rasty

Your skills are admirable.. I definitely can't progress since I rescued Ashley! I hope A-VCS-tec Challenge will not be so hard...! Regards! Rasty.-

Humm I actually happen to like the asteroids section better.. what instead really irritates me is the beasties always moving around while I try to beam them up! I guess Cosmic Ark is a game that could be played by 2 players alternating at the asteroids and surface screens. How's up for a game? Regards! Rasty.-

Speaking of which, I find it really hard to do such endurance marathons.. I do have a few games I can play for hours on the 2600, but I usually give up after 1h. I still can't understand how did they do endurance runs of 24h or so back in the day... Regards! Rasty.-

Yes, any posts made from about 1am (CST) this morning to about 11am (CST) did not make the transition. At 1am we backed up the forum database, copied it to the new server, and started the conversion process. Sorry for the inconvenience, it was either that or keeping the forums offline for 10+ hours. I did post about it, but not really in enough time for everyone to be forewarned. 835113[/snapback] Ah no problem actually, I think the whole thread got lost so I'm not alone Plus, it's definitely worth it! Regards, Rasty.-

All looks very very good, thanks for the effort Al and everyone involved! Playing around with the new options is fun, plus it looks to be working perfectly on FireFox too.. ! Anyhow I feel a post of mine from today may be missing.. but I might be wrong, I'll check again! Anyone has missing posts? Regards, Rasty.-

Unfortunately my 1st encounter with Solaris happened quite late in my life, but it didn't fail to get my attention for the extremely polished graphics and mostly for the extremely tight controls (IMO). I also realized I'd probably need a manual if I wanted to play it throughly, something that to this day I still inted to do! Regards, Rasty.-

Thanks Nukey, this one's gonna be really useful! Also I'm happy you left it a 262 scanlines so speed is unchanged.. Regards! Rasty.-

From your first post I understood you tested it already.. well, let us know when you actually do, this is interesting!! Freezing the CPU may be easy, but pausing a 2600 game from the hardware requires more than just that!! Keep us posted... Regards, Rasty.-

That was my initial thought too, but it wouldn't make much sense giving away review copies of a game that you (Atari) have no intention of releasing ? So either Atari planned on releasing a PAL version of the game, or did they plan on releasing the NTSC version in PAL land ??? I think the former is more likely! Regards, Rasty.-

If there are color pictures on the book, one could compare those against how the NTSC Krull colors look on z26 in PAL mode...! Regards, Rasty.-

Hi, I don't have the controllers very sad Ouch! Sorry to hear that.. ! Implementing a pause on the 2600 is probably one of the least trivial tasks to do, due to the lack of a framebuffer, and doesn't just involve pausing the CPU. But theoretically, the Pause switch could just set a bit on some register that the games have to read and make use of in software. I somehow doubt that this is what this unit is doing, but you never know...! Regards! Rasty.-

Nice score! The silver connector looks a little like a replaced part to me, but I may be wrong. Can you take pictures of the controllers? They look interesting! Regards, Rasty.-

I think it had an ATI cart, then they switched to nVidia with Battlezone! Actually it's just emulation.. you really never heard of it? Regards, Rasty.-

I think some of the best shoot em ups are still on the 2600 and I do love them even today. But indeed other genres don't age well.. that's it's important to put gameplay before graphics: gameplay ages better! Anyway I think the main issue with sports games is that the developers somehow are forced to do as realistic a game as possible in order to come close to the actual sports' rules and mechanics. This means that they had to dedicate a part of the 2600's scarce resources to this, leaving often little space for anything else! Regards, Rasty.-

I liked you better when all you needed was a simple bologna sandwich! Regards! Rasty.-

I think it's fair and professional that Rolenta quickly updated everyone with this! But how Jay Miner became Joe Milner will remain a mistery.. Reincarnation maybe? Regards! Rasty.-

McDonald's Prototype: stare screen. Defender: Kill baddies, rescue humans, don't look for too long at the map. Championship soccer: pretend it's a soccer field with players on it. Regards, Rasty.-

Well, that would be pretty much the same graphically since split screen would let you reuse player graphics vertically which is flicker free anyway! I've never finished the game, was there a sequence like that? Regards! Rasty.-

I think I could use those 128MB instead of the usual 128bytes... Regards, Rasty.-

A good point about the actual Spy vs Spy was the split screen and low screen action.. but I doubt a conversion that doesnt' rely on heavily blocky graphics and/or lots of flicker for the backgrounds could be possible.. Regards! Rasty.-

Hmm the catalog says the same about Ram-It.. well, probably the games are doing just what the catalog says: keeping track of hi-score while the system is on On the 2600, saving 3 bytes to keep track of the high score probably IS something to write about Regards! Rasty.-

If it's just a graphical hack, this should do: I've just replaced the graphics from Spy vs Spy PAL into a NSTC Chopper Command! Let me know if it's ok, otherwise I can probably start from the PAL hack. This wouldn't be any challenge for Thomas so forgive my intromission! Just needed to get back into some asm! Also I couldn't test it on real hardware since I don't have a NTSC system here. Regards! Rasty.- spyntsc.zip