OK. Im new to Jinks. I have read where many people have dogged it. I have watched video reviews on it where it didn't do so good. Granted it is not a typical 7800 game I'm use to. From a technical standpoint it actually does some impressive feats.
I have to admit that I don't belong in those majorities. On the contrary I find Jinks rather fun. I did find a few flaws here and there like my ball disappearing all of a sudden or going through objects it shouldn't but the game is s
The other day, I was cleaning out drawers upstairs, which were full of our kids' school stuff. Old papers and art and various supplies and books.. Out came this purple box, which I assumed was a pencil box.
But when I opened it, nope! It's a Nyko Gamoboy game case. And that writing on it? That's my wife's handwriting. It all came flooding back to me like a sharp zoom! My oldest child's first game system was a Gameboy Color. We learned pretty quickly that if he took it to a fri
Hi and welcome to Lance’s Laboratory! This is the second entry of what will be my personal blog, sharing small slices of life with you from within my Lab.
For those of you who are just getting to know me for the first time, my name is Lance Ringquist, I’m from Minnesota, and for nearly 40 years I’ve been in the Atari business operating Video 61, one of the last surviving original retail Atari distributors. We started in the video business as a local chain of video rental stores serving the
I have had this game called Crossbow in my collection for a while now. It is for the XE computers. Tonight, I played it for the first time. Keep in mind that I have never played this game before let alone heard of it. How did I do? I got 478,000 points. I have no clue if that is good or bad because it doesn't take long to start racking up points in this game.
Did I enjoy the game? Oh yes! I even played a second game but did not do as well. I have yet to discover how to reach th
AtariAge will again be attending the annual Portland Retro Gaming Expo, taking place this year October 13-15 at the Oregon Convention Center! We'll have an even larger booth this year, the largest we've ever had at the show. And we'll have many new games available to purchase at the show, as well as demos for upcoming games! The AtariAge booth will be located right near the main entrance to the vendor hall, so you can't miss it as you enter the show!
Many homebrew developers will be in att
I received an A1 series 7800 main board in the mail recently where the owner stated it was working properly but was missing a pause button for some reason. Well, when I receive a 7800 system for services, one of the things I do is to pull up a test utility without any controllers plugged in. The reason for this is to ensure that the system controller ports are working properly.
But you ask... "How does not having any controllers plugged in, help to know if the ports are working properly?" E
The 'Tower' was without power most of last week due to powerful storms on Father's day. As a result it put me behind a bit on console services and projects. Well last night as I've been working kinda constantly on console stuff to try and get caught up, I took a break and decided to do something I'd been meaning to try and implement for a while now.
I'm sure many of you here are aware of the Atari Vox? In summary it is a small device that plugs into controller port 2 on the 2600 or 7800 sys
So over the past few months, I've been trying to find ways of making the RCA jacks that I install into consoles more secure so they don't free spin over time. What I've been doing in the past that actually works 90% of the time far as I know...is that instead of using the small lock ring washer that typically comes with RCA jacks, I use inner star washers of the right diameter to do the same thing, but with more points of contact to lock into the plastic. It also has the advantage of holding the
Seems to be lately that I'm getting in more and more Intellivision consoles that all arrive with the same similar condition. Basically what most might call a black screen when powering on the console but it is more like a dark grey screen with a few lines along the bottom of the screen of even lighter grey. Pressing the reset button does produce a full black screen that will flicker and come back to the same dark grey screen or sometimes it might do something different like an all fuscia colored
My first 7800 was received in the early 1990s...long after the company stopped making them. What games I got with it was pretty much all I ended up with. I admit I had mixed feelings about the system because I wanted to like it, I wanted to enjoy the games, but the controllers were keeping me from doing so. Often times I forced myself to play it, enduring hand cramps for a couple of hours, just to play it. The only game I found I liked using the joystick on was Ms. Pac-Man. That's it. So I p
Received my BBPro 7800 adapter today and we have some really good things and some not so good that I'm hoping can be worked out in time.
- First the good, is that the menu of course is easy to navigate working in the same manner
- This might be the fastest loading flash cart for the 7800 with the exception of the older Mateos cart
- Plays the many of the original released games without issues including both Commando and BallBlazer with properly balanced and proper sounding Pokey audio! Ni
Voting is now OPEN for the 5th Annual Atari Homebrew Awards, celebrating the best in new Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, 8-Bit, Lynx and Jaguar homebrew games released in the past year!
VOTE HERE: https://forums.atariage.com/forum/203-atari-homebrew-awards/
VOTE for your favorite homebrew games in twenty-one different categories, such as Best Graphics, Best Music+Sound, Best Packaging and Best WIP! Voting closes on February 17th, so make sure you make your voice heard on your favorites!
The winners o
Won't got into too many details on this other than to state up front, that I try to be as transparent as possible with the work and services I provide. As a consequence of this, mistakes can and will happen. It is just a matter of when. One such big mistake happen to me this week while installing a very expensive DCDigital setup into a clients Dreamcast. I actually had the main installation done and was ready to test. However, in order for a DC to boot up, it requires that the cooling fan and GD
The BackBit Pro multi-system flash cartridge is quite amazing in all the systems it supports and the Atari 5200 is one of the newest systems to recently be added over the past few months. One cool thing that the BBPro cart has for the 5200 side of things that other similar devices do not have, is the ability to reset the console and go back to the game folder browser without having to power cycle the console. This feature works out of the box on the 2-port model 5200s by having a selector switch
I originally did most of the work on this 5200 about 8 years ago. It was also one of the first projects I did and to be honest, the wiring work inside wasn't that great. For some time I had wanted to redo it all similar to how I redid my 7800 about a year ago but just never got around to it. Well, now that I have a new BackBit Pro flash cartridge and it was designed to allow resets back to the game menu, I felt it was time to perform a small modification to allow this function of my BackBit Pro
A quickie game review by RickR. I'm having some fun going through the old PC CD games I've kept over the years.
Game: Hot Wheels Stunt Track Driver 2
My Take:
It's a very simple racing game with an interesting use of FMV technology. The game uses FMV movies for the track footage with a 3D car rendered on top of that. It works surprisingly well! There are plenty of tracks. But the game is meant more for kids and isn't very challenging. I like the ability to do "stunts"
I had a blog entry a little while ago about the desire to set up a machine to run my old collection of DOS and CD-ROM games. I successfully set up a Win 7 laptop, but hinted at something better....
Well, here we go. It's a Gateway Profile 4 all-in-one with a built-in LCD screen. Windows XP, Pentium 4 (single core), 1GB DDR memory, 40GB HD. Built in speakers, modem, network, DVD drive, etc. It needed a bit of repair, but I got it up and working.
I tried DOOM and DOOM2 first, and they
As per my prior blog post, I'm attempting to re-enjoy all the old classic 90's PC games. In that post, I mentioned using an old laptop running Windows 7. Well as luck would have it, something special has been donated to me. Check this thing out -- the Gateway Profile 4. It's a complete all-in-one Windows XP machine with a built-in LCD monitor, 3.5" floppy drive, DVD drive, speakers, Pentium 4, and....that's about all I know at this point. It may need a bit of repair. My best guess is that
Another day, another hare-brained project.
I've gotten the urge to play the multitude of old PC games from the 80's -> 00's. Think Doom, Quake, King's Quest, etc. I kept almost all of those games, especially if they were CD based. What I've found is that they mostly don't work on a Windows 10 PC without some help from DOSBox or D-fend. My idea was to set aside an old laptop exclusively for this purpose.
A friend gave me an old Dell laptop. It's a 2010 model and has Windows 7 i
We're proud to announce the immediate availability of three new games for the Atari Jaguar - Gods, The Chaos Engine, and Stormbringer! You can now enjoy these three classic computer games on the Jaguar with new soundtracks and no slow floppy loading! Gods and The Chaos Engine were developed by The Bitmap Brothers and were popular and well-reviewed back when they were released. Stormbringer is the fourth game in the Magic Knight series created by David Jones.
Click on the images below to jump
What started out as a small, innocent adventure has turned into a bit of an obsession. Up until last year (2021) the thoughts of owning a Famicom system were a dream, an afterthought, a fantasy. I had an opportunity to import a junk model last year, fix it up, and get a few games I was after. The library of games I obtained hit a niche in me I had been missing from the good ol' NES years yet I didn't realize I was missing them. And the visual appearance of the Famicom did not agree with me a
I've done a video on something similar to this but here is a rundown on what I was encountering:
A 5200 sent in for services had a note stating that top fire button wouldn't work on the console. This is an issue I've run into before and in fact have created a video on it. It can be due to the controller having a broken trace of course on the flex circuit inside it. But... it can also very well be due to a faulty 4052 MUX chip inside the console located at U13 or A13 depending on the age of
As part of a large project I've been working on for over a month now, one of the situations I encounter is when a console is sent in for services that has already had another tech's hands inside it. In most cases, it might be simple repairs like replacing an IC chip or some capacitors. But now and again, I get a console sent to me that I don't always know what to expect. In those cases, there can be undesired surprises waiting for me. Here is a 2600 that I would like to show as an example of wha
