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DeathAdderSF

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Posts posted by DeathAdderSF

  2. Posted

    12 hours ago, ClausB said:

    Here are OSS manuals:

    http://www.trailingedge.com/apple2/

     

    Yep. The webmaster posted in Usenet quite a few years ago, saying he had the disk(s). He apparently wasn't sure where they were stored, but noted he'd try'n seek them out when he had the time, so they could be archived. So far as I can tell, that never happened.

     

    A few people, including myself, have tried to get in touch w/him to inquire about it, buuuuut... no reply.

     

    S'pose at this point we'll have to hope for the best that somebody somewhere comes across a copy and is kind enough to image it...

  5. Posted · Edited by DeathAdderSF

    The US Gold conversion of Street Fighter II for IBM-PC (DOS) was absolute 100% unplayable rubbish; an insult to the game, and to PC games in general. It was so bad, that even a freeware pirate version of the game, coded from the ground up by a fan in South Korea, completely blew it away. Sad!

     

    Thankfully, Gametek published a very good port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo a few years later.

     

  8. Posted · Edited by DeathAdderSF

    IBM-PCs win the trophy. Sound card collecting is fun, and your reward is being able to listen to your favorite DOS game music on a variety of different chips and MIDI devices. It's awesome.

     

    Also let's not forget the consoles on cards: 3DO Blaster, PC-FXGA, Mega Drive... you can add thousands of games to your PC library this way. And it's all real hardware, not emulation! Bonus!!

     

    Second place is Apple II. Its expandability is vast as well. Just a shame the Mockingboard sound card was woefully undersupported "back in the day." That's truly disappointing as it's a great sound "solution" for the line.

     

    • Like 1

  9. Posted

    5 hours ago, Tanooki said:

    So so bad it's good.

     

    No, it's just bad.

     

    The increasingly annoying "retro fad" has people marking up absolute junk like the Poopervision to high heaven, that's for sure. But if you keep your eyes peeled I'm sure you'll eventually be able to find a system + a few games for a quasi-acceptable price. Not all the sellers are turbo greedmongers.

     

    As far as emulation is concerned, that's old hat. Peter Trauner had a solid driver for MESS back in 2003. But what you want is Wataroo because it's the most hardware accurate.

    • Like 2

  10. Posted · Edited by DeathAdderSF

    Today's update:

     

    A rather interesting update around here, for a change: I've acquired and scanned sets of instructions for Crystball and Hero Kid from the Travellmate era, aka the earliest known issue of what soon became (unfortunately) known as the Supervision.

     

    The Crystball set is especially interesting as it includes text in the game description that doesn't seem to appear in any of the later prints. Specifically, this gem of a line appears: “The animals may disturb you in the game, you can kill them with Crystball ans you will be scored, too.” (Terrible English and misspelling of the word “and” are faithfully reproduced from the source material.) Delightful. So make a beeline for the scans page and have a laugh.

     

    https://www.diskman.com/presents/supervision/scans.htm

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 1

  12. Posted · Edited by DeathAdderSF

    Unless the auto-off "feature" was controlled solely by the firmware and couldn't be touched by the game software -- and we simply don't know the answer to that yet -- there's really no excuse to why the developers didn't either disable it, or allow it to be toggled off. Hell, even an internal time counter with a "press a button soon or I'll turn off!!" message would have helped. Something! ANYTHING!!

     

    And its not like the game developers didn't know the system inside and out. They were all either internal Tiger employees, or outside contractors who were working directly with Tiger employees AND helping to write the official SDK!

     

    *takes a deep, calming breath*

     

    Or, to distill my point to its essence, and save y'all some frustrating reading:

     

    They just didn't care.

     

     

     

  13. Posted

    Applesoft BASIC is #1 for me, as it's the one I grew up with and wrote lots of (totally lame) text adventures in.

     

    Second would be TI-BASIC, specifically for the TI-82 and TI-83 graphing calculators. In high school, I authored some (half-decent?) text-based RPGs which I actually sold a few copies of [!] (for like $1.25 a pop) until the other teens realized there was nothing stopping them from spreading the games all around via link cable. D'oh!

     

    • Like 2

  14. Posted

    RPGs, though one of my favor8 types of games to play, also thoroughly piss me off more frequently than any other genre.

     

    Best examples I have are from doing QC work on our Super Fighter Team RPGs for Sega Genesis. Having to play thru the games a jillion and a half times not only to sniff out software bugs, but also to ensure the scripts were flowing great and free of errors, became maddening when the combat sections just kept coming, and coming, and COMING.

     

    It would get to the point where I was, like, "JUST LEAVE ME ALONE, FOR GOD'S SAKE!" when certain tougher enemies appeared, and just rolling my eyes at turbo speed whenever a random encounter popped up in general.

     

    The worst was Beggar Prince. During one of the longest, most monotonous sections of the game -- a forest with tons of dead ends that's basically a fetch quest -- there was an enemy whose magic would crash the game. Until we were able to fix that bug, it was a nightmare trying to get thru there, and to the save point, before that li'l bastard popped up and did his thang. Oof.

     

    Still. In spite of how g-damn frustrating some of those games were to play thru over and over, I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.

     

     

     

  15. Posted

    Yes, you mentioned your website already.

     

    The system software has an internal timer that shuts off the game.com after 3 minutes of inactivity. There's no way to override it. So regardless of which game you are playing, if you don't touch anything for 3 minutes then the system powers off completely. If you are sitting in the game.com boot firmware, there's an annoying little ditty that starts to play as you approach the time limit. If, however, you're playing a game, there's ZERO indication whatsoever.

    • Like 2

  16. Posted

    Today's update:

     

    When I discovered that the UK version of the game.com Internet package featured a slightly different box, manual, and cartridge label than the US version, not to mention additional inserts, my initial reaction was, “No. NO! NOOOOO!!” I bought it anyway, knowing full well I'd have to scan everything. Yuck. But now the dirty deed is done, and the downloads are waiting for you over on the scans page.

    • Like 3

  17. Posted · Edited by DeathAdderSF

    PC Transporter can use standard 800kb Apple II floppy drives. Just connect one to the included drive cable. You then format your floppies to 720kb on the PC, write an MS-DOS install disk image to one, and you can then boot to MS-DOS, format and configure your hard drive volumes, etc. That's what I do, and what I'd recommend you do, instead of seeking out AE's now elusive and expensive TransDrives.

     

    As for the pinouts, a Google search for "pc transporter keyboard pinout apple" yielded them as the top result. Try it!

     

     

  23. Posted

    Today's update...

     

    The other night I thought to myself, “I should get pictures of all the Crystball levels.” Then I laughed. Then I paused for a moment, raising an eyebrow. Then, I actually went and got all the pictures!! What is wrong with me?! (Wait, don't answer that.) Playing through Crystball again after all these years... sucked. But, I was able to notice and document some quirky details about the game's behavior. These stunning revelations are now available for you to overlook.

     

    On the scanning front, Mark Canon (aka “stupus”) was kind enough to send in the following: blue boxes for 14 games, Galaxy Fighter and Journey to the West cartridge labels, and the official Goldnation price list and order form. W0w! Thanks, Mark!

     

    Finally! Two more pages of Dixons ads were added to the existing PDF. Apparently the updated file had been sitting here for quite some time, waiting to be uploaded. Sorry, eh! 🙄

    • Like 1

  24. Posted

    On 3/13/2020 at 6:16 PM, Tanooki said:

    Any shot after doing this and the game.com you'll do a page of goodies for the MegaDuck which is super similar hardware to the Supervision?

     

    Sorry, just saw this reply! D'oh!

     

    Ah... well, to be frank, the Mega Duck never really caught my attention like those other two pieces of crap have. So, no. Probably not. Someone else'll have to find it within themselves to make a Mega Duck website, I'm afraid. (And if someone actually does it, I'll be very afraid!)

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