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Has anyone ever had this type of sound problem with prosystem? I'm not sure if this is just an isolated flaw when using on my computer. It's not just you. But it's odd if yours was working then went bad later... I've always had sound problems, and some other people have also reported it. My brother in law has a much newer/faster computer than mine and it doesn't have this problem. This made me suspicious that the problem has something to do with CPU usage. The emulator eats 100% of CPU time constantly, which in itself is really a bug. I wonder if fixing that would end up also fixing the sound problem. I wonder if people still have this problem with fast single CPUs, or if it's only fixed by having dual cores. Or maybe speed has nothing to do with it. I have an old dual P2 machine that might be an interesting test case, but it's running Linux.

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There's a bug in your poll. There should just be 1 question with 1-10 ratings, and "haven't been there" as another option. I can't say "no" to the first question without being required to answer the 2nd one.

If you do suck up a critical part, it's not like it's impossible to get it out of the bag.

I remember reading about somebody getting a perfect game in Pac Man. I figured that was as good as it gets... It never occurred to me now they can compete to see who does it the fastest.

I use a small Toshiba CRT from 2005. It's young and in great condition. It also has all the modern inputs on it, including even component.

looks like Channel-F could play a mean game of Ikari Warriors.

I almost forgot about Final Fantasy Legend. I remember that one got pretty hard. I never did finish that game. I got stuck trying to advance somewhere in the tower, but I don't remember what stage it was. I needed to do more leveling to get further. I also had FFL 2, and never beat that either. I have a habit of not finishing RPGs.

My original reply of Final Fantasy 8 was a bit silly, I'm sure it's not very hard once you figure out how to play it. But it meets the description of a game I somewhat regret owning because of confusion over the convoluted design. Rather than figure it out, I just lost interest. The hardest RPG's I've played are Wizardry 1 (NES) and especially Alternate Reality: The City. However, Wizardry is a fun challenge, not something that makes me regret buying the game. I also own Might & Magic on Genesis and Wizardry 5 for SNES, but haven't played them yet. I expect they're difficult. Last time I was playing Wizardry I lost my best fighter (permanently) when we walked through a door and got jumped by 9 Ninjas. He was decapitated in the ambush. Knowing such awesome things can happen makes it fun. You can't just pay a pitiful bit of gold and get easily resurrected in this game, you have to be prepared with some bench players. If you throw all your eggs in one basket, you could end up having to start over with a party of newbs. It's more interesting than Japanese RPGs where you're really just navigating a "story" on rails. Not sure how I feel about Alternate Reality. It's a fascinating game, but impossible for me to survive very long.

Final Fantasy 8: I didn't buy it, it was a gift. But it's impossible because the magic system doesn't make any sense. I never figured it out.

Generally you can only save in town, but there is a secret item that lets you save anywhere. Most people never got lucky enough to find it.

I remember Dark Force in Phantasy Star 2 was very hard compared to the dungeon that led to him. I think that's the most time I ever had to spend leveling for a boss. The scariest enemy in that game though is the "Blaster" in I think the 2nd dungeon. This isn't a boss, just a random encounter that will annihilate you at that stage of the game. You have to run when you see them and hope for the best.

These work fine for me on 1.3e. They're probably the same ones hosted by AA though, I don't remember doing anything special for them: Tower Toppler: TOWERTOP.A78 Double Dragon: Doubledragon.a78 Scrapyard Dog: Scrapyard Dog (1990) (Atari).a78 I don't have Rampage, and looks like AA doesn't have it either. I've seen problems like this happen from not having all the files in the Prosystem directory. Do you have these? They should be in the same folder as ProSystem.exe: ProSystem.chm ProSystem.dat

Very wise - I've seen some forums turned into battlegrounds because people want to be mean and 'neg' each other over minor remarks. Yep. I've noticed at least on youtube people misuse it as an "agree/disagree" button. Say something (not hostile) that more people disagree with and it gets negged away. Very annoying when people do that. On a computer support forum I used to use a few years ago, they only had upvoting. But even then it was sometimes a little annoying because people would make politically correct, grandstanding responses that didn't help the user's issue presented in a thread. Yet those posts would get lots of votes, especially if it was a popular, high volume user. Further down, somebody would solve it and get 1 vote (probably from the OP). That stuff doesn't really matter though, unless people start using vote count as a status symbol. I think a big problem on that forum was that they had a weekly announcement for who the week's favorite poster was. So you can imagine how people would make it their mission in life to maintain that status.

If we're talking about modern homebrew games, then that could certainly be attempted. I think the problem you'd run into though is that different displays have wildly different amounts of lag. So getting the timing to work would be an exercise in frustration. You'd need to put the player through a calibration test to detect the screen's behavior. Then it might be workable. Calibration would need to test not only the lag, but how consistent it is (run the test several times). If the lag isn't consistent then the light/dark pattern would have to be pretty slow to cover the range of possibilities. Incidentally, a program like that would be a cool way to objectively measure lag on all the TVs out there.

Can't think of anything I'm abnormally good at, but I'm pretty bad at Robotron.

I think it really just depends on the game programming. It could time the raster, or it won't, depending how the programmer decided to do it. All the gun does is see light, beyond that it's up to the programmer. Even if it's just doing the light/dark thing, it would still have issues from input lag. I would assume almost all LCDs are at least 1 frame behind, if not more. After all, it needs to wait until the whole frame has been received before it can start getting ready to think about putting it on the screen. Probably right, but.. a game could use light to detect a hit, and raster timing to determine the target. In that case using a light bulb would register a hit on whatever target comes first in the scan. Raster timing seems like a better way to do it, since you'd only have to flash the screen for 1 frame. But they may not have bothered.

Yeah but as long as there are newbies to Atari Age, the 4001st thread on "Donkey Kong Arcade" for the 2600 is going to be written. If I'm a topic starter, I'm guilty (as I think most are) of not searching to see if there is an existing topic before posting. How about explaining why Donkey Kong Arcade is not possible? It is brought up all the time. Everyone wants Donkey Kong Arcade and Donkey Kong, Jr. Arcade, but they has not been accomplished. Why? It's certainly possible. The only reason it hasn't been accomplished is simply because nobody has done it. If somebody was sufficiently motivated they could do it, it would just take a lot of time. Even if someone wanted to do it, a big deterrent with Donkey Kong is that Nintendo would probably get legal on it pretty quick. That's enough to make many people prefer to spend their time elsewhere.

Not video games, but I found some microcontroller electronics development kits in a local Goodwill once. It was starting to get picked through and strewn all over the place, it was hard to figure out what belonged together. But the kits were still mostly intact. I put them together as best I could, took them to the register and paid $20 for all of them. I had to do a lot of research to figure out the kits, but as I figured out what belonged together I listed them on ebay. There were bidders from all over the world. I don't know the total but I'm sure I got around $300 total for everything I sold. Classic case of something too niche to be worth anything locally, but if you bring them online there's people out there who desperately want them and will pay good money. If I left them in Goodwill they'd have been ruined and the people who needed them, wouldn't have been able to get them.

Megaman 2 was the first game that came to my mind when I saw this thread. I wanted that game so badly after getting the Megaman 2 Nintendo Power in the mail. I saved for ever in a day when I was too young to have money enough to buy games. Then I beat it in 5 days of after school playing. The first night I beat 4 robot masters and decided to not write down the passwords so that it would last longer. I initially wanted to take it back I was so disappointed, but I didn't appreciate the value in replaying games like I do now. Mega Man 2 was easier than I expected also. I played it on "hard" from the beginning, and still got through most of it the first night. It ended up taking more like a week to finish it, but I think I somewhat held back after I got to Wily's castle sooner than expected. I now wonder if reading Nintendo Power was part of what made it so easy. I don't remember if I knew what order to fight the levels in, but even if I did, the gameplay should have been harder. The "novice" mode was unnecessary, "hard" was easy enough. I never went that far. A friend of mine started beating Heat Man stage without the rocket item, but I thought he was nuts for doing that. I did get in the habit of beating Quickman without the flash item, but that's easier than the heat man stunt.

I'll admit I haven't put all that much time into 7800 programming. But I don't see any reason for anybody to get irritated because somebody posts game suggestions. I find those to be among the more interesting threads on this site. It's unlikely that I'll want to work on somebody else's game, but they're still interesting to read. And if they're not interesting, or just some loser lying about his background and trying to get someone else to do all the work, then I'll click the back button. Threads like that don't occur often enough to get worked up about it. Realistically, any time I spend on the 7800 is going to be spent on my own ideas, and I'm sure most programmers are the same way. But it's fun to talk about game ideas so I have no problem with those threads.

Yeah it's cheaper. But typical of any game console, not just Atari.

I tried going back to LORD about 9-10 months ago on some BBS I found. It was weird going into the bar and seeing everybody talk about politics and housing and gas prices...

I agree, except ripping out the RF means crossing a point of no return. If the mod doesn't work you've got nothing.

I did. But it doesn't answer the question as to why it's that high in the first place. It's an unregulated power supply. The voltage will steadily decrease as more load is added, it doesn't hold constant like a regulated supply would. It's calibrated so that with the load of a 7800 console, it ends up at about the correct voltage the 7805 chip requires (or at least it should). This is cheap and ugly compared to a regulated supply, but it works. The 12v->9v battery adapter you used is a regulated supply (it will hold 9v with varying load).