jbanes

That was such an amazing coup for Nintendo, too. They gave the Japanese market even more Mario, while the American market thought that Nintendo had dug up some amazing levels that had been lost in a closet for the last decade. If I didn't admire how they pulled it off so nicely, I might actually be mad.

Completely understandable. A classic arcade is almost guaranteed to have more technical issues than a new arcade. But that doesn't mean that all hope is gone. A "good" classic arcade would require a repair person on staff, capable of doing one of three things with the machines: 1. Fix them 2. Rebuild them 3. Replace them with a MAME emulator (hold onto the old machine for legal reasons, though) The mechanical parts of the machine aren't such a big deal, as you can always have a few custom manufactured. It's really the electronics that are the problem, thus why you may have to eventually replace a few of the cabinets with MAME versions. Not really. For example, I have no memories of playing the 7800, because I never played a 7800 until recently. And my kids have no memories of going to these arcades, because they're too young to have gone to them. But I can share my memories and help them build their own just as easily. Some dads play baseball with their kids because that's what they have fond memories of doing with their dads. I play video games with mine. Newly developed games are highly overrated. People still drive cars that are 20 years old, don't they? Ships sail the sea that are 50 years old. Homes are still used today that are over 100 years old. Just because something's old doesn't mean that its only value is nastolgia. Heck, I (and many others) still have old Sun machines from over 10 years ago still running important processes. Why? Because they're just too useful to throw out. As long as the equipment does its job, why worry about its obsolescence?

I did a bit of Googling and found the pinouts here. I'm actually scratching my head a little bit at this, but I think the idea is that the LD player supplants the 6502C and controls the MARIA/TIA directly. So the LaserDisc player would have to basically be a completely new processor and RAM architecture that is allowed to integrate with the graphics, sound, and controllers of the 7800. At least, that's how I read the specs. Am I wrong? If I am, please tell me now so I don't feel too sheepish.

Videogames Etc. on the corner of Harlem and Montrose in Harwood Heights, IL. (Not too far from Skokie. i.e. The Chicagoland area.) They have Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800 games, controllers, and decks, Intellivision decks and games, Colecovision decks and games, all kinds of Sega games and decks, tons of Nintendo stuff, Oddessy and Oddessy2 games and systems, ActionMaxx "games", some Japanese carts and stuff, and of course some new stuff. They also have a backroom where you can play Internet computer games all day. Note that while they have a lot of loose carts, their systems and controllers tend to be packaged nicely. They also have various Atari, Intellivision, and Colecovision games still in their boxes. So if you want to pick up Star Raiders with the special controller, this is the place to go. The only thing I'm ticked about is that they don't have Centipede for my 7800. Or to put it another way, the "rare" stuff is kind of hit and miss. I imagine you could chat with the owner a bit and he might be able to help track down some of that stuff, but it's not really that big of a deal for me. Special thanks to ekloot for pointing the place out.

No worries. Doki Doki was released here in the states too. Except that it had Mario in it. (Who ever thought that one up, anyway? Doki Doki was not what we were expecting for a Mario sequel.)

The first video game I ever saw as a kid was a Pacman Cocktail Table at my local Pizza Hut. It was pushed up against the wall near the counter as there was very little space in the restaurant. I've always wondered why someone didn't open a restaurant that featured ruggedized versions of these as every table? Get people to plunk money in as they wait for their food. Of course, the food has to be good, but otherwise the idea seems sound enough. (I hear that Nolan Bushnell is planning something similar with modern games?) The biggest problem I see is that the initial startup cost would be high, and you'd have a lot of potential maintenece issues. But still, it could be a very attractive restaurant. Especially in high traffic areas (like airports) where a little gimmicking goes a long way. Not to mention all the people who would sit down and play just because they're waiting for their plane.

While I agree that the Laserdisc would have been mostly useless, I chose it because it's the best out of three useless options. The mindlink was junk. Nothing more than a cutesy headband that would "read" your brow. If it was released, it would have gone the way of the PowerGlove. Except with less fanfare. As Bruce pointed out, the 5200 adapter would have been nothing more than a 5200 machine that plugged into your 7800. The Laserdisc, while guaranteed not to be successful, might have been at least interesting. i.e. It could have been the SuperCharger of the 7800. Just more expensive. At the very least, it might have been useful with a lightgun for an early version of Maddog McCree. As for the keyboard, I think it might have done alright for itself. I have to disagree that it was a distraction. It could have been used to create more complex games that needed more keys/buttons than the 7800 could provide. It could also be used to load games from tape, allowing for large worlds that could never have fit on a cartridge. Basically, the keyboard could have had a purpose, even though it may have seemed gimmicky. I don't see why not. For example, you could create a CDROM drive with extra RAM for the machine. Maybe even include a cool video or sprite compression decoder to free up the CPU. All you really need is the documentation that explains the pinouts. (And some hardware design experience, but that goes without saying. )

Or, he may have been referring to the Flashback 3 rumors. Curt has hinted that there will be a cartridge port of some kind on it, leading many AtariAgers to believe that the FB3 will be a 400/800 clone. Curt is also working on the previously-unreleased Keyboard component for the 7800. Basically, there's a lot of cool stuff going on with the ancient Atari hardware. Though I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say that Atari is "making a new computer".

Where's the keyboard? I know Curt is working on one, but it's still not released.

Technically speaking, an Atari video game for Stargate Atlantis already exists. Gameplay is pretty simple too: The city is under siege by the Wraith, and you must use your rail gun installations (recently shipped in from Earth) to defend the city against the Wraith! Watch out, though! If a dart manages to penetrate the shield, it will beam in a task force of Wraith solders who will destroy that structure. If the city sustains too much damage, you'll have no choice but to evacuate in the Daedalus and destroy the city! Hurry, you're the only hope the Pegasus Galaxy has against the Wraith!

You'll have to excuse the slight shift in perspective here, but if I may wax poetically for a moment.... "Say not, Why were the days which have gone by better than these? Such a question comes not from wisdom." -Ecclesiastes 7:10 The arcades that we knew in our younger days are long gone, never to be brought back to life. Concerning ourselves with the difficulties of creating new machines is a probably a pointless exercise, in part because of the points Mr_8bit_16bit brought up. That being said, I still enjoy playing Galaga, Cruisin' USA, Killer Instinct, After Burner, BattleZone, TMNT, Tempest, and the hundreds of other games. I also enjoy taking my family to the little hotdog places around Chicago so we can get some tasty fast food grub (Vienna Beef, Mmmmm...) and play a few of the multi-arcade machines they have setup. (My older son seems to like DigDug, while the younger one just likes to hit the ball in Pinball.) I see no reason why bringing these experieneces back in an arcade setting wouldn't work. Look at it this way. There's currently a booming market in PNP TV Games, primarily because they deliver to people's homes all the original games they used to (and still do) enjoy. In my experience, these TV Games also help bring back some of the social aspect that's been missing from gaming for so long. What I'm getting at is, I don't see why someone can't run a classic arcade that runs existing machines in a traditional arcade setting with food, tokens, loud noises, and other aspects that we used to enjoy. So what if Sky Kid is sitting next to Hydrothunder? The point is to create a common area where people can have fun! No, it won't be exactly like the arcades were back in the day. In fact, such arcades would probably be idealized versions. But they'll still be fun, and that's all that counts. It's been mentioned around here before that a few of these types of arcades have popped up in heavily trafficed areas. If I ever take a vacation in Geneva, WI, I'll have to look up the one that was mentioned there. Bound to be lots more fun than the gutted arcades in the Wisconsin Dells. Edit: Good News: I found the post I referenced here. Bad News: Most of the reviews are not positive.

Right you are. The social aspect of gaming just can't be overstated. IMHO, gaming went down the drain the moment the PS1 grabbed the market away from Nintendo. Instead of games that encouraged siblings, friends, and older family members to play together, gaming became a form of unsatisfiable escapism. Surprisingly, quarter draining is also a very important element. It seems a little weird, but it places a limit on your gameplay that is difficult to overcome. On a home port of a game you can keep playing until you reach some arbitrary limit of lives or continues. In the arcade, you can keep playing as long as you want, but only if you can bleed enough quarters to keep up. In a social game like TMNT, Simpsons, or X-Men, there's a lot of pressure (but positive pressure, IMHO) to keep playing. Even games like Killer Instinct keep people plunking quarters so they can prove who has better mastery of the game, and/or take over the single player game. This is a good question. One has to wonder if such studies were done before arcade manufacturers ran themselves bankrupt creating new machines. Anedotal evidence definitely suggests that a quarter/token at a time is ideal for "quarter sucking games". i.e. Players will be attracted by the low cost, and then kept at the game machine by the low cost of continuing their game. OTOH, most racing games would feel too "cheap" (as you say) if they were anything less than 50 cents. Why? Because you are paying for a fixed amount of gameplay. (Usually one level or track.) This is different from quarter suckers that tend to prompt you for more money at much more arbitrary intervals. I'd be interested in seeing if a proper study agreed.

Amen to that. Of course, how many arcades these days actually have a food counter? *sigh*

An interesting take on the market downturn. Though I'm not really sure I can agree with it. I was a big arcade go-er at the time, and despite the near flawless transition of SF:Rush and other arcade games to home systems, it just wasn't the same. The arcade experience included things like rumble chairs, steering wheels, gas pedals, stick shifts, force feedback, recoiling guns, solid joysticks, and other goodies that helped make the game what it was. Or in other words, it was really about the total package. With a home system, your total package is just the game. It's a game, very much like any other. You use the same controller (no matter how unnatural it is), and play it on the same console with the same sound system and the same video. A lot of what made the game interesting in the arcade is lost. What you're left with is a "game" that's designed to draw quarters from you, except that you don't need to plunk any quarters into the machine! Even games that don't have such specialized controls tend to be more fun in the arcade than at home. Killer Instinct is a perfect example. The arcade version of the game can be run from home on a PC emulator. Is it as much fun? Nope. Just not the same experience. Home games tend to benefit more from more drawn out play. Sure, a quick Atari game can be fun, but for the money you spend on an average console, you tend to expect to get hours upon hours of enjoyment out of a game. Arcade ports don't provide that. As a customer of the arcades when they died, I feel I may be able to shed some light on why they died. The key thing I remember about Hydrothunder is that it was very much the last interesting game to hit the arcades. All the previous good games were slowly disappearing, but weren't being replaced by fresh new games. The few new machines that showed up were rehashes of concepts that had been done a billion times before. (e.g. Another F1 racer game, another Street Fighter Alpha game, another poor shoot-the-zombie game with cheap-ass-guns, etc.) But why weren't the games being replaced? Where was all the innovation, the pushing of the limits? The other thing that stuck out to me at the time was that the machines were getting VERY expensive to produce. So expensive that prices for a single game were growing by leaps and bounds. It started as 50 cents a game, ballooned to 75 cents a game, and hit a dollar per game in no time. Some arcades charged a $1.50 a game! Basically, this hyperinflation was unsustainable. Customers were driven away from the arcades by high prices while the machines grew in expense. What was an arcade owner to do? Stop buying new games, and replace some of the older games with classic money makers like Skeeball, that's what. Some of my favorite arcades from days gone by are either nothing but ticket games or are simply out of business. The few that have any arcade games at all tend to follow the same formula: 1. 2 or 3 DDR or DDR clone machines 2. 1 or 2 racing games 3. A few gimicky games (e.g. Sword fighting with a wand, rotating tail gunner, etc.) that aren't actually that much fun to play A perfect case in point is the Chuck E. Cheese restaurants. Remember when they had TMNT, Super Mario, Excite Bike, Simpsons, Sky Kid, and other fun games? Yeah, well they're all just rides and ticket games now. You have to really search to find an actual video game. Big Rigs and some Firefighter game tend to be "it". It saddens me too, because I remember Showbiz/Chuck E. as a great arcade when I was a kid. Now I can't share those memories with my kids. So that's my opinion. The arcade games got too competitive and basically put themselves out of business. If the home consoles had anything to do with it, they simply helped force that competition by ensuring that arcade game producers would have to try harder than another Pacman to keep kids coming to the arcades.

Howdy! Looks interesting! Let's hope they manage to capture the spirit of Wing Commander rather than just "improving on the technology." (*crosses fingers*) Still, I'm fairly well satiated at the moment. [/end threadjack]

Them's fightin' words! Seriously, what's wrong with Hydrothunder? I always thought it was a great game. Probably the last arcade game to ever drain quarters from my pocket. It was especially fun if you found an arcade that had four of the machines linked up. Almost (but not quite) as fun as playing against friends in San Francisco: Rush. Indeed. From KLOV: Monitor: * Orientation: Horizontal * Type: Raster: Standard Resolution * CRT: Color Shadow, maybe you're thinking of the 3D Vector Graphics that the game used? Like most modern 3D displays, the graphics are rasterized prior to display. I don't think a filled-poly vector display was ever produced.

Don't forget Wing Commander. The WC series is still better than the modern variations like X2: The Threat and Star Shatter. Wing Commander even has its own following of fans who've used both old and new codebases to create new games based on the WC Universe.

Mr. Baer's design (the Odyssey) didn't have cartridges in the same way that the 2600 did. The Odyssey's cartridges contained none of the game code or hardware, and merely rerouted the circuits inside the Odyssey to activate a game that was already in the system. It's difficult to say if Atari would have been able to block the VES/Channel F had they filed a patent immediately after they'd developed the cartridge idea. As for the rest of the stuff, Atari only needs to show that they significantly improved on existing concepts in order to be granted a patent. They would then have exclusive rights to those improvements for the duration of the patent. Atari in fact, did file a patent on the TIA in 1976, and was granted the patent in 1978. It didn't seem to do them much good against Coleco, though. The judge decided that because Coleco had used off the shelf parts instead of Atari's custom hardware, Atari's patents didn't apply. (Does anyone actually have the full text of the judge's findings in the Atari v. Coleco case? I've been trying to find it for a little while now.) Addendum: Here's the patent Atari filed on their cartridge design. I believe someone mentioned this earlier in the thread. (supercat?) Software wouldn't have protected the Channel F prior to 1980. Before the 1980 ammendment to the Copyright Act of 1976, there was a lot of question over whether software was copyrightable. Thus Atari took the patent route instead of bothering with BIOS software. It's difficult to say if it would have helped them, though. In 1982, Compaq reverse engineered the PC BIOS. The courts decided that it was a completely clean room revision, and that Compaq was in the clear. On the other hand, Keith Robinson seems to believe that Coleco failed to produce it's Intellivision module for the Colecovision because of fears over software copyright infringement. So, it's hard to say what would have happened if Atari had used software as a protection mechanism.

That's not really fair to Nolan. You need to realize that the Atari VCS was a followup to the single-purpose Pong units. Atari's plan was to expand their Pong market by creating a more general machine that played about 10 cartriges which could be purchased separately. I seriously doubt they saw that that VCS would become as popular as it did. They certainly didn't expect their own programmers to leave and create competing companies. (i.e. Activision and IMagic) Hindsight is 20/20. Back when the VCS was made, there wasn't a whole lot of legal protection in the computer industry. Ffiling for a patent was like annoucing your inventions to your competitors. A lot of the intellectual rights of computer companies didn't stablize until the 1980's, in part because of Atari's suits. The weapon of choice used by modern console makers is the Digital Millinium Copyright Act which makes it illegal in many circumstances to break the encryption or lock-out software present on console systems. Such provisions didn't exist in the 1970's when it wasn't clear if software could be copyrighted and the USPTO rejected patent applications on software. As a result, "security through obscurity" and healthy doses of trade secret contracts were seen as the best solution.

If I understand that link right, the way to tell if you have a first release or not is to check for the expansion port. Since I do have the "Expansion Port" sticker and the port itself, I assume that I have the first revision. Those are reasonably rare, aren't they?

I agree whole heartedly. This thread is long ruined. I don't know why anyone's still here. <Ferris-Bueller>You're still here? It's over. Go home. Go!<Ferris-Bueller> (Makes shooing motion.)

Wait, I'm confused. I have a brand-spanking old 7800 at home. Last weekend I picked up Pitfall II from Sean Kelly's shop for $7.99. I took it home and popped it into my 7800 with no problems to speak of. Are we talking about some special version of Pitfall 2, because I found it neither rare nor incompatible?

So on one hand there's ZylonBane putting on his best tough-guy impression to distract everyone from the fact that he didn't have the balls to take up the challenge (which he soundly "lost"), SuperCat PMing me to convince me that "framebuffer" has been "retronymed" to mean something else despite the mountain of evidence (including some modern evidence produced by none other than ZylonBane), and Danno telling me that he didn't really want an apology and telling me to <really-gruff-voice>"Stay out of my PM box!"</really-gruff-voice> You're all a bunch of right loons, you are! (wipes tears from eyes) Ah, man. Thanks guys, I needed that.

As far as I'm concerned, Danno, this topic is closed. I've PMed you about the subject.

Fine with me. I never demanded anything else. And you owe a lot of people apologies for train wrecking a perfectly good conversation. For those of you who are interested in the historical usage, I prepared a few links for the challenge that ZylonBane refused to accept. You may find this to be of interest if you're the type who enjoys studying the history of computer science. ------------ In 1969 Joan Miller experimented with a paint program on a 3-bit framebuffer developed at Bell Labs(1). While the concept of a framebuffer had been theorized about for quite a long time, this was the first known example of such hardware. In 1972, Richard G Shoup created the first complete, fully functional framebuffer along with a paint program to utilize it. This system was dubbed "SuperPaint"(2), and had a user interface very similar to paint programs we use today. The hardware was implemented as a 307,200-pixel shift register, allowing pixels to be accessed only when the specific scan line and pixel time were reached. This shift register was synchronized with the television scan rate. Richard also implemented the ability to read in a video signal by synchronizing the television signal between the inputs and outputs. This allowed SuperPaint to also be the first example of a video capture system. The complete SuperPaint system currently resides in the permanent collection of the Computer Museum History Center in Mountain View, California. In 1974, Evans & Sutherland brings the first commercial framebuffer(3) (designed by Jim Kajiya with full Random Access Memory(6)) to the market. The device costs upwards of $50,000, but starts a revolution in graphics development across(5) Universities nation wide. Within a few years, memory starts to become cheap enough to allow devices like the Apple II to contain framebuffers. By the 1980's, Unix manufacturers began appearing to provide high quality graphics workstations to the market. SGI (7)(8 ), HP(9), DEC(10), and Sun Microsystems(11)(12) all released framebuffers throughout the 80's, and well into the 90's. Development didn't stop there, however, and manufacturers began to add Graphics Acceleator chips to accelerate their frame buffers for text modes, graphic primitives, and many other features used by the emerging GUI systems. The final result is the highly advanced 2D graphics cards we have today. They couple a graphics accelerator, framebuffer, and video overlay device to produce high quality imagery at blistering speeds. Many also include 3D Vector Processors which can be used to rasterize millions of 2D or 3D vector shapes per second to the framebuffer. ------------ 1. http://accad.osu.edu/~waynec/history/PDFs/Annals_final.pdf 2. http://accad.osu.edu/~waynec/history/PDFs/14_paint.pdf 3. http://accad.osu.edu/~waynec/history/lesson15.html 4. http://www.siggraph.org/movie/ 5. http://accad.osu.edu/~waynec/history/PDFs/paint.pdf 6. http://research.microsoft.com/users/kajiya/ 7. http://scanimate.zfx.com/DVD2T.html 8. http://hardware.majix.org/computers/sgi.iris/iris3130.shtml 9. http://openpa.net/systems/snakes.html 10. http://q.dyndns.org/~blc/DS3100/specs.html 11. http://www.sunhelp.org/faq/FrameBufferHistory.html 12. http://www.sunhelp.org/faq/FrameBuffer.html And with that my friends, I bid this thread adieu. Thank you to those of you who had positive contributions to add. I hope that we can intelligently discuss many of the points discussed at a future date, in a hopefully less hostile forum. Good day.