Atari Vault

[bulbousbeard]

You guys are probably already on top of this, but I wanted to try to discourage people from giving the current zombie incarnation of Atari any money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvrN1ZalYEQ

[evil_ash_xero]

That's an old school grudge, man.

[Marc]

They can go fuck themselves after burying Minters game the way they did. One company I'm happy to pirate/steal/emulate or whatever.

[Strider77]

I will buy many of their items. I fart on Atari.... hahahahaaaaa!

[Pixel_Outlaw]

Commodore "USA" did the same thing.
Didn't end well.

They sold new "Commodore" computer cases at very high costs with a very very very annoying version of Ubuntu (which made all kinds of noises for everything, just like hacker stuff on TV)

At some point it seems, companies just devolve into repackaging games from 20 years ago that their current team never had anything to do with.
SNK, Konami, Capcom, Sega, Midway...list goes on.

Pretty sad when those old games were written in assembly language with super tight restrictions.
Now you've got developers with API's 20 miles high writing in C# with every task done through a library module and they resort to repackaging again and again.

Don't get me wrong, I love a collection of games emulated on console but certain companies just keep milking projects over and over until the game teats are chapped.

I feel it is best to let a company die with dignity rather than put some string and wires on a corpse and try to puppet the parts around for amusement.

[bulbousbeard]

Commodore "USA" did the same thing.
Didn't end well.

They sold new "Commodore" computer cases at very high costs with a very very very annoying version of Ubuntu (which made all kinds of noises for everything, just like hacker stuff on TV)

At some point it seems, companies just devolve into repackaging games from 20 years ago that their current team never had anything to do with.
SNK, Konami, Capcom, Sega, Midway...list goes on.

Pretty sad when those old games were written in assembly language with super tight restrictions.
Now you've got developers with API's 20 miles high writing in C# with every task done through a library module and they resort to repackaging again and again.

Don't get me wrong, I love a collection of games emulated on console but certain companies just keep milking projects over and over until the game teats are chapped.

I feel it is best to let a company die with dignity rather than put some string and wires on a corpse and try to puppet the parts around for amusement.

Even though I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, many of those programs written in C# are actually better code than what was written in Assembly in the old days.

If you actually look at them for what they are, most game code has always been garbage. It was all rushed. They had like one year development cycles with employees sleeping in their offices. Crap was just pushed out the door as fast as possible. They didn't even do basic shit such as decouple updates from the speed the hardware ran at. We only have to look at a pile of crap such as Metal Slug 2 to see how shoddy most of the programming of those old games was. The CPS1 SF2 games were poorly programmed, too. Yet another one where the game just runs faster the higher you clock the CPU. That's not good engineering. That's ignoring all the bugs and little glitches in all of those games.

There are exceptions, of course, but I'd say the overwhelming majority of all video games have been terribly programmed.

[Strider77]

Wrong.

[gameoverDude]

They can go fuck themselves after burying Minters game the way they did. One company I'm happy to pirate/steal/emulate or whatever.

Agreed. Suck it, Fauxtari.

[BrianC]

The current "Atari" keeps making perplexing decisions. Instead of approving an improved version of the Flashback 2, they go and make a deal with AtGames, the company that did those poor official Genesis clones to make inferior Flashbacks with emulation and input lag. The odd thing is that "Atari" is okay with sites like AtariAge distributing their games, but takes legal action instead of letting Minter license TxK officially.

[Pixel_Outlaw]

... the company that did those poor official Genesis clones

Didn't those have really poor quality sound?
Sound chips seem to be the bane of emulation for the Genesis.

[Damocles]

... the company that did those poor official Genesis clones

Didn't those have really poor quality sound?
Sound chips seem to be the bane of emulation for the Genesis.

All the AtGames Genesis stuff does piss poor music.

[BrianC]

... the company that did those poor official Genesis clones

Didn't those have really poor quality sound?
Sound chips seem to be the bane of emulation for the Genesis.

yeah. Not as bad as Sega Smash Pack for DC, but worse than most of the better emulators.

As far as Atari Vault goes, I'm a bit skeptical, but I did like the two DS packs done by the same company (Code Mystics). I liked the iOS one too, but touch screen controls were not that great for the 2600 games and the game actually got worse after "Atari" messed with it and added a freeinum model to it. Code Mystics can be hit or miss, but their ports of KoF 99 and 2002 seemed to have turned out well. Still, the pack sounds like nothing new and these games are already on PC in multiple forms. I'm not expecting it to do anything over mame or the Atari Anniversary Collection/80 in 1. Surprisingly, Atari 80 in 1 has scanlines and good control for games like Centipede and Millipede.

[ED-057]

If you actually look at them for what they are, most game code has always been garbage. It was all rushed.

Yeah, I remember when I first got Super Mario Bros 3 and I had to wait ages for some updates to download which accidentally bricked my NES. What a pain that was.

[bulbousbeard]

If you actually look at them for what they are, most game code has always been garbage. It was all rushed.

Yeah, I remember when I first got Super Mario Bros 3 and I had to wait ages for some updates to download which accidentally bricked my NES. What a pain that was.

Yeah because Super Mario Bros. 3 was a cross platform game developed by a team of 400 that had to accommodate millions of hardware configurations and was as complicated as a contemporary big budget video game. Come on dude. It isn't even the same universe. In fact, I'd argue that Nintendo's relative lower amount of bugs is due to lack of ambition--not competence. It kind of blows my mind how many modern Nintendo games don't even have basic features that people take for granted today.

Mario 3 was no technical marvel even for its era. The scrolling in that game is hideous (so many ugly artifacts). There were better solutions to getting horizontal and vertical scrolling on the NES.

[Strider77]

The scrolling in that game is hideous (so many ugly artifacts). There were better solutions to getting horizontal and vertical scrolling on the NES.

Relax.. check your butt-hurt privilege.

[null1024]

They can go fuck themselves after burying Minters game the way they did. One company I'm happy to pirate/steal/emulate or whatever.

100% this. Absolutely worthless company.

If you actually look at them for what they are, most game code has always been garbage. It was all rushed. They had like one year development cycles with employees sleeping in their offices. Crap was just pushed out the door as fast as possible. They didn't even do basic shit such as decouple updates from the speed the hardware ran at. We only have to look at a pile of crap such as Metal Slug 2 to see how shoddy most of the programming of those old games was. The CPS1 SF2 games were poorly programmed, too. Yet another one where the game just runs faster the higher you clock the CPU. That's not good engineering. That's ignoring all the bugs and little glitches in all of those games.

There are exceptions, of course, but I'd say the overwhelming majority of all video games have been terribly programmed.

You didn't need to decouple updates when the hardware has a fixed spec [the game will always run at the given rate, unless the system is under very heavy load], and doing that adds overhead, taking precious CPU cycles away from very constrained machines. Games from the 68k-era and back were generally made in hand-written assembly for speed [as the compilers of the day produced slower code/larger code].

A ton of modern development practices are viable because CPU speed has increased so much.
MS2 runs like a dog for no apparent reason though, I really do wonder what the hell is going on internally.

Mario 3 was no technical marvel even for its era. The scrolling in that game is hideous (so many ugly artifacts). There were better solutions to getting horizontal and vertical scrolling on the NES.

The scrolling took a tradeoff, where the artifacts would be in the overscan area on most TVs. Later NES games do have better simultaneous H/V scrolling, but pretty much nothing before Mario 3 does.

[bulbousbeard]

They can go fuck themselves after burying Minters game the way they did. One company I'm happy to pirate/steal/emulate or whatever.

100% this. Absolutely worthless company.

If you actually look at them for what they are, most game code has always been garbage. It was all rushed. They had like one year development cycles with employees sleeping in their offices. Crap was just pushed out the door as fast as possible. They didn't even do basic shit such as decouple updates from the speed the hardware ran at. We only have to look at a pile of crap such as Metal Slug 2 to see how shoddy most of the programming of those old games was. The CPS1 SF2 games were poorly programmed, too. Yet another one where the game just runs faster the higher you clock the CPU. That's not good engineering. That's ignoring all the bugs and little glitches in all of those games.

There are exceptions, of course, but I'd say the overwhelming majority of all video games have been terribly programmed.

You didn't need to decouple updates when the hardware has a fixed spec [the game will always run at the given rate, unless the system is under very heavy load], and doing that adds overhead, taking precious CPU cycles away from very constrained machines. Games from the 68k-era and back were generally made in hand-written assembly for speed [as the compilers of the day produced slower code/larger code].

A ton of modern development practices are viable because CPU speed has increased so much.
MS2 runs like a dog for no apparent reason though, I really do wonder what the hell is going on internally.

Mario 3 was no technical marvel even for its era. The scrolling in that game is hideous (so many ugly artifacts). There were better solutions to getting horizontal and vertical scrolling on the NES.

The scrolling took a tradeoff, where the artifacts would be in the overscan area on most TVs. Later NES games do have better simultaneous H/V scrolling, but pretty much nothing before Mario 3 does.

"Didn't need to" is the key word. Games "didn't need to" be programmed as well as they do today. Games have to be portable and able to run on dozens of different operating system and millions of hardware configurations. It's really disingenuous to shit on modern development when it's exponentially more complex than development was during the 80s and 90s for fixed platforms.

I will say that there are examples of games that seem to work better. Garou, for example, runs at the same speed regardless of the Neo Geo's clockspeed. You can clock the CPU to 30mhz and the game still runs the same. Garou was probably the pinnacle of the Neo Geo.

[trap15]

A large majority of arcade and console games back in the day were decoupled from CPU speed (other than slowdown). I'm not sure where you get the idea that everything was tied to the CPU speed.

[bulbousbeard]

A large majority of arcade and console games back in the day were decoupled from CPU speed (other than slowdown). I'm not sure where you get the idea that everything was tied to the CPU speed.

I'm not just talking about arcade games. I'm talking about games in general. Many EGA PC games I've tried have this problem, for example.