LocalH

Am I the only one that thinks the original post was just a pisstake?

You've got to be careful with the 1084s, though. They tend to have a problem with cold solder joints on the flyback transformer. I've had three separate 1084s (old-style, with the rectangular POWER button on the right), and all three of them have exhibited this fault. It can cause the tube to just turn off while the monitor's power light is still on, and a good whack can bring it back on.

Last time I coded for the C64, I used C64ASM, wrapped in a small batch file that would launch my editor with the source, assemble it after I save and exit, launch CCS64 with the prg, and then loop back to the beginning.

Atari-related, I'd probably say Pink Panther as well. Non-Atari, I'd have to say either a proto of Sonic 1, the build of Sonic 2 that was used on Nick Arcade, or the Super Mario World proto that had the mushroom-shaped overworld and no trace of Yoshi.

Yeah, and that particular bankswitching mechanism allows, in theory, banking of up to 64 512KB pages. All 512KB pages within the 4MB ROM space are bankable with the exception of bank 0 ($000000-$07FFFF). SSF2 only has 10 pages, however. JB: Of course, but modern cart technology has improved (look at the GBA and DS, for example). It would be more feasible nowadays to make a cart that holds 1GB of data, regardless of the ROM space available on the desired system.

That sounds like 10 Minute Trap by Tony Crowther and Ben Daglish to me.

The 8568 found in the C128DCR could actually be programmed to output to an EGA monitor.

The VDC can actually display some nice quality graphics, but not with BASIC. Check out Risen From Oblivion (note that it requires an actual PAL C128, emulation doesn't run the demo 100%).

Yeah, some cartridges would do weird stuff (from Secret Weapons of Commodore): Given all the office politics that surrounded the C128 project, it's amazing that the system did as good as it did.

Any game that happens to write to $D030 will trip the 2MHz toggle and foul the screen display (what you're actually seeing in that case are the CPU fetches). Scrolls of Abadon is a game that breaks on the C128.

Or tape, in Europe. Disk drives seemed to catch on far quicker in the US than in Europe, and as a result Europe got more and better tape games than the US.

How is that possible? I was under the impression that in order to switch to 2MHz mode, the VIC-II chip had to be disabled, which would make C64 mode useless. It wasn't a full-on 2MHz, but it was still a large boost. Basically, you switch to 2MHz during the vertical border. Especially on PAL, you'd gain quite a bit of CPU time that way.

Yep. When you pause, the game switches to just showing 320 pixels of water sprites with no flickering. If you notice, during pause, sprites that are on the same lines as the water simply disappear on those lines: Those two are the alternation frames for when the game is running. This is the game when paused. Notice that part of Sonic is completely missing.

61 colors. Four lines of 16 colors each, with entry $0 of each line only usable as a backdrop color (treated as transparent for tile and sprite display). But, the Genesis excelled at making single-pixel dithering look much more colorful, and I think that's a major part of what hurts the Genesis when looking back on it - most people (at least in the US, anyway) played using composite video at best, and so when they see a game running under emulation, the single-pixel dither gives the image a "grainy" look. Genesis games really can look more colorful (and thus, arguably better) on a standard RF signal than on crisp RGB. Yeah, it's fairly simple to change the pallet mid-frame and gain additional colors. The mainstream Sonic games are famous for using this technique in water levels (and as you can only change 8 colors per scanline, they placed water sprites on top of the split so as to hide garbage - the reason the water sprites flicker is because they use a technique siimilar to OAM cycling on the NES in order to get the full width of the screen covered without cutting gaps into sprites that appear below it, as the VDP can only display 320 pixels of sprite data per scanline). The Genesis also has a shadow/highlight mode which further increases the number of colors onscreen (for example, in Sonic 3's special stage, Sonic's shadow is made with this mode).

Well, the YM2612 was heavily underutilized by Sega. For example, earlier games that used sound samples would dedicate the Z80 to playing back sample data, while the 68k would handle the rest of the FM and PSG channels. Later games moved to a Z80-only driver, which lowered the quality of the sample output. This is especially why SSF2 has such horrible sample output.

It's probably lack of interlace emulation - the console version uses interlace in 2P, and so it would stand to reason that the MP version would be the same.

Minter released an awesome Robotron: 2084 clone entitled Llamatron: 2112. You hardly see anyone mention it, compared to Attack of the Mutant Camels. It was one of my favorite Amiga games back in the day, along with El Caracho's Lemmingoids.

Not to mention that the label looks like it was printed using Arial (unless I'm misjudging the shape of the R), which means that the label at least is not authentic.

I don't see why people think it evolved into DK94, seeing as you can never play as DK in DK94, whereas that seemed to be a central feature of RtDK. If there's a binary of it in existence anywhere in the world, it's probably in Miyamoto's possession. That's assuming there was ever any code in the first place, which we simply don't know either way.

You know, instead of being assholes, someone could have offered to have Cody take regular film pictures and send them through the mail. Matter of fact, I'll do just that. If Cody is willing to send me some prints, I'll scan them and upload them.

Given enough accuracy, an emulator can be a boon to development, though. As long as the code is regularly tested on hardware as well, there's no harm in it. Granted, there's no Genesis emulator that's accurate to the level I'm talking, but still a combination of Gens Kmod and Kega can be useful for "seeing inside the system" with savestate ability and Kmod's VRAM peeking.

Of course it's legal. One can also use it for only homebrew development, never loading a commercial ROM.

I don't like Blu-Ray for one reason: Sony has yet to create a consumer-oriented proprietary media format that actually became an industry standard. Even all the way back to Betamax, they got their ass whupped by an arguably inferior format. If you consider professional-level gear, then Sony won bigtime with Betacam and successors, but that's a whole other situation and doesn't really apply here.

Unless the cart checks the domestic/overseas flag, which newer games absolutely do. It's still best to do both mods, that way you're compatible with everything.

Since when? Japan uses 60Hz NTSC just like the US. As far as I know, it's the 50Hz Japanese setting that's never officially used.