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Keatah

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Posts posted by Keatah

  1. Posted

    Emulation and virtual game systems are the only way to go. The burden of 30 year old hardware is ridiculous, and that hardware is prone to failure, you can't play the games without messing around with flakey hardware. With emulation you can play your games anytime, anyplace. The wife (or girlfriend) doesn't get upset with an ever-growing pile of garbage. All your games and documentation and notes and things can fit on one of these-- http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=525

     

    It truly is the most elegant solution. Emulation is here to stay!

  2. Posted

    Forget any of those one-off homebrew hack jobs. Those are basically 2600 units disassembled and re-packaged into a different housing, along with all the associated unreliabilities of half-baked solder joints and loose screws. The long-term reliability and usability has got to suck.

     

    Just go get one of those mini-EE PC's or something, http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=24&l2=164 , for example and you can game all day long. You can bring multiple systems with you, and you can trade roms with your buddies, as well as keep up-to-date with atariage happenings. The stella emulator is as good as it gets and really is the wave of the future.

  4. Posted · Edited by Keatah

    I got a-rid of this baggage just as the internet was becoming commercialized. So classic gaming groups like this weren't around. Otherwise I would have posted notification. I'll be disseminating the Apple ][ collection soon enough. I ain't gonna post it on ebay, someone will need a u-haul and 3 hours to load it. Or I just walk it to the curb.

     

    I'll post here soon with pickup dates.

  5. Posted · Edited by Keatah

    The biggest regret I ever ever had was hanging on to my extensive collection for such a long time. And building it up in the first place. I had complete docs and box and controller sets and tons of misc accessories for all the following systems.

     

    Astrocade, atari 400/800/2600/5200/1040/520, Colecovision, Vectrex, O2, Trs-80 CoCo/pocket computer, Intellivision, Sinclair, Vic20, C64, PC, Telstar, arcadia, Adam, Amiga 500/1000, Ti-99/4a.. and many more.

     

    I did save over 6000lbs. of Apple ][, ][+, //e, //c, //c+, ///, ///+ hardware, software, documentation, pictures, videos, ads, manuals, magazines, notes, and accessories, and 9200+ floppies, books, newsletters, including literally every type of hardware board and software product (with manuals) that was ever made. Minus the SayBrook 68000 accelerator card. Still need to acquire that, then I can finally trash my remaining collection. My other games collection was similarly in-depth.

     

    In retrospect putting this crap in the trash truck was the best thing since I had a ton of fun rebuilding the collection in a virtual style with emulation and the file archiving capabilities of NTFS - and a 500GB hard disk. Great! Freed from earthly physical constraints, my collection will last forever and can go anyplace. Eventually, sooner rather than later I will dissolve the Apple ][ series collection.

     

    About the only remaining thing from my console collection, aside from the perfectly preserved apple junk, are the chips from my 1st heavy sixer, We pulled out all the chips and put them in a baggie with hand lotion to stop corrosion and aging. I am impressed with how well it worked! Mind you, just a microdab, smeared on the inside of the baggie for anti-static purposes. If I remember, they are dated 1976 or 1977 or whatever. But definitely mid-70's, I'm certain. I remember doing that in 1979. I still have the big hair hippie pics of me and my sister doing it in the garage. Tools and everything. I was curious how the damned thing worked, so that’s why we took it apart. I never bothered to put it back together because I liked the pretty colors of the resistors and Chicklet-gum-shaped mylar capacitors. I thought that huge blue electrolytic capacitor was cool too. I even remember cutting up the original box and positioning the 2600 and power supply and joysticks inside so I would have something resembling a huge laptop. I made it so the top of the box would flip open and up. I would record my high scores with a Polaroid camera and paste them thumbnail style on the inside. Eventually this contraption fell apart and I used it as protective cardboard when I’d build and spray paint model airplanes. But before I trashed that rig, I had even made a portable battery pack with 3 or 4 9-volt batteries, you know, the one with the 9 and cat flying through the “0” part of the 9. And I had a 40 pound b/w portable tv. Heavy because of the batteries built into the base.. It was a ton of fun, we’d pack this stuff in the back seat of the old Chevy and my idiot parents would drive aimlessly around so I could pretend I was flying a space capsule. Star Ship or something or other was my game of choice back then.. My first space simulator experience! I kid U not.

     

    Oh I think I still have my asteroids button and Atari VideoGame Club Member Card too. The black one with the silver star. Looks sort of like a sheriff’s badge of a sort. Yes. Ha! I remember I was so proud of that I had it laminated and even took it to school with me and asked the teacher to pass it around, which she did. And she even taped it to the blackboard for the day and wrote something about videogames with an arrow pointing to it. Or something.

  6. Posted · Edited by Keatah

    One little 500GB WD Passport. Sweet. Everything right there. The lady doesn't get pissed, you don't waste money on storage, you don't get bogged down in the physical world. You always have a backup. Your collection is safe. You can transcend yourself to a higher plane of ecclesiastical experiences.. the list of advantages rolls on!

     

    I know that I will be able to play arcade gyruss at a moment's notice and not have to worry about relying on a cranky arcade unit with a misaligned crt that has burn-in and weak caps. Or a sticky joystick or rotting pressboard. Or loosely socket chips that make intermittent contact. Emulation is the way to go. Besides where would I house all this trash anyways?

     

    I ain't trying to be batty or strange or anything, just offering a unique and different way of seeing things, that's all.

     

    Imagine 80 gigs (compressed winrar) of organized stuff. encompassing Apple //e,][+,//c,//gs,][,//c+, A800, c64, 2600/52/78, astrocade, O2, vectrex, intellivision, colecovision. I have not gotten into nes snes genesis saturn 3do ps1 or ps2 yet. But will do so soon. And I still have stuff to go through for the first half of the collection.

     

    On a different note, here is why classic gaming systems are dangerous. Ever smell the new-car smell? All the VOC's and outgassings from the new plastics and such, that gets into your brain and messes with you. So avoid that if possible. Classic gaming systems are no exception, and with the used ones you are bringing in bacteria and other 'stuff' from other houses and garages. But really - think about it. Emulation is the way to really preserve these games. that *IS* after all, the main purpose of mame. The project authors will tell you so! Pc hardware and variants of it will be around far longer than a 2600 console, except for the die-hard collectors who put their units in glass boxes. Please, no lectures or comments on the reliability of error-ridden cd-rom drives or exploding pc power supplies. And even if the pc standard falls out of favor, you can then run an emulator to emulate an older o/s.. Just like dosbox running Mike Cuddy's Gyruss music program!

     

    What about the CRT radiation? especially from older monitors that don't have to conform to any sort of standard. Blasting your brain with radiation.. Dirty light.. pppffffaaaagghh!! Fergitabowtid! Lcd monitor running emulation is much much safer. And no transformer hum and magnetic fields to deal with either..

  7. Posted · Edited by Keatah

    If it is in in physical form, throw it in the the dumpter. The plastics and materials used in console construction are damaging to your health. It is also best to not game on a crt due to radiation exposure.

     

    That means a virtual collection is the only choice left available, i.e. EMULATION

    Emulation is the only way to be sure your collection is going to be around 50 years from now, and really, do you want to fill an entire basement with classic gaming crap? Especially not when you can put manuals, photos, emulators, disk imags, roms, documentation all on a usb drive.. Eh? 80 gigs babycakes!

  10. Posted

    Sort of true. The chip (gpu) is more powerful than we need right now. But the amount of memory on mainstream cards is sorely lacking. IT's the lack of memory (on the card) which causes bus texturing, and that gives the impression of the gpu getting bogged down. So many budget chips would perform excellently if we gave them enough framebuffer and texture memory. sigh...

  12. Posted

    No no no, most all of it *IS* early adopter syndrome. Paying tons of money to advance the industry. Either a voodoo II or geforce 2 gts ultra, still the same thing.

     

    Only now is the 3d graphics industry becoming worthwhile, barely. Especially if you consider the promises of the marketing campaigns back then. They promised so much, but gave so little. Marketing always makes their current offering/product seem 5 years better than it really is. Problems with drivers, cooling fans, all sorts of things had to go right to make a 3d game work.

     

    However, I do not consider all the Apple ][ stuff I have as "early adopter purchases". Most of that stuff worked far better than advertised, and the marketing and profit motivations weren't as greed oriented as today.

     

    Today, a company will simply put out a product to see if it sells. And the company is more than willing to let the public be the sucker for beta-testing any new technology. Back then in the beginning days of personal computing companies really had no idea what their products could do, and often under-advertised them. Today everything is overhyped..

     

    I suppose early adoption syndrome rears its ugly head when you buy a product that doesn't do what you expect. Simple as that. You get stuck beta-testing it.

     

    ok ok, 3d graphics boards from 3dfx were a new and unique product. I'll give you that. But I suppose what I hate and I mean really *HATE* is the word multi-media and everything in the mid 90's associated with that, like 1x or 2x cd-roms, games full of cut-scenes, games with no personality, soundcard drivers that were half-assed dos/windows hybrids, windows 95 and windows millenium, mmx and pentium and internet (web back then), none of this crap worked quite right. Full-motion video, ahem postage stamp sized video, software that took an hour to install.. pentium III with internet SIMD instructions? wtf!!? Pentium 4 and web tv and pci-tv cards. Sound card with remote controllers. Half-baked attempts to bring the pc into the living room. I hate that crap!!

  14. Posted · Edited by Keatah

    Who has it?

     

    Yep. here get a load of this early adopter *S*T*U*P*I*D*I*T*Y* -- useless garbage crapjunk hardware.

     

    Back in the heyday of the internet and multimedia and pentium & mmx I spent like thousands of dollars to try to make a game called Unreal to work correctly. When I say correctly, I mean achieving the 'experience' the advertisments and hoopla and self-induced tightly-cranked mental gyrations an OCD addict has would have you believe is possible.

     

    Let's see - I bought over the years -

     

    Riva 128, Voodoo II (2 of them in sli), the gf2 gts ultra, gf3, gf4

    awe64, sb 16 , sb live

    384mb ram, then 512mb then 1024mb

    27gb hd then 60 then 60 then 120 then 120 then another 120

    then a 266mhz p2, then 350, then 450, then 850, then 1.4 powerleap celeron,

    3 power supplies to go with it.

    20+ fans

    2 monitors

    3 mobos

    a p4 and 1gb rambus, and two mobos, and an audigy.

    Stupit Modderz-boyz cases with blackout trim and blu-litez

     

    Sure makes your brain burn, doesn't it!?!

     

    And none of that garbage performed as well as a laptop with good integrated graphics.

    As a matter of fact, look on youtube, coming soon, for my videos of me smashing and destroying all that crap.

  19. Posted

    smoke-signal compatible supercharger? yeh, ok. But that could work with a basic photocell and lightsource. The smoke would interrupt the light beam. Smoke signals are binary in nature, aren't they? yes..

     

    What about Morse Code? Could we somehow work that into the transmission medium?

     

    And for the grandprize, someone for chrissakes connect a Zoetrope and scanning photocell (gear driven by the rotating drum) to read a ups-style moving barcode (stored in each frame of the zoetrope).. I would estimate we could get about 20 kbytes with a setup like that. yehbaby!

  20. Posted

    Alright, Took a supercharger tape and put it into mp3 format, sent it to ipod. From the Ipod I sent to one of those kidz am broadcaster radio kits from radioshack. Received it with my crystal radio, sent it back to the pc through soundcard input. Transfered it to another pc in a trailerpark with satellite broadband, had my buddy there burn it to cd, sent it to my sisters place where she copied back to cassette and sent it back to me, played it and it worked good enough!! Impossible!!

     

    Someone top that!!

  25. Posted

    What I would have liked to see would have been cartridge slots on the Apple II series, I acutally plugged in a few atari 2600 cartridges into the expansion slots on my first Apple ][+ ... Yessir, I actually did that. They fit perfectly. Of course I didn't turn the system on. But it sure as hell looked cool.

     

    I also heard the // series was used as a development platform for many 2600 games?? True?

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