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Seems like these days AAA games are falling flat and smaller games are doing well. This could be just the right time for Atari to launch a game like this. We'll see.

Doesn't appeal to me either, not even the name but then again <heresy>I was never a big fan of the original Yar's Revenge anyway</heresy>

Then the VCS might be be booting in Legacy mode, confusing Windows. Check these out: https://superuser.com/questions/1188011/cant-install-windows-beacause-the-disk-is-of-the-gpt-partition-style#1188414 https://windowsreport.com/windows-10-install-issues-gpt-partition/

Also you should be aware of MBR vs GPT partition types if you aren't already. MBR is the old legacy style, GPT is newer, a bit more complicated. You probably should use GPT, I think support for the legacy type needs to be enabled in VCS BIOS anyway. https://www.howtogeek.com/193669/whats-the-difference-between-gpt-and-mbr-when-partitioning-a-drive/

yeah, I usually use Linux's fdisk to prepare drives for Windows. Set partition type to 7 for NTFS. Should be doable in Windows installer, but sometimes it doesn't work well for whatever reason. If you don't want to install Linux, there are live USBs you can use to get the work done.

"Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your Yars"

If you compress the images into a ZIP file instead, hatari can read the zip and allow you to change disks within the zip file.

What do you mean by "Hatari doesn't offer an option to switch drives"? If you press F12 you can access the disk menu

I didn't realize Xerox made a home version. I remember seeing an Apple II mouse in magazines at the time being hailed as a "revolutionary" interface device, but looking at just the still pictures, it wasn't even obvious what it did or how it worked. I know that sounds crazy now ("you push it around to move the cursor on the screen, duh!"), but looking at the photo, all you saw was a weird looking box with buttons, and it wasn't obvious that it could be pushed around! If you think about it, mice back then were little more than upside-down trackballs, and lots of examples of trackball use in the 70s and 80s.

Here's a couple of other interesting dosbox forks: Dosbox-staging is fork that's been getting some buzz for better CRT and sound hardware emulation https://dosbox-staging.github.io/ And there's the "Dosbox-Pure" libretro core that seems to be attempted to turn DOS gaming into a more containerized experience by allowing you to encapsulate the entire installation directory and CD-ROM ISO dump into a single zip file that you can run. I like the idea of it, but to be honest it hasn't worked so well for me so far. https://docs.libretro.com/library/dosbox_pure/

Are people saying that? Not explicitly, but this debate over "is it better to play the 5200 or XEGS version?" makes me wonder. Maybe it's because Defender was one of my favorite arcade games that even the best home versions don't quite cut it for me.

In the US which did not have as big as a cassette culture as Europe, the cassette versions tended to come in boxes very similar to disk versions. Some publishers had "universal" boxes/cases that had holders for disks, cass and sometimes even carts. It would not surprise me if budget publishers stuck with the just the cassette case. but I don't recall running across games like that in the US. I think retailers wanted larger boxes to help deter shoplifting. I know that was an issue with the CD "longbox" for music.

I sold my 1040STe/4mb for almost $400. I was pleased with that since it's around what I paid for it brand new! (not inflation adjusted). By contrast, to get rid of any PC hardware from that era, you almost have to pay someone to take it off your hands!

1979 was before most people even knew what a mouse was or why they'd want one. Apple introduced one in 1983, I think. But it wasn't until after the Mac came out in 84 that the mouse-and-GUI paradigm started to take off Apple famously copied the mouse and GUI from Xerox PARC, which was an experimental design

As a Dark Souls fan, I'm not one to normally complain that games are too hard, but wow! Easy mode could be a bit easier here! Still, I'm having a lot of fun with it, very addictive. I'd love to see more old-school arcade-style games on the VCS

IDK, ever since "Williams Arcade Classics" became available in the mid-90s, I've been able to play the original arcade version of Defender at my leisure and don't see the point of arguing which platform has better hyperspace controls. Do people really prefer the home ports of this game?

The bat can grab off-screen items, that happens all the time. But I've never seen an off-screen dragon kill. I'd love to see it though! If something touches the open gate of a castle, this will attract the bat's attention (in the white/black castle, he needs to be on the entrance screen), and he will escape that way. If a dragon touches the open gate and leaves, this could cause the bat to escape... But I think you have to be on the screen for the dragon gate collision detection to work? or maybe it's just that dragons look for an object to guard when you aren't around, and the chances of them randomly touching a gate when your aren't around are slim? So I don't recall ever seeing the bat escape a castle if he's in the castle with a single object and not on a downward trajectory. I don't think a dragon can enter a castle when you are offscreen, but I'd love to see this happen

I'd imagine they'd need parts that can withstand weather extremes, and if they have something that works, why "fix" it?

If the bat was flying in an upward direction or horizontal direction when you captured him, and assuming he didn't spot another treasure or dragon while you were carrying him that caused him to change direction, then yes you could drop him in the yellow castle and he can't escape. If he was flying in a downward direction, he will escape. If there are other items in the castle, it's likely he will change directions when he gets bored with his current item and eventually escape.

Most likely it is a full application replacement. But even if they just installed the application to hard drive, it wouldn't be as cheap as it seems, there's lives at risk so they'd have to do impact studies, thoroughly test and validate it, update all the documentation, retrain all the users and so on. Easily a multi-million dollar project.

Yes that used to happen on original hardware too! but it was rare. And the bat would start moving as soon as it saw another treasure or dragon. My friends and I used to call it the "stunned bat". And one of the challenges we'd engage in is try to move the bat and all the treasures and dragons around the kingdom without reanimating the bat. There was also a rare instance where the bat started off with no treasure and we'd try to keep it from ever picking anything up.

Wow, I never knew this was a thing!

Sure but floppy emulators aren't cheap apparently! I have a floppy emulator right here, I'm willing to sell it to them for only half a million...

I suppose if you've never seen the arcade version, the Atari8 version does look good. I saw the arcade version first, and it was one of the best looking games of its era, so I've always thought most home versions looked terrible. I think the best looking home versions are the C64 Disk version (not shown in this video-- the tape version that is shown is similar to the Atari8 version) The Apple II version looks pretty nice- not usually a system that gets best looking arcade ports!

I think a world where the PC wasn't so easy to clone, PC dominance takes a lot longer to happen or never happens at all. But then the question is does the computer market rally around another standard instead? I saw some articles from around 1985 saying how the MSX computing standard was set to take over-- never happened obviously because of PC.