JB0

Mmmm, NGPC... Love mine too, though I'd love it more if it had another action button(giving it a Genesis-style ABC/Start layout). AB/Start gets crowded these days. Look at it this way... the NeoGeo Pocket and WonderSwan are the only reason we finally got rid of the old monochrome GameBoy. SNK and Bandai released their way-more-powerful systems in Japan. They knocked a bit out of Nintendo's monopoly. Nintendo released a quick color hack, SNK and Bandai released a quick color hack, Nintendo started developing the GBA(which I'm pretty sure was rushed as hell, and has a few very sloppy design elements). SNK brought their quick color hack to America, then went bankrupt. They never even had a chance to bring Biomotor Unitron 2 over. Then the GBA came out, and the portable monopoly began again. *sigh* At least Sony's done SOME lasting damage to the Nintendo stranglehold... Nitpick: It's a digital stick. You can even hear the microswitches clicking.

Seconded.

I'm SO sorry! Don't own one, but... http://www.old-computers.com/museum/comput...?c=106&st=1 It was basically an Amiga 500 computer with a CD-ROM drive in a snazzy case. Floppy drive, keyboard, and mouse sold separately. So you really didn't get screwed too badly even though Commodore failed to support the machine. You got an Amiga PC to play with. ... Huh... interesting coincidence here... "The manager of the team promoting the CDTV was Nolan Bushnell, the man who founded Atari. By strange twist of fate, the man in charge of Atari at the time, was Jack Tramiel, the man who founded Commodore."

Hey, with an image like that in people's heads, what do you expect to happen? Seriously, those clouds are beautiful.

Apparently, a lot of companies had been burned with Sony's professional U-Matic format, and were leery about trusting them. JVC was seen as a "safer" partner. It also ran into a technical problem in that you can't fit as much tape in the smaller cassettes, so VHS had superior runtime. That probably made the difference in the consumer's eyes. According to Wikipedia, this was the BIG difference, since you could record a night of television(or a single football game) on a VHS tape, and you couldn't on Betamax. Beta which was designed for a 1-hour tape initially. VHS started with a 2-hour tape, and the 2x long-play mode was available at US launch, making it 1 hour VS 4 hours. I've heard the porn argument before, but I'm not sure how much that affected it. Certainly, the ability to buy movies probably made a bit of a difference, but I'm not sure if... other... programming was a major market force. Errr... The NeoGeo home system had fighting (and other) games that were IDENTICAL to their arcade counterparts, not superior ones. Seriously, it's the EXACT same ROMs in the home carts and the arcade carts. And the NeoGeo CD used the same hardware as the NeoGeo console/arcade boards(with the addition of a CD controller and data RAM), so I'm not sure where this "fraction of the colors" argument comes from. Maybe the TV encoder circuit, which fluctuated a LOT over SNK's manufacturing run(with wild variances in final image quality due to it), but that hits the cart-based system more. The disk-based one is more consistent, and from what I've read, generally has better TV out. Now, some of the later games DID have graphics alterations to fit within the system's RAM limit, but that's not all, or even most games, and the alterations weren't simple color reductions anyways(omitted background objects and reduced-detail character sprites). So.... [citation needed]? The 1x drive I don't dispute, though. It DEFINITELY hurt, given most of those games were written to run off ROM carts(load times weren't NEAR as painful on SegaCD and TurboCD, where they didn't have to copy several megabytes of data into RAM at once). And that was really enough to wreck the advantage of 50-buck arcade-perfect ports(with the home carts costing 200+ each due to the massive amounts of ROM in them, it's fairly obvious why the NeoGeo never caught on). The 3rd revision(2nd outside Japan), the CDZ, alleviated the issue somewhat with a better drive and large read cache. It was still 1x, but it generally loaded faster(and was misidentified as having a 2x drive in several places).

Not to mention that Sony's Beta patents were licensed to other companies for VHS. So even if they never sold a Beta player, they still made a killing. Yeah. DVDs use MPEG2 video compression. Laserdisks store a raw composite video signal. A poorly-mastered or over-crowded disk will be a mess of compression artifacts. But a properly-mastered DVD is better than Laserdisk, because it's not composite video. The audio difference isn't actually related to compression. As far as I know, it's because DVDs are mastered with more dynamic range than TV broadcasts. This is a good thing, believe it or not. It means there's more distance between the low parts of the soundtrack and the high parts. So your quiet parts are quiet and your loud parts are loud. Of course, having that range also means that everything isn't compressed up into the same volume level as the explosions, so yes, it IS quieter.

Honestly, I think arcades killed the arcades. For a long time after the home systems appeared, arcades were unarguably more powerful, and the home ports were heavily watered-down. But somewhere along the line, someone got the bright idea of making a standard arcade system board that you could swap games on. To save costs. Once they quit making new hardware for every game, the arcades quit staying ahead of the home systems. The Saturn came out, and it could do arcade-perfect versions of CPS2 and NeoGeo games(it needed a RAM cart for some of the later ones, but...). The PS1 could do arcade-perfect versions of smaller NeoGeo/CPS2 games, and only minor compromises for many of the larger ones. At that moment, the arcades were doomed. Capcom's CPS2 team actively sabotaging the CPS3 was probably the final nail in the coffin. Capcom abandoned CPS3 and moved to Sega's NAOMI board, which was... a Dreamcast with extra RAM. At that point, almost everyone's arcade hardware was a game console with extra RAM(and SNK kept using the NeoGeo). Arcade-perfect ports were a trivial effort. All that was left to distinguish an arcade game from a home game was controls and multi-screen displays. Thus the rise of the modern lightgun/racing game wasteland.

Ah, but FlexPlay works in a standard DVD player. It doesn't require you to buy a special player at a hundred-dollar premium. It doesn't have to phone home to work. There's nothing proprietary at all. It just degrades really fast once it's exposed to air. Coincidentally, they were pushing it heavily for preview and review copies when I first heard of it.

I can even tell you why! All other things being equal, longer cable runs and more connectors will only make things worse. It's logic. BUT... all other things are not equal in this case. Lot of Genesises... Genesii... MEGADRIVES had a poor NTSC encoder chip that generated a very crappy composite video signal(The older models with the headphone port usually had a good chip, later ones... not so much). The 32x, however, had a quite nice NTSC encoder. And due to the way the 32x worked, it had to take in raw unmangled RGB input from the Genesis so it could mask parts out and overlay it's own graphics. The 32x's TV encoder had to be active even if you weren't using the 32x hardware, since it didn't actually pass the composite video line through. So if you had a 32x hooked up, you essentially replaced your Genesis' TV encoder chip with a much nicer part as a side-effect. If people had known this, I think a the 10-buck final clearance 32x'es would've sold a lot better. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!

Virtual Boy. ... Does it count if I got it on clearance?

Word. Oh yeah... It's a damn shame we didn't get to see THAT part of things.

That's one thing I like about top-loaders. The drive mech (usually) has a much more stable grip than tray- or slot-loading drives. They're also far simpler and more reliable. And my bad. The first 360 chipset revision WAS the HDMI revision. Either they added HDMI sooner than I remembered, or the first hardware revision was later than I remembered. In any case... hooray bullet-point parity! Doin' good. I honestly can't remember what embarrassing statement I doubtless made that you're referencing. Jog my memory and I'll let you know if she escaped.

Why do you do this to people? I've heard so much about this, I almost HAVE to watch it to see if it's all true. ... *clicks link* I hold you personally responsible for any mental damage this causes.

HDMI isn't the first revision. It's the third, I think. I know there was at least one motherboard/chipset change before HDMI was added. I THINK there was a second, but I'm not certain. Mine is one of the last non-HDMI ones, and it's failed once. Got a buddy with a launch unit that still hasn't gone down yet. No clue what dark force he channeled into it.

Naw. I thought they did, then realized they didn't. I'd just already written it off as not happening because there's no way they can do Sighs AND Disappearance right. Unless they decide to skip the rest of the reruns.

Pfft. My SO2 clear file is at 172 hours. Now, to be fair, the final boss one-shotted my party once phase 2 of the battle began. So I turned around and went to the Cave of Trials, with a healthy dose of playing in the Arena sprinkled in for good measure. When I was done with Trial Cave(which was extremely grindy), I came back and shredded him like ham in a blender. I don't recall my timer when I initially made it there, but it was still WELL over 60. In short: tri-Ace is getting lazy.

Indeed. At the end Starscream, Bulkhead, and Sentinel Prime were the only 3 that Headmaster compatibility made sense for. Which isn't to say I don't have MY Headmaster on Ultra Magnus. He's gone undercover. Don't tell anyone.

They've gone ahead and moved into Sighs? Of course they would...

Actually, NINTENDO backed out of that. It was happening in the midst of the end days at TimeWarner. They were meeting with different people on a daily basis. No one knew what was going on, and it was a total trainwreck. Nintendo was rapidly figuring out that, brand or no brand, Atari was NOT in a position to market their product and they were better off alone. Shortly thereafter, the Tramiels bought Atari's home division, fired everyone, and killed the console division. All they ever wanted was the home computer division, and they wanted Commodore 2.0, not Atari Computer. So Atari WOULD have bounced it in another month. But the actual blunder they DID get to make was killing the 7800 and shelving it for 2 years, then not supporting it properly when they DID dig it out of the warehouse and ship it. The 7800 could've been incredible if it'd come out when it was originally supposed to, with all the accessories it was supposed to(including a high score cart for saving data!)and been given a workable budget. Indeed. Games like 1989's Secret Quest, a 2600 game that prominently advertised it was created by Nolan Bushnell on both the front and back of the box.

Except that he really NEEDS to be a leader-class toy, as one of three bots in the entire show that were actually taken by the Headmaster(making that a leader-class gimmick was one of the worse ideas the franchise has had). TOTAL OWNAGE, NOOB!

http://www.gamesx.com/avpinouts/saturnav.htm What? You wanted pictures of the games that might not exist?

Except for the broadcast order DVDs, which don't even look particularly good at their native resolution.

Saturn is before the component video standard had been created. It's RGB. Feel free to rig a VGA cable, though. And only select games are capable of it(I'm not sure if ANY retail games make use of the capability).

We were hoping(fearing?). I thought episode 2 did that well on it's own. Watching essentially the same episode 6.5 times in a row*? I don't think so. *(With the first episode being different and the last episode having a different ending)

That's a lot of Norikos...