Atari XEGS + 1050 FDD and old floppies = Lots of fun !!

[level42]

WOW is that the time ?!?!?

Just hooked up my old trusty 1050 to the XEGS and put in the floppy disk that was in it (isn't it amazing that those things still work flawlessly ?)....turned out to be Kennedy Approach !

What a brilliant game.....everybody should try it (even under emulation).
If you're a little bit interested in flight control.....of course this is not the real thing, and yes there are true to life simulations now....but I'm not an air-traffic controller, I'm just a game player who wants to have fun....

I forgot all about time because I had to try "once more" a good number of times.....great speech in this game by the way....

Nighty night !

O, and if you want to play it on your PC (or on your Mac under Parallels:
www.kennedyapproach.com

[Etienne MacGyver]

I never played thatone, on my C64..

I like the box art though

[Belike]

I loved it, speech is great indeed!
"American 767, climb to 7000  feet....or clear for landing."

[Equites]

Holly cow, that game rocked on the Atari!  Just a shame it had to blank the screen due to vertical interupt during speech.  I loved my Atari 8-bit loooong time.

[Belike]

Nice video from the pc remake with original speech:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GspwkyzPyY

[level42]

Holly cow, that game rocked on the Atari!  Just a shame it had to blank the screen due to vertical interupt during speech.  I loved my Atari 8-bit loooong time.

Actually this game doesn't blank the screen at all during speech on the Atari (That would make this game unplayable). Others (Berzerk) freezed the screen for speech but not this one...!

If I am informed correctly KA uses the same speech process as the Berzerk arcade game does...

Funny thing: I just read the instructions on www.kennedyapproach.com and well....ahum that's the first time I actually read them !

Some things I didn't know:
1) if you want to know what instructions a plane is following, press Shift- combined with the letter code of the plane. It will ask the pilot for the info and he will answer.
(IIRC on the later Atari ST version you had an indicator under the altitude that indicated climbing, descending or level)
2) (An important one !!!!) You can give a plane the command to circle around the VOR tower to keep it "waiting" to land. In fact, the instructions say that a plane that enters your area and is planned to land on the (a) airport it will automatically do so when it arrives at a VOR. Note that it has to fly over the VOR to get this working.

You can also issue the command later by turning the arrow a couple of times until it changes into a circle. You can let them do a right or left turn and of course at various altitudes.

I never knew this, and this surely hindered me succeeding in the higher levels.....

KA rocks !! It is SO addicting. Anything else that was made later didn't match it, because they were becoming too real.

The PC version on that site is pretty impressive, but it has some differences from the original. F.I. if you start at Atlanta and choose the easiest level (1) you will never get planes from Dallas or any of the other western cities coming into the area, yet the PC version does do this...still it's an amazing version because the guy who programmed it didn't even have the resource files...

[Equites]

Hmm, just shows how my memory has faded lol, I could have sworn it blanked the screen on my 48k Atari 800.  Back in the day, I had around 2,000 games on double sided floppies using US Doubler.

I still believe the Atari 8-bit computer was the most powerful on the market at that time, and kicked C64 ass (lets not start a war here!).

I think my favourite games were Fort Apocalypse and Pharoahs Curse by Synapse, and also what was that game by Thorn EMI where you are a medieval soldier defending a castle wall - excellent.

[level42]

Yes I've always been an Atarian ever since the 2600.

I do believe that the Atari 8bit machines were more impressive because they were released in 1979. At that time they were without a single doubt the most powerful homecomputers. IBM actually considered buying Atari because of this machine ! (GOD why didn't they.....)

The Atari was still up to the C64 when that arrived 4 years later (!).
Yes the SID was a more flexibel sound chip, but the POKEY smoked it on the BASS sound.
In graphics, the only thing better on the C64 were the sprites. But the 8-bit Atari's had "Player/Missile" graphics. Although much less powerful, remember they were conceived in 1978, when the game graphics were still very simple !

In almost every other aspect the Atari 8 bits were better than the C64.
-The (D)OS
-The Basic (which actually supported the colors, graphics and sound of the hardware, unlike C64's PET basic
-The much faster floppy disk drive
-The SIO port (the forerunner of USB !!)
-The number of available colors
-hardware scrolling
-much better keyboard with key-clicks
-a power supply that you could NOT cook eggs on....
-much better looking

I also liked "strange" things about the Atari, f.i. that you can hear the cassettes and floppy's loading with the beeps. If something went wrong you could already hear it in a lot of cases.

However, the C64 sure outsold the Atari. The price was the reason in the first period. Marketing was also very smart and strong at Commodore.

2000 floppies is a LOT wow. I didn't have that much, but still quite a collection. Do you still have some ?

Maybe KA did blank out the screen on the 48k Machines only ? Doesn't seem likely because the speech is mostly processor demanding, not memory.
It sure doesn't on the XEGS (which is basically an Atari 800XL, so 64K).
I also don't remember it from my very first system (600XL with 1064 memory module).

Fort Apocalypse is BRILLIANT. Loved that and played it a lot.

My favorites:
- Bounty Bob Strikes Back
- Miner 2049er
- Donkey Kong (and Jr.)
- ALLEY CAT !!!! (NO other version even came CLOSE to the Atari (original)
- The Great Amarican Cross Country Road Race
- Master of the lamps
- Pitfall II
- BC's quest for tires
- Bruce Lee

and of course Rescue on fractalus (Behind Jaggi Lines, yes I had the famous LEAKED version, like most of us did ) This was the first game that ever scared the shit out of me !
I only had the same experience later with Unreal...(the 1 player version).

My favorite demo: Passionatly ! (Remember that ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiX8Ba2L4u0
Regretfully this is probably running to fast for our European taste, PAL/NTSC thing I guess....)

[level42]

About Rescue on fractalus: here's a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbZ-chrOgGg&feature=related

That intro (both the Lucasfilm logo and the spaceship) could NEVER been done on the C64.

Listen to the firing up engine sounds, very similar to some engine sounds in the early SW films.

David Fox (one of the game's developpers) is actually answering on that YouTube video (Look at my remarks (AtariAndre42).

Be sure to watch the video all the way to the end.

It scared the shit out of me the first time I saw the alien. I still had a B/W TV at the time so I didn't even see the differently colored helmet so I had no "warning" at all...
Imagine playing this in a dark room, sound turned up through my stereo and than that alien coming up....

Loved it

[caincan]

blindness is bad 

yes there are some impressive demos on atari 8bits

but in matter of gaming, c64 is a longtime runner  and blew out the Amstrad

[Equites]

Dude

How could I forget Miner 2049er and Bounty Bob Strikes Back by Big Five Software?  They were favourites of mine too, I remember I paid £45 for a ROM cart for Miner 2049er back in the mid eighties, expensive but worth it.

When US GOLD released Bounty Bob here in the UK, it was a 64K only game on tape, so I upgraded from 800 to 800XL just to play it! Could not source the 48k cart back then.  Eventually upgraded to 130XE.  Bill Hogue was a genius, have you checked out the Big Five Software website?

The only thing I disliked about the Atari was the unreliability of the tape loading system and the slow baud rate it used.  You could always 'tell' when it was gonna crash out during a load and when it was gonna finish just by the sound of the tape loading.

Remember Canyon Climber? That rocked too.

I had Donkey Kong and JR on ROM, they were great conversions and got alot of play by me.

Alley Cat - It was such a humourous, original and addictive game! That damn broom always got me!

Masters of the Lamp - Great soundtrack!

Pitfall II - I think I played this for a week solid, I could not believe the massive bonus 2nd level when I completed it, took me completely by suprise and only the Atari version had this!

Bruce Lee - fab game, DataSoft owned! I still remember that I had to pull one of the 16k modules in my Atri 800 for this to work otherwise it would not run in 48k, 32k only.  Ran ok on 64k machines though.

Sadly, I sold my entire collection when the Atari ST launched so I could buy one.  What a big regret and mistake!  The Atari ST sucked compared to the Atari 8-bit.

Yes I had Behind Jaggi Lines two years before Rescue On Fractulas was released, the first time the alien popped up I truely jumped out of my socks, got me every time!

I also had BallBlaster, which of course became BallBlazer when released.  Did you ever check out the disc loading screen for this baby? Even better than Fractulas;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qri5xavBdh4

My benchmark to see if someone knew their Atari technically was Player/Missle Graphics, so clearly you knew your Atari very well.  I did dabble with Player/Missile Graphics, very simple to set up, but slow in Atari BASIC without using machine language routines.

Im sure I still have a load of ANTIC, ANALOG and PAGE6 mags somewhere though.

[atarimania]

More infos about Rescue on Fractalus (really fantastic game) : here 

[atarikid]

Yes I've always been an Atarian ever since the 2600.

Me too. I have a pretty big collection of Atari stuff myself. Some very rare 2600 cartridges too. But everything is nog boxen and gathering dust on the attic.

My music studio was originaly also bases around de Atari ST running Cubase. Aaahhhh ... those were the days. :-)

[level42]

blindness is bad  

yes there are some impressive demos on atari 8bits

but in matter of gaming, c64 is a longtime runner  and blew out the Amstrad

Amstrad ? What's that ? Never even seen one in real life. Nobody I knew owned one in the day...
Friends I had had C64, Atari, TI99/4a, sometimes even Spectrum's (The poor lads, both ways) but never Amstrad.

In matter of gaming the Atari 8 bit machines were much more on par to the c64 as most c64 owners knew.
Yes there were more games for the c64 but there were thousands for the Atari as well.

Some games took full advantage of the c64 hardware, some games took full advantage of the Atari hardware. If those games were converted to the "other side" they usually sucked big time.

F.I.: Attack of the Mutant Camels. Rocks on A8, completely sucks on C64
Rescue on Fractalus: Rocks on A8, sucks on C64
Donkey Kong: Rocks on A8, sucks on C64

Maybe you can name a couple of games that were better on the C64 then on the A8 ?

The blindness you accuse me off is actually more the "blindness of the biggest mass" that was typical for C64 users in those days (everything else sucked, without that they even touched other systems for 1 second.). (It's much like Windows users today....they never want to even bother to try something else....)

Also: the systems were NOT just only game systems. If you wanted to do other stuff, the Atari was a much more friendly machine to use. It had a menu driven DOS. In fact, it HAD a DOS, the C64 didn't !

I remember the cryptic basic commands that made no sense to anyone that were needed to do stuff on C64 floppies.

Yes, I had been using the C64 pretty much (my uncle had one) before I decided to go for the A8....so no, I was (and am) not blind.
Again: the C64

[Etienne MacGyver]

like you said before , everybody has his / her flaws...

I loved the C64, and i love my windows machine  
and i think the important thing about it is that the people are happy with what they use..

but its true that many times the mass chooses just because of the mass and do / did not actually try the other stuff

good example of "following the crowd" is the mohave experiment ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsStHxtVr_w

i need to admit, i like 7 more than vista (from experience  )
but thats another story..