Derek

I am still using MAME32b-036, as everytime I try a newer version, fewer of the old games work, Junior Pac - Man works on few versions. I posted about that earlier. Though I stil don't get why a working ROM would not work on subsequent versions of MAME. Why make changes to MAME that result in complete games starting to not work?...Anyway, now this version has started to have the sound lag almost two seconds behind the video. It makes all of the Pac/Ms. Pac/ and their variations hard to play as you often use the sound and not the blinking of the ghosts to decide whether to chomp one more or not risk it. Not all the games do it, which makes me think it will be really hard to figure out why some of them have the sound lag behind the video. Obviously they didn't do this before or I would have asked about it. I have changed no settings within MAME, same computer, same version of MAME, same collection of ROM's. Thanks in advanvce for any productive suggestions!

I recently fired up my woodgrain 2600, it worked fine in the spring, then outdoor activities took over. It sat warm and dry on my bedroom floor, unplugged since May, and now it doesn't work. Nothing at all happened to it. Other consoles, Coleco, Intellivision, a 2600 Junior, an Atari 7800, all sitting in the same room are all still working...any point in taking it apart? Checking for hmm, don't know. It just mysteriously doesn't work anymore. Perhaps a summer's worth of dust settling on the floor makes it want to be opened up and have the circuit board dusted off? My Sony receiver resumed working on the left channel after opening it up and blowing the dust off the circuit board. Where did all that hair and dust come from?!?! Perhaps the Atari just died while I wasn't looking as it is no longer 1982!

Not sure exactly what you are doing there, but if you want to run newer/different versions of MAME you need a ROM set that coincides with the MAME revision level. As MAME has progressed some ROM sets have changed due to dump corrections or additions such as color proms. My MAME cabinet is running .107 (yeah time to look at updating) and I was just playing around with something else, so here is Jr Pacman running in all its glory. Hmm. Rom sets changing. That just makes MAME more and more useless as the ROMS are no longer available to download. So anyone new to this can download MAME and has no access to ROMS so they have an emulator and no ROMS. Fun. At least I got in before all the copyright stuff kicked in making the roms unattainable I have one version on the computer, 36B, I think it is, that plays most of my games, and I wondered why some that when letting MAME "audit games" came through as complete ROMS, they didn't work. Now I know. Thanks!

Thanks! The voices are still missing, but there is more sound. Any idea why each time I use MAME I have to reset the buttons? It refuses to remember each "this game" setting, such as the four firing directions in vanguard are reset to the right button not being firing forward, etc. It is a total nuisance to have to reset these just to play a game such as Vanguard or Missile command where the left centre and right, never correspond to sensible buttons that I have assigned on my Logitech joystick. I hesitate to move onto another version of MAME as each subsequent version seems to acknowledge less and less of the older games, for example, most won't play Junior Pac-Man. You get the error that part of the ROM is missing/corrupt. To play games like this I have to disable versions of MAME except for the one that will play Junior Pac, as they seem to sense each other and none will work with a previous version on the desktop?!?! Thanks in advance for any thoughts!

I only played Vanguard a few times back in the day, but I remember there was more sound than just the music. On MAME your ship firing makes no sound, there are no explosions when you hit an enemy, the voice is missing saying such things as 'rainbow zone,' and 'spike zone', as I recall. Are there 'samples' that I didn't get before all the ROMS disappeared? It would be more fun with some sound effects beyond the often silly music. Without the sounds, the 2600 version is a damn good port, but I remember more sounds. The ROM I have is by SNK 1981. I think the one I played had Centuri credited on the top panel. On that note, other Centuri games on MAME seem rather quiet, Route 16, THe Pit, Round-Up, none of them have much for sound.

Amazing that such a crappy game ever got into a cabinet that spread from here in Canada to the Netherlands, where your post says you're at. Another STern game ruined by insane difficulty, in this case you waste all your time trying to keep the timer from reaching zero, slllooowwllyy running around collecting bags of cash and slllooowwlly taking them to the wheelbarrow, meanwhile no time is left to deal with the enemies, or god forbid use the gun to defend yourself. Useless, as they instantly start firing back at your slow as death moving character. Could have been a fun game, yet the designers ruined it with the slowness of your character and having to appease the fast as lightning timer. Another STern nightmare would have to be Turtles, where the evil turtle came out of the same areas as the turtles that didn't kill you so [email protected]#$# fast that you had no choice but to die. Super Cobra was the only thing that Stern didn't fuck up royally, and even that is quite difficult. Astro Invader wasn't too hard, but was quite pointless and dull, as was The End. Stern had a lot of good ideas, but it seems that nobody tried out the games before unleashing them on the arcade. Berzerk could have been fun, but having to stop to fire makes defending yourself nearly impossible, same thing ruined Tazzmania, impossible to stay alive as you have to stop to shoot. Why didn't the makers see that that ruined the game? You had no chance to stay alive while stopping to shoot at something while other things were able to continue to move closer and kill you. Anyway, Berzerk was the first game that talked, the only thing that saved it from immediately disappearing due to its 40 second game rip off effect. Free man at 10000. what a laugh, if you topped 2500 it was a miracle you were so slow and defenseless compared to the robots.

Nobody gave any credit to the worthlessness of Desert Falcon for the 2600. With one fire button you can never set off the earned prizes by collecting the three varying things on the ground, if you can live long enough to collect three as the collision detection is so far reaching that you seem to die if anything within a third of the screen comes by. I wasted no time dumping this into the charity donation bag. Let someone else get pissed off trying to find the fun in this. The real question is, how did some of these crap games get past test groups? Did nobody play these before unleashing the Froggo, Sancho, Zellers clone shit on the public? Did nobody say, umm, where's the game? Desert Falcon is unplayable, as is 7800's Tower Toppler with stick control so F$#$#@! fussy no one could have the patience to deal with it, or 7800 Scrapyard Dog, with it becoming impossible to jump gaps without overshooting and dying far before the first of five levels is even close to completed. Sometimes little things ruin a game, like the blue background to all the boards on 2600 ms pac. There is a blue ghost for shits sake, the eatable ghosts turn blue, with thousands of colors to choose from why make the background blue!?!? With that continued flicker it ruins the game, that and the fact that you can't round them up, and none of them chase you were serious drawbacks as well. Not unplayable, but certainly lacking.

I have a few of these carts, bought loose, second hand, in the 90's at Value Village, and don't remember seeing them around 1981-2, though I had an Odyssey2, which my parents though would be a better purchase (I was 10). Looking back, they ripped off the roms of Atari carts, such as Defender (I can't tell the difference? is there any?), sold them with different names, nonsensical pictures on the cartridge that made no reference to the game...how did they not get sued?

What the hell are you supposed to be doing with this game? Bonus critters that are almost impossible to catch, red and white circles in the centre, do what with them? Running over the critters in color matches to the scroll at the top unleashes an uncatchable bonus critter. That's pretty useless as you are no faster than him, and almost never can round the right corner to catch him. How does one end a round? Make all the circles in the center red, white? I remember seeing this in our mall arcade. It was there for two days and never again. No wonder. Then again, many Centuri games sucked. Too easy to die, too hard to steer, Route 16 comes immediately to mind. The Pit, could have been good, but again, too hard to steer, endless dying for no visible reason, not going where you pull the joystick. Nothing could be worse than their other centuri/amenip compilation; Mariner, an abysmal game based on Super Cobra, but sucking immerasurably with its impossibly lame joystick response and the incessant drone out of the speaker. Pure garbage. Makes you wonder if anyone actually played the game before releasing it on the arcades!?!? In Centuri's defense, they did accompany others in producing some good games such as Time Pilot, Phoneix, Pleides and Vanguard. Four good games. imho.

I responded to anyone who was interested asking where you were and how the shipping would be paid for. No one replied. No one. Guess posting a private message on this site doesn't work. I only check back here once a week or so lately, so when there was no replies to my messages I simply did what I was originally going to do, set them on the porch for Community Living to collect for charity, except for the pac-man cart. Maybe I will post that on E-bay, get a few bucks back on all this time on all these messages. Perhaps the administrators of this site should send a few members a private message to see if they actually get them, as I got none of the ones that you guys allegedly sent expressing interest in the free carts. Sorry, all around! Don't really know what went wrong?!?

Just wondering what the settings options are. The Galaga/Ms. Pac that I played had a very stiff joystick, tiring on the hand for Ms. Pac, and I didn't come close to my best on Ms. Pac, would never think of cheating and continuing a game...It was no problem to roll Galaga. If you do, and play for say, another 195,000 points, you don't get your name in as you didn't score 1,195,000 as it reset to zero, so just 195,000 in the machines opinion, so I just played till I was as close to 1,000,000 as I thought I would get without accidentally going over, deliberately died, and put in my initials till I had expunged all other initials and the top five was mine Besides the joystick stiffness, the ms. pac game didn't seem to respond as I was used to having played it all these years, I kept wondering about the ghosts behavior as though it had been reprogrammed. I know they all have distinct patterns, and attractions towards where Ms. Pac is on the board, and I found, particularly the brown ghost, who is supposed to be stupid and timid, often turned and killed me when he would normally have kept going in whatever direction. Don't think either ROM was purely the two games in one cabinet. Too many things were different, Galaga was too easy to roll 1,000,000 and Ms. Pac had the ghost behavior differernt, IMHO.

I'm giving this stuff away, not going to research shipping costs to individual places, geez, it is a bag full of free carts, manuals, overlays, absorb the shipping cost if you want it.

Before Christmas I posted a list of Intellivisiion carts needing somewhere to go, then got ridiculously sick over Christmas, so here is the complete list of Intellivision carts and Atari carts needing a good home. I looked into posting the lot on E-bay, but it is not worth the trouble for the little money that one might get, so, you pay the shipping, via a cheque or money order, seems the easiest way to do it, and I'll box this up and send it to you. Intellivision: Star Strike, B-17 Bomber, Sharp shot, Night Stalker, Dragonfire, Commando, Microsurgeon, Sub Hunt, Armor Battle, Pac Man, Tron Deadly Discs. Most of these have boxes, overlays, and manuals, exception: Pac-Man, or I would have posted that on e-bay as it seems to be rare. Atari 2600: 2 Missile Command, Space Battle, Star Wars Jedi Arena, Planet Patrol, RIddle of the Sphinx, International Soccer and Super Challenge Baseball, (both Mattel carts from Sears department store, US versions would look different), video olympics, video pinball, Space War, Haunted House, Journey Escape, Demons to Diamonds, Armor Ambush.

I could easily just drop these in the next bag of stuff to go to Good Will, but I thought that I would see if anyone was interested in the lot, not going to send individual carts all over the country but I want to find good homes for these games as I have had fun with the Intellivision, but my console has died, and it took several years of searching to just have one that worked, so it is time to get rid of the carts. Here are the ones I have left that still work. Some have boxes and overlays. Sub Hunt B17 Bomber Star Strike Utopia Armor Battle Micro Surgeon Night Stalker Space Battle Space Hawk Tron Deadly Discs Pac Man The easiest for me as the collection has dwindled to this many working is to just get drop it into the Value Village donation bin here in Canada, but I thought that maybe someone out in video game land with a penchant for Intellivision would want this all. If I'm wrong, into the donation bin it all goes!

I recently hooked up a relatives sirius radio, the little gheto-blaster size home version, and was so totally unimpressed with the sound quality, like a tinny, warbly, over-compressed mp3 file. Is this really how it sounds? Who could be happy with such shitty sound quality? One 80's station, one 70's station, yet four jazz stations? Even the 32k/sec low quality stations on Live365 sound as good as this does. Even if you don't subscribe to it, the free 64 and 128k stations sound infinitely better than the sattelite radio does. I guess this isn't really a question, just some thoughts for feedback, agree/disagree? No one with even 50% hearing would disagree that sattelite radio sounds crappy. They brag about 110 stations, but most of them are useless to most people. I can't stand Jazz, or Rap, or R & B there's 12 that I'll never touch. Four more in sports, yuck. Traffic radio? Useful to how few people? I realize that I can't use Live 365 in the car, but cd's full of mp3's on shuffle sounds good to me. I am not affiliated with Live 365 in any way, I just find that it is 1000% full of variety, with dozens of stations of every genre...want an all 80's female station, it's there! Pick one. All Beatles, that's there too! Anyway, I thought that the little Sirius unit was cute, a bit picky as to trying to pick up a signal, we had to drag the receiver out to the deck, and to set the radio on the night stand by the bed was as far inside as it would get without losing the signal, so forget about setting the radio in the kitchen while cooking, you'd have to climb up on the roof to get the signal as the slope of the roof prevented adequate signal. Just too much wrong with this to make me think it was any good.

Don't bother with the one that has it with four other games, Galaga, Zevious, Mappy, and Pole Position. Those games work fine. Ms Pac doesn't !#$#@@ steer! Press gently up, press hard, press hard enough to bend the god damn joystick, you may go up, you may go left or right. Has to be a problem in the Ms Pac program as the other four games have consistently steered where I pressed, despite my getting seriously pissed at the console while trying to play Ms. Pac. This was a Christmas gift last year, so if you get one that doesn't have 2004 copyright on the bottom, newer ones may have been corrected, as I still see them in the department stores, though I have to wonder how it got through testing when, right out of the box, first game I tried, it wouldn't steer where you pressed. As for a wireless version, sounds neat. Wal-Mart version, dunno, I just know that the one I was given should have never gotten past the planning stages with a rom that doesn't steer where you press.

What is the point of this game? Pick the boat, no other choice, as it is the closest thing in the river, then what? I can't seem to get off the first screen where you pole vault across something, a moat, a river,? God only knows, then you collect a bright shape, climb a ladder and it beeps at you, nothing else happens, drop the shape, collect it again and try the other side. Still nothing. What is the fucking point? I can't imagine how much more directionless this game could possibly get.

I think from now on I’m just going to start the game on level 21 and keep practicing. How do you do that? I thought MAME games were just emulations of the actual game. I have no idea how to start a game at a certain level. As far as playing Ms.Pac on MAME, it is not quite the same as the coin-op, I find that what I remember happening when standing in the arcade is not quite the same, perhaps is it because of holding a joystick that is not rigidly attached to anything. Dunno.

Don't soak a cartridge in rubbing alcohol and push it in and out over and over! Take a piece of light, say 220 sandpaper fold it over the end of a slim slot screwdriver and run that back and forth gently. This can be done after or without wetting the contacts with the rubbing alcohol. Contact Cleaner from Radio Shack, or whatever it is called now, works well too.If one has access to a compressor then blowing off the circuit board and the contacts for the cartridge sometimes will restore a machine. Dust can traverse solder points inside the machine and effectively transfer some voltage where it doesn't need to be. This happened with my receiver, effectively cutting out the right speaker on tuner only, a quick blow out and an expensive trip to the stereo service center was avoided. I discovered this by accident as we saw lots of long strand dust and wondered if it could conduct voltage, guess it can! As for cartridges, the cotton swab/rubbing alcohol trick is the best, especially for the old grey Nintendo carts, and the ultra moody console which didn't work well from Christmas 1985 when it was brand new, though no one knew how to deal with the flashing screen back then! Game genies need this cleaning just about every time you try to use one. How many times it froze up brand new, during seeing a new area of the pack in cart, Mario/duck hunt. Don't know why we didn't give it the fixing with a hammer that we sure felt like giving it. The Atari was always more reliable, but 20 plus years in, one can expect to do some maintenance and coaxing to get it to work, after all, arcade games were designed with the expectation that they would run for a life expectancy of a year or so. how many Ms. Pac's are still going strong in basements all over? Just my severly expanded thoughts, hope it helps.

You were a space ship traveling left to right through a field of rocks going in about four bands of different directions that you had to blast your way through, then there were other enemies in four levels, then it repeated, Moon something, I recall. I know it is not on mame as I have extensively looked. I only played this game at one arcade, and found it frustrating, yet kept playing it every Friday till the game disappeared, 12 and stupid I guess. It was in a cabinet that had Taito down the sides, as all Taito/Michibutsu games had. You couldn't approach one in a mall hallway and guess what game it was, as they were all the same from the side...how boring, but cheap to make! Just change the marquee, rom, perhaps control panel and instructions and the cardboard surrounding the screen.

After seeing these in stores I posted a simple note and got some nonsense replies about cans of worms...I don't get it. Where do these plug in, the promo shows the cables going into the front of your computer screen. I have never seen plugs on the front of a tv or a computer screen?? I thought these little boxes were for a tv set, aimed at the average joe? What can of worms did I open? That makes no sense?! I suppose die-hard game junkies may see these as infringing on actual coin-op games or 7800 games which are close, but really, the poeple owning the copyright must have ok'd these and are getting royalties, or else this company couldn't make these little machines. I am tempted to buy one now just to see what it is supposed to plug into! The Ms. Pac one, of course!

I saw a little blue (and other colors) box with a joystick and two buttons coming out of it beside the cd's at Wal-Mart. It contained different colored consoles that seemed to plug into your tv and play five different games. Ms. Pac, Frogger, Poe Position, Galaxian, etc. I have all these rom's on MAME so I didn't buy any and in my opinion the price was way high at $30 cdn +tax. Anyone played one? Are they right on with the arcade experience? Minus the fact that you are sitting in your living room, of course! The packaging is so cutesy colorful that I can't decide if the manufacturer is aiming at the 30-35 year old who actually played these games as a tween and would enjoy some nostalgia, or are they trying to suck in the teenager of today who would have no idea what Ms. Pac-Man is. Clue: The best video game ever, IMHO. This game swallowed my retirement fund:)

$300 for Tooth Protector!! I have one that has been collecting dust for two years. you really got that much for it? I'll have to post mine, had no idea it was worth more than the 49 cents I paid for it at Value Village.

All your replies have been USA based. Here is what I find in Southern New Brunswick, Canada. Yard sales have dried up. A 250 vendor sale in August has dried up. This year nothing...common or otherwise. This is the same place that I got my initial system and a dozen carts for 12 dollars in 1997. I hadn't played Atari since 1982, so it was 12 dollars that seemed like spending 12 cents, I felt like it was 1982 again. This sale is spread over two baseball fields plus! Not one cart for the last four years. A few carts for the first Nintendo priced at amounts that I laughed in the faces of the vendors. $20 for each cart! Get real! A local canadian chain store called Value Village which collects door to door each month (you put your donation in a bag marked with an X and they stop at all houses where they see that on your stoop) is a good place to get carts here. It is still rare that dropping by will produce anything other that the common ones, but sometimes there are surprises, particularly carts and cassettes from Germany. No idea why... They price everything at 49 cents a cart, having no expertice in rarity, nor concern, I guess. I picked up a Kim Wilde tape that would have cost me over $30 canadian on E-Bay to get. It cost me $1.15 tax in:) They sometimes have a find. I don't go there more than weekly, so who knows how much I missed out on!?