Does anyone have a Tiger Game.com? Is it any good?

I have one of each of the Game.Com hardware iterations, the larger original model with the two cart slots and the smaller compact one with a single cart slot. I'm with the consensus here, it's not much value as a gaming machine. The ports of Resident Evil and the Sega games are actually interesting for a while, but there's no way this competes with any other handheld.

I was actually more interested in the terminal emulation functions of the Game.Com. I own the network connection kit, which allows you to plug a modem into the RS-232 port and run a little dial-up terminal. With the touch-screen QWERTY keyboard going, you could actually run a fairly decent telnet or SSH session. Sadly, business handhelds gave you more value for less money.

About the screen? It's a crappy four-shade greyscale, but it's a little more sophisticated than people give it credit for. Like Sega's VMU, the Game.Com can conserve power by dialing down the refresh rate and the clock cycles, and so some developers decided it was worth saving your battery by giving you a 4 FPS Sinistar port. By way of comparison, compare the William's Arcade video output with the Centipede output, and note how Centipede has no problem producing a fast and flicker-free screen experience.

 

wha??

Empty packet of crisps and an elastic band ftw!

 

Four frames per second? Are you kidding me?

 

Not kidding you. It's an old power conservation trick for that type of LCD screen that has no place in this century, waiting to refresh the screen until there's new data to display. In the case of Sinistar, they deliberately slowed the action of the actual game down to prevent screen updates from occurring too often.

 

WK, thanks for the correction. I was basing my observation about the refresh rate on the one crappy emulator that was released for Win32, but I'm still astonished that the real screen is even worse than we imagined.

 

theres an emulator?...last i read there was one in development, but not released, I've seen dumps around of roms but not the emu....



Ryan

 

There are two, the official one that Tiger used as part of the SDK and the one that the game.commies homebrew guys are working on. They've been talking about releasing the homebrew one for about nine months now, but enthusiasm is low, tne product isn't up to snuff and there aren't enough interesting games to make it worth anybody's while. There's some interest in coding new games, but I haven't heard anything new about that since December.

 

And a box of band-aids for her bleeding...

 

duct tape works best.

 

because i could use it to protect my package, wrap it inside my boxers or something:lol: now that's protection! :lol:

 

Save your money. It's only worth it if you want to collect every game system. To play, it's one of the worst systems ever!

 

Now now!... Is it worse than a GameKing?

 

I resent that, the GameKing is actually a damn fine handheld.

 

About £1 a pop, no wonder teenage pregnancy is higher than so many other similar countries...

Does anyone know anything about the cancelled Castlevania SOTN port for it? I remember seeing some screens a while ago

 

It doesn't look all that bad to be honest.

Yakumo

 

It's a brilliant handheld, you can hold it all day long. If you play games on it though then it stops being a brilliant handheld and playing headers with large bricks seems more fun. ;-)

 

Why I oughta...

 

Looks good from those pics - good to see Alucard as the protagonist

 

Wait 'til it moves :lol:

 

Man I played this like 8 years ago, and even back in the day when the best you could get in a portable was the GBC, the game.com sucked donkey balls...

I say is not the hardware, not even the crappy screen, but the fact that there where no games to begin with, and even when there were some the quality was subpar to say the least.

And the modem, jesus, I cant believe a human actually made that! the thing was bigger than the damn console, had a a speed of just 14kps (outdated even for 97 standards) and you could only use it with tiger's ISP which was fucking expensive and had only basic mail and text, and you had to buy a special cartridge to do that!.

They [tiger] even gave you wrong instructions, so you had to set up everything by yourself. Plus the later single-cartridge version couldnt use any of this.

The game.com always reminds me of that phrase from Atari's marketing dept. from the early 80s: "we can shit in a box and people will buy it!".

Apparently Tiger didnt know about the VG crash of 83, and therefore how gamers react when you try to sell a piece of crap as a game console.

Yeah but you'll get testicular cancer eventually...