Goochman

IMHO the 800 could've competed very well with the CV, except Atari crippled the 5200 from the start. The 5200 should've been a cost reduced '800' not '400'. A 48k 5200 with compatibility with the computer line and a new self centering multi fire button joystick. The cross pollination should've been obvious. The computer line moves up scale with 64k of RAM and additional expansion capabilities. Win win - except we got lose, lose lose..............

It appears folks are listing these on ebay for $125+. Some selling. One of them is a copy it appears. Id be happy to sell my original with the manual for $55+shipping if someone was interested.

Ive got a v2 Skunk board for sale for $150 shipped within the US (US buyers only please) It comes in a one of a kind cart encasement - surely you wont see another one like it! The USB cable is also included.

This shows even more how badly Atari butchered the 5200 release. All the specs were wrong out of the gate and they looked to play catchup with CV right after launch. What a complete joke.

IMHO Atari thought they owned the video game market and stopped innovating. They made so much money on carts they didnt need to create arcade hits - they could just keep printing money on the carts they sold. Kassar tried to turn Atari into more of a marketing type company and when the cart model dropped like a lead brick so did Atari. It was easy for Nintendo to take the market away - they were creating the content game players wanted - the new Atari couldnt license the hits players wanted to play at home so the 7800 was doomed. Just my $0.02, but it was painful back then to see Atari turn into a pumpkin overnight.

My understanding is the working relationship started after the Dragster incident - they realized that had someone who was excellent on their titles and decided to use that as a marketing item. Someone correct me if Im wrong, but I dont think Todd had anything to do with Activision prior to Dragster.

Interesting - mind sharing the back story on how you got amold to produce carts? Just curious

Very sad to hear this - Ken did great work on the 8bit and 7800 lines. He died at a very young age - not much older than I am RIP Ken.

I didnt want to insinuate that frying was at play here - I did mention it would be a form of cheating if a bonus like the double shot in SI was found. Anyhow, I only brought that up to show that even a simple powerup can play games with a 2600 on real hardware. It wasnt engineered by NASA

There are ways of 'frying' a 2600 with repeated on/off attempts - not sure if you were aware of this. You can get some pretty cool game variations on some ROMs. This is effectively cheating if one were to get an advantage this way, but on real hardware you can impact ROM execution in some limited ways.

Demon Attack has different ROMs also

I could be reading all the evidence wrong but I believe Thomas has shown that Omnigamers evidence is not complete. THomas verified that if he followed Omnigamers execution path to a tee that he got the same result. This would make perfect sense since Omnigamers dissection is of the actual code. We have to assume to Omnigamers path is the absolute perfect path. Didnt Thomas find a path that got him 5.54 - matching Activisions theoretical best score? If this is the case then how does this align with Omnigamers theoretical best of 5.57? I believe it was also stated that if one could start in 2nd gear that better then 5.54 is a theoretical possibility also? Real hardware is going to behave differently than emulation - look at the Concerto problems on the 7800 - depending on when it was manufactured certain games work and others will not. Im with Yancey that in this particular case Activision validated it - not some TG Ref or gaming magazine, but the actual developer of said game.

The one time I was accused of cheating in a video game competition. I posted a score on Demon Attack of over 1M when everyone else had like 700k. We found out that the original programmer didnt think anyone would make it past 84 waves so he ended the game, Imagic got complaints and they issued a new batch that went on forever. I had the fixed cart - they didnt recall the defective ones. Thats all I can share, Im sure someone smarter than me in the 2600 section would know more.

If they put Demon Attack on any of these, make sure its the ROM that doesnt end after wave 83 or so.

I meet Todd at a CGE a number of years ago - he is a nice guy but does get a bit miffed when people contest his achievements all the time. I played Dragster with him and he is very good at it. He explained a few things to me and I was able to improve my score considerably. I wish I took a picture but Im pretty certain he got a 5.57 while we were there. 5.61 definitely. All this 'perfect algortithm' stuff is meaningless to me since no matter what this guys simulation does, it doesnt take into account 'everything'. This YouTube video IMHO puts the issue to rest, a 'perfect shifting' simulation kills all scores: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7W19PDpIHw&feature=youtu.be How is a 4.50 even possible when the simulation says a 5.57 is the best anyone can do?

I played Telengard on my friends C64 back in the day and we really enjoyed it. Fast forward a few years and I got ahold of the 8bit version - to say I was disappointed was an understatement. The only good thing was I played it under emulation so I could easily up my character stats and restore if I got burnt (Telengard has a nasty habit of dropping an unbeatable monster on you). I wish someone could replace the monster graphics with sprites, but alas that wont happen.

The 3 games are prob the pack in. VidGrid, Blue Lightening and the Myst demo.

There is a conversion out there somewhere but the Datasoft disk release has the intermissions also - not 100% sure if that is the 5200 version or not.

The City Transfer thing was a bug - I got the Dungeon the day it came out and had this problem. Datasoft issued an update shortly after release which fixed the transfer problem. It was only supposed to happen if you attempted to crack the disks.

No worries! I had like 5 of these PCIe cards and for some reason now only have 1. I have a couple GTX8800's that could run in SLI mode I dont think those are PCIe cards though.

Unfort I just have a 256MB PCIe card with 2 DVI outputs. If you're interested Id send it for $20 shipped

I met Tood at one of the CGE events - he was a pretty nice and personable guy. We played Dragster and he showed me some of the tricks. Im pretty sure he got a sub 5.6 time messing around at the booth. It was something like 5.57 is what he got after *alot* of gameplay. He helped me improve my time to 5.64 or .63 - this was 17 years ago, but I never cracked the 6 second mark before Todd showed me the best way to shift. He couldnt replicate his 5.57 time again during the show, but didnt spend alot of time trying to. I can say I did beat Todd head 2 head in 1 race - my claim to fame

Fantastic work - thanks!

Can I be first on the list to remove from the list list?