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1982 - Atari VCS was bought by my dad at some department store. I was very little but I've figured out before that it must have been in 1982, yet it was a 4 switch wood model, not the Vader. I didn't understand what it was until they hooked it up and my older sister explained it to me. 1987 - Atari 7800 was ordered through the Sears catalog. 7800 mode was defective and it had to be exchanged (more waiting!) It might have actually been a faulty PP2 cart, not the console. 1988 - NES was bought by the combined savings of me and my brother. Some department store, prob Wards or Service Merchandise. NES was crazy popular at this point, they were impossible to find when my friend was trying to buy one a couple months earlier. 1990 - Sega Genesis I bought with the most allowance money I ever saved. Bought at Toys 'R Us in Pensacola, one of the classic warehouse of toys style stores. That place was awesome. I was lucky I was using my money, because my mom was not impressed with the flaming werewolf on the box, or the Altered Beast instruction manual she found later. 1992 - Received a Sega CD as a Christmas gift. It came from Kay-Bee toys. I still have the box with the Kay-Bee inspection label, it was returned by someone who didn't know it required a Genesis, and my parents were there to grab it. This is the only launch console I've ever had. It died twice, and I replaced it with a model-2 from Funcoland. <discovered computer games> 2002 - Bought a PS2 at Wal-Mart. The End

I've never used the euro pads, but I'd hate it if the d-pad was angled. I have a knockoff N64 controller like that, with an angled analog joystick. As a result I always move crooked when I try to use it. Even if my hands are at an angle, I still know which way is up so when they tilt the controls it throws me off. It's not a problem for buttons though.

They start out very sensitive. They only need a light touch, but if you push them harder it wears them out. The sensitivity is pretty ridiculous, they don't take nearly as much force as you naturally expect. This might have been intentional so they don't get torqued around in your hand. Mine wore out quickly when I was a kid, probably because I pushed on them too hard and I'm sure my siblings did also. The joysticks became progressively less responsive until I had to push them very hard to get them to work. My 2nd set lasted much longer, maybe because I was so gentle with them but more likely because I didn't use them much. I still have that set and as far as I know they work fine, but I avoid using them. I think there's a way to repair the loss of sensitivity, but I don't know it myself. I've seen people post about it before.

You could have a separate field for "original copyright date". Might be useful to at least have that info rather then nothing.

The Italian postal service is notorious. Most sellers won't even ship there. Maybe justice will be served in a roundabout way. Check his feedback - looks like he pulled the same stunt on a Sunnyvale VCS auction. I wonder if that console fell from the same loft. He apparently wants more than 52 pounds for it. I have seen one seller regularly put stuff on at inflated prices. 520STFMs for £90 BIN but with a Best Offer option - they then go for around £60. If you hang around long enough and are in no hurry then someone will come along. After all, it only costs around £3.50 - £5 to list most items for a year on eBay. I don't have a problem with people listing their stuff at high prices. That doesn't bother me. But when they list at a low starting price, then weasel out of a transaction because they don't like how the auction ended, those people should be banned. He's done it at least twice recently, with the VCS and the 65XE.

I remember the Apple IIGS version had a level editor. That might contain some clues about which things are level settings vs universal game rules. But I don't remember if the game I saw was Arkanoid 1 or 2, so it might not apply.

I don't know where to a get a new one, but if you have a model-1 Genesis, you can use that supply. I don't remember if model-2 works or not. If you find one that's 10v, that's okay. Too much and it could cause damage though. Actually a little less voltage could work as well, there's some wiggle room. You might find something at a thrift store. Most power supplies will be too low on amperage but you might find something. Too high on amperage won't hurt.

The Italian postal service is notorious. Most sellers won't even ship there. Maybe justice will be served in a roundabout way. Check his feedback - looks like he pulled the same stunt on a Sunnyvale VCS auction. I wonder if that console fell from the same loft. He apparently wants more than 52 pounds for it.

Yeah, you can't leave fb obviously since the old transaction was cancelled, but I'd at least report him. It might not do any good, but it's worth a try to get him caught. Odds are against you but sometimes ebay does respond to messages/complaints. If you give the item number of the old listing, clearly showing it's the same item, and quote his message about the damage, there's at least some chance they could act on it. Hopefully his message was sent through the ebay system, so they'll have a record of that as well. Is it possible to file a non-performing-seller dispute? I'm guessing not, but if you can then that's the thing to do.

The AC goes through a rectifier in the NES that converts it to DC. It's harmless to send DC through the rectifier, just redundant but it won't hurt anything. As a side effect, you also don't have to worry about tip polarity - either polarity will work on a NES.

Most likely the overload would kill the power supply. Which may not seem like a big deal, but depending how it fails, it's possible the power supply could fail in a way that kills your NES.

I suggest that if you want paddle support, it would be best to work that out now rather than later. Supporting paddles will be tricky, and will probably dictate how the gameplay code is designed. If you try to add it at a later stage, you may find that everything has to be overhauled.

Looks like the DLL isn't initialized in the unused screen area. Should be an easy fix. Prosystem (maybe also MESS) defaults the memory to all 00s so that type of glitch won't show up in the emulator.

The NES probably did push the industry towards bigger teams, since games for that system had to compete in a crowded market. The technology was also good enough that having real artists was useful. But while there's lots of people in the credits for most NES games, I'm skeptical whether many of them really worked on it full time. The artists probably didn't have to invest nearly as many hours per game as the people doing the coding. Graphics and sound weren't advanced enough to take that much time, but I could be wrong about that. ... on those Batman credits - they have 5 "designers" and no graphic artists? I don't get that. What do you need 5 designers for?

I don't know what the actual costs were, but there's been a big shift in how the cost is distributed. Used to be that it cost less to develop the game, but cartridge production was expensive. Now it's the other way around. In the 80's, since the up front cost was lower, you could make money on a less popular niche game. So it was easier to get funding, and you didn't need many people's help to write it either. But if it turned out to be popular, there might be shortages of the game when it comes out (because cart production was expensive and had limited capacity). The smaller development teams also contributed to more creativity IMO. The game design you get from 1 person is less predictable than what you'll get from a bigger group. Nowadays, the up front development cost is high so it would be difficult to get funding for an unusual project. Every game has to appeal to everyone, and one flop could sink a company. But once the game is finished, it's cheap to print an excess number of copies. They don't have significant shortages on new games anymore. The upside is that (neglecting dev cost which is already spent) older games can now be sold profitably for $20. In fact that's so common that I really don't think anyone should complain about paying $50 for a game anymore - you *know* it will be $20 if you just wait a while. Cart games never got that cheap without being discontinued. It would be interesting to get some numbers from somebody who was involved with making games back then.

I'd be very pissed about the damage to the van, not as much about the loss of the Atari. But either way, thieves suck.

So apparently you can order popcorn by mail at the "Popcorn Revolution". Already popped in olive oil. And they were successful enough to have 2 retail locations.

Interesting observation. From what you describe, it sounds like a BIOS bug. They surely didn't mean for it to work that way. I'm surprised if nobody has ever tried disabling the Atari logo before now. I never have.

I'm not sure about Mythology, but I know that Age of Kings plays fair on Hard level. On hardest it cheats by giving itself +500 of each resource every 15 minutes. This is on Standard/Conquest type games. If you play King of the Hill or some other variants I think it starts cheating on hard instead of hardest. It's a good system I think. The AI plays it's best possible game on Hard, and if that's not enough to challenge you, you can let it cheat by using Hardest. I can't keep up with it on hard either, but it's not cheating, it's just faster than I am. A long time ago I started writing an AI script for that game, and it was slightly faster than the stock AI, without using any cheats. At the time, when I was writing the script, I was able to grow almost as fast because I had the script in my head. I can't do it anymore though. The one thing I don't like about these games is that it depends a lot on how fast you are at clicking and hitting hotkeys and other such busywork. In that sense the AI "cheats" because it doesn't have to use a mouse or a keyboard. The stock AI depends a lot on market trading, probably the same in Mythology. That can make it seem to get too much of a particular resource. If you want to watch the AI play a game, it might be possible to have the computer control your player. You can do that in Kings, but I don't remember Mythology as well.

Yeah, that's a good question too. Very frustrating not to have that feature.

Sometime way back I asked why it wasn't designed with the 2MHz version in the first place. I'm not sure it ever got a solid answer but one theory was that maybe the 2MHz version would be unstable at 1.2MHz (for 2600 games). Apparently some old NMOS chips don't like running slow. But it might also just be because they already had 1MHz chips and didn't want to spend money on new ones. Seems strange to do something that cheesy when designing a new console, but it wouldn't entirely surprise me. If that's the reason then maybe the 2MHz would work fine. It wouldn't accomplish anything as a retrofit though. The Maria slows down the clock rate when the RIOT addresses are in use, so plugging in a 2MHz RIOT won't actually make it go any faster.

If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend "Smoke 'Em Poker". It's an old Windows freeware. I love the AI in that game, which of course is what makes poker fun to play. I don't know if it technically cheats, but I think it doesn't. Bluffing works when it's done well, and not if you overdo it. It feels very realistic.

I think the worst cheating AI would have to be the yellow car in RC Pro Am. And another, not really a cheat but on a tangent: There was a cute gambling game you could play with somebody in a bar in Ultima 6 - it was rigged by design. The character explains the rules, and you play a few times, until you figure out that it's a scam. I think he even lets you win sometimes. Looks like it might be good... that's just a bunch of crashes though. It seems like those crashes should have caused more damage, but whatever. I had NASCAR 2 but didn't like it quite as much. I attributed the differences to Sierra taking over Papyrus, and didn't pay much attention to later sequels. I rented some version of NASCAR 200? for the PS2 once, but the controls were unplayable. 2003 on the PC might be good though. The biggest hurdle against me trying it is I'd have to buy a new USB controller, as my CH Flightstick is a 15-pin. Controls good enough for a racing game are expensive.

I think the problem is limited CPU time for physics on the other drivers. Or at least, that would have been the excuse back in the 90's. Nowadays I guess they just don't care to improve. My favorite racing game ever is NASCAR Racing by Papyrus from 1995. But as realistic as that game is, the AI is still rigged. It's apparent that the AI doesn't have as much physics as the player, and mostly glide around the track, although they will try to dodge hitting you. They will have solo crashes on occasion, but it appears to be an arbitrary event. You'll be behind a car and it will suddenly spin out mid corner, because it lost the random number lottery. That game is very realistic for the player though, much better than Gran Turismo in my opinion. It ran well on a higher end 486. Early Pentiums were the dream machine at the time. Obviously with today's hardware they could run that game with full physics on all drivers and an AI that drives based on those physics. But that would be hard to program and there'd be less time for graphics.

I'd order them from Jameco, but there's also probably other places. This will give you their SRAM section: http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/StoreCatalogDrillDownView?langId=-1&storeId=10001&catalogId=10001&categoryName=cat_1050&subCategoryName=ICs%20%26%20Semiconductors%20%2F%20Memory%20%2F%20SRAM&category=105090 Click on "configuration" and select either 32Kx8 (for an 8-bit 32KB chip) or 128Kx8 (for a 128KB chip). I'm not sure what you use when building a 48K cart. Note that there aren't any 64KB chips. For whatever reason SRAM is only made in multiples of 4. Make sure anything you look at is DIP (DIP-28 means DIP package with 28 pins). For the 32KB chips, part number 62256 should work. Jameco is selling 62256LP but I think that just means it's "low power", which shouldn't hurt anything. I don't know how much speed is required but 120ns should be plenty fast enough: http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10001&catalogId=10001&productId=42850 Note that the package is marked as "DIP-28" - for any chips you look at make sure it's a DIP package. Those are by far the easiest to solder by hand, are what Atari used, and are probably what you had in mind. I'd also download the datasheet for whatever you order to confirm the pinout matches what you need, and that it runs on 5V. There's probably 62256 chips available lots of places, Jameco is just a place I'm used to ordering from. I've never built a RAM cart, so I could be mistaken about the 62256, but I think it's what Atari used. For 128KB chips, it looks like they only have 2 in DIP-32 that run on 5V: http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/StoreCatalogDrillDownView?langId=-1&storeId=10001&catalogId=10001&position=1&refineType=1&sub_attr_name=Configuration&refineValue=128k%20x%208&refine=1&history=h01k7me3%7CsubCategoryName~ICs%2B%2526%2BSemiconductors%5Ecategory~10%5EcategoryName~category_root%5EprodPage~15%5Epage~SEARCH%252BNAV%407w9oh64b%7Ccategory~1050%5EcategoryName~cat_10%5Eposition~1%5Erefine~1%5EsubCategoryName~ICs%2B%2526%2BSemiconductors%2B%252F%2BMemory%5EprodPage~15%5Epage~SEARCH%252BNAV%40jxv1snk4%7Ccategory~105090%5EcategoryName~cat_1050%5Eposition~1%5Erefine~1%5EsubCategoryName~ICs%2B%2526%2BSemiconductors%2B%252F%2BMemory%2B%252F%2BSRAM%5EprodPage~15%5Epage~SEARCH%252BNAV Those are part 628128LP. I don't know if those work or not, but I assume they would. Definitely check the pinout first.