gdement

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-ykMhv51UI This? I think he confused a Saturn with a 32X, he sucks at Tempest, thinks Wolfenstien 3D was released for Genesis, and doesn't understand the difference between a cartridge and a CD. This kid is annoying. I want to punch him in the balls. This kid is completely uninformed and flat out wrong at multiple points and keeps repeating misinformation over and over... I can go on and on while I'm watching this. This shit gets 100,000+ hits? Unbelievable. Jaguar is one of my top five least favorite consoles, and I can't even stand this. Every one of his reviews makes me cry a little bit. I remember debating with this guy on the Jaguar and he actually had the nerve to call me an "Atari fanboy" when I defended the Jag. I see he's disabled comments now, very nice... I noticed that, kind of funny. Never seen that guy's videos before, but I watched a few minutes of his Saturn "review" and had to shut it off. I've never even touched a Saturn and can tell he's an idiot. I doubt he even hooked it up before recording that. Judging by his profile info, he apparently considers himself an elite intellectual. He'll probably go into politics. That's one business where you can go far by lecturing everyone on things you know nothing about.

I agree that in the past the term has sometimes had some technical basis, but I don't think that's the case anymore. I think most of the people who use this terminology on modern machines just don't know what they're saying. Among those who do, I'm sure if they look hard enough, they can find something, somewhere, to justify calling it a "128-bit" or "256-bit" or whatever system. But honestly, they're just grasping for any excuse they can find to make the number double. If they can't justify it by the size of the data bus, then they'll start looking at the size of rarely used special-purpose registers (like the SSE registers on an intel P3, for example), and if that doesn't work, look for the width between the GPU and the graphics memory, and if that doesn't work... Back in the days of 8-bit vs 16-bit machines, the term was relatively meaningful, although not precisely defined. Unfortunately that transition set a pattern in people's minds that the "bitness" of each generation of systems is supposed to double, and so it's been twisted into a loosely rationalized "Generation ID code".

Misuses of the word "bit". Not a big deal, but the casual perversion of this word gets annoying sometimes. "8 bit graphics" when referring to graphics that are NES style. Color depth on NES sprites is TWO bits. Lots of systems have an 8-bit processor, that doesn't define what the graphics look like. "First game in the series programmed in 16 bits" - really? It's that small? "128-bit system" - this is getting ridiculous. I seriously doubt there's an objective reason for assigning this number, people just like to double it every arbitrarily defined "generation". Lets drop the whole "2^n bit" thing and count by 1s. Leave "bit" to mean an actual bit. =================== Over the top fanboyism is cute from kids, but simultaneously amusing and disturbing from adults. I still remember hearing some guy in his 20's at Fry's ranting with his friends about PS3 vs XBox 360. They just listened quietly, probably knowing he wouldn't shut up until he got it out off his chest. That's the only time I've heard an adult in real life call a system the "Gaybox 360". He sounded like he was 12. Apparently frustrated by sales numbers up to that point, he explained in bitter triumph that, according to some report, the PS3 had ACTUALLY OUT-SOLD (OMG!) the 360 the previous month by like TWO THOUSAND UNITS! You'd think he spent his last penny on the damn thing.

Not sure if this is a good idea or not, but you could also make it selectable using the difficulty switch. That's pretty intuitive and makes it easy to change mid-game, but of course you'll get tons of people asking "why don't my controls work?" If you do it that way, the current setting should still be shown on the title screen.

Who cares. It's for collectors who are willing to pay high prices for a museum piece, and are willing to pay more for a 3rd party assessment of it's condition. That's a different market than people who just buy a cartridge to play it. These old cartridges aren't going to disappear. There isn't enough plexiglass in the world for that to happen.

Ultima 7. That's it. I have a problem finishing RPGs. I came close to beating Ultima 1, but I was borrowing it from a friend and had to give it back. I'm near the end of Ultima 3 on the NES, but haven't played in forever. I finished Wizardry: Forsaken Land on the PS2, but that's not as hard as the original SirTech games so it doesn't really count. The last RPG I finished was Morrowind, which again isn't particularly hard, just long. A while back I bought Wizardry 1 for NES, Might & Magic for Genesis, and Wizardry 5 for SNES. I'll probably never get through all those, but I do have a game going on Wizardry 1.

That might be easier.

That's a good solution to break the game for a petty thief, without being very hard to implement. It won't really deter people who would steal a proto to dump it though, as they'd probably be knowledgeable enough to figure it out, or find somebody who is. A more aggressive solution would be to encrypt part of the code, and put the key in the console BIOS. The modded BIOS would decrypt it into RAM before launching the game. As a generic solution for multiple games, there could be a standard location in the cartridge ROM that indicates the encrypted range, and what address it wants the BIOS to copy it to. There's more work involved setting this up though. But it would prevent demos getting dumped even if the thief has high technical knowledge. The only workaround they'd have is to rewrite the missing code, and that's not likely to happen.

I see. Thanks for the photo. I did some reading on ferrite beads and it looks like there's variations in their filtering profile, but I'll probably just get a few and see what happens. I'm now doubtful that this will do much to the ghosting problem, but I'm glad I read about these things anyway. It looks like a good idea to use a ferrite bead at the output instead of a plain resistor, it might filter a bit of high frequency noise if there is any, and there's probably no downside to it. Thanks for the help.

I don't think the games are very similar at all, but in terms of marketing I do agree the creation of Sonic was inspired by what they saw Nintendo doing with Mario. Sonic also seemed more brazenly manufactured than Mario, who at least appeared in some popular games before he was turned into an icon. Sonic was more of a deliberate marketing invention from day 1. The game they gave him was another marketing tool, emphasizing speed over gameplay IMO. It's an above average game but nothing incredible. The character was more important than the game really. Although I think Sonic is overrated as a game, he was undeniably important for selling consoles so I'm glad Sega came up with him. He made a quick fix to Sega's lack of appeal to younger kids, and made the system more attractive to parents than it was in the days of the Altered Beast packaging. For me, the real reasons to own a Genesis are series like Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, Phantasy Star, Thunder Force, etc. Yeah, it probably was. I like the N64 better than the Playstation, but I didn't buy it until it was obsolete so all my stuff is used and cheap.

Thanks for the replies. (uH question answered above) I don't really know where it would be.. if I had an 800 I'd have to probe around with a multimeter to find them. But these parts are probably somewhat near the video output. The transistor locations might be marked A104 on the board. The transistors themselves should have a small, barely readable part number on them, but probably not on the board. I'm not very worried about those though, as the 2N3904 worked for my XE-based circuit so it's probably okay. It's just odd that Atari didn't label them on the 800 schematic. The inductor is the main thing I'm wondering about, but I'm afraid it might not be marked. It would probably be near the same area, if it's labeled on the board then it would say L105. There might also be some similar inductors nearby marked on the board as L103 and L104. Problem is, I don't know if these inductors have anything marked on them. My 100uH inductors have a marking but they're bulky shielded types with a shell around them. I'm afraid most inductors might not have anything written on them, so reading the value directly might not be possible. Well, if the value isn't known, then I'll probably try ordering a few different sizes and see if anything appears to work decently, and go from there. I'm hoping somebody might know what the correct value is supposed to be, but I guess if Atari never documented it, it might simply be an unknown.

Recently I tried adapting the Atari 800's chroma circuit for a 7800 video mod. I couldn't replicate it perfectly though. I'm missing the 10pF capacitor (which I'll be ordering) and also inductor L105. The attached schematic, which originally comes from the official 800 service manual, shows an inductor L105 but doesn't give the value. It appears in the lower right in the attachment. I searched "L105" but of course that doesn't turn up anything. 1) Does anybody know the value of inductor L105? 2) Also, there are 2 transistors A104A and A104B, but the type isn't marked. I used 2N3904 transistors here. Are those appropriate? Unfortunately I don't own an 800 so I can't inspect it. ======================= So far this 800 circuit is ghosting, but I have a feeling that's because of the missing inductor. I fixed ghosting on an XE-based circuit with it's requisite 100uH inductor, so I think component L105 might be the solution here as well. Unfortunately 100uH doesn't work here, it just kills the color instead. Thanks for any info.

A regulated supply from a laptop like nathanallan mentioned is probably ideal. But if you happen to have an extra Genesis model-2 supply, you can also use that. Just transfer the tip from your old SNES supply, and make sure you get the polarity correct. That was how I fixed mine.

Not that I really want to get in some stupid fanboy argument, but scrolling performance is going to depend on all the other game logic and setup that prepares what the screen will look like, not just the process of uploading it to the video buffer. You have to reupload each tilemap layer every frame to scroll them? Surely it's more efficient than that. No, I don't know anything about SNES or Genesis programming, but I seriously doubt that video uploading speed is the differentiating factor, if there really is any difference in their scrolling performance at all.

Yeah, I'm sure a lot of games come from Canada, didn't know how involved EA is there but that company is too big for me to wrap my head around. The only modern game I'm much familiar with is Morrowind/Oblivion (Canadian as well). I guess they've decided that Canadians will buy NFL football, so they don't have to give you what you really want. Maybe you need a boycott.. or at least an email campaign. ============= I don't have much interest in sports games for the 7800, but if I ever did one, it would be indoor soccer. Such a great sport, but virtually unknown nowadays.

I agree it seems it would be very worthwhile to modify Madden for the Canadian market. I wonder if it's just a problem of corporate culture. Does EA have major offices in Canada? (I don't mean call centers or that type of thing) I see their corporate headquarters is in California, maybe that's where all the major decisions are made and they don't hear enough ideas from the outside.

His site is there but the page http://www.schells.com/7800mod.shtml isn't there anymore. Actually it's weird all the links I found are 'shtml' instead of a normal 'html', but the latter doesn't work either. Internet Archive says they don't have it because of a robots.txt exclusion. Google doesn't have it either, probably for the same reason. Hopefully somebody has it saved on their computer.

I can't think of much need for frequent updates on a text editor. If it's usable, has syntax highlighting, supports UNIX CR's, and doesn't have the bugs of MS notepad then it's good for me. notepad++'s politics turned me off, but looks like Crimson Editor is still updated as well. http://sourceforge.net/projects/emeraldeditor/files/ The homepage still says 2008 but sourceforge says 4/2010. They say it's now maintained by the "Emerald Editor community" so that might be why the Crimson site is out of date. The latest version I downloaded is something they call "SVN286", I can't find a real version number so I have no idea what that means. To me that just makes it sound like it was written for a 286. I can't believe it took me this long to find out about it, it's really a nice editor. I've been using gVim but that has all the vim weirdness I could live without.

So I was trying some things on an incomplete SVideo mod which I haven't touched for a long time. Got sick of trying to tweak it, and decided to play a game for the HSC. I looked up the scores in this thread real quick and then fired up Centipede. I eventually had a good game and scored 35,573, took a picture of it and everything. I was pretty happy with it. Unfortunately, that was the wrong game. And I'm apparently not that good at Asteroids. 22,450

I forgot about that, yeah, there were some surprising sales numbers found for the 7800 consoles. Assuming the SMS numbers are accurate than the 7800 may have outsold it in consoles. They didn't sell many cartridges though, and hardly produced anything more advanced than the 1st gen titles. The SMS had real support with competitive games, and that's what people noticed.

I think Sega just made a more serious effort there, while Nintendo ignored it until it was too late. Likewise, when Sega realized they had lost North America, they shifted focus and didn't release as many games here as they could have. I think it was low hanging fruit for both companies. Until they grew, Nintendo probably didn't have the ability to market effectively everywhere at once, so they emphasized North America. Same situation for Sega, so they focused on Europe and South America. I do think Sega did well enough with the SMS in North America that they kept themselves respectable, unlike Atari. The Genesis had the chance to succeed because early adopters trusted it would get decent support. That was my feeling about it anyway. I was a NES owner, and the SNES wasn't out yet, but I figured even if Sega ended up "losing" to Nintendo, I'd still get plenty of good games from Sega regardless. As reality unfolded, the Genesis ended up very successful, on par or a bit ahead of the SNES through the years that mattered. If it were the Atari Genesis, it would have bombed on the brand name alone.

I still think the Game Boy sucks. Regardless of how many games it has, it's unplayable.

That's not a problem, you just auto-calibrate the center position when the game boots.

It must be the dumbest cheat code of any game ever. With a 50% chance you'll trigger it, it doesn't even really count as a secret, just a confusing bug. I wonder if it's a test version, not the one they were supposed to publish. Having 3 modes would probably be more user friendly, as you could at least assume the middle position is normal/average difficulty, with "easy" and "hard" also offered. Electronically though having 3 modes would be awkward. 2 is convenient because it's a simple binary value, represented by 5V or GND on one signal line. With 2 modes, what Atari should have done is to put some color (I'd say red) on one side so you know which way is "beginner" vs "advanced". Either that or label each side with words on the shell. The old 6-switch VCS was marked "B/A" but that still isn't clear if you don't know what the letters stand for.

Nobody who writes any of these lists can claim to have played everything, or even a representative sample of every generation/system. They're just fuel for controversy, which I guess is the point. I agree, but I wouldn't make any exceptions for big titles. The popular hype of a big new title is a perfect example of why you should wait before ranking it with the all-time best. Kind of like the Hall of Fame's 5 year rule, which IMO they should not have exempted Roberto Clemente from. As a practical matter, magazines want to talk about the new games though, that's where the advertising money comes from. A thread like that would be interesting as the basis for a popular vote top 100 list. Actually, I think that's been done before on this forum, but it wasn't scored the way I would have liked, and I don't think it had that many participants. The best games reach a level where it's hard to say that one is better than the other. It's also hard to say how many more points should be given to the "best" vs the 2nd best. So I wouldn't have people rank them. Rather than trying to rank them, I'd just have each person give a list of their favorite games. They can list however many games they think belong on the list, but perhaps with an upper limit. No artificial pressure to fill empty slots, or to cull anything. Each game on their list gets 1 vote. Add them up, and you get a list of the games that the largest number of people consider to be among their favorites. There'd have to be a large number of participants for the results to become interesting.