carmel_andrews

March 11, 2005

I remember this game... and the sequel, except the scrolling is reversed

I remember there being a little easter egg built in that allowed you to crash the game by crashing/landing or something like that

March 11, 2005

Andrew... any chance of an english translation (UK english), that would be brill (is/was it a graphic adventure... a'la level 9 etc)

March 11, 2005

How about hacking out the source code for one of the better A8 emu's, find out where the antic/gtia code is and it's relationship with the rest of the emulator, and build some xtra capability into it, and bob's your auntie and uncle, a new graphics chip

or even better hacking out the source code for one of the better STE/amiga/snes/n64 or PS emu's out there, finding out were the source code for the respective sound/graphics chips are and their relationships with the rest of the emu's and hacking that back into the A8 emu's or even better, hacking the code into a programmable processor or FPGA tech. and 'et viola' a new chip set for us A8 users, or users of another flavour of computer

You can do this because all the hardware, the CPU, PIA, Freddy, P,A,G is now in code, and like you prog. a videogame the code should be laid out in a logical format, just ripe for improvement, just imagine a 64bit 6502, Antic/Gtia capable of 16.7m colour range, polygon graphics, T&L shading, z or x buffering, 1900/1600 hi rez modes etc etc... anything is poss as it's now in code, not hardwired

March 11, 2005

sorry for being a ignoramous but who or what is PES4, not really into GC, XBOX or PS/PS2, i've got a decent spec'd pc as well as most of my orig. Atari 8bit setup (less d/d's)

I do remember kick off on the ST (i owned it, as well as the machine), and an A8 port would be brill

As for Lehmann vs Kahn... I say bring back David Seaman... wasn't there once a German Goalie that used to play for Man City (apparently he once played in an FA cup final carrying a neck injury with he got, playing in the said match)

Dont forget Christian Ziege (ex liverpool) and Dietmar Hamann (liverpool i think) and ofcourse Juergen 'the diver' Klinsmann (Ex spurs)

March 10, 2005

don't bother... pokey can do most of what sid can do anyway, better options would be the amiga 'paula' chip or the a1200 aga version, alternatively if our american cousins know anyone associated with the original xe/st design team, and half inch a design spec or schematics for amy/amie s/c that would be brill or even better, ther chip itself

March 10, 2005

just to correct one of the previous postees (re: 65816 u/g)

The original 65816 and o/s upgrade was done by Chuck Steinmann c/o Dataque (he also was responsible for the first 'stereo pokey' upgrade called gumby) apparently, so the story goes Atari C. themselves were offered this upgrade, but turned it down (they wanted too bigger slice of the cost, as the upgrade use a modified Atari o/s)) those were the original 'official' reasons, i guess the other reason's being the processor itself (Atari originally designed it, and sold it of to wdc) and secondly people thought that it might be compatible with the st (an impossibility), and Atari didnt feel like associate itself with a product that might cut into ST sales

as a result the product was held back for a year whilst steinmann was writing a new O/S, the fabled 'turbo' o/s, from what i understand the early versions were a bit buggy, only the later versions were okay, the upgrade apparently worked ok but nothing special on a standard a8 (unless you had the o/s u/g as wel)l it was ram upgradeable thru simm's if mem. serves me right, cant rem. what the ram cap. was

The turbo 816 as the unit was known as, was to that being the centrepiece for extending the a8 platform as he (steinmann) had plans to build tower versions of the a8 to carry hard drives and also 1.4 and 720k d/d's, plus the turbo 816 os and proc., and hack jobs for the then pc sound and graphics cards and somehow merge them into the atari mem.map and address space, the syatem had a built in sytandard atari xl/xe mode with bolt on atari 800 mode (for incomp. 800 software)

Also the turbo 816 was supossedly atari 800 compatible

I trust that this clear things up

March 10, 2005

only if it's ported from an st or amiga... when i was playing it on my older bro's c64, the screen layout was well too small as it looked as if you were playing 5 a side

A better game to convert would be a proper version of kick off or kick off 2, not the pile of crap that Anco tried to palm us of with, even the c64 version was better then the a8 (and that's saying something)

March 10, 2005

Didnt Bob Wooley try this one out 'successfully' at the back end of the 80's, i do remember this because it was mentioned in Atari User and/or page 6, chuck steinmann tried something similar with pokey, hence the original pokey stereo upgrade 'gumby'

I cant remember the exact spec's of the unit he did, all i remember is that it did 4096 colours/colors (a'la Amiga/ste)

someone on one of atariages forum mentioned the c65 from cbm which used an upgraded/updated vic2 chip called vic3, it too had high rez modes and amiga/ste style colour/color range (4096 colours)

March 10, 2005

1.77mhz only applies to US systems

1.79 mhz is standard in all non ntsc markets

March 10, 2005

There's always next year...Arsenal for the FA cup (and the league... for the super optimistic)... England... World Champions next year (after all we did it in rugby, against a vastly better team), London to win the 2012 Olympics... see you on the next red bus/black cab

Chelsea to get thrashed in the q/f's

Foreign coaches coaching english sides (as least Arsene Wenger has won things, and by foreign coaches do you consider scotland as foreign, if so, i guess you can include a certain Mr Ferguson as well)

March 10, 2005

the original postee said 1010, are we sure he didn't mean 1050 or 810, as 1010's were Atari tape decks in UK

March 10, 2005

you mean like binatone and grandstand (the ones with built in pong variants (like football, tennis, squash etc)

March 10, 2005

if your ever in london, i think i saw one going at computer exchange (CEX) rathbone place (just off t.c.r. and oxford street), just can't remember how much they were asking for it

March 10, 2005

i am interested.. count be in, i am also interested in anything to do with assembler on the A8 (especially 130xe), prefereably from the very begining

March 8, 2005

Who would have thought that putting out a Pong type gaming system (from a design/technological viewpoint) would be considered a good business move

And yet we have Infogrammes/Jakks bastardizing Atari's technology (so far as the 2600/7800 are concerned) and reproducing it in a pong type machine which essentially play 10-20 different flavours of pong

How would infogrammes like it if we took one of their leading best selling software titles and began porting it over to the spectrum or ZX81 and selling the software under the infogrammes name

If Steve mayer and Joe Decuir (the main 2600 h/w designers) were dead today, they'd be turining in their graves

I was lead to believe that the idea behind the 2600 (and laterly the 7800) was to advance the games systems technology beyond 'dedicated gaming systems' (AkA PONG machines) by producing 'programmable games sytems'

And yet it would apear (according to infogrammes/Jakks) that the 2600/7800 might as well have never existed (so far as technology is concerned)

Is it no surprise then that 'gamespot's website recent reported that infogrammes (Atari) are loosing money (Again), not surprising when they want to screw their customer base by releasing/selling them 'substandard' or '2nd rate' products like the infogrammes/jakks devices

And further more, insulting Atari users (computers and gaming systems) by demeaning and denigrating the very technology Atari were founded on

People and consumers might have wanted 'Pong' type products 30 years ago, they certainly don't want them now

If infogrammes/Jakks were serious about releasing these types of devices, a better solution would have been to have added a cartridge port (hence keeping in with the design/technology capabilites of the aforementioned emulated systems)

Alternately bringing out an official Atari endorsed version of one of the more popular, cross platform emulators, and supplied the disk with a small selection of between 4-500 legal roms, and providing an internet link so that users of this product could acquire additional roms (for a small charge) or updated versions of the aforementioned emulators, at least this solution wouldn't have been as substandard or 2nd rate a product then the SHIT they released

But there again i guess that Jakks/infogrammes are more interested in screwing their customer base and don't believe in retaining their existing customer base

But there again, what DO i know about the videogame business

March 8, 2005