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Well, as I was saying...? Who needs boring reasons when you can just say "it happened!" (!@#$ Tramiels)?

Lol...this could be The Internet's motto. Why bother with facts (or the lack of them) when you can just say something is or is not true, and there will always be somebody on the net to believe it?

Death Sword - it's actually Barbarian, already mentioned above itt. Gunship, Cpt Blood, Harrier Mission - typically complex "computer games" which rarely made their way to consoles Joe Blade - budget game. Very popular but also kinda rubbish. Superstar Indoor Sports, Xenon - I guess could qualify but the former wasn't really that great and Xenon also would have stiff competition Producing carts was much more expensive than tapes or disks so console publishers had to be a bit more careful with their releases.

Thanks, that will do just fine. I don't mind anybody promoting their stuff but seeing entire sub-forums flooded with posts from one person is just not on. It's been a unspoken forum custom that content creators from external sources (which is mostly youtube) contain themselves to one thread, eg Battle Of the Ports here by Yakumo.

If you want to call it that, that's fine, but unless you were some kind of wiz-kid who learned how to handle everything from, I don't know, analyzing the logic gates on the chips or some such - then it means you had help too, be it in person, or written form, and so this something was "tuned for you" too. There's not a single CLI based interface which wouldn't require at least some effort to understand on the part of the user. In fact, you can easily extend it to most of the GUI ones from that era - hell, any era - too. Why do you think "For Dummies" books got so popular? It's probably only with the advent of smartphones that these devices became somewhat intuitive (to an extent). And compared to other platforms, MS-DOS was nowhere near as complicated as modern myths would have it. Literally every single one of my mates was able to troubleshoot the DOS environment, and every single one had only the absolutely basic knowledge of how computers/OSs work. Judging by how popular DOS gaming was, I think it's pretty safe to say it was an universal experience. No, but business people either had IT departments which did it for them, helplines, or simply learned OTJ. The latter, again because this whole MS-DOS thing was was nowhere near as complicated as modern myths would have it. Even a secretary or data-entry monkey (been there) person could learn a few basic commands which would take them to Norton Commander, if it didn't autostart, or that a: means floppy and c your HDD, and dir will show you what's in there. It's really not rocket science. And again, the proof is in the pudding (no matter how many times we will go through the motions with this tired argument ?) Being relatively simple to handle was one of the reasons PCs took over. If they required some Matrix (aka Linux)-level involvement from normal user, they would've never gotten so popular and conquered the world. And PC dominance even in the pre-GUI-Windows era has already been crushing.

Yeah, but that's because it was a pretty basic game anybody could knock out to exercise their 1337 coding skills. A bit like Hamurabi. Not sure it's something people would like to pay good money for to play on their mostly arcade-oriented consoles.

I'm sorry this was your experience, but mine and everybody I knew, was completely different. There was no need to use countless different files - just one config, certainly not magical, which would just work, and that would be passed on to everybody else. And it's precisely the same stuff I use everyday on MiSTer's ao486 core these days.

Chuckie Egg actually makes sense, though there were numerous lesser known but still very fun similar games on the micros (eg Mad Nurse off top of my head). But the thing to remember is that the heyday of micros (1982-1987) was sort of a black hole for the consoles, seeing as Atari et al have never really got their act together after the crash, and Japanese devs were churning out countless hits and didn't need many ports (especially from Europe) for their consoles.

There are countless similar channels which do pretty well. That "hey, I dump on retro games!" schtick seems to be always in demand.

It's amazing that you have the gall to say something like that, after starting a topic here which is basically a rant about something somebody said on a different forum - which is usually considered very poor form. And I think it's safe to say 98.4% people here won't know or care about your ancient/ongoing beefs which are based elsewhere. I think @bfollowel said it best above, that you're clearly one of the most knowledgeable people in the ST community, who has contributed a lot (paywall notwithstanding) to it, but who also often displays a simply unbearable attitude. I'm just glad that I'm a "lamer" - casual ST user, who can get by with using floppies, and doesn't have to rely on your HD installs. Having to put up with all the mood swings and random sermons would be a bit too much of a price. I still appreciate what you are doing for the ST scene but also hope you'll think twice before starting another thread like this one.

For that to happen there would have to be an Amico first, as well as games (no, some WIP previews or codes in a box don't count). And it's safe to say that cash-desperate as they are they'd license any notable titles - the likes of which you can count on fingers of one hand, btw. Also, no sane dev of note will agree to an exclusivity deal for a console which at best will be released either in tiny batches or not at all. It's not the heady days of 2018, with 3 billion target audience, but the harsh reality of 2022.

That's fine, but most (if not all) of these games are available on a PC and other platforms. This would be probably the same for Amico, no matter their initial exclusivity boasts, and is to extent the same for Evercade. So all that differs is just names and bits of plastic used to house the electronics, with an occasional gimmick thrown in. That's what I find fascinating about these machines and the brohuaha around them, because they are to an extent a reflection of the mad, totally consumerist end-of-times period we live in. Basically, people go incredibly excited about the fact that they can spend money on something that is either available free, elsewhere, or in many cases, what they already own.

I don't know the guy, but from what I see I figure Ray's a decent person and a true-blue Atari fan to boot. All these threads are perhaps a bit too much and it's easy to poke fun at them...but, oh, well, I'd rather see these than another thread about junk food or a zillionth plug for awbacon's utube channel.

We actually do. No need for vaseline or random house visits when you can simply plop a TV next to a monitor on your desk. It's not that it even needs proof, it's just common sense. If you look around you, the objects you see will be outlined in smooth lines and curves, not jagged blocks. So why would a designer want their games to look like this? The early machines did not have the juice to remedy the basic graph-made blockiness, but the CRT TVs with their natural antialiasing did - plus allowed for a heap of other tricks. That's why most VGA games from 320x200 era look a bit daft with their heavy pixellation on dimmer/duller displays (which were obviously productivity-oriented), and everything else, be it consoles, arcades, or microcomputers benefitted from being displayed on normal 15 kHz sets. Even via RF or composite, since S-Video, component and SCART RGB were luxuries that did not really matter till the late 90s and beyond. Sure, RF did suck, but not as greatly as some might imagine, and good composite is actually pretty good - enough for games. And that's why PC games eventually started adding antialiasing and other post process features with the advent of dedicated GPU cards, and it is something that continues to this day. Luckily, in 2022 it's not a great mystery anymore, and anti-CRT crusaders like good ol' Tanooki here are dwindling There was a period when people were awed by, and drunk on the TFT revolution, and so the "cleaner/sharper" rationalization narratives were conceived and vehemently defended. The fact that it's nigh on impossible to capture CRT display properly on video or photo, and make a good comparison, did not help. But it's all calmed down in the recent years and most people realised that it's at least worth trying to play the games the way it was intended. Especially seeing as it has never been easier - you have decent shader/scanline/shadowmask options available everywhere now, from Retroarch to Retrotink. Of course, if anybody prefers the modern look it's their prerogative, though I always smh at the idea of playing games in their raw output state - it's a bit as if going into Cyberpunk 2077's Options and dialling down all the gfx settings. But, hey, whatever floats your boat. Historical revisionism is another matter though, hence my occasional replies to these posts.

There were no legal games where I grew up, only pirated copies. And RPG/sim/strategy games were my favourites, so yeah, it was often a problem, sometimes a big problem. I'd usually try and manage to figure most things out anyway, but in some games it was just too much. Occasionally a kindly pirate would include some hand-typed docs, but that was a rare occurence. I remember distinctly refusing to play the Goldbox series on Amiga, despite wanting to immensely, since I was enamoured with its best-in-class combat. That was easy to figure out, but these games also relied on external "journals" to tell you the story and give assorted gameplay clues (a form of copy protection) . So you'd enter some place and the game would say "You see a dwarf chained to a wall. Please refer to the Journal page so and so". You could play without reading that stuff but it was too heartbreaking, so the only game from this series I played back then was Dark Queen Of Krynn (the last in the Dragonlance sequence!) because it came with the docs.

Elite Dangerous is a sort of GaaS-type game, and in 2022 it's a normal practice. This has been a trend for years. Even previously SP-only games are moving towards it (unfortunately), eg Assasins Creed, Halo, etc... They usually have very long timeframes in mind (5-10-forever) and so ED is not much different in this regard. Anyway, the part of the ongoing argument was that Braben shouldn't bother fans who want to do something (for free) with the old IPs, because he's not doing anything with them anyway. Well, he is, so this line of reasoning is kinda redundant. I still think he shouldn't bother anybody (and maybe he even wouldn't or hasn't, do we know for sure?) but that's another story.

Sorry, but this is a really bizarre conversation The latest title in the series has been published, developed, and marketed for years and is rather succesful. Every now and then they release a big expansion, which in the old days would be Frontier 3, 4, 5 and so on. The franchise is pretty much alive, and yet you guys talk about it as if it was dormant.

Elite Dangerous is a direct sequel to Frontier. It has been released in 2014 and has had continuous updates since then.

All the hate MS-DOS gets always amazes me, because my experience was so completely different. I was just a kid and all I knew about handling computers before it was from writing some simple BASIC programs on ZX Spectrum, loading tapes on C64, or inserting disks into an Amiga, and yet I found MS-DOS supremely easy to handle and quite intuitive. I mean, how hard is it to remember that typing a drive's letter plus colon will take you to this drive? The navigation by typing assorted dir or cd.. / etc, is a breeze and other commands also rather self explanatory. Sure, I never had to do any really advanced stuff, but I bet that was the same for 95% of normal users like me. Of course, there's also the fact that Norton Commander was a thing and set a standard of computer handling which I'm still using to this day, via Total Commander on Win10. I can do most file operations this way using keyboard much faster than slogging through the mouse driven Explorer GUI. It's similar with the alleged torment of adjusting autoexec / config.sys to play games, something which in reality was extremely simple and required "writing" (mostly copied from someone else or a magazine) a batch file which would then handle most of everything forever.

I must begrudgingly admit it's pretty good - if you know what you're in for. I was initially pissed off with him dumping on the KS pledges and turning it into online only MP game, but, well, what can you do. There is nothing else to scratch that particular itch of semi-realistic spaceship sim, with open world and at least some other human presence, in a persistent online universe. Production values are also pretty high. So I did cave in eventually and played Horizons for a few months. It was fun overall - quite mindblowing at first - but I did give up eventually because a) it can get a bit too realistic (the dreaded flight times) and b) I totally suck at dogfighting.

The later versions of Rogue, the ones released on 8/16 bit micros, have gfx tiles and simplified UI which you could possibly navigate with joypad. But even so, this game really wasn't that great fit for consoles, that's why Japanese went with their own take on roguelikes - Fatal Labirynth, Torneko, etc.

He's the man behind Elite Dangerous - this is the franchise. It's admittedly pretty succesful and doesn't really have any competition, so I guess that's the motive behind his trademark caginess - a bit like Nintendo or others. I don't condone it, also think it'd be much better for these companies to embrace fan remakes, homebrew projects, etc, since they can in no way hurt sales of their modern counterparts - to the contrary, I'd say. But that's the world of big money, corporate lawyers and such - they operate on different logic.

Most of the ridicule both of these platforms got was perfectly deserved, because it started first as valid criticisms (of often ridiculous things) but was met with vitriol and/or ridiculous rationalizations from both fans and creators alike. If you can't stand the heat, don't go into the kitchen, who lives by the sword... - well, you get the idea.

How do you propose to play text adventures with a gamepad? It's really not a great mystery why these games didn't get ported. So far Bruce Lee is the only example which kinda makes sense. The rest, aside from IF, were games unsuitable for consoles for assorted reasons, eg LSL too risky, Nethack open source, Hamurabi too niche, etc...

Yeah, but minus the social media circus (thank gods). All you saw was maybe a preview in a mag or a letter to the editor once a month. And now? Amico existed 95% in the social media sphere and, lest we forget, AA was TT's stronghold at some point, with quite a few people drinking his peculiar brand of Kool Aid here. Could be the reason these threads still keep popping up...a sort of delayed echo, if you will. Amusingly, good ol' Tommy is listed as a top Top Member of this board. Oh, the irony...