What would you want to be able to buy from Atari…

[Flojomojo]

Sorry to be negative, but the poll options were oddly focused on original media. That's not very friendly to Atari's financial situation. Atari 50 was an achievement since they included so many games, a good number of which had never been released like that before. 

 

One thing Atari 50 brought home is how despite their importance, they don't own the vast majority of what made them great, which was third party licensed IP and games produced by external companies. They're constrained by what they can actually afford to sell. I'm sure they'd love to put out a nice Activision Classics collection, but Activision is capable of doing that themselves. Maybe they could acquire Intellivision and Coleco from their current rights holders and put all the retro tomfoolery under one roof? 

 

Atari-IP-Catalog-July-2016.pdf

 

This is from 2016 but I don't think they've gained or lost any intellectual property since then. What's on this list that we didn't get in Atari 50?

[zzip]

10 minutes ago, Flojomojo said:

One thing Atari 50 brought home is how despite their importance, they don't own the vast majority of what made them great, which was third party licensed IP and games produced by external companies. They're constrained by what they can actually afford to sell. I'm sure they'd love to put out a nice Activision Classics collection, but Activision is capable of doing that themselves. Maybe they could acquire Intellivision and Coleco from their current rights holders and put all the retro tomfoolery under one roof? 

Yeah this came up in another thread.   I have no ideas of the licensing costs involved or which rights holders would be willing to strike a deal with Atari,  but some observations:

 

  -  The Atari Vault 2 has a bunch of M-Network (Mattel) games included, so they struck a deal for that, or AtGames did.   either way they got it done.

  -  Activision hasn't put out a collection in over 10 years.   Doesn't seem like it's worth their while.   They might be amenable to a third party like Atari doing it.   And the Activision library includes Imagic and I think Infocom.

  - Similarly Midway hasn't put out a collecion in some time.   If Atari got the rights to this, it would reunite the entire Atari arcade portfolio and they could release an amazing arcade collection.   Plus give them rights to the Williams games

  - Lucasfilm Games today seems willing to license old franchises to third parties.   A brand-new Monkey island game recently came out for instance.   Atari could potentially get the license to Ballblazer/Fractalus/Eidolon/Koronis Rift,  plus the Star Wars/Indy arcade games, 2600 Raiders and the Parker Bros SW games.  But I have a feeling it might not be cheap.

[Flojomojo]

@zzip interestingly, Midway has put its stuff on mini-arcade cabinets a lot lately, even as nothing is going on home collections. Maybe 1up and Atgames are less risk averse? 

 

Probably needless to say, but I'd buy any of the software collections you've proposed, even if it doesn't make sense for me to do so (I have it all already, and there's yo ho ho versions out there too)

[Keatah]

2 hours ago, zzip said:

Yeah I do that too at times.  But usually not for more than a 5 minute session.   In addition to overly simple games, and knock-offs a big chunk of the 2600 library is arcade ports,  but why play the 2600 port when I can play the original in Mame?   The 2600 games I return to most are 2600 originals with some sort of objective--  Adventure, Raiders, Pitfall II, Spike's Peak.

I often think that way about playing ports. If something came out originally on the Atari 400/800 and then a 5200 conversion comes next. I'm usually just interested in the 400/800 "original". Besides, the 400/800 and 5200 are so much alike hardware-wise. And Altirra further blurs the lines, it in and of itself is just one "super 8-bit system" covering everything.

 

Or like StarBlazer and Bolderdash, came out first on the Apple II and they're what I consider the premier versions. While I have them on the 400/800, they just don't play quite the same. And the A2 versions look better. Really they do! Don't know why the Atari ports had such drab and muted colors.

 

Similar situation with Gyruss. I loved having it on the C64. Was one of the few arcade games on it that "bought the arcade home". Great sound fidelity btw. I had stopped playing C64 games in the late 80's and didn't see Gyruss in MAME until the late 90's. But had I had both MAME + C64 "versions" I'd have said, "why bother with the home version when I could have the arcade one?"

 

Today I do like jamming both as a comparison exercise and had spent some time exploring the differences in detail. And I didn't discover Atari 400/800's Gyruss port till well after the emulation age was underway. But I don't like that one.

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

If it's just endless waves of doing the same thing over and over:  shooting stuff, roping cattle, flying through barns,  it won't hold my interest long.

Sometimes I actually like that. Zone out and find subtleties in the game's patterns.

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

but it's distortion.   I think back then I wanted nice crisp graphics like I'd see in the arcade when the cabinets were new and the monitors were pristine (before they started deteriorating).

 

    But then I'd go home and play on aging televisions and have all sorts of weird ghosting effects, fuzzy images, blurry text and color distortions.  We wanted TVs with sharper images like Trinitrons to get away from that.  Even on emulators the only CRT effects I'll use are a light scanline (to soften the sharp edges) and artifacting (because some games use it for color).   All the other CRT effect just serve to distort the picture, add noise, make text blurry.

1st generation classic gaming and RF/NTSC (distortion be damned) go hand in hand. They're inseparable. It's what we remember. It's the essence of gaming on mom's TV set on a wintry afternoon in the basement.

 

As we got older and more into computers I wanted more. My holy-grail target for "super video" was S-Video. I would have loved all my consoles and computers to have been S-Video quality along with the ability to do Apple II 80-columns. The venerable 1084 monitors are pretty good there. And I still have two of those.

 

I stopped at S-Video. I never wanted to go beyond that for vintage consoles, not even when computer gaming was exceeding 640 x 480 or 1024 x 768. S-Video quality and texture and phosphor masking in the sweet spot of our 80's dreams for a futuristic display.

 

Altirra is pretty good at giving us a good S-Video "signal". Stella and Atari 800 Emulator are great for RF/NTSC since you can dial in the distortion with a bunch of sliders. I absolutely abhor the pixel-perfect razor-sharp edges of most emulators' unfiltered no-shader looks. So harsh. So not CRT. So not 70's. So not warm and cozy. And while some emulators don't go full-CRT, most all get me that holy-grail S-Video look. I tend to use all available emulator effects. Most very subtle. A recent mistake I did was blowing out everything with bloom. It was like playing in a sunny fogbank! That lasted about an evening.. and I turned it down to like 5% or 2%.

 

As far as arcade cabinets and monitors - that's my sore spot. All the games I played at PinPan Alley - Aladdin's castle - Galaxy World were new or less than a few years old. So they were near-perfect. But they did deteriorate. Most common issues? Burn-in, missing a primary color gun, maybe some convergence.

 

Funny thing is I never saw many vector monitors in a de-tuned state. They were either full-on working or not. No matter however. I'm happy with playing the likes of classic Tempest on a modern gamer/pro class LCD today. The color saturation and purity equal and exceed what I remember from back in the day (even on a newly minted cab). And emulation has been consistent over the years. Just sumptuously gorgeous. Deep full-bodied reds and blues just explode!

 

Gotta love MAME's tweakability. There's so many controls you can adjust for getting that perfect image.

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

 Yeah sure it might look like my friend's crappy console TV from 1967, but I want the games to look the way they were intended to look.

That's just it.. Can be taken a few ways.

 

The industry was new then. And getting hardware that could draw stuff on the TV into people's homes was a gargantuan accomplishment. Making it a desirable & affordable consumer product even more so. I don't think the first designers had any styling goal yet. They just wanted the stuff on-screen to be moving and made into playable game. They didn't care how it looked.

 

Games started to look a certain way when hardware was beginning to be pushed and new colors (on a color-limited system) could be had by artifacting and drawing certain combinations adjacent to each other. Once the resolutions increased we could get stick figures. And cars were beginning to have 4 wheels rather than look like a misshapen "H". I think it was then that designers started taking into consideration how a game looked. Intentions and directions developed from there.

 

Designers quickly became aware of the limitations of home displays. They developed that artifacting and color mixing to increase detail. And that's an intentional look. Playing an artifacted game on a non-artifacting display (1084 monitor has a switch for that) is quite the shitty experience no doubt.

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

They have people on these forums.   I think they know what the community wants,  but at the same time they need to know what is marketable.   Just because a few retro enthusiasts on a forum think it would be great to have a device that can read any cartridge from any Atari system doesn't necessarily mean they could sell enough to make such a device worth building.

There's always that balance. I'm happy to leave it up to the beancounters and business-y types to figure out what's doable.

 

Citing the above example.. There'd be a lot of expensive (for cheap consumer product) engineering going on. Then actually making it and testing it. It's a lot once all the ugly details come rearing up. Then you're going to have a lot of unused slots. Not all vintage gamers have carts from all Atari systems to begin with! And we're an insignificant bunch in the grand scheme of things. So niche.

 

As far as a multi-system system goes. I think we've had them for a good 10-15 years by now. They're called emulator boxes. And like you say the gnu VCS does a lot right there. You just don't have the physical Mound of Media^(tm) trailing behind it.

 

I think people could build nice and highly personalized collections of vintage console games and arcade games if they'd get over "it's crappy emulation don't want". Emulators are very good, have been for a long time. Stop finding some minute contention point and blowing it up till it crushes everything! Shove a noo VCS up their ass! There's your atari sanctioned hardware right there. Playing original Atari games. What more can be wanted!?!?!?!

[Keatah]

As far as wanting a certain accessory or product? How about a premium travel or carry case for the knooh VCS? Something foam-padded with storage for 4 controllers, adapters, some cables, and removable flash media? Something to lend a bit of ritualization and presence to the console.

 

That kind of thing, the physical-ness of setting connecting up our old consoles was a big stink back then. Pull out the console from under the bed, find the wires, find the controllers, locate the cartridges.. All part and parcel of early gaming.

 

Dunno how well that'd go over today. I was just thinking about how I had this ridiculously HUGE box laden with an Apple II, 2 drives, a pile of wires, and interface cards and boxes of diskettes. It would take 2 people to safely haul it to the car when we went to wArEz confurhensiz..

 

I suppose it's (the case's) marketing success would simply depend on if people took their VCS to family and friend's gatherings. Maybe just buy another VCS and transport only your media. In which case (nopunintended) make a high-quality media case. A small sturdy box to hold flash stuff and maybe a controller.

 

Brand it Atari as loudly as possible.

[+GoldLeader]

I would want Atari to come over and clean my house and also paint my siding...Like in the Summer.

[Corby]

8 hours ago, GoldLeader said:

I would want Atari to come over and clean my house and also paint my siding...Like in the Summer.

And unjam my big toe

[zzip]

18 hours ago, Keatah said:

Or like StarBlazer and Bolderdash, came out first on the Apple II and they're what I consider the premier versions. While I have them on the 400/800, they just don't play quite the same. And the A2 versions look better. Really they do! Don't know why the Atari ports had such drab and muted colors.

Yeah I noticed Atari 8-bit games until around 1982 used some really muddy-looking colors,  and I'm not sure why either.   I'm pretty sure Boulderdash was originally created on Atari though.

 

18 hours ago, Keatah said:

1st generation classic gaming and RF/NTSC (distortion be damned) go hand in hand. They're inseparable. It's what we remember. It's the essence of gaming on mom's TV set on a wintry afternoon in the basement.

 

18 hours ago, Keatah said:

Altirra is pretty good at giving us a good S-Video "signal". Stella and Atari 800 Emulator are great for RF/NTSC since you can dial in the distortion with a bunch of sliders. I absolutely abhor the pixel-perfect razor-sharp edges of most emulators' unfiltered no-shader looks. So harsh. So not CRT. So not 70's. So not warm and cozy. And while some emulators don't go full-CRT, most all get me that holy-grail S-Video look. I tend to use all available emulator effects. Most very subtle. A recent mistake I did was blowing out everything with bloom. It was like playing in a sunny fogbank! That lasted about an evening.. and I turned it down to like 5% or 2%.

My best friend had his 2600 connected to an aging TV that was probably CRT at its worst, ghosting, fuzzy, buzzing noises when certain colors are displayed.   We played a lot on that system and the image always bothered me,  so I think the CRT effects start bringing back bad memories for me when they are overdone.

 

My default atari800 emulator config has CRT emulation on, but I often get annoyed by how blurry it is and turn it off.    Mame I don't want perfect sharp images either, I want it to look like CRT at it's best, so I'll have scanlines on at 25% visibility and artifacting when needed.   But I've also been messing around with the "deep black" and "vivid color" options in atari800 to make the games look better.   It especially helps when games have those muted colors like mentioned above.  For Mame I use screen shaders like "crt-lotte" and similar which I think makes it look like a real arcade screen before the screen starts to deteriorate.

 

19 hours ago, Keatah said:

As far as arcade cabinets and monitors - that's my sore spot. All the games I played at PinPan Alley - Aladdin's castle - Galaxy World were new or less than a few years old. So they were near-perfect. But they did deteriorate. Most common issues? Burn-in, missing a primary color gun, maybe some convergence.

And when they were new, they looked so good.  Colorful, bright, crisp.   Don't know what kind of monitors they were but they'd typically have a cleaner picture than we'd get out of home TVs at the time.

[Keatah]

3 hours ago, zzip said:

And when they were new, they looked so good.  Colorful, bright, crisp.   Don't know what kind of monitors they were but they'd typically have a cleaner picture than we'd get out of home TVs at the time.

It wasn't so much the tube itself that made the image crisp, but, instead, the simpler electronics. They weren't saddled with NTSC and RF. The arcade PCB signals went right to the horizontal and vertical circuits. No piggybacking on television airwaves or carrier signals. Just straight through. More like a computer monitor if you will. And at a higher frequency too.

 

There weren't any special Unobtainium parts used in their construction. Just simplicity and faster electronics. Additionally there were no tuners and filters to separate out and deconstruct the TV transmission into control/sync signals and the image data.

 

If you take apart a vintage TV and a vintage arcade monitor, that's the first thing you'll note. Double or triple the parts in the TV.

Edited February 16, 2023 by Keatah

[Giles N]

On 2/15/2023 at 7:18 PM, Flojomojo said:

Sorry to be negative, but the poll options were oddly focused on original media. That's not very friendly to Atari's financial situation.

There is nothing mysterious to this - I may simply have had in mind what people here would want to buy that may not be in production yet, nor planned for production.

 

I wasn’t interested in asking people here about everything they wanted to buy from Atari’s software-hardware-outlet, so it didn’t have anything to do with friendly/unfriendly to Atari’s financial situation, it was probably only me not properly making the wording for Q of the poll as tight as it ought to have been.

 

So, my poll-wording should’ve been better.

 

But it has nothing to do with any friendliness/unfriendliness-category.

 

Moreover, - if such things wouid be expected to be well-known and easily found by gamers who actually spend money on this, then Atari could’ve made it a lot easier to get a overview of the situation right now given their 50th anniversary.

 

—

 

Not long after I posted this, I cane to think of other categories I didn’t include.

Again, had nothing to do with any attempt at being friendly/unfriendly etc.

These were the categories/choices that came to my mind.

 

But the wording was flawed; it sorta should have made it clear that this didn’t concern a list of things already out-there for grabs…, or…

the list should’ve been much longer…

 

Sorry if I didn’t come to think of everything…

 

… but e-shop…,  uhm… well, Atari 50 is available on Steam, Switch, PS4, PS5, X-box’es…

Its already made, nothing to produce here…

 

New console-unit… yeah, it could be mentioned in several categories.

 

I think I should have put in some category of a monster-hardware-unit with all sorts of compatibilities with contemporary and retro-software.

 

Perhaps I should have thrown in ‘more games/games-collections’…

 

If I could have added more things to poll right now, coming out of the dialogue here - I would have done it.

Edited February 16, 2023 by Giles N

[+Yurkie]

I would like them to clone the 2600 unicorn chip and use it as the heart of a new 2600. It would have both analog and digital (hdmi) out

[Shawn]

7800 if I had to pick just one. If a multi like the retron or something was to be made I would love to have a 2600\7800,5200 and Jaguar console with cart slots for each (and Lynx if possible but that was a handheld and I understand if it didn't make the cut).

[Giles N]

On 2/15/2023 at 7:18 PM, Flojomojo said:

not very friendly to Atari's financial situation. Atari 50 was

Atari 50 makes it obvious, by looking at the very comtent in the collection, they want to:

 

- be around as a retro-name to be reckoned with (why else the collection contra just completely new games)

- reach new generations ( since they publish on new gen. platforms),

- be remembered as both hardware and software developers (… why else the history line-thing and interviews…?)

 

 

… then,

   if

they are unable to provide the best games made on their hardware-units (2600-Jaguar), how could they lose any fame, status, reputation or nostalgic staying-power, by

providing solid and easy-to-use, backwards-compatibility…?

 

And if they want to get back in, how can it be infriendly to their finacial situation to put out there actual ways to both satisfy old-school-collectors and new gen. curious gamers…?

Edited February 16, 2023 by Giles N

[Giles N]

18 minutes ago, Shawn said:

and Lynx if possible but that was a handheld and I understand if it didn't make the cut).

… there are as far as I can see no reason why games from a handheld couldn’t be run on retro-hardware unit if ones gives up the possibility of the retro-hardware having to be handheld as such, yet I do believe that its possible to make fair-priced handheld devices running very hi-tech hardware…

 

… of course that would either mean a split console in 2 parts - the station and the controller w/ screen …

 

But in my view something like a Super VCS Handheld with a docking-station and a gaming-handheld-unit with backwards compatibility to almost everything Atari (but at least 2600, 5200/800/XL, 7800, Lynx, Jaguar), and contemporary Steam-access, couid really be worth it… it may have to cost 300-350…, but if was easy to use, well built and with some inbuilt games, I think it’d be cool…

[Keatah]

3 hours ago, zzip said:

My best friend had his 2600 connected to an aging TV that was probably CRT at its worst, ghosting, fuzzy, buzzing noises when certain colors are displayed.   We played a lot on that system and the image always bothered me,  so I think the CRT effects start bringing back bad memories for me when they are overdone.

I get it. I had the fortune of seeing the best and the worst of NTSC/RF. I had my own 10" JC Penny b/w portable TV. And parents had the expansive 25" big-screen Zenith Chromacolor II in the living room. Everytime I bought my consoles downstairs it was like going to the arcade. Or getting an upgrade.

 

When CRT effects are overdone the whole thing seems artificial and weighted down. Miasmatic. Lethargic. Full of malaise. For me it's just visually annoying. No bad memories or vibes. When I first discovered BGFX, HLSL, and Blargg, I went totally overboard. Kept trying to fix my first mistake by adding more mistakes. Eventually the game became unplayable. I erased the configuration files and started anew. Fighting an epic battle on three fronts. Doing too much, achieving realism, and satisfying my urge to play with it all. So today it's all about subtlety and accents. My target output is S-Video quality. Sometimes a little less. That's what I aspired to have in the 80's. And even in the 80's it felt a little off playing 2600 games on a razor sharp monitor.

 

It's a pleasure dialing it all in through cfg and ini rather than playing with cables and adapters. But I do miss the CRT buzzing that so often spilled over. I suppose I could get a recording of it and loop it in the background or something. Just. So. Lazy.

 

The WORST visual experience I had was playing Activision's Action Packs & Microsoft Arcade in Windows 3.1. Classic gaming served up in razor sharp 800x600 (my desktop size at the time). Tempest and Battlezone suckedadickus hard because the vector lines were like one-pixel width. Dim and without bulk. The actionpacks were sharper than Lasik. And it looked so artificial. I didn't care much because everything was novel. I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know how popular and widespread emulators would become. I didn't envision much beyond what was available. Today everything's a torrential fire hose. Happy it turned out this way.

 

3 hours ago, zzip said:

My default atari800 emulator config has CRT emulation on, but I often get annoyed by how blurry it is and turn it off.    Mame I don't want perfect sharp images either, I want it to look like CRT at it's best, so I'll have scanlines on at 25% visibility and artifacting when needed.   But I've also been messing around with the "deep black" and "vivid color" options in atari800 to make the games look better.   It especially helps when games have those muted colors like mentioned above. 

Yes some palettes/games look better with higher saturation. I'm a saturation junkie and have separate "overboard" profiles for a few 10 or 15 games. Having a good monitor doesn't help. It makes you want to go even moar off the deep end to see what's possible.

 

I found turning off one of the electron guns brings back memories of playing at the arcades as they went downhill. Galaxy World pushed their machines till they were dichromatic. Then the establishment was suddenly closed. Some years ago the property was razed and now there's title loans and cellphone shops along with fast food joints.

 

Sometimes 25% scanlines is too much. I want just barely enough to see texture. As that's what I recall. I remember eye-tracking vertically moving objects. And when doing so, the scanlines all but disappear. So to each their own I suppose!

 

For different emulators I do have different set-points or tuning goals. In Apple II I want the "white-only text mode text" to be as sharp as possible, even sharper than raw-unfiltered pixels even! Especially in 80-columns. Otherwise I like either standard composite look or the fuzzy RF look when doing graphics. In Apple II emulation I'd argue the fuzzier the better for the graphics.

 

Totally abhor what Apple II looked like on a monochrome monitor. So many vertical lines in the graphics. Just no.

 

3 hours ago, zzip said:

For Mame I use screen shaders like "crt-lotte" and similar which I think makes it look like a real arcade screen before the screen starts to deteriorate.

Yes it looks nice doesn't it? Everyone will see and remember the newly minted machines just a little differently. But all that matters is that it looks pleasing today. In the moment.

[zzip]

19 hours ago, Keatah said:

I get it. I had the fortune of seeing the best and the worst of NTSC/RF. I had my own 10" JC Penny b/w portable TV. And parents had the expansive 25" big-screen Zenith Chromacolor II in the living room. Everytime I bought my consoles downstairs it was like going to the arcade. Or getting an upgrade.

I had a hand-me-down B/W TV when I got my 2600 too.   Used it for several years before I finally got color.   But I don't have any nostalgia for wanting to play the games in B&W,  I still want them to look as good as possible.

 

19 hours ago, Keatah said:

It's a pleasure dialing it all in through cfg and ini rather than playing with cables and adapters. But I do miss the CRT buzzing that so often spilled over. I suppose I could get a recording of it and loop it in the background or something. Just. So. Lazy.

Haha, no thanks.   Obviously everybody latches onto something different for nostalgia. 

 

 It's like that Amiga emulator FS-UAE?   It emulates all the floppy sounds,  and it does quite a good job at it.   But that means loading your disk images at real floppy speeds.   I'd much rather forgo the sounds and have warp-speed loading.   I don't need floppy sounds, or cassette loading sounds or screen buzz.   I also wouldn't want an NES emulator where you had to blow into a microphone to make the games work.    To me these are annoying things we had to endure because our tech was imperfect.

 

There's a reason people who maintain real hardware instead of emulation have multi-carts, gotek drives, video mods, etc,  because they don't want to deal with it either.

 

19 hours ago, Keatah said:

Sometimes 25% scanlines is too much. I want just barely enough to see texture. As that's what I recall. I remember eye-tracking vertically moving objects. And when doing so, the scanlines all but disappear. So to each their own I suppose!

I don't know if I'm at exactly 25%, but I tune it to the point where it's just noticeable but not distracting.    To me scanlines improve percieved resolution.  When scanlines are off, things look more pixelated.   I even noticed this back in the day,  the same 320x200 graphic image that looked good on an ST or Amiga monitor would look very pixelated on a PC monitor,  I could only assume it was because the monitors were higher res.

 

when I set up Dosbox-X I enabled scanlines as a matter of habit.  but I could never get them to look right, if they looked good in one resolution, they looked bad in another,   But then I stopped to think--  did my old PC multi-sync monitor actually have visible scanlines?   Probably not!   So I disabled them

 

19 hours ago, Keatah said:

Yes it looks nice doesn't it? Everyone will see and remember the newly minted machines just a little differently. But all that matters is that it looks pleasing today. In the moment.

Yes it does.  I do wonder why emulators include CRT filters, but video players for SD content don't,  these effects make that content look better too

[Giles N]

… they’re quitting the VCS… if I heard the news…

… they want to stay in there…

… they want - whatever qualities - that made them great in the past, to be appreciated by old and new gamers alike…

… they know the 2600 was the PS/PS2 of its day, …

… but hey, thats almost 50 years ago… and we now write; ‘today’

… they ought to know by now, their overall common failure was to NOT  ensure   game-designers and   game-producers   with that gamer-gut-feel for what was and-or is/isn’t the hot-stuff right now… (‘now’ as in, ‘back then in the 80ies, or right now in the millianistic ‘20ies….)

 

… and if they  hung  around and asked gamers   what   gamers would    like,   want,  wish,  desire,  feel-for,  find-fun,

be made merry by sights n sounds

which pleaseth the mind

as it revels unbound

,  enjoy,  make up great opportunity to waste time, to be  found engrossing in delving into other realms, worlds, stories and drama… whatever any player say…

if they just asked around, checked … and believed the common drift of the conmon gamer-drive… and chose to ride it, ride the gamer-gut-feel-wave,  not just throw themselves into alternative depths just for the sake of proving themselves to be as different as possible on every area… then they’d get it, nail it… score…

 

Edited February 17, 2023 by Giles N

[Giles N]

They knoe their 2600 reputation…

 

… a console that people threw themselves into, onto, to produce and publish on…

 

… then from 5209 onwards, securing game-developers attention, interest and accesibility to reach out as broadly and ‘commercially’ as easily and straightforwardly as possible, stiffled Atari from the 5200 onwards, all the way up to Jaguar…

 

Lots of inventive and/or spearheading hardware made, with little consciouss attention to what the usual gamer prefers…

 

Heavy duty hardware without the ammunition, like ‘who cares’… and obviously so…

 

And now I hope they get it, that unless the capitalize on hardware-backwards compatibility hardware, no hardware from them will have stsy for more than 0,00 nano-seconds,

… if they provide retro-compilations, they need to …

… ensure these have inbuilt keys and doors for further expansions … like upcoming special editions, inbuilt in-game-collection-upgrade-shops …or similar…

 

Moreover, cooperating with other companies aren’t wrong either…

 

… ‘now that I got your attention…’ [etc]

 

 

… making deals with other companies to make top-notch retro game stuff is a nice way to have your label stay strong in Retro-circles…

Edited February 17, 2023 by Giles N

[Keatah]

8 hours ago, zzip said:

Haha, no thanks.   Obviously everybody latches onto something different for nostalgia.

As far as the buzzing noise. I most remember it by Vectrex. Hear it a mile away. Less so on other consoles. It isn't a big deal anymore and I've decided a looping background mp3 or something fixes that. Eh...

 

I don't necessarily liken cfg and ini files to original vintage game nostalgia, if that's what you mean by the above. But tweaking by cfg/ini and not wires and twisting pots has since become a little nostalgic and synonymous with the early days of MAME. For me it certainly is more practical and intuitive and easier. If I want a certain beam thickness and persistence I can dial it in 100x easier than desoldering and swapping resistors. And I wouldn't have to dedicate part of my shop to doing that. Nor maintain a specific parts bin.

 

I like how MAME supports beam flickering. Just a coupla percent of that gives a live shimmering look if you examine it closely. You can even specify overdraw where the beam overshoots its start/stop point. Arcade machines often did this by about 1-2 pixels. Or sometimes the beam would sit at the beginning or end of a line for an instant before it started drawing. This made small points at the tips. Like pushpins connecting strings on a an old-school paper map and corkboard. You don't want to overdo any of those.

 

Playing with this sort of thing was fun in my electronics technician and circuitbending days years ago. Now I simply have zero patience for it.

 

What I would like to see in MAME is something of a synthesizer/sequencer/mixer control board with all the settings on one vast 4K virtual panel. Then I could become a true virtuoso skilled in arcane art of arcade CRT tuning!

 

8 hours ago, zzip said:

 It's like that Amiga emulator FS-UAE?   It emulates all the floppy sounds,  and it does quite a good job at it.   But that means loading your disk images at real floppy speeds.   I'd much rather forgo the sounds and have warp-speed loading.   I don't need floppy sounds, or cassette loading sounds or screen buzz.   I also wouldn't want an NES emulator where you had to blow into a microphone to make the games work.    To me these are annoying things we had to endure because our tech was imperfect.

In WinUAE you can have 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, or turbo, for drive emulation speeds. With or without sounds on any setting.

 

In Altirra I like those authentic drive load sounds. And it's amusingly nice because the 8-bit piped stuff through the speaker as stuff loaded anyways. I guess they call them SIO sounds or something.

 

8 hours ago, zzip said:

There's a reason people who maintain real hardware instead of emulation have multi-carts, gotek drives, video mods, etc,  because they don't want to deal with it either.

Real hardware augmented by flash storage and video mods are solid solutions. They're also the first steps in replacing parts of the computer/console with modern tech. And some of that modern tech is emulation in and of itself. Like a drive simulacrum or ROM chip simulator. I wonder what the next step after that will be? And how long will it take to eventually convert it all over into emulation anyways?

 

I know about CPLD and smaller FPGA being used to replace some custom chips already. So there's that. But it isn't widespread like multicarts or videomods.

Edited February 18, 2023 by Keatah

[GraffitiTavern]

Retro Console-wise? I'm in the category that wouldn't want fully universal, I'd prefer specifically a combo system that could play 2600/7800 + Jaguar games, only 2 slots needed, would keep things more focused. Something with modern cables, decent controllers, and an SD card slot. Ideally if it's FPGA they could emulate a 68EC20 and 2 MB of additional RAM, giving the system the capabilities of the COJAG board and helping the two big bottlenecks of the Jag. If it came with homebrew dev tools then it'd be perfect. You could call it the Sabertooth or something. A repro cabinet with a few of the Atari Games classics (Marble Madness, Cyberball, Gauntlet, Klax, Rampart) would be fun too.

 

Modern Wise? Work with DSM Arcade designs or something on releasing some of the Recharged titles + Akka Arrh to arcades, I just don't think Atari SA has the resources to support a platform of its own(I'm surprised they've been able to back the VCS this long). A good place to ease back into hardware could be getting into some basic DIY computer stuff, not whole machines but components and maybe official ROM+emulator packages for people's hobby projects. The software they've come out with the past 2 years has been good, and Atari 50 is the best retro collection I've ever played(which is because of Digital Eclipse but still).

Edited February 18, 2023 by GraffitiTavern
clarification

[Giles N]

5 hours ago, GraffitiTavern said:

The software they've come out with the past 2 years has been good, and Atari 50

Apart from Atari 50, which releases are those….?

[Giles N]

5 hours ago, GraffitiTavern said:

and Atari 50 is the best retro collection I've ever played(which is because of Digital Eclipse but still).

Would you then want to see a realization of a «Atari 50 - The EXTENDED Onwards-collection» (containing of course many more game-titles for all featured game-systems?)

 

As to this; please give a yes or no.

 

Then… we can discuss the ins-&-outs of the reality of licence-bound game-title-releases…

[GraffitiTavern]

On 2/16/2023 at 4:00 PM, Yurkie said:

I would like them to clone the 2600 unicorn chip and use it as the heart of a new 2600. It would have both analog and digital (hdmi) out

Didn't they make a 2600-on-a-chip design for the Flashback 2? I wonder why they haven't made anything similar since

On 2/18/2023 at 7:13 PM, Giles N said:

Apart from Atari 50, which releases are those….?

I've enjoyed Missile Command Recharged, Kombinera looks good, haven't gotten a chance to play it myself but glad they are making new IP

On 2/18/2023 at 7:19 PM, Giles N said:

Would you then want to see a realization of a «Atari 50 - The EXTENDED Onwards-collection»

Yes ofc, getting to play the Atari Games stuff(big fan of Gauntlet and Area 51) and Ballblazer from Lucasarts would be great

[GraffitiTavern]

On 2/15/2023 at 1:18 PM, Flojomojo said:

This is from 2016 but I don't think they've gained or lost any intellectual property since then.

I know they definitely sold off Alone in the Dark, besides that I'm not sure. The most recent IP catalog I've seen was from 2021 or early 2022

[zzip]

On 2/17/2023 at 9:45 PM, Keatah said:

Real hardware augmented by flash storage and video mods are solid solutions. They're also the first steps in replacing parts of the computer/console with modern tech. And some of that modern tech is emulation in and of itself. Like a drive simulacrum or ROM chip simulator. I wonder what the next step after that will be? And how long will it take to eventually convert it all over into emulation anyways?

Right but if you go to some flash memory storage for your classic hardware, you will lose the floppy sounds, the slow loading, etc.   But that's fine because people really don't like to wait for I/O.   If I still had real hardware, I'd go for such solutions.

 

So it's strange to me that people want emulators to do things that we wanted to get away from on real hardware,  slow I/O, loud floppy noises,  etc.