carlsson Posted August 2, 2020 Author Share Posted August 2, 2020 Atari 8-bit: Congo Bongo - 31 min. Java Jim - 14 min. MSX1: Block Puzzle - 10 min. Bloody Mary - 1 min. Bubbo World - 2 min. Cuncuna - 12 min. Dotattack - 1 min. Find It! - 5 min. Relevo's Snowboarding - 8 min. Wing Warriors - 7 min. Yazzie Remastered - 5 min. Xracing - 6 min. SG-1000: Congo Bongo - 12 min. Girl's Garden - 10 min. VIC-20: Congo Bongo - 23 min. So an updated version of Relevo's Snowboarding was posted, which allowed me to soft load it on my Philips VG-8235. I also figured out that the autoexec.bat file defined a RAM disk that might be useful in other circumstances but for me only stole valuable RAM so I disabled it. Magically it raised the amount of RAM available for loading ROM files from 32K via 48K to a whopping 80K out of the total 128K in the computer, which I suppose it fairly good. I prepared a few more disks and tried a number of those games from this year's MSXdev and previous years. Then comes a new round of the A8 HSC, featuring the infamous Congo Bongo which pretty much everywhere is mentioned as a fiasco even on the arcade back in its time. The Atari version, just like the majority of other cartridge based home versions, only contains stages 1 and 4. The ColecoVision version apparently contains 3 out of 4 stages, and the disk based versions for Apple II, C64 and IBM PC released a few years later had all stages and updated graphics. What is remarkable here is that on Sega's own console, the SG-1000 they completely omitted the isometric view and made it 2D instead. While it looks pretty and no colour clashes, some of the feel is lost, in particular in the second stage which is more of a maze game avoiding snakes and bouncing on a hippo than the Frogger-esque stage 4 in the other versions. Apparently the ColecoVision version wasn't subject of porting to the SG-1000 despite having just about identical hardware. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kurt_Woloch Posted August 2, 2020 Share Posted August 2, 2020 Here are my times for this past week (July 27th through August 2nd) on classic systems... Amiga: Tiny Galaga - 13 min. Arcade: Dig Dug... 33 min. Joust - 13 min. Atari 2600: Turbo (in Batari Basic) - 22 min. Run Out (in Batari Basic) - 11 min. This week I tried "Tiny Galaga" which is a pretty much colour-less port of Galaga on the Amiga. The I played a bit of Dig Dug, and the arcade version of Joust, which I played primarily because I'm trying to disassemble its sound code and to find out where each of the sounds atart in the ROM. Turbo is a bit similar to the Sega game, but it's actually an original game beause some things are quite different to the arcade verson. On the Atari 2600, Turbo and Run Out are ports of TUrbo (Sega) and Run Out (probably on Chinese hardware). 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted August 2, 2020 Author Share Posted August 2, 2020 1 hour ago, Kurt_Woloch said: Atari 2600: Turbo (in Batari Basic) - 22 min. Run Out (in Batari Basic) - 11 min. Turbo is a bit similar to the Sega game, but it's actually an original game beause some things are quite different to the arcade verson. Is it this version of Turbo? The tracker previously has minutes for another Turbo, which I think is the prototype once found which was completed and nowadays is sold on AtariAge. The other game, Run Out! was previously tracked so I didn't have to look it up. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oyamafamily Posted August 3, 2020 Share Posted August 3, 2020 ATARI 2600: Dragster - 1 minute Enduro - 77 minutes Pole Position - 14 minutes All games played for HSC, but I didn't increase my score on Enduro. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+thegoldenband Posted August 3, 2020 Share Posted August 3, 2020 My times for the week: Sega Master System: Altered Beast - 100 min. Ghostbusters - 90 min. Ys: The Vanished Omens - 577 min. Beat Ys and Ghostbusters, and "beat" Altered Beast with the codes that give you extra continues and health. I'll admit the recent Ys discussion here inspired my playthrough! But I'd been meaning to replay it, since it was one of only two Master System games left that I needed to replay without savestates (Phantasy Star is the other). Nice to log some SMS times on real hardware. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
agb Posted August 3, 2020 Share Posted August 3, 2020 Times for the week All Atari 2600 Boing for FB HSC 80 mins Eggomania 41 mins Enduro for HSC 171 mins Solar Fox 64 mins all fun. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonGrafx-16 Posted August 3, 2020 Share Posted August 3, 2020 Sorcer Striker (arcade) 35 mins Cybattler (arcade) 10 mins Played using my new (to me) Hori Fighter Stick V3 (in MAME) I also played a few C64 games on my new C64 Mini but they were like 1 min or less played each (really need to get some better games on it). 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Cafeman Posted August 3, 2020 Share Posted August 3, 2020 Atari 2600 Enduro, 180 minutes. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skippy B. Coyote Posted August 3, 2020 Share Posted August 3, 2020 (edited) A slightly smaller than usual week around here in terms of play time, but with some new and very cool games played! Outside of all the racing fun in the Atari 2600 High Score Club, the big highlight of the week for me was discovering the relatively new homebrew/hack Venture Reloaded. This absolutely amazing update to the classic Venture for the Atari 2600 adds in the 3rd level along with a huge amount of graphical updates, level transitions, a treasure collection screen, and music for every room to make it just as good (if not a little better) than the ColecoVision version. When I was growing up, Venture on my older brother's ColecoVision was my favorite game, but even as an adult I've never owned a ColecoVision (just an Atari 2600 for me) so it's just incredibly wonderful to finally have a version of Venture on the 2600 that's every bit as good as the ColecoVision port I that I loved as a kid. For the misses gaming time this past week, her birthday was on Sunday and one of the things I got her this year was Untitled Goose Game for the Switch. She's been really enjoying it, but my goodness... I had no idea she could be such a hilariously terrible person. This game really brings out the best of the worst in people Ineligible (All Nintendo Switch) Animal Crossing: New Horizons - 145 minutes Doom 3 - 355 minutes Untitled Goose Game - 85 minutes Atari 2600 Dragster - 38 minutes Enduro - 41 minutes New Pac-Man (8k Version) - 27 minutes Pole Position - 139 minutes Venture Reloaded - 112 minutes Super Nintendo Super Castlevania IV (played on Castlevania Anniversary Collection for Nintendo Switch) - 10 minutes Total Video Game Play Time This Week 952 minutes (15 hours 52 minutes) [367 minutes eligible] Individual System Play Times This Week Nintendo Switch: 585 minutes Atari 2600: 357 minutes Super Nintendo: 10 minutes Edited August 3, 2020 by Skippy B. Coyote 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atarian7 Posted August 3, 2020 Share Posted August 3, 2020 Atari 2600 Enduro - 41 minutes Kaboom! - 48 miinutes Pole Position - 93 minutes Solar Fox - 51 minutes 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+wongojack Posted August 3, 2020 Share Posted August 3, 2020 Dreamcast Crazy Taxi 2 Jet Grind Radio 22 Re-Volt 25 Sonic Adventure International 7 Soul Caliber 4 Space Channel 5 4 Intellivision AD&D Treasure of Tarmin 2 Dreadnaught Factor 15 I installed a GDEMU drive on my Dreamcast, so I was doing some testing on various games. I also pulled the Intellivision out to demo a joystick that I built for it years ago - still works great! 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kurt_Woloch Posted August 3, 2020 Share Posted August 3, 2020 (edited) 19 hours ago, carlsson said: Is it this version of Turbo? The tracker previously has minutes for another Turbo, which I think is the prototype once found which was completed and nowadays is sold on AtariAge. The other game, Run Out! was previously tracked so I didn't have to look it up. Yes, this is the version I played. Unfortunately, though, I made a mistake when posting my Atari 2600 times... coming from the fact that Stella doesn't report the game being played anywhere, and if you switch games, you do so inside of Stella, which doesn't affect the window title... So... actually I only played 3 minutes of this version of Turbo, the remaining 19 minutes of that session I actually played Tutankham (which is next to Turbo in the alphabet...). Similarly to that, I also only spent 3 minutes playing Run Out!, the remaining 8 minutes I actually played Room Of Doom (which is next to Run Out! in the alphabet) Sorry for those mistakes, I was pretty tired when I posted my times last night and forgot that the sessions were shared among multiple games each... the times for the other systems should be correct though. I can't actually remember posting the last sentence... I don't know what to make of that one (what's that with the Chinese hardware?)... could this have been edited in by someone else? Actually, I played both games because I have viewed some Youtube videos about ports of "Superscaler" games, which was Sega's sprite scaling technique used in Out Run, which over the years could draw more and more sprites on screen. The arcade original of "Turbo" is still using something more primitive which can only draw 8 8-color sprites, but the complexity grew from there... Hang-On already displays 12 scaling sprites in more colors and partly big sizes.. Pole Position came in between those two and is properly also able to draw at least 10 scaling sprites at once, but I've seen the sprite hardware exceed its limits if the player car, two enemy cars and a roadside sign happen to share the same scanlines. Out Run can (theoretically) display 128 sprites on screen, but in reality you don't see as many at once... The actual interesting thing for me was how much of that can be carried over to the home versions. Chris Butler in particular wrote a pretty good scaler engine on the C-64 which got used for "Thunder Blade", "Power Drift" and "Space Harrier" and uses a character grid to quickly change the screen contents... which comes at the cost of the objects jumping in 8 pixel steps, but allows pretty high framerates for a 3D game, though the limit seems to be at about 16 scaling objects simultaneously. There seem to have been more attempts to do similar graphics, for instance here: Edited August 3, 2020 by Kurt_Woloch fixing grammatical errors 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted August 3, 2020 Author Share Posted August 3, 2020 No problem Kurt, I have updated your numbers. As usual, I'll wait until Tuesday evening European time before posting the summary. Currently we're at 3751 min this week, which is almost double from last week with a few more expected to add their times. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted August 4, 2020 Author Share Posted August 4, 2020 Here's the summary for Week 31, running from July 27 - August 2. We logged 3751 minutes of eligible play, playing 59 games on a total of 15 systems. Top 10: 1. Ys Book I & II (US) (TG-CD/PC Engine CD) - 943 min. 2. Ys: The Vanished Omens (Sega Master System) - 577 min. 3. Enduro (Atari 2600) - 510 min. (#2) 4. Pole Position (Atari 2600) - 246 min. 5. Sonic 3 Complete (fan made) (Genesis) - 139 min. 6. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 115 min. (#5) 7. Venture Reloaded (Atari 2600) - 112 min. 8. Altered Beast (Sega Master System) - 100 min. 9. Ghostbusters (Sega Master System) - 90 min. 10. Boing! (Atari 2600) - 80 min. Pre-NES top 10: 1. Enduro (Atari 2600) - 510 min. (PN#1) 2. Pole Position (Atari 2600) - 246 min. 3. Solar Fox (Atari 2600) - 115 min. (PN#4) 4. Venture Reloaded (Atari 2600) - 112 min. 5. Boing! (Atari 2600) - 80 min. 6. Kaboom! (Atari 2600) - 48 min. 7. Eggomania (Atari 2600) - 41 min. 8. Dragster (Atari 2600) - 39 min. 9, Dig Dug (Arcade) - 33 min. 10. Congo Bongo (Atari 8-bit) - 31 min. Top 10 systems: 1. Atari 2600 (1251) (#1) 2. TG-CD/PC Engine CD (943) 3. Sega Master System (767) 4. Genesis (196) (#2) 5. Neo Geo AES/MVS (165) (*) 6. Arcade (119) (#4) 7. Dreamcast (64) 8. Sega Saturn (59) 9. MSX (57) (#8) 10. Atari 8-bit (45) (#6) (*) Includes Magical Drop 2 on the Evercade, as it was my best bet this version would be emulated there. It could be a wrong assumption though. Wikipedia tells me that one Ys is 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 seconds, or 3.16 * 1016 years. That is about 100 times longer than the entire lifetime of Brahma according to Hindu mythology. By then, all stars in the universe will have burned out and planets have been thrown off their orbits. While we're having an upswing in participation this week, we haven't played for quite that long time, but in any case this week is headed by two games from the Ys role playing games series. The TurboGrafx CD game is #1, and the Master System game is #2. Enduro for the Atari 2600 though does a good job challenging on the list, and takes the pre-NES title instead, followed by fellow racing game Pole Position. On the systems list, the Atari 2600 remains the most played, ahead of said TG-CD and SMS. Ys Book I & II (US) (TG-CD/PC Engine CD) also becomes member #414 in the 1000 Minute Club with a total of 1730 min. It is the second TG-CD game to enter the club, after Cosmic Fantasy 2 last year. 4 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+wongojack Posted August 4, 2020 Share Posted August 4, 2020 I just want to say that the Tuesday posting of time is required reading for me. I look forward to it every week. Thank you for this week's update Carlsoon! 5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steven Pendleton Posted August 9, 2020 Share Posted August 9, 2020 (edited) 0000 Monday JST = time to post times. I only got 31 minutes of Mega Driving done this time and nothing else. All done on the Nomad, as usual. Genesis/MD Batman - 15 Japanese version of Batman, not that it really matters. Sonic 3 & Knuckles - 16 Edited August 9, 2020 by Steven Pendleton 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlsson Posted August 9, 2020 Author Share Posted August 9, 2020 Atari 8-bit: Congo Bongo - 12 min. Java Jim - 22 min. MSX1: Block Puzzle - 115 min. More HSC and MSXdev. I really like Block Puzzle. Very relaxing and possibly renewing, though I'll admit I don't keep track of all the types of puzzle games. I even considered if it would be worth porting to other systems. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kurt_Woloch Posted August 9, 2020 Share Posted August 9, 2020 Here are my times for this past week (August 3rd through 9th, 2020) on classic systems... Arcade: Joust - 8 min. Atari 2600: Outrun's lair - 3 min. Tutankham - 42 min. in 2 sessions Channel F: Cranberry Quest - 7 min. This time I officially played Tutankham on the 2600. :-) But it still looks the same... I've made progress in disassembling the source code of the Joust sound chip CPU (in the arcade version), having now decoded more than half of the code base. There's a huge difference to how that was coded compared to the TI-99 builtin routines. Cranberrry quest is a new WIP for the channel F, where as a controler, you controll the Cranberry, taking it through different screens with different enemies. The ending, however, hasn't been designed yet. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
agb Posted August 10, 2020 Share Posted August 10, 2020 Times for the week are Atari 2600 Condor Attack 12 mins Espial 15 mins Dragster 10 mins Pole Position 63 mins Rescue Terra 25 mins Solar Fox 43 mins Stampede 50 mins All but one we’re for HSCs. All fun. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oyamafamily Posted August 10, 2020 Share Posted August 10, 2020 ATARI 2600: Condor Attack - 20 minutes Dragster - 5 minutes Espial - 25 minutes Pole Position - 135 minutes Rescue Terra I - 25 minutes All games played for High Score Club. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+thegoldenband Posted August 10, 2020 Share Posted August 10, 2020 My times for the week: Master System: Altered Beast - 193 min. Phantasy Star - 93 min. Beat Altered Beast legitimately -- got a 1CC, in fact -- and, against my better judgment, started working on Phantasy Star. (No slight to Phantasy Star, it just doesn't feel like a "take advantage of those waning days of summer" game. With the amount of grinding it requires, it begs to be played while multitasking.) 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+wongojack Posted August 10, 2020 Share Posted August 10, 2020 Intellivision Astrosmash 47 Beauty and the Beast 26 Dreadnaught Factor 143 Happy Trails 8 Masters of the Universe 14 Worm Whimper 36 I stopped the Dreadnaughts on level four of DF and took a spin with a number of other Intellivision games. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Cafeman Posted August 10, 2020 Share Posted August 10, 2020 Atari 5200 Jr. Pac-Man, 90 minutes. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atarian7 Posted August 10, 2020 Share Posted August 10, 2020 Atari 2600 Condor Attack - 5 minutes Espial - 5 minutes Hunchy2 - 8 minutes Kaboom! - 65 minutes Pole Position - 1 minute Rescue Terra I - 5 minutes Solar Fox - 17 minutes 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eltigro Posted August 10, 2020 Share Posted August 10, 2020 Quite a few retro games for me this week... NES Bomberman - 15 min (Just messing around a bit. Don't think I got past the second level. lol) Castlevania - 285 min (Trying to see how far I can get on one life. I can make it almost to the Grim Reaper... but not regularly.) Excitebike - 10 min (Just played until my first game over. Track 4 I think it was...) Gun.Smoke - 10 min (Got to the second boss and quit. Fun game, especially with turbo fire. lol) Joust - 10 min (Used to have this cart. Was one of the first ones I got with my system. Got to wave 6 or so and moved on. Some good nostalgia there.) Legendary Wings - 5 min (This is a game I always think that I have, but then look at my collection and find that I don't.) Lunar Pool - 5 min (Played the first couple of tables on the regular settings. I remember renting this one back in the day, too.) Metroid - 120 min (Realizing that this game seems a LOT easier when you're looking at a map. Wish there had been one in game.) Super Mario Bros. - 20 min (A classic. Played for a few lives... didn't get as far as I thought I should... but not too bad.) Tiger Heli - 5 min (This was the first game I ever rented for the NES back in the day. Rented it and an NES before I owned my own. I was terrible at it then, too!) Twin Cobra - 10 min (Pretty similar to Tiger Heli I think... although maybe a bit more refined.) TurboGrafx-16 Blazing Lazers - 30 min (Just gave it a run to see how far I'd go. I did not go as far as I have in the past. You put it down for a while and it shows.) Dreamcast Tee Off - 313 min (A very Hot Shots style golf game for the Dreamcast. I've had it for a while and just found out there's some kind of gateball/croquette game on the disc, too. I had no idea what was going on while playing it though. I played one 18 hole game on each of the games courses (US, Japan, Australia, Scotland, and Africa). I think my lowest score for a round was two under par.) 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.