davidcalgary29
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Posts posted by davidcalgary29
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I'll get one from them when they have another sale. The US-only shipping still makes me irate -- have Atari not figured out that they have an international market?!
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On 7/28/2023 at 6:21 PM, nadir said:
Got notice that Asteroids and Gravitar are scheduled to be shipping pretty soon. Good to see they keep making progress!
Speaking of which, the clue to 58A in today's NYT crossword puzzle is "Asteroids System". The answer reveals that the author is not an enthusiast, unless he thinks that 5200 "Meteroites" counts.
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On 7/13/2023 at 6:36 PM, Atari Dogs said:
I found my old copies of the 2600 connection cleaning out my parents house. I think I saw copies from 1991 to 1996. I did not know Tim printed them. Great job, buddy.
I bought the entire run in the spiral-bound collection from a member here about fifteen years ago. Great stuff.
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Two for me, please!
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On 7/24/2023 at 7:50 AM, Retroversity said:
Someone on Facebook was talking to me about the cart and asked if there was any backstory to it. Sorry to say, none that I know. I think, maybe, it came from a yard sale in Brooklyn, CT that was one in a series of clean outs from a deceased reseller's home that was purchased by a new couple. I have bought a lot of stuff from there, just big crazy tangles of wires and controllers and systems and games, but nothing else older than an NES, so I am pretty certain at this point that I have nothing else like this. Just a random find.
It would be neat if it had been a more personal sale and some still tech-savvy grandma showed me all the cool designs and rugs and whatever else she came up with in the 80's, but no such luck.
I've had a few offers for more than double what the auction is currently sitting at and some people have been telling me about sending it off to the National Videogame Museum. Whatever happens to it, I am really glad for myself that I didn't put it up as a Buy It Now for $20 or accept the $50 offer from someone that came in very shortly after it was listed. That offer is what made me go looking further to find this thread.
Congratulations on the sale price! Let's hope that this will spur other people to be on the hunt for some of the more obscure 'apps' that were made for the A8 in the early '80s.
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21 hours ago, MrFish said:
Complete mystery can be a good selling point too; and the cart addicts have now been alerted.
These auctions often remind me of the sci-fi novel A Canticle for Liebowitz: in the future, I can imagine religious cults being founded on obscure A8 carts -- burned with even more obscure art software -- that were found at garage sales.
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I put in a bid. If I win it, I'm going to send it away to be dumped.
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On 7/1/2023 at 9:12 AM, zestfulemulation said:
I made a 3d box for the game
Popeye looks sort of scary...I almost feel that he should have "LOVE" and "HATE" tattooed across his fingers.
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...especially because it was created as a passion project by an 8-bit enthusiast; Activision released it in select European markets after they realized how good it was (and the fact that they already had the rights for it). Activision had never intended to release an A8 port for this game.
Peter Sabath told me that:
Hi David,
Wolfgang forwarded me his mail to you containing my e-mail address so your mail did not come out of nothing…
About end of summer 1986 I saw “Shanghai” on the ATARI ST, and liked it from the day I saw it. Unfortunately there was no ATARI XE version announced so I thought it would be a nice,
relative easy to port game, so I started with grabbing graphics of the ST version (Tiles and the dragon) and started to program the whole game from scratch without any help from Activision.
I used the Bibo-Assembler and a special, stripped down version of Bibo-DOS (to be able to write “normal” formatted disks for save games) from Erwin Reuss which was my friend and worked at Compy-Shop.
Since I liked the mouse on the ATARI ST I had added support for the ST mouse on the XL/XE.
Since this was at the time where I did my military service I had not much time to work on it.
Erwin and the managing director of Compy-Shop (Peter Bee) as well as the guys from ABBUC which have seen the version at the yearly meeting found the port really great and told me it would be a waste not to try to sell it.
That was the hardest part, how to connect the “right” person at Activision. Happily Activision had opened its first German office in Hamburg (by Greg Fishbach) not so long ago. (around 1985)
I can’t remember from whom I get that contact, but it was a direct contact to the German management level.
I send a version to them in mid-1987 and started to wait. After some months I got the info that they forwarded the version to “Rod Cousens” which was managing director of the Southampton
based Activision owned studio “Electric Dreams”. In February 1988 they offered me a contract to buy the port which was nice money for a young man that just started at University.
The contract requested some missing features (the help & how to play sections) which were easy to add.
I asked them for the Activision logo animation I had seen on other XL/XE titles but they were not able to provide it (I think because they did not make ATARI 8 Bit titles) so I was allowed to rip it out of another title.
Thanks to my friends at Compy-Shop I had a Speedy drive and was able to apply a copy protection to the disk as well. But they were not able to reproduce the disk so I had to remove the copy protection.
I do not know how may copies they sold and where the title was released at all.
If I remember correctly I even did not get a copy from them, I got my copy from Wolfgang.
I hope that sheds some light on the creation of “Shanghai” for ATARI 8 Bit
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On 11/9/2022 at 1:45 AM, Lostdragon said:
Frank has made a nice little update to the Lynx Hellraiser entry:
Artist Nina Stanley confirmed working on the title, but that it never got very far at all. Nina explained to GTW that the rights were brought by Color Dreams for around 30K, but this was right around the same time they transitioned to doing Bible games – so it was endlessly postponed.
She recalled that the plan was to use the Wolfenstein engine for a handheld machine (which of course would have been the Lynx). Unfortunately she doesn’t seem to have anything of the small development that was made, although she believes that she may have done a few concepts before leaving to go to Novalogic.
Here's a poster up for auction to commemorate this nice piece of vapourware.
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On 5/17/2023 at 7:24 PM, Joey Kay said:
No kidding. Did find this 2019 real estate listing of the second floor of "Unit 1" though it occupied Units 1 and 2 IIRC. At least we can get a peek inside of what might have been...
https://images1.loopnet.com/d2/Rqp-d_kBn_6jtwII1qqCPiUyTOY5Tr6B2rPBE_Yrcek/document.pdf
Does that bring back memories! There must have been some type of renovation -- I recall that Atari Canada had its own entrance. I also don't recall a second floor.
When you walked in, there was a front counter that was staffed by a man. There was a repair "shop" in the back, as well. It was a really small operation when I frequented it in the mid to late '80s -- I can't remember seeing more than five employees there.
The vapourware lists were great fun -- I'm just sorry that I didn't keep them for the XEGS.
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Fat Bobby and Bubble Trouble were actually released by Telegames in a variety of cases; my copy of Bubble Trouble came packaged in this ugly white DVD movie case with cheap red printing on the front and back. Really, the CD jewel cases are an improvement. I dimly recall that Hyperdrome also orginally had some other packaging, but have never seen Raiden in anything but the CD jewel case.
I believe that Pete (UK Telegames) stated that Telegames just grabbed whatever packaging (and boards) were available at the time when making another production run of their cartridges; that's why there are so many cart variants of their games.
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I would love to see some pictures of the old Atari Canada HQ in Markham, Ontario! It was an ugly brown building in a nondescript business park, to which I made repeated pilgrimages to get my 1050 repaired (before I learned how to do it myself). Ah, the memories...
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56 minutes ago, woj said:
No Sunday update, I am afraid. I got so much done, essentially all Popeye movements in all rounds, including hanging on to the baloon etc. But I got totally entangled in the movement puzzle with the moving pad in round 3, and my head exploded, I need to start fresh with this tomorrow.
I'm incredibly impressed by what you've already accomplished. Thanks for doing this with VBXE!
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On 3/22/2023 at 10:42 PM, batari said:
I was hoping it would not be that weekend, because there is an annular solar eclipse going through Oregon on October 14 at 9:13 am, with the path being about about 60-100 miles south of Portland. Hopefully PRGE won't lose too many people who head south to see the eclipse instead.
I'll head outside to see it if I can pry myself out of Burgerville. I keep looking at that milkshake menu and drooling.
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1 hour ago, MrMaddog said:
If you're talking about doing a ROM hack that can add a bezel that includes status lights...I guess it could be possible by adding/changing the Display List on the screen.
(I am assuming that no one uses old CRTs for their A8's but now run them on flatscreens?)
Not true! I use both a 1702 and a LCD monitor with my units.
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Just ordered my copies!
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Well, no. The "50th Anniversary" version may replicate, and share certain graphic similarities with, the 1979 original, but it was not written for A8 architecture and could not run on it. It's possible that someone, at some point, could implement some of the gameplay improvements into an A8 version of the game, but none of the other graphic improvements would be feasible (or desirable, really) on the A8.
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2 hours ago, Overange said:
Rarity is becoming a big player, as so systems are being found in storage places etc and after then when they get into the hobbists hands, so many will then be modded or stripped.
At some point to find an original unmodded system will be key to selling or even buying.
There is the 'Someone on eBay is selling it for $$$, so its worth that much' Culture.
We are all seeing this term used a lot at other selling locations, FB Market Place, Charity/Thift Stores, Open Markets etc etc
Best i seen....
'This Atari 800xl is super rare, because its yellow'
I want a Vectrex, but I aint paying the stupid prices they demand and they cannot be that rare as they are always appearing on eBay.
I will sit and wait 🤔
I'd simply place a WTB ad here, where people are apt to be much more reasonable. I stopped buying older electronics regularly on eBay about ten years ago, when prices exploded and quality deteriorated (rapidly).
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I believe that I bought my first two carts from Ken in 2004, although it could have been 2005 -- time to fire it up again! The versions are largely the same, although the music in the original version has a number of rough glitches. I also seem to recall that Peter Pepper had some movement issues with this release.
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Update, please! How did this go?
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On 3/9/2023 at 9:31 PM, Sauron said:
I'll admit it here, I never gave the Lynx version of Scrapyard Dog much of a chance, due to a number of reasons. The primary one being, of course, that I played the 7800 version first. Like what was stated before, though, the 7800 and Lynx versions are like two totally different games. Hearing this praise for the game has gotten me curious, though. Just wish I could find my Lynx...
Don't forget that it's one of the games on the Evercade Lynx cart!
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Joining in on the SD love! It's still one of my most-played Lynx games. I think that, with its cartoony graphics, it was mistakenly (and is still mistakenly) categorized as a kiddie game, but it's got great depth and playability. I think that the only other game on the Lynx that matches it in this area is Toki, which can be unforgivably hard until you grind your way through it and learn enemy patterns.
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What late bloomer Atari 2600 game made you go wow?
in Atari 2600
Posted
Solaris, hands-down. I bought my first 2600 because of it.
Road Runner, Klax, and MotoRodeo are pretty great, too, although it was the homebrew scene that got me interested in the system.