Older arcade conversions

[christo930]

On 3/2/2024 at 12:57 PM, space_dungeon said:

You are right that there is something said about bringing home an arcade game.  But the arcade game has to be iconic like PacMan or Defender, which was incredible for 1982 on the 5200. Games like PacMan, Defender, Centipede really made the 5200 shine in 1982.  Bringing a 1978 Arcade Baseball game, would be digressing, especially if you had game like RS Baseball.

Says who?  Lots of arcade conversions were not "iconic"  Things that are iconic are, by definition, not most things.

 

Why not both?  Though, honestly, I think the arcade version would have far outsold the real sports version.  The arcade version simply had wider appeal.  Arcade games had wider appeal than a complex sports game.

[BIGHMW]

Well, to put in MY 2 cents on this as a longtime 5200 owner (41 years as of May 19th this year) I was brought to the 5200 originally by both its brilliant version of Pac-Man and also by the realness of the arcade experience with the (then-soon-to-be-released) Trak-Ball in which made Missile Command head and shoulders THE ABSOLUTE BEST 5200 port (until I later discovered 5200 Centipede after never seeing it before putting in the cart only having seen the 400/800 port before that) money could buy, and then Defender, and the other later-released arcade hits came along and then came RealSports Baseball, THE BEST baseball video game you could play ON ANY SYSTEM..... PERIOD!!!

 

Choice of what team to be on (home or visitor), what pitch to throw, what fielder to throw to, whether or not you wanted to steal a base, even BUNT!!! ....or check a swing if you're not sure. ONLY RealSports Baseball had it, as for the umpire voice, until then, if you wanted a voice in an Intellivision game, you had to buy an Intellivoice module for that shit and who's gonna spend the (then) vookoo $$$ for that??? Atari built the voice into the game itself, and, they also allowed you to disable it too, in which increased the speed of the play, the disable voice mode was also later made available in Berzerk too, in which also sped up the play in that arcade hit too!!!

 

Now as for the original 5200 pack-in game I myself would've gone with Pac-Man myself knowing that Coleco was going to pack its best title Donkey Kong with ColecoVision, but before eventually deciding on Super Breakout, in which while she may not be THE best choice was still a good game, Atari WAS going to include Asteroids as the pack-in game, it was even designated the catalog number CX5201, but it remained unfinished and even erratic in its unfinished form until our very own Paul Lay @playsoft (by request  ) decided to add some much-needed central/neutral "dead-zone" on the analog controls, in which stabilized them to the point of making the game much more playable. That "hack" version is available here, and, also, to my surprise (I did not expect him to do this but he did!), Paul did even one better, he decided to take the 400/800 version, and port it over to the 5200, and map its options to the 5200 keypad, and, even improved the defensive systems' (shields/hyperspace/flip-over/none) response from a 500ms delay to a mere 30ms delay. meaning instant response in which saved lives in which with the original 400/800 version's still-lame 500ms delay would've been lost. The A8 conversion and the improved defense version are here too.

 

The ONLY reason the 5200 lost the war despite having the better arcade and sports titles was Coleco's over-saturation of the market, they definitely made mediocre arcade titles like Exidy's Mouse Trap, Pepper II, and Venture, Sega's Space Fury and Subroc and Universal's Cosmic Avenger, LadyBug, and Mr. Do! more sell-able as home hits, Atari hung in there with THE BEST arcade titles money could buy and eventually introduced the VCS adapter for playing 2600 games on the 5200 but the "innovative" analog dual-potentiometer-based CX52 controller was its bugaboo, originally intended to be advanced for 360-degree control for titles like Star Raiders and the iconic RealSports titles, was just not the best for 4-directional control for arcade games like Pac-Man, Dig-Dug or Qix.

 

 

Asteroids - 5200 Version - 1982 Prototype.bin Asteroids - 5200 Version - Hack.bin Asteroids - 8-Bit Conversion - Original.bin Asteroids - 8-Bit Conversion - Improved Defense.bin

Edited March 4 by BIGHMW

[christo930]

On 3/3/2024 at 11:15 PM, BIGHMW said:

by both its brilliant version of Pac-Man

I disagree about the brilliance of 5200 Pac Man.  It was certainly better than the 2600 version, but that ain't saying much. For an actual brilliant port, see 8k Pac Man on the 2600 or Pac Man Arcade on the 5200.  They did do a much better job with Ms Pac Man.

 

On 3/3/2024 at 11:15 PM, BIGHMW said:

they definitely made mediocre arcade titles like Exidy's Mouse Trap, Pepper II, and Venture, Sega's Space Fury and Subroc and Universal's Cosmic Avenger, LadyBug, and Mr. Do!

Mediocre?  Mr Do! is one of the best arcade games of the era.  Pepper II is a lot of fun and so is both Venture and Mouse Trap, though I wouldn't say they were among the best the arcades had to offer.  Atari had far more arcade conversions than Coleco.

 

The game I would say is mediocre (on the Colecovision, not the arcade)  is Donkey Kong.  The screens are too short.  Not all the screens are included. Like most of the Colecovision library, I don't think DK is running at 60fps.

[BIGHMW]

2 hours ago, christo930 said:

I disagree about the brilliance of 5200 Pac Man.  It was certainly better than the 2600 version, but that ain't saying much. For an actual brilliant port, see 8k Pac Man on the 2600 or Pac Man Arcade on the 5200.  They did do a much better job with Ms Pac Man.

 

Mediocre?  Mr Do! is one of the best arcade games of the era.  Pepper II is a lot of fun and so is both Venture and Mouse Trap, though I wouldn't say they were among the best the arcades had to offer.  Atari had far more arcade conversions than Coleco.

 

The game I would say is mediocre (on the Colecovision, not the arcade)  is Donkey Kong.  The screens are too short.  Not all the screens are included. Like most of the Colecovision library, I don't think DK is running at 60fps.

I also own a ColecoVision as well as a 5200, I never said those games were mediocre as to their quality I was strictly referring to their lack of arcade success as opposed to their performance at home, I also dig Mouse Trap, Pepper II and most of the other games CV had.

 

As for the 8K version of 2600 Pac-Man I DO mind you own both a Jr. and a 7800 so yes I do think it’s a great version of the game.

[zzip]

2 hours ago, christo930 said:

I disagree about the brilliance of 5200 Pac Man.  It was certainly better than the 2600 version, but that ain't saying much. For an actual brilliant port, see 8k Pac Man on the 2600 or Pac Man Arcade on the 5200.  They did do a much better job with Ms Pac Man.

 

2 hours ago, christo930 said:

The game I would say is mediocre (on the Colecovision, not the arcade)  is Donkey Kong.  The screens are too short.  Not all the screens are included. Like most of the Colecovision library, I don't think DK is running at 60fps.

Those games may look weak in retrospect, but for 1982 they were practically arcade quality.   We had been used to seeing weak approximations of arcade graphics from the 2600 and even the Intellivision.   Along comes the 5200 and Colecovision and suddenly we're seeing graphics that seemed really close to the arcade.   Of course we knew that most arcade monitors were vertical and TVs horizontal so that's why Pacman and DK screens were wider and DK had 5 platforms, not 6.

 

We also couldn't boot MAME back then to see just how far those conversions fell short either.  So we thought they were really close with minor alterations.

[ledzep]

2 hours ago, christo930 said:

I disagree about the brilliance of 5200 Pac Man.  It was certainly better than the 2600 version, but that ain't saying much. For an actual brilliant port, see 8k Pac Man on the 2600 or Pac Man Arcade on the 5200.  They did do a much better job with Ms Pac Man.

 

I suppose he's also restricting his opinion to when those games were first released, back in the day.  At that time the 5200 Pac-Man was great (even though I don't care for the game) and superior homebrews did not exist yet.  So, it's comparing like to like during the era.

 

I can see both ways of reading "they definitely made mediocre arcade titles" but I think he's right in that the arcade games themselves were not that popular or fantastic as games though I would disagree about Space Fury, I love that game but then I think (know) that all vector games are better than raster games, hahaahaha.  As far as I remember nobody I went to arcades with cared about the rest of those games much except maybe Venture and the 2600 version of Venture was garbage until the homebrew Venture Reloaded arrived.  Sometimes having a weak version of an arcade port is just as disappointing as not having it at all (2600 Pac-Man).  Glad that homebrew versions can fix those mistakes even if it takes decades later.

[zzip]

2 hours ago, christo930 said:

Mediocre?  Mr Do! is one of the best arcade games of the era.  Pepper II is a lot of fun and so is both Venture and Mouse Trap, though I wouldn't say they were among the best the arcades had to offer.  Atari had far more arcade conversions than Coleco.

Mr. Do!  was a lot more fun than Dig Dug IMO, but Dig Dug was a more well-known game.   Atari had more well-known titles in their portfolio.   Coleco licensed the leftovers, but many of them were still fun games that just didn't get to be that popular in the arcades for whatever reason.    Coleco had Roc N Rope,  a game I used to like playing in the arcade, but it wasn't very common-  I only ever saw it in one arcade back then.

[+Defender_2600]

5 hours ago, zzip said:

Of course we knew that most arcade monitors were vertical and TVs horizontal so that's why Pacman and DK screens were wider and DK had 5 platforms, not 6.

 

No, just bad design. 184 vertical pixels are sufficient to display 6 ramps. See the VIC 20 (1983) version. And with 192 vertical pixels you can get even better.

 

On the other hand, it would have been a bad idea to eliminate some horizontal corridors in Pac-Man due to the low vertical resolution.

 

 

[christo930]

20 hours ago, zzip said:

Those games may look weak in retrospect, but for 1982 they were practically arcade quality.   We had been used to seeing weak approximations of arcade graphics from the 2600 and even the Intellivision.   Along comes the 5200 and Colecovision and suddenly we're seeing graphics that seemed really close to the arcade.   Of course we knew that most arcade monitors were vertical and TVs horizontal so that's why Pacman and DK screens were wider and DK had 5 platforms, not 6.

 

We also couldn't boot MAME back then to see just how far those conversions fell short either.  So we thought they were really close with minor alterations

I think Ms Pac Man is actually a pretty brilliant conversion for the 5200.  It's not like they couldn't do great versions of arcade games, it's that they usually didn't do them.

 

I do think you have a fair point about modern homebrews though. I wasn't actually making that comparison, so much as I was pointing out what a brilliant port looks like in terms of Pac Man.

 

Modern homebrewers are just not doing the same thing they were doing BITD. They had different goals. They had different considerations.  Extending the game could cost the company millions of Dollars.  An OK port was way better than no port or even a better port 6-12 months later when everyone has moved onto the next big thing.

 

We may not have had mame, but we did have an arcade (albeit a small one) on almost every corner. Corner stores were the primary source of my arcade gaming back then.

[zzip]

18 hours ago, Defender_2600 said:

 

No, just bad design. 184 vertical pixels are sufficient to display 6 ramps. See the VIC 20 (1983) version. And with 192 vertical pixels you can get even better.

 

On the other hand, it would have been a bad idea to eliminate some horizontal corridors in Pac-Man due to the low vertical resolution.

 

 

Several home conversions had six platforms, including the 2600 version.   The 2600 version also doesn't fill the screen horizontally.    But I don't know anyone who'd rather play the 2600 version over the Colecovision.  Having arcade-like graphics and sound effects was a bigger deal to most gamers than having 6 platforms.

[christo930]

21 hours ago, zzip said:

Mr. Do!  was a lot more fun than Dig Dug IMO, but Dig Dug was a more well-known game.   Atari had more well-known titles in their portfolio.   Coleco licensed the leftovers, but many of them were still fun games that just didn't get to be that popular in the arcades for whatever reason.    Coleco had Roc N Rope,  a game I used to like playing in the arcade, but it wasn't very common-  I only ever saw it in one arcade back then.

Atari had all their own IPs plus the deep pockets and prestige to get the biggest licenses. 

I agree about Rock n Rope. Very good game.  I only got to play the arcade version though.  I didn't have a CV BITD.  I got my first CV in the mid 90s.  The home port is pretty good.

 

Dig Dug was pretty well known, IMHO, Mr Do! was a much better game and it was fairly well known.

[Flyindrew]

5 minutes ago, zzip said:

Several home conversions had six platforms, including the 2600 version.   The 2600 version also doesn't fill the screen horizontally.    But I don't know anyone who'd rather play the 2600 version over the Colecovision.  Having arcade-like graphics and sound effects was a bigger deal to most gamers than having 6 platforms.

Maybe I'm looking at this with the perspective of sitting in the year 2024, but I dont think Colecovision Donkey Kong is that great of a port of the game.  The Atari 8 bit version (released several months after Coleco) blows it away on all fronts. In fact Id argue that 5200 Pac Man, Moon Patrol and Defender are far more arcade accurate ports than Donkey Kong was for Colecovision. 

 

As far as preferring the 2600 port of Donkey Kong over the Colecovision port...I raise my hand. Not for game play reasons, more for sentimental reasons as it brings back warm childhood memories regarding the day I was taken to buy it.

 

 

[christo930]

11 minutes ago, zzip said:

Several home conversions had six platforms, including the 2600 version.   The 2600 version also doesn't fill the screen horizontally.    But I don't know anyone who'd rather play the 2600 version over the Colecovision.  Having arcade-like graphics and sound effects was a bigger deal to most gamers than having 6 platforms.

The TI994/A version has the full screen and uses the same graphics chip as the Colecovision.  I'm willing to overlook the game not being perfect due to hardware limitations. But for some reason that isn't hardware, they decided to make the screen smaller.  Perhaps it had to do with the platforms being skinnier and they didn't like the look or something.

[zzip]

26 minutes ago, christo930 said:

Modern homebrewers are just not doing the same thing they were doing BITD. They had different goals. They had different considerations.  Extending the game could cost the company millions of Dollars.  An OK port was way better than no port or even a better port 6-12 months later when everyone has moved onto the next big thing.

Exactly, homebrewers have the luxury of time to get the port "right",  company-hired progammers had a deadline.

 

But back in the day I think we were judging 5200/CV ports against what we were used to getting on the 2600.   The 5200/CV were so much closer to the arcade that we'd easily overlook small details like no whites in the eyes of Pacman ghosts or green hammers in DK.

 

The homebrewers have consistently surprised me by taking ports I thought were adequate, like Pac-man, Popeye, Atari8 Donkey Kong and making them bettter than I thought they could be.

 

36 minutes ago, christo930 said:

We may not have had mame, but we did have an arcade (albeit a small one) on almost every corner. Corner stores were the primary source of my arcade gaming back then.

True, but the corner stores, laundromats and pizza parlors typically had 1-3 games each.   Something like Donkey Kong was rare to find outside of proper arcades in my area.

[zzip]

6 minutes ago, Flyindrew said:

Maybe I'm looking at this with the perspective of sitting in the year 2024, but I dont think Colecovision Donkey Kong is that great of a port of the game.  The Atari 8 bit version (released several months after Coleco) blows it away on all fronts. In fact Id argue that 5200 Pac Man, Moon Patrol and Defender are far more arcade accurate ports than Donkey Kong was for Colecovision. 

Yes that's a hindsight viewpoint.   CV Donkey Kong has been bested many times over,  and the Atari 8-bit version plays much better

 

in late 1982,  Donkey Kong was one of the hottest games around and the CV port really turned heads.   We really hadn't seen an arcade ports so detailed.   You also have to keep in mind that every in-store CV Kiosk was showing off Donkey Kong, and you weren't seeing Moon Patrol or Defender on 5200 Kiosks-  usually Super Breakout or Defender,  occasionally Pac-man. 

[schuwalker]

On 3/5/2024 at 12:55 PM, BIGHMW said:

I also own a ColecoVision as well as a 5200, I never said those games were mediocre as to their quality I was strictly referring to their lack of arcade success as opposed to their performance at home, I also dig Mouse Trap, Pepper II and most of the other games CV had.

 

As for the 8K version of 2600 Pac-Man I DO mind you own both a Jr. and a 7800 so yes I do think it’s a great version of the game.

Exidy was heeuva a lot smaller arcade manufacturer than what Atari was churning out #'s wise. That's an unfair comparison if you're going that route.