I have become interested lately in the history of computers before the mid 70s when I first got into them. Maybe it's because I sort of exhausted my curiosity about computers during the 70s and 80s and always thought of anything earlier as the dark ages and not worth spending any time learning. But this hit a fever pitch lately with the project I picked up on via Youtube to restore an Apollo guidance computer. That actual AGC then went on tour and I got to see it in action at the MIT Museum a
I've actually felt for a LONG time that consoles as anything Generation-X would classify as such are an obsolete concept. It's not that hardware is dead, but consoles are dead. Technically speaking the current XBox and Playstation are consoles, but are they really? They're both x86 boxes with PC-derived graphics hardware are they not? Plus, most games are built using authoring environments like Unreal or Unity, which can often compile be directly ported out to different platforms. Nintendo
I hesitate to post a blog entry but I know a few people here have some interest in knowing what's going on in my life beyond classic gaming, so I'll offer this update.
Last summer I freaked out because Xtranormal went out of business and I thought that was my E-ticket ride to a career-change. Well, here we are entering the following summer, and even though I helped with the liquidation, I don't have a job with the buyer, so I dragged my tail between my legs and I have another web dev job to
I'm happy to report that I shipped out 190 cased AtariVox+ units and all the cables I had on-hand to GoldenAx.
I don't really need any pats on the back over it, considering how long I made people wait for it, and really for no good reason. It only took me a couple of hours to case the boards and box them and get them to the post office. I could have done this ages ago, but I had some kind of mental block. I think I've got to concede that I have some form of OCD. It's good for really focu
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 hav
http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/184943-star-castle-2600-2011-at-video-game-summit/page__st__275
"I miss [stella] more and more every time another would-be Ebivision pops up. What happened to open collaboration?"
Well folks, this blog post is a long time coming.
I'm formally announcing that I'm bowing out of the classic gaming scene.
Well, I am kind of describing what I've already done by default. Over the last few years I've become increasingly distant from the hobby. My involvement has waxed and waned. Chimera was going to be the big epic swan song and when Delicon disappeared, it was like all the air going out of the balloon. What I think is really informing me that "it's time" is the fact
I was a little hesitant to try building my own PC. Every time I do it, I run into some snag somewhere, but this was the only way for me to really be choosy about components. The ASUS H57 motherboard has a lot more slots in it than the Gateway and Dell systems I considered. Anyway, sure enough, I've hit a snag. Because graphics cards keep sucking more juice, the ATX power supply standards have changed. All this in the last few years apparently. So I go down to the electronics store and buy
Last year I got sucked up in the hype over the E-Fix dongle to effortlessly build hackintoshes. This was after the boot drive on my main XP machine bit the dust and I didn't want to restore it because it's an old AGP/PCI motherboard that will never be HD-ready. When I got my business laptop I decided to hold off on building out a system since, as you know, motherboard and CPU technology changes at the drop of a hat, and the product was still very new. Periodically I would "check in" on the pr
This is the first batch of 25 AtariVox boards earmarked for the 25th anniversary 7800 project.All the boards are assembled. They still need to be individually tested, and I am 4 Speakjets shy. Also, I'm troubleshooting a custom startup speech line.These are using the new PCB that Richard designed that I'm calling "AtariVox+" The + part is the ability to switch to VecVox or VecVoice mode. However, since these are meant to be installed internally in 7800s, I am hardwiring it for AtariVox.Once t
I think one of the reasons I'm still into classic videogames is I've always stayed on the sidelines of the computer hardware treadmill. I had a Playstation 1 when it first came out, and then proceeded to get very few games for it. I had a PS2 as well and didn't buy many games for it. And don't get me started on PC games. My rig has never been where it should have been to facilitate cutting edge gaming, and so I keep procrastinating on getting into games. The most recent PC upgrade was a Pen
I tried scouring youtube and couldn't find any clips of people playing the Death Race that was there. This is the best I could find online:
Photostream
If anyone finds a youtube clip with it, let me know.
I think Steve Jobs is not long for this earth. He seems to want to ignore or be in denial of his medical problems, and I wonder whether this hasn't just magnified his medical problems rather than taking time off earlier for treatment. The case of Jim Henson's hesitation to seek treatment for pneumonia comes to mind. I really think Jobs' attitude towards his own health will be his undoing, and the company's privacy shield around him only further enables this dysfunction.
So iPhone 3.0 OS is here, and I can finally cut, copy, and paste. Great. One of the things that annoyed me was replying to email messages. There was no way to get rid of the quoted text. So now you can select all and clear out the old message including the "sent from iphone" footer. It's about damn time. However, they added the tethering feature only to have AT&T keep it disabled. So I screw around with the hacks that supposedly enable this and was not able to get it going despite fol
I was going to wait until June for this, but I was checking my PM history and noticed a shout out I gave over two years ago when Delicon did a previous disappearing act and well, I figure enough is enough. If Delicon does appear again, I have a clear conscience in telling him I'm washing my hands of it. The project started around Hurricane Katrina back in the fall of 2005. Ample time has been given for it to come to maturity. We've been at the current stage of development for close to a year
Tax time again. So I try installing TurboTax on my business laptop which is running Vista and the thing errors at the end with an unknown installer error. To add insult to injury, it won't even fully UNinstall. I can't repair it. I can't uninstall it or reinstall. It's in zombie-land. Luckily the CD is dual-platform so I popped it into my daughter's Mac Mini and had no trouble installing it there, thanks in part to the fact that installing software on the Mac is almost always little more t
I really am not much of a fan of satire. It too often trivializes important topics, as if laughing about things is all we need to do instead of fixing them. But the Onion does it so well. The social critique is so spot on. It's a work of art.
Looks like Christian Bale is now going to be the butt of a thousand jokes. I'm waiting for the phoney phone calls with real people. Howard Stern must be having a field day.
I'm never watching anything with him in it again.
This will go down as the worst recorded rant in history. Worse than Shatner's "sabatage".
Worse than Orson Welles' famous rant about peas.
I mean, it's one thing to call a guy names. It's another to threaten to tear the set apart and kick the guy's ass. I swear Bale sounds like a typical teenage bully. I can only imagine he kicked the shit out of his fair share of nerds like me who got on his bad side growing up. I kn
This is looking better and better. But like I said in the netbook threads, progress is marching quickly in the netbook space. As good as this looks, it may become obsolete tomorrow. The big deal right now is the NVidia Ion platform and giving these things some actual graphical horsepower. If this still has the GMA950 style graphics it might not be that great value in the long term. It would be great having a netvertible that would actually have enough horsepower to work as a desktop replace
No new Mac Mini at macworld.
Lame
Lame
Lame
Did I say lame?
No wonder they aren't going to do these shows anymore.
I've got my EFI-X so it looks like I'll be building my hackintosh after all.
This clip was brought to my attention recently. It is, as far as I know, the only video footage of Death Race online. I have the old VHS tape that I got from Rob Mitchell but I haven't digitized it. The DR section is very brief at around 1:00 in. Enjoy.
Just a note that I moved back to the Boston area last month and have been trying to get settled ever since. I still have a lot of boxes strewn around and haven't set back up my Atari "testbed" so to speak. I've been involved in a "death march" for my dayjob so I haven't had as much time to think about Chimera lately, and Delicon has I guess taken advantage of the downtime to do other things. But I will try to get organized again and see where we are. I really had hoped to get farther over th
Splitsville is a band that wrote a song called Atari 2600 which I licensed for Stella at 20 and the Stella Gets a New Brain v.2 CD.
I thought this song was pretty good and had some Atari-like connections in it, so enjoy:
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