Justin

LETSS GOOOOOO!

This is a MONTH LONG Squad Challenge! You have through December 31st to post your High Score! Take the extra time to enjoy the game!

Classic Game Room has a review of F-ZERO for Super Nintendo! It's a great place to start if you're new to the game!

F-ZERO Super Nintendo Entertainment System Controller: CONTROL PAD / KEYBOARD / PLAYER'S CHOICE Difficulty Level: Grand Prix > Knight League > Standard Class > Mute City I Bonus Challenge: Grand Prix > Knight League > Standard Class > Silence Play on: Real Hardware / Dedicated Console / MAME / Emulation OK! ✔ Squad Challenge ends 11:59 pm PST December 31, 2022 Nominated by @Justin and @Atari 5200 Guy Objective Play for the best possible time using the difficulty settings defined in the challenge. Post a photo or YouTube video of your score in this thread. Scores must be achieved between December 1st through December 31st, 2022. Screen captures are not allowed as they are more easily manipulated for falsified scores. Multiple submissions are permitted. The player with the fastest time at the end of the competition is the victor! Eligibility Anyone can join in. All players are welcome! Play Rules Games may be played on real hardware, Flashback / Mini console, or emulation, using any controller or keyboard, following all rules and game settings defined in the challenge. Choosing between real hardware or emulation, and choosing which controller to play on is part of formulating your strategy. Enhancements, rewinds and hacked versions of this game are not allowed. Difficulty Level Grand Prix > Knight League > Standard Class > Mute City I. This will be the 1st Circuit on Knight League, which will appear first when you begin your game. We are playing for the best overall time to complete the circuit at Mute City I. At the title screen select GRAND PRIX. Players may select any air car they wish. Next, select the League and class in which you wish to race. Players will select KNIGHT LEAGUE, then STANDARD CLASS. This will start you at Mute City I. For the primary Squad Challenge, we only need to post our scores for Mute City I. You do not have to play the rest of the courses unless you want to. The main Challenge is for the best overall time to complete the circuit at Mute City I. Bonus Challenge Grand Prix > Knight League > Standard Class > Silence. We are holding a BONUS CHALLENGE this year! If you complete Knight League and post a time for the Silence Circuit (the final course in Knight League) you can post your score as part of our Bonus Challenge. At the Final Standings we will be posting scores for both Mute City I AND Silence Circuits, similar to a Double Feature like we just did with our Frogger challenge. If submitting a score for the Bonus Challenge, please denote your score as being for the SILENCE Course. Silence is the 5th and last Circuit on Knight League, which will appear after you have successfully completed your race through the previous four Circuits in Knight League, which starts with Mute City I (as explained above). Fair Play Your integrity is everything. Players should play fairly, be honest, and have fun! Falsified scores will result in your immediate removal from the site. It goes without saying that we will not allow cheats, hacks, cartridge frying, enhancements, rewinds, deceitful photo manipulation, subterfuge, or any other unfair advantage. Everybody hates a cheater. More To review detailed rules on how to play, please visit the High Score Squad page here: Message Welcome to our 140th Squad Challenge! This year we're celebrating the holidays and bringing in the new year with a visit back to where it all began, at Mute City I in F-ZERO on Super Nintendo, a true SNES classic! We are also holding a BONUS CHALLENGE for the Silence Circuit at the end of Knight League. I have wonderful Christmas memories of F-ZERO, I received the game with my SNES when I was not expecting much of anything for Christmas. The game brought my family a lot of fun and joy that year, and I love playing F-ZERO around Christmas. For years it's become a bit of a Christmas tradition in my house to play F-ZERO and a few other SNES Classics during the Holidays, and now it's become a tradition every year in the forums too, something special I like to share with all of you. ☃️❄️🎄 F-ZERO is one of the iconic titles on Super Nintendo, and it served as a great demonstration of the Super Nintendo's Mode 7 graphics. F-ZERO was a predecessor to anti-gravity racing leagues such as Wip3out (and probably pod racing!). PDF F-ZERO Instruction Booklet is attached below. Good luck, racers! NOTE: Per conversations with @RickR and other members, we chose to make this a MONTH-LONG SQUAD CHALLENGE to give everybody time to join in and play during the Holiday Season! I hope you enjoy the game! F-ZERO.pdf

Congratulations greenween and Marco1019! Congratulations to "The Mayor" @greenween for winning the Parker Bros. Frogger Squad Challenge, and likewise to the legendary @Marco1019 for winning the Starpath Frogger Squad Challenge! We had a lot of enthusiasm for our Frogger Double Feature and the high scores are incredible! In our Parker Bros. Squad Challenge for Frogger commonly found on the 2600 cartridge, @greenween went balls out to take the top spot on our leaderboard with an incredible score of 4,119 points! @Marco1019 takes 2nd Place with a score of 3,574 points, and @HDN joined us for this Squad Challenge, taking the 3rd Place spot with 2,301 points. @Csolo @Atari 5200 Guy @RickR @TrekMD and I all joined in on the Parker Bros. cartridge challenge, all posting fantastic scores and having a great time. In our Starpath Supercharger Squad Challenge for "Official Frogger" from Sega on the Starpath cassette, @Marco1019 takes the 1st Place spot on our Final Standings with an outstanding score of 28,190 points! I took 2nd Place with my score of 19,350 points, @TrekMD secured his position at 3rd Place with a score of 16,830, and @RickR rounds things out for us with a strong showing, taking 4th with his score of 8,360 points. Way to go on your incredible performances @greenween and @Marco1019, and THANK YOU to everyone who joined in this Squad Challenge! As always I'd like to encourage "The Mayor" @greenween and the legendary @Marco1019 to post their new high scores on the Scoreboard, and let's make sure these Frogger Challenges continue on! Once again, a very special "Thank You" to your Club VCS Moderator @Sabertooth who is doing incredible work hosting Atari VCS "Recharged" Squad Challenges and other fun events in our new Club VCS! If you're a VCS owner or just curious about what's been going on, be sure to check out Club VCS where this month's Challenge will be for Jetboard Joust, and thank Sabertooth for all the hard work he's put into building the best community for VCS gamers! NOTE: Our next High Score Squad Challenge is a MONTH LONG EVENT: The 2022 F-ZERO Christmas Challenge for SNES. Be there!

Thank you everyone for the thoughtful input! Excellent suggestions @RickR, THANK YOU! I've heard good things about LibreOffice. For me to start with Linux would be with daily personal computing, which to a degree could be limited usage. I would be using it as a second machine, so if I ran into a roadblock of something I was unable to do easily with Linux I would have an alternative. Do you have recommendations for web browsing and e-mail on Linux? That was one of my concerns, and was hopeful that the Linux community had developed easy solutions. That would be my biggest question. I'm curious what you guys are using, and what is commonly used among Linux users for daily computing. It becomes both confusing and incredibly interesting when looking at what hardware to start with, because there are so many options and yet there's no "Linux Store" at the mall. I've seen Bitcoin miners running on classic DMG Game Boys somehow running Linux. I don't see how that's even possible or how that would work for me. The VCS is an option. I've also seen $99 Raspberry Pi keyboards running Linux and able to perform every function of basic personal computing - LibreOffice, web browsing, e-mail and more, all in a low priced "keyboard". It's like the modern equivalent of what an Atari 8-Bit or C64 served, as a low-cost alternative to an expensive IBM. I think of Chrombook as being in this same category as well. I was thinking of taking an older machine - let's say a 5 year old desktop or laptop in good condition - servicing it and installing Linux on it. Not sold on the idea yet. I'm also not opposed to buying a brand new machine, but I should probably try Linx out first and see if I like it. That's an excellent suggestion and I may go that route as I want to spend more time enjoying the VCS. I hope they keep the VCS around for a long time. I prefer Unix-like systems, and primarily use macOS. I'm very happy with it and there's not a pressing need for me to switch, but I'm curious about Linux, and Linux has been rock solid over the years with the servers I've worked with. What are the three Linux flavors if you don't mind me asking, and is there one you prefer? I'm looking at Kali. I'm also curious about Debian and Ubuntu. What are the pros and cons? That all sounds fun! Part of my curiosity in in the "is this really better, faster, safer" aspect of it all, and "what can I do with it?" My computing history was always ambidextrous, I grew up using both macOS and Windows, (and of course using both Atari 8-bit and Apple II in the early days). I’ve always appreciated the “home appliance“ closed design of systems like Atari and Mac, while simultaneously appreciating open architecture hardware design and open source software. I also like Unix-like systems. Lately I’ve been looking at adding Linux to my daily routine but I wouldn’t even know where to start. I’ve worked with Linux servers but I’ve never had a basic Linux PC on my desk for personal computing. I thought someone in the forums may have taken an old beat-up Dell laptop and repurposed it into a lightning fast Linux machine they could show off. It's a fun idea to play around with.

WOW! This is the exact vibe Atari should've gone with Jaguar when it first came out.

Is anybody here running Linux on your desktop? I’m looking to hear experiences and input from people who use Linux for their daily desktop computing. People who use a Linux setup to send email, write documents, compile spreadsheets, surf the web, enjoy life. Programming is a plus! What version of Linux do you prefer and what hardware is it running on? What are your preferred software programs? And how many of you have a Raspberry Pi running Linux? Not looking to hear stories about mobile or handheld gaming.

Thank you @Marco1019!! Dinoforce is sure to be a hit! The weapons are strange but the game looks stunning and plays smooth

My Starpath High Score: 19,350

PCEWorks has a NEW HuCard release for the TurboGrafx-16 and has made the game's ROM available to download COMPLETELY FREE of charge on their blog! You can get the game ROM for free by checking out their page here: http://dinoforce.pceworks.net Dinoforce is probably THE MOST INFAMOUS UNRELEASED PC ENGINE TITLE OUT THERE. A horizontal shoot'em up with a unique weapon system and lots of secrets to discover, Dinoforce was featured in a few issues of PC Engine Gekkan in 1991, but eventually never saw release. A few rare glimpses of prototype versions surfaced over the years, but a ROM was never made available and the completion status of the game remained a mystery. PCEWorks is a dedicated team of PC Engine and TurboGrafx-16 enthusiasts who release new games and new box sets for the NEC PC Engine and TurboGrafx-16. Often times they generously have made special releases of Duo games on CD available for free by mail upon request. Both @btbfilms76 and I have received Dracula X - Rondo of Blood (a Japanese release for the Duo) from PCEWorks and it was fantastically well done, with detailed screen printing on the CD and a beautiful poster included in the free mailing. So cool! PCEWorks has been teasing an upcoming release for a while already, and the finished game has finally been released! You can download the game’s ROM file completely free of charge by following the link to our info page above. (Out of respect for their request, I am not attaching the ROM file to this post, but rather linking to their Blog where you can download it free of charge). I have already loaded Dinoforce to my TurboEverdrive and have been playing it on my TurboDuo. It plays great on the original hardware and it's awesome to finally be able to play this! Physical HuCard editions are currently available for pre-order from PCEWorks. Details on those and all related items are available on their site: http://dinoforce.pceworks.net

My Parker Bros. High Score: 2,044

Woops! Thanks guys, corrected and posted 😀

As we head into the homestretch, our current leaders are... Parker Bros. @greenween 4,119 Starpath: @TrekMD 16,830

My Starpath High Score: 11,840

My Parker Bros. High Score: 1445

I had better make time tonight to post a score. Wish me luck!

You have a beautiful 2600 Junior @Atari 5200 Guy

@TrekMD @RickR This is my strategy exactly, but with the added measure of running right or left with the "traffic". Then I can take a step back, let a path become clear, and then go for it. If you watched me play you'd see I move more like a lion than a frog. Sit and wait for the right opportunity and then pounce.

This probably isn't much less obvious than saying "Don't get run over" - but the strategy I've found works best for me is not hesitating to "take two steps forward and one step back". Quite often I have to take a step back, move further down the screen, and try another move at advancing up the screen. I lose some precious seconds, but I keep my lives and live on to fight another round. It's okay to take a step or two back, so long as you see a path worth taking.

Lets do this: keep it simple. If you’d like to share Frogger scores from other systems, go for it! Whatever is fun. Officially this remains a double feature for the 2600 Parker Bros and Starpath versions of Frogger. Having too much going on at once can get messy and overwhelming for everybody, especially keeping track of scores across multiple different platforms. (Super time consuming!) but it's fun and engaging sharing interesting pictures and scores on a game that’s been on so many systems. Share what you’d like, if it becomes competitive and others jump in, I’ll do my best to tally up those scores too! @RickR I love it! Vectrex is entirely underrated and sometimes completely forgotten.