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Curt Vendel

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Curt Vendel last won the day on May 5 2019

Curt Vendel had the most liked content!

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About Curt Vendel

  • Birthday 04/21/1964

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  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Carmel, New York
  • Interests
    Atari History, Robotics, Animation

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  1. Sad to see one of the great Atari enthusiasts pass. He will be very much missed. My deepest condolences to his friends and family.

  2. Bumped back at ya... ? New original Yamaha music in the Yamaha testing menu has been completed according to the Consumer BIOS guys.
  3. XM’s have everything but a PIA. It’s just plug and play. Install a PIA the SIO is fully enabled. It’s already been tested and I did add in the motor control line as well.
  4. No one is at anyone’s mercy to be honest. We’ve all be together in this project for years. Everyone has had to step away and back as life family health and finances got in the way of our hobby focus. its Actually Mark, Bobby and others who were at my mercy for many years if you want to look at it like that. they had to wait until they had final hardware to create everything needed. The BIOS is what the end user sees and uses to bring out the features, the magic, from the XM. this has been a long project. The devs are writing games for it. Let’s just get it right and not go into a sloppy rush to make it to some arbitrary finish line.
  5. Hi everyone, thank you very much for the kind replies. I just emailed Mark to get a status on how the Consumer BIOS is moving along and to see when I'd receive the next rev to test out. I'm going to be working on writing up the beginings of the manual so that I can get that over to someone Albert put me in touch with to do a full professional layout for the manual like the way the homebrew games are done. I also need to start screen capturing all of the menu and sub menu's to put into the manual. So I'll let everyone know more soon, thanks.
  6. Atari Corp was trying to liquidate as much old inventory they purchased from Atari Inc's assets, so they were pushing out everything they could. I would agree. You have former Commodore management. There were computer people, not video game people and they had no experience whatsoever in the video game field. Totally different industry, terms, sales and marketing. Their lack of knowledge and experience in that field is just one of the numerous things that lead to Atari Corp losing the entire race to Nintendo and Sega in the video game industry.
  7. Hi everyone... Some sad news. As many of you know, the boards are marked “Milo” who was my Pug. Milo would be my shadow, never leave my side, sleep on my feet while I would sit at my desk and work. The XM was named after him. Tonight around 7pm just after I gave him dinner, Milo passed away. He was just over 15 years. He had a good life and he was my boy, he was such a great friend. Going to be tough not having him around and with me anymore.
  8. Asteroids was scrapped because of the non-centering stick. If you have ever played the prototype 5200 Asteroids, it is not always fun to play because of the controls. Atari really should've immediately jumped on making a digital stick and a centering analog. I never understood the lack of urgency is fixing the blatant issue, but instead all of these attempted "band aid" fixes of thicker boots instead of directly releasing a digital stick. Damned shame too... the 5200 games were all great, better than Colecovisions. It was the controllers lack of centering that really hurt the overall system. However for games like Star Raiders, Missile Command, Centipede, Space Dungeon and Robotron... the sticks were actually superb.
  9. LOL!!! No, that would be the Atari VCS you're thinking of I've already shipped out to quite a few 7800 developers. Only thing I'm waiting for is the beta of the Consumer BIOS so it can be fully testing out on the final boards (the last version now has the Motor line on the SIO connected, just a very minor change. All hardware work is done. I also need the final Consumer BIOS so the manual can be written. This is a rather extensive piece of software, as well as a rather impressive one as well. It will actually redefine several of the console buttons during power up to allow certain functions and settings to be done as the console boots. I already have an early version of the Consumer BIOS and it blew my mind when I tried it out, but many area's were not yet completed. Any of the 7800 coders... well, a coder on any of these consoles will tell you, the software side takes time. There are 3 people working on the BIOS and the Dev's have all seen a sneak peak of an early version of it as well as Albert. I'm just putting together boards and readying them on my end.
  10. To stay in perspective... Ouya sold over 1 million units, its best selling game, only sold 7,000 copies... so you can see and fully understand why no respectable developer house is going to sign up to make any new games for the Tacobox. Games are only developed here on the classic Atari consoles because people have a passion for them and want to see the consoles stay active with new games. If it wasn't for the hobbyist community supporting the Atari consoles since the mid 90's, no one would even remember Atari's name since Atari itself completely abandoned the consoles in 92 and then its Jaguar console was a failure and failed so bad, that Atari itself bowed out of existence in 96 to become a part of JTS.
  11. Sorry, no I hadn't but thanks for the remind, now I'll put a post it on my desk and make a point to do it this weekend.
  12. Kevin - so those huge empty platter cases on the tops of those washing machine looking units, those are removable hard drives that connect to the mainframes. Until I can find someone with a working drive unit, which so far no one in the classic computing circles seems to have one in working condition (even I have a drive, but it completely non-functional) and willing to mount the disks and read them.... this is getting to be a serious issue the longer time goes by.
  13. ACTS was the Home Computers version of the PITS testing system. I think I ran across something one time, but it may have just been some emails or a memo regarding, not sure if anything code or technical wise is stored on the mainframe backups though. I have to find a photo of an early Missile Command for someone, so I will run a search in the Atari MF Restores and see if anything pop's up. If I do find something I'll post up whatever I've got.
  14. Yes... thanks... so it looks like Atari is giving up on the console fight and is solely focusing on the joystick. Which is a really bad move on their part for the simple fact: I got a direct release of fair use from Ataris head of legal that they couldn’t stop me from making my USB Classics. My joysticks actually look far more authentic to the old 78 cx40’s than Hyperkins. I pointed Atari to the post right here on Atariage and announced the sale of the joysticks which got picked up by PC World, MacWorld and dozens of other major sites, plus it was also Slashdotted which for video game & computer geeks is like being on the front page of The NY Times... Atari has known full well about my joysticks for over 10 years. They’ve been sold on Thinkgeek, Thumbsup UK, Amazon, Reflex Audio sold a special edition clear version I made... Ataris lack of action since 2008 to now completely destroyed any standing that they somehow still can enforce being the only ones to sell a CX40 type stick. So they’ve already lost the case.
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