rorysl

May 14, 2020

Pm sent!

February 12, 2020

Pm sent!

February 4, 2020

Hi all, just wondering what the dimensions of the Xm unit are? Building an entertainment unit and wanna clear enough room for 7800 + xm + sir lancelot/Robin Hood or ghost manor/spike’s peak! Space is at a premium!

January 26, 2020

Still following intently, with a touchpad controller ready to mod.

April 29, 2019

Decathlon

April 29, 2019

Two questions:

1. What % of Missile Command carts produced did NOT have the RF Easter egg? My guess is less than 10%. I have been collecting, and tested others, and I have never come across one out in the wild. It's usually the first game I go to test a system, This leads me to question 2.

2. Would others consider the Missile Command egg the easiest of the 2600? For me, it's oh too easy to end a game with less than what, 50 points or so.

I've been buying and testing Missile Command carts forever and have NEVER found the no-easter egg version. So I'm definitely curious too!

January 17, 2019

Information submitted!

February 25, 2018

I’m a big fan of boxer. I’ve even experimented, with some success to wrap booters in boxer format. Took some terminal work though.

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September 22, 2017

Hey folks, well after some tinkering it looks like the power supply is fried. Anybody know if the power supply from an EX and an HX are transferrable -- practically the same computers so just wondering.

July 26, 2017

As noted in my OP, I've no monitor to hook it up to so F1 doesn't help me and I've attempted to use F2 and the MODE command with no luck. What is helpful from your reply, though, is the fact that the function keys must be pressed after the startup beep, which I didn't know. As I'm not getting a startup beep it appears to be a bigger issue than display.

Based on some preliminary research, it appears to be the power supply. In any case, I've got a guy looking at it. Will report back with results, for those interested.

July 20, 2017

I tried to power up my HX the other day, hooked to a CRT Television with a video RCA composite cable and am getting no proper picture.

There are no error beeps on start-up, unit seems to power up fine. Power light comes on and stays on. 3.5" drive light comes on and stays on Number lock and Caps lock lights respond to their button presses.

Screen, however, is black with garbled white lines. These lines could be the white Dos text scrambled or could just be interference, I can't tell.

I've tried hitting F2 when starting the Tandy to see if that will restart TV mode with no luck.

I've also tried typing MODE TV once the computer has booted with no effect either.

I made a video of the booting process for reference: https://youtu.be/AGH4LsxKfJQ

Unfortunately I have no Tandy monitor to hook it up to test and see whether or not it is only the composite output affected.

Hoping someone here might be able to offer up some advice!

April 7, 2017

Ok, the trouble I had was the two games I was testing had corrupted disk images. Once I figured that out I was in better shape. I used Ciderpress to extract all game files to a folder from the .2mg disk images I had. I then transferred those folders to various console versions of ScummVM to test: PS3, Xbox and Wii.

So....the Xbox version of ScummVM was unable to run ANY of the Apple IIgs games. The only one that loaded up at all was the Sierra Demo Disk and even then it would crash when you chose a game demo from the menu.

The PS3 port fared only slightly better. Of the games I tested, only three worked at all and two of them with graphical issues. (King's Quest III is the only one that appeared to work at all).

The Wii port worked the best. All of the Apple IIgs games worked perfectly. For reference I'll include a list of the AGI games I tested below.

For the record, the games all worked in KegsX on the Xbox and it's an awesome emulator but, as expected, the disk load times are long and I had a lot of trouble building virtual hard drives to run the games from. In the end, ScummVM on the Wii with a wireless keyboard seems to be the best option right now.

Any Sierra fans should check out the AGI versions of these games on the Apple IIgs, the sound is incredible.

Games Tested:

Sierra Games Demo

King's Quest 1 - 4 (4 is the AGI version)

Space Quest 1 - 2 (1 features speech on the first play screen)

Police Quest 1

Leisure Suit Larry 1

Gold Rush!

ManHunter New York

The Black Cauldron

Mixed-Up Mother Goose

The only AGI Apple game I couldn't test was Donald Duck's Playground as it is an Apple II game not a IIgs and I couldn't find an extractable disk image.

March 22, 2017

Hmm...after some more experimenting...it seems that if I extract the files with Ciderpress then rename them removing the #_______ numbers at the end, it still doesn't recognize them.

BUT if I have a folder with the renamed files AND the ones with the #_____ numbers at the end, ScummVM DOES recognize them and it boots Space Quest 2.

But, of course, the version of ScummVM ported to the original Xbox is an older version that doesn't recognize them! Ha!

March 22, 2017

You need CiderPress: http://a2ciderpress.com

I gave CiderPress a try but it extracted all the files with odd filename endings. For example:

AGIFONT was renamed AGIFONT#06000

SQ2.SYS16 was renamed SQ2.SYS16#b3000

Is this normal? ScummVM didn't have any luck recognizing the game either...

March 22, 2017

I've been experimenting with Apple II emulation lately both on my computer and my modded Xbox, particularly because I'm a big Sierra fan. The Apple II versions of the original AGI (typing) games (King's Quest 1-3, Space Quest 1-2, Police Quest 1, Leisure Suit Larry, etc.) had the superior sound. The only trouble I've run into is the emulation, particularly on my Xbox which is where I would prefer to play, is quite slow and disk load times are killer. I've experimented with building virtual hard drives with some limited success.

What I'd like to do is play those games in ScummVM for Xbox. Apparently ScummVM will play Apple II games and it will emulate the Apple II sound chip. Where I've run into trouble is the only versions I have of those games are disk images (*.2mg) and ScummVM will only recognize a folder with the Apple II files in it.

Where I'm running into trouble is finding a way to extract the game files from the disk images and then getting ScummVM to recognize them. Anybody out there have any experience with this?

December 28, 2016

Hi guys, necro-bumping this thread as I just picked up a Harmony Encore. Great tip on the Sega controllers, although I haven't tried it yet. What about the coleco gemini controllers? Is there a way to get those working sensibly with the Harmony?

December 21, 2016

Hey folks...had a shot at an Atari 65XE for 75.00. Was curious about it as I've never owned an Atari computer before. I'm really interested to try the 8-bit version of Crystal Castles... how rare/htf is that cart? There's only one on eBay for $100...at that price, I think I might just emulate. Any thoughts?

August 7, 2016

Also had Kings Quest III on my CoCo III (awesome) and King's Quest on my Master System (too hard to play).

I never played any of the CoCo versions, although I had a CoCo II I believe. We're there any differences between those versions like with the Apple IIe versions that were talked about earlier?

I've tried playing that Master System version so many times via emulation and it's brutal.

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July 21, 2016

Newer than that I think it is too modern looking and lost its charm with me.

I felt the same way. Although I completed Space Quest 4 & 5 and King's Quest 5 & 6 and really enjoyed them, they just weren't the same as the typing games.

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July 17, 2016

Anyone remember the Sierra hint books. The originals were designed so you had to use an included highlighter to reveal the answers

July 15, 2016

Great thread. I was a huge DOS gamer BITD.

Space Quests

King's Quests

Police Quest 1 - 2

Leisure Suit Larry 1

California Gold Rush

Manhunter New York + San Francisco

Commander Keen Series

Some others:

Crystal Caves

Secret Agent

Arachnophobia

Star Trek 25th Anniversary

Sleuth

Castle Adventure was deadly as well.

...I'm sure I'll be editing this post as more come to mind....

July 15, 2016

The first copy of King's Quest I that I played as a kid was a self-boot or booter disk and when I was researching the Apple IIgs music I read that it had different music and sound effects. I managed to find a copy and load it with Dosbox and, sure enough, the opening theme is way better and sound effects throughout that weren't found in the regular PC version. I find those different version changes really interesting.

July 15, 2016

My family's first computer was a Tandy 1000TX and I loved that little machine. I can remember seeing ads for the Tandy Sensation and seemed like such an incredible multimedia PC. I'll have to take a look for those CD's and give them a test drive myself.

And I can remember that ad campaign as well. If kids had cash, the Tandy Sensation probably would have sold like hotcakes.

July 15, 2016

The other major change I remember was that Kings Quest III didn't have the clock when the wizard leaves so you just had to guess how long he'd be gone. That made the game much harder than it should have been.

Whoah, that's brutal. I think King's Quest III might have been my favourite of those. Has anybody been playing the new series? I've finished chapter one and I think they did a really good job. As an adventure game I don't think it's quite as good as The Walking Dead series but I'm having a blast playing them.

July 14, 2016

The Apple IIe versions have almost no sound and very little music. The IIGS had an Ensoniq sound chip in it which gave it some of the best sound of the time (better than just about everything aside from an external MIDI setup). The IIe had no special sound circuitry other than a 1-bit speaker (the Sierra games did not support the Mockingboard add on card).

It's a miracle they even ported these to the IIe, they're almost too much for the system to handle. In fact, there's a part in Manhunter NY where you can skip a whole puzzle (the sewer maze) because the system couldn't let you save your game during it due to lack of memory. This never happened in any other port of the game.

Wow! Thanks for the info, I had no idea. I'll have to fire up an emulator and check out that MH-NY puzzle skip. Those MH games were hard enough without losing the option to save.

I'm currently trying to track down the Japanese version of Police Quest II for the PC-9801:

http://kotaku.com/5812431/japan-what-the-hell-did-you-do-to-this-classic-pc-adventure-game