jhd
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Posts posted by jhd
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Had this game actually been released, would it have been the first use of the Madden name/license?
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The only time I've played the game was the cocktail version at a classic gaming convention. If I remember correctly, it seems that the game was a new sight for most of the other convention attendees. I have still never seen an upright Warlords game.
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.
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Final Fantsay VI (as re-released in the Final Fantasy Anthology for the PSX). I'm playing it on a PS 2 console, however.
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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
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Would something similar to the contest for SwordQuest, etc. be done as a homebrew today? Let's say someone creates a homebrew game and accompanying comic w/ clues, and states that whoever finishes the game first (or something to that effect) wins a prize. Could this be done, or would it be too easy to reverse engineer a cart in order to cheat?
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.
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If you are one of the few that doesn't connect their console to the internet, and you buy one of these broken games, you're boned. Nowhere on the package is there a warning that says "Game may or may not work."
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)!
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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.
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I got it in a lot of electronic scrap. About a half-dozen //e and GS computers were in a school warehouse, and a scrap dealer came in and chopped off all the wires for copper scrap, and gave us the rest.
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.
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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.
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Anyone know if/where this is sold in Canada? Can't find it in places like Walmart or Zellers.
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.
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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?
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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.
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there IS a technology that has almost died which is very relevant to the situation: Cartridge games. Disc-based games have almost completely destroyed the cartridge, and I would NOT bet that there will be a cartridge-based console ever again unless it was strictly retro and the decision to go cart was based on nostalgia over capacity/function.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.
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BTW, the CoCo color artifacting doesn't just display 4 colors. With different dot patters you can produce a lot of colors, however, that usually requires a larger area of the screen to successfully accomplish. Pegasus and the Phantom Riders was the only one of the three that attempted to use artifacting extensively. There was some with the lava and islands on the others but that was about it.
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.
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The Coco 3 ROM included a digitized photo of the development team.
At least one game cartridge for the Emerson Arcadia (and clones) included the name of the programmer and, if memory serves, a dedication to his famiy. This was found by examining the code; I don't think that it is displayed in the game.
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Wasn't CLOAD a cassette-based magazine, rather than something printed?
I seem to recall that there was a similar "magazine" for the Coco with this title.
If there is no print version, the game may very well be lost
because finding a working cassette tape from 30+ years ago is going to be close to impossible. -
Well, I discovered that there was a book entitled Simon and Schuster's Guide to Atari's "My First Computer" (1984) that was published. It was written by Danny Goodman, who seems to have written a lot about tech, beginning with the "golden" age of videogames. He must have had a test unit. So interesting that the book was released but the product wasn't. I'll report back on the book once it arrives. Link to bibliographic info on book is here.
Interesting. I'm skeptical you'll ever get the book. I want to be wrong on that however.
Hmm. You were right. I just received a cancellation notice on this. The store was a Goodwill in DC. I wonder what happened?
I question if the book ever was released. Still, I would guess that it exists in some form or another. I say a letter to Simon and Schuster is in order.
I'm a bit late to this discussion, but a quick search on the Library of Congress catalogue does not list this title. Goodman did a seriois of titles in the early 1980s for everything from the Tandy Model 1000 to the Mac, but this title is not listed. I also checked a union catalogue of major Canadian libraries, and this titles does not appear either.
ISBN numbers can be issued before a title is published; persumably Simon and Schuster recieved a block of numbers for its pending titles. (I once worked on a publishing project where we were given about four ISBN numbers; we ultimately only used one or two of them.) I'd be curious to see how Barnes & Noble managed to get a catalogue record for this (non-existent) book.
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It really seems to depend on where in the country someone lives.
I am aware of only one thrift shop in Edmonton (the Goodwill store on 51st Avenue) consistently has consoles (usually bare) and games (almost always sports games), and sometimes even strategy guides. Prices tend to be more-or-less reasonable. Other thrift stores in the city will have the occasional bare console or a random joystick or one or two newer games, but not consistently.
In contrast, the Value Village in Saint John, New Brunswck frequently has vintage hardware, including once a Sears-model 2600 (which were not originally sold in Canada), and games from the 2600 up to the PS 2. I almost always find something whn I'm there.
Here in Calgary, I mainly see occasional random gaming things like a Dreamcast keyboard, but no console or games, or an obviously damaged bare Gamecube. I sometimes find PS 2 or Xbox games, but not very often. TV Game, NOAC-based systems are surprisingly common, but these tend to be packed in baggies and hug with the other "electrical" parts, making them quite challenging to find.
Edited to add that there is no equivalent of shopgoodwill.com in Canada (that I am aware of), so presumably more donated merchandise gets to the sales floor.
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I picked up one of these last year at a small-town Wal-Mart for about US$10. It remains happily sealed in the original box.
There is another, older model that included Activision games, aptly called the Activision TV Games: http://www.retrogami.../rtm41/#OldWine
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At the end of the day, we are in this to have fun and that's what the deal is! The other comment I wanted to make is although speculating about the value is fun... it's a moot point since we won't be selling it (so far I've only had one request to do so LOL). It's too important from a history perspective! Plus I like the fact that it might just get some of you out to the museum in person one day.
Well... if your museum is a registered charitable organization, the donor could be given a tax receipt for the fair market value of their donation. This would normally require the expert opinion of an outside appraiser, but the Canada Revenue Agency will accept in-house valuations up-to a specified amount. (I don't recall the the specific details; I think that the cut-off is around $5,000.)
It is also possible to get an historical object (or a collection thereof) recgonized as Certified Cultural Property, though there is a minimum fair market value before this provision can be used. This has major tax benefits for the donor, but it is a lot of paperwork for the receiving institution.
Minimally, you will need to assign a value for insurance purposes.
I'm not a tax accountant, but I worked for some 10 years in the heritage field (in two different provinces).
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Pirated Games at Thrift Shops
in Classic Console Discussion
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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.