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Keatah

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Keatah last won the day on May 19 2022

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  1. Absolutely loved the end credits. Powerful. Evocative. Pulls at your heartstrings. Pride exuding everywhere!
  2. I'm a 2600 gamer. Back in the 1970's I used real hardware, obviously. But today I use Stella, been using it for years now. Mainly enjoy the simplicity and immediacy of the games it offers. The 2600 seems so much more pure. Many other things to like.
  3. I haven't modded my Apple II with anything much beyond what was available back in the day. The only modern stuffage I use is all socketed and simply plugs into slots. A more modern memory card of the same capacity used back in the day, just low-power & low-parts-count. I have a VGA output daughtercard that plugs into the RamWorks III and IV memory card. And I use modern flash storage solutions, which aren't any different than a vintage 10MB HDD from back then. Just more capacious. And one solution plugs into the actual Disk II controller card for even more authenticity. I don't do accelerators beyond 3 or 4 MHz, if/when I do them at all. And I definitely don't do graphics chips or super sound boards or arcade sprite boards. I also don't do ethernet. I figure if I want speed I can have a 1GHz 6502 via an emulator on an i9. That gives me 10x machine language speed in Applesoft BASIC. I figure if I want connectivity I'll just use a modern PC with all the creature comforts of a modern browser like Firefox. Another thing is hardware which enhances sound and graphics usually doesn't have widespread software support. Only a few titles tend to take advantage of such things. I'm not a purist and do not require things be exactly like they were in the halcyon days of the 70's and 80's. I just believe that equipping a vintage system with too much modern tech takes away the flavor and essence of machine. It becomes less nostalgic. The very things that made it so advanced back then and so endearing today suddenly go missing when you mod too much. I mean after all that's why we do this hobby, for enjoyment of 45 year old rigs as they were.
  4. What a pain in the ass question! Presently I will have to go with Star Raiders, Doom, and X-Plane. Of course I wanted to cheat and say my favorite hypervisor/virtualizer, which would open it up to all PC software and emulators..!
  5. Sure, the first early versions are retro. So yes. But the last build is less than a month old. So no.
  6. ESB from PB as well. Unless you wanna count those Applesoft/Integer BASIC games on the Apple II that called themselves "Star Wars". Those were generic space battle games IMHO. Aside from SuperMan, Aliens, SpiderMan, it was one of the few movie tie-ins I really liked. Up to that time. There would of course be more later..
  7. I clearly remember the Atari 400/800 being the perfect arcade companion and alternate computing platform, and used it right alongside my Apple II+ and //e back then. We all know the super hits that were.. like Defender, Star Raiders, Centipede, Galaxian, Qix, Pole Position, and so many more. I soured on the 5200 after getting one and rapidly discovering the software was essentially the same as what I had on the 400/800. Really soured. And upset at the money I spent on it. Combine that with ratbaggy controllers and weird switchbox (which tied me to one TV), and I wasn't spending a lot of time on it. Certainly not enough time to develop nostalgia like I did with other unique platforms. Today the best part of the 5200 is the styling and futurism about it. That's still memorable and desirable. And in a big expansive living room entertainment center it fits well. On a small shelf not so much. Since I do vintage gaming almost exclusively via emulation, I rely on Altirra to bring me the 8-bit goodness. When playing I sometimes don't even know the 400/800 vs 5200 version of any game. But I do gravitate away from the analog controller versions. Prefer the crisp digital switching of plain'ol switches.
  8. Sharing writings about recollections of days past is a fine way to keep these machines alive. One story triggers another and then another. Lots of undocumented stories and times with Digi-View. Eventually!
  9. Not really. It's a chosen way of life for me. Absolutely. Not too much on the financial restrictions - but we don't appreciate the recent inflated prices, WATA grading prices, "because Apple" syndrome prices, "because old" prices. Scalping. Speculating. Extra outlet for thrift stores being not so thrifty. Not interested in watching bids and hunting for the cheapest. Not anymore. So time consuming. Additionally having arcade games through MAME alleviates 2-hours worth of driving to get to the not-so-local arcade. And they're not likely to have StarJacker either. There's the creature comforts at home. Instant snacks. A clean toilet. My choice of music. Fresh air. Sit. Stand. Recline. Controls always in top shape. Adjust the screen & sound effects however you see fit, if that's your gig. I've got my hobby room. It's filled with electronics lab stuff and books and other paraphernalia, so there's really not much space for loads of consoles and carts. Emulation takes up but a tiny corner. Necessary hardware fits in with the rustic decor theme because its unobtrusive. Think NUC and MiSTer and R-Pi sizes. So many practical things add up in favor of emulation. Well. I can enjoy a 1000 FPS 900 MHz Apple //e via AppleWin. Certainly not practical for action game playing, but perfectly amusing for working with disk images and recreational Applesoft BASIC programming. Among other experiments and just farting around. Back in the day a 3.5MHz Transwarp accelerator was astounding! I remember writing short Sci-Fi stories and we never thought that far ahead in speed, most we guessed would be maybe 100MHz. In the Amiga ecosphere, hardware was not easy to acquire back then. It was always too expensive, all through mail order, and not always compatible. Adding in an accelerator would break other things. And the Bridgeboards couldn't do all PC software. So lots of caveats and trip-ups. Some software needing KS 1.2, other needing 1.3, or a new WorkBench. Granted PC was that way with DOS and WINDOWS 3.1, 98, and XP, but hardware was so cheap and available everywhere. Common to have 2 rigs going. So here, emulation makes the Amiga a more enjoyable platform. Virtual add-ons that don't play nicely in one configuration can simply have their own as necessary. Any version of ROM, KS, WB is but a few clicks away. Emulation has evolved and changed so much for the better over the last 30 years. Each platform is like a full-featured virtual machine module.
  10. I tried SoftRAM or something similar for Windows98 and even XP. I didn't see any real change. There was RamDoubler from Connectix for both MAC and PC - and it actually did compression, but gains were minimal. Was also unstable. Either way I quickly reasoned that any data compression would thrash the CPU cache and not be any better than HDD based Virtual Memory. So I thankfully lost interest and recouped any money I spent. With 32GB standard in entry-level rigs, there is zero need for RAM compression. Though Windows 10 & 11 does it for real. A automatically. But. Now. Disk compression was a whole other animal. The thought of doubling my HDD space was almost too good to be true. But it was true! Overall disk compression increased space for real by 1.3 to 1.7 for an honest-to-goodness ratio. 200MB suddenly became 260-300MB - depending on the datasets. BMPs compressed well, JPGs did not. And gamedata anywhere in-between. That's what was reported. Had good experiences with DriveSpace in MS-DOS 6.22. If I had been been into PCs earlier I would've used Stacker from Stac Electronics. In the 486 days, the speed of hard drives and the processor and the bus were just right to notably benefit from compression. Most pre-VLB systems were I/O bound. The CPU running at 2x clock could whip through the compression routines on the fly fast enough to see gains from lesser amounts of data being transferred. Once set up I found it reliable and transparent, even being able to load the driver high. Sure, there was one more layer going but I didn't experience any data loss. Though I see how that could happen. And if it were to occur it was of no consequence with backups. DriveSpace even worked with Norton Utilities SpeedDisk. You would first make the host drive contiguous. Then you could organize the files within the compressed volume. Additionally I still have it on my vintage rig. And it made imaging the HDDs - already done. All I had to do was copy the .CVF file to my modern PC and put it and the driver into PCEM virtual disk. A lesson learned in the Apple II days payed off well here. Never turn the system off till all disk activity is done. With a compressed volume this meant getting up from my workstation AND THEN turning it off. Allowed SMARTDRV cache to flush pending writes. All in all a great tool that saved me hundreds by allowing me to push off bigger capacity disks till even BIGGER ones were available.
  11. That's something I believe a lot of folks don't consider when browsing ebay. The amount of work needed to do a good restore and clean-up. And now with today's inflation, cost of those clean-up & shop supply materials add up pretty quick. And the quality of the machines available at a reasonable cost aren't getting any better. They've been around the block a few times. I don't find it fun doing that kind of work too often. Maybe once every year or two. I'd rather get right to it and enjoy the essence of the software and what it does. That's what these machines are all about!
  12. I'd say that MiSTer in conjunction with WinUAE will cover you pretty well. They said it was emulation. So it appears you may be paying for convenience of having everything set up in mini-console.
  13. Yes. I see that they have 9.2.11.0 R2 out recently.
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