Dave Farquhar

I picked up an NES today for two bucks (woo hoo!), but it was the bare console, with no controllers or AC adapter. And that reminded me, I've never found my old NES AC adapter. From what I've read, it originally came with a 9VAC 1 amp (1000ma) power brick. I've seen some suggestions online that it works with a 9 VDC brick. I'm assuming polarity doesn't matter? I'd just like to get some confirmation from someone before I plug in any old power brick I have that looks about right and fits. I hate destroying old hardware, no matter how little I paid for it...

Hi, I hope you'll tolerate a total n00b question, because I generally don't do modern systems. I had a chance to buy a few Playstation (original, not PS2) games today, but I passed on them because they had some minor scratches on them. Do the CD-based systems tend to do OK with games with minor scratches on them? At the asking price, I wasn't comfortable taking a chance, and I've never thought to ask before. If they do have scratches, do the same tricks to polish out scratches on an audio CD or DVD work fine on game discs? Thanks!

Well, when an Apple cost 2-5x as much, it had to be better, right? The Apple II had a library of more complex games that took advantage of the fact that most Apple owners had dual drives, for example, so games like King's Quest made it on the Apple II but never got ported to Commodores or Ataris. They were certainly capable, but I guess they didn't believe enough people had two drives. But I know a lot of people would have bought the second drive in order to play the game. The 64 and Atari 800 blew the Apple II away when it came to sound, and graphically, they had comparable resolution, but the Apple II had no sprites. The Apple II had its strengths and it certainly had a following, but the other machines of its generation had strengths too. The Atari 800 was designed by Jay Miner, after all. Everything Jay Miner touched kicked major butt.

I remember when Software Hut (I think that was the outfit) was selling the C-65 prototypes for around 200 bucks. They were coy in their description about what it was, but there was enough truth in what they were saying to figure out what it was they were really selling. Never did get around to ordering one though. I was making $4.80 an hour, so at the time, $200 was still a lot of money.

Video, yes, that effect (or variants of it) was extremely common. And programs would use a similar effect with timing to change the color midscreen, rather than haphazardly like this program does. In 6502 machine language, you can time it pretty precisely and get some neat effects. If you do the equivalent in machine language, the colors change mid-line, which makes for a neat effect that I remember seeing in a few games. Programming the 64 in machine language is a fun challenge, but I think it's better to get a feel for the machine in Basic first, then learn ML (also called assembly language or assembler). And Gabriel, I agree with you, the Commodore manuals did a good job of teaching the fundamentals. Anymore my programming is pretty much limited to writing batch files (which really makes me long for Commodore Basic's power sometimes--who'd have predicted anyone would ever say that?) but the program flow and logic is still the same. I also have a much better-than-average understanding of hardware, and I think I owe that to plinking around on those Commodores way back when. My eyes don't glaze over when someone says "chip registers."

Sure... The 256x192 graphics is a limitation (the 64 was 320x200) but it had 32 sprites, to the 64's 8. The 64 had limitations that were overcome with programming later in the machine's life; presumably the 99 would have had a similar fate. The sound wasn't as good as the 64's SID chip, but you had SID at the top, then you had the TI and the sound chip from the Atari 800 line, and from there, sound capabilities really fell off the cliff. The lower price would have been necessary, yes, but if the TI's price had been in line with the 64 *and* the two machines had software libraries comparable in size, things would have gotten interesting. TI would have had to refresh it with more memory to stay competitive, but TI and Commodore were the only vertically-integrated manufacturers, so they were the two most evenly matched companies. TI probably still wouldn't have won, but I wonder what would have happened if Commodore had had a true nemesis. And I mean no disrespect to the 64 whatsoever... I was a huge Commodore fan, up to the bitter end. I remember selling PCs at retail in 1994, and when customers would point at the shelves and ask me which one I had, I'd say, "Something you can't buy anymore," referring to my Amiga. Yeah, I was bitter.

(Putting my computer technician hat on) There's less reason to be concerned about 30 year old electronics than brand-new ones. Chips tend to either fail very early in their lifespans, or run indefinitely. Any 2600 that was bad from the get-go was tossed 25 years ago, so what's left is mostly the good stuff, and chances are it's been sitting idle for the better part of the last two decades. If the seller says it works, there's little reason for concern. I agree with you about emulation. Emulation is fun for a quick fix, or to see a system you've never seen before in person, but the experience of putting the physical cartridge in the physical hardware and seeing the game with the same flaws the designer worked around--flickery NTSC TV, RF modulation and all--is undeniable. It's like going back in time. How many people have a fake woodgrain console TV in the basement with the 2600 hooked up, the way we had them way back when? The only thing better is the console TV with the Atari 2600 hooked up in the living room, right?

Shock value is what these web sites are all about. And unfortunately there are people who are more than willing to oblige by making that kind of stuff. The best thing to do is ignore it. Otherwise, next month, a couple more losers will find something else, like a Vectrex. There's worse stuff out there too. There are sickos who will make tapes of people dying, and other sickos who enjoy watching it. Whether it's a 25-year-old artifact or someone else's life, it all comes down to respect, and unfortunately, there are a lot of people who don't have any.

I remember when I was in grade school, a classmate was trying to put together a gaming rig with a TI-99/4a. The peripherals were really expensive though. The computer was $50 but the disk drive was something like $450. So if you wanted to do anything other than cartridge games, it was still expensive. I'm not sure what he ended up doing. The video and sound chips in the Adam and Colecovision were very similar to the 99/4a, and I believe the sound chip (or a close relative) ended up in the PCjr and Tandy 1000. With a less quirky processor and a freer attitude towards third-party publishers, it would have really given the C-64 a run for the money. The decade could have turned out very differently.

I was 8, and living in a small town. I read about the crash in Boy's Life magazine. I still remember it really clearly for some reason. It said something along the lines of "earlier this year consumers largely abandoned dedicated video game consoles in favor of home computers, which can play more complex games and do other tasks." I know Commodore really went after consoles with its computers, even going so far in its VIC-20 ads as to say, "Why buy just a video game?" And they sold them in the same stores that sold the consoles. By 1983, the VIC-20 was selling for $99, and the 64 was going for $199 or $249. The VIC was less powerful than anything but a 2600, but you could hook up a printer and there were enough productivity applications available for it to make it look like a serious computer. The 64's graphics and sound were comparable to the Colecovision, and while there were probably only a couple hundred games available for it in 1983, that was still a pretty sizeable library. By the time you added a disk drive or even a tape drive they were more expensive than a game console, but Commodore's advertising convinced a lot of people it was worth it. Then Commodore spent the next 11 years dying a slow and mostly self-inflicted death, kind of like Atari. My parents opted for a C-64. In my small town, you didn't see the huge clearance bins everywhere, but when we went shopping in the city, I vaguely remember seeing them. I'm sure the memory would be more vivid if I'd had a 2600 at home. I guess the games got a little harder to find and they got cheaper, but I don't remember any of us talking about it. The 1983-84 time period was when everyone I knew started getting computers. Just about everyone I knew put the 2600 in the closet and got a C-64 or a TRS-80 Color Computer. I didn't know anyone who could afford an Apple II or an IBM PCjr. Then a couple of years later the Nintendo hit, and everyone had to have one. I remember when the 2600 was reintroduced, and seeing stacks of 2600jrs at K-B, and I remember seeing the 7800s, but the NES was what everyone wanted. I only knew one person who had a Sega Master System, and if anyone had one of the Atari consoles, they weren't talking.

Thanks for the suggestions so far. And if anyone else has any others, thanks in advance!

In the same spirit as the best NES two-player games thread, I was wondering what people think the best two-player games are for the 2600? My wife and I enjoy playing Freeway together a lot, and we play Surround. And of course there's the ubiquitous Combat. I know there were tons more. What are some of your favorites?

You'd be able to do a rudimentary label, with the text and some stock clip art (or a screenshot), using PowerPoint. Draw a box the size of your label, then just be sure to keep all of your elements inside that box, and then you can print it like you normally would. You'd be able to do better labels than the original publishers did with QuarkXPress, Photoshop, and Illustrator at your disposal, but the learning curve is pretty steep too--I took a 3-credit hour college class that taught the fundamentals of those three, and another 3-credit hour class the next semester on QuarkXPress. But PowerPoint can do an acceptable job, or even a head-turning job with some practice, and it's probably something you already have. As Corey said, laser-printed labels are less likely to smear but they're also less likely to fade over time. If you don't have a color laser printer, either take your file or an inkjet printout to a copy shop and have them laser copy or print it onto the labels for you.

Space Invaders, in the closeout aisle of a KB Toy and Hobby store at Crestwood Plaza mall in St. Louis, in 1990 or 1991. I paid a whole 75 cents. I was there with a friend and he got one too. It was the only title they had.

Guess what I found reference to on comp.sys.cbm? Downloadable digital copies of Mapping the 64 and the C-64 Programmer's Reference Guide. Here's where you'll find 'em: http://www.geocities.com/researchtriangle/lab/1767/files/ Much better than paying $174 for a printed copy of Mapping the 64.

No, you don't have to be a math genius to program. I'm rusty as all get-out, but back when the 8-bits were still popular, I was very good--good enough to sell my first type-in to Compute magazine at age 16. But I was an A-/B+ student solely because of my math grades. I had to work hard for those Cs. If your math skills are sufficient to balance a checkbook, you've got enough math skills to write programs in Basic. The built-in Basic languages don't force you to do this, so it's not immediately obvious, but the trick to programming is to break the process down into logical steps. I got considerably better once I took a couple of college-level programming classes in Pascal. Pascal didn't help me with the language at all, but the classes taught me logic. But prior to taking classes, I learned the majority of what I knew by going over type-in programs from books and magazines and figuring out how they worked and changing them. Often, adding features to a game written in Basic or making it run a little bit more smoothly was as much or more fun than playing it.

An Amiga, preferrably an A1000, autographed by Jay Miner on the outside of the case. Triply so if it were personalized "To Dave" or "To David." Since he died in 1994, he isn't signing any more of them. But if I found any pre-Commodore Amiga stuff, like a Joyboard or Powerstick, in the wild, it would certainly make my week. Maybe my month. And I know if I saw an Amiga 1200, I'd pay probably any price that was listed on it. I always have wanted one of those, even since it was new. The Jay Miner rule applies if it's signed by ex-CBM engineer Dave Haynie.

Thanks for the correction. Gotta stay off the forums until I finish that first cup of coffee. At any rate, I checked on Amazon, and the C-64 Programmer's Reference Guide is about 4 bucks. Mapping the 64 is $176. Ouch. It's awfully good, but that price puts it a bit out of reach of someone who's merely curious about messing around on a Commodore.

Yeah, current production 3.5HDs are junk. I have disks I wrote 10-15 years ago that are fine, but when I write to a brand-new disk, the data probably won't be there in a week. I used to keep an old 386 laptop with Norton Utilities 8 loaded on it to run revive.exe on disks people wrote at work that went bad. Then I'd show them how to map a network drive and tell people to save their backup copies there, instead of on floppies. When a pack of 3.5" HD disks costs less than a pack of baseball cards, you don't get much quality control. Back when I was doing this on a frequent basis, we were using old disks with (obviously) old drives. I'd be much more reluctant to try it with a box of disks fresh from the store.

I know if I saw one in person for a few bucks, I'd jump for it. I had one when I was a kid and it might very well have been the best joystick I ever had. It took a ton of abuse and always seemed to stay responsive.

It's hard to pick just one. I spent so many hours in my aunt and uncle's basement playing Pole Position, Defender, and Missile Command with my cousin that they have to be up there. Space Invaders was an early favorite too. Then there are the Activision titles: Pitfall, Barnstorming, and Keystone Kapers are probably my favorite three from them. And my wife and I have taken to playing a game or two of Freeway almost every night when we both get home. I guess for me the nostalgia attached to any particular game is about as important as the gameplay, because I can think of several great titles that aren't on my list.

If you want to understand peeks and pokes, either Mapping the 64, published by Compute! Books, or the C-64 Programmer's Reference Guide, published by Commodore itself, is what you want. Peeks were most often used to read the joystick ports, while pokes were used to manipulate chip registers. Try this out on a 64: 10 for i = 0 to 15: for j = 1 to 15 20 poke 53280,i: poke 53281,j 30 next i: next j 40 goto 10 This will flash the screen different colors. It's a cooler effect in machine language, since the colors change faster than the 64 draws the screen, so the colors change mid-line. But it does a nice job of demonstrating two commands. Basically what the program I said means is this: Count to 15, and put that number in memory location 53280 and 53281, and repeat. Pokes can also be used to turn on sprites, move them, and generate sounds, since the 64 had no built-in basic commands for sprite and sound handling. One of the big selling points of the 128 was that its basic did have commands to do all that.

Well, HD disks may work in the short term when used in DD drives - but don't plan on them working for long. DD drives simply do not have the field strength to properly align HD film particles. So while your data may be there today - don't count on it being there tomorrow. Just simple electro magnetic floppy physics That's very true of 5.25" HD disks and drives, but the difference between HD and DD 3.5" disks is testing and manufacturing tolerances. Back when there was a price difference between 3.5" DD and HD disks, people used to drill holes in DD disks (or use a special punch) to go the other direction and make HD disks out of DD disks. The danger in doing that was (1) that the disk either hadn't been tested as HD, or had tested and failed, and (2) if any shards of plastic from the drilling process found their way into the disk, you had problems other than uncertified media. But I never, ever had problems with 3.5" HD disks formatted as DDs. At my first job, we had a bunch of old 8086-based IBM PS/2s with DD drives still hanging around. Whenever we needed a disk for those, we'd grab a disk out of our big box of scratch floppies, tape over the hole, and use it. The disks I made that way lasted a couple of years. But if you have an ample supply of DD disks, I'm clearly trying to solve a problem you don't have.

Very hard to imagine, that. Plus the industry likes to re-use things. The PCI connector actually originated elsewhere--Microchannel. IBM's Microchannel (remember the PS/2?) used the same connector--it was just flipped around and the position changed slightly. So I would expect the PCI connector will get flipped around and moved again for some future bus. In the meantime, it's only been what, maybe four years since PC motherboards stopped coming with ISA slots? Based on that observation, I would expect PCI has maybe seven years left. And there are literally millions of obsolete Pentium motherboards out there that we can scavenge PCI slot connectors from, if it ever comes to that. At any rate, this seems like a very cool project indeed.

Not that this will help you with the present problem, but you can make double density disks out of high density disks by covering the hole opposite the write-protect tab. Or, if you will never use those disks on anything but an Amiga, just use the disks as-is. Amiga drives lack the sensor so it assumes everything is double-density, and HD disks will happily format as DD. I figured out in college that my Amiga would format many (but not all) HD disks my buddies' PCs rejected as bad, so I started having them save them for me. So, for future reference....