Looking for unreleased Activision and Imagic titles

[Alex]

Ken, good to hear from you again.

 

Yes, my complaints about the original would be along the same lines as the article. Why not license one of the existing free 2600 emulators? They're much more accurate and already written - they would probably just need some tweaking to get them ready. People would be more pleased with the quality, the community would view it positively, and the emu authors would probably be thrilled and also have a chance to make some money.

 

Also - more games. That's an obvious one, but it's hard to understand why certain games are excluded when it doesn't seem like it would take much to include them (unless there are licensing issues).

 

About protos - I personally don't know of any other Imagic protos that have been discovered. I believe there may be three Activision protos out there, and I have screen shots from two of them. Last I knew these two mystery games were sent to you - did you ever figure out what they were? Will they be included in such a compilation?

 

Mystery Game 1

Mystery Game 2

 

The third is Thwocker, which I have not personally seen nor has the ROM been circulated.

[khryssun]

Ken,

don't you want to include an original game as bonus ? In the spirit of these old good Atari games ?

 

What do you think of Yar's Quest ? Lot of Atari fans send me enthusiastic emails about it and asked me for a new game (Thanks to you guys.... and be patient).

 

Damn I've got to rename the game et change some graphics, they are copyrighted by Telegames....

http://khryssun.cjb.net/

[Scott Stilphen]

Yars' Quest Easter egg...

Well khryssun, I tried to find it, but I'm sure it's something maddeningly simple that I'm overlooking

[PeeknPoke]

Ken,

 

Its always good to hear about a new package for old software.

 

even if you consider that video footage would cost too much (but have you seen some inverview disks, looks like they used a comcorder to film it!) I would like to see a big history file on each game, with scans, ads and suchlike, giving the player a view of the development of the games.

 

I didnt mind the other Activision packs (mumble, mumble.. but as another user said, Dont do a PC port as we already have a large emulator community and that would hurt PC sales.

 

A playstation pack would be welcome as would any next-gen machine playing great Activision titles.

 

Shame you say no-one from the "old-skool" is there anymore over at Activision, thats sad

 

 

anyway, thanks!

 

Lee

[Eckhard Stolberg]

I don't know what you guys have against a PC version. If it included all the Activision, Imagic and Absolute games plus some prototypes, that aren't available on the net yet, plus some multimedia stuff, I for one would like to see such a package come out on the PC.

 

As for the PSX, this console is just not fast enough to do a proper universal VCS emulator. You'd have to use hand optimized assembles code and still would need to do some customizing (i.e. disabling unnessessary calculations on a gamescreen by gamescreen basis) to get get the games to play faithfully on the PSX. Even the old emulator wasn't THAT bad. It could do full frame rate and collision detection in every scanline on a fast enough machine. On the first PC versions you could even adjust this in the INI files. The documentation didn't mention that though, and the sound really was pretty unacurate.

 

And for Ken:

You might want ot contact Glenn Saunders from the Cyberpunks. Their address can be found on the links page of this site. Glenn has done a very nice video documentation on the VCS and still has plenty of interview footage left over. Also he tried to get Hasbro into releasing a VCS emulator package. This never happened, but for this project he had Bradford Mott brush up his Stella emulator to a fancyer product. So you probably could get everything you need easily from the Cyberpunks. And Brad's emulator is written entirely in C++, so porting it to one of the faster consoles might not be much of a problem either. You can already check out the quality of this emulator by downloading one of the older version from the emulation page of this site.

 

 

Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

[+Random Terrain]

If you don't think the Playstation is fast enough, how about the Playstation 2?

[+Cafeman]

Well, I have Konami Classics, Namco Classics, and atari and midway emus on my psx -- and it's fast enough to emulate those 68000 arcade coin-ops perfectly. I suppose the emulater is written more low-level than the 2600 one?

[Ian Primus]

Actually, I bought the Activision disc before I had ever seen an actual Atari 2600 in person. I thought that that was what the games actually looked like, and I thought they were great. I played Kaboom! for hours. Later, I actually managed to get an Atari, and found a copy of Kaboom! several months later. The paddles make the game much better. Any plans for a PSX paddle? Ironically enough, I didn't even grow up in the 2600 era, but rather the NES/SNES era. I still like the 2600 better

 

BTW-will the PSX discs suffer from a new sort of Actiplaque 15 years down the road?

 

Ian Primus

ian.primus@usa.net

[liquid_sky]

Kust to let everyone know how I feel,

I own both Activision's game vault 3 (or 4)? with all 3 Atari packs and a Commadore 64 pack. I had no internet access at the time, so this was my only option. Shortly after i got a copy of Williams arcade classics. I beleive both products were good (id never seen an non-commerical emulator before) I give the nod to the Digital Eclipse version, its alot smoother on my old p-120. anyway just thought I'd put my 2 cents in

[popeal]

Wow, this is a great topic here! Loving it!

 

Anyways, just like everyone else, I would love to see some video history footage... look at the "Intellivision Lives!" for the PC - lots of good games, lots of history, box scans, history, easter eggs, and video footage of the people behind the scenes.... I can't wait for the new Intellivision disk to come out!

 

Have all that, and it will be something to rave about. Look at the good reviews that the Intellivision disk got? We need that for the next Activision disk - I don't care if it won't sell more than the new Tony Hawk XVII, but, at least give the older games the justice it deserves. Playing the old games aren't history enough - it's good to know what went on as well to try to imagine the experience...

 

Al www.blowoutmagazine.com

[Eckhard Stolberg]

About the emulator speed on the PSX:

 

There are two major differences between arcade emulation and VCS emulation. The first is that arcade games have a more advanced graphics hardware than the VCS. If the game only sets up a couple of sprite and background pointers once per frame and then lets the graphics hardware do the rest of the work, you can write an optimized routine to handle this. And since this routine would only have to be called once per frame, you don't need too much processing power for the emulator. But the VCS only has enough video memory for one scanline. So the game has to change the graphics data in every line to get to display anything. Most games even change the graphics data in the middle of a scanline to get better looking displays. This means that the handling routine for the graphics processor has to be called a lot more for a VCS emulator. Also you have to check if any access to the TIA would cause some of the special graphics tricks to happen that are beyond the original TIA specifications. Examples for that would be the Cosmic Ark starfield effect or the extra tanks display in Robot Tank.

 

The second difference is that arcade emulators only need to work with one game, while a VCS emulator has to work with many games. If you know the game you want to emulate, you can customize your emulator to it for better results. For example in Kaboom the biggest part of the screen is only filled with the bombs and the paddles. The bombs are one sprite that gets repositioned during the screen and the paddles are another sprite. If you only wanted to emulate Kaboom, you could write the emulator in such a way that it wouldn't render any other objects besides these two sprites and wouldn't have to check for collisions with any other objects either. Then this emulator could probably run at full speed on the PSX.

But if you wanted to release an emulator package with 30-50 games, it might not be worth spending so much development time with essentially rewriting your emulator for each game.

 

The PS2 on the other hand is running at about 300MHz, right? I think this should be enough to handle an universal VCS emulator at the full frame rate.

 

 

Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg