Small stuff

Been a few days since posting, but haven’t completed material to post on. I’m still making cartridge and case art. I’m still cataloging my games (just completed Xbox 360) http://mrgibson.com/game_catalog.php

Ed Averett and all known KC Munchkin games!

It would be difficult to talk about Ed Averett without discussing his most famous game, K.C. Munchkin. Released in 1981 for the Odyssey², K.C. Munchkin was the PacMan like game that was not only MUCH better than Atari's PacMan but was also released two years before Atari could put out the game. Magnavox had asked Ed to make a maze game similar to PacMan, but not so close that Magnavox would be legally liable. This was one of the first games to use the expanded 4k memory. This game turned out so good, it put Odyssey² on the video console map. Many say the concepts in this game made K.C Munchkins better than the whole PacMan concept. In interviews, Ed has mentioned that this favorite game he programmed. Mazes that changed by moving their walls and/or walls that turned invisible while playing. The games has pills and power pills that ran away from you. There are only 12 pills (called munchies) in each maze, which begin in four groups of three but move through the maze independently and at speeds that increase as each one is eaten. The final munchie moves at the same speed as the Munchkin and must be intercepted rather than followed. The super-pills are called blinking munchies because they flash and change color. Lastly there are no memorization of patterns like pacman. None the less, Atari sued and Magnavox had to stop selling K.C. Munchkin. This was a first of a kind law-suite. In today's world, Atari would not have won. Ed followed up with the amazing game K.C. Krazy Chase in 1982. This version also used 4k memory and and had voice synth and new characters. Ed would write write a total of 3 games in the series:

Title          : K.C. Munchkin     
  Platform     : Odyssey2 
  Game ID      : AC9435
  Description  : How many Munchies can your Munchkin munch
  Year         : 1981
  Publisher    : North America Phillips
  Programmer   : Ed Averett
  4k           : Yes
  Voice        : No
  Grade        : -A Recommended
  Game video   : Game play video




Title          : K.C. Krazy Chase  
  Platform     : Odyssey2
  Game ID      : AC9442
  Description  : Starring K.C. Munchkin! In this episode our hero confronts the 
                 dreaded tree-eating Dratapillars of Venus!
  Year         : 1982
  Publisher    : North America Phillips
  Programmer   : Ed Averett
  4k           : Yes
  Voice        : Yes
  Grade        : A Recommended
  Game video   :  Game play video


Title          : K.C. Returns     
  Platform     : Windows 7/8/10
  Game ID      : 
  Description  : If you can see it, you can solve it! Microscopic KC to repair DNA
  Year         : 2015
  Publisher    : Averett and Associates LLC
  Programmer   : Ed Averett
  Grade        : A Recommended
  Game video   : Game play video

The Odyssey² faded from market, but people were not done with K.C.. Since at least 1998, several Home-brew games have popped up. I'm not sure how many, and honestly, I'm not sure how Ed feels about these games. That said, here are 4 other inspired games I found:

A faithful remake!


Title           : Atari KC Munchkins  
  Platform      : Atari 7800
  Game ID       :
  Description   : K.C. Munchkin clone that runs on Atari 7800 
  Year          : 2014
  Programmer    : Robert DeCrescenzo  
  Publisher     : AtariAge.com
  Grade         : A Recommended
  Game video    :Game play video

Newer Odyessy game based on Ed's work


Title           : J.G. Munchkin 
  Platform      : Odyssey2
  Game ID       :
  Description   : K.C's foul-mouthed bother. Remake of Attack of the Time Lord
  Year          : 1998
  Publisher     : William Cassidy
  Programmer    : -VPaC (William Cassidy?)
  Grade         : Not graded.
  Game video    : Game play video


Very loosely based
Title           : MyMan KC Munchkins  
  Platform      : Windows/DOS/Linux
  Game ID       :
  Description   : Maze game inspired by K.C Munchkins
  Year          :
  Programmer    :
  Publisher     :
  Grade         : Not graded.


Title           : K.C.'s Crazy Nightmare 
  Platform      : Atari 2600
  Game ID       :
  Description   : K.C. has found himself trapped in a Atari 2600 system along with some 
                  enslaved O2 zombies
  Year          : 2009
  Programmer    : John A. Reder 
  Publisher     : TACTICAL NEURONICS
  Grade         : Not graded.

Post 1 - Ed Averett games, Alien Invader/Time Lord

I'm going to start my Odyssey2 posts by posting games made by Ed Averett. The first two I'm posting about are top-down shooters; Alien Invaders - Plus and Attack of the Time Lords. In the two year difference between these games, it is clear how much Ed improved on his programming. One of the biggest difference between the games is that Alien Invaders was programmed with 2K while Attack of the Time Lord, he was afforded 4k.

The photos of the cartridges and manuals are from my personal collection. The screen shots are from an emulator. Alien Invaders - Plus




Attack of the Time Lord

Game : AA9428 Title : Alien Invaders - Plus Console : Odyssey2 Year : 1980 Publisher : Magnavox Programmer: Ed Averett Voice : No Grade : C

_

Game : AC9445 Title : Attack of the Time Lord Console : Odyssey2 Year : 1982 Publisher : Phillips Programmer: Ed Averett Voice : Yes Grade : A

Odyssey 2 games and my 4 day flash back romance

Saturday I started playing something I had not in years, my Odyssey 2 games. I no longer have the console and would not be able to play it anyway because the hookup, but I found a good emulator and grabbed the ROMs that I own. I have to say, I still love Odyssey games more than Atari 2600. Some are not done as well, while others are *so* much betters. But the overall fun-factor still lives on with Odyssey and that is not something I can say about many Atari 2600 games. I was lucky enough that my parents purchased most, not all, but far majority of the titles for me. So I decided to post about my collection. The color for the games were always more vibrate that Atari's Unfortunately I don't have ROMs for all my cartridges and currently don't have a way to create them. If I can convince my wife it is worth the money, I would like to create an Odyssey2 console/ROM reader.

Here is a quick link to the List of my Odyssey2 games here.

I have a ton of photos of cartridges, manuals, and screenshots I will probably be sharing over the next few days.

To the roots of this blog.

This Blog started way back in December 2000 with Retro arcade gaming blog with other gaming stuff. Much of the content was hardware/cabinet related. Some content was ROM related and other just general game information. Of course back then, I was using my own blogging software and today I'm using Blogger.

To reflect, Here are my first 5 posts:
http://mrgibson.com/index5.php?year=2000. Oh the fun, kinda really miss the building/restoring/repairing cabinet days. You can see much more of that stuff here.

A few years after that, the blog became a general blog and later baseball/baseball cards. I guess the point of this posts is to say, yes I'm posting a bit more on Retro Gaming. Yes, I will still post about baseball cards, but I plan on taking the rest of the topics out. Currently I'm considering building a Odyssey 2 console, not a ROM emulator, but one that will play cartridges and download ROMs for the cartridges. I also plan to post more on ROM emulators and how to make them or hack commercial ROM emulators. Lastly I might start writing hardware/accessory setups and reviews for game systems. Will I do more arcade cabinet stuff? Probably not, although I still do have some of my circuits, game controls, and marques I saved from my cabinets (sold everything else).

SNES Classic vs PlayStation Classic capabilities

Someone suggested to me that it would be better to play PlayStation games on a SNES classic instead of a PlayStation Classic. This would not be true. Upon evaluation, the PlayStation Classic uses considerably more powerful hardware.

What hardware does the PlayStation classic use?

Internally, the console uses a MediaTek MT8167a Quad A35 system on a chip with four central processing cores clocked at @ 1.3 GHz and a Power VR GE8300 graphics processing unit.

It includes 16 GB of ECC flash storage and 1 GB of DDR3 memory.

The A35 processing uses Quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A35 cores and an Imagination PowerVR GE8300 GPU.

The MT8167A designed to provide high processing and graphics performance specs, with support for 1080p video decoding at 60fps and support for a Full HD+ (1920x1200)

What hardware does the PlayStation classic use?

It uses an Allwinner R16 system on a chip with four ARM Cortex-A7 40-bit central processing units and an ARM Mali 400 MP2 graphics processing unit.

The CPU is designed for 32-bit operating systems such as Linux.

The ARM Mali-400 MP4 is an OpenGL ES 2.0 capable GPU for ARM SoCs. The GPU is primarily designed for tablets and smartphones with mobile operating systems like Android.

It includes 512 MB of flash storage and 256 MB of DDR3 memory.

PlayStation Classic Controllers

1) Can you use the USB PlayStation Classic controller on a PC?

Yes, yes you can. Despite what several YouTubers have claimed. At least it does work on Linux and Windows PCs. I have not tested on a Mac. Don't believe me, plug it in and test the device through the device settings. Once you plug in the controller to the PC, on Windows the system will show a quick windows stating "setting up controller". You can test and see the actual buttons being pressed under Devices and Printers Test tab.


Evaluating the USB, I found that it registered to the USB port as:

Descritpion: USB Input Device
Device Type: HID (Human Interface Device)
Vedor ID:    054c
Product ID:  0cda
Vendor Name: Sony Corp.
USB Class:   03    [x03h is Keyboard, mouse, joystick, game controler]

Triagle=button 1
Circle =button 2
X =Button 3
square =Button 4
ect...
That said, if you purchased the PlayStation Classic solely for the game controllers, that would be $30 dollars each and that would be a bit expensive for their capabilities.

2) Can the USB PlayStation Classic controller be mapped to keyboard output on PC for emulators?

Yes, yes you can. There are many ways of doing this. I used the Keysticks application. With Keysticks (http://keysticks.net/site/) application, I was able to map the Sony game controller to use on my Z26 emulator and/or generally control my PC.


A free alternative: http://atzitznet.no-ip.org/Joy2Mouse3/
Joy2Mouse3 is more difficult to setup but much more powerful/configurable (plus free) :)

3) Can other game controllers be used on the PlayStation Classic?
Probably. For example, the XBox 360 game controller works very close to the PlaySation classic game controller. I also know the Xbox 360 Game controller can be programmed to be used on the PC.

PlayStation Classic and BleemSync

I'm going to keep this post updated as I test and play. These are games I have gotten to run on the PlayStation Classic with BleemSync. If the game is having problems, you could be a tweak that needs to be made and I will post that here too.

So Far,
I have gotten these games to run and play:

Discs     , Title                    , Publisher  , players, Year
SLUS-01427, Atari  Anniversary       , Atari      , 2      , 2001
SLUS-00884, Star War Episode I       , Lucas Arts , 2      , 1999
SLUS-01235, Rayman 2 The Great Escape, Ubi Soft   , 1      , 2000
SCUS-94228, Spyro The Dragon         , Sony       , 1      , 1998

I have gotten these games to run, but not play:

Discs     , Title                    , Publisher  , players, Year

Games that I have for the PlayStation 1 Classic listed HERE.

PlayStation 1 Classic Menu Icons

On my PS1 Classic
I was curious about the menu icons and have learned a few new things other than they should be 226x226. The PNG files should be RGB and don't have much limitations on colors. So I reworked the menu icons. For example, the Atari icon I had made:

So I remade my menu as:



These look much better on the screen.

This is the information I used to create the config file (Game.ini) for the menu:

Discs     , Title                    , Publisher  , players, Year
SLUS-01427, Atari  Anniversary       , Atari      , 2      , 2001
SLUS-00884, Star War Episode I       , Lucas Arts , 2      , 1999
SLUS-01235, Rayman 2 The Great Escape, Ubi Soft   , 1      , 2000
SCUS-94228, Spyro The Dragon         , Sony       , 1      , 1998

On my SNES Clasic
For my SNES Classic, I have added the Doom ROM using Hakchi2 CE 3.5.2 tool. Honestly, since Nintendo and Sony made the classic consoles so easy to mod, I believe they expected the community to do so. If everyone was going to buy Raspberry Pis, and play their own ROMs, why should they not get some cash out of an official product.

PlayStation 1 Classic Game add

This article is how to install more games on your PlayStation Classic from your PlayStation media disks. I did these instructions with pre version 1.0 - I have done each step and tested. I collected this information from several sites and people. I then compiled it here on this blog.

I purchased the PlayStation Classic so I could play PlayStation games on my HDMI television using actual PlayStation controllers. So the first thing I wanted to figure out was how to add purchased disk games to the system and this blog entry is exactly how to do that.
Since your PlayStation Classic does not have a disk drive, the first thing you will need to do is create a .bin file from the disk that you wish to add. The disk image .bin file will be placed on a flash drive (USB stick) and play on the PlayStation Classic. The larger the flash drive/USB stick, the more games you can fit on one stick.

[1] To get started, you’ll need to head to the Magic ISO website (http://www.magiciso.com/) and download on a Windows machine.

[2] After downloading run "Setup_MagicISO.exe"

[3] After installation, run Magic ISO Maker and click "Try It!" if you are not ready for purchase.

[4] On the Menu, Select "Tools" and then "Make ISO from CD/DVD-ROM"

[5] Select the DVD/CD drive with PlayStation CD in it. For "Output format", select "BIN image file(.BIN/.CUE)" and save to your C:\temp directory (my suggestion, make it your desktop if you want). Give a short name for the game. For example, my Atari Anniversary Edition Disk, I just used "atari". This will create a .bin and .cue file that you will place on your USB stick. In this case atari.bin and atari.cue was created. In later steps you will need to rename these files, but this helps track the files while on your computer.


Now let proceed with how to build your flash drive/USB stick.

[1] To get started you’ll need to head to GitHub and download BleemSync

https://github.com/pathartl/BleemSync/releases/latest

[2] Download the ZIP file and extract the contents to the root location of a FAT32 or ext4-formatted USB drive plugged into your PC (Windows, Linux or Mac will work).

[3] Name the flash drive “SONY” in upper case - this is a requirement.

[4] In the same root directory you extracted the ZIP file into, you may need to create a folder labeled “Games”, but the extraction of the zip should have done that for you.

[5] Inside the Games directory, you need to create a folder for each game you'll like to add to the system. Each folder needs to be numbered sequentially. Each of these folders also need to contain a “GameData” folder with a “Game.ini” file, cover art image, “pcsx.cfg” file and the game’s “bin” and “cue” files. A template for how game folders should look is located in the initial ZIP file and the GitHub page has an outline for indexing too.

A proper folder structure looks something like this:

Games/
    1/
        GameData/
            Game.ini
            pcsx.cfg
            SLUS-01066.bin
            SLUS-01066.cue
            SLUS-01066.png
    2/
        ...
    3/
        ...

The file prefixes for the .bin, .cue, and .png must be name from the disk's SLUS (or SCUS for some Sony games) label that is on the Sony disk. When you stick the disk into the machine, the disk will have this ID as the label.

So for Atari I created a directory "3" under games/ and "GameData" under 3. I then copied the atari.bin and atari.cue to Games/3/GameData/

I then I renamed the files SLUS-01427.bin and SLUS-01427.cue based on the disk's label.
Next, I created a game.ini file with the following content:

[Game]
Discs=SLUS-01427
Title=Atari Anniversary
Publisher=Atari
Players=2
Year=2001

For "Discs=", I used the label Sony had assigned to the disk and copied the additional information from the CD cover.

I used this default pcsx.cfg file:

Bios = SET_BY_PCSX
Gpu3 = builtin_gpu
Spu = builtin_spu
Xa = 0
Mdec = 0
Cdda = 0
Debug = 0
PsxOut = 0
SpuIrq = 0
RCntFix = 0
VSyncWA = 0
Cpu = 0
region = 0
g_scaler3 = 2
g_gamma = 64
g_layer_x = 0
g_layer_y = 0
g_layer_w = 0
g_layer_h = 0
soft_filter = 0

Lastly, I created a png file for the menu icon, named "SLUS-01427.png". This file must have the resolution of 226x226. I'm not sure of color requirements, so I kept mine simple (limited colors).


[UPDATE Jan 3 2018: PNG should be RGB and no know color limitations I found ] NOTE: More specific details on the nitty-gritty of how to format files and where to find them is outlined in the GitHub page, so make sure to read through that carefully. It also outlines how to install multi-disc games too.

[6] Insert the flash drive into your PlayStation Classic (second joystick slot) and turn it on, the new games should be on display. Don't worry, if you need to use multiple joysticks, you can use a USB hub.


NOTE: Make sure to not remove the Flash Drive while playing or while the unit is in use. Also, it’s not known if all games will run on PlayStation Classic without issues so don’t be surprised if you encounter some problems.