catharton
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Posts posted by catharton
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Just to explain, I run a games site called Catharton Electronica, the idea of which is partly to get people to leave comments and memories on old and new games from any computer or console.
As I said in another thread on here, I think gaming is destined to become really mainstream in the same way other media like books and music and film have become, with something for everyone. With this in mind I'd like to try and help create a record of people's memories of how gaming began, how people who played these games on their first release remember them.
To jog people's memories, I've tried to compile games lists for all the systems I could find that have had commercial games released for them, and I'm adding screenshots all the time to further remind people what the games used to be like. You'd be surprised how many people post who remember the games but have never heard of emulators.
The Contest Itself!
To help encourage people to leave their memories and comments on games, I'm running a monthly contest where the author of the best-written comment wins a game of their choice. The rules are availble in detail at the link below, but in short the comments have to be new and not taken from anywhere else, the idea of the prize is to encourage new material to appear on the internet rather than recycling of existing material. Also, the winner is based on quality, not quantity, so people with something to say are more likely to win than people who just waffle.
The comments can be for any game, old or new, and if it's missing from the system's game list post a message telling me so and I'll fix it.
Just to emphasise, the comments can be anything to do with the game, your memories, opinions, stuff you know about the game's production etc. They don't have to be a traditional review, although if you want to write a review that's okay too.
Contest Details & Rules (please read if you're thinking of entering!):
http://www.catharton.net/electronica/index.php?topic=21211.0
Catharton Electronica:
http://www.catharton.net/electronica/index.php
(ORIGINAL POST: I run a general gaming site which tries to cover all systems retro and current, the idea is to give people a place to leave memories of games from the past or the present.
We've got a monthly contest where the person who leaves the best comment wins a game, and I was wondering if it would be okay for me to mention the site and contest on here?)
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Haven't played Hard Drivin but I heard it was a stinker.Hard Drivin was terrible on every format it was released on IMHO, it either had a terrible frame rate on slow machines or was very boring to play on fast machines.
I think its appeal had more to do with the impressive arcade machine, and that cow that mooed if you ran into it...
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I was amazed when I saw someone post that the PlayStation 2's vertical design patent acknowledges the Atari Falcon Microbox. Can someone confirm this? All I have is this image file:
http://www.atari-explorer.com/images/sonyps2-large.gif
Looking at a picture of a real Microbox though does remind me of the PS2, so I guess it's just about possible.
But then after I saw that, I remembered a couple of things. If I remember correctly, Atari's Jaguar included technology from Loki, a computer project at Sinclair aimed at making a next gen replacement for the ZX Spectrum. The Loki was cancelled when Sinclair was taken over by Amstrad, who shelved all future development projects and just sold Spectrums.
But Loki wasn't the only computer project Sinclair was working on when they were taken over, there were several others including a very secret project called Janus. The only public information about Janus is a single photo of a mockup of what it would look like (look very closely and you can see the grilles at the back):
That was a design from 1986 at the latest, well before the Falcon or PlayStation series were even conceived of.
(There was also one other project, Pandora, which did see the light of day as the Z88 laptop, so these weren't all vapourware.)
Now, I'd be perfectly willing to believe it's just coincidence that Janus, the Falcon Microbox and the PS2 all went for a vaguely similar stand and casing design, it's a sort of obvious shape to build.
But it just brought to my mind the interesting, if unlikely, possibility that if Atari hired former Sinclair staff to do hardware in the Jaguar, maybe they had hired former Sinclair staff to their design department. If so, the design of the PlayStation 2 could possibly be a twice recycled proposed design for the ZX Spectrum 2, via staff at Sinclair and Atari, and Sony's apparent acknowledgement of the Microbox in the patent.
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So... I agree and disagree...In 2000 years of recorded history, we've always had "data life cycles". Arguably, this may have set us back from time to time when important advances were LOST because of a "single point of failure". On the other hand, imagine the volume of data we would have if EVERY time quill went to parchment, chalk to stone, whatever, was archived somewhere?
It wouldn't actually have been that large a volume, especially considering how few people were literate and how cumbersome it was to reproduce data before the printing press.
It's actually quite shocking how little remains of the ancient world, th
Which today, we have, with the Internet and those services that attempt to archive various aspects (WWW, usenet, etc) of the Internet. Every burp or brainfart you utter on the Internet is probably archived at least one place with the *intent* of preserving it for all time, and is likely perserved in several other places for at least 5-15 years...Which is creating a very real result of information overload.
Only if we don't keep inventing new ways of storing data more compactly, but at the moment we're doing that amazingly well.
As far as text goes, I don't think there'll ever be a problem about storage, and probably not storing pictures or audio or video either.
It reminds me of the apparently wide assumption during the 1960s and 1970s that overpopulation would inevitably cause mass starvation by the 1990s because there wouldn't be enough food to go round, but pure lack of food didn't happen because the technology for creating food didn't stand still, it continued to develop allowing larger and larger harvests which (on average) kept pace with population growth. Politics and economics did cause terrible, apocalyptic tragedies but lack of food didn't.
On the other hand, you're probably right if we wanted to preserve all data on its original media, but as most data nowadays is in the form of downloads I don't think people know or care what it was originally written to. As long as we keep transferring it to higher capacity storage media, we should be okay.
In some cases, it seems to me that information should have a life cycle, and if it is allowed to DIE, it probably was due, anyhow. Seems like it is human nature to assume responsibility for keeping things alive and to take the blame if those things go extinct. Could be that a thing has just lived it's life cycle, and it's time to move on.I don't agree, especially with historical information which we usually need more of, not less. If we're talking about recorded history, there are more people alive right now than have ever been alive, so it's natural if we have a lot more events, places and people that need documenting than we ever did before.
If you agree with the concept of studying history, essentially to learn from our mistakes and see where we came from, it's worth getting at least a representative permanent storage of things that tell us what life was like in the past. Maybe not everything, maybe not every supermarket receipt, but probably at least some supermarket receipts.
The trouble with saying particular data isn't important enough to warrant storage is that it's very tricky to know how important something is at the time it's made. It's also easy to overestimate how difficult it is to store it, when usually it becomes a trivial matter.
The example that haunts me is what happened to the BBC's archives before the 1980s. From the 1950s to the 1970s, there was a policy of destroying anything they felt had no relevance to modern audiences, because at the time TV masters were stored on enormous magnetic tapes which took up lots of shelf space. At the time, they couldn't understand why anyone in the future would want to see things like the first TV performances of the Beatles and the Stones. Had they waited a relatively short period, the storage problem would have become trivial and the huge influence and historical interest of these two pop bands (and many more deleted programmes) would have become clear.
The fate of silent movies was almost identical, a huge hit in the early 1920s could well have vanished from the face of the earth by the early 1930s, their makers just could not conceive why anyone would want these preserved. Many of the pioneers who established film making have little or no representation of their work, and many concepts in cinema which we take for granted were actually invented by films which no longer exist.
At the moment, gaming seems immature and peripheral, and it's difficult to see what mainstream interest there is in preserving old games, but this is the same view the movie makers took, and the same view the BBC took, and they were both wrong.
Gaming, like film and television and radio, has had a novelty status for most of its early years and decades, no one at their birth saw them as proper media but poor relations. I honestly don't think that will last forever, I think one day games (in some form) will be something people of all backgrounds and tastes will enjoy, just like books, films, TV and music, there would be something for everyone. And it's at that point that there will be true historical value in the earliest games, and that's why we should preserve as many of them as possible as faithfully as possible, including the hardware that ran them.
Sorry this took so long, it's just a subject very close to my heart. I read a book over the summer about what happened to silent movies and the kind of stuff they used to justify their destruction was so close to what people say about early games now ("There's no market for them" etc) that it made me more determined than ever not to let history repeat itself.
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The cocktailsI THOUGHT they were called cocktails, but then something in me said "no, don't be ridiculous"
It'd be so cool to do a retro-bar where you had a cocktail game built into every table.
I don't suppose you know how expensive it'd be to buy one second hand?
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A bit more news on the smartphone front, Nokia's bringing out a couple of Atari arcade compilations called Atari Masterpieces 1 and Atari Masterpieces 2 for the N-gage. Included in each game will be 8 Atari arcade games and 4 unlockable Atari 2600 games, so that's 24 titles in all.
Volume 1 will have Asteroids, Battlezone, Black Widow, Millipede, Missile Command, Red Baron, Lunar Lander and Super Breakout, plus four hidden 2600 games.
Yes, I know, it's just another couple of retro-compilations, but there's two nice points about these particular ones:
-The N-gage's screen is pretty much the same shape as the original arcade machines, so this is a pretty snug fit as far as ports go.
-The N-gage has a cell phone internet connection which can be used wherever your phone works, so the high score tables on the games are linked to the internet and the same for everyone. If you're top of a table, it means you're better than everyone else who owns the game, it's like all the players worldwide live near the same arcade.
Here's a bit more about Volume 1, nothing's been said about Vol 2 yet:
http://allaboutngage.com/games/viewgame.php?id=60
"The eight titles in the first compilation have been reproduced with every trick and tip from the originals. Atari Masterpieces Volume 1 also includes four unlockable Atari 2600 titles. Gamers can also upload their high-scores on N-Gage Arena and find out who is at the top of the charts."
The one thing that worries me about the screenshots is how tiny the text is. If they have made EXACT ports of the originals, it could be quite difficult to read some of that stuff. But it doesn't make a huge difference I guess, we're not talking about text adventures here
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I had a go on a table version of Space Invaders at a games exhibition in London, and... it was really great fun! I was with a friend and we could sit down, put our stuff next to or even on top of the machine, we could both see the screen properly, the controls felt easier to use sitting down. It was great!
If I ever bought an arcade machine myself it'd have to be a table machine, quite apart from anything else it looks a lot more classy.
Why is this kind of machine so rare though? This was the first time I'd seen one in real life. Were they of very limited appeal, or were arcade owners afraid of vandalism?
If the vandalism wasn't a problem, I could imagine something like tabletop games being popular in clubs or pubs.
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I am all for a good game of Poker but those damn machines are a fools downfall.There was stuff on the BBC about fruit machines ages ago (are they called fruit machines in America? they're one-armed bandits):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2979142.stm
"The Fairplay group has emulated the workings of the majority of fruit machines currently in use in the UK and studied what happens at crucial moments, for instance when a player gets a chance to gamble for a big payout.
At these times fruit machines studied by the group stop a player collecting the jackpot no matter which choice they make. One of the machines tested has a hidden display which decides in advance when a player will stop winning."
"This is all absolutely deliberate," says Stuart Campbell, spokesman for the Fairplay Campaign.
"There's certainly no randomness involved," he says. "At times it will throw you a jackpot to keep you interested but most of the time it has a pre-set block on what you can win that will be quite low."
...so basically if you get into a situation that's close to winning the computer often deliberately alters the game so it's impossible to get the jackpot.
But even with the old mechanical fruit machines, gambling can very easily prey on vunerable people.
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Today the arcades are going the family route because that's a safe crowd that pays the overhead.Not in Europe they're not, all the ones I've seen lately have been pretty scary places full of scary people very much like the arcades of 1983 that you mentioned.
They weren't always like that, but it seems like ever since consoles started outclassing arcade machines the actual arcades became dingier and dingier. Most of the ones I know that are still around are now mostly filled with gambling machines and gambling addicts, despite having desperately non-threatening names like "family leisure centre" or "amusement arcade" etc.
On a brighter note, one sort-of rebirth of arcades has been the demo console booths you see quite often in cinemas and fast food places. I assume the console companies give them out for free, to get people to try the console and then (presumably) buy one so they can play somewhere other than Mcdonalds.
DDR made an impact, but many of us would never be caught dead dancing at an arcade so the audience is still limited.Ohhh, dance machines are great! I used one with a friend (not in an arcade, it was in a museum for some reason) and it was just brilliant fun! I've never enjoyed an arcade machine more than that, and a nice little crowd built up around us (it was a two person machine, we both had to dance simultaneously). If video games have been perceived as too introverted in the past, things like dance games are a great way out of that.
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That's almost enough to make me want a game phone. Almost.You don't have to have a game phone, just a Symbian phone. You might possibly already have one without knowing it.
Symbian Series 60 or UIQ smartphones are just normal-looking phones (game phones are basically just normal smartphones with a different casing and a better direction pad). Most people with symbians don't even realise they own one, because it hardly ever gets mentioned by the shop they buy it from.
All the major manufacturers make Symbian phones (Motorola, Nokia, Siemens, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic etc etc.) and the Symbian operating system is jointly owned by them all.
There's about thirty different Series 60 and ten different UIQ models but they're all basically the same two phones and can run the same programs and games.
Here's a list of them all if you want to check if you have one: http://www.tapaga.com/viewpage.php?page_id=33
(This photo isn't complete, just a selection)
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I've just done a brief interview with the brilliantly named Rude Scotsman who's done a remake of Tempest for Symbian Series 60 and UIQ smartphones:
http://www.tapaga.com/viewpage.php?page_id=45
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If online games get popular, they could almost dispense with charging for the game itself and concentrate on providing the online service. This would be a good way to sidestep piracy because it's meaningless pirating a free product and it's hard to imagine how you'd pirate a service without resorting to things like credit card fraud.
In effect, this setup is much like the Phantom and we all saw the warm welcome the Phantom got from gamers.
I think that had more to do with the CEO's trail of failed companies and strangely deceptive language, as well as his attempt to silence critics by suing them.
It also probably didn't help that the Phantom is basically just a PC on its side covered by a fancy box. The people who wrote that controversial expose also got hold of a phantom and took it apart:
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjU3
They said they found nothing inside it to suggest it was anything other than a PC on its side.
In any case, looks like it's curtains for Infinium Labs:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/news.php?aid=5643
They have $20,000 cash and they're $10 million in debt.
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Price has to be supply and demand, as MMCs are far simpler devices, and consequently cheaper to manufactureWhy didn't MMC become the standard? You'd think it had everything on its side, although I suppose from a content point of view DRM is attractive to content producers.
As I gather, the main reason is that SD spends more moeny talking people into supporting it.
Darn... looks like it's SD for you and me in the future...
The SD board seems to be mostly camera makers, maybe that helped too. Digital cameras have been the first big products to use memory cards.
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Yet, you must admit that Sinclair made the difference between incredibly expensive computers and home computer (along with CBM VIC20)I loved the Sinclair! I had a Spectrum for years and years! But it wasn't a console...
My next door neighbor had a 'Stinkclair' = it was inexpensive alright - It basically drove both his family and mine to not buy inexpensive computers anymoreWhat was wrong with it?
For 1982, which is when it was created, it was absolutely brilliant: cheap, easy to use, loads of software (there's something like 10,000 titles out there, you can play most of them online in java at www.worldofspectrum.org ), and the best Spectrum developer was a British software house called Ultimate, who later changed their name to Rare and became one of the top developers in the world. Many of today's programmers started out on one.
It was faster than the C64, and had higher resolution graphics even if they did have trouble with colour clash. A monochrome Spectrum game like Head Over Heels is one of the best games of the period.
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How are the internet capabilities? Are there any?Yes, that's actually the main focus of the N-gage as its oriented towards online games. Just like other symbian smartphones, you can do anything on an N-gage that you can on a PC with a dial-up speed connection: the web, message boards, instant messenges (the most popular is Agile Messenger), chat rooms (including IRC), email (POP, webmail etc), FTP, online games...
The built-in email client is okay but the built-in browser is rubbish, it's only really useful for text-oriented pages with small graphics ( e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm ).
However, you can install your own browser such as Netfront ( http://www.access-netfront.com/ ) and Opera ( http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/ ).
Symbian browsers display websites pretty much like a PC browsers, although as a mobile screen is much smaller than a PC's, they both offer several options for displaying pages:
-full-size (where you scroll around a full-sized screen, this is usually rendered just like on a PC)
-smart rendering (where the page is reformatted by the browser so the pictures and text fit onto the screen and you only have to scroll up and down)
-small image (where the page isn't formatted but the pictures are all shrunk)
-text only (where there's no formatting or images at all, which is actually quite excellent if you're surfing something like a news site and don't want to see advertisements etc, I've been doing the same thing on my PC)
There are other browsers too.
I know too much because SD is a minor thorn in my side.Got an older device that doesn't support SD. Made finding memcards for it a pain. That and I dislike DRM.
Yeah, SD seems to be everywhere. Shame as you're right about DRM.
Price has to be supply and demand, as MMCs are far simpler devices, and consequently cheaper to manufactureWhy didn't MMC become the standard? You'd think it had everything on its side, although I suppose from a content point of view DRM is attractive to content producers.
Meh. I'd rather have a proper MP3 player. Not a big fan of multi-purpose devices, personally.Well, it's not just a question of convergence. If a phone has an iPod-like storage capacity (and possibly a 3G speed connection), people could start buying music tracks straight onto the device. If the phone has a visual radio (which is a standard radio that displays what track is being played), you could end up with something that lets you download and store a track as soon as you hear it on the radio.
That might make things very very interesting indeed because it wouldn't just be a case of trying to save space in your pocket. As soon as you hear music you could buy it, and you could listen to it anywhere.
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As far as this "recall" goes, I did hear some people saying the slimline PS2 overheats when running San Andreas, although I've never seen that confirmed. Maybe this has something to do with it?
Well, when I'm at work and someone asks me which console they should get I pretty much always suggest the Xbox.
Oh, how can you so cynically abandon the Bally Astrocade?
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The guy who owned Konix wanted the system to be purely British, and he wouldn't accept any outside help to get it off the ground. Plenty of companies wanted to buy the system out, the biggest of which was Lucasarts. He just didn't have the money to put it in production, so it never came out.Oh great, another victory for British industry
No wonder there's never been a successful British console. The only other one I can think of is the Amstrad GX4000, but the least said about that the better...
One thing stated in that great Retro Games Magazine article was that a game that was under development, called Return of Starglider (a sequel to the Atari ST game) eventually saw the light of day, at least in concept, as Starfox/Starwing on the SNES.You're kidding! Starfox is a starglider game? Wow... I did not know that. Was it developed by the same people?
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So many questions, so little time!
I broke down and bought Operation Shadow last week. It's a pretty fun game, so far.I would definitely get Pathway to Glory if you're into OS, Pathway has multiplayer and EVERYTHING
Didn't they take out the radio and MP3 player on the QD version? If they didn't, how is the QD at playing music and MP3s?Yes, but you can put your own MP3 player on the QD because it's just software and you can install whatever Symbian software you want. The radio can't be replaced because it's hardware based.
It seems like that happens a lot with N-Gage software. Taito Memories, Sega Rally, Alien Front, and another game I can't remember at the moment. Put out in small quantities somewhere, then it's release for the rest of the world is canned.Aergh, not this again. Sorry, this "where is taito memories" thing is a common thread
Only those four games you mentioned just now were cancelled (the one you couldn't remember is Shade: Wrath of Angels). The other 48 games announced so far have either been released or are about to be released in the next few months.
All except Shade were early 'Gage games and all of them except Shade were panned by everyone who saw them. I have no idea what Shade would have been like because it was still a long way from being released, unlike the other games.
Taito Memories is NO LOSS AT ALL. It consists of standard versions of 8-bit classics Space Invaders, Bubble Bobble and Qix, and that's it. A total rip-off for a full-price game, if they'd released this for $35 a pop it would have sunk without trace, especially as you can play the original versions of all three games on a MAME emulator (or Spectrum, or C64 etc). If anyone wants a copy our local shop has five copies on the shelves, and no one's touched them. I can buy one on your behalf if you're desperate.
Sega Rally, by all reports of people who managed to get a copy, was also pretty poor. It was one of the first games announced and apparently it had zero playability, it was nothing like the SR of the arcades or home consoles and the steering was a bit of a joke. Colin McRae is a much better bet if you want a realistic rally game, it just got released this month to good reviews.
Alien Front got one review in Tilt magazine which gave it 20% and said it was utterly boring, there was nothing to do. (It might not have helped that they removed all the online features from the original version.) The same reviewer in the same magazine in the same issue gave N-gage Tiger Woods 90%, so they weren't being biased against the system.
Shade is a possible loss, but the rest of them sound like they would have just dragged the N-gage's reputation further down, which is what happened when they released Puyo Pop, Virtua Tennis, Puzzle Bobble etc. which all got panned. I cannot believe a single person in the world would have bought the cancelled games at full price and been pleased with them (except perhaps Shade).
Sorry to go on, but it just gets a bit frustrating when people moan about those four cancellations when there's genius stuff like Pocket Kingdom, Pathway, Asphalt, Elder Scrolls etc available now.
I've actually considered buying a QD and not activating the phone, I like my phone seperate from games. I do think the screen on the QD is nice but it needs to be wider.Just out of interest, why do you want to separate games from the phone? I'm not criticising or anything, just curious
The screen is a bit weird to begin with but I honestly just completely ignored it once I started playing. If you can try one out I'd advise you to do so before you judge it, it was the screen that piqued my interest when I saw a demo machine running Pandemonium (an old PlayStation game by Eidos, looks great, kinda boring).
Are there any emulators out for it yetUmm... you mean for the QD? You can emulate:
Commodore 64 (Frodo)
Game Boy (GamePhone)
Game Boy Color (GoBoy)
MSX (fMSX)
NES (Symbnes, Vnes, YewNes)
Megadrive/Genesis (PicoDrive)
MAME (Emame)
Sinclair Spectrum (Spectrian, ZXBoy)
...and there may well be others too as Symbian is an open system that anyone can develop for without needing anyone's permission. There's someone working on a Neo Geo Pocket Color emulator for example: http://www.symbiandiaries.com/n-pop/
Ummm, no.MMC was the original. Older devices support MMC because SD didn't exist.
Ah, I didn't know that! I think a lot of new devices support MMC because of it being a royalty-free standard though.
In any case, Nokia has just announced they're going to start supporting SD in future models so this whole argument may become irrelevant as far as the 'Gage is concerned. The main argument in favour of SD is they're slightly cheaper and easier to find in shops.
1. SD cards have a much larger max capacity than MMCs, which are currently maxed.What capacity did you have in mind? I don't think MMC is currently maxed as they keep coming up with bigger MMCs.
The maximum capacity MMC you can buy at the moment is 1 gigabyte ( http://ngage.allack.co.uk/Extras/index.php ) and there's also a 2 gigabyte model about to appear ( http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=6879 ). The new MMCs are four times faster than current SDs, but I guess SD makers will also have whizbang new prototypes on the way into production. There's not a huge difference between the two in practice.
The interesting point will be when 4 gig MMCs and SDs appear, because then smartphones that use them will have the same capacity as iPod Minis.
When you say you are paying 5 dollars a month does that include phone minutes ? Most of the plans here include so many minutes a month and many other features. (And yes we are getting ripped off)No, but calls and texts cost about 8 cents a minute anywhere anytime. It might work out the same price per minute if you divide the free minutes you get though. Plus I think you guys get better deals on handset prices when you sign up. Swings and roundabouts, swings and roundabouts
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I thought one of the reasons he was involved with the Jaguar was because he was on the ground floor of the Konix Multi System. There's a great article about the Konix MultiSystem in a recent issue of Retro Gamer Magazine. It was supposed to be a purely British console, with the best UK developers on board. He had made Mutant Camels '89 for it, and from the video of the game on the magazine cover disc, it really looked wild.Since the Konix's hardware was fairly related to the Jaguar, and he was already familiar with the technology, I guess it was pretty easy for him to pick up the new development system and start working right away.
Yeah, what happened to the KMS? I vaguely remember reading something about it in a Spectrum magazine (Your Sinclair? Crash?) but it never actually appeared. I didn't know Minter was involved, but if he was it seems he was quite interested in console games even before consoles took over completely.
It certainly looked weird, being based around a steering wheel. For a long time I thought I'd imagined it but there it is on the internet.
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There's a lot of info out there, just search for minter and jaguar. Here's a good write-up of his classic gaming programming including why he went to the Jag:Ah, thanks, that's exactly what I was after. I did try and have a look but it usually just talked about the Jaguar games, not how he got involved.
I like the bit at the end:
Minter amicably parted company with Atari not long after completion of Defender 2000Hadn't Atari gone into bankruptcy by then?
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How accurate is the Symbian Spectrum emulator? That qualifies as a definite 'killer app' to me
Me too, it's a shame Nokia can't advertise it as it's technically not quite in the clear legally (and they sell less new games if people are playing emulated old ones).
There are at least two symbian Spectrum emulators available. The first was ZXboy (the same company does a game boy simulator), but I've heard that's not quite the best available.
The one I use is called Spectrian, which has also been the preferred emulator by N-gage owners on the World of Spectrum boards. It's worked fine with every game I've tried, including sound and speed. Head Over Heels for example is totally accurate as far as I could tell, and it sold it to me as an emulator when it had all the same sounds I remembered from when I had a real speccy (like the "pa daddada daa daa, DAA DAA!" noise when you die).
It can emulate all the models, although it does have to squash the picture slightly as the original spectrum's resolution was wider, but you get used to it.
I don't remember any major problems although at one stage their website said the title screen of Manic Miner would flicker but as they've removed the notice I assume they've fixed it.
White Cloud who make it have a website with screenshots and a free downloadable version here:
http://www.whitecloudsoftware.com/
(The N-gage / QD is a series 60 Symbian device, so they're the screenshots you want to look at.)
The downloadable version is fully functional but it stops working after 30 days now. You have to register it for €15 (about £10) after that. It's quite good when you register though, as you get to save all the keymaps you assigned to the keypad for each particular game. It's kind of like what the Spectrum would have been like if it'd been a console with a joypad.
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I haven't found one title that I've actually played for more than five minutes ("Sonics" included). The GG does have some pretty bizarre Japanese titles (I have two horse racing titles), but that's not enough for me to recommend the system over the Lynx.There were some good RPGs, including the almost-unheard-of Crystal Warriors. That had me glued for weeks until someone stole my GG (and the TV Tuner
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If the SNES and Genesis could handle it for sure the ST could. To be
honest, despite the atmosphere and realistic movement in the Delphine
games they were not excactly pushing the hardware on any platform.
There is very little going on at once. Still a very impressive game in
it's day.
I was just about to say all this! It was absolutely amazing at the time, the way the character leapt and rolled realistically (kind of like Prince of Persia, only better), I was amazed when I first played it on a PC.
At the end of the day though it was just a 2D platform game / adventure with good animation, and the gameplay was possible on almost any system if you were willing to sacrifice graphics.
The ST could definitely have handled the full thing though, definitely.
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Okay, thanks for replying...
I'll edit my first post so it has more about the contest.