Bloodcat

If my experience with the 5200 is anything to go by, it is possibly one of the most poorly made and unreliable systems of all time even before we count the infamous controllers. Half the chips die. Power supply and switchbox hell. No monitor output much less Svideo or later. Enormous. Tiny library that is usually just as good if not better on the Colecovision, C64, and it's daddy the Atari 800/XL or 130xe. The latter have Yoomp and Ridiculous Reality. (The C64 has all the 80s rpg and Strategy titles you can handle in a decent visual form.) For me the 5200 is basically SUNK COST FALLACY THE GAME CONSOLE and I've only been putting in money and time out of sheer pig headed anger and revenge that the thing never wants to work. I honestly only ever bought the thing to play Gremlins. I mean yay I have it boxed and complete because it was due to X Entertainment (eventually to become Dinosaur Dracula giving y'all an idea how long this thing has tormented me..) but I'm not sure it was worth it. Especially when the A800 exists. It's just been a miserable experience. I've gotten a Colecovision roughly 20 years after the 5200 (800 family in the middle timeframe) and have had almost zero issues with lots of easy to get upgrades and QoL doohickeys. Just play the thing! Sure no Gremlins but Colecovision H.E.R.O. is the definitive version of one of my favorite Crash era titles. (It's boxed too. Except it was obviously just as the retro bubble was blowing up, albeit more Nintendo to now era stuff.) It's just not a good machine. Poorly built and designed with very little exclusive to it.

I saw one at Target today and picked it up. Only one they had. I mostly bought to get some of the games not on other collections. Wired I saw no lag whatsoever with the included controller which is ok but I would have preferred a single one if it could have been a gamepad style with microswitches and a bit larger and looser paddle. Some in system manuals for the games and being able to tweak the control options would be great especially on the paddles. The scan line option is terrible as most are. (Only an Apple ii one long delisted from the Android store did crt simulation good imo.) Overall the emulation is decent but there are some light tearing moving vertically and the vector games are dying for the vector options the Flashback PS4 collections had. Absolutely excellent vector tweaks nothing else seems to use. I've not had time to mess with sideloading files or trying other controllers yet. It's decent so far though.

This list is terrible. Like yeah the newer machines can be argued to be better but some classics are lower than complete failures hardly anyone heard of!

Hell of a lot of great mods to some classics dude!

If it works for you cool. Means slightly better prices for me right? Right?

I always remove those annoying little blighters. I hiss at them.

I'm like in the 70-80 range iirc. Though some games like Buster Douglas Boxing I merely have the Pal Region Heavyweight Champ version. Same exact game. I'm dumb but I'm not that dumb.

I thank you for the kind words! I have still been looking for complete games at reasonable prices and this.. seems to not happen. Even when I am willing to spend a bit more cash the game is missing the manual. ITS A PLASTIC CASE HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN RAAAARG. Needless to say I have irritated sellers at Retroworld Expo as I refuse to buy games without the manual. Add in some of the above and its been a bit rough. Though with that new Analogue SG out there some SMS fun sounds good, doubly so when the Game Gear dongle comes out because lol at playing on a real gg especially given how they love to die.

Well I am trying! Sadly the RAM came in today and didn't work. The screen stayed black and I got THE CHIMES OF DOOM. So I contacted the seller for a refund and I will move towards the 64 megs I saw. Perhaps it is a sign from RAPTOR JESUS (Aka Woz.). I did buy a nice barstool to use with the machine and gave the top of the case a nice scrubbing. Which actually took some paint OFF the case but eh. It was mad dirty and now is just schlubby and the nooks n crannies are still icky. I am debating just spraypainting the whole thing in a nice dark blue or purple when it warms up a little here in New England. The case is in rough and cracked shape (some from the shipping) anyhow so its not like I am destroying a vital artifact of computing.. Hell, even opening the case caused a tab to crack off so might as well make it mine eh? Now do I protect the Apple emblem or just repaint it a solid color at the end? I'm thinking the latter because EFFORT. Just some tape over the vents to keep em open and just get some TUSSIN rubbed up all in it! The battery is due tomorrow, the VGA dongle wednesday. Next week I will probably order the SD2SCSI interface and possibly depending on if the not working RAM gets refunded order the 64 megs this week and have a billy boss system. As is its MUCH better than the Mac Plus but somehow my silly butt is still wasting time on it as it is. Sometimes I think its half the fun.....

Amber looks sweet and is kind of how the turret gun laptops in Aliens were screened. http://devblog.monothetic.com/post/100917702075/interfacing-connection (Scroll down a little bit.) And as an Aliens geek I had to go with that. But the black and white of the Mac is a good second. Green is that of the Apple IIes and is inferior. But we all know the cool people have the 16 colors of the Commodore 64 and its all you really need for low color glory.

You know I probably saw that same machine on the Bay looking to replace my Plus which is just not fast enough for me to play Might and Magic 1-3 on. (Though my physical copy of 3 is the Turbografx one and could be sold for the price of a couple old Macs.) But luck and fate brought me what I have been searching for: http://wargamedork.blogspot.com/2018/03/retrocomputing-why-bother-machalla-iisi.html Its working pretty good so far. But I keep finding MORE STUFF I want for it though hardware wise as opposed to my Atari 8 bits which are just game collecting vacuums that I spend money on every few months when I get a bee in my bonnet or some searches come up. Most old Mac games are either freeware or I have the PC version and can thus play the Mac port with little to no issue because ports are the same thing as legally owning it eh eh eh? (Almost zero old Mac software will ever be put up for even digital purchase. Also see Atari and how they seem to think the company they bought the IP to with that name made nothing besides 2600 and arcade games, leaving the 800 in the dust which is heretical heresy.) I am just Tim the Toolmanning this thing and its FUN TO DO. I WORK ON THIS BABY THE SAME WAY, GOTTA GET MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE THAT CAN PIERCE THE HEAVENS WITH THE FURY OF A THOUSAND SUNS! My goal is to have my rig feature complete by the start of Summer. (Which is around my birthday and the machine itself showed up like the first day of Spring or the last day of Winter.) I won't get everything done because I just now (about 6 hours after ordering 4by4meg SIMMs for 22 shipped) found a place with 16by4s for 12 a stick and a wandering Google showed me there is one existing and one probably soon to happen USB to ADB so I can maybe have nice high grade optical mice or maybe even use a nice mechanical keyboard over the MONSTER Extended Keyboard II even if its pretty solid. I doubt a modern mechanical 2 USB gamer type KB would work with the interfaces but any normal modern USB board would work including the nice KB that came with my currently not working G5 Imac. (Capacitors. The bane of a retro electronics geek's existence. My Turbo Duo is close mocking me until I swap out so many surface mount caps. IM SCURRED OK. I HAVEN'T SOLDERED SINCE 1993. DON'T JUDGE ME.) Like I said ALL THE RAM can be one of the future but not precisely gotta have it things. Same with a NuBus adaptor and an improved video card or at the very least math coprocessor or something silly. Basically though the Clock Crystal, a nice comfy stool to sit on, and a SD2SCSI drive to replace that tiny 40 meg drive are do it ASAP dealies. Ridiculous amounts of RAM and Nubus shenanigans are later and optional.

Glad to see ya back!

You know like the superlative tweaking of Donkey Kong and the like. Why hasn't anyone done this to Spelunker? You know take the gameplay of the A8 version and maybe try fitting in some of the graphic and musical style of the NES version for the best of both worlds? A game that is fun to play and has a good charming look! It just seems like one of those no brainer things though it might be mad hard to do.

I am kind of interested. I just... need to get one of those other thingies to make it work the best? The big Q then becomes will it be then cheaper than just getting a Lotharek?

Well I wouldn't say I have totally stopped but I haven't been active either. I am casually still looking for games at prices I am willing to pay. But the effort I put to my reviews wasn't really giving me a lot of response. Its like why bust my butt on these things when hardly anyone seemed to care and there are tons of games I want to play before even getting into all the newer retro titles I pick up from time to time. It didn't seem to resonate with anyone and it was making me want to put less and less time into it. So for a while its just on a hiatus. Is it done forever? Doubtful as I have at least one more review 70% completed for months and once I get more games to have closer to a complete or as complete as I am willing to pay for collection of US titles. (Like today I drove a good hour to a geek shop for the hell of it because the weather was fantastic and gas was cheaper in the region. I wasn't about to pay 12 bucks for Joe Montana Football, 30 for My Hero, or 55 for Spider Man. At least not at the moment. I was kind of close to getting Joe Montana but I decided to look around the mall and they had some of those TMNT Heroclix blind bags at a store called Newbury Comics so I instead got them and the first comic Rick and Morty trade paperback. They also had some boss ass diecast (I think) Alien/s vehicles that were around 30-50 each and if I am gonna burn 30 on a silly thing the Dropship or APC is MUCH cooler than My Hero.) There are still deals to be had in retro gaming but the whales are pushing lots of stuff up. And its getting to the point where most of my gaming interests (Atari 8 bit micros, PC, SMS) are easier and cheaper to find online than driving all over creation. Time available and my time management skills mean also easier to just buy online as money and my interests dictate.

Sorry to Necro this but while that works none of the preload options come up. So you can't set resolution or windowed mode or controller support. Still I only paid like 7 USD shipped for it MISB. But I like the interface and achievements and the like which is a thing Stella doesn't have. Even checking the .ini file doesn't seem to do the trick.

Gah! Thought I had some time to actually send in a submission on this one! But if it helps any Phil my thought to not work 7800 just powered on fine meaning I might only need an Edladdin dongle and a Composite mod kit and I can happily play my 7800 collection! I just didn't realize I had an extra sealed edition of DK and Jr! And thanks to your podcast I just ordered a complete boxed Crossbow. (Ninja Golf and Midnight Mutants are two more I want but not at their going rates. If I ever do some audio submissions I will get into why I don't really want many 7800 games. More expensive to get inferior editions of games superior on other platforms.)

My current Colecovision score in an emulator, no save stating, using a wired PS3 third party controller. H.E.R.O. is one of my favorite games of all time. First played it on a friend's C64 and eventually bought it from him. Foolishly sold off with my C64 in 92. I am not a big fan of it on the 2600 as the 64 and CV versions to me look more RIGHT since that's the first way I played em. (To be fair though I first played River Raid on a 2600 but now its basically A8 bit or nothing.) A button for bombs is so good!

I just want the best playing versions possible. And best sounding/looking. Which at the moment basically means for English speakers: I: IIGS port (have fun with emulators!) 2: PC port with fan patches 3: NES port with fan rebalance patch: http://www.jeffludwig.com/ultima3/ 4: SMS or PC with VGA/MIDI patches. (C64 remaster above would work too.) 5: PC 6: PC port with NUVIE. 7-9: Don't care they all kinda suck in their own ways. Real time RTS combat? NO SIREE! (Lots of folks recommend Exult for 7 and 7.5) I am leaving out side games and the like obviously. I believe NUVIE isn't quite where it needs to be to make U6 super good but they are working hard on it. Don't like the tiny world window? FULL SCREEN WITH INTERFACE OVERLAY FOLKS! I know this makes me a bad retro person but I want the best looking, playing, and sounding experiences I can get. I don't care about the purity. Life is too short and busy to deal with some of the older era game shenanigans.

It has been a while since I did this thing but my Ataring hasn't stopped. I have more games on the way to my house and I even did a little surgery on my 800 a couple weeks back. Its now prettier and the N key actually works! Among other things. I just flit from thing to thing and finding A8 bit stuff in the wild is hard. Its all basically ebay or one of the Atari resellers. Ill share some pics next week. In fact it miiiight be time for a full recollation of my collection just to see what I have. Except maybe not the way my Mk1 collection pictures went. I might go with spines only where possible this time. Retro gaming has gotten BIG and tons of stores have been opening up as of late. And even a cheapo like me can find some good deals provided I don't chase the same stuff the collector whales all want. (DO NOT EVEN TRY COLLECTING TURBOGRAFX/PC ENGINE. SRSLY. Even mid level titles have gone to what upper range A8 stuff does!)

Is it just me or should they maybe lay off with the 2600 and maybe try a 7800 or 5200/XEGS one? I mean those machines werent nearly as popular but the machines were so much better than the 2600! I could kind of understand that some licenses have expired but as long as it is not some odd split thing with the Tramiels the ones that haven't would at least be great extras and add ons to future machines. Sure it might mean they have to actually make a new case but the internals are still probably plenty usable, something they wouldn't be for most of the Atari arcade stuff. Maybe not enough horsepower. I've had the same issues with a lot of disk compilations for Atari stuff. Its like if its not the arcade or the 2600 it doesn't exist! No Jaguar. No 8 bit computers. No 7800. (Correct me if I am wrong here though.) I have the same issues with Activision. Why keep bringing out the 2600 games when the A8 and C64 and Colecovision and Intellivision and TI 99 all had superior versions of a ton of their back catalog? Why not show these games in the best possible way? I really can't play 2600 HERO when the Coleco or C64 version exists. And River Raid? A8 bit or GTFO I say! It might only be a little bit, but A8 Kaboom! is so much better IMO. (And considering They even had C64 Activision packs for Win 95 its not like they don't know this stuff exists. Though it wasn't any of the 2600 stuff for some oddball reason.) Then again, compilations in general are a pain, especially as a US gamer. Japan got a ton of legit ports of arcade classics. Even stuff like Terra Cresta, UpnDown, and Haunted Castle had some sort of legit release. Quartet? Yes that too! Yall will get my PSP Salamander pack when you pry it from my cold dead hands. Now stuff based on licenses I can sort of accept even if so many Alien franchise arcade games are lost to most of us (legally anyhow) forever. And I can kind of understand Atgames or anyone else not wanting to make a Vectrex (Retro VGS? Dumb and pointless. SUPER VECTREX REBORN? WHERE DO I PUT MY MONEY? TAKE MY MONEY! ILL EAT RAMEN FOR A WHILE DAMN YOU!) or some of the more obscure stuff but... There are more options. And honestly most of these games MAME team or other emulation and translation crews have already done the work for FREE you could probably pay for cheap which would cover most of the work to put games that are mostly sub 1 Megabyte in size on legit collections. Or at least GOG/Steam/PSN. Even some Irem stuff got released on Dotemu for crying out loud! And no Japan stop saying DURR WE LOST THE SOURCE CODE LOL because I aint buying that excuse no more! (Sorry felt I needed to rant. I just don't want to have to pirate or anything and will spend money for reasonably priced legit collections of old classics. And not just the same basic pile of Midway, Atari, and Namco games that we have had a bajillion releases of. Sure they probably still sell but.. use the rest of the back catalog! Taito has more than just Space Invader dangit!)

http://masterratings.blogspot.com/2015/07/game-twenty-shinobi-1987.html First SMS review of the month is up and ready to go!

I honestly don't think age has anything to do with if a review of a game new or old has anything to do with it. IS THE GAME FUN FOR THE REVIEWER? Yes or no? Why does said reviewer think so? Even if you disagree with the reviewer if they give their reasoning it might be an interesting read even if you don't concur with their statements. That is kind of what I am aiming for in my reviews. Why do I personally like or dislike a game? What is the game about? What could be done differently? What did it do that I liked? I try to bring these things up in my reviews. Like Shinobi which should be up sometime this week, probably Wednesday. The lack of any continues and the POWER UP DEATH SPIRAL it has going on really hurts it for me, especially with a couple of the bosses and the control issues that require near pixel perfect jumping or DEATH in a couple spots. It ruined what could have been an excellent game that was almost better outside of graphical issues than the arcade game it was spawned from! I also bring up what is important to me which is why sound and music are barely even mentioned. I usually have a podcast playing in the background and have the sound turned down low. (In games that allow it I usually turn music OFF but have sound effects at maximum along with speech. And subtitles on where allowed. Its not that I don't like a good soundtrack its just I enjoy podcasts too! Then there are games like Raiden Project on PS1 where when I emulate it I have music on Remix but have my mixer settings at like 10% for audio so I can hear the sound and music but as a minor background to the podcasts. But to each their own which is why my reviews have basically three or four different loose ratings. General score of Good, Ok, or Bad. (Sometimes with an Asterisk as say on an emulator with save states it might actually be a better game. Or a remake version might be superior. Or the original if its an arcade port though I rarely give asterisks for that one.) How much money I would spend on a complete copy. (For me 20 bucks is about maximum I spend on ANY physical copy of a videogame nowadays, with the odd exception as high as 60 but that is EXTREMELY rare. Needless to say the complete House of the Dead on the Saturn I saw at a Game Exchange today for 190 was laughable. Even for 90 it would be a joke. I doubt I would even drop 50 and that's acknowledging its a very rare game! Now 50 for maaaybe Popful Mail? Possibly! But its also a longer game and not an arcade shooter.) Have I completed it? Do I want to? These things give folks an idea what I actually think without being some set in stone score ala Videogame Critic or whatever. Plus some people think you have to totally 100% complete a game to give it a proper review so I might as well let them see if I did or didn't finish it. (Though in many many many 8-16 bit era games completing it requires tons of memorization and replaying the same sections over and over and over again. I wasn't big on that when I was 15 and had no life. I still have no life at 41 but I GOT STUFF TO DO. Like the big foundation cement crack that was leaking water into my basement and bedroom. Sucking up all the water off the carpet, fixing the crack from leaking, and filling in the crack with a mixture designed for such things is a butt ton more important than properly beating a game on original hardware! Also 95 shipped for the repair kit is more important and worth it (because itll save me THOUSANDS long run) than spending 50+ dollars for bloody ALF. ALF.) But I am an oddball who likes discovering new games and old games and look at it as a "stranger is a friend you haven't met yet" as opposed to some odd nostalgia or brand religion nonsense. I don't care if a game is on a Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Commodore, Apple, Atari, TI, Tandy, or whatever platform. I just want to experience new and fun games! Ideally for less than 10 bucks a title because Steam and GOG have friggin SPOILED me. (I did spend 15 for a loose SNES Tetris Attack game today though. This way I don't need to pull out my N64 to play Pokemon Puzzle League. I don't really like the N64 outside of Paper Mario which is a MASTERPIECE. And Doom 64 I just play it source port. I really ought to get the manual to Ogre Battle 64 so I can figure out how the hell to play it though. I already sold off Conker and Perfect Dark and Harvest Moon along with a couple of loose carts because bleh. I kind of want Robotron 64 though. And apparently Donkey Kong 64 has FULL 4 LEVEL DK ARCADE on it which is like the only reason I would want it. I like legit copies of things. And the big N made the 3DS release exclusive because REASONS.) So yeah. That's my basic views on reviewing stuff.

http://masterratings.blogspot.com/2015/06/game-eighteen-phantasy-star-1987.html I was delayed but I still have my second review for the month up! This time the legendary PHANTASY STAR.

It is June and thus it is time for another Master System review: Ys is up! http://masterratings.blogspot.com/2015/06/game-seventeen-ys-vanished-omens-198788.html I meant for this to be a quick one but well.. I kind of got carried away because I really like Ys.