deadmeow

I remember back in the old days, when I got my Apple IIgs, moving a lot of DOS 3.3 games over to UniDos on the 3.5 inch disks. Much more convenient that way.

Apple has always had good quality products, but overpriced. I had an Apple //e, and later IIgs, and they were great machines. The IIgs was purposefully given a low 2.8 mhz speed as not to compete with Macs. So the IIgs was sort of a dead end machine. I would have preferred it if Apple had continued the Apple II series, without any Lisa/Macs in the picture. Many IIgs friends jumped over to the Amiga, which was a great machine. However following the 16 bit era, computers do not have personality any longer. The 8 and 16 bit computers were the best.

It is a nice system. I got mine cheap in the 90's when it had been out a while. When they stopped making them, I picked up a CD-ROM for super cheap, and bought a System 3 card to play Turbo Duo games. It has lots of good games that you won't find on SNES or Genesis. As far as HuCard games, Bomberman is great, up to 5 players with multitap, Military Madness is a simple strategy war game (1 or 2 players), Davis Cup Tennis, and Pac Land is a great arcade port.

That little dude in Venture just moves too slow. Otherwise its a nice looking game. I had that for my Intellivision, which was awesome. I think the Intellivision version might be a little smoother with the movement.

When the Colecovision came out, it killed the competition. It was like having the arcade at home, just like the commercial. Then it came with Donkey Kong, which was huge at that point. Atari 5200 finally came out, and it had horrible joysticks. Super Breakout was fun, my friend had that and Galaxian. However, he didn't like the lack of games and returned it for a 2600. Another friend bought a 5200, and now it had Pac Man as the pack in game, but Pac Man was old news by this time, and impossible to play on those analog joysticks. Overall they are both good systems. I like the odd arcade ports Colecovison had, as many were favorites of mine. Atari 5200 had some good games, but the joysticks made it frustrating for the average person. Had the Atari 5200 had digital joysticks with the same layout, and if they had been able to get or share rights to a home port of Donkey Kong, it could have been just as good possibly. I must give Atari credit for getting the rights to Mario Bros. I did enjoy playing this for hours 1 on 1 vs my friend on his 5200.

I have both a Wiz and Dingoo A330. Both are nice little machines. If you buy a Dingoo, in order to get the most out of it, you have to install Dingux, but after that it has many great emulators. The native emulators on the Dingoo are good to below average, but Dingux fixes this issue. The controls on the Dingoo, especially the direction button, is very cheap, so you have to push it more exact and be careful. There are no volume control buttons, this is done through the software. If the Dingoo crashes, you must use a needle to push inside a pinhole to reset the machine, as you cannot turn it off, or press any buttons. It is a cheaper machine, and can run every emulator decent enough. The Wiz costs a little more, but seems much sturdier. All the emulators I have tried seemed to run full speed, with the exception of PSX emu, which doesn't fully function. The volume controls come in handy, and SNES emulation is much better on the Wiz compared to the Dingoo. The Wiz doesn't seem to crash as much as the Dingoo, if it does, you just turn it off, and back on, no big deal. I use both of them to play mostly Atari2600, Genesis, Mame, NES, and sometimes Atari800, and a few others. If you can fit the Wiz in your budget it is the better machine, but if not, you can be just as happy with the Dingoo.

It seems the only way to get a good picture on an LCD monitor or television is through a digital or VGA connection. Analog connections (s-vid, rca, composite) look blurry and lag. If this is true, it seems the best ways are through emulation. Obviously the PC is one option. Another good option is a Dreamcast, since they can play CD-R without a mod. Right now I have my Dreamcast connected via VGA, to my 46" LCD television. Most of the emulators are very good, and the picture is perfect. Sometimes I use the PC, but the Dreamcast is more convenient. I still play emulators on the computer and LCD monitor, but when I want a bigger screen, I use the Dreamcast and LCD television. What does everyone think about this? Does anyone prefer using the original console on an LCD? The consoles always sound better than emulation. Is it worth the trouble??

I had the Colecovision version of James Bond, and it was very good. I was very surprised to see what they did to the Atari 8 bit version of it.

Montezuma's Revenge is the best. All those different screens in one 2600 game was amazing. Good quality, comparable to A8/C64/Colecovision versions.

The Intellivision ECS was my first "computer", before my Apple IIe. Basic language programming was pretty simple on it. The major problem was that it only had 2k of programmable memory, (the ECS memory itself), and you could not use the 8k of the Intellivision unit. Even the basic commands I remember were shortened. For example PRINT, was PRIN, I believe, haha. On the plus side you could pull sprites out of cartridges and animate them in your own game or program. It was a lot of fun to learn Basic language on the ECS. This prepared me for my Apple IIe. Assuming you received the manual with your ECS, you should be able to toy around with Basic language a little bit. My favorite games for the ECS were World Series Baseball, the best baseball game of that time, and Mindstrike, which was maybe my fav Intellivision game of all time.

Applesoft Basic!!! My favorite programming language! Integer Basic was more limited, but ran faster.

On a side note, I was able to play Donkey Kong and Venture a handful of times on my Intellivision II, by slowly pushing the cartridge in, to about 75% to 90% of the way, and a small number of times, like hardly ever, I could get the title screen and get into the game. If you tapped the cartridge at all, or even not, the game may blank out. It wasn't worth the trouble though, but Venture was always one of my favorites.

When I upgraded from my Apple IIe to an Apple //gs, I had very few if any compatibility problems. However there is a setting in the control panel called something like "alternate display mode", which is designed to work with the few pieces of Apple II 8 bit software that might have problems on the IIgs. Among my favorite games were John Elway QB, (IIgs and IIe versions), GBA Basketball (IIe and later IIgs version), 4th and Inches (IIgs), International Hockey (IIe), Hardball (IIgs), Moebius (IIe), Castle Wolfenstein, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, Mario Brothers. I must say that me and my friends spent many hours playing Castle Wolfenstein/Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, and many hours waiting for it to load as well. The Apple II versions of Wolfenstein were perfect, and very easy to control with the Apple II joystick having 2 buttons. If someone wants to do only 8 bit gaming, then an Apple IIc is the way to go. If you want the wider experience, an Apple IIgs (with a tiny Apple IIgs keyboard), and RGB monitor is the way to go. You can probably put 75 to 85% of the IIe games on 3.5 inch disks, which makes it much easier to use. One of the last versions of an Apple DOS I used, treated an 800K 3.5 floppy like 4 separate DOS 3.3 disks, and this basically let you use DOS 3.3 on a 3.5 inch disk, which is good, because many old DOS 3.3 games would not run under PRODOS or GSOS.

That was very funny. Dark humor, but there is a time and place for everything, (you can find worse than that on regular broadcast television). We do need more creative games out there, like the old days though.

Some classic systems have games that play well online. What games are or would be best suited for online emulation play, for each system? Sega Genesis - madden, nhl, bomberman SNES - Bomberman, nhl Atari 800 - Mario Bros Commodore 64 - ? Playstation - ? Nintendo64 - NHL, ?

The best 16 bit home consonle baseball is the RBI series for Genesis. RBI-3 Has the cool little sized dudes, and the sequels have the larger players (RBI-4, RBI'93, RBI'94). The best 16 bit computer baseball I ever played was Hardball for the Apple IIgs. We had a lot of fun with that one.

That was such a cool show back in the old days! Do you remember when the show was canceled, then it was revived, I think on ABC, Arnold had outgrown his cuteness, and they had some new young dorky white kid as his little side kick. And does anybody remember Webster? hahaha.

These types of threads are always interesting. I love to see the self-righteous perfect people foaming at the mouth! BTW, "wetback" is a mean spirited word for Mexicans, but Mexican is a nationality, not a race. (Wonder why nobody ever gets called racist for bashing Canadians). You should just be nice to everybody (in my opinion). As far as the Atari 2600, at least it went to a good home. It didn't get thrown out, or have some little uncivilized brat drooling all over it and shoving a grilled cheese sandwich in the cartridge port. I don't know what to tell you about the Pac Man carts

The Sega Genesis is more fun with a flash cart, which you can get from tototek.com , I have had mine for a while, but only recently played around with it. I have hacked many roms, and its fun to play them on a real Sega Genesis (Madden NCAA, CFL Football, Bill Walsh Montana, among others (and the soon to be released, 1 year late, Madden 2007). As far as challenging 1 player sports games, Joe Montana 1 is the only decent sports game that will give you decent competition. All of the others are really 2 player only games. http://www.geocities.com/madden91sports/

It's mizers like these, that ruin things for the average guy. I remember in the 90's going into thrift stores and buying Atari, Colecovision, and other video game items. Now it seems these "professional" ebayers clean everything up, and sell it for rip off prices (5 dollar shipping for an Atari cart). One of the worst examples I saw, was of Intellivision ECS World Series Baseball for like $150 in some guys ebay store. I would pay $50 for it maybe. Me and my friend used to play that game in the old days. Other people could be playing the game, and having fun with it, but instead the game sits in some cheap ass mizers drawer, collecting dust. Thank goodness for emulation, although the original experience of playing games on a television and original equipment is nice, without it, some of these games would never be accessible.

Did anyone else ever stumble upon the bottomless pit in Colecovision Montezuma's Revenge? When I was about 13 or so, I found this by accident, while jumping from vine to vine in the treasure room. If you jump and don't hit a vine, which is difficult, you will fall from appx 10 to 20 minutes, and then all of your remaining men will crash into the pyramid floor, and your game ends. I remember calling my friend on the phone and telling him to hurry up and come over to see it. Little things like that are such a big deal, when you are a kid.

The Intellivision and Colecovision would have at least been around a little bit longer. Plans were made for an Intellivision 3 & 4, which would have been interesting. Colecovision with its expansion port, had many possibilities, and who knows if a gaming only version of the Adam would have come out. A "super" Colecovision with 80k of ram, and a imagine being able to hook up an Adam disk drive to a "super Colecovision", and buying games on disk for a home system. But that is where the problem comes in, computers stole the thunder of the game systems. The game systems had better arcade type games, but the computer had text games, and more strategy oriented games, and Castle Wolfenstein, etc... Then you had the computers that sort of doubled as game systems, C64, Atari, which could use traditional cartridges, or tape cassettes, and later disk drives. Had home computing come along 10 years later, the crash would have come 10 years later as well.

The internet enhanced my collecting back in the 90's when I was really into it. Most of my finds came from thrift stores, in about 1996 when I did the majority of my collecting. I then would go onto the newsgroups and big in auctions for atari 2600/5200 carts. That was a lot more fun than ebay. People didn't gouge you on shipping. In 1996 I had an Atari 7800,5200, XEGS, and tons of other systems. As nice as Ebay is/was, its not the same now, that everyone uses it. Just like IRC chat used to be cool. Go onto Yahoo chat now, and you will see what the proliferation of cheap computing has done. The internet is easily the best way to collect in this current day.