On Mon, 3 Mar 1997, Glenn Saunders wrote:
> I see the cartridge market as dead as a doornail. I had always thought of
> the Supercharger CD as a way to make the 2600 an open-system whereby new
> games would either be freely distributed as .BINs (or shareware) or
> compiled on a non-profit or small-profit CD. There are enough
> Superchargers out there to saturate the remaining userbase likely to
> consume new 2600 games, if they don't already own one.
The problem with that is you've just eliminated a primary incentive to
create new games: money. As I said before, even a few hundred dollars
can be a great incentive to spend the time creating a new game.
Please don't confuse this with unabashed greed. When I was a kid, I
spent endless hours writing games for the TI-99/4A first, then later for
the PC (even wrote some BASIC games on a Xerox PC with 8" floopy drives,
believe it or not!), all for just the fun of me and my brothers playing
them.
Now, I find myself with a 40+ hours per week job, a wonderful wife, and a
house and two cars that always need attention, not to mention involvement
in church activities, visiting relatives and friends, etc. And I know
we're all busy people, not just me. But I'm mostly past the stage in my
life where I can spend the countless hours necessary to develop a game
just to have it freely distributed. At least with the Lynx, I will get
some compensation for my time, though not nearly enough to quite my day
job.
The idea someone had about distributing on your own cassettes is a decent
idea, it would still allow you to get some compensation for your
efforts. I'd probably even buy some cassette-based games for $8-10
apiece.
> There are also lots of early games that could be updated and refined. I
> think Warlords is a perfect example here. Not only that, but the
I would love to see an updated Warlords (the ultimate 4-player 2600
game!), with slightly improved graphics and better 2600 AI.
> limitations on what can be done on the 2600 were usually due to the
> hardware. With the Supercharger environment, especially the multiload
> capacity, new game genres that would have required mega banked ROM are now
> possible (Lode Runner type games, zillion wave shooters, more RPGs). Depth
> can now increase infinitely with multiloads.
No doubt about it, the SuperCharger is a fantastic piece of hardware.
Dumb user question here, but does the 6K in the SC allow you to keep a
RAM copy of the screen buffer? Or is it still vital to generate each
scanline "on the fly?"
One great aspect of the Lynx is the ability to have a section of RAM
entirely dedicated to screen buffer usage, and let the hardware do all
the work for you...
> You don't have a Supercharger?
Why, do you need one of those to use the SC CD? :-)
What I meant to say was that until recently, I had neither sound card nor
CDROM drive, which meant I only used the SC CD to try all the cool
games. Even now, my TV and PC are on different floors of my house, so
unless I start making cassette copies of games off my PC, I have no way
to "quickly" test out new code. OTOH, I have my Lynx attached directly
to the PC for easy download and test.
Carl Forhan <><
Vindicator Online: http://www.millcomm.com/~forhan/vindicator.html
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