jhd

I agree that the majority of old PCs will have no enduring value or interest as they were just generic, commodity hardware. I think there may be some interest in odd or unusual systems, however -- for example, my first PC was a Tandy 1000 SL, which included proprietary graphics and sound hadware. I never owned one, but I recall seeing advertisements for a Compaq(?) PC with the same form-factor as a Mac (with an integrated monitor, etc.).

Could you post (or link to) a picture? I was an avid reader of Hot Coco (and, less so, Rainbow) back in 1984-1986 and I do not recall having ever seen an advertisement for this joystick. I always used the stock Tandy/RS sticks, but I have also seen the "Deluxe" joystick.

Yep -- those Antic magazines are clearly in a library-style binding. (Though usually the whole run of a title is bound in a single colour.) Are there any property stamps or other markings to indicate where they may have originally come from?

I will shortly be upgrading to a new laptop. Before I sell the old one, I would like to "scrub" the hard drive of any and all personal information. A complete reformat of the hard drive would be best, of course, but I do not have the system disks anymore (the hardware is about 4+ years old) and I don't think anyone would buy it without a functioning OS. I'm currently running Windows Vista. Is there anything available that will completely wipe the My Documents file tree?

After I retired my PSX in favour of a PS 2, I picked up the Final Fantasy re-makes (Anthology, Chronicles, Origins) and I have been working my way through some of those titles. I have a good handful of strange and quirky games (e.g. No One can Stop Mr. Domino, Board Game Top Shop) that have no equivalents on the PS 2. Many of the 3D titles, and especially the sports games, have not aged very well. I would love to find the Midway Collection 2, because, as noted above, some of those titles were never included in the various PS 2 compilations. I really miss playing Moon Patrol.

How far along in development did these games/rides get before development ceased? Are there any photographs of the original (prototype or production) hardware? Disclaimer: I don't have a Jaguar, and so I'm not a potential customer for this release, but I am also interested in information about games that never made it to commercial release.

I don't think that the TSA would care about (or even recognize) pirated software. Customs and Border Protection, on the other hand, are responsible for prohibiting the import of material that violates US trademarks and/or copyrights. That said, I'd be surprised if the average inspector would know what a pirate Famicom cart is/looks like.Now, if you had cases of them obviously desitned for resale, that may raise some suspicions.

About 1989, my family received some promotional material from GM (or possibly Chrysler) that included a PC trivia(?) game on a 5.25" disk. I no longer have it, but I remember that it was in a custom jacket with a very nice illustration of their latest high-end car.

Has anyone ever encountered pirated/burned/copied games for sale at a thrift shop? At one store, several years ago, I once saw two obviously copied PlayStation games. They had crudely printed case inserts, edited to remove the PlayStation logo, and the disks were also printed with colour labels. One was a sports game (Baseball, I think) and the other a racing game. I once accidently bought a copied PS 2 game at a flea market; the packaging was so authentic looking that I did not realise it was a copy until i tried to play it. More recently, another thrift shop had a battered orginal PlayStation console, with a CDR still in the drive. The disk was labeled as part of a multi-disk Final Fantasy game. I also found a Famicom cartridge once, SMB 3, but I'm not sure if that qualifies as a pirated/copied game. Obviously, we collectors know that owning, much less selling, this stuff is illegal, but thrift shop employees are not experts.

The original (1981) IBM PC shipped included support for cassette tape as a storage medium. Indeed, for many years GW BASIC included reserved keywords related to the cassette, even though the hardware was no longer present. Was there ever any software released on cassette format? Wikipedia implies that it would have been limited to programs written for the built-in BASIC interpreter as there was no other software support for the cassette. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC#Cassette_tape

From a retail perspective, this system is only marginally still current generation. Wal-Mart has a few new titles in stock (mostly just sports games and a few Sing Star titles) and EB Games has about the same stock. Everywhere else has either dumped all of their PS 2 stock, or it is sitting on the discount racks gathering dust. I would push for the PS 2 to have Classic status based simply on the difficulty/impossibility of finding new games for the system. The same argument can be made for the Gamecube and the original Xbox.

Had this game actually been released, would it have been the first use of the Madden name/license?

I spent a good chunk of the early-1980s haunting video arcades. The first time that I ever saw/played Warlords it was also the cocktail version. It was located in a very small arcade in the Champlain Mall in Dieppe, New Brunswick. This would have been around 1981 or 1982. I never saw one anywhere else. There was a regular, upright version on exhibit at a video game show here in Calgary in October, but it was not working.

Final Fantsay VI (as re-released in the Final Fantasy Anthology for the PSX). I'm playing it on a PS 2 console, however.

I have recently been playing Final Fantasy VI on the PlayStation. Almost all of the early FF titles are available for the PSX as part of Final Fantasy Origins, Final Fantasy Chronicles, and Final Fantasy Anthology. FF III is not available, but Chrono Trigger has been substituted. It is obviously not an emulator because the PSX does not have the power to emulate SNES (or NES?) games, and the in-game instructions have been all changed to reference the PSX control pad. I have not played the originals, but it looks like some of the background graphics have been improved too. Does anyone have any information on how these titles were ported from the NES/SNES? I assume that the originals were coded in assembly language, and that would be a massive challenge to convert to completely different hardware. Were any other NES/SNES titles ported over to the PSX? -- perhaps some Japan-only releases/titles

Someone (VGR/Craig Pell, IIRC) did a remake of Adventure on the PC quite a few years ago. The first handful of people to beat the game would apparently win a T-shirt, but I don't think anybody actually received the prize. I assume that the end-game text was encrypted or something to prevent such cheating. I suspect that it would be much harder to prevent cheating in a 2600 game -- it would be rather easy to simple disassemble the binary file.

This is the #1 reason why I have no plans on moving beyond my PlayStation 2! For various reasons, the Internet connection at my apartment is both very slow and not especially reliable. I therefore refuse to buy any system where online connectivity is (essentially) mandatory. I like software that works properly out-of-the-box. On a related note, I have not even downloaded an OS update for my desktop PC in several years (and it still works just fine running Windows XP, SP2)!

In 1983, I would have been in about grade 6. That Spring, I sold my Atari 2600 and bought a Coco. It was about Cdn$600 (16K RAM, Extended BASIC) on sale. I never had a modem for this system; I got a 64K memory upgrade and printer in Fall 1984. I never did have a floppy drive for the system -- always cassette only. As best I remember, most of my friends/classmates had a Commodore 64, one poor fellow had an MC-10. Most people I knew did not have home computers at that point. We had one TRS-80 Model III at school. I mainly played games and did some programming (i.e. writing games). I never had any "application software", other than a really crude wordprocessor. My "rich" Uncle, who was then living in Illinois, had an Apple II. He used it for productive work, including maintaining a mailing list.

Is copper woth enough to make it worth the effort? I would think that the labour involved (i.e. stripping the insulation) would cost more than the resale value of the salvaged metal. I've never heard of anyone salvaging wire in such small quantities before -- around here it is usually stolen from construction sites, etc. in truck-load quantities. Perhaps it is worth buying the whole box of random cables at the local thrift shop.

According to the magazine, when was this competition held? What was the ending date? (Does this match your memories of when you were involved with it?) Some of these contests (most famously the Swordquest series) were cancelled due to companies poor financial positions. The earlier it ended, say 1982 or 1983, the better the chances that it was completed and a prize was awarded.

Sometimes Toys 'R' Us carries these PnP games; otherwise I have only ever seen them for sale (in Canada) at thrift shops. A trip to the nearest American town may well be in order; I've found a decent selection at the Wal-Mart stores in a little border town in Maine. Larger centres would, presumably, have an even better assortment.

I wonder how practical this device would be; it was apparently limited to 4K games (as built), but by 1984 most games were significantly larger. Can anybody tell if this device would support bankswitching?

I obviously missed out on a lot of Coco software ; presumably because I never had a disk drive. Virtually nothing was available retail (besides Radio Shack stores) and as a kid I had neither a chequing account nor a credit card, so buying mail-order was a real challenge. The only title on the above list I have seen/heard of was Sands of Egypt, and that was a (glowing) review in the Tandy in-house magazine. Did Color Computer News have a newstand distribution, or was it only subscription based? I regularly got Hot Coco, very occasionally Rainbow, and I had a few issues of Color Computer Magazine. Again, I was limited to what I could find locally in stores -- which was not too much.

I expect that (game) cartridges will continue to survive, albeit as another niche product for a specific market segment -- much like LPs. While not especially relevant to most of us, most (if not all) of the the child-friendly "edutainment" systems (e.g. Leapster, V-Tech) are cartridge-based. Given the audience, this makes since because disk-based media would be far too fragile. In terms of the mainstream market, I certainly agree that cartridges are dead.

Wow, that is an impressive screenshot -- those are easily the most colourful graphics that I have ever seen on a Coco game. Were there many other games that used mult-colour artifacts? I was active in the Coco scene from 1982 through about 1989, and I don't recall having ever seen such a technique before, nor did I see it discussed in the magazines of the time.