jbanes

How about this: I'm married, have kids, and you're still a dork for pointlessly pulling out these old threads. Please stop.

I've never played it before, but I doubt it. The orbital mechanics are probably fine (hell, the Space Shuttle's dinky 64K computer can track them, can't it?), but the atmospheric flight and myriad of controls that make up the Shuttle are very tricky to simulate correctly. I used to have the Shuttle Simulator from Virgin Interactive. Now THAT is a simulator. You could not only look out every window, but each control panel had its own view so you could scroll around and flip all the switches. (Oh look, here's the switch to vent the OMS fuel. *click* Whoops.) You could even perform maneuvers with the Shuttle arm to rescue Satellites. The game was so realistic that you actually were on the REAL mission clock. Yep, you heard me. Each mission could take several days of real time. Thankfully, a time accelerator was included. When under acceleration, the shuttle would perform the correct manuevers according to the mission. (The missions were taken from NASA's actual logs.) This would allow you to skip to any part of the mission that you wanted to practice. Suck at landings? Go right to it. Want to manually do a reentry (What are you, nuts? Just punch the program code into the Shuttle's computer!), you can jump right to that part. It was an incredibly impressive program for its time, and could have easily been used to train budding astronauts. However, I doubt that NASA would have much use for it. Not only do they have their own (much better) simulator with full motion simulation, all their pilots are air force pilots with thousands of hours of flight time. They tend to already have the basics down, and really need to learn more of the nuances of the Shuttle. Something a naive simulation like Virgin's can't provide. You'll probably need to look it up for more info. Here's what I know. The Space Shuttle is equipped with four different engines: 1. The 3 SSMEs, the most powerful LHOx (Liquid Hydrogen/Liquid Oxygen) engines ever developed. These are capable of burning a swimming pool worth of fuel per second and provide 400,000 pounds of thrust each. The engines are gimballed (i.e. allowed to swivel) to compensate for any leaning of the shuttle on liftoff. They are fueled by the LH and LOx tanks located in the ET. (External Tank - the large brown section underneath the shuttle itself.) These engines are no longer useful after the External Tank is jettisoned. 2. The 2 SRBs (Solid Rocket Boosters), the heavy lifting part of the shuttle. These engines provide 2.8 million pounds of thrust each, making up about 83% of the shuttle's thrust on liftoff. Without these engines, the Shuttle would be too heavy to get off the ground. However, once MaxQ is reached (the maximum velocity the shuttle structure can reasonably take), the SRBs are throttled back and eventually ejected via explosive bolts. The throttling is not actually a true throttling, in that the solid fuel is actually shaped so that less will burn after X amount of time. As a result, the Shuttle's liftoff profile is somewhat on a fixed schedule. Once the SRBs are ejected, the SSMEs become the engines responsible for obtaining the desired orbit. 3. The 2 OMS (Orbital Manuevering System) thrusters, the small engines used to change the Shuttle's orbit. These are the small bells located next the Shuttle Main Engines at the back. Each of these puts out about 6,000 pounds of thrust, and are used to circularize the orbit, move to a higher orbit, and moving to a lower or retrograde orbit. 4. The RCS (Reaction Control System), a set of small thrusters used to spin the shuttle on its axis. These don't have much power at all, and are only useful for changing the yaw, pitch, and roll of the Shuttle. As you can see, none of the engines used in orbit are all that powerful, making it unlikely that they'd be used for a powered reentry. Even both OMS together wouldn't be enough to keep the Shuttle airborne, assuming that it is even safe to fire them in the atmosphere. What some may be considering is the fact that the SSMEs are still attached, and that the cargo bay is usually fairly empty. Theoretically, the bay could be loaded with extra fuel tanks and the SSMEs restarted. However! (Here come the big BUT.) The SSMEs are not designed for in-flight restart. They are normally only started on the pad, after they're thoroughly checked. They're also started prior to the SRBs so that the launch can be aborted if they fail to light. Making the SSMEs reliably light in-flight would require some redesign. NASA looked at the possibility for the CEV program, but has decided to go with the less-powerful (but more reliable) J-2 engines from the Saturn V/Apollo program. Google is your friend. Learn it, live it, love it.

This is really a silly topic. The NES would have succeeded, period. There was never any question or poor sales figures to suggest it. In short, Atari's collapse left a huge gaping hole in the market that Nintedo was able to exploit. Looking at the market of the day: Atari was out of the market Intellivision was dead (now supported only by INTV's mail order) Colecovision was dead (they stopped shipping it in 1984, and sold their assets to Telegames) The SG-1000 had the same type of games and controllers as competing consoles, and would not have differentiated itself Nintendo came in with something completely different, and that was why they were successful. The only way the Nintendo could have failed in the US market was to not have existed. Given the market vacuum that existed, Sega and Nintendo were the best bets for new market entries, and Sega just wasn't different enough. If we assume that Nintendo simply didn't exist as a video game company, then we run into a whole host of problems trying to find a replacement. The SMS would have never been developed, because there was no competition and no controllers to copy. (Sorry.) Whatever game consoles remained would have been severely lacking direction. So what would have happened had Nintendo never entered the game market? Not a whole hell of a lot. The home market was already moving where they wanted to go: Toward home computers. If anyone remembers, both Apogee and Epic were well established by the early 90s. It's questionable if their games would have been so focused on side scrolling if Nintendo hadn't shown them the way, but the direction of arcade games by the time of the crash would have likely provided the necessary inspiration. The only difference is that there may have been a larger market for inexpensive computers that hooked up to your television. Also, keep in mind that pretty much every game console of the 80's was trying to become an inexpensive home computer. (Oddly, the market settled on expensive home computers, so go figure.) Basically, Nintendo created a market that didn't need to exist at the time. Without them, it's possible (perhaps likely) that the Playstation and XBox wouldn't exist today. Arcades killed the arcades. As the machines got more expensive, they began to get too costly to support on a quarter per game. This drove per-game prices up, which in turn created revenue to make games more expensive. The market eventually plateaued, and then began to rapidly decline. Thems fightin' words there boy. You better be ready for a showdown... (insert The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly music)

No problem. Space travel is a side interest of mine, so I've got all kinds of useless knowledge bouncing around. You wouldn't believe all the uber-powerful engines we're sitting on, none of which ever got used because Nixon shut down the space program. Thanks to the new CEV program, though, we may start seeing a *few* of the cooler ones pop up. This engine, for example, has a very real chance of being included on the LEO -> Moon craft, as well as the Manned Mars Mission that's currently on the roadmap.

Just so that others realize, Skylab's reentry was not entirely accidental. Skylab was parked in an orbit intended to last 8 years (long enough for the Space Shuttle to be completed), but extra heating from unexpected solar activity caused the atmosphere to expand thus incresing the drag on Skylab. NASA was aware of this and began planning a mission to boost Skylab back into a stable orbit. Unfortunately, there was a common concensus in NASA and the government that Skylab was junk. It had been beat up pretty badly during launch and was being held together with a lot of ad-hoc repairs. As a result, the funding was never given for a rescue mission, and Skylab was allowed to deorbit. I wouldn't put too much stock in what he says. He'd have an incredibly hard time finding an external piece of Skylab that could be easily detached by a child. If the parts were that loose, the first craft never would have made it into orbit! Even if we assume that such parts did exist at one time, steps are usually taken by museums to either remove such parts or protect them behind glass. Next thing you know, he'll be claimng that he stole a piece of the Apollo Modules too. (Anyone see anything loose on it?) As a side note, SciFi fans may be interested to know that Skylab is the source of the floor grills often seen in television shows like Star Trek: TNG. Skylab was so large that it required a Saturn V to boost it. Unfortuantely, all the Saturn V's were allocated to other projects. So the engineers came up with a design that involved making part of the space station out of the fuel tanks for a S-IVB stage of a Saturn II rocket. The space station would actually be filled with fuel during launch, thus acting as part of the rocket. Once in orbit, the remaining fuel would be vented. This plan required that the internal sections of the craft be porous so that the fuel could easily pass through to the engines. As a result, the floors were designed as a metal grills rather than solid plates. However, the cancellation of the Apollo program resulted in a spare Saturn V becoming available. This was used to boost Skylab in a dry configuration, and the flooring became nothing more than a curiosity. There's a picture here where you can clearly see Skylab's unique flooring.

It would also be nice to see Atari get along with Activision again. While the 8-bits didn't have quite as large of an Activision library as the 2600, it did have a few gems buried in there. Beamrider, Dreadnaught Factor, Hacker (Wow, that brings back memories), Megamania, Zenji, and Zone Raiders would all make wonderful additions. At the very least, their relative rarity makes them interesting titles to include. On second thought, does Hacker require a keyboard? My memory is a bit fuzzy. A lack of keyboard is a big reason why games like Mindshadow couldn't be included.

I honestly can't speak to this as I don't (yet) have a 5200. The Video Game Critic seems to think that the 5200 version is the worst game ever (Quote: "Everyone hates this game!"), but a lot of other people seem to think it's just fine. If you've tried both, I'd love to hear what you think. The one thing that kind of worries me about the 5200 version is how they had to make it vertically scrolling due to the differences in sprite trickery. I personally like the horizontal scrolling, and fear that vertical scrolling would significantly reduce visibility of the Dreadnaught. That being said, the 5200 version obvious looks better, but that's to be expected out of a more advanced console.

Correct. Games like Legend of Tarzan lack a battery backup. However, there are very few games like this, so I simplified it to "usually". Edit: In addition, you probably don't WANT to purchase most games that lack a battery backup. It's usually a sign that they're boring as all hell. I let the kids play Legend of Tarzan, but it hasn't held their interest any more than it's held mine. It's simply inexcusable to not save your progress in a multi-level game. To each their own. I found the thumbgroove to be a slippery at times, whereas I can yank a GBC cart in my sleep. (i.e. Flip the unit over, run your hand along the back, and find a cart in your palm once you've completed the motion.)

There are effectively 4 "Gameboy" cartridge types: Gameboy Gameboy Color Gameboy Advance Nintendo DS Of these cartridge types, the following systems are compatible: Gameboy - Can only play Gameboy designed game cartridges. Inserting a GBC cartridge won't do anything useful. In fact, they're not supposed to fit. Gameboy Color - Can play Gameboy or GBC carts. Advance carts don't fit. Gameboy Advance - Can play anything from the Gameboy to the Gameboy Advance. Older games have a border around the screen due to resolution differences. Note that the Gameboy Micro edition only supports GBA games, and not original Gameboy games. So make certain you get the right unit! Nintendo DS - Can play most GBA games in addition to DS games. Multiplayer will not work on GBA games. Between the Gameboy and the Gameboy color, there are three different cartridge variations. Gray - These cartridges are black and white. (Actually grayscale, but who's counting?) If played on a GBC or later, they will have their grays mapped to a "best guess" (sometimes pre-programmed) set of colors. These carts have notches in the top to allow for the locking mechanism of the original Gameboy unit. Black/Colored - These are bi-mode cartridges. When played in an original Gameboy, they will be grayscale. When played in a Gameboy Color or later, they will be in full color. These have the same shape as the original Gameboy cartridges (including the notch!), and differ only in color. Transparent (usually greenish) - These are Gameboy Color games that will not work in an original Gameboy unit. Unlike the original carts, they are symmetrical (i.e. lacking the notch) and have a rounded backend for easy yanking from the system. You can usually see a large watch battery inside the cartridge. The remaining formats are: Half-Height - These are GBA cartridges, and will not fit into anything older than a Gameboy Advance. They are smaller than any other Gameboy cartridges, and can come in a variety of colors. They simply won't fit in an older GBA, so you don't need to worry about accidently inserting one. Memory Card - These are Nintendo DS games. They're a bit larger than MMC/SD cards (probably to keep them from getting lost), but they're still extremely small and flat. Their form factor is designed to ONLY fit the Nintendo DS. So don't even try to insert them into anything else. (Including an MMC slot on your computer.) You won't harm anything, but you might feel stupid. That should pretty much cover everything. Nintendo actually made it incredibly easy to understand. Simply looking at the shape and color of the cart should tell you everything you need to know about compatibility. Probably the worst offender of the series is the Nintendo DS, but that's not technically a Gameboy. The Micro is also quirky, but that's due more to its form factor. Nintendo couldn't have made it small and still support the clunky form factor of the original Gameboy and GBC cartridges. It simply wasn't practical. Hope this answers your question. And apologies for repeating some of the info already discussed.

Since I feel in a sharing mood... After trying to find a copy for what feels like forever, I finally managed to get ahold of The Dreadnaught Factor for the Intellivision. At over $20 it wasn't cheap, but it did come complete in a box with overlays. The box is well-worn, and the catridge is not solidly screwed together. It seems that the previous owner played the starch out of this game. Was it worth the money? Read on... Premise The "story" surrounds this alien race that is sending large Dreadnaughts (read: Big-ass space ships) to destroy Earth. You must take your fighter through the stargate on a suicide run to stop them. If even one of those Dreadnaughts reaches its target, it's "Goodbye, Earth!" time. Use your guns to nail missile launchers, lasers turrets, and control towers while simultanously making bombing runs over exhaust vents, planet destroyer missile launchers, and engine pods. Overlays The overlays for this game look nice, but are really unnecessary. All they really communicate is the number of available skill levels (1-7). This same information is communicated through the title screen, where it asks you to press a button (1-7) to start the game. The button for guns vs. bombs can be divined by just trying them both. (Ammo is unlimited, but you can only have two shots airborne at a time.) Gameplay As soon as you start the game, you are required to chose a skill level. Which level you chose determines how many Dreadnaughts you'll need to fight to win the game, as well as the in-game difficult factors. A Dreadnaught that fires more guns more often is much more dangerous to your little ship. Even performing complex zig-zag patterns will still allow a lucky shot to take you out on higher difficulty settings. After you chose a skill level, you are presented with an informational screen that shows you how many ships you have left and how close the Dreadnaught is to Earth. Each Dreadnaught has a distinctive shape, so you have some idea what you're going up against. Press a button to launch your starfighter through the wormhole. Once through the wormhole, you find yourself in empty space. The Dreadnaught is only a few screens to the right, so catch your breath and steel yourself for your attack run. As you approach the Dreadnaught, you need to zig-zag up and down to prevent the guns from getting a bead on you. This is also a chance to do some damage, even though you can't yet see much of what you're firing at. As the Dreadnaught gets larger on the screen, you'll see a massive spaceship (the first one looks a bit like a Star Destroyer) with guns jutting out of every possible crevice and surface. The few surfaces that don't have guns are littered with control towers, exhaust vents, and planet-killer weapons. You need to hit every exhaust vent with a bomb to destroy the Dreadnaught. As you pass the rear section of the Dreadnaught, you also find engine pods to bomb. If you feel being strategic, you can destroy the planet-killer weapons (ensuring the safety of Earth while you take care of the Dreadnaught) or head straight to the back of the ship to hit an engine or two to slow its approach toward Earth. You can't stop it, but you can buy yourself more time. You can adjust the speed with which you pass the Dreadnaught, but you cannot change directions or stop. After you pass the Dreadnaught (or get killed!), you will be returned to the informational screen. Here you can again check how much progress the Dreadnaught has made toward Earth. If the Dreadnaught has made it to Earth and still has at least one planet-killer weapon, you're treated to an animation of the Earth exploding. Having lives left won't help you here! If the Dreadnaught is still far enough away, you'll get a chance to sweep in with another fighter and do more damage. Once the last exhaust vent is destroyed, the Dreadnaught will explode. If it was the last Dreadnaught, you see the text "Victory!" Otherwise you start with a brand new Dreadnaught. (Potentially even more deadly than before!) As one might expect, some of the weapons are going to be repaired on your next pass through. Strategy As mentioned above, there's quite a bit of Strategy to go along with all the blasting. You can try to take the Dreadnaught on head-on (likely killing yourself in the process!) or chose to make a quick pass at the engines before coming around the front on another pass. You can't stop the Dreadnaught, but you can slow it down. If the Dreadnaught is close to Earth, it might make sense to bomb all its planet-killer weapons. Unfortunately, all those weapons are just as well protected as the vents. The only advantage to targetting them is that there are fewer to take out. Difficulty While the first few levels may make this game seem like a cakewalk, it keeps its true difficulty under wraps until you're ready to handle it. The moment you start seeing more than one Dreadnaught (level 4) you start seeing the true weight of fire that a Dreadnaught can rain down on your position. To put it succinctly, this game is hard. A Dreadnaught has dozens of weapons to throw at you at any given time. When you realize that each Dreadnaught is easily 3 screens high by 5 screens wide, it becomes apparent just how powerful these suckers are. Their primary advatange is that they can take damage and Just. Keep. Coming. Not only can you expect to lose your first few ships, but the developer willfully acknowledges the difficulty by starting you with 10 ships (!), then giving you an extra four for each Dreadnaught you destroy. Even the best players will have a hard time keeping a positive inflow of ships. Thoughts Maybe it's the Sci-Fi geek in me, but I can't help but find this concept insanely cool. I'm not a huge Star Wars fan (the most common comparison), but there's just something appealing in the idea of taking on a massive ship in a tiny fighter. (Too much Wing Commander, perhaps? ) Thankfully, this game is more than just a cool concept. It really delivers a game that you will enjoy playing again and again. Conclusion So was it worth the money? Oh, yeah. In my humble opinion, this is not only one of the best Intellivision games ever produced, it's one of the best games ever produced PERIOD. If you don't have this game in your collection, go get it. Seriously. Stop sitting around and get it already! You won't be disappointed. Screenshots Links http://www.intellivisionlives.com/bluesky/...tml#dreadnaught http://www.mobygames.com/game/dreadnaught-factor http://intvfunhouse.com/games/dred.php

Really? Everything I've seen has described the Build Engine as a sector-based (similar to portals) Raycaster. For example, the Wikipedia article on Raycasting describes Duke 3D as: Even the Build Engine documentation uses the term "rays" to suggest that it's casting rays. e.g. hitscan(long xstart, long ystart, long zstart, short startsectnum, long vectorx, long vectory, long vectorz, short *hitsect, short *hitwall, short *hitsprite, long *hitx, long *hity, long *hitz); Pass the starting 3D position: (xstart, ystart, zstart, startsectnum) Then pass the 3D angle to shoot (defined as a 3D vector): (vectorx, vectory, vectorz) Then set up the return values for the object hit: (hitsect, hitwall, hitsprite) and the exact 3D point where the ray hits: (hitx, hity, hitz) How to determine what was hit: * Hitsect is always equal to the sector that was hit (always >= 0). * If the ray hits a sprite then: hitsect = thesectornumber hitsprite = thespritenumber hitwall = -1 * If the ray hits a wall then: hitsect = thesectornumber hitsprite = -1 hitwall = thewallnumber * If the ray hits the ceiling of a sector then: hitsect = thesectornumber hitsprite = -1 hitwall = -1 vectorz < 0 (If vectorz < 0 then you're shooting upward which means that you couldn't have hit a floor) * If the ray hits the floor of a sector then: hitsect = thesectornumber hitsprite = -1 hitwall = -1 vectorz > 0 (If vectorz > 0 then you're shooting downard which means that you couldn't have hit a ceiling) Perhaps most revealing is the function of the Build Engine called "raytrace": raytrace (long x3, long y3, long *x4, long *y4) { long x1, y1, x2, y2, t, bot, topu, nintx, ninty, cnt, z, hitwall; long x21, y21, x43, y43; hitwall = -1; for(z=clipnum-1;z>=0;z--) { x1 = clipit[z].x1; x2 = clipit[z].x2; x21 = x2-x1; y1 = clipit[z].y1; y2 = clipit[z].y2; y21 = y2-y1; topu = x21*(y3-y1) - (x3-x1)*y21; if (topu <= 0) continue; if (x21*(*y4-y1) > (*x4-x1)*y21) continue; x43 = *x4-x3; y43 = *y4-y3; if (x43*(y1-y3) > (x1-x3)*y43) continue; if (x43*(y2-y3) <= (x2-x3)*y43) continue; bot = x43*y21 - x21*y43; if (bot == 0) continue; cnt = 256; do { cnt--; if (cnt < 0) { *x4 = x3; *y4 = y3; return(z); } nintx = x3 + scale(x43,topu,bot); ninty = y3 + scale(y43,topu,bot); topu--; } while (x21*(ninty-y1) <= (nintx-x1)*y21); if (klabs(x3-nintx)+klabs(y3-ninty) < klabs(x3-*x4)+klabs(y3-*y4)) { *x4 = nintx; *y4 = ninty; hitwall = z; } } return(hitwall); } Now I'll grant you that I haven't taken the time to decode the engine to its fullest extent, but it does appear to be a bonafide Raycaster. If you have any insights, please do share. I can't promise to agree, but I will listen attentively.

What about Shark! Shark!? Or Demon Attack? Or Beauty and the Beast? Or *gasp* BurgerTime? You don't know what you're missing if you're not playing these games! Thin Ice was released by INTV Corporation, the company that was formed out of the Mattel Intellivision ashes. Pretty much anything released by them seems to be pretty rare. Supposedly, two of the best games for the Intellivision (Thin Ice and Diner) were released after Mattel sold the business to INTV corp. I haven't yet gotten around to saving up for these two gems, but if anyone is interested and has the money, they can be found here and here. Given the cost however ($104 for Diner!?!?!), you may want to troll EBay instead.

Are you sure it was actually broken? The thing I've noticed about my Inty is that the reset switch is a bit tricky to push. If you don't hit it just right, nothing happens. The best way to figure out the button is to slide your finger from one side of the button to the other until you find the "sweet spot" that makes it work. Sounds like another cost saving measure. The Intellivision II was one seriously cheapened piece of hardware. BTW, did anyone know that Tandy produced a licensed Intellivision console? I mean, Sears is one thing, but Tandy? Who'da'thunk? Apparently Mattel licensed it to several manufacturers, including the GTE (now Verizon) subsidiary Sylvania.

Intellivision/Mattel *did* port many of their games to the Atari via their M Network brand. However, Snafu (a stupid name developed by marketting) was not one of them. Your friend is probably confusing her Intellivision and Atari experiences. The game is not rare at all (I have two copies - don't ask) and can be obtained from Atari2600.com for as little as $1.95 for a loose cart, or $7.95 new in box. Given that the instructions are online and the overlay is useless*, I'd suggest not wasting money on the boxed version. Of course, if you don't have a system to play it on, you might be looking at another $60 or so just for the system. The Aquarius was produced by Mattel, the same company that produced the Intellivision. As a result, many of the Aquarius's games were Intellivision ports. (You can see the full list of games for the system in the 1983 catalog.) Given how it was treated as just another Intellivision console, one has to wonder if Mattel wasn't thinking that the Aquarius would make up for the failed Intellivision keyboard attachment? * What is up with that overlay? I mean, they could have at least TRIED to put something useful on it. For example, putting the words "Slow" on '3' and "Fast" on '1' would have helped with starting the game.

Afterburner II (Just about every system on the planet.) How can anyone forget that riff? Bada bada bum... buuuuuuuuuum... buuuuuuuuuum... buuuuuuuuum... (bing! bing! bing!) Bada bada bum... buuuuuuuuuum... buuuuuuuuuum... buuuuuuuuum... (sounds of missiles and machine guns firing from every which direction!) Oh yeah! That's the type of music you'd find yourself humming for no particular reason.

This guy seems to be a real winner. According to the Wikipedia article on Gizmondo, he has had ties with the Mafia in the past, and was forced to resign because of it. This little bit caught my eye, though: Hey! Those yahoos stole the name of my video game! In case you're interested, here's a load of links: Xero Mobile Website Mobile Tracker News Story Inquirer Story Engadget's Take This business plan sounds like the stupidest yet. At least with the Gizmondo, there was a reasonable change the user would be looking at the screen when it played ads. How exactly do they expect to get people to flip open their Razrs (or whatever) just to see a "Buy Viagra Now!" ad? Stupid, stupid, stupid. And no, I'm not despondent over having the good name of my game dragged through the mud.

I'm not sure that's a good idea. Many games were calibrated around the disc and the way you could rotate it. For example, in Triple Action the tanks turn by following the spin of the disc. While this is frustrating at first, you learn to stop pressing the direction you want to go, and start pressing the current direction before rotating. Why don't you just use a Sears Super Video Arcade System or Intellivision II? Both have detachable controllers, meaning that you can plug a new stick in. That's about the only thing that offsets the (from what I hear) horrid cheapening of the INTV II controllers. The Intellivision rocks! I think a lot of the dislike for the system stems from the fact that it's poorly suited to 'twitch' games. The 16 direction disc can make the precise direction you press rather unpredictable, and the stiff side buttons can be problematic for reflexively hitting the fire button. As a result, the Intellivision's strengths are in the area of playing more cerebral games. For example: Space Battle is about strategically deploying your forces before the enemy overruns your base. Shark! Shark! is about taking openings as you see them, and planning ahead as possible. "Twitching" rarely saves your fishy, and usually rams you into a shark muzzle. Sea Battle is nothing but deployment strategy. Sanfu requires strategic thinking to box in your competitors. Burgertime has you spending most of your time running from ladder to ladder. In between ladders you're spending time deciding your next move rather than quickly jumping or firing. Pepper must be conserved, thus requiring you to plan ahead on its usage. Sports games. 'Nuff said. Poker and Blackjack. 'Nuff said. Night Stalker gives you limited ammunition before you must track down another gun. Given that your character moves slowly, you need to keep your wits about you if you want to nail the robots before they box you in. If I was in a position where I had to go down to one system, I think it would be hard to chose between my Intellivision and my 7800. The 7800 is great for playing quick games that are jam-packed with action (e.g. Enduro, Centipede, Donkey Kong, Missile Command, etc.) while the Intellivision keeps me playing steady-paced games for hours. (e.g. Night Stalker, Shark! Shark!, Blackjack, Space Battle, Beauty and the Beast, etc.) The systems are just different, and both make great additions to any system collection.

I was the eldest of five children. We got an NES in the 80's, and it served us for well over a decade before it started experiencing flashing screen problems. (I'm thinking it was around '99 or 2000 that the problems first started appearing.) Our primary source of games was rented titles, and yet the system experienced no real issues during its decade+ long lifetime. I eventually inherited it because my younger siblings didn't know what to do with it anymore. It still works pretty well, with flashing occurring only about 50% of the time. Since it only takes an eject and reinsert to fix the problem, I haven't yet bothered to clean the pins and bend them back. The ZIF port was definitely a weak point on the Nintendo system, but it's not as bad as many people make it out to be. Now if you want to talk about hardware that doesn't last, let's talk 5200 and Proline controllers. The 5200 issues are well known, but the Proline controllers are so cheaply built that they become junk after a few years of use. Even cleaned and rebuilt controllers tend to have a "mushy" feel to them that makes it difficult (if not impossible) to play. If you open these suckers up, it's easy to see why. Instead of placing switches to the sides of the stick, the buttons are underneath the board, with a plastic cross-section carefully aligned to press the metal switches. If alignment is off, the controller becomes hard to use. Of course, wear on the switches makes good alignment more difficult. (I ended up taping the cross-section to maintain its optimal position. It worked fairly well, but the new controllers I eventually purchased defintely had a better feel.) My Nintendo controllers, on the other hand, are still in perfect operating condition. While I know of a few people who managed to flatten the buttons after extensive use, I also know that those controllers stood up to being pitched at walls, stomped on, continuously yanked (often out of the system itself), and other forms of torture that the Prolines never would have survived. And even if your controllers are flat, it's relatively easy to replace a few parts to return them to tip-top condition. Many stores used to sell kits to do this. So I don't think it's fair to pretend that the NES is the only system with hardware faults. It just happens to have faults that personally annoy you more than the faults in other systems.

Use the Keypad. Button 1 = Rotate Clockwise Button 2 = Rotate Counter-Clockwise 4 = Left 6 = Right 8 = Accelerate Down 0 = Slam Down Atari should have done the same thing for Asteroids. (Which was originally played with buttons, anyway.) It seems like such an obvious solution that you'd think the engineers/programmers would have thought of it. Then again, it's possible that they did think of it and got the usual, "That's a stupid idea and would make Atari look bad!" type of answer from management.

That mod looks dangerous. Looking at the cartridge sticking out of the unit, I can only think, "What happens if a kid/pet manages to knock the cartridge a good one?" Ouch. Best case: bye, bye game. Worst case: bye, bye Nintendo. Now if there was a way to sink the connector farther into the unit (so that the cartridge is firmly braced against the opening), then it would be a pretty cool mod.

Hmm... scratch number three then. The first two are the key reasons.

MP3, AAC (the format used by iPods), and ATRAC are all lossy codecs. Which means that they lose information when they encode. Depending on how the data is encoded as WAV files (a lossless format, which means that no information is lost), this may or may not be a problem. Generally, I'd recommend keeping the files in their original WAV format, as others have suggested. A CD or DVD could hold pretty much anything you might want to download. If you're in love with the idea of using a portable player, though, you might want to check out the FLAC format. FLACs are completely lossless, compresses fairly well, and work on a variety of portable players.

I assume you mean the original arcade Tron, and not Discs of Tron? That game was so bad to begin with, that I don't think that anyone wants to port it. Actually creating a port would be trivial, as all the mini-games have counterparts in real 2600 games. e.g. Lightcycles ~= Surround, MCP ~= animated Breakout, CyberTanks ~= Combat/Bezerk/Wizard of Wor, etc. I can't think of anything to match the "Bug" level, but that might be because it's dull. A 7800 port should be able to faithfully reproduce the arcade game +/- some changes to the aspect ratio. That being said, "trivial" is not the same as, "takes no time at all." Someone still needs to invest hundreds of man hours in porting a game like this. If you really want to see it happen, you might consider picking up programming and building it. It's not too bad of a project to cut your teeth on. BTW, the reasons why the arcade game was never ported to any system were: 1. Mattel sapped up the home console rights for Tron spin-offs, and created their games in parallel with the Bally game. 2. Despite its reputation as a cult classic, the movie flopped in the theaters. Mattel was hit hard by a surplus stock of Tron carts, and thus wasn't looking to do more. 3. The game wasn't exactly an arcade hit, either. Game producers wanted to work on profitable licenses rather than wrangling with contracts for dead (for the time) properties.

Ok, very simply. For each scanline, there is a list of instructions on how to draw that line. This is called the Display List. Each item in the list specifies how many pixels per byte (1 or 2), how many iterations of those pixels should be pulled from memory, and where on the scanline to start drawing. It also specifies which palette to use (3 colors for each of the 8 palettes). When executed, the Maria will execute these instructions to fill in the scanline. Given that there's more than one scanline, a Display List List is used to hold pointers to each Display List. Each DLL entry can specify how many scanlines a given display list should be used on. The Display List instructions will automatically use the line counter (called "offset") to pull the next line of data in each sprite. Thus a 16 line DLL entry would draw a 16 pixel high sprite. Finally, an absolute address to the DLL is placed in two registers, and DMA is enabled. The 7800 will then execute those display instructions every frame, whether your program does anything useful or not. If anyone has any additions, corrections, or comments, feel free to speak up.

You, my friend, are far too easily excitable.