaps Merlin and Simon and Ideal's A-Maze-A-Tron.
We might as well throw in a few others from that era, like Big Trak, Speak'n'Spell, Starbird.
Perhaps a PC or 2 for MAME and MESS. Don't forget a few terabytes of removable storage. But that's dirt cheap nowadays. You should not spend more than 2 grand on last years top-of-the-line pc's and today's hard disks. You will get a *LOT* of stuff for such a small price.
And *THE* grand total is a little over $75k.
What U say!??!?!
OMFG!!!
Erm, yehp, go figger it out! Do the math! Now I'm not going to give you exact figures as availability and pricing constantly change, but here's the framework. Don't believe me? Read on.. boys and girls.. Read on!
First of all we are going to touch on the rotting label syndrome. There is another name for this and it sounds like a bonafide disease. I forget what it was though. Anyways, you have all seen this problem with older carts, bleedthrough of the adhesive, ugly isn’t it? To counteract this you will have removed the label, removed the original adhesive, and replaced it with a non-penetrating/bleeding silicon based glue. How to do this is beyond the scope of this posting. Suffice it to say your cartridge labels must not show any sign of curling, lifting, buckling, or puckering, nor any evidence of the adhesive oozing beyond the label edges or through the label printing. The label adhesive must not have migrated into and discolored the substrate and/or caused staining of the substrate after normal aging. Any re-applied label must be squared in position with no more than +/- .4mm error in any direction. These things are from 70’s, last century for you newbies!
Your cartridge boxes must be packed in containers which are so constructed to ensure that they maintain the contents in new condition - dry, undamaged and without kinks or creases. A BOM on the outside of each container must list the contents within; specifying the number of items, mfg name, cart name, date, applicable serial numbers. A separate numbering scheme should be enlisted to identify said box and contents within a database.
Odorlessness, this is important. You cannot utilize any construction material that will outgas any VOCs or corrosive vapors that can harm paper, metal, and plastics.
A dedicated room in the house, employing correct environmental controls, shelving materials, plastic containers and display cases is required. The room portion is surprisingly cheap and will be cheaper than a completed collection of Apple ][ stuff, for example.. just get some drywall and cordon off a section of your basement. You get a bonus if you have a contractor do it professionally!
Now be sure you have original receipts, documentation, manuals, warranty cards, boxes, cables, controllers, rf switch boxes that are not corroded or tarnished. Be sure that 5200 is totally glossed and not a scratch anywhere. Not even a hairline smudge. I want you to buy a new iPod and look at the mirror finish, be sure that 5200 looks just so!
Much of your documentation will have (or soon should) go through a deacidification process to prevent fading and yellowing. Your manuals shall be free from torn pages, rust deposits on the stapled, ‘dog-ears’, loose pages, torn pages, fast food stains, blocking(stuck together pages), sandwiched food grains, etc..
There should be scanned copies of all documentation, 600dpi minimum.
The rubber on the 2600 joysticks should not be smooshy or sticky. You should have all varieties of those sticks, including the ones issued with the first heavy-sixers - the ones with the tiny metal "Atari" disc glued on top and long-throw action and pressable fire-button.
Your 5200 sticks should be 100 percent functional and the force needed to press the buttons must be equal across all 4 sticks. The Colecovision power connector should be clean and arc free, Intellivision disc pads should activate smoothly if you rolled a good-sized ballbearing around on it. Edges on boxes must not be frayed. You also need a set of useable controllers that you don't mind breaking from time to time or get mad if the dog pisses on them or something.
You should have at least 50% of the available software for computers, and almost 90% for rom-based consoles. Granted there is some stuff not available anymore, and some of the computer stuff is simply filler material, or just so bad. These are my guidelines, yours may vary, and that is O.K. Since you''ll be using emulation to pick up the slack. And you'll be using emulation to play most of this stuff, most of the time. You're not going to want to keep ripping into your pristine shrine we're in the process of making, now are we?? The next words I expect to hear from you is "NO SIR!" You might want to run emulation through an original xbox, for realism. And perhaps a laptop to take with you.
Get all the oem add-ons like Intellivoice, or perhaps the expansion chassis for a TI/99-4A and a load of expansion cards, documentation and software to go with it. Don't forget disk drives, printers, memory boards, serial and parallel interfaces, accelerator boards, speech boards, controllers, rom cards, modems. A box of spare replacement chips. Some classic TV's or monitors, preferably the same ones shown in advertisements of the day. To wrap it up, get some L.E.D. Calculators and maybe your top 5 most favorite ones. These can raise the cost by $5.00 each. Mine is unfortunately the TI-59, and it cost a microbundle to acquire some missing items.
You should also set aside $1000.00 for a good tool set, DMM/LCR meter, o'scope, soldering iron and torch, lighted magnifier.. Workbench is optional here. After all, you will need to effect repairs from time to time. You want to this with minimum hassle. You want to do this with confidence and style. Get some electronics books and *read* them! Order yourself a Mouser catalog, this should be one of the few free items! Learn Excel and Access, you will want to keep record of everything. A nice Nikon D90 will let you document your collection with a touch of elegance. You will become friends with a few electrical engineers and computer geeks from around your neighborhood. Say what?? There will always be a problem, sooner or later, that you can't solve. Just get'em some pizza and beer and you now have the next best thing to the original designers - on call, 24/7! If they have kids, get the children some bubble-blow-soap or something that shoots stuff. Instant hit!!
Surge suppressors and powerstrips are the order of the day, you're ONE-UP if you go UPS! You will be using that o'scope and power meter to check AC line conditions from time to time. Or you might use it to fix a faulty address line in that Gyruss upright. You will need that DMM to wire up custom controllers through ipac and opti-pac in that full-size MAME cabinet you built for party guests. After all, you don't want to beat on your originals, do you?
You are going to use a dearth of cleaning chemicals where appropriate, from gold contact cleaner, silver and tin contact lubricant, to plastic preservatives and protectants.. You will mostly use lint-free cotton socks and underwear (I kid you not) to dust and clean your consoles from time to time. Basic liquid hand soap and water works excellent here, as long your stuff isn't thrifted. Don't forget high-grade silicone lubricant that will not attack plastics. Remember, you will be buying premium-condition items here and they should not be so dirty as to need heavy cleaning. Directly though, you are going to buy NOS equipment, or have been lucky enough to get consoles and not have opened them yet.
The list of do's and dont's is far more extensive, but you get the idea. A complete collection is only complete when it is COMPLETE, FUNCTIONING, and MAINTAINABLE.
So get off that fat *** duff'O yours and start collect'n da'right way!
Or just go with emulation, with a total estimated cost of about $2500.00 for everything. Emulation is upgradeable, customizable, educational, compact, aesthetically pleasing, portable, affordable, durable, 'backupable', long-lived, stress free, timely, girlfriend-pleasing, and improving every month.. Hey!! What else can I say? GO EMU!
Uhm girlfriend-pleasing? Yeh, Women are generally make more common-sense then single-minded, short-sighted OCD hoarding men. Pursuing such trivialities as collecting old videogames is an annoyance to most women. They will, however, 100% approve of a ‘nice’ gentle and small collection that can fit in a Rubbermaid. Just tell them it’s for the next Tupperware party. Heheh if only they could comprehend the extent of 5x2TB emulation collection bwaaahahahaaa!! Like I say, as long as they don’t see the manly sprawl of excessive hardware they’re fine..
But, getting 100% away from the real stuff netted me a good chunk of change toward a cts-V. Now, you tell me, is that suh-weet or what? Good luck, best regards, and happy days to all!
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I love emulators. They're a lot of fun. But for real gaming, nothing beats the real hardware.So, yeah, at the moment the game cartridge population is a little out of control. Many of them reside in the subsidised housing project (cardboard boxes), but some are forced to wander homeless - huddled in little piles next to the Nintendo and on top of the TV. Plans for an affordable apartment complex (shelves) are underway, construction to begin when I accquire a Round Tuit.
-Ian
Many many game systems are sold into slavery on Ebay. Put up for sale in a meat market. Everything exposed and impersonal questions asked. Graded on appearances.
Before I wrap up this post, allow me to present to you a Round Tuit!
http://mrmom.amaonline.com/poems/roundtuit.htm
And here are some for your buddies.
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most updated emulators will display a correct game screen, you'll just have empty space on the sides.
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The fun is in putting together your own configuration!
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An experiment in data preservation.
I have an emulation collection that I believe would survive any man-made or natural EMP. It is also a time capsule. We open it about every year, mid-summer or thereabouts and update and verify everything from the drives and optical media backups as well as perform operational tests on the computers.
It consists of a honk'n lead lined steel box about 2 cubic metres in size. Though due to the +5 armour steel and lead construction(1) and internal crush-resistant trusswork(1a) it is considerably smaller inside. I didn't weigh it yet, but it takes the 5 of us to barely slide the damned thing. I want to put this a metre or so directly below or to the side of the wine cellar.
The contents consist of a 2 laptops, netbook, some controllers, various usb converters and interfaces, spare batteries, 2 folding solar panels and inverters, other power adapters, usb hard disks, box of bare hard disks, electronics tool kit, backups of the flashroms(2) used in the drives and laptop, and simple straightforward printed-on-paper documentation on how to access everything and perform troubleshooting if needed. Each of the 2 exact copies of each drive is positioned differently within the capsule, one horizontally, the other vertically(2a). Condensation and thermal protection has also been considered. A 3rd set of drives is encapsulated in a silicone material to shield against water and would survive hundreds of meters below sea-lever, we’re sure. These drives can only be run for a few minutes at a time since they have no airflow, they would take forever to re-load. It would be more cost-effective to trash them and replace them; since replacing the sealant block takes a weeks on end. So we only do incremental updates.
My personal favorite highlights consist of Intellivision, Astrocade, Atari 400/800/8-bit, Odyssey2, Trs-80 model 1,2 and 3, Colecovision, Vectrex, Microvision, Aquarius, Adam, C-64, Vic-20, 2600/5200/7800, Kim-1, Timex Sinclair, Apple-//e, ][, ][+, ///, Amiga 500/1000, Ti-99/4a, PSX, Nes 8-bit, SMS, various x86 and DosBox(3), All M.A.M.E. games, All M.E.S.S. systems and gigs of software and extras for each(4).
I personally guarantee that classic gaming and computing *WILL* live through the toughest post-apocalyptic environment you can possibly imagine, and beyond. If this one cache is destroyed, somehow, there will be other copies available. But until more funding becomes available, the stuff will reside in plastic baggies stuffed into a cardboard box that was(is) shipped cross country and overseas. The security comes from there being multiple copies at a long distance way away from the main archive. No other epoch has seen code this well protected.
This is my contribution to the emulation community.
Notes:
(1)The lead plates are intermeshed with each other and cut in such a way that that a particle on a straight trajectory will see no gaps or holes to sneak through (my crowning achievement! haha)
(1a)A Leach 2R stalls on this.
(2)I keep hearing that flashroms are only guaranteed for about 10 years data retention. Though I have yet to see some of my earlier electronics with flash memory fail.
(2a)For added protection against varying radiation angles of incidence and in the event there would be physical damage or shock.
(3)Made up of many many gigs of old-skool stuff and some modern day things too, covering all genres. Not only games, but applications too, ranging from creativity to the obscure, scientific, medical, astronomy, accounting, etc.. the list goes on.
(4)Using the Atari 800 as an example, this system's section alone is 39 something gigs and demonstrates what is included in each system's cache - being made up of book scans, rom/prom/eprom images, disk images, tape images, program listings, advertisements, programmer's notes, my own bbs files and history, several FTP websites worth of disks & docs, various emulators, pcb scans and layouts, databooks for the chips, source and binary codes for emulators and games/apps/oses (where applicable), reviews, magazine scans and text pdf's, audio and video interviews, box scans, manual scans, cheats, cartridge scans, pictures, message board dumps, prototype info, schematics, hardware projects, fpga jedec files. Also included is a misc section for files related to each specific system that doesn't fit the above categories.
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oh.... im currently selling a malfunctioning 3DO on ebay for $100k. is that too much?
That might not be enough, after all, it *is* the only one in the world that has probably failed that way.
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You should be able to render quake or doom-3 easily with this approach. I'm joining this thread late and need to think this through. But basically you'd build up a "frame" in the "frame-buffer" in the cart, the tia could simply read it and dump it to the screen. Or you could put code into that "frame-buffer" and the tia would execute that code and build the picture line-by-line. The 6507 would have little to nothing to do with game logic or anything else.
Just like having super-powrful co-processor in the cart. There is no reason why you couldn't run windows xp or any modern o/s on the 2600 this way. You'd need to work in low resolution relative to the os though.
Make sense ?? I mean they did this with pitfall II's sound, didn't they?
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Gyruss and I, Robot on M.A.M.E, Xevious-3d on ePSXe, and I'm working on setting-up Vectrex in M.E.S.S.I robot BARF ON THE LAKE (Pizza on the lake mtka ) had a I robot are you painting or playing the game..
I, Robot - the game portion. Unless there is some super-sophisticated high-society thing in the painting option that I ain't seeing, I'll never mess with it. It seems pointless. Though I do like the game part, after all it was the first raster-based 3d hardware-accelerated videogame I ever played. Unless you count Tempest and its mathbox processor.
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I dont want to start...I dont really want to think about it......I should of never started collecting.Id be a Millionaire!
Collecting is a recognized psychiatric disease. Compulsive hoarding, only organized and 'justified'. Many collectors have simple lives and live in hellholes; as the disease causes you to behave in ways that are not conducive to maneuvering through society in a beneficial (to yourself) manner.
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Gyruss and I, Robot on M.A.M.E, Xevious-3d on ePSXe, and I'm working on setting-up Vectrex in M.E.S.S.
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Laptops *+are+* the ultimate protable gaming systems. Cheap, readily available, versatile, and the most important thing - they run emulators. Nuff saidWe're actually talking about netbooks in particular, rather than general laptops.
..ahh yes of course, big laptop, small laptop, same difference. Sounds like someone just *had* to invent a new word for the dictionary!
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There needs to be NTSC noise and waviness and more general imperfections here.
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This is almost one of those 'ineffable' qualities missing from emulated systems vs. the real thing. This is a milestone step towards 'perfect emulation'. Not only are we emulating the discerete logic chips, the cpus, sound synthesizer chips, LC networks, ladder d/a converters, ram, rom, i/o these days we are taking the next step in simulating the output devices. I cannot emphasize enough that we make this as modular as possible so that programmers can implement this in their emulators. It is also important to make as many parameters adjustable. Afterall, my unearthly beautiful AFFS LCD's are probably of a different mfg, that yours is. And yours most likely has a different crystal shape or arrangement (hahah phospohor mask) than that of my girlfriend's monitors. And my friend's 1600x1200 classic UXGA is different than your kid's laptop, which might be a 1440x900 WXGA+ .. Perhaps somebody has a an S-PVA or MVA type.. so you see, tweakability is paramount! And as a side bonus, it would be nice to have a crt.ini profile file that we could post or exchange amongst the user forums. After all, I would want to share my blazing Sony Trinitron aperture grille (O'led enhanced!!) with all of the emulation community! Especially since it would have hundreds of hours of tweaking behind it. So you see.. This is defnitely
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Nice work. Yar's looks very CRT-like.When you use openGL as a renderer, maybe you could add barrel distortion effects too, as old crt's are curved.
Yes, I thought about this too! It's not in there yet, but it's a good idea for a future release. I think some GL optimization is required first (it can really chug at 4x size). I also considered a tube reflection, as one might see on the curved glass surface.
I'm not to worried about a tube reflection, you can always get glare-free viewing by playing with your orientation with respect to the other lights in the room. But if you want, you can overlay a .png file or something as the reflected image.
What is more important, to me, is somehow simulating the crt electrical noise. The pictures on the the old tubes were never really stable like today's lcd monitors. There was some random fuzziness always present. and you could see it by looking real close. there was always some tiny static and shakiness in the image.
I have seen some of the mame filters and only a few look halfway good. It is nowhere near enough to just round the edges, you have to round them due to bleeding and glowing.
Everybody remembers playing these games on crappy crts. Some of us had good ones, some not so good. It is important to allow us to adjust the parameters based on what tv we had. It would be too much of a hassle to emulate all the types of tv tubes, but not much of a hassle to put in adjustable controls. Fuzziness, bleed, noise, stability, convergence, mis-convergence, saturation, brightness, luminance, chroma, type of phosphor mask, persistence, aperture grille. etc.. etc..
Someone previously said vector emulation pales in comparison to the real thing. Sure that's probably true, bit it *is* getting better. And yes, they have made a basic attempt at emulating phosphor glow too!
look at these -
http://xout.blackened-interactive.com/Gravitron.html
http://wiebo.wordpress.com/my-pc-games/
http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/grid/wars.htm
and then there's this -
http://typhoon.kuto.de/shots.html
Not really emulation related or anything, but I do like the openGL glow effects. So it can be done to a certain extent.
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On a slightly different related note, what would be the lowest spec computer I could use to play stella on and still get a perfect 60fps? Can this be achieved with the ISA bus? And would stella for windows work on 386 or 486?
Of course my main 2600 emu computer is a p4m1.73+2gbram855graphics, erm yeh that sounds about right..!
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Laptops *+are+* the ultimate protable gaming systems. Cheap, readily available, versatile, and the most important thing - they run emulators. Nuff said
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Uh, can't you be both a collector and a gamer?I suppose you could. It seems though the reason for collecting is for the sake of amassing a pile of stuff or something, whatever it is. It's the collecting part that is the problem, hoarders, junk collectors, OCD'ers. Collecting seems to serve some strange need or something. Psychiatrists would tell you collecting is a disease, especially when you get all obsessed with obtaining something 'useless'. The term 'collector' when applied in the context of getting a-lot-of-something, is just a nice way of saying you're a hoarder.
Hoarders often go through great lengths to convince themselves and others that what they are 'collecting' is valuable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collyer_brothers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding
It doesn't matter how nice and spit polished your collection is, it is still hoarding! "Collecting" is the politically correct word for ocd hoarding or pack ratting, or junk collecting. Sorry..
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Stephena stephena stephena, what are we going to do with you? Another update? This is just like having your own personal programmer available 24/7.. muchas gracias!
now, about the previous posts about the reset button problem
I have noted this too. However, perhaps the "problem" is related to pressing the fire button of the P0/P1 joystick like in "adventures of tron", you need to press the fire button of the other joystick. I assume this is a cartridge 'issue' or 'just the way it was written', the game rom .. not stella. Is this what were dealing with? Or are there roms that work on a real 2600, but won't 'reset' on the emu? uhm did that make sense?
But tell us the names of the games and we'll look into this!
Hey one other thing is there any advantage to getting the 64bit version of stella? Any reason at all?
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Yeh some folks need to be abble to fondle the hardware and touch the cartridges and listen to the noise it makes when inserted. I propose that could happen with any other type of 'classic' gaming hardware or old electronics. It is indeed a separate fetish and has nothing to do with gameplay mechanics or 'hi-scores' or tricks or timing.
And easy way to discern the difference is by firing up an emulator and playing the game, does it 'take-you-back' right away? If so then you've always been a true gamer. If not, then you're a collector. And gaming is secondary. You can re-train youself to get that feeling again by playing with baseball cards or hotwheels or some other so-called collectable.
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There is nothing interesting or surprising about it.. Emulation will grow in popularity if not by choice then by necessity - for the reason I previously stated about about degrading hardware.Disagree. I mean, logically, this *should* be the reason, but I think you're making a cause for correllation error here.
I think the actual reason emulation is gaining in popularity is two-fold:
Emulators have improved.
i/o solutions for systems running emulation have improved.
When emulation FIRST started coming on the scene, flight-sticks and d-pads through gameports on PCs or a keyboard were the only methods of I/O for emulation users - and they SUCKED. These games were not generally well suited to either analog sticks or d-pads, and I/O for the PC in general was never a real strong suit of the platform, anyhow - especially "gaming" I/O.
People saw an emulator, got excited, loaded it all up, found some ROMs, and all but the most dedicated went, "This SUCKS" and gave up. Among the rest, they remained excited and the majority went, "This SUCKS" - and headed to eBay to start putting together REAL hardware to relive their memories. The minority went, "I think we can make this emulation thing better", and kept chipping away.
Now... a good 15+ years later, we've got some good hardware alternatives to mimic the original hardware I/O, we've got more processing power on our PHONES than those original emulation PCs had on the highest end PC, and we've got dedicated programmers who've been refining and porting emulation to every conceivable platform known to man.
We've also got communities like AtariAge that are well established where you can get some info and find some resources, rather than reinventing the wheel for yourself.
So, it isn't just degrading hardware... if it were, the hardware would be far more rare on eBay, and far more expensive. It is about emulation maturing and becoming viable and actually being EASIER to deal with than the real stuff.
I absolutely agree! I remember trying to play Dragster on Activision's Atari 2600 ActionPack with my CH Flightstick! OMG! What a disaster. And it ran in windows 3.1, not fullscreen either.. It ran *almost* full speed on my 486 dx2/50. ALMOST. The game behavior was solid and true, but the presentation was just horrible. The first attempts at emulation were severely limited by the platform and I/O devices. The first 'cool' emulators I remember playing with were DASA, a forerunner to mame I think, written by Dave Spicer. And the Digital Eclipse offerings of the late 90's, featuring Sinstar, Bubbles, Robotron, Defender, Defender II, and Joust - Courtesy of Jeff Vavasour. This was the first 'real' commercial product worth getting. It emulated sound *AND* graphics 100%. Many 'emulators' prior to this often 'pasted-in' .wav files for sound effects. And others used sprites generated by windows as oppsed to pixel-perfect scanline-accurate works like M.A.M.E. and Stella and Atari800-2.1.0-winsdl. With the latter being simply the best ntsc repesentation I have seen. I swear it makes your hi-def LCD go back to 70's stoopid-skool. And some 'emulators' had the audacity to spew forth classic games that were nothing more than re-writes, like Microsoft Arcade. Those sucked.
The first time I got the feeling emulation would begin to work and work well was when Mike Cuddy's Gyruss sound emulator came to pass. This was a dos program that just played the audio soundtrack from Gyruss. It actually emulated the 5 AY-3-8910 chips and the DAC to go with them. This was just unreal!! I knew if that could be done in real-time, it was only a stone's throw for other systems and games.
And I definitely second the 'EASIER' part too. When I need to move my collection, docs, box, scans, cartridges, tapes, disks, consoles, i/o devices, displays, controllers, drives, add-on peripherals, audio outputs, power supplys, photos, cables, storage mediums, and everything else - I just toss it all into the laptop bag and away I go! Imagine doing that to a real live space-consuming physical collection? You'd be there for days organizing it and rearranging it! Not to mention walking on pins and needles making sure you don't scuff up the uber-rare box you paid $199.95 for. Emulation let's me keep like 20 different systems, fully documented from advertising brochures to technical memory maps, with all the associated software, right in one little bag!
Improvements in emulation are coming about because people want to do this, they want to make all the games work on modern hardware with good failthfulness-to-the-original. Why do they want to do this? Because it is more convenient than maintaining original hardware, and it is a whole lot more versatile and just plain cool! Heck, back in the 80's I so badly wanted to run games from multiple systems on one 'box', that box being either the Apple ][ or perhaps a PC or a custom-built emu-box of a sort. I kept hoping that some company would come up with a card that would plug into an expansion slot. And on this card would be all the circuitry from all the games I knew and loved. And I could call this up with a simple menu.. I always presented my ideas and concepts to those who knew more than a 5 year old kid, but I was quickly dismissed. The primary reason being the complexity of the software, not the know how. I was told we needed to have a machine that ungodly amounts of memory and the ability to get at it quickly. And that you'd need a team of hardware and software engineers to make it all work. I wanted Mr. Wozniak and Mr. Jobs to put this together in their garage!!
I thought I came across the holy-grail of emulation with the Amiga. I got all excitied and forced my gramma to buy me one of those things. Costed like 2000.00 with all the peripherals. And I kept waiting and waiting for emulation to happen. It didn't. Ironic! Now I emulate the Amiga.. Oh well..
And low and behold! look what we have today! hundreds of engineers designing the graphics chips and mobos and cpus of modern pc's, and a software team of thousands; writing the modern oses we know as Windows and Mac OSX. It probably took a comittee of thousands just to approve some of the standards that define the framework into which elements of the modern pc fit into! USB, OpenGL, Windows, SATA, IDE, DirectX, DirectSound, GTL+ databus on P4, Win/G, SDL, AGP, PCI, PCI-E, C++, X86, the list goes on and on..!
Once enough of the 'critical' technologies came to the market, the idea of faster and more modular pc's came to pass. Then, once these modules became polished and finished, our emu programmers started digging into them to see what could be done.
The emulator programmer is but one tiny (but important) part in the scheme of things. He/she is also the end link in the system. The one that orchestrates all of elements to perform the final piece. Everytime we post feedback and bug reports about emulators we are critiquing the conductor's ability to synchronize all the components. Sometimes the components themselves need to be changed. Sometimes the author needs to use the tools differently.
But in the end, make no mistake about it, emulation is here to stay! Popularity will continue to grow. The emulators will be refined. And the purists will soon see the benefits of a virtual collection.
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So, it isn't just degrading hardware... if it were, the hardware would be far more rare on eBay, and far more expensive. It is about emulation maturing and becoming viable and actually being EASIER to deal with than the real stuff.I'm sorry, I have to dispute that. Here's what I had to go through to get 5200 emulation going:
1) Download Atari800MacX
2) Open .DMG file
3) Copy Files to Drive
4) Download ROMs and .ATRs
5) Double-click ROMS and/or .ATRs to make them run.
Now, compare that to the simple process I went through to get a real 5200 up and running:
1) Decide whether to get 2-port or 4-port model.
2) Find 2-port model for cheap price at random Internet storefront.
3) Receive broken 2-port model; find out vendor won't take a return.
4) Look again. Find one on eBay. Bid it up and buy it.
5) Receive broken 2-port model. Find out seller won't do anything about it.
6) Try again. Find one on Shopgoodwill.com -- boxed, with boxed games. Buy it.
7) Receive 2-port model that turns on, but despite having 7 controllers from the various purchases, not one of them works, so who knows if the system works?
8 ) Order gold controller from Best Electronics
9) Try gold controller. Find out it sort of works with some games, while others don't work as well. For example, there's no "down" direction in Blueprint.
10) Buy 5200 diagnostic cart and 2-port loopback board.
11) Use above to calibrate the ports to perfection. But look -- the OS chip is bad! Swap with one from broken console. Now OS is OK.
12) Now try out the gold controller. Still not quite right.
13) Use diagnostic cart and loopback board to make the system slightly out of calibration.
14) Try controller again. It now works on all games!
See how easy that was?
(Of course, I'd not trade my 5200, gold controllers, trak-ball controllers, and boxed games for anything. But it was starting to seem like the 5200 was a hobby all by itself!
)I hope this message is extreme sarcasm, because steps 1-5 are a hell of a lot easier and can be done anytime anyplace at little to no cost.
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you're gonna need to read about love-shys (brian gilmartin), and take a few pointers about becoming a man from david deangelo. If that don't work the only thing remaining is a good beating! Unfortunately..
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Little stich gonna lose your games? daddy gonna take them away? you got problems and need your ass kicked!
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Controlling our collections in the age of emulators
in Classic Console Discussion
Posted
I just threw out one more A800 console. The keys were ever so slightly yellowed AND they were falling off. It was certainly beyond cost-effective & timely repair. Too many little things wrong with it.
So yeh! Emulation it is!