Articles tagged with: 2600

News Roundup: June 5 - July 9

mossy_11 on Saturday, 09 July 2011. Posted in News

After a year of frequent incremental updates (around 2500), Nintendo Wii and Gamecube emulator Dolphin has been bumped up to version 3.0. If you haven't been paying attention since the 2.0 release, Dolphin has ditched the plugin interface in favour of a integrated architecture, in addition to reaching near-perfect audio emulation and much improved levels of performance and accuracy. See the Release Announcement for a more detailed rundown of the changes. You can get a pre-compiled build of version 3.0, as well as the more recent source changes, from the Dolphin download page.

Keep reading for more emulator updates.

News Round-up: November 10 - December 5

mossy_11 on Sunday, 05 December 2010. Posted in News

apple-logoIn Apple and Mac gaming news, iOS 4.2 was released two weeks ago, bringing “multi-tasking” functionality to the iPad; a Steam hardware survey suggests that most Mac gamers are using laptops; Feral Interactive has released a Mac port of popular action-RPG Borderlands; Aspyr’s Mac port of Civilization V has landed; Telltale has released a poker game, Poker Night at the Inventory, with Max (from Sam & Max), Strong Bad, The Heavy (from Team Fortress 2), and Tycho Brahe (from Penny Arcade) as the opponents; id Software’s Rage has hit the current generation of iOS devices; and the Grand Theft Auto 3 trilogy has finally made its way to OS X.


stellaAtari 2600 VCS emulator Stella received a big update last month. Version 3.3 lists around twenty bug fixes, improvements, and additions to graphics display, application performance, debugging, and more. See the official Stella news page for release notes and the main site for the latest download link.


MacifomCycle-exact and Cocoa-native NES emulator Macifom has been updated to version 0.15. This new version adds support for games that use the MMC3 mapper on TxROM boards and games that were designed for SUROM boards, in addition to providing various other improvements. See the official site for full details.

More updates after the break.

Gravitar

Pixelcade on Monday, 30 August 2010. Posted in Retro Game of the Week

gravitar_marquee

Incoming Transmission from Atari Mission Control circa 1982. Message as follows: "Your mission is to travel to alien planets, wipe out enemy bunkers, gather fuel units and make the solar systems safe for you and future generations of space pioneers." End Transmission.

I was a bit young to have played Gravitar at launch -- being just 3 years old at the time -- but I discovered it later in my life at a local arcade, pushed back in a corner, collecting dust. What attracted me to the machine was the awe-inspiring hand drawn artwork of the marquee and what I could see on the sides of the machine. Graphically, this game was highly outdated by then. It was a vector-based game (meaning it used a different monitor system) in a time of pixels and higher sprite counts (which is saying something since it was only about 1985).