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AkashicRecord

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Posts posted by AkashicRecord

  2. Posted

    I fired up Dragonstomper under Stella and was immediately impressed to see an RPG on the 2600, and that was less than 5 minutes into the game. I would have gone apeshit over that game back in the day!

     

    Adventure certainly qualifies, and might have been one of the earliest of the "deep" games on the VCS.

     

     

    That said, Adventure went over very well just last weekend, even. I brought my light-sixer and 37 games to a family / friends out-of-town trip and set up a TV in the hotel lobby on a table. Within minutes, there was a sizeable crowd flocking around the TV and more than one person asked if I had Adventure, and the answer was an obvious, "of course!" The parents all seemed to enjoy re-living a little bit of their childhood...

    • Like 2

  4. Posted · Edited by AkashicRecord

    Now that you mention the RIOT chip, that's a definite possibility with the obvious timing issues in those video examples...but I'm still suspecting the TIA.

  5. Posted

    I'd say that there are plenty. There are a bunch of disassemblies around here by Dennis Debro, Thomas Jentzsch, and others. Check the Atari 2600 Programming subforum.

     

    One thing however, is that there is NO positioning for Atari 2600 objects in the sense that you are going to expect.

     

    Horizontal positioning is strictly related to CPU cycles in sync with the scanning of the electron beam, with a fine-positioning function for adjustment up to 7 or 8 pixels +/-, and the vertical aspect is related to scanline number...and this depends further on the granularity (in whole scanlines) of a particular display kernel...and there can be many "kernels" in a single program...

  6. Posted

    I'd probably suspect the TIA chip is at fault, but maybe someone with more repair experience can chime in. At least it should be socketed on that model, so it should be easy and quick to replace...

  7. Posted

    I've been kind of flip-flopping between a few projects that don't have dedicated threads yet. I wanted to have at least one type of shooter; this particular one pits you as a hypodermic syringe firing drops of vaccines at bacteria, viruses, and bacteriophages, etc...something like that. "Outbreak!" seemed like a good name for it. :)

     

    The other thing I noticed is that a lot of my test programs seemed like they could be repurposed into a useful utility, or at least a type of drawing / painting program...possibly with some frames of animation...like a better version of Surround's last two game modes.

    • Like 4

  14. Posted

    Fantastic Voyage. I really feel like I am inside Cyborg's bloodstream, trying to cure him of a nasty blood clot in his brain.

    I can second FV. I had a great time with that one. It felt like a slightly more in-depth shooter. For some reason I always wanted to compare it to Vanguard a little bit, but I feel Fantastic Voyage was probably the better game.

  15. Posted

    I disassembled the two joysticks that I have, and on the outside they appear essentially identical and meet the criteria of a CX40; but on the inside, the boards are a bit different. One has the wires connected to each side of the board (matching service manual diagrams of the stick.) The other stick however, has all six wires connected on one side of the board.

     

    Were there a few official revisions of this stick? My Google-fu is usually better than this, but I'm turning up nothing?

  16. Posted

    if you just want to play the games, use an emulator or sd/harmony type cart, the originals used cassettes that can be pricey and hard to find - and we all know 30+ year old magnetic media is a gamble....

     

    *i think the cassette recorder was not included with original charger, had to use the old radio shack style recorder with an external audio jack....

    Yeah it looks like people would just use a walkman or any other (relatively portable) cassette player. I like the CD re-release that had the audio data on CD tracks to be played into the cartridge unit jack.

     

     

    Dragonstomper does look very good and the unit seems to have upped the system RAM to 6K, which would have been very nice as a game programmer!

    • Like 1

  18. Posted

    I did however think Krull was pretty interesting with several different screens each with different gameplay....

    I mentioned Krull in the games to be remade thread earlier today...I felt that the game could have had a little bit...more. It was a good game though; it just could have been a GREAT game.

     

    We watched the movie last night and some of the shots are utterly amazing on Blu-ray.

  19. Posted

    Glad to see mention of a lot of games that I wanted to include in my original post before I decided to keep it short and more open-ended. (Adventure, Pitfall 2, Starmaster)

     

    I couldn't properly appreciate Riddle of the Sphinx as a kid...we were too stupid to figure out that it was a two-controller one-player game...kind of like how we couldn't figure out the console switches in Space Shuttle, either (not that I'd have a fart's chance in a hurricane even if I did know the controls...)

  20. Posted

    I agree with you on Raiders, Space Shuttle, and Fathom. I got seriously into all 3 & completed them back in the day. The Sword Quest games on the other hand were far too complicated for me. (I didnt even understand the whole comic book page hints & such)

    Others for me included Pitfall II & Montezumas Revenge.

    Wow, I was going to add Montezuma's Revenge, and hoped someone else would mention it.

     

    I remember thoroughly enjoying that one! It turned up over here...but for about $30, so I let it slide! :P

  21. Posted

    This one might help spur some members' upcoming purchasing decisions:

     

     

    What are some opinions of the "deepest" and most enthralling titles for the VCS?

     

     

    For me, Space Shuttle: "A Journey into Space" has to be at or near the top of the list. I was completely enthralled with this title as a child (only one person ever had it, and we had no idea how to even play it) so coming back to it over 30+ years later, it's still got me...but in a good way. I owe one broken joystick and some very long nights to this one as of just last week! It kind of needs to be played on a 6-switch model though, in my opinion.

     

    The Swordquest series was probably only really deep when it was fueled by visions of fame and fortune during the running of its contest(s), so it probably gets a pass here. I've never even seen a copy of any of the comic books which were absolutely required for properly distilling the game's clues, so to play today is probably more of a masochistic endeavor than anything else.

     

    Fathom, on the other hand, (even the name is "deep") was a favorite of mine many years ago. That one always evoked a much bigger sense of scale and adventure than other titles, and it was just so cool being able to both fly and swim. I would always borrow this one when I could get the chance.

     

    I'm sure that Raiders of the Lost Ark probably fits in this list, but my memory on that one is quite foggy. Unfortunately, I was strictly limited to playing that one on a tiny black-and-white television, so I recall just having an unnecessarily negative experience at no fault of the game or it's programming.

     

     

    There are certainly many more, but I had to mention at least a handful to start.

    • Like 2

  22. Posted

    After revisiting both the Atari 2600 game for Krull and the motion picture for the first time in over 30 years, i kind of feel that the game was missing quite a bit from the film, and it didnt,have to be that way.

     

    Not having any boulder-dodging minigame was a major omission, and randomly having glaives strewn randomly about the land only to be acquired while passing by at full clip on a fire mare...just ridiculous! And where's the quicksand!?

  23. Posted

    I bought it back in the day brand new. It came with a olive green t-shirt with the mash logo on the front and 20th century fox games logog on the back. I jused to wear it all the time. I wish I knew what happened to it.

    Now that's a pretty cool bit right there.

     

    Ill agree that this game does feature a fairly blatant rip of Operation!

  24. Posted

    Old thread, but I just picked this game up for a few bucks the other day since it just seemed so strange and obscure.

     

    Not a bad game, though I only played a few of the modes.

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