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OldAtarian

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Posts posted by OldAtarian

  1. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    And Apple did something right, what was it? Aggressive improvements of the Mac line perhaps (new models every year), but coming out earlier helped a lot too.

     

    Giving Apple IIs away to schools years prior was a really wise move for Apple; it established their dominance as an "education" computer, familiarized the brand name with school administrators across America, etc. That, and the aggressive improvements! When the Mac II came out, I remember it was kind of eye-opening. Atari was considered a game machine brand, even if they'd have put a Cray in a little box. As for Commodore, I don't know.....Some schools used them (when they couldn't afford Apples) but not many.

     

    It's funny how Tramiel let the arcade division go to Midway, discontinued all video game projects declaring "We're a computer company now!" and as soon as the NES is released scrambles to get the 7800 onto the market. So much for abolishing Atari's "games machine" image.

     

    It's ironic that they dumped computers altogether to focus on the Jaguar, literally putting all their eggs in one basket, and when that failed it was the end, Tramiels "computer company" being brought down by the "games machines" that he hated so much. Games built Atari and games killed Atari.

  2. Posted

    Is this the point where a Mac fanboi points out that the bottom line is that Apple won? ;-)

     

    Seriously, I always wondered if the real problem (well, it sold well, so maybe it wasn't a problem) was the idea of trying to CRAM all that new technology inside that tiny case WITH a monitor? That must have made hardware design a nightmare.

     

    Personally, I would have preferred to see what Woz and the Apple II team might have been able to do if Apple didn't decide to go Mac, but oh well...

     

    desiv

     

    It's because Steve Jobs is an artist, not an engineer.

  3. Posted

    All sound is routed through the RCA jacks in the back and the monitor output pin at the same time. The difference is that the RCA jacks output stereo when the program running takes advantage of the STe stereo sound. The original ST sound output is mono through the RCA jacks. All sound output is mono through the monitor output pin.

     

    I wouldn't imagine there were many programs written to take advantage of the STe stereo outputs. That was one of the big weaknesses of the STe, the developers kept coding for the lowest common denominator which was a 512k 520ST with single sided floppy drive. There's not too much software that requires you to have more than that to use it.

  5. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    All I know is that I'm going to try that bargaining technique, myself. I don't care whether it's looking at a car for sale, or something on this marketplace. I'm going to remove my shoe and bang it on the table as I chant, "The price has got to come down. The price has got to come down."

     

    Success will be reported on; the opposite will be assumed to have taken place.

     

    We'll all be watching our televisions for news of your arrest. Man bangs shoe on checkout counter at WalMart. Film at 11. :D

  8. Posted

    can someone explain to me why the consoles have color/colour or black and white?

    i don't get it, either you had a colour tv or you didn't, i don't imagine you had to switch the console to BlackWhite to work on a BlackWhite tv and colour with colour tv.

    p.s yes this is how we spell colour in our country :D

     

    It affects the image quality greatly. A color image on a black and white television looks horrible. It looks horrible on a color television, but we can fix that now. We have the technology. We can make the first 6 million dollar 2600. Oh, wait, I'm regressing to the 70's... :D

  11. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    Uaaaaaaaa, paypal, again lock my funds from people who order and pay for ultrasatan. Today i do refund for all. Please check yours paypal accounts account. My apologise for that but this company is crazy . Lock my account becouse i do suspicious activity, right, money transfer company and i send i recive money, thats right is suspicious ??

    I fell like idiot, sorry guys but from now i can only accept bank transfer.

     

    Didn't Paypal institute something like a 45 day hold before you could transfer money out of your Paypal account to your bank account to give buyers enough time to complain if there's a problem? I know lots of sellers who set up bank accounts just to sweep their Paypal funds into who then transfer the funds to another account right away so they never have to worry about a chargeback because the account is always empty. Putting a hold on your account makes this less practical because Paypal retains control of the funds for the full length of the complaint period. Nobody can run out and leave ebay/Paypal on the hook for the refund. This makes it rough if you're doing pre-orders, though, because you can't pay your suppliers for 45 days when the funds are released and a lot of people will have filed non-delivery complaints by then. You have to take the money out of your own pocket to pay for the pre-orders then wait until Paypal releases the funds to get the money back and hope someone doesn't file a complaint before then because then you'll lose money.

  14. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    I found 3 MoniTerm 19" monitors that may work on an ST. I believe that some or all may be green instead of white. Anyone that wants to play with them can have them. Otherwise, into e-waste.

     

    I do not want to ship these things, sorry.

     

    Bob

     

     

    I am going through all my Atari stuff and notice that I have a lot of ST monitors and such. (I'm an 8-bit guy) Are any of these monitors useful to people? I also have a few systems if they would be of any interest.

     

    Otherwise, it's into the e-waste dumpster.

     

    I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have one ST Mono box and foam...

     

    Bob

    Please let someone pay the shipping charges for these if necessary. I can remember way back when these were the monitors you really wanted for DTP. They could do 1280x960. There were adapter boards that shipped with these that you needed so make sure you keep them together with the monitors if you have them. It may explain any loose boards that you find that you don't know what they are used for.

     

    "Moniterm, a giant in the monitor industry, has completed a high-resolution interface board for the Atari Mega and the Moniterm Viking 1 and Viking 2400 monitor. The board connects to the Mega's internal bus connector and provides a monochrome screen resolution of 1280 by 960, more than twice the size of the current ST monochrome monitor.

     

    The board will also have a socket for the Motorola 68881 math coprocessor that may be installed at a later time. The Viking 1 19-inch monitor and board will sell for a maximum of $1,995, according to Ward Johnson, President of Moniterm. The Viking 2400 24-inch monitor will sell for $2,595. Both monitors have an option for a non-glare screen. Properly written software should work immediately with the Moniterm monitor."

  15. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    The Tramiels are THE most hated men in the history of the gaming and computing industry, especially by the old time Atari fans who still to this day believe they destroyed Atari from the inside out.

     

    Get over it. These days, it's all about hating on Bobby Kotick.

     

    I can remember when hating on Trip Hawkins was the thing. Does that make me old? Sigh. :sad:

  16. Posted

    Most of the great engineers and programmers were gone years before Jack came along.

     

    If not for the earlier bastardry, companies like Activision and Imagic would never have been established.

     

    Practically nothing of note hardware-wise was developed and released after the 400/800 by Atari under Warner. All of it was based on existing products and the hard work had already been done.

     

    Not to take anything away from the XL series, but the advances over the 400/800 could have been just as easily engineered by a homebrew hacker. And, the 5200 in essence was just a cut down cheapened version of the 400.

     

     

    You obviously never saw any of the more interesting products being developed in the Atari Labs division, then. Thought controlled video games? Yowzers!

  17. Posted

    Several options for back up, do a search for

    • Real Hard Drive
    • Ultra Satan (HDD emulator that uses SD Cards)
    • HxC (Floppy Emulator that uses SD Cards)

    They all have strengths and weaknesses...

     

    A real hard drive is going to be old and prone to failure, as well as on a 1040 STe you may have an older DMA chip that will cause flaky operation (this can affect the operation of Ultra Satan too)... Also a Hard Drive is good for back ups but a lot of stuff will not autoboot from a Hard Drive (although there are links that I am sure someone will provide where you can download cracked versions that will boot from a hard drive)

     

    Ultra Satan is going to be the same as a regular hard drive in terms of issues, but it is obviously going to be more stable than a real hard drive and you can swap SD cards at will.

     

    HxC is a Floppy emulator so you can load disk images to it and load them right from the card. although (and I could be wrong if someone has written software for it) you cannot browse the images on the ST, you select them on the device and then boot from that image. (I have one but have not tested extensively yet)

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Links to where these products can be bought?

  18. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    Wait. This goes INSIDE a PC in a PCI slot?? How the heck do you connect anything up to it? Shouldn't it be mounted in a case of it's own so the ports all stick out where you can actually plug something into them? Making it so it fits in a standard ST case would have been a much better idea. There's lots of people with those who could just swap out the original motherboard and replace it with this one.

  20. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    Hi all,

     

    Reading the post about Commodore Vs Atari here :

     

    http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?s...t&p=1624439

     

    where commodore 's fan said C64 is the best , and Atari 's fan said A800 is the best.

     

    this post turned to be a steril discussion that will never end.

     

    As on that forum it seems there is very good A800 programmer and very good C64 programmer also.

     

    So what i propose instead of that steril discussion is to do concrete things.

     

    i propose a kind of contest.

     

    Take a game that does not exist on A800 and C64 , and make it for both . and lets compare the result.

     

    I propose for instance , you adapt the level 1 of the MSX game KnightMare on both plateform.

     

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFbCz538ng0

     

    The goal being to show power of your favorite plateform!.

     

    And then we can judge what is the best plateform.

     

    What do you thing?

     

    A800's fan it is a mean to proof that you plateform is the best.

    C64's fan it is the way to proof they are wrong.

     

    Personnaly i don't think the A800 is better than a C64 ,but i don't think the opposite is true as well...

    It is like comparing a Ferrari and a SUV .

    On a highway , the ferrari is the best , but go "off road"... you will prefer the SUV...

     

     

    Have you ever played Great Giana Sisters? The C64 version scrolls beautifully but the Atari ST version can't do side scrolling at all. I guess that means the C64 is better than the Atari ST. :(

     

    C64

     

    Atari ST http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr58eAozSM4

     

    See how the C64 scrolls but the Atari ST loads one screen at a time?

  21. Posted

    The only game machine that ran 2600 games natively in addition to it's own games was the 7800. The 5200 could do it with an expansion module.

     

    Besides the original 2600 there are several non-Atari clones that'll play the 2600 games. With an expansion module the ColecoVision is also 2600 compatible.

     

    There is also the Tele-Games system from Sears but that doesn't really count as it's just a re-branded 2600.

     

    The Intellivision also had a 2600 module but I was just talking about Atari made machines.

  22. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    Nope, no 2600 games, but at the time for some owners of machines that couldn't boot from floppies (machines with 16k or less of RAM installed) it was a boon because a lot of popular games that heretofore had been floppy only were converted to cartridge format. Many games that were popular on the 2600 were converted to run on the 400/800 anyway and look better. The only game machine that ran 2600 games natively in addition to it's own games was the 7800. The 5200 could do it with an expansion module.

  23. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    How about this one, the 7800 Vs the original competition for the NES in Japan, i am talking about the Epoch Super Cassettevision. I guess most people here dont know much about it so here are some links with info, screenshots:

    http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~kiden/supakase.htm

    http://homepage3.nifty.com/doritomo/game/Scv/SCV-3.htm

    http://www.game-nostalgia.net/scv/scv.htm

    http://www2.odn.ne.jp/~haf09260/Scv/EnrScv.htm

    http://www1.interq.or.jp/~t-takeda/top.html

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Cassette_Vision

    I dont know much about interpreting specs so reading them on Wiki doesnt do much for me, but from the games i have played i would say that it is similar to the 7800 in that it appears to me, to be better at moving many objects on a single screen, rather than at doing games that are heavy on scrolling (NES type).

    In the games i have, scrolling is sometimes a bit jerkier than what you would usually see on NES but quiet better than say, MSX. But on the other hand, the Galaga clone called Astro Wars: Battle in Galaxy, is really fast with some pretty interesting enemy patterns, its really good. Also, the into the screen racer Star Speeder is very impresive with very fast action, but has little background detail.Another thing in wich it its similar to the 7800 in that it uses the same sound chip from its predecesor, the original Cassettevision just as the 7800 uses the one from the 2600. So both are quite inferior to the NES when it comes to sound. One final caracteristic that it shares with 7800 is that usually its carts were also smaller than your average NES carts, apparently Epoch also was pretty cheap like Atari, or simply didnt have the resources.

    Games that appeared on both the Super Cassette and the NES usually look better on NES. Like Mappy, Pops and Chips, Sky Kid. But the Super Cassette ports are still pretty good, not bad at all.

    I think the only game that it shares with 7800 is Pole Position 2, but i havent played the Super Cassette version, nor have i seen decent screenshots of it to do a good comparison.

    So can anyone here can talk a bit more in depth about this japanese console?, i am not a coder so i dont know too much about hardware specs.

     

    I don't think it looks up to the level of an NES or 7800. I'm not sure I'd even compare it favorably to a 5200 or Colecovision.

  24. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    Ok I bought a copy but I just want to be sure that the shipping charge will cover going to USA before paying. I sent an email through ebay but as I said before I don't understand Polish so I'm not really sure I did it correctly. I think I did. I hope I didn't accidentally send ebay a complaint. LoL.

     

    And send mine unboxed with the box flattened to avoid damage. Thanks.

     

    (What's the exchange rate of Polish Zlotych to USD anyway?)

  25. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    I know I'd like to eventually have a 1200XL and 130XE to round off the major models. A working 410 tape drive would be nice too, since I do have two 1010s (both kinds) and an XC12. And an XF551 to finish off the XE range (I'm up to 2 810s now and at least 3 1050s). But what else makes sense? How often do the "escaped" 1400 models show up on ebay, or the XLFs? For printers I've got an 820 with a cracked case (but which otherwise more or less works), an 825 and 850 boxed away somewhere, a couple 1020s that don't work and a 1027 that I seem to remember was giving me trouble... Do I bother with the XE printers? Should I find my parents old Star printer in a box where ever it might be and call it a day? What about modems? I kept an XM301 in its box after shipping one off to become my SIO2SD case, but should I get a 1030 or SX212? Should I focus on things I can display, or things people could actually use in a show, like figuring out how to assemble a multijoy? And how much do people look to get the 3rd party peripherals, like the parallel port connectors or Indus disk drives?

     

    I mean, it'd be nice to eventually have one of everything, but with some things being so darn rare (65 XEP for example), I just don't think it's ever going to be financially feasible, so where do I cut it off?

     

    Thoughts?

     

    The 1400's don't show up nearly as often as they used to. Neither does the 1090 expansion box. The people who have them seem to be keeping them. I just managed to snag a ATR8000 which has been an object of lust since they were first released and I hadn't seen one of those in years. Speaking of third party stuff, an APE face would be good to have and the MPP modems that plug into the joystick ports still surface on occasion as do Indus, Percom, and Rana drives. There was a Trak ATD2 I remember from not too long ago but those aren't nearly as common.

     

    The SX212 modem still seems to be pretty available. I'd go for one of those before they start disappearing. The XE printers might also be a good thing to get because they seem to come up a lot more often than the 8xx and 10xx series printers.

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