Best Console: 2G

Ok, for those of you around for that time or have owned any.. place ur votes and thoughts....

Originally posted by grog_grog I'm old so... Kinda tough to pick one as better than the other, all were different etc.  Atari 2600 set the bar and genre really.  Atarti 5200 and 7800 improved on it, though Atari was busy f***ing themselves as a company at the time so those didn't get wide play.  My buddy had an Odyssey,  all I remember is it had some type of pacman clone, but it let you create and edit your own levels, which was all pretty sweet.  Seemed to have better colors than the 2600.  I think my brother had an intellivision, all I remember is it was goldy or beige or some odd color.  My dad (sadly) bought us a Coleco ADAM computer, which had a Colecvision built it.  I played a lot of Zaxxon on it.  Those other 3 I never heard of, were they european?  Hell, I even had a friend with the Pong hardware, talk about good times. Hmm, this is more a bleary walk down memory lane than a review.  All I can say is having played Pong, and Atari...then later Doom on PC, Doom II, Quake...Quake3, UT, now UT PS.... is that life is good and its been sweet to be along for the ride.  PS3 and FPS as it is today was just a dream back them "dude, what if it could be 3d and have more than 8 colors!"

  You're right about that.  Atari had a good thing and all the internal strife really hurt them in the end.  the 52/7800 were design improvements along with some hardware mods but the publisher support was hellish.  Odyssey I only played once as it was a friend's and it was horrible compared to the other stuff available brings me to intellivision.  for it's time it was a sweet machine.  the cord was rough with a telephone cord but it had a circular dial/disk for controlling and had a number keypad on it.  Coleco vision was my dream system though.  if you may remember not only did Coleco vision had all those great arcade ports (donkey kong, turbo, congo bongo, etc) but it had the module that let you play ALL the 2600 hundred games.  that was pretty sweet.  plus they had the first console gaming wheel (came packaged with Turbo which was my fav racer at the time anyways so it was f***ing sweet).    Personally I never med anyone that had an ADAM so I'm impressed.  I used to drool over that thing lol.   The other ones never achieved the same level of success for one reason or another.  I never got to play the others except for Vectrex which was one sweet machine for it's time.  check out this article on wiki for pics on these and all the other machines in all the polls

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console

that link will lead you to EVERYTHING video game console related.  for old timers like you and me it made for really interesting reading.  it was sad that having been so much into video games I knew almost 80 percent of all the consoles mentioned.  and there have been a lot lol.  by the way my vote went to Coleco Vision because:

great arcade ports of popular arcade games
great overall library of third party games
great add ons like the track ball, 2600 expansion module and the driving wheel

Originally posted by grog_grog When other folks had 386's and dot matrix printers and we still had that damn ADAM with its built in wordprocessor and flywheel typewriter style printer it wasn't so cool. I remember those telephone cord style controllers heh.

true lol.  but you have to remember computers weren't mainstream yet and that was the idea behind ADAM.  to get some type of computers into consumer hands.  this was around the same time that ad came on "See why 1984 won't be like 1984" for Mac.  it was a consumers computer but that mac 128K was roughly 2400 dollars.  the ADAM was what?  like 700 bucks or something?  it was a steal for what it was.  too bad it had all sorts of other issues that plagued it from being the success it could've been.  while you were stuck with an ADAM I was stuck with a Radio Chack Tandy TSR-80 with those huge floppy drives and a blazingly fast 4mhz 68000 motorola chip.  lol.  I wish I could say I miss that monochrome screen lol

Originally posted by grog_grog Ohh, remember Amber monochrome?  Now that was blinding.  I learned to program on an Atari 800 at 1.87ghz, so the ADAM was faster, but the atari had disk drives and the ADAM just duel ca**tetts.  But yeah, it was a deal, hence my we got it. I have a case (100) of unopened Shugart (now seagate) 8" floppies in my closet.  Some CP/M freak gave them to me once around 1990.

lol yea I remember the ca**ettes.  what type of ca**ettes did that use?  not regular audio ca**ettes right (the bay looked like it but I never owned it so). 

yes.. the amber monochrome was atrocious.  but the tandy was just as bad.  the screen was black except for those halogen-bright lettering lol.  after you turned it off you can still see the prompt because of the burn in lol.  I was learning basic in school and thought it was the bomb. .I wish I had stuck with it.