My Vaporware
Entry posted by mos6507
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I've found it difficult to stay focused on some of these forum threads because I feel the need to kind of review over the past whether it's warranted or not. I've now reread my original bowing-out of the hobby from two years ago and I thought I'd kind of list all the project I wanted to do, but never did.
First, I had Death Derby. The goal of Death Derby was to port a bronze-age game that is not supported by emulators, and was popular enough that in some alternate universe, Atari might have done it in the first few years. The secondary goal was to make a kernel that featured 4 flicker-free players and a pseudo-bitmap for the tombstones. The third goal was to create a special Y-cable that would allow people to add extra buttons to the driving controller, hence a gear-switcher. I came up with the idea for it way way back in 1999, and I think the last time I worked on it seriously was about 10 years ago. It became a project I wanted to use to kind of climb Mt. Everest, but over time I realized I just don't have the aptitude for assembly language. In fact, I probably don't have the aptitude for coding in general. I do get things done, but my code quality leaves much to be desired. And it makes it hard for me now, being unemployed, and having to kind of spin things as best I can to try to get work again in the field where I have the most experience, but now feel woefully inadequate.
Next, there's the Cybertech A/V mod. When I was doing Stella at 20, A/V mods were not very good. Chris Wilkson gave me a prototype board with S-Video out that I was very happy with and used it on Stella at 20. Other mods arrived on the scene, but I became a real advocate of Chris' design. He eventually did a run of these and I got a production board, but it just wasn't on the market for that long. I wanted to help him make a newer version of the board, and that was one of the last things I was working with him on circa 2008 or so when I moved back to the East Coast. Chris had his own job difficulties at the time, and just could not keep the R&D going, but he was doing some wonderful things. I don't think anyone really knew the video output of the TIA the way he did.
Then you've got Chimera, and I've talked about that a lot already. I still have prototype boards that I guess are now collector's items, but they help point towards where things were going with it, which was a device that would have had some immense potential, really too much for the 2600 to handle. But I got as far as seeing some nice clear text being generated by the ARM chip. The ARM in Harmony is much more modest than the one planned for Chimera, and if I really should reserve some time to see what Harmony is all about.
Then you've got the Stella at 20 recut. I wanted to delegate this, so I took the footage to Nathan. When he didn't do anything with it (no offense) I came close to having him send the footage to someone else, but I didn't actually pull the trigger on it. By this point I think I felt that the significance of the 2600, at least to my own life, was waning. My interest in cataloging game history overall was waning. I was more interested in the present and the future than the past.
I also had a 2600 case-mod idea that would have kind of helped bankroll Chimera. It would have been done in real wood using a CNC machine. I was looking for someone to handle the making of this limited-edition item. And I was also hoping to see a new replacement board go inside something like this where you'd pop the main ICs off your old board and toss it in favor of the new one which would have all modern circuitry including the A/V mod and perhaps also an internally wired Chimera and AtariVox. The Chimera would expose its two expansion ports in the back and it would be almost like a new system. It would still have a cart port but since it would have an internal Chimera you could just load stuff off the SD card or serial. The peripheral system on Chimera was planning to use external dongles and each one would be an adapter to different things, so one would be serial (or dual-serial) and another would be an analog PC joystick, and so on.
The pattern across all of these things is that I couldn't do them alone. The one thing I could do alone, after I got setup, I bungled, which was the AtariVox+.
I think what attracted me to animation was it presented something I COULD do alone, and I was not beyond my limitations the way I was with Death Derby. Of course, I discovered how grueling it is doing it alone, because by "alone" it meant I had no support whatsoever from Xtranormal either. So I had to evolve the software myself--all without being able to change the DLL.
Since this is my blog, I thought I'd reveal an unlisted clip that actually shows you the added-value that I've contributed to Xtranormal State. It is, in its own way, my own Harmony Cart. The vast majority of what I do in my videos is only made possible via these hacks. So while a "hack" like the 48-char routine in Dragster that David Crane pioneered becomes, through common use, a routine technique, the hacks I exploit here become simply the means that I use to get the program to achieve things that animators would most likely want anyway. Some of this stuff was latent in the system and never finished by XN, and some of it are happy accidents just like the quirks that happen so often with the TIA. So it may not seem such a stretch that this form of hacking appealed to me so much. Therefore the last two and years since when I announced I was leaving, I spent building out this huge bag of tricks, but doing it in a very carefully controlled way so that they didn't just seem like manual tricks, but a true extension of the stock system. So State Plus piggybacks on top just as a Harmony does, to provide extra features and services. So yes, I have vaporware, but then I did this and it's not vaporware. It's just only of interest to a tiny number of people besides me.
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