Bill Brasky

Mastering the TI-99, plus other TI-99 assembly/graphics programming books if you have others. LMK.

You should announce 5 years before it's ready but create a waiting list of interested buyers. Then as you get much, much closer to the actual date of release, create a new, updated list of interested buyers. Then without advance warning, release the game in a first come, first serve blowout that eliminates all available copies without notifying anyone on the lists you told people to sign. Tell upset people that you strung along for years "TOUGH LUCK". Later on, sell additional copies for $550 on Ebay.

They used to use vector monitors for computing, computer graphics, high-res drafting displays etc. back in the day. Does anyone know if these monitors are different than the ones used by arcade machines of the day, can be used as substitutes, are more easily available and are more reliable? Did they make any other color vector monitors besides the ones Atari used for Tempest and that Sega used, both notoriously unreliable?

Have you come up with a good solution to handle all varied controls? Switching from a lightgun game to Top Secret?

You might be able to find MS1 for cheap as I think it's the most common and def. worth getting. I seem to recall MS5 being very brief compared to the others. I still maintain Metal Slug X is not worthy. It's only highly regarded because that's the one most gamers are familiar with because it was released on the Playstation in North America and the other Metal Slugs weren't. Most Metal Slug games have multiple paths, that doesn't make it unique.

Dr. Kwackleberry? Sure you can fix Mr. Do's cord. Two Tigers is a great game and better IMO than Tron. You might want to leave it as TT. That MCR hardware might be able to play both with a simple ROM swap. Check out all the other cool Midway MCR games.

I killed an entire family and buried them in their backyard. Damn You Nintendo!

Yet when Game Freak, Intelligent Designs, and HAL Laboratory design Nintendo's games, people are perfectly content to give Shigeru Miyamoto the credit for all their hard work. Isn't that kind of, you know, unfair? JR 915487[/snapback] You'll have to take that up with them. I'm not one of those cheerleaders for Miyamoto, praising everything he's done or been associated with as genius.

add the necessary traces for BBSB.

Exactly. Minter has neither quanity, nor creativity and the quality is debatable. I give Eugene Jarvis and Dave Theurer credit for Minter's "creativity". Minter just took their game ideas and created showy versions of them, often at the expense of gameplay(1UP). I'll take the original arcade Tempest and Defender any day over Minter's inferior versions.

Totally overrated IMO, and I'm a Jaguar fan. Tempest is probably my fav arcade game and played it in the arcade for years but T2K was the game I played the least. It just didn't feel anything like arcade Tempest to me or have that intesity where you got into the zone. Never understood why it was considered the Jag's flagship game. There were much better one's like Iron Soldier IMO. All the games he's made since the VIC-20 days are rip-off's of Defender, Robotron or Tempest. He's does have an attraction to developing for doomed systems: Konix multi-system, Jaguar, NUON, GameCube. How does this guy eat? He's like Dave Perry, milking his "fame" forever off of one old game.

Metal Slug 2. Metal Slug 3 is cool but the difficulty was ramped waay up which made it much less fun for me. Metal Slug games are hard enough as is. Metal Slug X is the worst, just a mish mash of the others with no storyline.

I bought a sealed, Coleco shipping container of NOS SA joysticks a few years ago from an online store. Forgot the name, the ones who put out that failed GameGo! magazine. I kept a box for myself and sold the rest on Ebay. They worked out to $20 per box(pair) and they come with the baseball cart and overlays. I thought I got a great deal but then I'd see NOS ones on Ebay rather frequently, so it was no big deal really. If I were you I'd look for NOS ones as the joysticks switches get oxidized and stop working, need to be cleaned.

That's cool. Some of the game screenshots for that system are amazing looking. I wonder if this is similar to what Coleco originally wanted to release Dragon's Lair on the ADAM on. The ability to overlay game graphics over FMV exists in the CV/ADAM video chips as well. AFAIK it would have to be accessed through the expansion ports. Opcode expansion module?

Don't sweat it. It's not that good. I don't miss mine at all.

What is that RSI stick?

Yeah, why not just use the CV Super action controllers? They're waay more comfortable than the 7800 stick and it has a built in keypad.

What CV games don't have a pause feature? On all Coleco made games, you just press the * to pause. http://tomheroes.com/Video%20Games%20FS/vi...eco_manuals.htm I could never find a Y cable to try that.

It looks like crap, but I don't know if that's due to the hardware difference or that it's a crappy port of the game. It wasn't done by Lucasarts. It was done by some no-name third party company I never heard of.

Ballblazer is on the MSX.

Death to the NES on a chip!!!

There's a few subjective points in there being presented as fact. IMO, 5200 controllers are better than CV controllers, even though they give the nod to the CV. Case aesthetics is similarly subjective, even if I AM on the same side of that one. Neither should have been included in an article claiming to be fair and objective. While I'm nitpicking... I'm not fond of how the 5200's massively more versatile video capabiltiies were reduced to a footnote at the end. The fact that it had more graphics modes was mentioned, then swept under the rug so he could stick to JUST looking at the ones most similar to the CV's graphics modes. And he never even MENTIONED that you could use per-scanline effects on the 5200 to create 3D graphics that not only the Colecovision, but the later NES and Master System as well could merely gaze upon with envy for the most part, even though he dropped a shot of Ballblazer in there. It just seems like he was actively trying to prevent either system from appearing greatly superior. 905231[/snapback] I think this article better describes what the CV is capable of and how a lot of games could've been made to look much better. The 5200 may have some neat specs or features on paper that the CV doesn't have but I don't see that translating to better looking games on the 5200/8bits in the real world. There's a few games that were done better on the 5200/8bit but overall the CV has it beat IMO. The 5200 can't match the "arcade look" of CV games because it doesn't have high enough resolution. The only area that 5200 has it over the CV is number of available colors. There are ways to program the CV to do smoother scrolling. http://www.siggraph.org/publications/newsl.../molyneaux.html

No for the CV I mosty use ColEm but I'll give it a shot in MESS. Thanks! 904343[/snapback] For the love of God, use MEKA or MESS or ADAMEM but never use Colem or Virtual Coleco. Those two are the worst. Moon Patrol plays plenty fast on my emu's and on the real hardware. I don't know how fast you consider fast. I suck at this game so I die before I get very far, though there are unlimited continues IIRC. I got my Moon Patrol cart from ADAM's House/ecoleco for $20. Yes, it's Matt Patrol/Flying Brassieres on the cart.

I know that this game was intended for the CD format and is too large for a cart, as written but has anyone who has the source code looked at trying to use the basic "game engine" with new, lower resolution graphics, simpler backgrounds etc. so that it would fit into a smaller 16meg cart or something?

How is component inferior to RGB? AFAIK one is not better than the other. It's two different ways of achieving the same result. Component doesn't have a green signal but that is just to save on bandwidth. I don't see how it's inferior. Really, it's a pointless argument for most in North America since we have no way of using RGB signals, unless you want to play on a tiny Atari monitor.