vidak

Hahaha we totally have. I feel a homebrew video game concept forming: Attack of the Audiophiles. You have to avoid shit audio, and stay in the path of good audio. OKAY ENOUGH ABOUT COOL SPEAKERS

I guess this is why I want to get into reproductions. So long as people don't mind not having an authentic cart, we could start production again to bring down prices. I'll have to look up some guides to see what counts as as breach of copyright, and constitutes privacy.

it's so true. I can't stand tinny earbuds anymore, after being gifted some expensive headphones.

I'd like to second this sentiment. I have always been in awe of the incredible skills and dedication of the homebrew community, as well as individuals. The amount of resources (tutorials, scanned out-of-print books, reference guides, source code examples...) freely available is nothing short of amazing. It has never been an easier to time to get involved in making wonderful experiences for people on Atari platforms. That's all thanks to the decades long hard work of the homebrew and hacking community. I know I have benefited greatly from these people's hard work. So I say THANK YOU.

Also Bill Gates was a crook who screwed people

This is awesome! I'm just getting into homebrew development, and Stella is a huge tool for getting the job done! The better the tools, the better the games! This will be an enormous help for the homebrew community. Thank you so so much.

Definitely don't be a perfectionist. It's the same with doing a PhD, like mine. There will always always be room for improvement. It's my belief that nothing is ever perfect enough. I always say, "near enough is good enough".

For instance in characters touching musty, dusty wine bottles in a cold cellar. There's a sound for that!

this is a bloody awesome post! I just bought a pair of 6 inch bookshelf speakers and they've done wonders for movies. I am noticing things in all my favorite movies I have never noticed before! Good sound makes all the difference.

On I totally agree, I'm just offering a way to skewer these guys. If you had used a copyleft licence it would be 100% illegal and you could sue him.

You can always try assembling Thomas's minidig decompile with a different seed. It's not hard!

That's awful. This actually is ruining retro gaming.

An awesome, awesome project.

Oh gosh. That's enough to establish causation, I'm sure. I can't believe it. Kind of makes me want to get into making reproductions. The only way to bring down the price is to increase supply of retro games, because they're in fixed quantities with increasing demand as time goes on, unless people make new carts... I'd go one step further. Capitalism (money and commerce) are bad full stop. The only way they can succeed is by always going too far and becoming monopolistic and hegemonic.

It seems sensible to me to conclude that retro gaming prices have skyrocketed due to the increased exposure of retro gaming on youtube, but is it possible to get any hard empirical evidence on whether that is true? Because the increased prices of retro gaming objects may have come about for another reason. Just because youtube and ebay events seem to correlate doesn't mean that one event caused the other. You need hard evidence to prove that is true. I remember what I bought 5 Megaman cartridges for in 2012, and I just checked the prices of individual carts on eBay. I have absolutely no hope of ever affording to collect original carts in boxes unless I double my income. I wonder what the real causal factor in deciding eBay prices for retro games is. I wonder who we can ask about this issue. On Youtube and retro gaming... I think it's dreadful. Youtube is all about making money. Google designed and implemented a central algorithm driving the exposure of youtube videos to viewers. When it comes to making value under capitalism, economies of scale are all where it is at. Big channels make the most money for advertisers the most efficiently, so they are promoted ahead of small channels. The search engine on youtube is built into this exposure algorithm, so you will only ever find the videos Google wants you to find on youtube. Because youtube is all about making money, it's all about quantity over quality. It's all about hocking and selling commodities instead of developing an artform. The research says you will only get subscribers and likes if you ask, but the research never questions the morality of this practice and how disrespectful it is. Whenever media platforms get controlled by the Hollywood-industrial complex, they become centralised and the content of their media becomes thin and meaningless. I was watching the Simpsons episode from Season 5 where Homer goes into space (ALL HAIL THE INANIMATE CARBON ROD!!), and it satirises how idiotic and cheap cable TV was in the mid-90s. Youtube is exactly the same because it is no different in organisation from cable TV in the mid-90s. All the successful channels are monetised and plugged into the centralised structure of networks and marketing agencies. The appearance of independence of "content producers" (I hate that term) is an illusion. You just work in your own home now for less pay. All my favourite Youtubers work insanely long hours on their monetised channels for much less than they should be receiving. The problem with Youtube is capitalism. If we had a platform geared more towards collective ownership and virtuous personal characteristics, we would have a much friendlier and less cut-throat world of video gaming. PS. I mean look at the way Atari started. Atari was a huge multi-million dollar company, but their platform was almost completely open. Single people could program a game in a matter of months for the VCS2600. There was no lock-out chip copy protection, and the costs of production for games was very very low. The small game development companies that sprung up around the VCS2600 were organised along communist lines, with everyone pulling their weight and being justly rewarded for their efforts. Capitalism got in the way of the openness of the Atari days. It turns out having a tight-fist and a centralised hierarchy to game licencing works a lot better (see Nintendo and the NES).

I'm just getting in to homebrew development. I guess I have a different view on copyright and property. When I make games, I'm going to release not just the binaries but the source code as well. Both will be covered by a "copyleft" licence, which means if anyone ever distributes my games, they will also have to distribute the source code. Personally I think if you're making a product, you should give it away for free, but I don't have an issue with charging money for a commodity, so long as you also distribute it with its source code. Its then up to that person who bought the commodity to distribute it at whatever price they want. I think if you've licenced your games under traditional copyright, you should have your property respected, but I think you shouldn't have property in your games at all. The concept of copyright is what this seller is hiding behind in order to produce repros and pass them off as originals. If you release your games under a copyleft licence, like the GPL or a permissive licence, like the BSD licence, you'd have a way of suing this morally bankrupt seller because he would be claiming private property contradictory to a free software copyleft licence. Just on the topic of "killer collections", I personally think the value in software (games) is in their function and not their status as objects with rarity. Rarity is just mystical nonsense. Marx called it commodity fetishism. I personally see "counterfeits" and repros as the same as "originals" because they have the exact same ROM data and same function. Repros might even be superior to originals because they may last longer. But by all means, no one should be allowed to stop you from collecting rare objects, as long as you're not harming anyone.

I'm a huge fan of the original Atari joystick. I grew up with a PS1 digital controller and I hated it. When I got an N64 a few years later I was so relieved to use its optical-based analogue stick. But coming to use the VCS2600 when i was about 9 or 10 changed everything. I really enjoyed the simplicity of the design. I realise it's quite a primitive design, and that we've come a long way in controller design, but I feel like Atari really got something right with the original joystick. I feel like modern controllers are too cluttered. I am a huge opponent of current gameplay styles and concepts, and I think current controllers only serve to further those kinds of games. A key example I have is the new Yooka Laylee game. I am a huge fan of 3D platformers, but current XBOX One controllers are horrible for the gameplay metaphors in this genre of game. In terms of simplicity and parsimony, I think the original VCS2600 controllers are really, really beautiful. I wish we had the same inventiveness and imaginativeness about game controllers today.

Thanks so much for your reply! What do you mean by virtual blocks - that I don't understand!

Yo! I'm working on my first homebrew game, and I've been following the excellent tutorials made by SpiceWare, Kirk Israel and others. (Are there more?? I feel like I want to construct a database to centralize all the tutorials) I want to make a game where a character runs vertically up the screen on a scrolling playfield. I can find a couple of examples in batari BASIC (one interesting one from 2009), but I want to use assembly. Following SpiceWare, I can construct asymmetric playfields, and I know how to count scanlines and machine cycles. If BASIC is the best language to effect vertical scrolling, I'll use BASIC! (As an aside, there are so many amazing resources for learning 6502 assembly online. My favourite is a video series by a man named John Dale on YouTube. His channel name is Oldskool Coder. In many ways assembly language is easier than BASIC because it's just plugging data into registers with a whole load of branches and tricks.)