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I had a Gravis Ultrasound in my PC in like 94 or 95. It was able to do 32-channels of sound. It had a DSP of some sort, maybe not as powerful as the Falcon's. Actually lots of soundcards advertised DSPs, but the thing was, they did not get used by end-user applications. They seemed limited to digital sound effects processing by the driver. I did eventually get a SB live, but the only difference I noticed as an end-user was higher quality instrument samples for Midi playback, and the fact that it was PCI instead of ISA meant less bottleneck. I guess what I'm saying was PC sound was "good enough" from the early 90s. Sure the Falcon's DSP looked great on paper, but it didn't change the fact that Falcon was hampered by a slow main CPU even by 1992 standards.

Heh- I remember when my friend grabbed the reference guide an looked up Error 143, and read "Serial Bus Data-Frame Checksum error" our heads practically exploded! I think we laughed, because we didn't know whether to cry. Eventually we got to know it to mean "somebody in the house or the cat moved, and the vibrations were enough to upset the 410 program recorder, try your 15-minute tape-load again" And even though "Serial Bus Data-Frame Checksum error" sounded like gibberish then. Sad to say today that sentence now makes perfect sense to me

Only one I ever watched was the Pacman one, and I hated it.

I don't understand the hatred towards DLC actually. It's optional. A way for people who enjoyed a game to extend the experience, at a fraction of the cost of a new game. They could simply rerelease the game with the new content instead at full price and call it version 2 (and that did use to happen sometimes-- I have a few games in my collection to prove it). Also these optional purchases keep the cost of the base game down for the rest of us not interested in buying them. $60 adjusted for inflation is pretty cheap when compared to many consoles of the 80s and 90s. And we get way more content in the new games than those old ones.

$4000 does seem high for that rig in 1990. That was around the time I first started seriously considering getting a PC and was shopping 386 systems. I don't remember exactly how much they were then, but I could say for certain that if they were over say $1500, I wouldn't have been considering one.

IIRC Sheena's popularity predated Benetar's by a little. Also I don't think Sheena knew what musical niche she belonged to. First she was doing easy-listening middle-of-the-road pop, then James Bond theme and then a Prince protégé releasing explicit songs like "Sugar Walls" and giving Tipper Gore nightmares.

When I built my PC in about 1994, my video card did have 24-bit true-color modes, and it wasn't a high-end card by any means. I think it was also capable of 1024x768. Now I know the Falcon came out in 1992, so I don't know the exact situation of PC in 1992 (turns out SVGA was a very loosely-defined standard), but I doubt it was far behind the Falcon, if at all.

yes you can buy store credits, but for those you have to pay the full digital store price- or wait longer for a sale. Gamestop has a rewards card that gives discounts on games, they have coupons. Amazon has 20% off new games for Prime members-- these things would give people incentive for buying a boxed code and save money vs a generic card. Plus lots of people do like getting the box art and collectors editions. Also as you mention, the digital store is a monopoly (or can be, if we allow the other game retailers to die), so having alternate places to buy with better prices and/or additional incentives would be a good thing, right?

Ubisoft CEO has said that the reason digital stays high is to not undercut the physical stores. Sony, MS and Nintendo still needs these same stores to push hardware. PC doesn't, which explains why they're practically all digital already.

That's not quite my recollection. As much as I wanted a Falcon, I recall the PC having 24-bit true color (16 million colors) vs the 16-bit (262,000 colors of the Falcon), I think they were doing high res too around that time. For sound, there were a bunch of great options then. And the 486's ran circles around a 16mhz 68030. But yes, the 256-color modes were still commonly used for speed and memory. I ended up building my first PC instead of getting a Falcon

My suggestion wouldn't replace the disk, the box would be clearly marked whether it contained a disc or a code. The code might be $5 cheaper because it has no trade-in potential. To explain my thinking further. Right now, physical disks go on sale quicker, and digital game prices stay artificially high so they don't piss off the physical retailers. It sucks for someone like me who prefers not needing to put a disc in to play a game (try that with Remote Play ) but I also prefer the better prices on physical. So I've often bought physical games and traded them later. If they boxed codes and disks, the physical retailer still has something to sell, so they aren't hurt by it. If they can give the same kinds of discounts they give on discs, I would certainly buy through them instead of PSN. It would help keep retail viable. Seems like a win-win for everybody

With all the mediocre games the fly-by-night 2600 publishers where pushing in 1982, I find it hard to believe that ET was the game that pushed the public over the edge and caused them to return it en-masse. I think the "returns" were from retailers who couldn't sell nearly the number of copies they bought. Yes Atari allegedly made more carts than systems. But the thinking was the game would sell many systems that year. (and I can't say it was an entirely unsound idea-- problem was that young industry didn't yet have that much sales data history to tell them how many sales a game based on a major movie could expect to sell.). At any rate, the media likes to repeat the narrative that a single game could be so bad that it destroys an entire industry. Lots of people now believe that. However it doesn't make sense to me.

If it was me and the picture didn't automatically adjust, I'd manually switch it for every game until I got fed up and bought a new TV It drives me crazy when the aspect is wildly off.

Maybe it's a thing on some platforms. Not PS4 for sure. I have seen boxes containing Steam codes, but it's almost impossible to find retailers that carry boxed PC games anymore.

I would like to see companies start selling "boxed codes". This way people who like box art and collectors editions can still buy these things and get the convenience of digital game (no disk flipping). These could sell at a slight discount to discs because they lack trade-in value. Retail stores have a chance to stay in business- and they serve a purpose as a place you can go and try the systems and play the games. Seems like a win-win for everybody, which is why it probably won't happen.

Except my recollection was that many people actually did stop playing videogames, or played much less. After Pac Man hit, videogames were a constant topic of conversation at school, day in and day out. Arcades sprung up everywhere, and even every retail business seemed to have an arcade machine or two. Then suddenly kids at school were talking about different things, rarely games anymore. Sure there were still some gamers, but they were much fewer. Many of those arcades closed down, even when they had steady traffic before. It seemed like it wasn't until NES got a foothold in the late 80s that it was cool to play games again.

Like you, getting an 800XL computer in 1983 caused me to focus on all the possibilities of it and mostly ignore my 2600 after that. But I still have that 2600 and its games I didn't even realize the crash was happening at first. I just noticed bins of $5 games appearing everywhere suddenly.

I had more fun with Combat for the wrong reasons. If you crawl up behind another tank, and stick your gun in its, umm.. 'backside' , and then "jiggle it". Strange things happen. Both tanks might fly through walls. Please tell me I'm not the only one who discovered this? Has there ever been a topic on exploiting glitches in 2600 games? There should be, there were some really cool glitches, and you could create others by toggling the power switch rapidly (probably not healthy for the system, but it never hurt ours ) ETs main problem was it never even came close to selling the kinds of numbers Atari had planned for. They made something like 7 million carts and only sold 1 million-- because the crash was beginning. But now that's been revised to "ET caused the crash!" (as if people stopped buying Colecovision and Intellivision games because ET existed on the 2600-- makes no sense!). I see it more as the victim of the crash. Once you get past the pit problem, it wasn't a bad game at all. There's a patched version around now that makes the pits much less sensitive

Lol, I picked HERO, It was because I thought Activision had done an amazing job with Pitfall II, and I had high-hopes for HERO- which I believe was using the same tech as Pitfall II. But I found it repetitive. But I'm open to change if you can convince me why I should give HERO a second chance

I think the version you first encounter will always be your "definitive" version, and you'll judge the other versions by how much they keep to the spirit. So if you played the home version first, that will be the one you have the most nostalgia for. I put Defender on my "worst" list, but it was kind of a hard decision because overall it's not a bad effort given the 2600's limitation. But I chose it because it changes a few of the arcade's core mechanics. 1) your ship disappears when firing, giving you limited invincibility 2) you have to go off-screen up and down to use the smart bomb and hyperspace, vs the arcade where you can use these on the fly by hitting the button. So again, a significant change to how the game is played. I know this is a limit because the joystick has a single button though.

I'm no expert in digital audio, but I do remember that "1-bit DAC" was used as a feature on many of the more expensive CD players at one point. (as opposed to whatever the cheap CD players were doing, I have no idea) Anyway, given that it was a premium feature on a medium that had always used 16-bit samples, I don't think it means what it sounds like. I guess I should google it and learn what it was all about

I always found it funny that the cheap ~$200 early computers were called "Home computers" while the $4000 systems were called "Personal Computers" You could buy a 'personal' home computer for every member of your family for the price of one PC back then! Lol yeah I know the origin of the word is in business. personal meaning a computer a worker could have on their desk vs logging into the mainframe or whatever

Wow! I never would have thought of that as an open world game. I guess it does give a rather large area to explore for the time, but I can think of better examples

yes this annoyed me as well, although I must say that the last few times I bought a new game there, I got an actual sealed one.

I wouldn't say it was a hiss so much as having a tinny-sounding quality to it. I'm no expert in digital audio either. I mean, ST games having all these samples in them certainly had a wow factor at the time, enough that I didn't notice how poor the quality was-- until I got an STe and realized how much clearer it sampled sound was on it.