Mr. Gibson's (elfstones) blog

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

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 …

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

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, …

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 …

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.

…

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 …

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.

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 R…

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 dow…