/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5272903
Pitfall

Solaris
Beam Rider
Juno First
Tomcat

>>5272903
Yars' Revenge
Pressure Cooker
Pitfall
Pitfall II: Lost Caverns
Kaboom
Solaris

>>5272903
The 2600 port of Centipede is arguably more fun than the arcade version (particularly if you like twitchy games). As previously mentioned Kaboom and Yars' Revenge are awesome. I like Enduro a lot as well. Honestly most of the games I love on the 2600 are arcade ports, but they're often times to different from the source material that they become excellent games in their own right.

>>5272903
Get warlords, rotary controllers, and 4 friends. You will thank me later.

Also combat is top tier 2 player game.

Other favorites: Frostbite, HERO, Joust (arcade port, poor graphics but damn good physics), Yar's Revenge, Arkyology (just released prototype that's really good).

>>5273339
The physics in 2600 Joust are absolutely fantastic. And I can vouch for Warlords as well, there's no better 4 player gaming experience I've ever had

>>5272903
I like Adventure. I think it's fun.

Gotta give another huge endorsement to Yars' Revenge. That game holds up extremely well and is legitimately still a blast. You can get into such a nice rhythm/flow.

>>5273634
What's the objective of the game, though? I keep shooting the center thing and nothing happens.

>>5274049
You have to hit it with a missle, shooting it won't work. You may actually need to RTFM for Atari games.

Back in the day it was the VCS. The 2600 tag is something that happened later.

>>5274373
Yes and that one is legit, but the other just a interstitial technicality.

>>5274432
*an

Master System, you cunt.

>>5274373
Yeah, yeah we all know

>>5274467
That one is known as the "Darth Vader" because of the jet black finish. Unofficially of course.

>>5274373
I think they started using the 2600 name to distinguish it from the Atari 5200.

>>5274474
It was also manufactured in Taiwan, cost-reduced, and not as bombproof or reliable as the old heavy sixer. I'm not sure the heavy sixer VCSes can die. They'll probably last until the heat death of the universe.

The Mega Drive and VCS are probably the two most reliable retro consoles. Worst might be the Colecovision and early production SNESes.

>>5274498
My personal favorites are the 4-switch woody (what I grew up with) and the vader. Let's be real though, the only unreliable 2600 model is the Jr, and only because of those stupid mylar contact buttons.
>>5274475
Right you are.

>>5274529
>Worst might be the Colecovision and early production SNESes.
Atari 5200s were notoriously shitty and broken. No one that had them in the '80s had a working one. No one. The controllers all broke the first couple of days, they were so bad.

And the Atari Jaguar CD universally is broken or in need of hacking just work.

>>5274529
Famicoms are absolute tanks too. Every one I've ever purchased has powered on, even before maintenance. Pic related.

The Colecovision and 5200 are flakey because they used tri-voltage 4116 DRAMs that get hot and can be easily nuked by a faulty power supply.

>>5272943
Kaboom is a reskin of Avalanche

>>5274538
Japs probably take better care of their stuff anyway than...

>>5272739
Yeah.

>>5274529
Worst are easily the FDS and Sega CD model 1. Throw in the PCE + CDR2 and the Gamegear.

>>5274564
haha, you still see a lot of just absolutely cigarette destroyed Famicoms, but never bugs or like, ooze.
>>5274569
To be fair the PCE itself is a beast, but the CD-ROM units are like cancer incarnate.

>>5274569
>Sega CD model 1
Not them, but fuck off, those are solid as rocks. Maybe don't beat the snot out of your moving-parts consoles?

As for retro computers, TI-99/4As are one of the best. You have a better overall chance of finding one in working condition than pretty much any other consumer-level computer of the period. They spared no expense with high quality components and manufacturing tolerances.

The Commodore Plus/4 is well known as the very worst of all. It's not if but when they'll die.

>>5274584
>the lasers die
>the rubber bands disintegrate
>the gears crack
no fuck you, it's a sexy piece of shit.

>>5274597
>>the lasers die
all lasers die

>>5274597
>>the rubber bands disintegrate
same

>>5274597
>>the gears crack
Do you live in Antarctica?

>>5274597
>no fuck you, it's a sexy piece of shit.
Damn right. Model 2 is the retarded basement secret.

If you're just going to play one game, make it Demon Attack.

If you can be bothered to RTFM, Yars' Revenge and Haunted House.

>>5273052
Atari trackball is not too hard to find... lots of these games improve cosiderably with the proper controller

(the standard joystick is ass tho, you're not missing much by emulating)

>>5272903
Anything by Activision.

>>5274609
Oh I much prefer Centipede with a joystick, and I unironically love a properly functioning 2600 stick.

>>5274701

>>5274823
Weird I wouldn't have though zoomers existed in 2009

I don't think there are any bad home conversions of Centipede. The game is so simple that it's pretty hard to fuck it up.

>>5272903
18+ sport

>>5274906
The Atari 8-bit version is pretty rough. I just got an 800XL and was kind of bummed with Centipede. The game library on the whole is pretty cool though.
>>5274927
We're having a pretty good thread here man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUDsl28ENqQ

The IBM version is ok, maybe the spider sound would get annoying after a while. I got this off an abandonware site once and it worked fine on an old Pentium box but on my real XT your shooter thing would move to the left side of the screen and stay there so you couldn't control the game. I suspect the game had some hack done to it to work on newer machines--that's not uncommon with CGA-era PC games you find on the Internet. Also every version of Galaxian I found produced a blank screen on the XT and on newer machines only one VGA monitor I had, an old Taxan from 1990, would also display it without blanking or giving a "Signal Out of Range" message.

Maybe I'd just have to go on Ebay and look for original copies of these games.

Also the executable was really small, about 12k or something.

>>5274529

>>5275083
The SHVC board SNESes do seem to have a high failure rate, probably because of the newness of the technology and it took a while to work out manufacturing defects in it. Compared to the Mega Drive, the SNES chipset has relatively more advanced technology and is also all-CMOS while the Mega Drive's chipset is mainly NMOS. It's also more integrated with more functions consolidated into each IC to cut down on the chip count (the CPU also handles I/O and DMA).

>>5274934
The Apple II Centipede just has clicking noises for sounds.

>>5274934
>The Atari 8-bit version is pretty rough. I just got an 800XL and was kind of bummed with Centipede

There are two versions. The first is the original 1982 brown cartridge Centipede for the 400/800. It is a little rough and there's not even a Game Over screen when you die. The second was the silver cartridge XEGS version. This appears to be a port of the Atari 5200 Centipede and has trackball support which is a bit more arcade correct, although the joystick control on the original version is more accurate and surefooted.

Too bad there's no NES version of Centipede. Some homebrewer ought to do it sometime.

>>5274927
I'm 30 and this thing came out before I was born. You're a fucking idiot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHLnkJPfNvI

This is the TI port. I think it was made by the same people who did the PC Centipede because the title screen and sound effects are quite similar.

>>5275379
>LARPing as a 30 yo
kek

>>5275302
Interesting, I'll have to see if I loaded both versions onto my flashcart. Thanks anon

>>5275337
Say, that sounds interesting. I don't know anything about NES programming though.

>>5274927
4chan is a safe space for millenials and zoomers.

Here's a quick mockup of the major game sprites. The spider and scorpion would need at least two. And since the centipede is made of several segments, you'd probably have some issues with the 8 sprite per line limitation.

>>5272903
>awful ports

There were good ports too, anon.

>>5275337
The millipede port HAL did during the Atari / Nintendo talks ain't bad, but I never liked Millipede as much as Centipede.

>>5276591
You'd probably do at least three colors. No reason to use monochrome sprites except maybe on the shooter thingie.

The NES does have its own interesting set of limitations against other 8-bit machines. For example, a game like Shamus would be next to impossible to do on the NES without massive amounts of flicker--see Bubble Bobble to understand what I mean.

You couldn't use character graphics for the baddies like on the C64 or whatever, they'd have to all be sprites and you'ld run into the scanline limitation very fast/

The NES does have its own peculiar set of limitations against other 8-bit machines. For example, a game like Shamus would be next to impossible to do on the NES without massive amounts of flicker--see Bubble Bobble to understand what I mean.

You couldn't use character graphics for the baddies like on the C64 or whatever, they'd have to all be sprites and you'ld run into the scanline limitation very fast.

>>5276591
Centipede on most other 8-bit systems was 8k in size. It would probably be about the same on the NES, well, really 16k because 8k PRG+8k CHR.

And it's yet another "/vr/ talks about a homebrew project that will never get done because /vr/ cannot into programming" thread.

>>5276768
That's a few posts out of what has been quite a good thread, don't be a dweeb.
>>5276591
>>5276704
https://www61.zippyshare.com/v/Woqxmukk/file.html

Might be of interest to you. The Atari Flashback 1 was NOAC hardware, so there's already ports of Centipede to that. Someone dumped the games off of the machine at some point, and someone shared them with me on 4chan. The Centipede ports don't run correctly on real NES hardware, collision detection is off, etc.

>>5274609
Isn't Demon Attack just a clone of Phoenix?

>>5276813
The 2600 port of Phoenix is great too

>>5272903
Jesus I can't go this old. Oldest old shit I like is the Nintendo Genesis

>>5276846
What's a Nintendo Genesis

>>5276810
NES coding is very timing sensitive and requires you to count clock cycles carefully because all video operations have to be performed during the 70 cycle vertical retrace (you can't just do it any time you want like on a C64 or something). It's easily possible to write code that works on an emulator but fails to operate correctly on the real thing.

>>5277057
The Flashback 1 wasn't an emuator, just an inaccurate NES hardware clone. Lots of 'Hong Kong Original' Famiclone games have issues on real hardware due to the designers coding to the eccentricities of the NOACs they were used to rather than 'official' hardware. You're definitely wiser than I about the inner workings of this stuff though. I've just read a lot about Famiclones.

>>5277156
>You're definitely wiser than I about the inner workings of this stuff though

Technically speaking, the VRAM and PPU registers cannot be altered except during the retrace and you have limited time to do this. In that sense it's like an Atari 2600 where all video manipulation takes place during the retrace. The VRAM is also not visible to the CPU and can only be indirectly accessed via soft switches.

The NMI is also triggered each vertical retrace. There's different ways you can structure a NES code loop, for example SMB has the entire loop in the NMI and the main CPU thread is just a dummy infinite loop. You can usually tell from playing a particular game how it's structured; if the music slows down when there's a large number of sprites on screen (as it does in SMB), then the NMI is used for the main loop.

>>5277186
Interesting, very cool. I didn't realize the NES and VCS were similar in that way. Thanks for the knowledge anon.

>>5277201
Actually most consoles are like that, the video hardware usually restricts access except during the VBLANK. The Atari 2600 doesn't even have video memory, your code loop has to redraw the play field every frame on top of handling all game logic/sprite movement, all in only 70 clock cycles.

>>5277156
Those "eccentricities" are actually enhancements to the original design and are a documented standard. It's a Taiwan design. You might want to aim for quality over quantity when doing all that reading.

There's a lot of NES clones. It's thought that Ricoh may have leaked the tech info for the chipset in the early 90s as production was coming to a close.

>>5277220
I didn't spout any misinformation. I fail to see how poor compatibility and audio inaccuracies are enhancements, my dude. Not to mention that NOACs have been constantly changing over the decades and vary from manufacturer to manufacturer to this day.

>>5277232
>>5277259
Yes well it seems like every clone manufacturer has their own slightly different "interpretation" of the NES chipset. Also newer ones are probably made in CMOS and not the original NMOS which would also affect their behavior.

>>5277232
>>5277259
Yes well it seems like every clone manufacturer has their own slightly different "interpretation" of the NES chipset. Plus newer ones are probably made in CMOS and not the original NMOS which would also affect their behavior. CMOS chips are cleaner and not as hacky/buggy as NMOS ones.

>>5276725
Every enemy+Shamus+Shamus's shots+each item/keyhole would need 16x16 sprites. That would be a horrible, horrible flicker-fest.

>>5276725
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVH-AXdQQ8k

C64 Bubble Bobble has no flicker at all because its sprites are much bigger than the NES's sprites and you can use char graphics as soft sprites, you can't do that on the NES and everything has to be a sprite.

>>5277553
The programmer (Steven Ruddy) didn't do a bad job considering like every other 80s home arcade conversion, he had to mostly rely on playing the arcade game and trying to recreate it from memory. Supposedly he had some original Taito docs of the arcade game in Japanese, which he couldn't read.

It is a bit disappointing how the C64 port has no good/bad ending and there's just one generic ending. But then the game is also only 50k while (eg.) the NES Bubble Bobble is 160k.

My favorites:

>Enduro - racing game where the goal is to pass a certain number of vehicles in one day. It's definitely primitive - you could easily see it being an LCD game - but the weather effects give the game some variety
>Dragonfire - basically the perfume department scene from that one Spongebob episdoe
>Jawbreaker - the game started out as a Pac Man clone on PC, but after Atari put their foot down, the game was retooled into something more original while still being nearly as fun
>Laser Gates - Horizontal shmup that's more about getting past obstacles than shooting down enemies. The game has a certain rhythm to it with how you face exactly one threat at a time,

No mention of Dark Chambers yet? For shame.

>>5275337
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mADDyJdjKs

Squish 'Em would be a fun one to do.

>>5277591
Just tried Dragonfire...nice. It's got a lot of atmosphere for a 2600 game.

>>5277259
>doubles down on stupid
Top kek kid. Like I said, read more written by people who know what they're taking about and less by retarded parrot babies like you.

>>5274373
May just be a regional thing, but even well into the 16 bit era we all knew it as "The Atari"

>>5275448
>being old is braggable
Look at this 14 year old retard.

>>5276606
Fuck you, FUCK YOU. Go play pac-man or donkey kong and say that to my fucking face again. I dare you, I double dare you, motherfucker. Make sure to turn the sound all the way up.

>>5272903
- Basically every Activision game.
- Demons to Diamonds
- Yars Revenge
- Adventure
- Atlantis
- Combat
- Star Raiders
- Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back
- Frogs and Flies

atari is fun and easy to play

>>5277964
>Go play pac-man or donkey kong
...on MAME. There's no need to bother with silly inferior home ports of them in this day and age.

>Activision co-founder David Crane said "The [C64] was simple, it didn't afford the challenge to the programmer one had with the VCS, the pleasure one got out of making it do things the designers hadn't originally intended it to do.

I got some favorites

>cosmic commuter
>secret quest
>spacemaster X7
>montezuma's revenge
>no escape
>spider fighter
>room of doom
>cosmic swarm
>seaquest
>ram it
>worm war 1
>tunnel runner
>cross force
>space cavern
>dolphin
>towering inferno

Also seconding previous recommendations for yar's revenge, solaris, H.E.R.O.

>>5277963
It's massive cred here. You'd be amazed how insecure kids can be about playing with dads toys.

>>5278037
Is this guy for real? Didn't he know about the amazing tricks European programmers discovered they could coax out of the VIC-II and SID?

>>5278054
Crane was probably speaking from his own experience and I doubt he knew a lot about the European scene.

>>5278002
THAT WAS THE FUCKING POINT OF THE POST YOU RETARDED PIECE OF SHIT
STOP JUMPING INTO CONVERSATIONS YOU DIDN'T BOTHER TO READ
THE ATARI 2600 PORTS ARE MOURNFUL, YOU FUCKING SPAZ.

>>5278002
Just about any home conversions of arcade games mutilate or significantly alter the game mechanics because the programmers couldn't have possibly known every little detail.

>>5277553
>>5277575
Doesn't help that Taito lost the source code, no filthy gaijin will be getting their round eyes on it now for sure. Even the NES version seems imperceptibly off. It's kinda amazing that these home computer devs managed to turn out anything decent, just by eyeballing the arcade cab and trying to approximate the gameplay.

>>5272903
Adventure

Cosmic Ark is fantastic

>>5278323
The arcade game has four CPUs in it, that code must be a bastard to figure out.

The PS1 Bubble Bobble isn't 100% true to the arcade either.

>>5277014