Lord_of_Sipan

Personally I don’t mind that she kicks you out. Superficially it is a “cheap” mechanic but I think it adds to the strategy of the game and introduces a little bit of chance that can be frustrating in the right kind of way if that makes sense. (“Just one more try for a higher score!”)

I just use the D-pad with no stick /shrug feels more comfortable that way to me. I use both controllers about equally. I have a bestelectronics rebuilt proline and it just feels very clicky and satisfying to use. It doesn’t really appeal to me to use alternative controllers that never used to exist for an old system. I feel part of how good a game is comes from how playable it is with the authentic controller. Like, I can get a much higher score playing a 2600 game with a genesis pad but I will just have more fun playing a good game with a period correct controller. I’m a historian by trade though so maybe I’m just wierd. I only make an exception for the Coleco vision and intellivision because those controllers are heinous

Solaris does look and play great, but I like Radar Lock more myself because I tend to prefer more simple games. BMX Airmaster, Secret Quest, and Dark Chambers are probably my favorites from that era. I like the more claustrophobic, zoomed in gameplay of 2600 Dark Chambers a ton as a contrast with the 7800 game. Gives the game a much different feel.

Thank you for expanding on my post. I had forgot the duplex feature for the characters. That explains the green zones in Flashpoint.

Maze craze is ridiculously fun multiplayer. I have always tried to get in to night driver. The graphical “trick” is super effective and it is a cool clean game, I just find it a bit too frustrating lol. halo 2600 is pretty awesome. I’m a maniac so I like Waterworld, the game not the movie, but the movie isn’t that bad either.

Just to clarify some things all in one place (as far as I understand the system at least). I am a collector and I have never programmed an O2 game but I have read the hardware documentation from BITD and the giant PDF on the BiOS produced by Soeren Gust in the early 2000s. The O2/videopac G7000 allows for simultaneous display of 4 single color sprites AND up to 8 of the predefined characters on screen at once without any kind of interrupt tricks. It also allows for a grid to be drawn on the screen using horizontal or horizontal lines of a thickness set by the user. I believe these grid lines are used for the lines that pop up after you eat fruit in Super Bee. The system has built in sprite/sprite, sprite/background (ie. “grid”), and sprite/character collision detection that you can control. (so more like a 2600 or NES than a 7800) Sprites can overlay characters and/or grid lines. The system does not have enough cycles per frame to do 50/60fps tile scrolling (much less fine scrolling) easily. This is why the Super Cobra port for example is flip screen instead of scrolling. Scrolling “tile” (actually character block) by tile in 8 pixel blocks is possible and some homebrews do it but it takes a more advanced game design than Philips had back in 1978-1982. The retail O2 library makes as much use of the character set as it does in part because almost all of the games were coded by a single guy. (Philips basically did next to nothing to support the console until 1982 when they extremely belatedly worked hard to attract third party publishers, put out the big box hybrid board game series or games, etc. They would repeat the same bold strategy of releasing a console and then waiting 3+ years to properly support it with the CDI.) The videopac G7400 (which was never released in the US) is a more interesting console in my opinion as it has kind of strange specs that make sense in light of the shortcomings of the original g7000. It is pretty much fully backwards compatible with the O2 (it removes the pseudo-random number generator, not sure if that breaks any games. I am not aware of any that don’t run on it and I own one and a multicart). It has the same microcontroller/cpu and VDP as the O2 with the CPU clocked slightly faster. It adds support for larger bankswitched carts of 12k or 16k without needing to put any extra special mapper chips in the cart for it.* It also adds a 2 part extra “graphics” processor (actually a modified teletype IC used on the terminals for a French precursor of the internet) that only can use character pseudo-graphics but it has both 90 something predefined characters and the option for 96 user definable characters. It is fully capable of filling an entire screen with these “characters” and using them like a tilemap. The CPU can detect sprite collision with these characters if you set the luma level above a certain amount for a given tile/character. In practice these mostly got used as backdrops for rereleases of older titles but they could be used for some cool effects and did allow for much more advanced games like Norseman, Trans America Rally, and Helicopter Rescue. The system can apparently actually scroll these graphics pretty efficiently. The (originally unreleased) game Flashpoint shows one way these new graphics capabilities could be used but also displays one limitation in that they are still character graphics so they cannot overlap with the 8 normal characters. The expanded characters are also always behind the sprite layer. (I think the green zones in flashpoint are regular characters even though there are a lot of them because the player sprite goes behind them).

Is this demo a PAL demo? I think the clock speed ratios of the TIA MARIA and the CPU are different between PAL and NTSC 7800s

Do both 7800 and 2600 games look less saturated? Do you use RF out or is it a modded console?

Harpy’s Curse is extremely fun. I have yet to play the second quest. Think I was the first person to beat it when it was still in beta. I love balloon fight and joust and I love adventure games that are not overly long/huge. The dungeon in Harpy’s Curse doesn’t feel small but you probably won’t need to make a detailed map for yourself, similar to OG Metroid or Zelda/Zelda II and not enormous like SotN.

Many Atari 7800 games, including a number of the retail releases use extra ram on the cartridge. The console is designed for this and the concerto supports many games that have extra memory, provided that they use a supported scheme for that. The concerto supports games such as Sirius that have 16k of cartridge ram. http://7800.8bitdev.org/index.php/ATARI_7800_BANKSWITCHING_GUIDE The demo you are trying to run may need ram at strange memory addresses. If it is a 16k cart ram game, it should have that ram at $4000-$7fff That is also where some games have pokey audio though so that demo may use a non-standard memory map.

It might use a non-standard bank switching format OP

So the graphite potentiometer for my SCV’s RF output literally deteriorated and crumbled to dust and fell out of the bottom of my console so now I have no RF out. I have an RGB cable for it buried somewhere that I have never used, but, I have a dilemma. My best CRT only has composite input rather than component. (It is a bizarre little professional monitor, its got composite and some failed proprietary input that is only on like 4 monitors) I have a rgb to component breakout adapter though from retrotink which gave me an idea. Does the SCV output a composite video signal as sync or does it put out luma sync or something?

It may make it not run at all or it will run the same. Those OG power supplies are oooooold by now and may be out of spec. As long as you have a decent quality power supply with the correct specs you are good. (The one kind of modern power solution I would generally avoid with old consoles are USB plug power cords but I don't think there is one like that for the NES)

It doesn’t technically qualify because it does not have a sprite based architecture, but, I believe the astrocade can save multicolor (up to 4 colors?) “objects” in a range of ram locations and then redraw them from a pointer to those ram locations rather than from the rom graphics data. (This is sort of a blitter)

I’ve only beaten commando but I consider both good games. Commando is definitely easier and feels a little less “cheap” than Ikari Warriors. Both games are more fun than the NES versions.