Kurt_Woloch

I think at least one homebrew NES game did see a commercial release... though maybe an unexpected one. I've read about different "Famiclones" now on the market (based on the NES-on-a-chip), each having a selection of various games in their ROM, and one game mentioned was "Somari" (basically Mario playing in the levels of Sonic the Hedgehog), which, as far as I know, is a homebrew game. About the different mappers... well, this might be a problem, but somehow the famiclone producers also made it to include all the games so they all can be played by the NOAC. Which poses the question which mappers are supported by a NOAC or how those games switch banks... I can't say anthing about it, not being a NES expert. Anyway, without bankswitching (that is, without a "mapper" per se), you seem to be able to have 32K of PRG and 8K of CHR ROM, which isn't bad for a start, I think... I can think of many possible homebrew games which could work within this limit.

How about Joust Bros.? A mash-up of Joust and Mario Bros. Hey, those two already have a similar platform layout... Or how about mixing Moon Patrol with Super Mario Bros.? A tank shooting turtles? Well...

And Ktel was a division of Goliath/Bitcorp, I believe. There must have been one factory in Taiwan pumping out all these pirated games I wonder if that can be true. K-Tel was/is also a record company. I've got two hit sampler tapes by them from 1978 and 1982, and they also had LP's... I've got one called "Disco Dance" where a Hungarian orchestra plays instrumental versions of Disco classics like "Y.M.C.A.", and I also had two Smurf LP's by them, that were popular here in Austria in the early 80's. In contrast to that, I never heard of Goliath outside the Atari 2600 world, whereas Bit Corp. also produced hardware... I can remember the Bit 60, which was a computer based on the Atari 2600, and the Bit 90, a computer based on the Colecovision. Both of them were able to play the carts for the game system they were based on. I've never seen one of those computers, but at least the Bit 90 was reviewed in a computer mag back then, and I also saw a listing for it which revealed that its BASIC was very similar to that of the TI-99 in terms of graphics commands. So, I don't think K-Tel could have been a division of Bit Corp. or vice-versa. I think it's a similar situation like with the budget tapes where companies bought each other's cover tracks to release them. I've got about 20 tapes and LP's with cover versions by different companies, and in many cases, where there are duplicates, you'll hear the same cover version although it's been released by a different company, though there are also songs with different versions. For instance, I've got an LP "Hits for young people" by Europa and a tape called "Internationale Hitparade" by Jackson. On them, there's the same cover version of "Baby it's you" by the Promises, but two different versions of "In the navy" by Village People. So, it may have been a similar thing with K-Tel, Goliath, Bit Corp. and Hot Shot. K-Tel had its records in all the department stores and probably found ways to put video games there too under their name. Bit Corp. may have gone for the computer stores where their hardware also was found. And the other two names... well, that may be the actual names of the companies who did the games. Probably, we'll never know... best bet is to look at the screen. Some screens show "Bit Corp.", some show "Goliath" and some show "K-Tel" (like the title screen of "It's only Rock'n'Roll").

Well, it is possible to read and write PC disks on the Amiga... there are programs for that. But it only reads DD disks, which is a bit of a problem... you don't get these new for a long time, you only get formatted HD disks, if that. And if you re-format one of those on the PC as DD, the Amiga still won't be able to read it. So you need some old DD disks which never have been formated as HD in order to do some data transferring. Maybe it works with some cable between the parallel ports or something like that... after all, the Amiga has the same printer port as the PC (used to have).

OK... the archives of the mailing list are here: http://www.freelists.org/archives/channelf/ One of the posts with the binaries is here... http://www.freelists.org/archives/channelf...4/msg00006.html and if you follow the link, you'll find that multiple binaries are stored here... http://www.bingbangboom.us/files/channelF/ If you follow the discussion on the mailing list, there might have been more advanced versions than the latest one archived on the site above, but I've been unable to locate them :-( Thanks... I think something like this COULD be doable, but you'd need a lot of memory to store all the pictures... even if one of them is only 2-3K... that's already the whole space of a Channel F cartridge from back then. So you'd probably have to be creative with bank switching...

No, sorry, it doesn't help... the ZIP file you posted seems to contain only Arcadia ROM's. What's missing is a lot of VC-4000 ROM's (especially all who are longer than 2K). But you are right... MESS now emulates both the Arcadia and the VC-4000... and it's got the same graphics glitches on CIRCUS. :-) By the way, I've been wondering if a Tetris variant would be possible on the VC-4000, since it has been done on the Arcadia too. I think it's not too hard if you can live with the blocks being nearly 2 times as wide as they are high, and if it's possible to read from the object shape memory locations... otherwise, good luck, you only have 37 bytes of RAM! On the other hand, on the Elektor computer it would be doable for sure, since you have more RAM there. And the expanded version working with the expansion board could even have pretty good music (think about it... they equipped it with TWO AY-3-8910 PSG's, giving it 6-voice sound which makes it even surpass the Atari ST (which had only one of those)).

Yeah, I downloaded this too some days ago, along with the "software pack" for the VC-4000, and it occured to me that the pack only contains 2K games, which means that none of the more elaborate games are in there. Yet, in the "gaming guide", there are several 4K games listed as having been dumped, e.g. Backgammon, Boxing, Chess, Cockpit, Draughts, Golf, Metropolis/Hangman, Motocross/Dragster, Spider's Web/Monster man, Super Space, Winter Sports. Could it be that they're not included in the pack because the emulator doesn't support 4K carts for the VC-4000 yet? By the way, there seems to be some confusion about the processor speed of the VC-4000. I've also downloaded the book describing the Elektor computer, which says that the 2650 processor is clocked at 1,79 MHz, which is divided by 6 internally and thus would give a cycle duration of 3.36 microseconds. The book gives it by saying that the processor is able to execute 19 cycles per scanline, which is roughly the same, and is only a third of the amount of cycles a 6507 does in the Atari 2600. But other sources say the VC-4000's processor would be clocked at 4.47 MHz, and the successor of the VC-4000 is said to have its processor clocked at 3,59, which would be the double speed of the VC-4000. I wonder if that's correct and what of this is correct. Anyway, with the 2650 processor being that slow, this explains why the arcade game "Hunchback" looks as bad as it does, having choppier animation than the C-64 version, which doesn't make you wonder if you consider that the C-64's processor is over 6 times faster than the 2650 in the Hunchback machine (which is clocked at 895 kHz, thus a cycle would take 6.72 microseconds to execute there!)

Well, thanks for those binaries! As far as I know, there was a mailing list set up, and Fredric CJ Blåholtz and someone called "Blackbird" started to do a Pac Man clone on the Channel F (also known as VES), but I've only seen an incomplete binary where you can move around Pac Man, but no ghosts are there, and there seems to be some "holes" in the maze data, which means that you can move up or down if you leave the tunnel on the right, and then get stuck. :-) However, that mailing list has been inactive now for over a year. In my opinion, what limits the Channel F greatly is its limited choice of colors. In one scanline, you can EITHER get black/white OR red, green and blue mixed freely on a grey, light green or light blue background. That means that you can't use black or white on the same scanline as one of the other colors! Oh, and video access seems to be pretty slow too, due to the necessity of setting each pixel individually. In the following picture I tried to do a mockup of one of the screens of "Defender of the crown" on the Channel F: (yes, I know it looks pretty crappy)

The closest thing to "giving it up" I can remember was in 1991. Up to then, I constantly tried to get new games and play them, from handhelds in 1980 to the Amiga 500. But in 1991, I was in an Amiga club. I joined there because I thought of it as a place for Amiga users to get together. Sadly, there were fights between the club leaders because each one had different goals in mind. When I first went there, it was about 6 months after I got out of school, and I was still regularly meeting up privately with other Amiga users I knew from school. But that changed with the club. Some of them visited the club too once or twice, but I sort of gave up the relationship in favor of the club. In the club we had access to nearly all the new software that came out, but pretty much of that was crap too. I remember playing "Burger Man", a badly done clone of "BurgerTime" for a pretty long time until I got to a point where it was impossible to make another level, though I don't really remember. So basically, I had "it all" twice a week for 3 1/2 hours at least. Usually I was the one to stay there the longest because I volunteered of looking after the club a little. But eventually I got sick of the club when the "ultimate" leader declared "There are no rules. If I need money, I take it off the club budget". You see, he ultimately was in there only for the money and tried to sell as many Amiga hardware pieces and also illegal copies of software, which he sold by as a "subscription" (like 40 disks a month for $60 - there were multiple plans). In order to do that, he really wanted to prevent the users that came there from exchanging adresses and meeting elsewhere, and he also said that in his mind, every club member visiting the club should order something (a piece of hardware or some illegal copies of software). Well, in October 1991 I met up with a member of a band I wanted to play in, but unfortunately the rehearsals were on the same day of week as one of the club opening days, so I decided to leave the club. After leaving the club, I had become rather fed up of all the Amiga games I've seen there, and also it got much harder to get new games (other than buying them) because my bonds to my private Amiga friends weren't very strong anymore. Out of this reason, I only played very rarely anymore. The gaming lived up somewhat in 1998, when the Internet came along and I discovered MAME. Also several people were throwing out their old 5 1/4" disks for the PC and the C-64, and I picked up some of them which left me with a heap of new games to discover. And with the Internet, that heap wasn't determined to diminish. Still, after I was through with all the disks, gaming was reduced to about 90 hours a year because I was busy with other things, like programming a Karaoke CD+G authoring system. Only last year I got into gaming again heavily when I found out that Karaoke wasn't that much fun anymore.

Hmmm... OK, two things about that... 1. UK pricing of home computers: I noticed that "foreign" computers were more expensive in the UK than in other parts of the world. For instance, when I went to the UK in 1988, the Amiga 500 had a list price of 499 pounds up there (but in some shops went for 449), which in Austrian Schilling was 10978 and 9878, respectively. The list price in Austria was ATS 8990 at that time, and in Germany, it sold for 1100 or 1150 DM, which was ATS 7700 and 8050, respectively. So, technical things were always more expensive in Austria than in Germany, but in the UK those computers were even more expensive. With the Spectrum it was probably different. I remember it was introduced here in early 1983, when it was competing against the TI-99, the Commodore VC-20 and the Commodore 64, among others. The TI-99 at that time was ATS 6990, the VC-20 was ATS 4490 and the C-64 was also just introduced at ATS 9990. The 16K Spectrum was introduced for ATS 5990 and the 48K one for ATS 6990. If Commodore was making similar pricing desicions as in 1988, this would mean that the VIC-20 was 199 pounds in the UK at that time, and the C-64 was 449 pounds. This would mean they were heavily outpriced in the UK by the Spectrum at 125 and 175 pounds for the 16K and 48K version... but price relationships were different around here. By the way, it's the same with software coming from the UK. I remember all the original Sinclair games for the Spectrum sold for 10 pounds in the UK, which amounted up to 270 ATS, but they went for 399 ATS here. Later cassette and disk games were 9 and 13 pounds respectively (which is 198 and 286 ATS), but in Germany they were 39 and 59 DM (which is 273 and 413 ATS), and in Austria they sold for 499 and 699 ATS, which was very expensive in comparison. Similarly the 1.99 range Mastertronic games (which was 44 ATS) were DM 9,90 in Germany (ATS 69), and here they sold for ATS 119 before dropping to ATS 99. 2. Robotics: The spectrum here definitely has the advantage of being relatively small and only needing one DC power source, whereas the C-64, for instance, has got 3 different voltages (at least the original one). Still it draws about 0.7-0.8 Amps if I remember right, so "normal" batteries would be pretty hard pressed to deliver that. But it runs fine on rechargeable ones. Just for the record, you can also power the Atari 2600 and the Sega Master System on those, which draw about 265 and 400 mA, respectively. But those are not that easily programmable...

So, when did the Spectrum's lifespan end in Spain? And what came after it, if not the Amiga or ST?

I don't recall there being any skip in the arcade ones that I played, or if there was, it was pretty imperceptible. On the home version it is VERY noticeable, almost a full second each time. It really disrupts the flow of the game. The question is at which moves there are pauses. In the arcade, there was only a pause if you made a wrong move. If you played correctly, the whole scene just played through from beginning to end. Only if you made a mistake, there was a pause of approx. 1 second, after which the death animation got played. There were some exemptions to that, for instance, the scene where Dirk is on a falling platform and the player has to decide when to jump off of it. In this case, there is a pause after jumping off the platform (though it doesn't lead to death), while there is none when Dirk stays on the platform. Also, I think in the scene where Dirk swings on burning ropes, there's a slight pause after Dirk changes from one rope to another. In the DVD version, is there a pause after EVERY move, good or bad?

OK. I'll list the contents of my disks here. As far as I can see, those are mainly third-party programs that have been written mainly in Assembler, with maybe a short GPL routine calling them if need be. I don't list the disks which only contain BASIC and XBASIC programs... E/A 5 means these are normally called by Editor/Assembler Option 5 (Run program file), E/A 3 means Option 3 (can't remember its name now). Out of the mixed disks I don't list pure BASIC and XBASIC programs. I can't say exactly which of them are really module dumps... Sorry if I give wrong names for some programs, but I didn't actually try to load all those when I wrote the list, so some (to me) unfamiliar programs might have a different name than can be supposed from their usual 10-char filename. TI Editor/Assembler Data Disks A and B: Assembler / Editor / Debugger / Tombstone City (with source code) Anteater / Bigfoot / Burdie / Cave / Driving Demon / Ghostman / Gulp / Wargames (all E/A 5) Lasso / Moonsweeper / Mouse / Shamus / Spy's Demise (?) / Tennis (all E/A 5) Popeye (E/A 5) BurgerTime (with XBasic loader) Freddy (E/A 3 loader) / Henpecked (E/A 5), Nibbler (Xbasic loader) Slymoids (E/A 3) Assembler Demo (with XBasic loader), Atari (loader for: Dig Dug / Pole Position, but those also seem to work independently with E/A 5), Macro Man (E/A 3) Donkey Kong / Driving Demon / Eat-Man / Guardian (all E/A 5) Cerberus (original disk, can be loaded with E/A 3 or XBasic) @Apesoft Grafic Generator (Bitmap graphics for XBasic, original disk) Frogger (E/A 5) / St. Nick (E/A 5) / Fruc (E/A 3) Ghostman (E/A 5) / Call_Vdump (Xbasic) / Monopoly (Xbasic) / Micro Pinball (E/A 5) / Sub Command (E/A 5) / Wargames (E/A 5) Caterpillar (E/A 5) / Crossfire (E/A 5) / Espial (E/A 5), Ghostdruck (?), Defender (with loader) Angler Dangler / Pizza (all E/A 3) GRAM Loader (E/A 5) / TI Invaders (E/A 5) Backsteine (E/A 5) Lasso (E/A 3) / Ms. Pac Man (E/A 5) / Treasure Island (E/A 5) Star wars (E/A 3) Interept (E/A 5) / Worm attack (E/A 5) As for the GPL simulator disks... I never got that deep into the TI-99. I just programmed it in XBasic and tried some little things in Assembler, but never got very far with that (on the TI). I never had a GRAM card or something like that, I only used "official" modules or programs supplied on disk. Basically, I never cared exactly HOW they got those cartridge programs to work from disk, so I don't know which programs use a GPL simulator and which ones don't. But I do know someone around here (in Austria) who knows much more about the TI than I do and who has tried various things with it. He also never seems to give up his TI-99 hobby. Maybe he'll be able to help you out. His name is Gerhard Eichberger, and the last e-mail addresses I found are: [email protected] (from 2003) or [email protected] (from 2006). Maybe he'll be able to help you...

I think you even misread something here. According to those specs, one bit pulse is 144 ns long. In comparison to that, one pixel on the Atari 2600 is about 280 ns long. This means that you would have to output nearly two bits in the space where only one pixel occurs. This should be impossible by itself... apart from the fact that in order to display complete lines of 40 characters, you have to keep up the data stream for 51,9 ys per scanline, putting out 360 bits in that time. That's probably much more than the 2600 can do...

Yes, I agree that BASIC does have this limitation. But you can hide other stuff underneath the BASIC ROM, for instance, I wrote Crab Grab in BASIC (which then got compiled), and used Chris Hülsbeck's Soundmonitor for music, which is stored in the area of $A000-$CFFF which is unusable for BASIC. Basically, what happens is that the interrupt vector is redirected to a routine in the $C000 area which switches the $A000-$BFFF area over from BASIC to RAM and then calls the music routine which is stored between $C000 and $CFFF and reads the music data from the $A000-$BFFF area. When the routine's done, that area is switched back to BASIC and the normal interrupt routine gets jumped to (I think it was at $EA31, if I remember right). Besides, since I'm answering to a post that got posted using an Amiga 500, I seem to remember that AmigaBasic has got much worse limitations for code space when compared to the amount of RAM an Amiga really has - and the 512K expansion didn't help there!

What are you talking about here? As far as I know (and I *have* a C-64!), you can use the full 64K on the C-64. Some areas in the memory map, however, can be switched to contain other things than RAM... and the video chip "sees" things differently than the CPU. What seems to be true is that the C-64 has got less memory available for BASIC than the Spectrum, due to its different memory organization (here basically 24K of memory get unusable because they contain the ROM's, the I/O area or are squashed between the two ROMS (the Cxxx memory area). However, I've seen many disk programs written in Assembler using more than 48 K of memory in one shot... you can load a program from disk which reaches from $0800 to $CFFF directly from the built-in BASIC, which is 50K of memory... more than the Spectrum has. An exception to this would be an 128K Spectrum, but that one should be compared to the C128 rather than to the C64. But for the 48K Spectrum, to my understanding... only the memory size for BASIC is smaller than on the C-64... for assembler programs it isn't because on the C-64 you can switch all the ROM areas to contain RAM instead, which you can't on the Spectrum.

I'd agree with Burger Time. I didn't try the Apple II version, but from a FAQ I read, it has the same 12 (!) levels that the PC version has. In comparison, there wasn't a version of Burger time for the Atari800, and the one for the C-64 by Interceptor Software sucked badly. This, however, may have changed a bit with Burger Time 1997 for the C-64 and Beef Drop for the Atari 800. But how do you emulate Burger Time on an Amiga 500?

Are you sure it was me who mixed them up? Well, I told you the manual for "Sea Master" was in the bag of another cart, so I suppose it was in that of "Missile War" and vice-versa. So maybe the labels got mixed up instead of the manuals? If you look closely at the artwork shown on Atarimania, the artwork of "Missile War" fits more to the sea bombing game than the horizontal shooter, and that of "Sea Monster" fits more to the horizontal shooter than the sea bombing game. And I'm pretty sure that my cart labeled "Missile War" played the sea bombing game, and the one labeled "Sea Monster" played the horizontal shooter, not vice-versa. Further it occurs to me that none of the "Astro Attack" screenshots on Atarimania show the labyrinth screen. And they also seemed to mix up something... If, from the link you gave, you click on "Galactic", you get the "Galactic" I had. If you click on "Black hole", you get a description without screenshots, however, if, from that page, you click on "See also: Galactic", you get NEARLY the "Black hole" I had, only that it shows "GALATIC" on top instead of the "GOLIATH" it showed on my version. And "Challenge of Nexar" is a slight variation of the same game with the kernal slightly altered so that it shows the horizontal lines coming out from the middle instead of the multi-colored border. Oh, and the word on top has again changed to "NEXAR". :-)

Well, for here in Vienna, Austria... in the really early days, I think the most popular computer was the Sinclair ZX-81 (until about 1982), but that was when computers were still for "geeks". From 1984 on, it was probably the C-64, which was outrun by the Amiga 500 in 1987-88. Then from about 1992, the PC's took over. As for game consoles, the most popular one was probably the Atari 2600, followed by the Philips G7000, which some classmates had, and one cousin had an Intellivision. Before the Atari 2600, the popular electronic games were handheld games in the style of Nintendo Game & Watch, though some people found Pong clones at yard sales. The Colecovision I only saw in stores, however, as I did with Creativision, SMS's, Mega Drives and NES's... at that time we all had C-64's and Amiga 500's instead. The next popular "console" probably was the Gameboy, which spread pretty far. As for other computers people had... one classmate had a ZX-Spectrum, one had a Laser (don't recall the model #), and one had an Amstrad CPC 464. There also were some TI-99 users in Vienna if you looked for them, but none among my classmates, at least when it was still produced. I never met anyone having an MSX computer, a Sharp home computer (though I did see some of their pocket computers in people's hands), an Atari ST or an Atari 8-bit computer, though I learned that Atari ST's were the usual equipment in music studios before they switched over to Macs and finally to PC's. And businesses probably used PC's much earlier than hobbyists. This, of course, is out of the eyes of someone who still went to school back then.

Ah yes, Hot Shot! I used to have some of their games too, but swapped them with a collector. These were the first "cheap" games sold here in Austria for about ATS 200 in January 1984. We got alert of them by a newspaper ad which lead us to a small shopping centre in Simmering called Massa (if I remember right). The manager (!) of the shopping centre had the carts in his room which you had to buy "in the bag" without being able to try them (he had no Atari set up anyway). They came in a plastic bag instead of a box - along with instructions printed on a small sheet of paper. The instructions were text only and much too "generic" to really describe steering, scoring etc. They only said what you have to do in the game in 1 or 2 sentences. The titles I picked up were: "Missile war" (you had a ship at the top and had to shoot various objects down in the sea which fire back at you - the bottom of the screen said it was by Bit Corp.) "Astro Attack" (?) (a little like Vanguard, first you have to battle helicopters and other enemies, then you fly through a labyrinth and have to dock to your mothership) "Galactic" (a bit like Galaxian, but you can't shoot the formation, and all in all it's pretty bad and monotonic) "Black hole" (things come out from the center which you have to shoot using a crosshair which shoots into the black hole - a little bit like Gyruss, this one, according to the screen, was by Goliath) "Sea Monster" (much like Astrosmash, only that the enemies come from the right instead of the top) They even mixed up the instructions somewhat... the one for "Sea Monster" was labeled "Sea Master" and in the bag of another cart, while the instructions for that other cart were in the bag for "Sea Monster". But I somehow had the feeling that these instructions didn't really describe the correct game anyway.

OK. Just found THAT thread and, having used the TI for a long time, I do have some comments... 1. Seems like funny little unit. 2. About the dumped cartridges... I have some of them myself on TI disks... and most of them load using Editor/Assembler. They have already been created back in 1984 or 1985. Some have a menu, and some games load directly. My memory's a little sketchy by now, but I think some of the modules that originally use 16K of CPU ROM are stored on disk as 2 PROGRAM files, which have the advantage that they're the fastest to load from Editor / Assembler (I think it was menu option 5, RUN PROGRAM FILE). For those files, the TI loads the whole content of a file into VDP RAM and then copies it over to the 32K expansion (I suppose the reason for doing it this way is that the TI can't communicate with the RAM expansion and the disk controller at the same time, or the DSR's in the disk controller are programmed to load into VDP RAM, since that's the only RAM guaranteed to be there), while for other file formats, they are loaded block by block, which is slower (and Extended Basic again does it MUCH slower than Editor/Assembler, if it works at all!). For some games I have I even don't know if they were originally module-based or not. Some games also are enhanced compared to their respective module version, for instance, Demon Attack has speech in the disk version, but not in the module version, and Burger Time has got two different bonus items in the disk version (don't know if I have that one, though), while the module which I have only ever shows the same bonus item on every round. And some probably aren't complete, for instance, Shamus crashes at some point.

OK, some comments here anyway... The line of parcels on the belt as shown seems undoable to me, since they use four different colors on a black background, but you can have only four colors on a line, unless you rewrite them on the fly. Anyway, with the size and distance of the parcels you currently have, it seems undoable to me since the parcels are also too close together. But given some constraints, something like this could be possible. The outcome depends on if you want the player sprite to be able to be visible on the same scanline as the parcels or not. If you do, you can only use Player 2 and Player 2's missiles and the ball for displaying the parcels, which means you can have up to 6 parcels of the same color next to each other on the belt, plus one parcel of a different color. If the player sprite can be restricted not to be seen on the same line as the parcels, then you can also use Player 1 and its missiles for the parcels, which give you up to 6 parcels of one color, up to 6 of another and one additional parcel in a third color. From then on, there are some things left out in your description, for instance, you don't exactly say how the play mechanics should work. Do the parcels automatically fall to the floor after a time as soon as the player touches them, unless he grabs them? Or do they fall to the floor even when left untouched? And how is the player supposed to send a parcel to its proper pallette? Does he run to the pallette and drops the parcel there? Or does he throw the parcel through the air? If he throws it, which directions can it fly, and how is determined where the parcel lands? The fact that two pallettes with different colors share the same scanline somehow also screams "undoable" to me, though it might be doable with some trickery. If the rest is doable really depends on how the parcels get transported and stacked on the pallettes. More screenshots and a better description would be helpful here. Oh, and the screen ratio is wrong anyway since a normal TV screen is more wide than high.

That's sad to see since the TI-99 really was an importance piece of computer history. It once was the bestselling home computer in the USA (before the VIC-20 came about), and it gave us such nice things as the sound chip that was later used in many arcade games and home systems, and the TMS9918 video chip which also found use in the Colecovision, Sega SG-1000 and MSX systems, from which the video chips of the SMS and Genesis / Mega Drive were derived and which also inspired the designers of the C-64's video chip (as they reveal somewhere on the net in an interview).

OK, I think I've tried most of the versions out there... TI-99 (the first I had)... good port, but totally different screens than in the arcade... all in all, less complex ones Atari 2600: Really disappointing. Looks like they didn't hear of the possibility to re-use sprites... the chef fights against one sausage, and the remaining three enemies are all only lines and blocks. Intellivision: Pretty good, but different screens than on the Arcade. Colecovision (Prototype): Pretty good, has the same screens as in the arcade, but still bug-ridden. Colecovision (released version): Clearly based on the prototype, but they redrew all graphics, and, in my opinion, didn't improve them by doing so. Since the screens take up only 24x24 chars compared to the arcade's 32x32, the sprites, who are the same size, look too big now while they were shrunk accordingly in the prototype. But the remaining bugs are gone now, save for the inconsistent falling speed of the burger parts (which depends on how much processor time is left after doing other jobs, so if some characters line up on one line and flicker, the burger parts fall much slower!). MSX: Similar to the TI-99 version, the screens are different here too. Atari 5200 (Beef Drop): Pretty good conversion here, mostly the same screens as in the arcade. Atari 7800 (Beef Drop): Even better, because the 7800 has got more colors available. PC (MAME): This IS the original... of course. PC (Flash game): Pretty good rendering, though some minor differences in gameplay, lower framerate and slowdowns in more crowded screens. And it's got no sound... PC (DOS by Mattel): Pretty good conversion... far superior to the INTV version. You get all the screens from the arcade plus some more... all graphics, including falling burger parts, move smoothly, and sound and intro music are true to the arcade - best they could do on the PC speaker. Amstrad CPC: Is this BASIC or Assembler? The characters move in 1- or 2-character steps, flicker like hell, the falling burgers stop all other animation, and the same single screen repeats over and over again. Thus, one of the worst... C-64 (Interceptor Software): This is also one of the worst. It's impossible to let enemies fall with the blocks, the screens are different from the arcade, and you have to make a level using one life or it will start from the beginning! C-64 (Burger Chase): This is better, at least some screens from the arcade are in there, but the animation is pretty sloppy, and the enemies don't chase you... they just wander around randomly on screen. C-64 (1997 version): Pretty good conversion, but the screens are based on the INTV version rather on the arcade one. So, my ratings (in order of rating): PC (MAME): 10/10 Atari 7800 (Beef Drop): 9/10 PC (DOS by Mattel): 9/10 Colecovision (Prototype): 8/10 Colecovision (released version): 8/10 Atari 5200 (Beef Drop): 8/10 C-64 (1997 version): 8/10 PC (Flash game): 8/10 Intellivision: 6/10 TI-99: 6/10 MSX: 6/10 Atari 2600: 5/10 C-64 (Burger Chase): 4/10 Amstrad CPC: 2/10 C-64 (Interceptor Software): 2/10

There have been quite a few for me too, where by "surprised" I suppose it means I didn't expect the game to be that good... TI-99: TI Invaders (where every other level reveals a new type of invaders, and you get one base repaired every 10000 points), Shamus (much better than the C-64 version which suffers from severe collision detection problems), Frogger (the smooth scrolling all over the screen is excellent given the TI's limitations), Popeye (having in part better background graphics than the arcade original) Atari 2600: Sea Monster (cheapo game that plays like Astrosmash, but horizontal), Smurf: Rescue... (really good graphics on that one and even one more distinct screen than on the Colecovision), Zaxxon (not bad an effort of 3D view), Gyruss (didn't expect it to be able to be that good, even had to call a doctor because I got so excited about the music), Millipede (good conversion here, considering the 2600's limitations) Philips G7000: Turtles (pretty good arcade conversion compared to all the other stuff Philips put out), K.C.Munchkin's Revenge Arcade: Millipede (really pushing the fun to the next level) C-64: Avenger (pretty dead-on conversion of Space Invaders), Q*bert (near arcade perfect aside from the animations), Rainbow Islands (pretty accurate conversion here), Street Surfer (which, although being a budget game, still has correctly looking and probably the fastest pseudo-3D graphics I've seen on the '64, and athmospheric music too), Kennedy Approach (the only game where the 64 is talking while the game goes on), Revs (which, some years before Out Run and Hard Drivin', already sported simple, but real 3D graphics, including small hills, with still a pretty good framerate for the 64), BurgerTime 1997 (finally a good conversion, although it's based on the Intellivision levels) NES: Marble Madness (having correct physics and even smoother animation than the original) Amstrad CPC: Commando (rather smooth animation considering the CPC's limits) Colecovision: Matt Patrol (Prototype) (good scrolling!), Wild Western ("Prototype") (good flicker logic), Galaxian (prototype?) (good conversion) Intellivision: Donkey Kong Jr. (good conversion in comparison to the versions Coleco usually put out) PC: Arkanoid II (good VGA graphics and smooth animation), BurgerTime (smooth animation and even more levels than the original), Rampart (played that one until the end), Cosmic Do! (good adaptation of Cosmic Guerilla into the Mr. Do! universe), Dig Dug (very small and manages to run at the correct speed even on fast machines)