Hi Russ!
> >Glenn, I know you're always trying to move people in that direction. But
> >I'd never go that way. To me it's not the *real* thing. Doing something
> >for the Supercharger is like cheating.
> That's like saying that Starpath was cheating. Heck no, they made it
> work in the VCS, so it's hardly cheating, right?
But... it is cheating! :-)
It's like putting the SuperCPU and a second SID into the C64.
Everybody can make a cool looking and brill sounding ultrafast 3D demo then. What counts is what you get out of the standard hardware.
> Burger (an occasional poster here) had worked on a device that even
> had it's own *processor* that allowed you to do even more than the
> Supercharger does. Cheating? Not if it follows the rules the VCS
> lays down.
Come on, you probably could put an 1 GHz pentium 4 processor and a sounblaster-on-a-chip into a device and connect it somehow to the VCS.
The Coleco for example had a device for running VCS games, everybody knows it was cheating :-)
> Would you also say that Pitfall II cheated for its extra chip? Of
> Mountain King for the RAM Plus?
Yes & Yes.
I'd say Nintendo cheated with putting extra 3D chips into the early Super Nintendo games like 'Pilotwings', since they were pretending the SNES had higher abiltities than it actually had.
> >If I really wanted more RAM, better graphics abilities, larger medias
> >and such, I wouldn't go for the VCS as a target anyway...
> I do understand what you're saying, but I don't think it's fair to
> say that the Supercharger is cheating, but rather you seek the larger
> challenge of developing within the 4K ROM format.
If you prefer to see it this way - see it this way :-)
> >Hope you don't mind, that's just my personal opinion. Besides - judging
> >from the # of homebrew cartridges compared to the Supercharger stuff,
> >I'd say there's more people thinking like that...
> On the other hand, you have to keep in mind that the Supercharger
> introduces other challenges to coding 2600 games -- making sure it
> loads appropriately, and if you decide to do multiload, how to fill
> the game meaningfully. I think most people who have coded for the
> 2600 think they should start with the basics first, but then never
> get back to another game because of how much time the first took
> them...
Hm... might be, ok. It really is just my point.
I really think it is cheating to simply shifting a game to the Supercharger that'd normally need 500 Bytes of RAM. Instead of solving the problem, you're sneaking away from it, in other words: cheating. The challenge is to make it run with 128 Bytes anyway.
If I were to do a game on the superchager, I'd probably go for a game that'd normally need an Amiga :-)
Greetings,
Manuel
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