6502wrangler

You certainly are a very effective troll! Much better than Powerdubs.

I was a rabid defender of the Lynx back in the day. But the thing is, these folks are rabid defenders of a platform that doesn't exist. It's kind of strange. I'm not sure I fully understand the thought process. I mean, who are these folks who actually think Atari Token is a good idea? How can yet another distracting cash grab be anything but a negative for the quality of the VCS? And yet these guys seem so cult-like in their devotion to Atari SA, and actually think the Hotels are going to happen.

Oh lord, no. Back in the 80s when I a kid, my C64 PSU started overheating and crashing the computer. So, in my genius, I started putting a cool, wet washcloth over the PSU to get the heat out (periodically rinsing it in cold water when the washcloth got hot). I did this for several years until I finally upgraded to an Amiga. Since I survived that incredible display of idiocy, I had to become an Electrical Engineer to repent.

For me the "I NEED THIS" moment was seeing Shadow of the Beast on a demo Amiga 500 at a local computer store. I had never seen anything like that outside of an arcade. At the time the Amiga was so far ahead of the competition. I soon upgraded from the C64 and the games were so much better on the Amiga. The Amiga version of Test Drive (that I got along with the Amiga 500) was miles ahead of the Commodore 64 version in graphics and gameplay. I was hooked. The Amiga is kind of a sad story. It was so far ahead of the competition, but, fundamentally, the tricks they pulled in the design to get that performance ended up being barriers to innovation (especially given Commodore's meagre R&D investment). It was hard going from the guy with *by far* the best gaming computer to seeing my friends with their PCs start pulling ahead and then away by 1991 or 1992 or so.

Atari is probably hoping someone will hack it into something actually useful.

No. You will need an external drive to install Windows. Crazy but that's the brakes.

I agree with the sound and graphics of course but the gameplay was closer to the arcade feel in my opinion. I played the arcade version a lot (and have beaten it on a few quarters) and what was nice about it was the zen-like rhythm you could get into. In the arcade version it was the reverse elbow, in the 7800 version it was the front kick but otherwise similar. So that's it for me. The NES version didn't taken me to that place. Now Food Fight. That was the killer app for the 7800 for me.

That's a strange list. I had several of those games and quite liked them. Double Dragon, especially, had much better gameplay than the NES version (although, yeah, the graphics on the 7800 version weren't great). I agree. I played it a lot (as for a little while it and Asteroids were my only 7800 games) but never loved it. You were rewarded by memorizing the patterns, not by skill in avoiding cars (since avoiding them around a corner was impossible unless you knew exactly what was coming and when).

You don't even have to be a pessimist to come to this conclusion. They are holding up all shipments to wait for all the Joysticks to come in, but not everyone who preordered chose to order a Joystick, so they could have shipped those by now. My guess is they are having problems with the software and online store, and are stalling to try to apply some bandaids. It's possible they have refused to pay (or can't pay) whoever is actually implementing it and they don't have the keys to the kingdom quite yet... but this is just speculation.