Console Classix - Retro Reborn

Changing Gears

2011-06-13T07:26:00.000-07:00

Greetings to the faithful few who keep up with what's going on around here. I have a number of things to tell you so this post may get a bit long. Sorry about that...

To start with I haven't been around for about three weeks. That's because I took a semi-vacation. It was supposed to be a week of real vacation, but what often happens with me happened again this time. The fertilizer hit the fan covering my relaxation with a number of interesting smells. It seems I have a gift. Last summer my car bent a rod and I decided to fix it myself, for those of you who don't remember when that happened.

So, what happened this year? I don't even want to go into it. For one thing I can't remember it all. I think it's my brain's way of shielding me. I know that me and Jonathan, the next in line for the CC throne, spent a number of hours/days moving his sister from about two hours down the road back to town. Also, I had to work on my car.... big surprise. A number of computer problems also cropped up mysteriously as soon as I decided that I needed a rest.

Now, I have also started playing new game and that ate up a lot of my time. I say it's new, I should say it's new to me. It's Dwarf Fortress and you have to be a serious man to play it... I decided to take a second crack at it while I was off because I failed to play it once before. The “Getting Started” tutorial takes several hours to play through. The game doesn't have a learning curve, it's move of a learning cliff that most people throw themselves off of before they learn to play. Once you can play it though it's amazing. If any of you play it e-mail me. I want to virtually pat you on the back...

In other news I'm writing a book. I know I mentioned it once before, but now I'm working on it in earnest. Gaming is one of my loves, storytelling is another. You might say I'm an aspiring author. At the moment a lot of my time is being eaten up by the book. I'm trying to get it ready to send to an agent before the end of August. (I really hope to have it ready by the beginning of that month...)

Part of the reason I am doing this is to try and raise some more money I can stick into CC. Things are going well around here, but not well enough to hire the new hands we need. We have got to get an influx of cash and, so far, all the new things we've worked on haven't brought in a great deal of new traffic. General MacArthur said that you shouldn't land where the enemy was, but where he wasn't. I am trying to step out on new ground rather than fighting the same old battle we've been entrenched in for years.

On top of all this I have got to get a lot of meat and potatoes work done around here. So, for the next little while you're only going to be hearing from me now and then. If any of you want to know what's going on come by the forums or shoot me an e-mail. Once I get some of this stuff under hand I should have time to get back on videos and blogging and the whole deal.

Back To The Point

2011-05-22T09:22:00.000-07:00

Eventually I do plan to get back to the point and start doing “elements” posts again. Today however, I'm just not up to it. I'm working on a book (Shhhh, that's not exactly public knowledge.) and I feel written out in a lot of ways. It's one thing to get on here and blabber about whatever I'm thinking as I think it. It's another to lay out a philosophical position point by point underlining some running theme. So, for a second Sunday in a row I fall down on the job.

In truth I have got to give myself a vacation soon. It probably looks like I'm not doing anything from you guys point of view, but there's always a lot going on in the background. This video thing really eats up a lot of time, but it really is working. Honestly we've only touched the surface with it as well. We plan to do more even soon. It is like I don't have enough hours in the day though. I get up at six, even on weekends, and before I know it it's time to head to bed. I was waiting to take a week off when SWTOR came out, but it doesn't look like it's going too this spring. If it's not out in June I am taking a week off anyways.... I am worn down, lol.

This week I really hope to get another video or two up. We have the funny one we are working on and if Daggerdale comes out this week we hope to get it up as well. There's more going on than that, but I am going to cut it here. I just started playing Dwarf Fortress this weekend. It is CRAZY and it's calling to me. I'm sure you all understand what I mean, lol.

Congratulations Guys!

2011-05-20T06:36:00.000-07:00

Well, Tim and b5a0ed44-6ada-11e0-ae5e-000bcdcb2996 (if that is your real name...) both of you have won a copy of Star Raiders. Shoot an e-mail to me here: webmaster@consoleclassix.com and I'll send you your keys.

I do wish we had had a few more entries, but I guess it worked out for you guys. I think we may have to up our prize packages to bring a little more attention to all this, lol.

Either way, once you guys have played the game a bit post your thoughts here if you don't mind. I'd like to know what you think of the game.

You Know, Just Hanging Out

2011-05-18T07:07:00.000-07:00

In truth I've been doing a lot more than that although you guys can't really see what's going on in the background. That's why I decided to take the time to do a full blog post about it. The number one thing eating my time right now is playing games. Yep, that's right. I have spent countless hours playing a number of games getting ready for overview videos and something else we're planing.

In fact I've decided to tell you faithful few about the other project. I wanted to call it “To Hack With It”, but that got booed down, so now it's “The Video Project Without A Title”.... Anyways, one of the things I do for fun (when I ever have the time) is hack games that I've played in the past to add some interesting element or facet to the game. For instance what I've started with is Dragon Warrior. You all may remember how the game goes on FOREVER and how you start with nothing, not even clothes. Well, it struck me as funny when I was playing it for the overview. You are the decedent of Erdrick, who was the greatest warrior in the world. Apparently your family blew all his money on cheap wine because you start with nothing. So, I hacked the game and with the change of one byte I went from starting with nothing to starting with Erdrick's Armor, Erdrick's Sword and the Silver Shield. Believe it or not even starting with that it still takes HOURS to top out your character.

Anyways, the point is that I want to make funny videos where I hack some game to add something cool to it. Like starting Final Fantasy with the grown up versions of your characters. What do you guys think? Can anyone think of a title better than “Fun Time With Aaron”? Post a comment and let me know something...

In other news Atari has already told me that I can get a copy of Daggerdale to review when it comes out, so that's cool. The new game reviews seem to be bringing in more traffic than anything else. I honestly think we need to start trying to do one new game review a week, but I'm not sure we can fit it into the current time table. Plus I really want to continue to tie things into the whole “classic” theme around here. Of course with Daggerdale I feel like it's a D&D game and that probably appeals to a lot of our fans anyway. How many D&D games do we have on the site? A lot...

I also need to get those games moved into the new boxes. So far I haven't gotten one game moved... I need more time or more help or if I can get it both... Either way, I'll try to let you guys know when when I make measurable progress on any of this stuff.

Win A Copy Of Star Raiders

2011-05-16T14:28:00.000-07:00

Once more Atari has been generous enough to throw a couple of copies of their newest release our way. Star Raiders is a reinvention of the original classic. It's a space combat simulator with a couple of new twists. We've actually already done a review of the game for our YouTube channel. If you haven't seen it yet, you may want to check it out.

In spite of my controller rant it's still an interesting game. We've got two copies of the Xbox 360 version to give away. So, how can you win a copy? Just comment on this post with the first space combat game you ever played. For example, the first one I ever played was the Star Wars arcade game. (If you can remember that far back.)

The first person to respond will get a copy, plus we're going to pick a random winner from the other replies Friday morning. Go ahead and let us know how you cut your teeth in space combat. Good luck everyone!

Getting Back On It

2011-05-15T09:04:00.001-07:00

I plan to get back on it starting tomorrow. It's been a busy week for me and I don't feel up to an elements post today. I just thought I would do a quick post to let you know what's up. I'm still working on video stuff in the background. I should be able to get to a real post in the morning. It's just been very busy and I am basically too tired to think right now... So, that's about the state of things at the moment, lol.

Bogged Down

2011-05-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

Guys this is just a quick post to let you know that I haven't forgotten to post, I've just been busy. We were working on the Star Raiders review until 8PM last night. (The sound ended up having some problems after we were done as well. We have got to do something about our sound setup and QA, lol) Anyways, you can check out the video below. I plan to do a regular post on Sunday. I have got some non-CC work I have to handle Saturday and for the rest of today I plan to be making more game video.

You know... Keeping Myself Busy

2011-05-10T06:16:00.000-07:00

So, as usual there is a load going on this week. It's only Tuesday and I'm already tired, lol. To start with I'm going to be recording hours of video each week for the for next few months at least. Now, I am sure that playing twenty to thirty hours a week sounds like a dream job, but there's a catch to it. I have to try to keep up with all the other things I'm working on around here as well. Plus, of course, we want to take on some more interesting and entertaining video projects. For instance we'd like to start doing video blogs once in a while. They would save some time and that's a big factor around here. We really need a better camera (or at least mic) before we can start doing that. Either way it's something we're looking at for the future.

I'm supposed to get the site skin stuff from Atari for the up and coming Star Raiders. Our contact has been out of the office for close to a week so we haven't been sent the stuff yet. Which means it will probably come in this afternoon and I'll need to get it ready for tomorrow morning. (At least that's what they're telling me.) We are planning to do a review of Star Raiders like we did with Yar's Revenge. That review has already had over a thousand views and it's still climbing. Plus, of course, we've just started the whole YouTube thing really. As time goes by we should get more and more subscribers making massive views easier to get.

That's another thing that is really going to eat time this week. Believe it or not the last review took close to ten hours to do. We have to capture the footage we are going to use, write a load of notes about the game and compile them into a logical voice over and then edit the video so you can literally see what we're talking about from one moment to the next. It's a lot of work, but I think it's worth it. I'm honestly considering trying to start doing one new game a week. As new games come out that the retro-gamer may be interested in we need to weigh in with our opinion.

In addition to all this we really need to work on updating the inventory soon. I'm sure you guys have seen the Domino video by now. Well, part of the reason behind that was that we want to move the games from cheap plastic bins into the nice wooden ones. The first batch of wooden crates have arrived and, in theory, we should be moving the games from one place to another, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen this week...

Anyways, the point is that things are moving along. We hope to have at least one new video up this week if not more. We keep working away, there's just a lot to do. I plan to post again near the end of the week and you let you know how things are going.

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The Elements of a Great Game – Story

2011-05-08T10:33:00.000-07:00

Here again I may seem to be touching on something that is rather optional in gaming. After all, where is the story in Tetris? OK, OK... Yes, there is no story in Tetris and Teris is a great game. However, what I'm talking about is the starting chords, the fundamental palette, the base elements if you will of gaming. Not every game uses every element. I know I've basically said that before, but I wanted to underline it after I had strayed out as far as optional supporting characters in my last post. Story really is one of the basic building blocks of gaming and most games make use of some kind of back story.

To start with I want to look at a game where the story was there but had very little to do with gameplay and was never really filled out. Space Invaders is a perfect example. After all you're not playing a little dot trying to hit other little dots with a third little dot. You play someone guarding the Earth from evil invading aliens with a weapon that can blast them out of the sky. That is certainly story! However, that's as far as it went. The developers never built on the idea and, since the story went no where so did the game. Now, I know some of you may be hoping up and down screaming at me through the screen right now “Space Invaders is a timeless classic!!!!” OK, I agree, but let's look at a couple of screenshots. Take a look at the Atari 2600 Version and the new PSP version. See any similarities?

The game hasn't changed, it hasn't evolved. Now, I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but Space Invaders just doesn't have the following that it once did. Arcade games have moved on and it's a throw back to the past. At first it may not seem like the kind of game where story could have added much to it, but I don't agree. Games like Fire Emblem have deep story lines that have nothing to do with how the game plays. The characters in the story, although well developed, don't necessarily pass from one game in the series to the next, but the story continues on. What is the result? A long running series that keeps growing and changing while still remaining true to it's original form. The story is used as a motivator to keep the player playing and it works.

We can even look at arcade games like Mortal Kombat and see that story does matter. A new MK game just came out and, of course, it has a story mode. Why? Because the story pulls you through and keeps you playing. The series started with a story and it has grown and changed and although the game has evolved to some extent it is still basically what it was when it started with more bells and whistles. The makers of Mortal Kombat gave people a reason to keep on fighting and they do. Now, some could claim that the story isn't important and that it would have been a smash series without it, but I don't believe that. I can't think of a series that has had such a prolonged arcade life, but that doesn't have such a compelling story. (If you can think of one let me know.)

If I seem to be missing the obvious story driven genre that is RPG games, be assured, I didn't overlook it. For the most part RPGs ARE stories, so there seemed to be no reason to mention it here. In time I intend to take a look at each genre and will talk about my thoughts on RPG stories, the good, the bad and the ugly, but now's not the time for it. My point here wasn't that some games are story based, but that most games can get a little something extra out of story. What would have happened to Tetris as a series if there was some compelling story based reason to line up those little blocks? The world may never know....

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Console Classix Videos – Take 1

2011-05-06T04:36:00.000-07:00

So, this week has been loaded with video. I don't know how many hours of gameplay I've recorded this week, but it's been a lot. We're working on getting more overviews up and we're also doing a little recording for an idea I got the other day while playing Dragon Warrior for hours and hours.

That actually brings a point to mind. It's been suggested that my overviews need background music. Now, I generally agree with that. My voice isn't unmelodious, lol, but when I am reading an overview and trying to keep the time reasonable I do have a rather quick and to-the-point dialect. So, all in all, background music would be great. Enter the problem: We can't rip music out of the gameplay footage and use it as background music!

Why? I'm glad you asked! As is usually the case when we can't do something we want around here the answer is copyright law. Why can't we translate games from Japanese into English? Copyright Law. Why can't we show a picture of Link playing Console Classix on the home page? Copyright Law. Why can't we sell bootleg DVDs out of the trunk of our car up at the mall? Copyright Law! Wait... strike that last one, I would never want to do that anyway. Now, I want to say that I agree with the limitations of copyright and I'm not really complaining that we can't do those things. (Well, not being able to translate a game is stupid and the law should allow that, but that's another subject.)

Anyways, back to background music. You see, when we record video of a game it's not the game itself. The video is it's own artistic work that is, in fact, copyrighted by Console Classix. Now, we could almost certainly leave the background music playing in the video without any problems as long as we didn't modify it. (Imagine how chopped up it would be in the our Dragon Warrior video...) However, if we pull the music out separately and use it, say as background music for a video we are making, that would be a copyright infringement. You understand? We can show video of a copyrighted game, but we can't just take and play copyrighted music wherever we want.

So, the questions are: Where can we get background music? Should we use background music? Can we find a range of music to work with different games? Should I do the voice overs with an Australian accent?

There is a lot to think about there. In any event, we are going to be working on video for the next few weeks at least. If you guys have ideas or suggestions let us know. We're listening!

Oh, and thirteen followers! Hooray!

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So, What's Up?

2011-05-03T04:45:00.000-07:00

A lot really. That's why I decided to do this blog post. The last couple of weeks have been a little crazy and I'm running short on hours this week. You may have noticed that we didn't do a contest Monday. Well, there are a couple of reasons for that. One, we don't want to beat it to death even though I enjoy them. Two, time, time, time. There just isn't enough of it.

Last week we spent close to twenty hours all told pulling out the inventory, laying out that giant domino pattern, filming the great fall and then cleaning everything up. On top of that we put up another video review and, for the most part, kept up with the blogging, forums, facebook, etc. There are only so many things I can work on personally at a time. So, I have to be very careful about how I choose to spend the time that I've got.

Right now I am working on Console Classix number one problem. No one has ever heard of us. Now, I know you have, but look to your right. Now up just a tad. You see that number of blog subscribers? It's eleven guys. You can feel as if I'm talking to you all personally, because I DO talk to you all personally. The truth is that as AWESOME as our product is for the most part we are unknown. The thing is that we have got to fix that. How can we?

Well, I'll start by telling you what doesn't work:
Adding more games! Believe me, we've tried. The difference between offering 1,000 games and over 3,500 really matters to people who already know. However, It doesn't do anything for people that have never heard of us.
Adding more systems! For the longest time I thought this was going to be the fix. We have added system after system and everybody around here loves it. Here again, however, it doesn't do anything for people that haven't heard of us.
Adding more features! No seriously guys... It just doesn't work. I still think that it will in the long run, but it doesn't now. Why? Well, because we offer so much for $5.99 that very few people are saying to themselves “I'd signup if they offered _______”. Most people who are going to be interested ARE as soon as they find us. The problem is that very few people manage to find us.

So, what does work? Well, we're working on that. You may have noticed that we've started to take an interest in videos. Why? Well, because they are a very viral way of sharing information. The dominoes video really has nothing to do with what Console Classix does, but it gets our name out there. So far it is working. Believe it or not our number of “Likes” on the homepage has started going up a lot faster since we started regularly posting videos. It's a way for us to get word of mouth advertising.

Anyways, the point of all that rambling is that I am spending a lot of my time doing video editing. Now we get to the ways you can help:

First, tell everyone you know about what we're doing.
Second, share our videos all over.
Third, if you like us “Like” us.
Forth, feel free to click the subscribe button on this blog if you haven't already. It encourages me, lol.

What Console Classix really needs is more traffic. We are working hard to get it. Once we have it we will be able to add more games, more systems and more features. It's all tied together guys!

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The Elements of a Great Game – Atmosphere – Supporting Characters–Part 2

2011-05-01T05:19:00.001-07:00

OK, I have to admit that in this post I am stepping way beyond the basic elements of gaming. If I was laying out a artist's palette I would have started these posts with basic blue and red and I with this post I have moved on to teal or mauve. So, why have I strayed so far from my original concept. Well, to be honest, I've just kind of meandered over to this point. In my next post I intend to get back on track with “A Study in Yellow” if you will. However, I want to finish my look at supporting characters first. So, with your permission, I'll continue.

What I am considering today is the way that supporting characters really fill out RPG games. In the first place there are simple NPC characters that the player has no direct influence on. They can be considered as much a part of the atmosphere as the artwork or the music. However, they can be used to inspire the emotions and get the player really involved in the story. Here I have to mention Champions of Krynn once again because I feel it has one of the best examples of this I've ever played through. As the game unfolds you get to know an honorable knight name Sir Karl. He dies a little over half way through the game. By that point you really feel like you know him. To play up the drama the woman he loves is with you when you find him dying in a pool of his own blood. (Of course, you could have just healed him if the game would have let you, which does let some of the air out of the drama balloon. Still, sometimes you just have to suspend disbelief.) You instinctively feel sorry for the woman and her lost love and it drives you on through the rest of the game. In the sequel the story continues as Sir Karl is brought back as evil undead. You have to kill him to give him rest. It's all very deep and it makes the entire game memorable. NPC back stories that grow as you play pull you in and make the world feel more real.

Supporting characters are also used to fill out the “party” in RPG games. This particular aspect has changed a great deal over the years. When we look at games like Bard's Tales and Final Fantasy we see the party represented as nothing more than a combat group. When anyone talks to the party they are talking to you, the player. They don't talk to party member A and then party member B, they just talk to the entire party. The part has only one personality and, for all intents and purposes, might as well be one person with four to six bodies. Even this unarguably added something to the atmosphere, however. You ended up with fighters and wizards and thieves that each had their own skills even if they didn't have their own voices. In many games you could customize the look of these characters and at least make believe that your party had more than one person. In fact, we used to play Final Fantasy as a multi-player game. We would each pick a character and then announce what we wanted “our guy” to do in combat. It certainly added a great deal to the game.

As time went by this idea expanded. We began to see games with a single main character who would gather a party of actual NPCs with them as they traveled along. Here I can't help but mention Bio-Ware. One of the first games I ever played with this kind of main character/NPC party members formula was Baldur's Gate. As soon as think of that game I think “Go for the eyes, Boo!” The party members had personalities, they had goals, they were full fledged characters. There were even side quests related to what was going on in these character's fictional lives. You could help them out as if you were helping a friend. This idea was expanded on with games like Knights of the Old Republic where you had a real influence on your party as the game played out. Wherever they started from they were going to end up more like you were by the end of the game. Were you going to be a hero and inspire them to be people of moral courage or were you going to be the villain and teach them all to look out for number one? (This choice between good and evil is actually another element in RPG games, but we'll touch on that when we get fully into RPGs.) Filling out the NPCs in this way made them feel more like real people and, as a result, made the game world feel more deep and real. For RPG games at least, these supporting characters added a great deal to the atmosphere.

I've run long again... In the next post I'm going to try to get back to the roots of the thing and take a look at something that applies to all games. This tangent just sort of popped up.

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You Made Me Laugh!

2011-04-29T06:50:00.001-07:00

Once again it's Friday and once again it's time to hand out a prize! Now, all the entries were funny and I don't want you to think I didn't give them all a good consideration before picking a winner. However, in all true contests there has to be one winner. Someone that for one reason or another came in first. In this case the winner is:

ocg1984

Backdoor childbirth got the best belly laugh. Admittedly it has to do with kids/birth which I have a lot of experience with. My wife went natural on a couple of our kids and we know a few people who have delivered at home and one who did it in a car. So, it instantly struck a chord with me, lol. Somehow the idea of tying them up for there own safety struck me as funny.

Again, thank you all for your comments. We'll have another contest soon and give you guys another crack at the prize.

Ocg1984, don't forget to send an e-mail to webamster@consoleclassix.com with all your mailing info.

Taylor.... you still haven't done that yet. Your prize is aging like wine man...

Triumphant Video

2011-04-27T08:56:00.000-07:00

Maybe we can get Eddie Van Halen on guitar soon! For those of you who don't know yet, we just put together a rather interesting video for YouTube. We've always wanted to show you guys our game inventory, but we were never sure how to go about it with sufficient “Cool Points”. We were given an idea a few years ago, but it was so epic that we felt we didn't have the time. We finally decided that we needed to make time and the result is our truly triumphant video. The idea was simple and beautiful, just take thousands of games, line them up like dominoes and then knock them over. So that's what we did yesterday. It took ten hours on setting games on edge and a few more to get everything in place and finish the video. It's all done now and I have to say that I think it's worth watching and telling your friends about. So, take a look, share it with your friends, leave a comment, lol.

The Triumphant Video

Make Us Laugh And Get a Gift Card

2011-04-25T03:46:00.001-07:00

We've decided to run another little contest this week in order to wrap April up on a winning note. Once again it's “Caption the Screenshot” bum, bum, bummmmm! The rules are simple enough, post a caption for the screenshot below as a comment. We, the staff of Console Classix, will pick the one we think is funniest and award them the prize for exemplary humor. What is the prize? A $25 Amazon gift card! Now, you may be saying to yourself “Wasn't that the same prize they offered a couple of weeks ago?” Well, yea, it is. So, what? You gotta problem with Amazon? Alright then! Caption the screenshot!

As usual, we're going to wrap the contest up on Friday. So make sure you post your caption before Friday morning!

Without further adieu here is the screenshot:

The Elements of a Great Game – Atmosphere – Supporting Characters–Part 1

2011-04-24T13:20:00.000-07:00

In my last “elements” post we took a look at the different kinds of main characters that we often find in gaming. (Those being static and dynamic characters.) In this post I want to look at another optional layer to this already optional element and that is supporting characters. Mario has his Luigi, Sonic has his Tails, Han his Chewy and Simon had Garfunkel. Now, I know that supporting characters cover more than just the atmosphere of a game. They certainly do add atmosphere, but they can also change game play and cross right into game mechanics. However, supporting characters have to go somewhere and so I am sticking them in here just because we've already run into them.

There are several roles that these supporting characters fill. The first and most simple is to give a multi -player aspect to a game. When we look at the original Super Mario Brothers we see Luigi represented as the “green Mario”. The play styles between the two characters is exactly the same. Their great in-game difference is nothing more than the color of their cloths. This is also true of Contra, Ikari Warriors and loads of other games. The addition of multi-player gaming certainly added something to the game, but that was the extent of these supporting characters' roles. (Multi-player gaming is actually another optional element, but it's going to have to wait for another time) However, even though the main and supporting characters are exactly the same except for wardrobe, the developers still understood that it was important to represent these characters as separate individuals. The second player in SMB isn't green Mario he is, in fact, Luigi. Just look in the manual!

Now, with Ikari Warriors and Contra the difference in the characters never got much further than clothing and they remained where they started as simple multi-player options. However, with Mario and Luigi the different characters began to take on different play styles along with their different cloths and back stories. In Super Mario Bros. 2 Mario was still the well rounded guy he had always been, but Luigi became a fantastic jumper even though he wasn't quiet as strong as his brother. In games like Sonic the Hedgehog the supporting characters were introduced with different play styles already intact. As each of these series developed, more and more characters were added to the list and more and more play styles became available. (Again, options in play style is another optional element, but now we're looking at supporting characters.) Each of these supporting characters also had story based reasons why they had their skills or powers. This helped immerse the player in the game. The philosophical gulf between deciding to play “high jumping Mario” and Luigi is very great even if it wouldn't have effected game play. These characters added not only more playing options, but presented a more rounded and real world to the player. They added something to the atmosphere of the game.

Villains are another aspect of supporting characters. One of the things that made the original Star Wars trilogy great (you remember, the real Star Wars movies) was that you could really hate Darth Vader. From the moment he broke that young soldier's neck he was somebody you wanted to see “get his”. Bowser represents a generally more humorous woman stealing villain that everybody can want to defeat. Mother brain represents a menace that has to be stopped. Dracula is a undead blood drinking a-moral killing machine that just needs to finally die! All these villains provide fuel for the imagination as do their poor victims. In the first LOZ princess Zelda was nothing more than the poor girl kidnapped by Ganon. However, as simple as her role was it certainly supported the feel of the entire game. Imagine what you would have felt like if you had finally defeated Ganon only to find out that “Princess Zelda” was a prize winning poodle that a well off north-eastern family of elite dog breeders wanted back... Legend of Zelda would have had a whole new meaning.

These are only a few ways in which supporting characters add to the atmosphere of a game. Their influences are much deeper in RPG games. In fact I plan to cover than in my next post. I don't want to make these posts book length, so I'm breaking them up.

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Anguna – Homebrew Classic

2011-04-22T06:20:00.000-07:00

Some of you may not have heard of Anguna yet.Well, that's exactly why I'm doing this post. I also plan to do a complete review of the game for our gameinfo page on it next week. So, what is Anguna? It is a truly remarkable Zelda like homebrew game for the GBA. I could go down it's list of features praising it, but I won't right now. That's going to wait until my review is complete. This post is just to let you know that my review is on it's way. Well, that and I also did a quick interview with Nathan Tolbert the author of Anguna. Nathan did the coding and Chris Hildenbrand provided the truly beautiful artwork. I wanted to let you all take a look at the interview before I did the review. So, here it is:

1. How old are you and how long have you been programming?
32. I started programming at about 6 yrs old when my parents bought us a TI-99/4a computer, that came with a book called "Beginner's Basic". I was immediately hooked, and spent the rest of my childhood trying to figure out how to make cheesy games in basic.

2. What do you do professionally?
I write software at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

3. How did you get into programming and how long had you been coding before you wrote Anguna?
I guess I already answered this :)

4. How long did it take you to code the game from start to finish?
About 3 years. Since it was just a hobby project, I wasn't able to sink a lot of devoted time into it, and I worked on it off and on during that time. I guess only about half or 2/3 of that time was actual game coding, the rest was level/game design, asset preparation, throwaway code for learning the GBA platform, etc.

5. What were your influences for the play style?
Zelda, of course :) Really, I've always enjoyed old-school action-adventure games (older zeldas, metroid, blaster master, etc) and all my life have wanted to make a high quality console adventure game. With Anguna, I sat down and said, "what would I like to play?" and tried to make that (I only half succeeded, I think). Some of the design decisions (no real plot, lack of clear direction of where to go, etc) were very purposeful based on what I enjoy in video games (And don't really appear often in modern games). I like wandering around not knowing where I'm supposed to go ;-)

6. How much were you involved with the art development.
Early demos of Anguna had HORRIBLE graphics that my friends I and made, combined with some nice graphics from Reiner's tilesets http://reinerstileset.4players.de/ that were pretty but didn't fit well with what I was going for. (see http://www.gbadev.org/demos.php?showinfo=698 )
Then I lucked out, and had an amazing artist (Chris Hildenbrand) contact me about reworking the graphics for the game. He had quite a few ideas about changing the game engine to support things that it didn't originally support (foreground tiles, enemy portraits, etc), but his art was amazing, so I overhauled the engine to support his suggestions. It was then a back and forth process -- I'd give him a list of sprites and tiles that I was interested in using, he'd give me back art that partially matched what I asked for, and also included other ideas. I'd then work what he had given me into the game.

7. The AI for the game is fairly impressive. Was coding it difficult or is it easier than it looks?
The AI was actually relatively easy and fun to work on. Each enemy had it's own script that ran every frame to determine what to do next. Most have very simple patterns, but a few (the toadies and sentries for example) took a good bit of testing and debugging to get right.

8. What influenced your decisions about level and enemy design? How did you go about developing a list of enemies? How did you lay out your dungeons?
Enemy design had 2 parts: first, what the enemy is (the picture), 2nd what it did (the ai). For what the enemies were, I mostly used fairly standard fantasy game enemies, combined with whatever Chris came up with in the graphics department. For what they did, that took more thought. One of the fun things about zelda, (and in contrast, what made some other top-down action adventures like Final Fantasy Adventure for GB weak) was learning each enemy, how they move, their patterns, which were all different, and fighting accordingly. So I did my best to come up with predictable but challenging patterns.
Level design was a bit harder. I'm pretty bad at it, I feel like. Trying to make maps that were not completely linear, but not just a mess of random rooms was hard. I'd generally sketch it all out on graph paper, then sit down at the map editor and flush out the details. Trying to get the difficulty right (not just of the enemies, but of the maze, secret passages, etc) was tricky. I still don't really know for sure if the difficulty level is quite right (since I made it, I know where the secrets are).

9. Did any enemies get marked off the list before they got in game? If so why?
I originally had a wolf and some undead critters (for the graveyard scene) planned, but never got suitable graphics for them, so they got chopped. And I originally wanted a few more types enemies for the 4th dungeon, but at that point I was getting impatient with finishing, so I just did some palette swaps (thus the red toady) and went with it.
Also the toadys were originally ogres, but Chris had that neat toady graphic, so I replaced the ogres with them.
10. When you can't see enemies on screen are they still running around with their AI or do they cease to exist?
Yeah, offscreen enemies that are in the same room as you are still running around offscreen. I debated a few different design methods for that, but finally thought it would be easiest if I broke everything into discrete rooms, and everything in the room is still processed every frame.

11. What was the single hardest challenge you had to overcome?
Heh, my own tendency to get bored and not finish hobby projects :)
Probably the hardest technical challenge was getting all the final glitchy bugs out of the game. I had a few places where the game would intermittently lock up after a few minutes of play. That was really hard to debug. And my background scrolling code was never rock solid -- I kept running into scrolling glitches right until the end. Developing for a small handheld made debugging a lot of those issues a lot harder than it is on a pc.

12. Will there be a sequel?
Probably not. I like the idea of doing one, but I'd really rather make a different game instead.
I do get people asking if they can port it to a different platform, (the answer is yes) but nobody has ever followed through with it. I've ported it to the Nintendo DS, and started on an iPhone port, but that got stalled out (making the same game 3 times starts to get old, and I'm not a fan of Apple's tight control over development on their devices)

13. Do you have any plans to develop other games in the future?
No definite plans, but I'd like to. The trick is finding a good niche. The GBA was perfect -- it was relatively easy to develop for, and had a such good homebrew community that I knew if I made a decent game, it would get played. I keep throwing around ideas to make an unofficial Blaster Master sequel for GBA and DS, but haven't gotten motivated to do so yet. I also keep thinking about trying to write an atari 2600 game, just to see if I can.
I'd also like to eventually make some games for android devices, but that will have to wait until my hobby budget can afford an android device!

14. Do you have anything you would like to add?
Not that I can think of. Thanks for the interest in the game! I did find a company that supposedly still sells GBA flash carts, I ordered some and am waiting to see if they actually will get delivered, so maybe I'll have physical carts to start selling again soon!

Thanks!
Nathan

I found Nathan's responses very interesting and am certainly going to pull from them in my review. I may even touch a few of the points he mentioned in another post. If you haven't tried Anguna yet go play it. No, go play it now. As it's in the homebrew section of Console Classix it's free for everyone. Go click the play now button and play it. It's amazing to see what a couple of determined guys can do. Also, keep an eye out for my review. I hope to have it done early next week.

And The Winner Is....

2011-04-22T05:42:00.000-07:00

So, out of all our contestants, who I want to thank for entering, one of you got picked as the lucky winner, who I want to personally congratulate, of a copy of Atari's new game Yar's Revenge for the Xbox 360 which is a great prize that I wouldn't want to delay the giving away of with a single long, confusing run-on sentence.

So... Amber won!

Yet again the random number generator has picked the winner with it's deep insight into human nature.

Amber, I need you to shoot an e-mail to webmaster@consoleclassix.com so that I can shoot you your key.

Now, if you like you can also post a comment and let us know what you think of the game. It's a way to share the wealth, lol.

Once again, congratulations Amber!

Also, thanks everyone for sharing your memories with us. I intend to have another little contest soon, so keep an eye out.

Lines of Communication

2011-04-20T07:44:00.000-07:00

As all of you almost certainly know by now Atari released Yar's Revenge last week. It was a very new take on a very old favorite. Atari was generous enough to give us a copy of the game to review, which we did. All in all the game is well designed and fun to play and it's certainly worth what they are charging for it. HOWEVER, it could have been even better had they gotten a little more feedback before they released the game.

Those of you who have watched my review may think I'm just picking on the game's weak points and being overly critical, but I'm not. I wanted to lay out my complaints here so that everyone could see a couple of things. First, these issues are very minor. Second, they would have been a piece of cake to fix. I'm not going to step out into what I would have liked to see in the game in the form of additions. That's not what I'm on about right now. I am only going to touch on things I consider border-line bugs that no one could argue are features.

First Point: The dialog for the in-game story was only offered in the form of sub-titles. These moved by so fast only a speed reader could follow it all. Now, on day one a decision should have been made. Either the story matters or it doesn't. If it doesn't don't bother to put it in. However, if the story does matter make sure that it's at least readable when the player encounters it. There was so little dialog in the game that I think they could have also sprung for voice actors. Two good voice actors could have done it all. During gameplay this would have been especially useful. Well, there is spoken dialog during gameplay. Sadly it's bug talk, which is cool, but unintelligible. So, you have to dodge around the screen killing legions of bad guys while speed reading tiny text in the lower left hand corner. I can't help but feel that this made it through testing because the testers either knew or were ignoring the story. All this could have been fixed with a few voice actors and pausing the sub-titles until the player pressed a button.

Second Point: The controls are basically un-customizable. You do have the option to switch ONE Y-Axis, but not both. (This was murder for me. My brain has basically been hard-coded by years of flight simulators. Up IS Down man!) Honestly in most cases it doesn't matter what the controls are you get used to them. However, this would have been so easy to add that it was worth putting in. I would certainly have inverted both my Y-Axis for instance. There may be some almost universal rails-shooter controller configuration that they were using, but in all the WOW clones I've ever played I could change the default setup if I wanted to. Again, I think this shows a lack of depth in their play testing pool. Within about thirty seconds I had gone to change my control setup only to find that it was basically hard coded.

Third Point: The dialog and menus were hard to read. This is a truly minor point because you can basically use all the items to find out what they do. However, it's still annoying. Why go to the extra trouble to make things hard to read? Go back to the shallow testing pool. The guys who were testing this game didn't need to read the menus, they knew what they said. They seemed to only be concerned with whether or not they looked cool. I admit they did, but that wasn't the main reason for their existence!

As I said before the sum total of the game was still good, it just could have been better. All this is my way of saying that Atari needs to add more testers to it's play pool. I don't think anyone is going to argue that unreadable dialog, hard coded controls and hard to read menus added a lot to the game. All these issues could have been addressed before this game rolled out the door. I also see room for more features, but I'm not going into that right now.

If you are asking yourself why I am bothering to complain about this, it's because I want it to change in the future. Atari has two more up and coming titles in the pipe right now.

Star Raiders has gotten a remake:

Star Raiders Trailer

Centipede: Infestation is due to come out this fall:

Centipede: Infestation Trailer

In my opinion Atari needs to call in more testers and ask for more feedback from the community they are trying to sell to. They are aiming at the retro-gaming community. They need to ask more questions and listen carefully to our answers.

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Win A Copy Of Yar's Revenge

2011-04-18T05:37:00.000-07:00

Atari has generously given us a copy of Yar's Revenge to give out to their adoring public! The copy we have for the Xbox 360 and we're going to give it away this Friday. We're doing this as a contest, but since we only have one copy we are just going to select the winner randomly from the correct responses. So:

How to enter?

Just reply to this post with the first Atari 2600 game you ever played or your favorite Atari 2600 memory.

For instance: My favorite Atari 2600 memory was playing Adventure when I was six of seven years old. I would go down to my Aunt and Uncles and play Atari for hours with my cousin.

I was going to also say that the first Atari game I played was Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but it couldn't have been. That game wasn't released for the 2600. I was four years old and my memory is sketchy that far back. I'm going to have to go through all the 2600 games released before 1981 and figure out what game I was actually playing....

Anyways, not the point. Just reply with a game or a memory. We'll random up a winner Friday morning and e-mail the code out as soon as we have the winner's email address. (You may want to put your CC username in the reply.)

Speaking of which... Taylor, we still owe you a gift card. I am waiting on your address. The card is just sitting there in my drawer man...

Good luck everyone!

The Elements of a Great Game – Atmosphere – Characters

2011-04-17T08:17:00.000-07:00

Whereas all games have some sort of atmosphere and some kind of setting (even pong was supposed to be table tennis.), not all have characters. However, just because they're not universal doesn't mean they're not one of the solid building blocks of gaming. Not every painting has purple in it, but purple is still a color in spite of that fact. Now, some would point out that purple is, in fact, blue and red. A combination of two more basic colors. I know, that's the reason I picked it. Characters may not be one of the most basic elements, but they are still very near the foundation.

There are at least two kinds of character development in gaming and I want to touch on both. The first, and mot common, is the static character type. This ranges from the hero of Shining in the Darkness to Sonic the Hedgehog. In spite of the fact that these two games are very different, one being an RPG and the other a classic platformer, the static nature of the main characters is very much the same. In both of these examples the main characters is a hero. He is fighting for truth and justice against some evil that is trying to take over the world. At first it may seem that character development is very different for these two games. However, that is not the case. The story telling method is very different, but the character development itself is not. First we'll consider the differences and then look at the similarities.

In Shining in the Darkness we have a complete in-game story. In the standard RPG fashion the game opens with short overview of what is going wrong in the world and what it is the hero is going to have to do to put a stop to it. Throughout the game more and more of the story is revealed as our champion get's closer and closer to his final destiny of defeating the great evil. We are told the sad stories of individuals wronged by the villain and given a number of story based motivations to drive us on to victory.

In Sonic the Hedgehog we also get a great back story. The hero is in fact saving cute little animals from being imprisoned in robot bodies under the control of the villain. However, this story isn't presented in-game, but is rather found in the manual. Some might say that this makes the characters development in the game unimportant. I disagree and it's obvious that Sega felt that developing Sonic as a character was very important. In each new game we have a continuing story and new characters with their own back stories.

Consider two of the most recognizable characters in video gaming Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario. Both of these characters were introduced in games that had no in game story. In both cases the game developers took the trouble to fill out both the background story and the characters. Each of these characters has since stared in his own RPG, not to mention TV show. These characters were woven into the imagination of the public. In spite of the fact that their back story had nothing to do with the game play of the games they were in, those stories still made the games more enjoyable. There is a long list of characters in this category. Samus, Simon Belmont and Mega Man are just a few examples. All these characters started out in games where their story was all in-manual.

Having considered the differences, now let's consider the similarities. In both SITD and STH the hero starts out and ends in the same place as a character. He was a hero at the beginning and he is a hero at the end. His path was set and it wasn't up to the player to change it. The player's only option was to go from point A to point B or not to play. Both these heroes are perfect examples of static characters.

The dynamic type character, to my knowledge, is found almost exclusively in RPGs (I can think of very few non-RPG examples). Even in that genre is it fairly rare. There are also two types of dynamic character to consider. The first is what you might call the “Literary Dynamic”. The character is dynamic in as much as they start out a villain and become a hero or, much more rarely, start out a hero and become a villain. However, here again the player has no control. So, whereas the character is dynamic from a storyline point of view they are still static from the aspect of game play. Truly dynamic characters are those that the player has storyline control over. The player can choose, not only what the character does, but also why he does it. We have seen this type of character in a number of titles. Fable, Oblivion and Knights of the Old Republic are certainly familiar to most of us.

These characters draw players in, not only with their rich compelling stories, but with the connection formed by the player by being in complete control. It is the philosophical difference between an on-rails shooter and a flight simulator. On-rail shooters can be beautifully crafted, the player guided through stunning scenes and the enemies put just where they should be just when they need to be. With an open flight simulator the developer doesn't have near as much control over what a player sees or does, but the freedom the player has to go where he wants and do what he wants makes up for it. This is really the same difference we have between games like Legend of Zelda and Oblivion. With LOZ you see what you're supposed to see while you're doing what you're supposed to do In Oblivion you see what you want to while you're doing what you want to. Both styles have their strengths and weaknesses.

Personally I am more drawn to the dynamic type characters. However, both types are fundamental building blocks and both have their own charm. There are also a number of ways to present supporting characters that add depth to a game. We can touch on those another time.

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Yar's Revenge Review

2011-04-16T05:57:00.000-07:00

We got the review done Thursday night. You can watch it on YouTube if you like.

Yar's Revenge Review

I hope to do another “Elements” post today, but I may not have time. I've started it, but it's probably going to be a bit lengthy.

In any event, I'll do what I can.

A Time For Vengeance

2011-04-13T06:44:00.000-07:00

I know that everyone around here probably already knows that the new Yar's Revenge game is coming out today, but I wanted to mention it anyway. Console Classix has gotten into the spirit of things and put up a site skin to honor the occasion. Later today I am supposed to get my hands on a copy so that I can take it for a test drive and let you guys know what I think of it. It's certainly a good step for us to start paying more attention to what is new and exciting in retro/classic gaming. I also feel that it's a very positive step for Atari to be reaching out to companies like Console Classix for support and feedback.

It is my fond wish that Atari, along with all the other companies that are putting their toe into retro waters, will really listen to what the community has to say about it's current and up and coming products. The classic gaming community is large and constantly growing. What many of us want isn't just a re-release of an old title (although we do love to see that, it's not the only thing we want.) We, just like any other group of gamers, want things that are new and exciting. However, unlike many other demographics retro gamers are generally a bit more picky about what it is they want.

This isn't always true and there are those classic game fans who only love what they loved when they were children. Retro games are merely a nostalgic connection to their past. However, that isn't true of most of us. We don't just play games that were released thirty years ago, we play the best games that were released thirty years ago. It's a game's quality, not it's age that gives it value. This is important to keep in mind when releasing a new title aimed at the retro/classic gamer. I am hoping to find Yar's Revenge the spiritual squeal to it's predecessor, not just a attempt to use an established name to bolster sales of a new game.

Now, what makes a classic game great is a matter of opinion and it varies from gamer to gamer. (Keep in mind that guy who likes the NES game Hillsfar. I forget his name, but he just loves it. Console Classix has no evidence of such a person. He is, to the best of our knowledge, a figment of the President's imagination.) However, there are a large number of games that are generally considered true classics by most of the community. What makes these games great is quantifiable, understandable and repeatable. I feel that if companies want to be successful in re-releasing classic titles, as well as expanding those titles with new games they need to listen to what the fans have to say about them.

Whatever the new Yar's Revenge turns out to be like we should be willing to offer our honest and open opinions to Atari. We should let them know what we feel they did well and what could have been improved or left out. It's also good to keep in mind that we vote with our money. If we like something and want to see it progress and grow we have to invest in it. It is my hope that this new title is worth investing in. I should be able to weigh in with a more informed opinion soon. I plan to do a review shortly after getting my hands on the game. I'll let you know what I think as soon as I can.

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The Elements of a Great Game – Atmosphere – Setting

2011-04-11T05:53:00.000-07:00

In exploring what gives a game great atmosphere we have to look at several different factors. The first of these elements I am going to talk about is the setting. Now, you may be thinking “Setting, Atmosphere, what's the difference?” OK, good question. What I am talking about is the backdrop of the world itself devoid of any “living” element. The scenery, the lights, the sounds, etc. I know that atmosphere and setting have very much the same definition in this context, but I'm drawing a philosophical line here. For the purposes of this study “Atmosphere” includes all the things in a video game that set the mood. The “Setting” only concerns the artistic style of the virtual world in question. “Do the trees look real?” is a “setting” question whereas “Would that character actually do that?” is an “Atmosphere” question. (OK, really it's a “Characters” question and “Characters” is another sub-set of “Atmosphere”, but I'll get to that later.)

In my last post I mentioned examples of where the setting was really done right and really done wrong. I want to start with the positive and look at some examples of well done settings. To begin with I am going to go where I often go in any “well done games” discussion, strait to the Legend of Zelda. (I know I talk about it a lot, but give me a break, it's LOZ man!) I have noticed that there are very few men my age that can't be brought to a screeching halt (no matter what they are doing) by the first few notes of the opening theme of LOZ. The same “Hey, isn't that...” invariably falls from their lips immediately. It is amazing that a simple video game could etch itself on the minds of an entire generation of young men (at least in the US).

How did it do this? Well, in part with the setting. In the land of Hyrule we found lush garden spots and burning desert sands. Monster filled mountains and lakes teaming with our enemies. The colors, the sounds, the music and the flashing lights all played their part in transporting us from Earth to Hyrule. When we entered a dungeon the appropriate setting was maintained. The music changed, the scene was darker, more sinister. You could tell something was down there, something bad. I remember how nervous I was when I first walked down into the first dungeon. I just knew I was going to get Link killed. (Needless to say, I did. I don't know anyone who beat it on their first try.) The mood was seamless. LOZ was a window to another world. We, the players, were looking through that window and helping guide a young hero to his ultimate destiny: saving the princess Zelda from a terrible fate.

For another great example I am going to turn to PC gaming. Many avid gamers no doubt know the name Sierra. At it's height it was one of the great PC gaming companies and helped to develop the “adventure” genre more than perhaps any other company. One of the anchors of Sierra's game design was setting. The games led players from one beautifully crafted scene to another. They presented us with forest glens and dark wizards laboratories. What they excelled at was presenting the player with a fantasized version of the real world. Scenes of beauty were drawn out like gardens. Everything was were it should be. A crystal lake, a flowing stream, a giant rock and a bird flying by at just the right moment to set the scene. We were also presented with dark dungeons and undead monsters. All things dark and terrifying. All these elements combined to offer something that seemed better than real life. What we found in Sierra games was a world of enchantment, a magical land that we wanted to be a part of.

Both of these examples pulled us into the games. The settings made us feel as if we were part of the worlds presented to us. A lot of work was put into them and they were very well done. However, not every setting ever presented has had such an effect. For my bad example I once again turn to PC gaming. If you have never played Champions of Kyrnn you have missed a truly beautiful and compelling game. It's difficult to play by today's standards, but I feel it is still worth the effort. This game was followed up by Death Knights of Krynn which was another masterpiece. The artwork was exquisite and the storyline amazing.

If anything it was better than Champions. However, the next release was Dark Queen of Krynn. I suppose you could call it a joke, but nobody laughed. Why was this? Improper setting. That's not to say that the graphics were unappealing or that the sound or music was harsh. It was beautifully done, both from a graphical and musical point of view. So what was wrong with it? It was ALL wrong.

Now, unless you know a little bit about Dungeons and Dragons and the two settings, Dragon Lance and Forgotten Realms, you might not fully understand what I'm about to say, but believe me either way. (I do know a good deal about them.) These two settings are very different from an artistic point of view. There are also key gaming elements that vary from one setting to the other. What does all this have to do with Dark Queen of Krynn? Well, the Krynn series was set in the Dragon Lance universe. The first two games were developed by SSI on a custom engine that was designed around Dragon Lance, just as they should have been. However, Dark Queen of Krynn was developed after SSI released Unlimited Adventures. This title was an excellent piece of software that allowed players to make their own D&D video games in the Forgotten Realms setting. It came with a large art package and it was truly possible to design your own SSI style D&D game in the Forgotten Realms setting.

Now, we hit the point of SSI's horrible, mind numbing mistake. They took their own Unlimited Adventures engine and altered it to try to squeeze a Dragon Lance game into it. How do I know that? I owned both! I had spent hours playing around with Unlimited Adventures and I recognized the engine! Could I have been wrong? Well, no, they used their own default graphics package!! Yes, that's right, playing through Dark Queen of Krynn you would run into the same still (and slightly animated) artwork that was found in the Unlimited Adventures tool set.

(Some of you may think these picture are identical, but look closely! You see those three moons just below the girl's portrait on the left. Well, those three moons are from Krynn. Now you feel yourself in another world don't you?!?!?)

That in and of itself might not have been a horrible problem (although the two settings have such completely different art styles), but they actually made STORY DESCISIONS based on what graphics they had on hand. For instance they had an awesome image of an elf changing into a dolphin. So, in Dark Queen of Krynn our heroes ride across the ocean on the backs of elves that have changed into dolphins. That doesn't fit the epic emotionally deep story you expect to find in a Dragon Lance game. The end result was that you felt like you were in the world of Forgotten Realms and someone was telling you a story about Dragon Lance. It was truly sad and the series ended there. SSI had pushed players out of a world they already knew and loved with a mangled setting.

The same thing can be done by making characters behave unrealistically or by presenting the player with a story that makes no sense, but we can touch on those things later. I've run on long enough for the moment.

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Retro Remakes

2011-04-10T05:41:00.000-07:00

How many of us have longed to see some of the great old games of the past pulled out, dusted off and reborn for the modern age? I'm sure most of us have one or two games (at least) that we would love to see remade with graphics and sound up to today's standards. Well, as you may have noticed recently, there has been progress on that front. (At least in theory.)

Few can argue that the retro-gaming community is getting bigger and bigger with every passing year. More and more companies are offering their games for play on the Wii Virtual Console, Xbox 360 and even the Playstation 3. Part of the reason for this is the ease of distribution and the fact that the games already have a following so, in many cases, it's an easy sell. Couple that with the fact that these games paid for themselves years ago and you come up with a product that is going to hit profit days after launch.

However, for the most part, this retro movement is confined to classic games being reworked to run on newer systems without any changes, additions or improvements. Now, I of all people love keeping things just as they were when they were first released. I like to play the Legend Of Zelda just like it was when I first plugged the cart into my NES. I love the nostalgic feeling I get when I hear the first few notes of that 8-Bit music crank up. The entire game, just as it was when it first came out, is a true classic in every sense of the word and should be preserved exactly as it was originally.

All that having been said, I also feel that for retro games to truly be reborn, new features, play styles and even complete games have to be added to the original. Again, look at the Legend of Zelda. As truly magnificent as the first game was would we have been satisfied with a simple remake for the SNES? Gamers wanted more. They wanted the feel of LOZ, they wanted the world of Hyrule, but they also wanted new challenges and a new storyline. Link to the Past is the perfect example of a classic game being moved into the future just like it should be. (Many would prefer to skip Zelda II and so I will do so for the moment.) It was the perfect second step in what has become a long road of classic games.

I do feel that Nintendo missed an opportunity, however. For a long time I've wanted to play the original LOZ storyline with the bells and whistles from the SNES (or N64, or Wii, take your pick). I love the additions to the series, but the original has only been maintained in it's original form which, even as the masterpiece it is, is somewhat limited. I feel like there is room for maintaining the original format, remaking it to the latest standards and branching off in new directions that maintain the original theme. This is something that is very rarely, if ever, done. I hope that as retro gaming grows this is going to change.

What puts all this in mind? Atari's up and coming Yar's Revenge. It is certainly a re-visualisation of the game and not just a remake of the original. What I am wondering is how true it is going to be to the elegant simplicity of the original title. Is it going to be the arcade wonder that the original was? Is going to breath new life into old lore and lay a new foundation for a series of games? Is it truly going to add anything to the legacy of Yar's Revenge?

I hope to get answers to my questions next week. I plan to do a review of the game shortly after it's release. I am hoping that Atari has put together another classic hit. I want this to succeed, both for the Yar's Revenge legacy and for other titles that may well see remakes if this game is something special. Next week should show us what we need to know.

The Elements of a Great Game – Atmosphere

2011-04-08T05:52:00.001-07:00

“You awake to find yourself in a sunlit garden. Bees are buzzing in the trees as butterflies flutter about in the still, warm air. Beside you is a cool clear pool. As you study your reflection in it you notice the image of a beautiful young girl standing behind you, looking down on you. You turn, but no one is there....”

“The air is damp and musky. It smells of standing water and rotting flesh. There is nothing but darkness all around you. In the distance you think you hear something scratching inch by inch closer to you. The creak of a door fills the air with sound as a line of light slowly widens before you. There in the dim light you can hardly believe what you see...”

The atmosphere is the first paint applied to the canvas of gaming and indeed any storytelling. It is what pulls us in and makes us relate to what is going on about us. It sets a scene in which we can plant ourselves so that the story isn't just happening, it's happening to us. Although this is certainly important in movies and books it is of paramount importance in video games. Why? The answer is simple.

We watch movies and we read books; we are only observers no matter how involved in the story we are. However, in video games we help decide the outcome of the story. Is the hero victorious or does he die a horrible death?

“Now, would you go right or left?”
“I don't know, which way would you go?”
“Me? I wouldn't go either way.”

In a game you're not just silently watching on as the hero decides what path to take. You choose and your decision affects the outcome of the story. Atmosphere helps make the story personal and compelling. The more you can relate to the hero's situation the more you actually feel good when he finds himself in some beautiful garden and the more concerned you are when he is lost in some bottomless dungeon.

Although atmosphere isn't a universal component in gaming, it is almost universal in video gaming. If you look as far back as early Atari 2600 games you see digitized tanks, pixelated woman-stealing apes and square blocks that everyone knows are actually knights in full armor. Due to the limitations of the system we found the scene set in the manuals and box art. The label on Adventure made it very clear who you were and what you were doing even if the graphics couldn't.

Would asteroids have been as much fun if it was merely a math game where a circle broke big square blocks into smaller square blocks? Atmosphere was what pulled us in and made us want to rescue Princess Zelda, stop the evil Dr. Robotnic, and defeat those pesky Space Invaders. I think very few people would argue that atmosphere isn't extremely important, but what are its elements? How can it be done well and how can it be totally messed up?

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The Quick And The Lucky - Part 2

2011-04-08T05:36:00.001-07:00

So, our official submissions were:

Botticelli - Nathan Tolbert
Ghiberti - ppd2
Masaccio - Coolsonh
Vincent (Van Gogh) - dayallencrey25
Venus de Milo - Zerothis
Machiavelli – taylor

Now Brian Farmer pointed out on our forums:

“1) Just about everyone's missing the fact that Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello were the first names of those renaissance artists, not the last names or nicknames, as are being suggested.

2) All of these four were just as famous--and in some cases, more so--for other forms of art than painting. Donatello and Michelangelo are best known for sculpture, and Raphael was a master architect, as well.

3) The idea of fitting in the "Americanization" of the names is a good idea, too.

Based on the above, it surprises me that no one's suggested "Benvenuto" (Cellini). He was a leading goldsmith and sculptor, an author, and a composer. Plus, Benvenuto shortens and "Americanizes" to "Ben" quite easily. “

and he makes some good points. However, I'm not so picky. For instance Machiavelli may not have been a painter, but he was certainly Italian and involved in the renaissance. I also don't believe anyone can question the fact that the Venus de Milo was involved in the art scene (besides, the turtles need a woman.)

As as result of my rather liberal views on riddle solving and naming conventions I declare that all the entries are valid. Now for the results!

Nathan Tolbert was unquestionably the “Quick” in our little contest. He answered correctly roughly twenty minutes after I posted.

As for the “Lucky,” that plum goes to taylor's submission of the dark turtle “Machiavelli”. His number quite literally came up. (Does that say something about the balance of the light and dark sides?)

I enjoyed this a great deal and I plan to kick off another contest soon. I won't give you the exact date, but I will say I plan on doing it in April, so that should give you some idea.

Nathan and taylor I need your address info. Please send an e-mail to webmaster@consoleclassix.com so I can get your prizes sent out.

Once again thanks for you participation and congratulations to the Quick and the Lucky!

A Busy Bee

2011-04-06T06:27:00.001-07:00

This week has already been a busy one for me. (I know I say that a lot, but honestly it's true.) I'm still working on the Linux library I talked about a couple of posts ago. I hope to do another post about the elements of a great game, but I have to get the time. Lord willing I will get a NES emulator working on Linux today. If I manage that I should be able to get my next element post up soon.

I know not many people are going to be using the Linux client at first, but it opens a few doors. It was also my first foray into cross-platform development. I would like the next one to be Mac. We have a lot of Mac users out there who have asked us about a version for them, but we haven't been able to do it yet. This Linux project has given me a bit more insight into the whole cross-platform scene. Given time I think we could get something working for Mac users.

I also want to do a series of videos on all the different settings options the emulators we use have. You can actually do a great deal with them if you know how. The thing is most people don't know how. That's why a series of videos would be a useful thing for us to put together. Like so many things it's a matter of finding time.

I'm supposed to update all the emulators that have new versions out this month, but it may have to wait. We also have to do an inventory and that is going to eat some time. I want to move all the carts into better containers and while we are doing that I figure we might as well do a complete inventory. There are over 7500 carts, so it's a bit of a chore. I plan to make a video of us doing it so that you guys can see our entire inventory. It's kind of cool if you're into that kind of thing. (and most of us are, obviously)

Either way I'll keep you guys posted. If you haven't entered the contest from my last post go do it now. You could win a gift card man! I'll announce the winners this Friday.

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The Quick And The Lucky

2011-04-04T06:33:00.000-07:00

So, I've decided to have another little contest here on my blog. Why? Why not?! Everybody likes a good contest. It's a chance to show off your quick wit or mad luck skills.

Let's start with the rules: No cheating! How you would cheat in this particular contest I have no idea, but if you find a way you're on your honor not to do it! None of the CC family can participate (sorry guys). The first person to chime in with a correct response (there are a number of possible correct responses) wins a prize. At the end of the contest we are also going to randomly select one of the other correct responses and give a prize to the person who posted it. You can only post one response, if you post more than one only the first one will count and other people can take any additional responses you posted.

What are the prizes? Both the the first correct poster and the randomly selected correct poster are going to get a $25 Amazon gift card. (Don't tell me there isn't something you want from Amazon, they offer almost everything.)

When is it? Right now! You have from the time I post this, Monday April 4th 2011, until this Friday April 8th 2011, to enter the contest.

What is the contest? I'm glad you asked that, so I am. You just have to post a name in response to this post. What name you ask? Ahhh, that's the contest. Let me explain:

The four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are named with a running theme. You have to come up with a name for a fifth turtle whose name is related to the other four in the same way that they are related to each other. Find the common threat and expound on it, as it were. Now, some of you may think this is too easy. For those of you who want to make it more challenging you can force yourself to post only using a cell-phone with internet access while standing on your head in some public area (a state park for instance.) The rest of you can just post your submission here as a comment.

So, have fun and good luck!

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Getting Cross

2011-04-03T04:52:00.000-07:00

As so many weeks are at Console Classix, last week was a busy one. We got a number of things underway. One of the tings I'm really excited about is the fact that we started building a cross-platform version of the CC Library. Now, that may be complete gibberish to some of you so I'm going to explain what it is and then why it matters.

To begin with, the Console Classix Library is a piece of software that allows a program to connect to the CC server and play a game. (It also handles a number of other little things, but we'll skip that for now.) It's what we use to enable emulators to access our services. It makes the entire process neat and clean.

Now, when a piece of software is “cross-platform” that means that it will run on more than one platform (duh...) So, for instance, it might run on Windows and Linux. In fact, that is exactly what we intend the CC Library to do. In point of fact the software runs on both of them now. We just need to pack it all up as a library and start using it.

Here we come to why this matters. First, it will allow us to offer CC on the Linux platform natively. Up until now Linux users could only play CC from within a Windows emulator. (That is a bit of a performance limitation.) As soon as we are done they will be able to run it directly under Linux just as our Windows users do. As I've mentioned before, the more people we have playing the better it is for everyone. This is going to open another small door for our fans to come through.

But wait! There's more! For a long time we have wanted to put together some plans for a CC home console that you can hook to your TV and wireless network. One of the limitations was that Windows would tack $100 onto the cost and make it unreasonable. Linux is a completely free operating system so we could put it on a home console without adding anything to the cost. We're still a long way from this, but the cross-platform library is a very real step in that direction.

Once it's done we may start trying to put together a prototype with a single board PC. Adding CC support for the Linux emulators we would need should only take a couple of days (Lord willing.) Then we'll just need to make a cross-platform version of the CC Browser. In some ways that may be easier than doing the library in the first place. All things considered it will certainly be worth our trying to build a prototype. If we do we could post a video of our building and testing it for you guys to see.

On top of all this I want to build a CC arcade cabinet. I would prefer to run Linux on it, which is one of the reasons I haven't done it yet. Once this is wrapped up I'll finally be able to do that.

All in all this cross-platform library is another good step. I'll let you know more when there's more to know.

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The Elements of a Great Game

2011-03-31T07:22:00.000-07:00

I decided to do a post about a discussion we've been having on the forums. The topic?

The elements of a great game! (duh...)

The reason I decided to lay my thoughts out in blog format is that I hope to seem less like a gibbering mental patient than I did on our forums. Here I can ramble on without interruption until I make my point or until they come to take me away.

“but I know I've got one thing I got to do, Ramble on!”

Lately I've been thinking a lot about game design. There are number of reasons. For one thing I got into computers because I wanted to write games. My life and career moved around until I've dedicated years of energy to preserving and providing classic games for other fans such as myself. This has kept me so busy that I haven't worked on a video game for, well, let's just say a long time. I hope that, one day, I will finally get my chance, but there's more than that.

I have also played D&D for many, many years. I have been the Dungeon Master for I don't know how many hours of my life. I've written good campaigns and not-so-good campaigns. I've played where I was caught up and enjoying every minute of it and I've played where I just sat there rolling my dice watching the clock and dreaming of the moment when the game wrapped up.

What do these two things have to do with each other? Everything. I'm not just talking about what makes a great video game, I am talking about what makes a great GAME. I believe there are common threads that connect all gamers and all games. It is those threads that I am considering.

What makes people want to play games? A lot of things really. The challenge, the reward, the atmosphere, etc. I want to boil these motivations down to their basic elements. Why? Well, someone on the forums compared these base elements to chords in music. I think that is an excellent example. As chords to a musician or a palette to an artists so these basic driving elements should be to game developers.

A lot of people might believe that these game “chords” are already well known or that they don't exist. Well, I believe I have an answer for each of these objections. First, games are much like books, television or movies. In all those forms of entertainment there are certain formulas that are used. That is why there are classes on writing and cinematography. They teach people what the basic “palette” is that they should use. Now that's not to say that you can plug in the formula and BAM you have a best seller or a block buster. Even if you know the chords you have to be able to play.

“Well, how can we have descent instruments when we don't really even know how to play?”

“That is why we need Eddie Van Halen!”

As in all forms of art the artist is really what makes it art. However, if Van Halen had never learned his chords would he have still been a great musician?

So, I believe those elements exist. Which is why “Save the girl” is a running theme in books, movies and games. Man has a natural desire to save the girl! (and if she doesn't want to be saved hilarity ensues .)

Now, as to these themes being common knowledge, they may be, but I'm not familiar with such a school of study. Plus when I look at some of the games that have come out I have to believe that I'm not the only potential game developer that has never heard of them. Some games just make me think “Who would have ever wanted to play this and WHY?”

This post is getting a bit long, so I am going to cut it short. I plan to do another post soon touching what I believe is one of the “Colors” of game development.

I hope my sanity has been established and that you could see what I was saying.

Good Old Atari

2011-03-30T06:40:00.000-07:00

So, early last week I got an e-mail from Josh Pendrick. He's a Social Media manager over at Atari. He wanted to know if Console Classix would be interested in promoting up and coming Atari products that our fan base might be interested in. My answer, in a word, was:

Duh!

Of course Console Classix will promote new “classics” that are just about to come out. Needless to say we're huge Atari fans. (Don't bother mentioning how many times the company has changed hands, I know, I know. Not my point!) I don't know how many Atari products I own personally. We'll just run with “A lot” for now. We love Atari past, present and (I hope and believe) future.

Now a week went by before Josh said anymore to me. However, when he got back with me he did, indeed, have a couple of interesting news items to share.

First, a new version of Warlords is due to come out this Summer. That was a personal favorite of mine. Me and one of my childhood friends would play it for hours at the time. Josh gave me a link where you can get a bit more information about it. This is it:

Warlords

Now, I haven't gotten to play it yet (cough, cough), but it looks great. My only hope is that it maintains the feel of the original even with all the new bells and whistles. I may very well do a review of it after it comes out. Until then, go check out the site.

In other up and coming awesomeness news, a new version of Yar's Revenge is also under way. If you've never played the original go give it a whirl:

Yar's Revenge

I don't have any more information yet, but I am supposed to get some soon. I'll comment on this post with the URL as soon as I get it.

I would also advise you to go by Atari's website. They actually have a number of rebuilt 2600 games up. You can play them here:

Play Atari

All in all Atari has a lot going on for the retro-gamer. I am going to have to keep a closer eye on them in the future. If I get any more information or actual play experience (cough...) with these up and coming titles I'll be sure to let you guys know.

In a final note we may be getting a little Atari swag to give out. If we do we'll almost certainly contest it away in one way or another.

Have fun and good gaming!

This week at Console Classix

2011-03-27T04:47:00.000-07:00

Well, last week really, but I'm posting about it this week....

Anyways, the parts finally came in (yesterday) for the new NES reader I plan to work on this week. I actually have to go pick up some SNES carts to dissect for the project. I know it's a loss, but what can I do. They will have to lay down their video lives for the greater good. Plus, we can still use them really. I need to remove their ROMs, but that won't trash them, it will just make it impossible to play them on the SNES.

I made some changes to the browser and rolled out an update. We added a “Random” button so you can take wild ride to who knows where. It reminds me of when the Doctor put the randomizer in the Tardis. (If you don't know what I mean I am talking about THE Doctor and Time And Relative Dimension In Space) We also updated the Facebook Status Update code. Now it's easy to turn the status update on and off. Of course, the more you guys use it the more traffic we will have. You all know what that means. (More games and features!)

Belief it or not that basically ate my week up. I also had some tax stuff to take care of, but for the most part I was working on the browser.

As I mentioned, I hope to get the new NES reader up and running this week. I probably won't get it done in time to get any new NES games up Wednesday, but I'll do what I can. I am probably going to work on adding the categories to the CC browser although, again, I may not get it finished this week. I want to add a commenting system on the game info pages. The user review system is good (although we really need to keep up with it better), but I want something that allows a bit of back and forth between players. I am also planning on doing more blog posts and, as I mentioned in my last post, I am enlarging the number of subjects I touch on. Last, but not least, I am probably going to work on getting more video up soon. I want to show you guys how we go about building an adapter and what have you.

For the moment I'm off. Have fun, cause I'm gonna!

Change of Venue

2011-03-26T06:39:00.000-07:00

OK, the point of this post is, first of all, to say that I am expanding what I am going to cover in this blog a bit. How? I am going to begin to post about what's going on in gaming in general with specific regard to what I consider truly “classic”. Why? Because I want to.

Up until now I have just used this blog to talk about Console Classix. It's not a bad subject. In fact, I love it. However, CC isn't the only thing going on in the gaming industry. It's not even the only thing going on in the classic gaming industry. Those are things I want to talk about because it will reveal a bit more about me and my feelings on what makes games truly classic. Past, present and even future. Why do my feelings matter? I'm the president of one of the coolest classic gaming companies ever! (OK, so that doesn't make my opinion any more important than anyone else's. Still, it's cool to say at parties.)

So, first of all most classic gamers (at least the ones I know of) enjoy good games from whatever time period they come from. They love games like Yar's Revenge, Link to the Past, Final Fantasy Tactics right up to Force Unleashed. Classic gaming isn't a time period it's a matter of quality and gaming philosophy. Most of them are also very “cross-platform” playing games for whatever system they happen to run on, including PC games. I mention this only to explain that my subject here is about good gaming, games that are going to become “classics” and what makes games good/classic.

The first subject for all this: Free to play MMOs

“WHAT?” you ask. “How does this tie in with classic gaming in any way shape or form?” It's very simple. The industry is changing. Free to play MMOs have already begun to change the gaming landscape. At the moment it may not seem “classic” because it's going on right now and we can see it happening, but, in time, it will touch the entire industry.

Think back to the days of the Atari 2600. The goal of the games was simple: get the most points. That honestly sums up most of the early Atari games, but then things stared to change. In 1979 we got Adventure. You had to get items, solve puzzles and accomplish something tangible. You were trying to beat the game, not just your buddy's score. Today, many may not think of this shift as extreme, but it was. Game consoles turned on this very point. They became something other than “home arcade” systems. Space Invaders was a huge arcade hit that then made the transition (albeit poorly) to the home arcade. The Legend of Zelda was a huge hit in it's own right. It didn't get numbers from arcade popularity, it was hit for the home console all by itself.

Now the landscape is shifting around the Free-To-Play concept and it's likely to change the entire gaming industry. The reason is simple. Nothing will get you into a game better than an unlimited free sample. If you truly enjoy the game it's only a matter time before you put money in it. We've already seen companies like Frogster build very successful business empires with FTP games like Runes of Magic. Turbine pulled LOTRO and DDO out of the financial fire by converting over to FTP. Just recently Cryptic switched Champions Online over to a FTP model and managed to increase it's profits by over one thousand percent. (Yes that's 1000%)

I know a lot of people out there are screaming at the top of their lungs “Yea, but those games suck!” However, they certainly aren't looking at it from an objective point of view. Between them these games have millions of players. More importantly they are very profitable. “What? Profitable? I thought this was supposed to be about how classic a game was, not how profitable!” Well, that's true, but here the two run hand in hand. Players vote with their money. It's one thing to say you enjoy a game, it's another to drop five bucks in it. The profitability of these companies really represents what gamers want and enjoy. It's the fact that these games are financially successful that is changing the industry.

You have to consider the fact that DC Universe Online was released in a landscape of direct free competition. You may feel that no self-respecting player would play CO rather than DCUO, but not everyone feels that way. Now DCOU has got to prove, not only that it's worth $15 a month, but that it's worth that much more than CO. No matter how you feel about it personally I'll bet you that the head cats at Sony we're jumping up and down with joy when CO went FTP.

Now, imagine DCUO had opened with a FTP model. (I can hear hissing in the crowd already, but hear me out.) If DCUO is really worth the $15 a month then they would have no problems. They could have setup micro-transactions and offer a better deal for monthly subscribers. Now, I know some users hate this model. The only reason I can think of is because teenage boys that still live with their parents will shell out $100 a month to get on top and that's not fair to the rest of us. I agree with that totally.

However, Craft of the Gods (I know, you've never heard of it....) offers what I feel is the perfect solution. They offer servers for each payment model. If you are a subscriber you can make characters on any of the servers. FTP players can only create characters on FTP servers. The advantages with this model are numerous.

First, you can sample the game as long as you want before you decide to buy. That means publishers will have to focus on making a good game more than on making a good ad campaign. Second, if you think the game is worth five bucks a month and not fifteen you can pay the five. This puts money in the developers pocket and let's you pay on your own terms. Third, if you do decide to buy the game you can play in a private environment with other subscribers. Forth, if you are the only one of your online friends that wants to pay for it you can still game with them on the free servers.

One of the things that FTP brings to the table is options. You can try the game before you buy it and you can decide on a month by month basis what the game is worth to you. I think this is going to be a good thing for the industry. How many great games have never really made it because their advertising was weak. Imagine if players had been able to sample every Nintedo game that ever came out before they bough them. Some profits would have been lost and others gained. Good companies that went under might have survived (plus some stinkers might have gone under quicker.)

Some of you may be wondering how this relates to console gaming, but it's not hard to see if you look. Already we are seeing free demos pop up and it's only a matter of time before we get free to play online games for them. (In fact we may already be seeing those. I haven't kept up as well as I should have.) This brings me to the point that Farmville is, in fact, a FTPMMO, but I'll save that for another time.

So, FTP, personally I love it. I think in many ways it's already the present and is sure to be a big deal in the future. Players are just going to have to accept it and look at ways to eliminate the problems they see in the model. The FTP model itself isn't going anywhere.

Fix Up The Old And Break Out The New

2011-03-20T09:42:00.001-07:00

This week we got a good bit done. We added pages to list the most popular games and home brew games. We also added a way to list games by publisher and by release year. I think the new additions really add a bit to the site. We also fixed (I hope) the Facebook status updater. Our fans should begin to see more and more “So and so is playing such and such at CC” messages. Lord willing, this will bring in more traffic.

We also ordered some parts for a new NES reader I intend to build. We will still have to pull the chips off the boards, but if it works we'll be able to read NES ROMS with the Retrode. That will save us a great deal of time and energy. Plus, we should be able to use the same setup to read GB/GBC games. (We will still need special adapters, but we own most of what we would need.)

In addition to all this we got a few of the requested games up and running. I want us to get more, but we have to work it into the budget. Some of the games requested were a little more pricey than your run of the mill cart. Still, what we got up was good and we're going to try to get more as soon as we can.

There is now a “Development” post on the forums. I opened it up by giving a brief explanation on reading ROM chips. I intend to fill out that information bit by bit and provide more technical data about what it is I'm currently working on. In the long run we're also wanting to setup a “Media” section and I may make some video of me building adapters and what not.

All in all last week was a good week. I hope we make even more progress this week.

For those of you who have requests or questions remember that you can post them on the forums:

Console Classix Forums

That's it for now. Have fun and good gaming!

An End To Code

2011-03-13T09:37:00.000-07:00

My title could have been “An End To Re-Code” because it's the recoding of the site that's actually done. Thank the Lord! It's been six weeks (or so) well spent, but I'm glad to have it behind me. Now the site looks better and, more importantly, works better. We hope that this will lead more people to sign-up simply because the site won't look broken if they happen to browse by using Firefox.

Now, that the great re-code is over we're going to be able to add a few pages. In fact, we've already added a “Free Sample” page that duplicates the features of the “Free Sampler” button within the CC Browser. We also started collecting the game use data in a database. We intend to use that to build a “Most Popular” page next week. We've got a few other little additions in mind as well.

One of the big advantages of the re-code is that we can now make changes more easily. If we get a new page suggestion or a suggestion to add a feature to a page we can fill that request much more quickly than we could have in the past.

We want to handle requests as quickly as possible. All kinds of requests: New games, new features, website changes, etc. One of our current weaknesses is that we are seriously understaffed. We have a great deal to do each week and we don't have enough hands to do it. Changes that increase our efficiency, like the changes we just made to the site, are good for everyone.

If any of you have suggestions or requests to make we'd love to hear them. Just sign-up for the forums and let us know what you're thinking.

Console Classix Forums

The more feedback we get the more good changes we can make.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forums

2011-03-06T04:52:00.000-08:00

Nothing really funny happened, but we did open the forums up to the public this week. I just picked that title because I have to pick a title for every post and it's not always easy to come up with something clever that really pertains to the subject at hand. Anyways, not really the point is it...

We got a fair bit done this week. As I said the forums are up and open to the public. Already we're getting feedback and game requests which is awesome. The more communication there is between us and all the others fans (yes, we're fans too you know.) the more we can improve things.

We also got a few more pages recoded. The upgrade, credit card edit and cancel pages all work like they're supposed to now. (At least they seemed to in my tests. There is NO need for anyone to test the cancel page. We'll just run with the idea that it works, lol) We just have a handful of pages left in the re-coding queue and then we can move on to add a few new pages.

I plan to add a “Most Popular” page where people can see what's been played the most. I also plan to a “Free Sampler” page where people can browse the free samples we offer from the full system from the web site as well as from the CC Browser. In addition to all this goodness I hope to add a “Home Brew” page that lists all the home brew games we offer. All of these should add a little more functionality to the site. (I know I mentioned a lot of this on the forums, but not everybody goes to the forums!)

If you would like to visit the forums they are here:

http://forums.consoleclassix.com

You'll get a lot more “up to the minute” news there than you will here or in the site news.

That puts me in mind of our new Wiki pages. So far the response hasn't been overwhelming. I think my little wikiclassix button has much to desired. People simply aren't clicking it. The wiki could be a real resource for us and for the other fans, but only if we get info up. Still, it hasn't been up long. People will get used to the idea and things will start to move along.

Anyways, that's it for the moment. Lord willing, this is going to be a great week and I'll have more to talk about soon.

The Ethridge Code

2011-02-27T05:26:00.001-08:00

It's neither a secret code nor a smash movie this time. The Ethridge Code is a load of web code for the site. At least for the last few weeks that's what it's been. It looks like that is what it's going to continue to be for the next two weeks as well.

I had forgotten just how complicated some of our dynamic web code was. As I'm recoding and fixing errors I am also trying to make it easier to update in the future. In the coming months we want to launch a new layout. I don't want it to take me another month of coding to get it up and running.

Of course, with every pass things do get better. This new rendition makes it even easier to make small changes for the purposes of search engine optimization. We are working very hard to make sure that every game page shows up a high as it possibly can in search engine rankings. It will take a few months to get things honed in because you have to make a change and then wait a couple of weeks to see what the results were. Fortunately it doesn't take long to set the tests up and we can test several changes at once.

In other news we almost certainly won't get the forums out to the public this month. That's mainly because this month only has today and tomorrow left. I hope to be able to get them ready within the next two weeks. I tried to make time for it last week, but there was simply too much going on.

I had also hoped to work on dumping a few new NES games this week, but I doubt that is going to happen at this point. I have got to get the site recoding finished ASAP. We have a few new pages that we can't roll out until I'm finished.

As always there seems to be more work than time, lol.

Wiki Whack

2011-02-20T05:29:00.001-08:00

Yea, I know it's a goofy title. I don't care. The point is that we got a Wiki put up for Console Classix this week. It's going to take a while for people to get the idea and start adding information, but it's probably just a matter of time. Now anyone who wants to give Console Classix a little extra push and helps us get more features out there needs only add a little info to our wiki.

“How will that work?” you ask. Once again the answer is traffic. The more data we have up the more traffic we will get. The more traffic the more users. The more user the more subscribers. The more subscribers the more staff. The more staff the more features. It's Console Classix very own trickle down effect.

We also set up a forums for the moderators this week. We are probably going to open it up to the public before the end of the month. It will obviously allow classic game discussion, but we can use it for other things as well. I think it will be a good idea to keep a “Bugs” board with a list of known issues, what we are doing about them and what the temporary fixes are. We also want to have a “Features” section where we keep a running list of what we intend to do in the future. It might help us find willing recruits to do things like add CC support to emulators that run on Linux and Mac and maybe even cell phones.

I have to admit that when we were in the hospital last week I wished I could play CC on my cell phone. You may be wondering how a man could find time to play a game when his wife is having a baby. Well, it was our sixth one and we ended up spending the night in the hospital. Anyway, not my point, the point is that I wanted to play on my cell phone and couldn't.

I'm sure people wonder why I don't just handle the cell phone port myself. Well, as I've explained before, I don't have time. For instance I am still working on recoding the site and I'm probably still going to be at it for a week or two.

I am constantly working on fixing bugs and adding new features. I don't have time for everything. Other people our out there are making awesome emulators. In less than an hour they could add the ability to load games from CC. We need to let them know that.

In any event, it's probably going to be a busy week. Lord willing I will get a few more pages recoding and get the forums ready for the public. Step by step, inch by inch...

Baby on Board

2011-02-13T05:53:00.001-08:00

I got a small amount of Console Classix work done last week, but not as much as I would have liked. That is mainly due to the fact that my lovely wife had our sixth child Friday at eleven thirty nine. That makes my third son's birthday 02/11/2011 around 11PM. If any of you are wondering, he is happy and healthy and we're all home from the hospital and getting back to normal. It blew my week up because of the baby appointments we had leading up to the actual delivery. Now that he's home I can get back to a normal work week.

So, what's been going on what is about to be going on? Well, I'll tell you! First, I put up our new and improved game info page last weekend. I may have mentioned that already, but it had some unexpected results. So far it has tanked our Google search listings. I have no idea why. The new page is almost exactly like the old one except for the fact that I fixed hundreds (literally) of HTML standards errors. The new page is seriously cross-browser compatible and I think it even looks a little better. Why this would have blown up our rankings I have no idea. Lord willing, I'll be making a few minor changes later this week. I turned off a couple of features until we saw how the page preformed. I plan to turn them back on this week.

It might seem like we could just go back the old page, but that isn't going to happen. The new page is better. We are just going to have to figure out what is going on with Google and press on to the future.

We are also waiting to see how the Facebook “Likes” are going to effect our rankings. Supposedly they are counted by Google just like any other links. If that's true it should really help our pages in general. I don't know that this information is going to help us at all because we're not going to be able to create more “Likes” ourselves, but I want to see what happens anyway. We might have some kind of “Like” campaign, although I'm not sure how we would go about it.

This week I plan to implement a Console Classix Wiki. I think I can have it setup in a few hours. The only problem is I'm not sure how to tie it to our current game info pages. I don't want to completely do away with the old ones (at least not for a while) and I'm not sure how I want to run them side by side. I think we should have an “Add a Wiki” button for any page that doesn't have a CC Wiki entry yet, but after the wiki page is up I'm not sure where the CC menu should point a user to first. Should we keep bringing up the old page with a link to the wiki? Should we bring up the wiki page with a link to the old page? What should we do with screen shots? Should we post all the screen shots on both pages or should each have it's own? Where will we fit in video when we start making trailers for the games?

Needless to say I have to think all this out. Still, I hope to have it in place Monday. Then I will contact a few people I want to be moderators. (Again, Brian, I'm looking at you.) Once that is done we should be able to roll it out in some fashion later in the week.

I do have at least one bug report I have to look into as well... Always so much to do....

Anyways, things are going well. We are getting there step by step.

What a Week

2011-02-06T06:09:00.001-08:00

So, last week I put in close to 60 hours. I actually stopped keeping count as time rolled by, but 60 is a close guess. What was I doing you ask? Working on the website. Working hard on the website. Working long on the website....

I managed to recode the index page and the game info pages so they work better on Firefox and Chrome. I also fixed a load of validation errors and actually made a small change to the login scripting. I have to list all these things because you'll never be able to see them. The biggest change you might actually notice is that the font is changed. Still, we are hoping all this work will payoff in traffic and, as I've explained a few times now, that helps everybody.

I am going to keep up the work this week and try to work through the rest of the site. Once all the code is up to date we plan to add a couple more features. First, I think we are going to make new user “Enable Web Launch” before they can start actually loading games from the webpage itself. We have user who sign up, but never download the client. So, when they try to launch a game they get an error. This confuses them and most wander away back into Internet space never to be heard from by us again. We are also planning to convert the game info pages to a Wiki format so we can start getting more actual information up an the site. When we do that we are going to need a few volunteer moderators (Brian, I'm looking at you.)

It's going to take a while to get that rolled out because I've got so much else going on, but we are getting there step by step. Lord willing, we are really going to see things pick up soon and then we'll be able to get a few more full time staffers.

In any event. It was a busy week and it looks like this week is going to be plenty busy as well!

A Full Working Week

2011-01-30T05:19:00.000-08:00

So, I'm sure you guys are excited about some of the future features we plan to add to the site, however, we can't always be working on new features. We have to divide our time up between maintenance and development. This week, at least, we've got to work on some fixes for the CC browser and the site itself.

We got an e-mail last week saying that the “Sever Load” feature wasn't working on the NES. (I know the NES is the only system that has it and that the others should, but I'm always so busy...) At first I rejected the idea. “I know it works, I tested that thing I don't know how many times!” I told Jonathan when he told about the bug report. Well, we tested it again and it didn't work. So, I crawled around in the code until I found the problem. We sent the guy a zipped version of the new DLL and it worked. However, we still have to roll it into a new install/update so it will work for everybody.

While we're doing that we're going to go ahead and make a few minor changes to the browser. We've got a list of changes we want to make including making the Facebook button a “Social” button and adding a bunch of features. For instance, we want to add the ability to turn the status update on and off. I only mention this to let you know what we plan to do in the near future. This week we are just going to fix that bug and add another “Upgrade Button” for free accounts. As I mentioned before this will lead to more features for you already-paying customers.

The site also needs a bit of work. I know it doesn't look perfect now, but it won't look perfect when I'm done either, lol. That is at least partly due to the fact that I'm not going to be working on the site's look or layout, but on the code behind it. Many of you may have noticed that the site doesn't work well in Chrome or Firefox and we need to fix that. We also need to fix problems behind the scenes that our users don't see, but that Google does. I think some of these problems are costing us traffic.

If we can fix them maybe we will get more visitors. That will lead to more users which will lead to more features. We also really need to add forums back to the site. We need you guys feedback and we would also appreciate any volunteer help.

Someone suggested that we should convert the game info pages to a Wiki format and let the fans do the editing themselves. I think this is a great idea, but I'm not sure where to start and I doubt I have the have the time right now.

I any event, we will be working away this week. If any of you have any thoughts or suggestions feel free to comment here or on Facebook. You can also shoot me an e-mail if you like.

A World of Features

2011-01-24T04:57:00.000-08:00

In my last post I mentioned that adding more games and systems to the service was one of the benefits of having more free players at Console Classix. Another of the advantages is the addition of more awesome features. Here is a very short list of some of the things we'd like to do with the service:

1.)Add multi-player gaming
2.)Host tournaments and playoffs
3.)Share high scores and screen shots on Facebook
4.)Offer a wider range of emulators for more advanced users
5.)Support mobile devices like the Andriod and iPhone
6.)Build our own open-source multi-console cross-platform emulator

I could go on and on. These are just some of the highlights. If you're looking over that list and thinking “Hey, I thought of that!” or “I sent Aaron an e-mail about that!” I, for one, am not surprised. Our fans have a huge number of ideas and thoughts on future features and additions. There has been many a time I've checked my e-mail and sat there thinking “This dude is brilliant!” as I read some fan suggestion. Although it may not always look like it we are always listening to you guys.

So, you may be asking yourself why don't we ever get on it. Well, I'm Console Classix lead programmer, but I'm also our junior programmer. I'm even the intern who fixes the lead programmer's coffee. If you haven't figured out what I'm saying, I'm our entire programming staff. That includes web programming as well as coding for the service itself. I'm also our network engineer and PC repair man.

Some fans have the idea that we are some huge corporation, but one look at our website should tell you that isn't true. We're a very small company with some very big ideas. In order to see some of those ideas turn into realities we are going to have to get more full time staff. In order to that we need more paying customers. In order to get them we needed to get more free users. That is how the “Login as Guest” and “Free Sampler” changes lead to direct benefits to our current full members.

We are doing everything we can to make Console Classix better and better everyday. We have a lot of plans and a lot of ideas on how to get things moving a bit faster. I may share a bit of that with you in my next post.

Have fun and good gaming!

What's Up

2011-01-16T10:31:00.001-08:00

Many of you may be wondering what we've been up to for the last few months. The short answer is “A lot”. You may have noticed that we've added a “Free Sampler” button to the client as well as a “Log in as guest” feature. In the long run this should benefit all of our users.

“What could the benefit possibly be for full members?” You ask. Well, it's a step toward getting even more full members for Console Classix. The free sample gives users an even larger test selection so they can see how well the “For-Pay” systems work on their computers. Being able to log in as a guest allows first time users to jump in and start playing as fast as possible. Both these things should cause more users to sign up for a free account and actually use it. The more free users we get the more full users we get it's as simple as that.

There are many reasons that matters to our full members. First, a larger subscription base means more games as well as more systems. Last year we launched the N64 as well as the TG16. Both of these systems need more “filling out”. Also, the more users we have the more copies of each game we need. The more full members we have the quicker we can add width and depth to our game selection.

What this means for all our users is more selection and less wait. That is just one way in which a larger subscriber base adds value for our full members. I think I'll discuss another in my next post.

Back in the Saddle

2011-01-11T08:13:00.000-08:00

OK... So months ago I said I was going to try to get back to this blog. Well, it was true, I did try. I failed miserably, but I did try, lol. This year I plan to put a lot more into it even if I just post “Hmmm, nothing much happened this week....” at least once a week.

There has been a lot going on with Console Classix over the last few months. I plan to go down the list over the course of a few more posts. I'm sure most of you have noticed that we got the N64 and TG-16 up last year. This year we plan to fill those systems out.

We also have a lot of changes in mind for the Console Classix Browser and the general level of social interaction with the service. I ask you guys to bear with me. I will really try to keep up with this blog. If you see me falling down on the job feel free to shoot me an e-mail saying something like “Aaron, you taking a vacation or what!?!?”

We need your feedback. That's one of the areas we're really planning to work on.

That's it for now. I'll try to put up a bit more by next week.

Short Vacation

2010-07-26T09:29:00.001-07:00

Those of you who are good enough to keep up with what's going on with CC may have noticed that things have been quiet the last couple of weeks. The reason for that is simple: we were on vacation. Shouldn't I have said something before we went? Yes, of course, I should have. However, I was exhausted and I just didn't get it done before it was time to take a break.

Now we're back at work. We have a number of little things that we are going to be taking care of, but most of them aren't very interesting. That having been said you guys have probably seen that we have put up some more N64 games. Expect more of those as well as new TG-16 games.

That's enough for the moment. I just wanted to let you guys know that we're back on the job!

Carousel of Progress

2010-07-02T05:17:00.000-07:00

This week went fairly well. You guys may have noticed that we got the TG-16 up and running at last. I reworked the adapter and got it fixed well enough for the moment. We still need to get a more permanent one put together. I also need to get the wiring map sent over to Matthias so he can share the wealth with all Retrode users. I would like to see him offer PCBs that you could solder you own TG-16 connector into. Still, we'll see what happens.

In other news Paper Mario doesn't work right. We did more testing after we got it to read and the data is there, but it won't play on our current build of the emulator. I need to grab the latest build and see what I can get it to do. I wish we had more manpower so we could try to tackle a few of these issues ourselves. Time and money...

I managed to find Urbs this week. It was tossed in a drawer. I'll try to get it up next week along with a few more GBA games. The week after that I want to put a few N64 games up. I know I've said this before, but we want to get in a pattern. Something like GBA/N64/GBA/TG16 for the moment.

That all for this week!

Some Good News

2010-06-25T05:06:00.000-07:00

The prototype adapter for the Retrode arrived this week. We used it to read most of the GBA games we put up Wednesday. That is to say that it read three out of five. The other two we had to use our original equipment to read. Still, I feel certain that the problem with the other two was just a software issue. I've contacted Matthias about and I feel certain he'll come up with a fix soon.

While I had it hooked up I decided to do a little more testing. I tried to read both Ogre Battle 64 and Paper Mario. I am happy to say that both read flawlessly. Now, you may be asking yourselves we we didn't already put them up. The only answer is: because we didn't. We're planing to do that next week. I want to get three more N64 games to put up with them and I am going to take a crack at Resident Evil 2. We'll see how it goes I guess.

In any event, it's all good news. I just thought I would let you guys know. Everyday we make a little more progress.

A Little Slack

2010-06-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

Ok. So, I forgot to do a post last week and haven't done one this week until now. I know I probably should have done a post just to let you guys know I wasn't going to do a post, but I guess I'm a little a lazy about such things. I'll do my best to sum up what has been going on for the past couple of weeks.

The TG-16 games came in and the new build is ready for launch. However, I broke the TG-16 reader before I got the last five games read so we've put off the launch until we can fix it. We worked on it some this week, but ran into some aggravating problems. We are going to try to make the new adapter more robust.

Matthias has mailed us a prototype GB/GBC/GBA/N64 adapter for the Retrode. It should be here in the next few days. Once it comes in we are hoping to be able to put more games up for each of those systems. I'll try to include an update in my next post to let you guys know how it is going.

Today we bought some more GBA games. We can't find Urbz and they may not upset most of you, but I have to tell Brian that I am sorry. I know we had it, I think we lost it when we changed offices. It is probably in a box somewhere. I am going to keep looking and just buy a new one when I run into it. Of course, we may do a complete inventory over the next few months, so I may just find it.

One last note for those of you who don't know. I also do another weekly blog about my childhood. It may be of no interest to most of you, but it's a bunch of funny stories about me and some of the other guys involved in CC. If you're interested you can read it here:

http://childhoodlived.blogspot.com

Have a great weekend!

Automotive Week

2010-06-04T08:26:00.000-07:00

Yes, I took this week off to work on my car. Well, my minivan. I'm married with five children. It was a lot of hard work and I got basically no Console Classix work done, but the van is still broken... Still, I suppose it builds character. After the week I've had I'm not sure I needed that much more character, but there you have it.

I am still awating the arival of one more game for the TG-16 launch. Lord willing, we will be able to kick it off early next week. I am going to try and get a good rotation going with the GBA, N64 and TG-16. Once I can buy a couple more adapters for the Retrode I plan to start putting up more GB and GBC games as well. We may even be able to work in the occasional batch of Atari 2600 games.

That's all for this week. Have a great weekend!

Almost There

2010-05-28T08:03:00.001-07:00

We have the last of the games for the TG-16 launched purchased and they should be here soon. The last five games we intend to put up before launch are: Aero Blasters, Air Zonk, Devil's Crush, Neutopia 2 and Parasol Stars. That will bring the total up to twenty. It's a small launch, but the original TG-16 only had a little over one hundred titles in the US, so it's still a good percentage of the total. I hope to have everything put together and launch the first Monday in June. That being the 7th.

Once it's out there I want to start putting up TG-16 and N64 games at least once a month. We have got to get ourselves in a position where we can start adding more games more quickly. We ran into some unexpected expenses this month and it put us back a bit. Lord willing, June will be different.

There wasn't much news this week I admit. I ended up out of the office most of the week. Hopefully I will have more news next week, lol.

Everyone have a great weekend!

More Games

2010-05-21T12:00:00.001-07:00

This was an exciting week game-wise. We added five new titles to the TG-16 Beta. They were as follows: Dungeon Explorer, Galaga 90, Neutopia, Ninja Spirit and Vigilante. We are getting closer and closer to an actual launch. I want to have twenty titles and enough copies to go around before we make it public. Lord willing, we'll have gotten what we need together by the end of the month.

We also put up our first new N64 games since launch. I plan to start putting them up a little more regularly. We may have to slow down on the GBA for a while. We're going to do our best to increase the total number of games we're putting up. Like so many things in life we have to priorities. Still, inch by inch we're getting better and better.

Mathias sent me a few new revisions of the firmware for the Retrode this week. He has greatly improved his TG-16 support. It works as is, but he keeps making it better and better. Any of you serious collectors out there need to check the Retrode out. He has only made a limited number so far. On top of working great they are going to be serious collectors items in time.

So much for this week! Everyone have a great weekend!

A Change of Pace

2010-05-14T05:20:00.000-07:00

I've decided that I am probably going to just start posting on Fridays for a while. The things we are working on at the moment don't generate enough to talk about three times a week. The plain truth is that Console Classix is having to dig in and let a little time pass. We just launched the N64 and, Lord willing, the TG-16 is right around the corner. We have got to get our game purchasing up to full speed and start getting more new games up.

I know this might seem like a no brainier, but it takes a little more planning that you might imagine. It's something I hope to have all worked out by next month. After we're getting games up like we should we are going to wait until we've filled these systems out before we launch another one. I was hoping we could get rolling a little faster, but it's just not feasible at the moment.

Still, patience is a virtue. We're all going to have a chance to work on it because time is the main solution here. So, until we get the ball rolling a little faster I am probably going to just stick with an end of the week wrap up on Fridays.

More on the TG-16

2010-05-10T06:10:00.000-07:00

The good news is that we have more games on the way. So far we've got the following: Galaga 90, Neutopia, Neutopia 2, Vigilante and Ninja Spirit. It's not a long list, but every step is another step. I plan on placing a few more bids this week. I admit that I'm waiting for deals. I want to get as much bang for our buck as we can. Lord willing, we will get enough up to kick the TG-16 off early next month. Also, I've gotten one complaint that the control setup is backwards. I want to know if any of you other beta testers are getting that problem.

Speaking of the N64, (well we weren't, but let's do) I hope to get some more games up for it soon. We've had a lot going on and it's been hard to get into a good rhythm. I want to put games up for it once a month kinda like we do with the GBA once a week. I want to put up more obviously, still, you get the idea. We'll be playing it by ear, but hopefully we'll get things moving along and get some more games up soon.

The Art of Emulation – Part 3

2010-05-07T08:14:00.000-07:00

In my last couple of posts I briefly explained that emulation is simply taking code written for one platform and making it run on another. This is done by translating the input to the native format, completing the correct processing and then translating the output. This explanation is necessarily lacking in details. If it wasn't it would be a book not a blog post. All this is just a very cursory overview.

To wrap this all up I decided to talk a bit about my personal method of coding an emulator. To start with I consider it best to bring the emulation down to the lowest possible level. For instance, I don't think about how I would emulate an Atari 2600 I think about how I would emulate the 6502 processor. Each piece of the Atari 2600 can be emulated separately. Once each of these pieces is complete they can be “assembled” into a working Atari 2600 emulator. For those of you who are familiar with Object Oriented Programming you understand the concept.

Doing things this way has several benefits. First, it allows you to test each component and do you best to bang out bugs while the situation is less complicated. Second, as each of the pieces are completely separately, several coders can work on the same emulator with very little communication. Once a standard I/O is agreed on each programmer can work on their section independently. Lastly, once a particular chip has been successfully emulated it can be used in other projects. For instance both the Atari 2600 and the NES use a 6502 processor (there are slight differences... but still...). Many systems used the Z80 processor. Once these chips have been developed they can be used across multiple emulators.

Keep in mind all these ideas are being presented by a man who has never successfully completed an emulator, but the theories are sound. Console Classix plans to begin pursuing it's own emulation project in the future. We just have to line up more help. I hope this post has got a few people out there considering the idea.

The Art of Emulation – Part 2

2010-05-05T06:13:00.000-07:00

In my last post I was using the NES as my example system. I'm now switching to the Atari 2600. I didn't give any real details on the NES and I know a bit more about the Atari 2600. So, changing gears shouldn't throw any of you off the scent. I'm going to go into a little more detail here so that when I wrap all this up by explaining what Console Classix plans to do in the future it will all make sense.

The CPU is the Central Processing Unit within a computer system. It has a limited number of instructions that it can complete. These instructions are known as Op Codes. If you take a look at the 6502 processor that was in the Atari 2600 and compare them with a modern PC you will find, in many cases, identical Op Codes. For instance, ADC is used to add two numbers with carry. Both the Atari 2600 and a modern PC have to be able to this. The trick is that Op Codes are actually accessed by using a one byte number (for the 2600) to represent the code's location in the CPU. The numbers within the two CPUs are not going to match. (The following numbers are arbitrary guys, so if you're a 6502 expert ignore them, I'm not explaining this to you...) So, say ADC is 0x65 on the Atari 2600 and 0x3E on your home PC. If you just tried to run an Atari game on your PC it would run into 0x65 and instead of running ADC would do something totally different. The result being that it wouldn't work!

Now, some emulation authors have simply remapped the Op Codes in order to emulate the CPU. They create a kind of go between that takes the Atari 2600 codes and translates them for the PC. So when it runs into 0x65 in Atari software it translates to 0x3E and does it's thing. This is an elegantly simple method and is very fast. However, it comes with a number of limitations that I won't go into now. (Just run with the idea that rewriting the functionality of the Op Code in something like C++ is more flexible.) Whatever method the emulator uses it has to give the same results as ADC would when it runs into that Op Code. In the case of the CPU core I wrote for our Atari 2600 emulator (that may be released one day) I used C++ and provided the same results as the expected Op Code.

This has been a very long way of explaining that you have to grab the data that is destined for an Atari 2600 CPU then process it and return the same results. It's a complicated subject, but I am honestly trying to keep it simple. When you look at the data on an Atari 2600 cart a large portion of it is just calls to Op Codes one byte at a time. So you grab the data read off the cartridge and start with the first Op Code (0x65 or what have you) and then step through one at a time doing what each one is requesting to be done.

More before long...

The Art of Emulation – Part 1

2010-05-03T08:14:00.000-07:00

So, how does emulation work? What exactly is emulation? This subject may or may not be of much interest to the few readers of this blog, but it is of interest to us here at Console Classix. Because of this I've decided to discuss it. At least, I've decide to give a cursory overview here. Many of our fans are programmers and we are always looking for people to help us do what we do. I hope that some of these coding fans may take a look at this and think to themselves “That sounds easy! I could help with that!” Still, my motivations aren't entirely selfish. Anyone who is interested in the subject needs a place to start. The small amount of information I put up here may help them get the ball rolling. I will warn you guys that this may get a bit long. There are some interesting things in it, you just have to plow through and try to keep your brain from going numb.

To start with, emulation is the process of making one computer system act like another (at least for the sake of this explanation). When you consider a modern PC you have several elements that make the machine useful to people. A computer allows input, processes data and then provides output. These are the first three elements we have to look at when we begin to plan an emulator. The forth element is software. The magic of software is that it takes the three hardware elements and makes the machine do something useful. So, for an emulator to do anything it has to be able to read software for one platform and make the hardware of a different platform act the correct way.

We have to start by looking at each of the three elements.

Input: The NES has two controllers that have a D-Pad and four buttons. The modern PC has a least a keyboard and mouse and possibly has a number of controllers plugged into it as well. The NES controls place input at a certain memory block. So, when you push the A button it updates a memory location that the game programmer can read. In order to use PC control to represent this an emulation coder has to catch the input and translate it into the form the NES uses. We'll come back to this, for now you just need to understand that you catch the PC input and translate it.

Processing: The NES has a CPU just like the PCs our clients use. I am going to give some detailed information on the CPU so we'll skip it for now. The NES also has video and sound processors. They take the data coming from the game and prepare it to be displayed on a TV and played on TV speakers respectively. The emulator has to make the PC process data in exactly the same way as the system being emulated.

Output: Here the emulation author has to take the data output by the NES and translate it in order to display the video and play the sound. As I said, this is just a cursory glance. I plan to add some detail before I'm done.

More Soon...

Blogging, Blogging

2010-04-30T04:32:00.000-07:00

Obviously I didn't do a post Wednesday. What can I say? It's been a wild busy week. Plus the truth of the matter is that although a lot has been happening not a lot of it is particularly interesting. At the moment we are building upon the recent progress we've made. So a lot of what's going on revolves around what bids we are winning or loosing on eBay. It's very important stuff, but it doesn't make good press...

Also, everyone may have noticed that we didn't put up any new games Wednesday. Again, a general busyness was to blame. We should be back to normal next week. I'm hoping that we are also going to be able to put up some more N64 games. We've got to finish testing what we've read. Normally it doesn't take this long and I hope we can do better next month.

Sadly we are not going to be able to officially launch the TG-16 until June. Everything is working fine I'm just having trouble getting the games we want while not paying a fortune for them. Little by little we're increasing our number of titles, we just don't have enough yet. We really didn't spend the amount of time we should have on it this month. We had a few bugs to chase and what not. It slowed us down a bit.

In other news I am going to try to start doing more with this blog. As interesting as it may be to read the weekly play by play of exactly what little problems I am having doing this or that I think I'm going to do a bit more. I'm not sure how much technical information you guys will be interested in, but there are some things that I think are interesting that I want to talk about. How do emulators do what they do? How do ROM chips work? Etc.

I don't plan to flood you guys with a lot of techno babble. I just want to open up some of these mysteries in an easy to understand format. I have no idea if it will interest anyone but me. Still, you guys can feel free to cheer or boo. That way I'll know if I'm holding you spellbound or just taking up blog space.

Retrode Update

2010-04-26T13:17:00.001-07:00

Matthias sent me another firmware update for the Retrode over the weekend. He made a few more changes to make the TG-16 adapter work even better. We are still working to refine it. It works well enough for us, but we want others to be able to make use of it as well. It was my hope that after the prototype was built we would be able to have a small batch made for sale to the public. In that way the work that we did wouldn't just help CC, but would also help the retro community a bit.

However, there was a snag I didn't see. The TG-16 edge connector is hard to come by. In fact, we pulled ours out of a TG-16. Needless to say we can't go around destroying perfectly good consoles just to make adapters. We have some ideas, but I'm not sure how they will work out. We'll probably build a prototype 2 at some point and run from there.

Before too long we plan to start working on an N64 adapter. Most of the leg work has already been done for that so it should be much easier. Once it's done we'll be able read N64 games more efficiently. That should allow us to get more games up more quickly. Time will tell.

Step By Step

2010-04-23T16:27:00.000-07:00

I don't have a lot to post about for the wrap up of the week. To be honest I took a little time off. Things have been hectic and I felt I needed a rest. However, we have made some little baby steps. I did manage to get a hold of Neutopia, so it should be here next week. I haven't gotten much feedback on the TG-16, but I'm running with the idea that no news is good news.

I have made some progress on those two 1964 bugs. We're waiting for feedback at the moment. I'm am very hopeful that we are getting close to fixes. I am afraid we are going to have to face up to the fact that 1964 is too heavy for some of the machines out there. I was afraid of that when we we started, but I had hopped that I was over reacting. Still, the fact that most people can use it is good. It's a lot better than nothing.

In other news it looks like we are going to be taking part in the intern program at USC. Daryl has conducted a number of interviews and selected three interns. The project is going to be a redesign of the website. Depending on what happens and what interns we have available we may try and start the open source Atari emulator. It's a project we're very interested in, but we don't have the man power to get it off the ground in house. At least, not yet.

All in all things are going well even if I don't have some ground breaking thing to talk about for the week, lol.

A Little More TG-16

2010-04-21T06:24:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I put a few more games up for beta testing. They are: Bonk's Adventure, Bonk's Revenge, D&D: Order of the Griffon, Falcon and Legendary Axe. They are a nice addition if I do say so myself. I hope to get some more games in next week. Now that we can read HuCards with the Retrode getting them up and running is a piece of cake. I could wish that we had a little more investment capital at the moment. The games for TG-16 are not as cheap as they could be. The system has a very definite “collector” type status.

Either way, I'm working on acquiring a few more titles at the moment. We are currently trying to get our hands on: Galaga 90, Neutopia, Neutopia II, Ninja Spirit and Vigilante. This certainly isn't all we hope to get before launch, but it's what I am trying to get right now. Our resources are a bit stretched by trying to launch two systems so closely together, but I think it's going to be worth it. Both of them have so many good games to offer. We are trying to get kind of a “best-of” up and then build on top of that.

If any of you run into any problems with the games I just added please let me know. The Beta period is for seeking and destroying bugs. That's all for the moment!

Running Behind

2010-04-20T06:23:00.000-07:00

Again, here I am a day behind. Unlike last time this time I don't have a good excuse. I got a bit done over the weekend and I had to make a games run first thing yesterday morning. I got home around noon and thought I had gotten enough done for a bit of a break. I started gaming, got sucked in and forgot to blog. Still, what do you expect from the president of a gaming company? I'll try to do better in the future... lol.

In any event, I have good news. Matthias got back with me over the weekend. He built a firmware version that works with our TG-16 adapter. I read all but one of the games we had to read in roughly ten minutes. You may be asking yourself why they aren't up for beta testing yet. It's like I said, I got sucked it. They should be up later today.

We hope to take the prototype and build a more permanent adapter in the next few weeks. For now the prototype will allow us to read most of the games we might run into. Because of that I plan to purchase a number of new games this week. I may do a post tomorrow to let you guys know what's on the way.

Stomping on Bugs

2010-04-17T08:32:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are good enough to keep up with this blog you will no doubt have noticed that I didn't post yesterday. Well, it's been an odd week. Crazy hours, sickness, insomnia and tax deadlines. Still, I did get a bit done even considering all that. (The TG-16 adapter still isn't done, but you can't have everything.)

The end of the week was occupied by two tenacious and annoying bugs. Both are problems with the N64. The first turned out to be a matter of video hardware. At least, I think that's what it is. We haven't exactly fixed it yet, but we're at the point where upgrading hardware seems to be the next logical step. If we can prove that the issue was indeed hardware we may have to put minimum video requirements up. At least it's mainly a self fixing issue in the long run. Everyday the base video hardware gets better and better. In a year or so the most cost effective PC will come with video hardware that works fine with 1964.

The other bug is with 1964's input plugin. For some reason it won't load for some users. The really crazy thing is that I haven't been able to get any meaningful error messages out of the thing. It won't load, but the reason is a mystery. We are going to have to get more feedback before we can crush this one. If any of you guys have run into it please let me know. The more info we get the faster we can fix it.

Either way, have a great weekend guys! I plan to myself.

Getting Closer

2010-04-14T11:33:00.001-07:00

It's been long week up to this point, but it's been worth it. The TG-16 adapter for the Retrode is coming along well. Matthias has begun working on the firmware update for it. I am hoping that we'll have it done before the end of the week. We've gotten a couple mores game in and we plan to order more before the end of the week. If I can find the time anyway.

We have also been fighting a short list of small problems with the N64. It seems that for the most part it is working well, it's just that a few users have run into a few problems. Unlike most of the emulators we offer the N64 uses a number of plugins to process the sound, video and input. In a lot of ways this is good because users can use different plugins to get better output for different games. However, one of the shortcomings is that not all the plugins we include in our install seem to work for everyone.

Obviously, we only included open-source plugins with the install. That did limit the number we could offer, but they do seem to work well for most people. The difficulty has been in finding bugs that only a few users have run into. Still, we'll keep working at it and, lord willing, we'll get the bugs crushed before too long. Again, this is another reason we need to begin our own emulation development.

There never seems to be enough time. I guess that's the same for everyone.

Working Weekend

2010-04-12T10:18:00.001-07:00

Yea... It was a long weekend, but it ended with some good news. I decided Friday that I needed to start on the new TG-16 reader. I've got some games on the way and we have a few that were too big for the old rig. We need to get the new one up as fast as possible, so we got started. We had made enough progress that I decided to work on it Saturday for a couple of hours. Those hours stretched out into a full working day and we still didn't have it up and running.

In the past we have been able to throw these things together really quickly. This time it's been different. After Saturday's failure I decided to give it a go Sunday. I got closer, but still no cigar as the saying goes. It also turned into a full working day and since I didn't get started until after church service I didn't finish until almost bedtime.

Why has it been this difficult? I have no idea. We had the thing pinned out within a few minutes Friday. The rest of this battle has been against electrical noise. At least I think that's what's causing it. The data gets random errors in it. Given time I can pull good data off the hucards, but it's very time consuming. I think we're close. That's good news. I hope to have even better news later this week.

TG-16 Beta

2010-04-09T07:13:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm glad to say we have the TG-16 up for beta testing. We only have a few games, but it's enough to start with. I have more games on order and we are working on a new cart reader for the system. We hope to make an adapter for the Retrode. This should speed up the process and make things a bit smoother. I have four games right now that our current setup won't read. Lord willing, we'll get it worked out next week.

That's all for now. If you want to be a beta tester and aren't at the moment e-mail here:

webmaster@consoleclassix.com

Put “Beta Tester” in the subject line. Have a great weekend everyone!

Incremental Updates

2010-04-07T06:04:00.001-07:00

Last week I mentioned that we had to make some changes to our update system in order to roll out the N64. I decided to explain what we changed. Why? Well, I think it's cool. I guess that will have to be a good enough reason.

Our first auto-update system was actually put together by another company. When a new version came out it would download the new setup executable and run it. This did have some advantages, but the install had to be rerun each time a change was made. The user was also downloading much more data than they needed to. Admittedly with all the bandwidth we have at our disposal it may not seem like it was worth troubling with. Still, I don't like the idea of having to download a 5meg setup in order to update a 5k file.

With our first attempt we decided to have the updater only download and install the files it needed. We wanted the changes to be automatically put in place and the browser to restart itself. We got all that in the first pass. However, we did overlook a few things. First, the auto-updater can't update itself. That was a bad oversight on my part. It a simple little program, but if it needs to be changed it's not easy to roll out those changes.

Another shortcoming is the fact that we had one update location. So if we updated one file and then decided to update another we had to give the first one time to get pushed out or put both in the current update. The problem with this is obvious. If we just keep putting in files before long it would be so big that we might as well have kept the setup download system. If we only put in the latest files someone who hasn't logged in for months might get a half-updated version.

What was the solution? Incremental updates! With the system we rolled out last Friday the updates go in order. You start from whatever version you currently have and then update one after the other until you are current. This will allow us to make minor changes in very small steps. Because of this we can roll little changes out more quickly instead of waiting for group of changes to pile up. If we only have to change one file that's fine. We change it and go on to the next version.

This is a good step for our updating process, but I'm not done. We still need the ability to append files, update the updater itself and possibly make small changes to Console Classix registry settings. A good example of this is with the n64 ini file. We are going to have to makes changes to it, but we don't want our changes to overwrite any custom settings our users have put in place.

All in all it's progress, but we still need to do more.

Another Month Another Beta

2010-04-05T04:06:00.000-07:00

Things went well enough with the N64 Beta that we have decided that we are going to try to do the same thing for the TG-16. We will only have a limited selection of games to start with, but it should be enough to get the ball rolling. I really want to thank all the beta testers that helped out with the last test. We intend to offer them the opportunity of helping us test again.

The entire process really gives everyone a little extra. We get to see how the new system is going to preform on a much larger range of PCs than we normally could. Our testers get first crack at the new games. All the way around it's a win win situation. Now that we've started doing it I wish we had done something of the kind long ago.

In the long run I need to develop some kind of beta web page. A place where users can see known issues and fixes and give us a little more live feedback on what is or isn't working. The better the tools we can provide to the testers, the better the feedback we can get. For this next test I probably won't have time, but it's another little thing to add to the list.

Little by little we are producing a more refined product. I really appreciate the feedback and interaction we get from our fans. Lord willing, as time progresses we will get better and better systems in place to accept, process and act on this feedback.

So, the long and the short of it is this: Be expecting a TG-16 beta launch soon.

Up and running

2010-04-02T09:18:00.001-07:00

Well, it's been a long morning, but it's finally done. The N64 is now available to the public. I had to make a few changes to our updating software. I also had to rebuild the install several time because of minor mistakes. Still, all's well that ends well I guess.

This may set a record for my shortest post ever, but it's been a rough day so far. I was sick with a stomach bug all day yesterday so things have piled up on me a bit. I have a bit more news, but it will wait until Monday. You guys have a great weekend!

A few updates

2010-03-31T08:39:00.000-07:00

Over the next few weeks we plan to roll out a couple of updated emulators. We're looking at Gens-GS to replace our current version of Gens and VBA-M to replace VBA. Now, for the most part they are just like the older versions. However, one large difference is that they are still alive as projects. Because of this bugs are addressed and fixed. This is something we can't handle with our own staff for the moment.

Gens-GS works a lot better with Windows Vista for instance. We also plan to take out a few of the games that we couldn't get working with Gens to see if the issues we ran into have been fixed. Since it's still under development we may actually be able to have a little back and forth with the developers. Because it's based on Gens we shouldn't run into any problems with what works now. It also supports 32x and Sega-CD, so we are also good to go there. I still have to do some testing, but it's probably a go.

With VBA-M I am hoping we will see some dead bugs. At the moment a number of Pokemon games don't work with VBA. Again, we simply don't have the time and manpower to fix these issues ourselves yet. In time we hope to really offer something more than just games, but for the moment games is what we've got. Even if we have the same bugs as before there is at least the chance of improvement with a living project. Again, since it almost certainly won't introduce any new bugs it's almost a no brainer.

This may not seem as exciting as new systems, but it's important. We want to offer perfect emulation for every game ever sold to the public. We're not there yet and that is why minor updates are actually a major deal.

Wrapping it up

2010-03-29T04:07:00.000-07:00

I know my last few posts have been related to the N64, but it's what's happening right now. The final test install had a few little problems, but they seem to be worked out now. Lord willing, Thursday morning we will wrap the beta up. Things have gone very well. We are going to have to pull a few of the games down, but in time we may be able to get them back up again.

In order to move from beta to live I have to do a few things. I need to update the N64 system from TEST to N64 in the database. I need to pull down those games that don't work just right. I've got to update the version number and test the auto update to make sure everything is working in that regard. I also have to put together the pages for the website to display the N64 selection. (We still need a writeup and screen shot for that.) That should tie up most of the loose ends.

So, hopefully my next post concerning the N64 will be about the launch and a few other little details. On the Wednesday post I actually plan on touching some updates we are considering. There are a few updates for the emulators we use and what have you.

That's it for the moment!

The Final Test

2010-03-26T07:55:00.000-07:00

Well... The second test... I hope that it is the final one, however. I just put up the second version of our N64 Beta install. It includes what should be the correct default settings for the games. It also allows the user to change the controller settings from within the CC Browser. Lord willing, with the feedback we get we should be able to put together the real install by next Friday.

Should we manage to do that we will launch the N64 officially next Friday, April 2nd. We are very excited about this. It's been something that we have wanted to do for years and now it's so close we can reach out and touch it. As soon as we get it up and running we'll be looking at adding more games.

Matthias over at http://www.retrode.org/wordpress/ is already working on adding N64 support for the Retrode. In point of fact he has made major progress already. If we have the ability to read N64 games with the Retrode it will greatly simplify the process of getting new games up. The easier it is the faster we can do it.

Of course, there are still the monetary considerations, but we plan to invest what we can into new N64 games. We know there are a lot of games people want that we don't have yet, but you have to take these things one step at a time. Either way, progress is progress. I hope to be announcing the launch of the N64 next Friday!

More And More

2010-03-24T03:24:00.000-07:00

I am hoping that we are going to be able to start adding games to the site at a little higher rate. Those of you that have been with us since the beginning know that we're a bit off from our “Golden Period”. At one time we were putting up so many new games is was hard to keep track. Then we hit out slow point. For around a year we put up very little and even now we only manage to add five new games a week. So, what's the hold up?

Money... Big surprise eh? Money seems to be a very common problem at the moment. However, I am very happy to say that things are looking up for us again. Lord willing, in the next couple of months things should really begin moving forward again. I would like to add at least as many N64 games a month as we are adding GBA games now. Five a week adds up to over two hundred and fifty a year. That would mean in about a year and half we would fill out the N64.

There are so many games we have to add. When you look at our list is seems very complete at first glace, but it needs so much more. It's true that the SNES and Genesis are very close to complete. However, you might say we only have a sample of the Atari 2600 games that were produced. The GB, GBC and GBA need a good many titles before they are complete. (Some of the games will actually need updates made to the emulators before they will run, but that is not true of most of the games we don't have.) We have a little over half of the NES games released in the US. (I know it's hard to believe when you look at our list, but there were a lot of NES games!)

Really I am hoping to kick off a new golden period next month. I hope to get a load of N64 games and start putting them up along with the GBA games we add. I also want to start getting the TG-16 games we need in order to launch that system. That's all we're waiting on at the moment. The TG-16 stuff is actually commented out of the current CC browser code. All I need to do is un-comment it and it's ready to go. Of course there isn't much point when you only have a couple of games. Still, that's what I hope to work on in April.

So many games, so little time...

Some New Hardware

2010-03-22T01:02:00.000-07:00

We got a new toy last week that I haven't had time to try out yet. It's a neat little device that allows you to connect SNES and Genesis cartridges to your USB port pretty much like a thumb drive. The game actually pops up under My Computer in windows. So you can play your games on an emulator directly off the cart. It's called a Retrode and you can get one here:

http://www.retrode.org/wordpress/

Now, you may be wondering why we would want one since we already have our own hardware for reading carts. First, it's awesome! That's a good reason to support any small business like this. The Retrode is actually produced by one guy. We love to support small businesses because we like to see things like this grow. It's a good product and we want to support it. Second, our hardware for the SNES and Genesis is getting older. It still uses a LTP port. USB is a nice upgrade. The Retrode is also much more compact and can be thrown into a desk drawer. Plus, there were some games we had a lot of trouble with using our old setup. As we are considering adding some Super Famicom and Megadrive games getting a Retrode seemed like a good idea.

I've actually talked with (e-mailed back and forth...) with the creator of the thing. I am trying to convince him to make an N64 adapter for it. As I said before our N64 hardware is a real mess. I would love to replace it with something like this. Just being able to plug it up to the USB port and read the data off the cart... The idea almost brings tears to my eyes.

We are actually going to try to build a TG-16 adapter for it. I feel certain that we will be able to. That will make launching the TG-16 a little easier. Well, it will make it less bulky anyway. It's a fairly strait forward system really. The HuCards are fairly easy to read. Still, never overlook being able to throw the hardware in a drawer when you are done!

Either way, I thought it was something you guys would be interested in.

A Little Progress

2010-03-19T19:21:00.000-07:00

Well it was a busy week, but I'm happy to say I've made some progress. I am a little later than usual getting this post up, like I said... busy.

I got the N64 reading hardware up and running, thank the Lord. It was a pain, but it's done now. I am going to wait until after launch to put up any new games. We've got enough to deal with at the moment. I'm considering adding N64 games once a month rather than once a week. The INI file that 1964 uses may have to be updated for certain games. I don't want to do that more than once a month.

I also made some progress on the N64 controller settings. It's not done, but it's moving along. I hope to finish it this week. If all goes well we should have the new Beta build up next Friday. I would probably have gotten it done already, but I had some personal things I had to take care of this week. (The weather turned warm and so I had to finish some things I had been putting off all winter.)

That's it for this post.

Opening Up - Part 2

2010-03-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

Really I feel like we need to develop our own emulators from scratch. Why? It's a long story and I'll go into it later. For the moment just believe that I have good reasons. I actually started several years ago. I developed a CPU core for the Sally 6502. That is the CPU of the Atari 2600. I actually designed it to be a completely stand alone piece of software. You can not only use it for an Atari 2600 emulator but for any system that used a 6502, the NES for example. It would actually need a bit of tweaking to work for the NES, but the changes could be implemented with a series of “switches” that way the same CPU core could be used for the Atari 2600 and NES.

The idea is to develop each piece separately and then assemble those pieces together into a working emulator. Once we have a perfected 6502 it shouldn't need to be redeveloped ever again. It may need to be updated in time and translated from one language to another, but most of the work would only need to be done once. Another advantage of developing this way is that all the core development can be cross platform. The CPU core itself doesn't need anything that isn't standard C++. Since it's standard it's cross platform.

The input and output could also be developed with porting in mind. I actually have a very full idea of how I want it all to work. I'll lay out here later. The real point of all this is that we need developers to help us get this off the ground. We intend to open the source code for the CPU core I've already developed and then start a number of other open source projects to complete our own series of emulators. That way anyone who helps us is also helping the emulation community. It's another way that Console Classix will be giving to the classic gaming community. Even if our actual code contributions are small we should be able to help orchestrate something awesome.

One top of any emulator projects we may have I might open the source code for the browser itself. I would like to see what additions the community could come up with. It might also be interesting if we provided potential developers with the software library we use to allow emulators to connect to our server and retrieve games. I would love to see a NES emulator loading games from CC on an iPhone!

As you can see, we have a lot to do. This isn't really a complete list. This is just a look at a few things we need help with. There is just too much for us to do. We need more help. Lord willing, we'll get it.

Opening Up - Part 1

2010-03-15T04:16:00.000-07:00

This week, being very busy, with all kinds of things going on, I decided to talk about something I'm not working on at the moment. I am loaded down with N64 stuff everywhere I look. This post gives me a quick change of subject so I don't go N64 crazy...

Most of you probably know that we started taking resume's recently. Now, you may be wondering what we want volunteer help for. There are actually a number of projects we are looking at taking on. There is always so much to do with CC that we often feel like we are working on the never ending todo list. Because of this we have finally decided to open up some of our projects to the public. (I was actually the one to drag my feet on this. Many of the people involved with CC have wanted us to do this for a long time.)

I present these in no particular order:

First, we need to convert our game info pages over to a Wiki page. There are so many games with so much information that we simply can't handle it all. In fact we can't even start to handle it all. The game info pages have fallen further and further behind. At the moment we don't even have screen shots up for all the games. (That was something we managed to stay on top of for years.) There is simply to much to be done. Especially since, Lord willing, we are about to start adding games like crazy again. If we can get a Wiki setup to handle that then the fan base can help us maintain that information. We all love classic gaming, that's why we're here. Wiki game info pages would allow fans to publish info about the games they love.

Second, the website needs redone. That is something that has to be done every few years. In truth it is long overdue. The site works, but it could be so much more. Again, we just don't have the manpower to do it totally in house right now. The full time staff is working on getting more systems and games out there. We only have so much time. That means the website redesign is going to have to be handled by a third party or by a combination of in house and volunteer help. There are a lot of very artistic web savvy people out there. We want to give fans that have the know how the chance to help us improve the site.

Third, the software we use needs a little work. The emulators we use generally works great, but we need to add features for our fans. For instance, we need to add a multi-player option for all our users. Most of the emulators have some kind of multi-player mode, but we don't have a good way for our fans to get together to play. We would also like to develop some kind of “competition client” where fans could complete head to head while others were watching. If we could manage that we could have our own video game Olympics.

More soon...

A Long Week

2010-03-12T04:19:00.000-08:00

Not this week... Next week. I've got a number of things I've got to try to get in place over the course of next week. What's going on? Well, first Jonathan is almost done putting together the first Beta update. Although I handle the programming issues Jonathan takes care of the “is this setting any better” work. The N64 emulator uses an INI file to keep custom settings for each game. He's almost got that file ready to add to our Beta install. He also found another open source video plugin that should fix a few of the issues we've run into. Once Jonathan gets the INI file to me I have to build the new install, put it up and let all our testers know they need to grab it.

Once that's done (or while it's in the works) I have to pull out our equipment for reading N64 carts and get it setup. That equipment is a mess. Of all the equipment we use the N64 stuff is some of the worst to work on. It has to be done, however. We have a few games that never got read or the read wasn't good. We've also gotten some game donations recently. (Thanks Brian!) On top of all that we are going to have to add new N64 games each month. All in all, we need that equipment working before we launch the N64...

I also have to start working on the controller page for the N64. I haven't done much of it yet... On top of the normal amount of work that would take I had to add the Z Axis to my own controller software. I had left it out up to this point just because not all the systems can use it and none of them need it. The N64 obviously does need it so I had to add it to my control setup. Fortunately I got some time this week and got that done already.

To make sure I stay busy I need to order a few of the controllers that fans are having trouble with. Officially we only support the Logitech USB controllers, but I want to make sure the browser works with as many different controllers as possible. There does seem to be some limitation I have overlooked. I want to find it and fix it...

On top of that I have some personal work to take care of. I won't bore you with it here. Either way... I have a fair amount to do next week.

Another one bites the dust. Part 2

2010-03-10T06:22:00.000-08:00

What can be done about it? Well, the systems themselves read the data from the CD in chunks. That is why you run into loading screens as you play. I am hoping we can download the data in pieces just as the system would have done from the disk. Again, this would require a bit of reworking. The server wouldn't be sending an entire ROM file. Instead it would be sending the chuck that the system was about to need.

At the moment it seems plausible, but this is all currently theory. I have yet to see how the emulators load CD games. I can tell you that they don't load the 640 Meg image into RAM, just by looking at it logically. However, I don't know exactly what it is they actually do at the moment. Before I can be sure that we can do this I've got look inside the code for each emulator.

So, as you can see there are two distinct hurdles we have to jump before we can offer CD system games. We have to be able to send a BIOS file and we have to be able to chunk the data up.

With things like this I like to move slowly. I prefer to roll out one change and see how it works before I roll out another. Because of this I am looking at launching the 32X. Now at first you may reject that idea. It wasn't a very popular system and some would even question it's quality. However, it is a classic and it is going to end up on CC some time or the other.

The advantage is that it also requires a BIOS image. So I should be able to get that up and working. We can test it in both beta and real world environments. After we know the BIOS system is working we can look into the CD systems and add data chunks. It's a way of reaching the goal one step at a time while adding an additional system.

While we are all musing that over a bit I though I would mention the fact that there are a few more systems we could add easily. First, the Super Famicom and Mega Drive spring to mind. I know, I know, that's just the SNES and Genesis... Still, are you saying you don't want us to offer any of the games for them? Are there no Japanese only releases that interest you?

If our fan base wanted those two we could start adding games for them in the next few months. Running along those same lines we could add the Famicom Disk System. (I least I think we could. I have a pretty cool idea for getting it working.) The real point is that we could add more games that would play in the emulators we have up and running.

Considering all of the above, what do you guys think?

Another one bites the dust. Part 1

2010-03-08T03:35:00.000-08:00

Well, it hasn't really bitten the dust quite yet. Plus, of course, it's really more like another one un-bites the dust... Still, one could say that when a system comes off our todo list it's list item bites the dust... Come to think of it that might not have been much of a title for this post... Moving on...

The N64 is getting closer and closer to finished. If all continues to go well our fans should see it up and running in the beginning of April. After that we intend to launch the TG-16. We may even have it out by May. So then, what's next you ask? There are several things we are looking at.

Any of the CD systems would be a big winner. The Sega-CD or TG-16 Duo would be great. Playstation goes without saying. Each of these has certain limitations and problems. For the Playstation for instance we haven't found an open-source emulator that we like yet. (If you have a suggestion feel free to make it.) However, there is a more common limitation with these systems.

First, each of the emulators we are looking at requires a BIOS image file from the CD system itself. So, for instance, the Sega-CD requires a BIOS image from an actual Sega-CD system. The TG-16 Duo... well, you get the idea. All of them need a BIOS image. Now this BIOS image is actually copyrighted software just like any of the game software we offer.

So what? Well, that means that for each Sega-CD game we let a customer play we actually have to own a Sega-CD system. If ten Sega-CD games are in play we have to own ten Sega-CD systems, etc. Now, this isn't really a big problem. We will just have to buy enough of them to go around just as we do with the games themselves. It will cost a little more at first, but we would earn that money back over time.

However, we also have to change our file transfer protocol a little. At the moment it is only geared up to dish out one file at a time. Again, this isn't a big deal, it's just something we have to consider. With a small amount of tweaking we could have the server dish out the game image and the BIOS image. In fact, as each game type would use only one BIOS image it would be very easy to pull the right image for each game. We would also have to set the server up to track the number of systems we owned as well as game, but again that's no big deal.

So the BIOS really aren't a problem so much as they are a little more work for me. I don't mind the work so they aren't an issue. There is another issue I have to consider however, and that is the game size. At the top end one of these CD systems can hold around 640 Megs of data. That's a lot to download every time you want to play a game. It's just not realistic.

More soon...

Congratulations Nikitas784!

2010-03-05T04:43:00.000-08:00

We have our first winner! Nikitas784 made me laugh with the most vigor and so has won a $10 gift card from Amazon. I want to thank the other submitters, who were also worth a laugh. Pat Benatar is a favorite musician of mine so Brian gets 10 points! I also love Jerry Lewis so 10 points to Charles. Sadly the points aren't worth anything.... Neither are the points in Space Invaders, but the more you have the cooler you are, so there you go.

Either way, I enjoyed this and got a good laugh, so we'll probably do it again in a couple of weeks. There are a lot of crazy screen shots on the site. Considering there are around 12,000 screen shots there would have to be some funny ones really...

I would like to expand the whole contest idea. I think it gives us a bit of social interaction. As this year progresses we may add a few more contests and some bigger prizes. It all depends on how much interest we see.

Nikitas I can't find your e-mail address. I need that to send you your prize. E-mail me at:

Webmaster@consoleclassix.com

That way I can get it out to you.

Thanks again everyone for participating!

Another Day, Another Test

2010-03-03T08:07:00.000-08:00

I would like to open today's post by thanking all the people that are participating in the N64 Beta. All of you are helping us get a system up and running that our fans have been crying for since we opened our doors. We here at CC really appreciate all of you taking the time to help us improve our product. Admittedly, you guys do get to take a crack at a number of great games before anyone else, so that is a bit of a reward, lol. Still, the point is that we want to thank you all.

That having been said... We've still got a fair amount of testing to do. We are slowly getting all the settings we need straightened out. One game after another gets put in the “good enough” pile. However, we could always use more feedback. There are so many options for each of these games that it can be almost overwhelming to try and figure each one out with our small staff.

What we really need is more fixes from our testers. If a game doesn't work just right there are number of options that can be changed. As fixes are found they'll be worked into the current install. Slowly, but surely we should get the games up and working. The more help we have the faster it will go.

If any of you beta testers find a fix for a bug, please let us know. The more feedback we get the faster this is going to go.

A Thousand Words

2010-03-01T09:28:00.000-08:00

Don't worry, there aren't really a thousand words in this post. The title concerns the old saying “A picture's worth a thousand words.” You see we've decided to have a little contest. Why? Why not? It will be something we can look back on and feel “Well, that was a bit of fun!” If everyone gets into the spirit of the thing we may start doing it fairly regularly.

This first one is simply a “Caption the Screen Shot” contest. We want everyone to be able to compete and I want to laugh until I cry. So, that having been said take a look at the screen shot below. Now, it's important to note that we didn't take this shot just for the contest. No, that beauty has been on our site for years. Who took it? I don't know... Oh, I have some suspicions, but so many people have taken screen shots for the site that I can't be sure.

It says a lot about fair play and what not doesn't it. In any event, all you guys have to do is caption it. We, the humble, but official, CC Staff will vote on the one that we laughed at the most. Whoever manages to get us closest to crying wins.

Now, I've left something out... Oh yes, the prize. Well, it's a small contest. Shouldn't be too hard to walk away with the prize. Still, it should be something that anyone could use. How about a ten dollar gift card from Amazon.com? Yea, that sounds good to me. Kind of a “Picture's Worth a Thousand Pennies” kind of thing. I plan to wrap it up and announce a winner this Friday.

So in short:

Contest:
Give the screen shot a funny caption

Prize:
$10 Amazon gift card

Simple enough. Come on guys, make me laugh!

A console-ation prize. Part 2

2010-02-26T03:31:00.000-08:00

The problem goes back to that cost versus profit thing I mentioned in an earlier post. If we make a product like this we have to be sure there will be enough consumer interest to merit the thing. I don't want you to think that we here at CC are a bunch of penny pinching profiteers, but money does enter into it. We keep things as low price as we can, but there are a lot of costs to consider, not to mention the fact that we have to make a living.

So, let's say that we could throw the box together for around $150. The software would add no additional cost, but we would still need to charge for the service. We could potentially put the things out there for around $200 with one year of full service.

That is a chunk of change for the Retro-gaming experience. I'm certainly not saying it isn't worth it, I'm just saying it's more than I would want to charge. Now, our free systems would be playable for as long as you had the console, but the full service would need to be paid for each year. That adds another cost consideration.

We also have to think about the fact that in a few years time the console would be outdated and wouldn't be able to play the latest games on CC. That would mean buying the newest version of our console. You could probably count on doing that every three years.

That's the problem in a nutshell. I'm just not sure enough people would be interested in it to make it viable right now. In the long run I am sure we could get enough interest. Especially if we did manage to add a cartridge adapter port where different cartridge ports could be plugged in.

Like so many things it's a matter of time and money. At this point you may be asking yourselves “Why do you do posts like this? You dangle something in front of us just to slap it out of our hands! What's wrong with you?” Well, it's not really like that at all. I'm just sharing the things I think about with you. Lord willing, one day, we will have a CC console. We can't right now, but we have to work toward it. Without the idea you don't get the product. The idea comes first and that is what I am sharing with you guys.

A console-ation prize. Part 1

2010-02-24T03:43:00.001-08:00

I mentioned two things while discussing the Atari Flashback. One was home-brewing which has been pretty well covered. The other was that we might consider making our very own Console Classix Console. It an interesting idea, but there are a few things that have to be considered.

First, is it feasible? I think it is. A number of small, low power PC-on-a-board type products are out there. (Embedded systems as they are known.) We could buy a unit that had all the things we needed in it. A good CPU, plenty of RAM, a solid state drive, wired and wireless network connections and a TV out port.

Hardware-wise it's really not that big of a deal. Get the system you need, wrap it in a molded plastic case and include a power supply to support it. Throw in a couple of low cost USB controllers and you are really rolling. We might even be able to do something really awesome like include a cartridge adapter module where you could put the right adapter in it and play your own carts.

Software also shouldn't be a problem. First off we could throw Linux on the thing. Provide our own splash screen and load directly into the browser app. Then we would only load X windows for the browser and the emulators as needed. It should be fairly thin and run relatively fast. (We would need to put a button on the front on the thing to take you back to the menu... a little thought would be required for that.)

The emulators themselves shouldn't prove any great difficulty. Most of the emulators we use now already have Linux builds ready to go. There would be a system or two that we would have to change out, but it would just be a matter of finding a good Linux emulator for that system. Once we had our list of emulators we would just need to get them working with our service.

The last piece of the software puzzle would be the CC Browser itself. Fortunately this last build was done with portability in mind. It is almost cross-platform ready. All told the software work shouldn't take more than a few weeks. It would also give us the added bonus of having a Linux version of the client up and running.

So, it seems simple enough. Get the hardware together, setup the software and get it out there for the public to buy. What's the big deal?

More soon...

The Art of Home Brewing. Part 2

2010-02-22T03:29:00.001-08:00

Up to this point I've only talked about the Atari 2600, but don't think that's the only system that still has games being developed for it. The Genesis is still alive and kicking. In recent years we've seen a few new releases. You can take a look:

http://piersolar.com/
http://www.superfighter.com/

The NES is still out there:

http://retrousb.com/

I could go on, but you get the idea. The classic systems are still alive and well. Each of them offers something unique. People see that, which is why development continues.

Most of these developers have a few things in common. First, they love the systems they are coding on. Second they want to make a bit of money from their hobby. Third, none of their games have ever showed up at Console Classix. Why is this?

Well to start with Console Classix wants to make sure that the original authors of the games have made the money they are going to make before we pick up their games. I admit that we may offer the Wii virtual console a little competition, but I can talk about that later. For the moment just run with the idea that we don't want to cost any developers any sales. These guys have spent months (sometimes years) developing a game. We don't want them to loose sales because we offer it to the public.

In time we certainly plan to offer these games, but when and how is still very much up in the air. We need a way to offer the games and still encourage people to buy a copy for themselves. I think Console Classix could bring attention to these games as well as letting our fans play them. It's simply a matter of working out something that is fair to the developer and Console Classix and, of course, the gamers themselves.

Up to this point we've done very little on this front. We tried to contact one group (I'll leave out the specifics) and were shut down. They didn't like the idea of emulation. This was very shortsighted, of course, because we can offer the games with or without their blessing. We just wanted to work out a system that was beneficial to everyone. As they were so opposed to the idea we let it sit for the moment.

I'm not sure how to go about this. I'm not certain how we should start. For the moment I am going to put it back on the shelf. In a few months I may pull it out again. We have so much we are working on I can quickly get overloaded.

However, if any of you are home brewers or know a home brewer or feel driven to contact the author of some favorite home brew, Console Classix is ready to talk. We want to offer these games in a way that satisfies everyone. I'm certain we can work something out.

The Art of Home Brewing. Part 1

2010-02-19T03:41:00.000-08:00

In my last post I mentioned home brew Atari 2600 games. Now, I know that most of you probably already know about these, but I feel I should explain before I go on.

For those of you who don't already know it, Atari 2600 development is alive and well. A number of new games come out for the 2600 each and every year. Most, if not all of them, are developed by home coding hobbyists. These hobby coders are known as home brewers. There are several remarkable things about this. The first is that the 2600 was released in October 1977 (Meaning I could have played it at the ripe old age of six months.) The system is thirty two years old and people are still writing games for it. The second, and perhaps more amazing thing, is that some of these games are really good. In point of fact, some of them are better than the games released during the 2600's height. Third, you can buy some of the really good ones in cartridge form!

Can't believe it's true? Take a look at Atari Age:

http://www.atariage.com
http://www.atariage.com/store/

How can this be with a system that's as old as this? Well, most of you are retro-fans and you get it. However, again I'll take a moment to explain. The Atari 2600 represents an age in gaming. Although it is very limited as a system by today's standards it still has the ability to do one very important thing: It can still run fun games. Take Space Invaders as an example. The game play is very simple and the graphics are extremely limited. However, if you like that style of game then the Wii can't do it any better. Pitfall is an awesome side scroller. Adventure arguably represents the beginning of the adventure genre.

What all systems have in common is that all have their limitations. It is up to developers to work within the confines of the system they are working on. What this does is gives each system a very definite “Feel”. The 2600 was a good system and it still is. To this day I love playing Warlords with a few friends. The games for the 2600 are simple, they have to be. However, if that simplicity is worked into the game you get something that is not only fun, it's easy to play.

More soon...

Back to the Flashback. Part 2

2010-02-17T03:41:00.000-08:00

I am sure not all Atari executives love the old 2600. In fact most of them may not, but they could at least look around and see what's going on. Here are a few points for the cartridges:

First, cartridges may very well last until the end of the earth. We haven't reached it yet, but since those games were first sold very few of the carts have ever worn out. You can go to almost any flee market anywhere in the country and there are Atari games that still work just fine. (In truth it's also easy to find a working Atari 2600, but it would be worth buying the new model just to get a better TV connector.) Second, new games come out for the Atari every year. True, they are developed by home brewers and hobbyists and only people that are into the scene know about them. However, who do they think was going to buy the Flashback? The same people that bought a Flashback are likely to be interested in buying new Atari 2600 games! Third, Atari could have released several more compilation cartridges. If they were marketed correctly they could have been sold online and produced in micro batches.

I honestly don't believe that Atari had considered the bigger picture on this one. Why mention all this now? A couple of reasons! The Flashback 2+ is suppose to come out later this month. Again, no cartridge port! (How can Atari keep seeing that there is a market for this thing and not see that there is a market for new carts... this is nuts!) Also, I've been looking at Console Classix own collection of Atari games. We need more. I need to try to work on this in the coming months.

It also makes me consider all the home brewers out there. Console Classix needs to find a way to work with them. I'll have to consider that a bit more. I may even do a post all about that. It also makes me think that a Console Classix Console might not be a bad idea. I wonder how the public would react to that.

Back to the Flashback. Part 1

2010-02-15T02:15:00.000-08:00

You may remember that a few years back Atari released a product known as the Flashback. It was an Atari 2600/7800 type console thing. (For lack of a better description.) It came with twenty built in classic Atari games. I was very interested when it came out. However, when I went to buy one I noticed that it didn't have a cartridge port. What came with it was what you got. I was very disappointed. It went right back on the shelf and I went away thinking “So close, but not close enough.”

As it turns out there was a good reason it didn't have a cartridge port. The entire system was built around a Nes-on-a-chip. The games were actually emulated on the system. Obviously I don't have a problem with that in general, but in this case it just didn't make much sense. The game play wasn't true to the Atari and, of course, no Atari cartridges would work in it. End result: A slightly larger version of the joystick compilations that were out there already. It was an ok product, but it could have been great.

A little time passed and Atari released the Flashback 2. This was a great improvement over the first one. The console was based on an Atari-on-a-chip and the games played just like they had on the original. An added bonus was that it could theoretically play Atari cartridges! Atari even went to the trouble to include some of the newer, more popular home brew games out there. This was certainly to tip their caps to the very much alive classic Atari market. This was certainly a good sign. Atari seemed to recognize that it's old system was still alive and kicking. However, low and behold, no cartridge port...

To add to the frustration they actually designed the mother board of the thing where it would be easy to modify yourself. You can add your own cartridge port with very little effort. So, Atari seemed to know that people were going to want the port, they just didn't add it! You see, this is how close companies come and still drop the ball. They knew people would be interested, they just weren't willing to go the extra mile.

To be continued...

Sweet TG-16! Part 2

2010-02-12T03:43:00.000-08:00

I strayed off my real point in the first post. The question was “Is Console Classix ever going to add the TG-16?” I am happy to say that the answer is yes. In time we hope to offer every system ever sold to the public. No matter what the system's success was someone is going to want to play it. We plan to preserve that experience for them. I myself am looking forward to the TG-16. I never got one as a child and I have a lot of catching up to do.

To add to this good news I have even better news. The TG-16 is, Lord willing, going to be one of our next systems. (It may be the very next one depending on how this work on the N64 goes.) Want better news than that? It's ready! Yep, the software is all there just waiting to launch. It's all done. 100% complete. Yes sir, ready to roll out the door. Any second now... Wait for it....

Ok, now the bad news part. We've got to buy games. We have Pac-Land and it works great, but one copy of Pac-Land isn't going to fill demand. We hope to have the games we need together by April. As soon as we've got the games the TG-16 is going up. We really want to get it out there. We hoped to do it in January, but we've had to push it back to April. (As I said in an earlier post, we are a small company, we've had a few financial hiccups, but we're working on it.)

Want to help get it out faster? Send us a donation! Send us some TG-16 games! If you send a game donation to us we will even give you free service for the amount of the value of the games along with your shipping cost. It's the perfect way to support Console Classix while making sure your investment goes right where you want it. If you are interested in sending us a game donation e-mail me here:

webmaster@consoleclassix.com

You want the TG-16 up faster? You can help make it happen.

Sweet TG-16! Part 1

2010-02-10T04:15:00.000-08:00

I decided to go ahead and post this because I got a comment asking about the TG-16. It truly was an excellent system. In many ways it was a very over looked system. Nintendo and Sega ruled supreme in the market that it hoped to fight it's way into. Sadly, as a system, it failed. (At least in America) Why? In my humble opinion it was a mater of games. Not that the games for the TG-16 aren't good, but there simply aren't enough of them. The system never got enough developers behind it to produce the quantity of games that people expected to see.

Many might argue that quality matters more than quantity. Although in theory that makes sense it doesn't work in real life. Let's look at the facts. First, believe it or not, some people actually like Hillsfar for the NES. Now, by making that statement I have drawn a line in the sand. One side is saying “You lie! No one no where no how ever liked that game!” the other side is saying “What do you mean 'some people'?!?!? It's a classic! It may be THE classic!”. Quality is a very subjective term. If you like it then it must be quality.

I would agree that most TG-16 games are quality products and I think that is a generally popular view among people who have played many of them. However, quantity is not so subjective a matter. Nintendo and Sega cranked out three news games for every one new TG-16 game. When considering buying a new system I looked at the games. I loved the TG-16, my brother and I had actually picked one up and were headed for the checkout. Then we talked about it, my Dad weighed in on it. When all was said and done the TG-16 went back on the shelf and we walked out with a Genesis. Why? Sega seemed to be more alive as a company. They had more games. We thought we could expect new games for years to come. We were right.

More on Friday...

N64 Where Are You? Part 3

2010-02-08T04:39:00.000-08:00

The truth is that there is a good N64 emulator out there. It's called 1964 and the guys that developed it have done a very good job. The problem is that it is a little on the slow side. If we put it up now there would be many computers (my home computer being one of them) that would not run 1964 well. What I am trying to decide is whether the demand is so great as to excuse this limitation.

Nothing is perfect, I know that. Often it is better to get something out there as soon as it is usable then to work toward perfection. Many people would disagree with me, but look at Console Classix current track record. We started with roughly one hundred NES games. Our server app was a small application written to use an Access database. It locked up around three times a week and was desperately slow. We put it out there anyway and people began to play. They liked the idea enough to look past all the problems. They believed in what we were doing enough to invest their money in it. Now we have thousands of games and the service is much better. We were able to reach this point because we launched an unfinished product.

In point of fact, Console Classix is still “unfinished” and will be for a long time to come. I will consider it complete when we have every game ever offered for every system ever sold up to what is out at the moment. (We won't offer games for systems that are currently on the shelves. The companies that developed them need to realize the profits from all their work. We're here to preserve the past at a low cost, not hurt other companies financially.) So we offered a unfinished product, we are offering an unfinished product and we will continue to offer an unfinished product for a long time to come. So, what's the holdup on the N64?

The thing is that even though our service isn't “finished” it's still good. All the systems we offer are playable and enjoyable. I'm afraid to launch a system that only twenty percent of the current PCs will run right now. I don't want to tell people they can play the N64 for the low cost of $5.99 a month, oh, and the cost of a new PC. This is my dilemma!

We're a small company and we listen to our fans. So... What do you guys think?

N64 Where Are You? Part 2

2010-02-05T03:22:00.000-08:00

To pick up where we left off, the N64 is certainly worth doing, but we have to consider another facet of Console Classix. We are a very small company. We only have one full-time developer and he's not the world's greatest. I can say that freely, because I am our full-time developer. This limitation means that we can't develop all the software that we use in-house.

Fortunately there are a large number of developers that are just as interested in game preservation as we are. They have given their time, effort and abilities to make classic console games playable on modern PCs. There are a large number of quality open-source emulators out there. (I'll go into more detail about “open-source” and “emulators” later. For now just run with the idea that it's software other developers wrote that Console Classix can use.) We have added support for the Console Classix service to the emulators that we use.

Basically, Console Classix just offers the game to the user. The software that allows the user to play the game on their PC was developer by other programmers. Although that has allowed us to grow quickly and add system after system by making use of software that other developers generously donated to retro-gaming, it also has a severe limitation. What if there isn't an emulator out there for the system we want to offer? We don't have the man power to develop one on our own. So, what happens? Nothing...

That has been the limiting factor with the N64. We own a large number of N64 games. We have dumped the data off of them and they are ready to work with the Console Classix server. What we haven't had is a solid, open-source, N64 emulator. For those of you that would criticize me for not developing my own I would simply say “Try it sometime.” It is very complex and my programming skills, although in some ways impressive, aren't good enough to undertake something like that on my own. (Well, not and finish it in any reasonable amount of time while, at the same time, maintaining CC.)

However, the time has come when we may have something that is “good enough”. The question that bothers me is this: How good is good enough? Well, I warned you when I started this that it might be three chunks. Looks like that is the case.

N64 Where Are You? Part 1

2010-02-03T04:03:00.000-08:00

This is a question that has been asked since we opened our doors in 2001. It's a valid question, a good question. It deserves a good answer. I think it's best to fully explain the situation so our fans can finally understand exactly why it is we do or don't have a certain system. This explanation may be a little long so I plan to break this into two parts (It may even end up being three parts). That is the reason I'm posting this on Wednesday.

First, I need to explain how Console Classix works legally. Many fans may already understand this, but bear with me. It's usually best to start at the beginning. Console Classix works like any other video game rental place. We can only ever have as many people playing a game as we own physical copies of. So, for instance, if we want to allow ten people to play Super Mario Brothers we have to own ten physical copies. That is why certain games can't be played at certain times. All the copies we own may be in use by other players.

As one can imagine this can cost a great deal of money. We currently offer over three thousand games and have over seven thousand physical cartridges. As large as these numbers may seem we still need more. Since our launch we have had to add more and more copies of games we already own just to fill demand. Even with that we still don't always have enough to go around. We try very hard to make sure that our fans never have to wait for a game, but with our current income we can only buy so much.

Whenever we are considering launching a new system we have to look at the cost of the games involved. How long will it take us to regain the money we've invested in that system? How long will it be before we have to buy extra copies to fill demand? Is the system going to be popular enough to merit the investment at this time? These are the questions we have to consider when we are looking at a new system. (The popularity doesn't matter in the long run. We want to offer every game ever sold to the public. Don't worry if you're the only person you know that ever liked that game. We still intend to get it when we can afford to.)

With the N64 the answers to these questions are obvious. It won't take long to regain our money. We will have to buy extra games quickly, but the increased income should cover the cost. The N64 would be hugely popular and it certainly merits the investment. So why haven't we added it? More on that Friday.

Oh Server, My Server

2010-02-01T03:50:00.000-08:00

I know that in my last post I said I planned to do these every Friday, but I may have changed my mind a bit. I decided it would be good to do a post anytime anything unusual is going on. This weekend we had such an issue arise. Our server had a few lockups over the weekend. I tracked the problem to a lack of hard drive space (We uploaded a good deal of data Friday morning). I fixed it well enough to get us through the weekend, but I'll be working on a more permanent solution this week.

As many of our fans may have noticed we've done a lot to improve server stability. Over the course of 2009 we rewrote our server application from scratch, moved to improved hardware and updated all the client software including the Console Classix browser. Many of our former stability issues have been completely resolved. However, it's still a work in progress. Lord willing, after I make the changes this week it will make the service even more stable.

What's all this then?

2010-01-29T07:09:00.000-08:00

For those of you who may not know I am the president of Console Classix. If you don't know what Console Classix is I am surprised you're reading this. Still, I'll take a moment to explain. Console Classix is an online company that focuses on offering classic console games for play on home computers across the Internet. I would suggest going to http://www.consoleclassix.com and taking a look. I any event, we'll get started now.

I've been under pressure by a number of friends for a number of years to start blogging about what's happening with Console Classix. It may seem hard to believe that a person as involved as I am in cutting edge technology would constantly resist what's hip and new and now. However, it's easy to understand when you think about the fact that I am the president of what is possibly now (and I feel certain will be in the future) the greatest classic gaming preservation company in the world.

I don't live in the past, but I do love it. As I sit here writing this I am listening to music from the 80s as I do almost every work day. (In truth I also listen to music from the 70s, 60s and 50s, and select modern music, but the 80s is my big deal.) I'm a classic kind of guy really. I read old books, I watch old TV, etc. It's not that I feel being old gives something value it's that I live a “classic” life. I consider myself a collector of the best the ages have to offer. Video games are actually only a small part of that. A very dear part, but a small one none the less.

Classics are created all the time and only the effects of time can show us what is truly classic. When you look over a certain period of time and pull out the best that age had to offer you are always going to come up with something awesome. The Iliad is unarguably a classic and so is The Lord of the Rings. There is no age that can claim it was more “classic” than any other. Every day has it's own classics. The passage of time shows us where they are.

I have been asked many times why I started Console Classix. This is the answer in short: I saw a need and decided to fill it. I wanted to play many of the NES games I had once owned, but had since lost. I was grown, married and had two children before I felt the longing to play The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy again. However, once I felt that draw it pulled at me a great deal. These games were connections to my childhood. I wanted to enjoy them and offer them to my children to enjoy.

Now many of you reading this (If there are many of you...) are probably asking yourselves why I didn't just play what was out there rather than starting my own company. The legal issue was what bothered me. I didn't feel it was right to illegally copy a game. Although many would laugh because it seems to be a victim-less crime, I felt it was wrong and I still do. Plus, of course, you can look at the results. Few, if any, of the illegal ROM sites that were up when Console Classix opened are still around. We have weathered the years well and, Lord willing, will be here for years to come.

I wanted to offer the games of the past to the public at a reasonable price in a legal format. That is just what we have done. Because of the way we went about it we are still here and still growing. That's a good thing, because as I mentioned before classics are being born everyday. We are here to preserve them now and I hope we will be here to preserve them in twenty years time. That is what Console Classix is all about, saving the great games of the past for the enjoyment of the future. The latest LOZ is great, but we keep the memory of where it all began alive. We even manage to do it at a very low cost! (In fact you can play the original LOZ for free.)

I supposed that's enough for a first blog. Although I may have rambled a bit I have, at least, explained why Console Classix is here. I plan to start updating this blog every Friday, so if you're interested in what is currently going on with Console Classix come check it out.