spacecadet

Hey guys, I have my 520STm up on Ebay, starting at $1: https://www.ebay.com/itm/223206894032 Comes with the computer with a new Atari power supply, an SF354 floppy drive with a new belt and new Atari power supply, an Atari mouse, composite cable, RF cable, and all drive cables. Everything's been tested and works. This is the version of the 520STm with TOS and GEM in ROM. As far as I know, it's all original, no modifications. And yeah, I mean the PSU's are Atari new old stock from Best, not just "new to me" or to the system. I bought them shortly after buying the system but have never really used the system since then because I have no software (I finally made that OutRun disk below just last night!), and haven't taken the time to make a cable to be able to use a floppy emulator. (Hence the sale!) So these PSU's have almost zero miles on them - they've only been used to test. I'm gonna be posting some other stuff too - clearing out my house in preparation for moving. Right now I have a surplus Apple IIe Platinum up as well, but more will be coming, so watch my Ebay page! https://www.ebay.com/sch/modernclassicyt/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_ipg=&_from= Thanks for looking!

I've done the tea trick on guitar parts. It might work; guitar guys know it only works on ABS, which is the kind of plastic that yellows too. So I'm guessing the 400 case is made from it. Tea works much better than coffee, no matter how strong it is. I can't guarantee that the resulting color would match the rest of the case, though. Just that it'd probably be darker than it is now. Of course, in my experience, if you wait like 6 months it'll be back the way it was anyway. Everything I've retrobrited has gone yellow again ridiculously quickly.

For one thing, he shows it in operation. You'd be shocked (at least I am) at how few people do that. Most auctions are a gamble. This looks like a pretty safe bet.

That's the point. Intellivision pretty much invented it. Read through the ad below. Everything's about how much more realistic everything is, how many more directions and buttons on the controller, how much more *challenging* the games are vs. the "simplistic" games of other systems. Nothing about this ad campaign appealed to how "family friendly" the system was. And it certainly didn't try to make the system seem family friendlier than Nintendo! (Which there wasn't even an equivalent of at the time; "family friendly" is another modern term.)

I'm sure that was the intent, and he specifically said "let them do what they do" at one point. The problem is that they are in no way on an equal footing, and that seemed to be one implication of what he was saying. Another is that there's this giant untapped audience out there that even Nintendo is ignoring - he also mentioned "middle America" several times, and said something like "we look at this and go pffft, but we're gamers! What about all the non-gamers!" First of all, I don't want a game console for non-gamers. That was *never* what the Intellivision was about. The Intellivision was always for the most hardcore of the hardcore - that was their whole ad campaign. That's why I wanted one as a kid. Second, this notion that there's a huge untapped market out there that's being ignored... I mean, come on. He went on and on about how he can't even recommend Nintendo to families he knows because they have too much blood in their games. What?! I don't need a console for non-gamers and I certainly do not need one for someone of that level of prudishness. But again, not to contradict myself, I'll probably buy one if it's not like $300. But only because it's a new system actually from some of the guys who made the original. I just don't feel like this is really in the spirit of the original system. They're not going to get anywhere by trying to be a more family-friendly Nintendo.

New console called the "Amico", wireless controllers (still disc based), also a cell phone app so you don't really need a bunch of controllers for multiplayer games. New games, supposed to be the best 2D system ever. No 3D. Tallarico mentioned the SNES but also the Dreamcast, so it seems like they're targeting better 2D than the Dreamcast. (I'll believe that when I see it.) That's all good. Cringeworthy: RGB mood lighting. All games will be rated "E". And they're going for quality over quantity, which sounds great in theory, but Tallarico spent a bunch of time badmouthing Sony, MS and even *Nintendo* for having "too many games" that they couldn't control the quality of. Says if a game isn't good, they don't want it on the Amico. That whole section sounded ridiculously pretentious, as if they have any leverage or place in the industry to be dictating quality or rating. And badmouthing a bunch of successful companies as if they don't know what they're doing and he does. Honestly there was about 28 minutes more that I couldn't get through, and when I went back to watch the rest, it was gone. I don't know if they're going to repost it or if they removed it out of embarrassment or something. They seemed to have copyright issues with showing some of the games (I guess?) since there was a section when they were obviously showing a video montage and they just swung the camera at the crowd for like 8 minutes. And the crowd didn't seem all that impressed. But I doubt they removed the video for copyright reasons since they showed it to begin with. I'll probably buy a system since I'm an OG Intellivision guy, but I feel like they have delusions of grandeur.

Sooooooo... anyone else watch the keynote? I've been looking at the other threads too, it's like crickets since 3PM today. Figure this was as good a thread to bring it up in as any. I'm personally trying to keep an open mind, but some of that keynote was frankly cringeworthy.

When I was a kid, my mom would try to play various Intellivision games with me that required two players. The sports games, especially, but I remember her playing some of the space games too. She wasn't very good, but she wasn't awful in those days either. I think as games got more complex, though, she kind of stayed where she was and so couldn't play most games after the 80's. She probably could have played something like Candy Crush but she never got into casual cell phone games either. I do remember that her retirement community had Wii Bowling nights. That kind of cemented me in *not* wanting a Wii at the time. I was still 20-something and all I could think of was a bunch of retirees gathering around to play Wii. I can't remember when I did finally play Wii Sports, but I remember bowling strike after strike within 5 minutes of my first go at it and thinking "yeah, this is not a game for people who play games." My dad I don't think ever played a video game.

I agree that games are meant to be played, but I do also think that games *are* fun to look at even if they aren't working. Just the other day, for example, I found myself just completely randomly pulling about half of my Dreamcast games off the shelf and just looking at the packaging, the artwork, and some of the manuals. It can be fun to do that. And that's the idea behind display pieces. (All of my Dreamcast games work, btw, and I play them... but on that day, I just wanted to look at them.) But I see this as less about individual games and more about systems and maybe some accessories anyway. Usually if games themselves are in their original packaging and complete, they work. Systems are less reliable. But I'd probably still be tempted by a non-working yet all-original, complete system over a working but beat up and loose system. I can always fix the non-working one, but it's a lot harder to make a non-complete system complete, and it'll never be *as* original even after the first system is repaired. As for "restomod", I like the word too but I think gamers probably don't use it just because we don't mod our systems so extensively, and if we do, it's usually pretty obvious (so not really a "restoration" at all, but just a mod). I think there are just fewer game consoles or computers that you could even consider "restomodded". Most "restorations" I've seen are actually just deep cleaning, and mods are just mods.

I think there are different types of collectors. The car analogy is apt. In cars, you have people who won't touch a classic car unless it's 100% original, and then on the other end of the spectrum you have people who buy old beaters and then immediately turn them into custom hot rods. I don't think either approach is right or wrong; it's just whatever you like. (And whether a car is better in its original configuration, or with updates.) In terms of dollar value, I think it depends on what it is whether originality really affects value. There can even be certain things you *don't* want original; for example, people nowadays want to buy bolt modded Model M keyboards over the original unmodified version with plastic rivets. Bolt modded Model M's sell for way higher than unmodified keyboards, because they're more reliable and should theoretically last a lifetime - they're actually easier to work on and built better than IBM originally did it, assuming the mod was done right. Similarly, a Dreamcast with a battery mod is probably going to be worth more than one with its original (almost certainly dead) battery, which aren't easy to change unless you mod the system. I think that most things that are common and have useful potential mods are going to be worth more modded than not. *Rare* items more likely to head for a display shelf will usually be worth more in their original configuration. (Edit: I will add a caveat that in most cases, I think an item that's been repaired with an unoriginal part is going to be worth more than the same item that's 100% original but broken, whether it's rare or not.)

Technically I guess you can count the Sega SG-1000 through Mark III, because when the Master System was finally released worldwide, it had a physical lockout for those cartridges. (It was technically compatible but used a different physical cartridge in NA and EU, so you couldn't just buy a Japanese SG-1000 game and plug it in to your American Master System.) And there are a ton of games for that system.

Mine did and mine was a lower end model, so I think they all do. But "direct" mode bypasses all that, which is why I was saying it's probably not the right mode. I think that mode is more for people who have separate equalizers or processors for room/speaker compensation - more for higher-end setups. You just want to see on the receiver display the mode that matches what's on the disc.

Agree that it's a straw man argument. At worst, people ignore pre-NES consoles because the NES is the thing they grew up with and it's all they know and/or feel nostalgia for. That's not the same as "hatred". That's something you write to get video views and shares, and it seems to have worked here. Someday there will be people making videos asking "do YouTube viewers HATE consoles before the Xbox 360?" There will always be a group of people who grew up with a particular console and don't know anything earlier. The NES just had a large fan base at the time and was a lot of kids' first console, and given that Nintendo is the only remaining console maker from that time period, it's still building new fans today. Atari fans generally knew them at the time, but very few people are spontaneously discovering them today if they didn't know them before.

It may be for you, but see how it sounds because I think this also turns bass management off, and you usually need that depending on your setup. Dolby Digital and higher spec digital surround formats do rely on your receiver to know where to send the discrete bass signal (the ".1" IFE channel). You usually would set that up when you first get the receiver and do the Audyssey automatic setup, or manual setup. And it depends on your specific speakers. It's been a while since I used my Onkyo receiver but the way I remember it working is that there were two separate buttons: one for "surround" and one for "listening modes". If I pressed "surround" it would default to whatever the native surround mode on the media was. If I then pressed "listening modes" it would go through all the different extra audio processing modes. I think if I *repeatedly* pressed "surround" it would also go through the listening modes, so be careful of that, but the first press would just give me what was on the disc. And I think it remembers that setting if you use it once and then leave it. But most Onkyo receivers will tell you what's actually on the disc if you just press the "Display" button a couple of times on your remote while a disc is actually playing. Just see if what it says there matches what mode the receiver shows (which should be on the display at all other times while playing). If it doesn't, then just press that "surround" button if you have one and see if it matches what's on the disc then.

Yeah, was that 93? I had both 92 and 93 while I was in college in a dorm so I always forget which one had the blood and fighting. We had a thing where nobody won unless they won both on points *and* penalty minutes. And bonus points if you knocked out the other team's best player. There was also a way in that game that you could go up and down the line of spectators during a fight and knock down the guys from the other team. You could get more penalty minutes that way, plus it was really funny. I'm thinking you either had to play co-op or more than 2 player (not sure that was possible, though) or maybe you could just switch players during a fight. At one point we got bored with playing the game properly so we tried to just see what the max number of penalty minutes you could get was, plus what would happen if you got too many guys knocked unconscious or sent to the box. Turns out there's logic in the game that just stops handing out penalties if you have only three guys left. We played a lot of three on three hockey that year!

I vote IBM PC and its 360k Tandon TM-100-2 drives. They were higher capacity than most, faster than most, and they're basically bulletproof to this day. It's very rare, in my experience, to find a 5150 or 5160 with non-working floppy drives. I don't think I've even heard of belts needing replacement. Most likely the TRS-80's TM-100 drives were similarly reliable (I don't know much about the TRS-80 model 3), but they were single sided so they lose to the PC's drives on that basis. Apple drives were pretty reliable and relatively fast but also stored only 140k. The Commodore 1541 stored 170k but was slow as dirt. The Atari 810 only stored 90k and in my experience, is as durable as cooked spaghetti. (Both of mine broke, including one whose case just shattered during shipping despite a lot of padding around it.) Commodore and Atari drives were also HUGE. I will say that I generally do like drives with spring-loaded close/eject mechanisms like the Atari 810, but it's not enough of a "pro" to outweigh the cons on the drives that have it. 3.5" drives are kind of a different animal IMO. At that point, disk drives stopped being really distinct from each other. Some still stored a bit more or less and were maybe a little more or less reliable, but the experience of using them was really similar from one drive to the next.

Well, if you have a good CD player, you don't necessarily need a receiver with a good DAC in it; you don't need a receiver with any DAC in it. That said, I've read about these PlayStations and while most people say they sound pretty good, they're not supposedly any better than a reasonable quality CD player. Probably better than a Discman, though. (One guy I read said it sounded better than his entry-level NAD player, but not as good as a couple other boutique players I hadn't heard of. But even sounding better than an entry-level NAD is pretty good for a game console.)

Yeah, I admit that I do that too, and it's also the only case where I let my receiver do any extra processing. But at least for me, I do it because my speakers are pretty weak for music - in my living room I have one of those satellite/subwoofer combos that all came in a box for a few hundred bucks, and sets like that are never all that great, but especially for music. So the "all channel stereo" sound mode on my receiver helps music sound fuller. That's why I was saying if a person actually likes a sound mode, then go ahead and use it, but most of those additional sound modes are really intended to make up for shortcomings in someone's setup. A few are to simulate a particular listening environment, like a theater, but they usually do it poorly IMO. With a really good set of front speakers, I doubt routing music to the surrounds would help it sound better; it would probably just make it sound weird. I have a decent set of stereo speakers attached to an audio-only rack in another room, and I don't ever feel like the sound is lacking in there with only two speakers. But it does help in my living room where I have more speakers, but lower quality. But for movies, TV and games, I always just use the default mode that's on the media.

Yes, it's a mess, and I think it's that way intentionally, which makes it worse. Their dashboards used to be pretty logical. But that probably kept people just doing the same things; they'd go straight to their games, or their apps, and never do anything else. The purpose of the current UI seems to be to get you to click around more in confusion, which they probably hope has the effect of enticing people to buy more stuff from the store, or at least find functions that they didn't know about that keep them on the system longer. A lot of current UI design is like this. It's even got a name now: "Dark Pattern design". I hate the Xbox UI and I avoid it as much as possible. I mainly use my Xbox as a media player so I stick to only what shows up in my "recent apps" and that's it. So on me, I guess the design is a failure because it actually discourages me from clicking anywhere else. But this kind of thing must work on some people or companies wouldn't do it. It's both annoying and kind of evil if you ask me, though.

I think if you *just* want to play Blu-Ray discs, then a dedicated player is going to be less annoying in use. I do use an Xbox One S as my primary player, but you're right about some of its little hassles. I would get a third party remote for it, at the very least, which is an expense not necessary with a dedicated player. (I do use a Harmony remote.) I use the Xbox One S because it's my one-stop movie player including all streaming apps, and all of its apps are updated regularly. I do have a dedicated player that doesn't have any of that, so I don't use it as much. (Though obviously there are Blu-Ray players with apps, but how often they're updated is a different story.) Also my dedicated player has some weird copy protection issue so I can't use it through my regular TV input - I have to switch the cable every time. Only thing I don't use my Xbox for is Netflix, because its had an HDR bug for *years* now where it shows *everything* in HDR and that they never seem to fix, even despite regular updates. Maybe it's actually a bug in my TV, but others have talked about it and no other Netflix app I have on other devices does that (on the same TV).

There basically is one setting to rule them all, and that's NOTHING. All receivers have an option to just pass through the sound mode included on whatever media you're listening to. This should be the default and you should just leave it alone unless you really just *like* something else. But it sounds like you don't, so there's nothing to worry about - just set it to play your media as it was intended and forget it. The people who created whatever you're listening to (whether movies or music) have already mixed it and added whatever effects they think are right. You don't need your receiver to add anything else. I did have an Onkyo receiver until fairly recently and I actually *couldn't* get it into just a base sound mode. I realized, embarrassingly, years after the fact that it was because I was using an optical cable, which doesn't support the most advanced sound modes (which are pretty much the current standard). So make sure you're using an HDMI cable from your devices to the receiver, and cables that support HDMI 2.1 or above. But then it should just go into whatever's on the disc unless you set it to something else, as long as your devices are set up to pass through the native formats too. Some game consoles might need a little setup of their own for that, in their audio settings. I remember I did have to Google how to do that for the PS4 and maybe the Xbox One too. (The Xbox One is problematic; I think it will always do its own mix unless you're watching a Blu-Ray, in which you can set it to pass through the native audio. The PS4 can be set to always pass through the native signal.)

Every C64 user I ever knew had a floppy drive. A few *also* had a tape drive, but nobody I knew had a tape drive alone. The 1541 was kind of a standard accessory. By then, the Apple II also had the Disk II and the Atari 8 bit line was on its second generation of floppy drive. And these were not really considered optional by then - you bought a system with them. If you wanted something that only came on tape, you bought a tape drive later. But only if you needed it. Again, this is 1983 we're talking about, not 1977. The IBM PC launched in 1981 and the original version includes a tape drive interface - and most people think that's a joke when they hear it. The PC was intended for a different market, but that was two years earlier and most people are still surprised it supported tape drives at all. (There never was an official PC tape drive, and nobody rushed to make a third party one.) Wikipedia says that at the C64's release, a system plus floppy drive would have been about $900. The Adam was apparently introduced at $725, but I'm not clear on which version of the system that was (I would have thought the expansion version would be cheaper). So, take away the dual tape drive (which costs something in itself), put a floppy in its stead and they'd probably still have gotten it in under the cost of a C64. Anyway, the C64 was vastly more successful than the Adam, so there's not a lot of evidence that consumers cared more about price than anything else. If that were the case, then the Timex Sinclair 1000 would have been the most successful computer in the US. Consumers seemed to care about the combination of price, technology, available software and the perceived future of a system, the last of which would definitely be affected by including an obsolete storage medium with the system. (And I was there, and I'm telling you it did. If I thought it was kind of backwards-looking, other people did too.)

Others have more experience and know the technical details better than me, so take whatever I say for whatever you think it's worth. But a friend of mine who lived across the street from me got an Adam the day of its release and in the first month or so of it being out there, I used her machine basically every day. I would call it competitive with other home machines of the time, although it didn't really excel in any area. If the competition was the Atari 8 bit line, VIC 20 and C64, it held its own, especially in the early days against the C64 because at first it had the advantage of that built-in library of ColecoVision games. Plus it could run CP/M, which most of its competitors couldn't do. Came with 80K of RAM, which was pretty standard at the time. Was theoretically more expandable than the C64 (though I'm not sure if its expansion slots were ever used for much). The tape drive was an anachronism, though. We all thought that was a joke even at the time, and that was even before peoples' tapes started getting zapped. It would be like coming out with a laptop computer today with a CD-ROM drive built in. I think this hurt the system, because you couldn't buy it without that and it just made the system *seem* obsolete from day one at first glance. I think it would have done better if it either came with a floppy drive instead, or just sold for less with no built-in storage and let you choose the storage type. (Same for the printer, really.) It's hard nowadays to look back and separate things year by year; we tend to lump everything together. It's easy now to look at that tape drive and say "well sure, computers back then used tape drives a lot." But no, they really didn't, not in 1983. Especially not new machines. The floppy drive had become standard on every other major machine, so I think this really hurt perception of the Adam more than anything else on initial release. But technically, it was a reasonably capable home computer otherwise.

Yeah Japan is pretty easy to explain, and that's the explanation. Nintendo's cartridge strategy just did not pay off there at all, because all the RPG developers went with the PlayStation. (One or two went with the Saturn.) Every Dragon Quest game either tripled or almost quadrupled sales of the biggest selling N64 games, and that's just one series. Europe, I dunno. Europe's tastes have always been ironically more difficult to explain than Japan's. Japan's sales of almost anything are usually down to just one or two simple things. But Europe is kind of all over the place, probably partly because it's not just one culture. I've seen console sales breakdowns by country in Europe and they are not even close most of the time, often even when the two countries are right next to each other. So you basically have to go country by country and looking at their own unique reasons for buying something; "Europe" is not really one market like a lot of people want to think. I'd say Japan is easy and pretty consistent because it's a homogeneous culture; Europe is difficult and inconsistent for the opposite reason, and the US is somewhere in the middle.

Doesn't House of the Dead: Overkill also support the Move on PS3?