Subject: Re: [stella] POLL From: Songbird <forhan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 3 Mar 1997 14:14:39 -0600 (CST) |
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 -- To unsubscribe, send the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of a message to stella-request@xxxxxxxxxxx
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