I for one have enlarged my gaming collection since it's getting harder
to collect S100 and other older computer items. Every where I go now
people tell me that they can get more on eBay than my offer. Some have
called me back after trying to sell their items with no luck on eBay.
Back to the gaming items I now have almost every Sega console, one each
GameBoy series, both Atari 2600's, Atari 5200, and 7800, The Pong,
Intellvision's 3 different models, Atari 400 & 800, Vic20, various C64
models, various other Atari models in the XL series, a Bally, TI99/4's
various models, many handheld models like the NOMAD, GameGear, and
others, Coleco Adam, VideoBrain, and many other systems plus tons of
game software and cartridges. Someday I will have a complete list on
the web and the units on display.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chuck McManis" <cmcmanis(a)mcmanis.com>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, October 29, 2001 10:48 AM
Subject: Classic Gaming OT and OT / Re: OT: Playstation 2 opinion?
On Topic and Off Topic :-)
At 11:44 PM 10/28/01 -0800, it was written:
>PS2 is last year, by Xmas all his friends will be talking about Xbox
and
>GameCube. We have N64, and I resisted forever
getting one, and
relented
>only as the price dropped to about $150 with a
game (he just HAD to
have
>Zelda). Keep in mind this is a razor blade
industry, regardless of
the high
price of the
console, the real money and costs will be in games etc.
Off topic part:
I was originally quite excited by the Xbox, I still think the
_hardware_ is
cool, but the fact that Microsoft will be in charge of
the software
makes
me cringe. The first dedicated console that crashes
not because of the
games :-( If I had to buy one this year I'd go with the PSTwo. Best of
the
current lot, if I could get full docs and write my own
software, I'd
get
the Xbox.
>My recommendation is to forget the console, and put together a gaming
PC.
Better
intelligence to the games, and immensely greater selection and
usefullness.
On topic part:
This will basically cost 10x as much in real terms and be harder to
maintain. Unless you use it only for games and even then games from
different years won't work on it.
So how many people collect gaming environments? It seems that classic
computers go back to the early days of the C-64 vs Atari console wars.
Remember the advertisements where the young guy is sitting in a job
interview and the interviewer says, "So you can score 200,000 in space
donuts and get to the 15th level in maze wars, but what else can you
do?"
and then they offer that if your kid said, "I can
hack a C64" they
would
hire him. (they don't really say that, they imply
programming ability
:-)
But I've been a gamer as long as I've been a programmer (which is
waaay
too
long ;-) and witnessing the folks who got the original
4.2BSD image of
the
game Haunt running under NetBSD/VAX was an example of
the extremes
folks
would like to get to, to recreate gaming experiences.
All the gaming magazines (especially the ones that are left) wax
rhapsodic
about the "good old days" when polygon count
and particle physics
weren't
as important as game play. There are some classic
computer games out
there
(SpaceWar being perhaps the most famous) that need
preserving.
--Chuck