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A8Watcher_808

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  1. One thing you could always do is try to correct the mistakes and teach the AI how to program in Atari BASIC. The last time I messed around with ChatGPT I was able to teach it to write a program to play a couple songs (it only played 6 notes each) and to draw a "cat" and house. The cat was just a mess of lines but the house came out as a box with a triangle roof so I call that a success. For the song I had to teach it how the sound command was formatted and show it a list of all the notes. By default it tried to use midi values for notes. For the pictures I had to teach it the Atari graphics commands and graphics modes. Unfortunately after about an hour it forgot everything I taught it probably because I reached some limit.
  2. I used to read z*mag all the time and all those other online mags like ST Report and Atari Explorer. My dad would bring home rolls of paper so I would print up every issue so it would be easier to read. I found an archive of all the issues of Z*Mag, Z*Net, ST Report, and Atari Explorer at https://www.atariarchives.org/cfn/06/08/index.php
  3. It sounds like I was pretty lucky when it comes to arcades in the '90s. Vegas was going through a "family friendly" stage in the 90s. Most major hotels/casinos offered some kind of entertainment for kids. The Luxor had one of my favorites which was the Sega Virtualand. It was a huge multi-story arcade with some pretty advanced machines for the time. The most memorable machines for me was the 8 player wall of Virtua Racing with motion seats all linked together for tournament play, a motion ride "game" with Michael Jackson in space, and the R360 machine which could rotate in all directions. Other notable arcades was the midway at Circus Circus - there were Big Top circus acts in a central location with classic and new (at the time) arcade machines with along with carnival games. I only went there in the late 80s/early 90s and it was always packed and had just about every popular machine from the 80s. The MGM had a Wizard of Oz theme arcade, The Excalibur had a medieval theme with carnival games, just about every other Strip hotel had something. And then there were the arcades I managed. The theme was possible money laundering, incest, and polygamy but all hidden away. There were few documentaries on the owners but I didn't know about it until I caught one of the documentaries on the Discovery channel a few years after I last worked with them.
  4. I prefer Steem SSE on Windows also. The main thing I like is when I want to play games or music software with midi music support it's as simple as picking which midi device you want to use from a drop down menu. You can find it at https://sourceforge.net/projects/steemsse/
  5. A lot of my original Atari equipment came from the Pearl Harbor NEX. My dad bought our second Atari computer from there for Christmas. A 130XE with another 1050 drive along with an xm301 modem. I was only a little disappointed it wasn't one of those brand new ST computers but any new electronics was good for me. I don't remember what the computer section was like at the Hickam AFB BX so it couldn't have been that great.
  6. There are quite a few. The ones I remember using back in the day would be Digicomp, protracker, and I think Paula. I'm sure they've improved some by now especially for the STE. Try checking out http://atari.music.free.fr/main.php?UMICH Sound
  7. From what I can remember, there was a slider on the printer for darkness. On some thermal paper, if you set it at the darkest setting, you would get that grey color so you would need to adjust it to get the perfect setting.
  8. After a quick search I did find some shops that sell both color ($12.50) and black ($3-$6) ink ribbons for the star nx1000 rainbow but who knows if they're actually in stock. As for the Okimate 10, I may have 2 cases (10-20 ribbons?) worth of the color ribbons sitting in storage somewhere that were "given" to me when my uncle moved to another state about 10 years ago. The printer may be in there as well but with either the C64 interface or missing the interface module. I'm sure after 10 years of having it in my storage I can officially claim it for myself.
  9. I used a Star NX-1000 Rainbow printer for color printing on my 8-bit then later the ST. I remember there was a program that I saw featured in the Antic that supported color screen dumps but I was a kid back then and couldn't afford it so I did the next best thing and wrote my own program that supported the standard 8-bit formats and even APAC and Colrview. I don't have that software anymore and I only had it uploaded to two bbses back in the day. I also just looked up the printer on youtube and found an LGR video on the 24-pin version of the printer. It looks like the color cartridges are very rare these days (I believe both printers used the same cartridge). I also had an Okimate 10 and used that in the mid-80s for color prints using RAMbrandt. My friends used to swear that I didn't print it off my computer and got the images from a magazine or something because they were so glossy.
  10. Arcades in the '90s were pretty much my life since I worked in them from '93 to 2000. I worked in several different arcades on the Las Vegas Strip. We would get all the latest games including rare machines like Galaxian 3 Theater which was the size of a garage and cost as much as a house. The most popular games we had were the racing games like Daytona or the Cruisin' USA & Cruisin' World. Fighting games were very popular too and I would give tips and tricks to kids. I was a pro at all the fighting games (and all the other games) and would challenge kids by playing blind folded or one handed and win. We pretty much had all the popular fighting games with all the Street Fighter games including Street Fighter The Movie and the SF: Alpha games all the way up to all the SF3 games. We also had all the Mortal Kombat games, a bunch of other Capcom fighters, Virtua Fighter 1-3, Primal Rage, etc... The older classic games we had on rotation as well as all the pinball machines. Shooting games did well, also, like Virtua Cop and Area 51. The arcades were mostly filled with tourists but there were some regulars. In the middle of the week I would do my major cleaning with the help of some kids. I would let them keep all the tokens they found in return for helping me clean. I also had some other perks like getting to watch movies being filmed on the strip like Vegas Vacation, Mars Attacks, and Con Air. I was invited to be an extra on a couple of them but turned them down. I didn't get to see any of the big stars but I did meet some of the other actors and crew when they'd come into the arcade. They'd ask for a few free games then tip me for more than what they played. It was fun times working at all those arcades. The pay wasn't the best but it was probably one of my most favorite jobs.
  11. I tried the sun method a couple weeks ago for 2 hours on my SNES. It made a pretty noticeable difference. Still far from the original color which you can see from the cartridge cover but much better than the darker brownish/yellow color. I stuck a coin on the bottom right so I could see the color change. It's much easier to spot in person. Haven't tried this with my 130xe yet but that isn't nearly as bad.
  12. I'm not an expert but maybe it needs to be degaussed. Usually just power cycling the monitor a few times will degauss the monitor. Turn it on for a minute then power it off awhile (5-10 mins?) then repeat. The other common method is using a degaussing coil which I've used a bit when I ran an arcade and when kids (or adults..) played with magnets on a tv and discolored the screen. It's basically a magnetic coil that you wave around the screen that would clear the imprinted magnetic fields. I've also heard of other methods like using a corded drill or a soldering gun to degauss the screen but I don't know how much that can be trusted. I'm sure google has more information on it.
  13. I just tried it on my living room setup for the big screen and it runs full speed. It's on my older gaming computer which is running a Phenom II X4 at around 3200mhz and geforce 750ti, I believe. I used the default settings and got a full 60fps. Going through the readme file I didn't see much settings to improve performance. If you're trying it on a single-core system you could try running it with the -no-threads option. It looks like it uses opengl so maybe you need updated video drivers? Or maybe you could mess with the PowerPC frequency setting. According to the readme it sets the PPC frequency in MHz with the default at 50. Lowering it may improve performance but may cause timing issues and jerkiness. It says that 25 MHz works in many games. To set that you would use the -ppc-frequency=25 (or any value between 1 and 1000). Hopefully one of those things work. Now the only thing I need to figure out is how to change the mouse settings for the lightsaber battles.
  14. I tried a copy of the Blues Brothers from atarimania using Steem SSE 3.64 and above and with multiple configurations from 1mb to 4mb and STF/STE. It worked perfectly each time. Maybe you have a bad copy of the game.
  15. I know you can download all the individual files at atarimagazines.com. You can also download the files in a zip by year and some disks are available as DCM format. Half the fun is transferring them over, right?
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