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'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 actually had a lot of experience working with speech synthesizers. Back in the day I had S.A.M. That program completely captivated me. I'd say it was one of the best things I remember about the Atari 8-bit. It's also why I was sorely disappointed by the 1400XL prototype I picked up when I learned that its Votrax chip did not allow you to adjust all of the vocal attributes. I had always wished I had an Alien Voice Box because that thing supposedly could sing. I think that used the same
After shutting down my MySpace page, and in recognition of the nonexistent blogging potential at Facebook, I thought I'd use this blog as my dumping ground for observations about gadgets and pop culture, especially when they tie into nostalgic themes.
Last year when "JJ Trek" came out, I was quite merciless in my criticism of it, both aesthetically and storywise. I also never warmed up to the new Battlestar Galactica. And I am not a fan of the Star Wars prequels, to put it mildly.
And
We're getting close now. We just need to make this interactive and embed it into the firmware.
Unfortunately I had trouble photographing the monitor and the youtube clip is even more blurry. Hopefully you can get a sense of what it looks like.
Here is the microSD file lister:
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
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.
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.
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 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
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
Remember this post back in 2006 where I said Chimera text would look similar to the Atari 8-bit, like this?
Well, we've taken another step closer to doing that today, via fast queues.
Right now I'm populating the queues manually. The next step is for Delicon to render the Atari 8-bit OS ROM font data directly into the queues. Then we'll have the foundation of the game select menu.
This kernel does support changing the sprite and background colors on each row. I'm just no
In recent discussions with Delicon we started to revisit the Chimera API I found the hotspot memory map we came up with to be somewhat lacking. Really the big problem is there are too many things for Chimera to do and not enough addresses in the last page of ROM(RAM) to hold them. The most efficient way to handle things is via an instruction language. The VCS would push a stream of bytes into an instruction hotspot. Either the length of the instruction would be encoded in the message, in whi
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
The irony of this is unreal.
I mean, falling off his own ship called Yamato. I guess that's the way to go, albeit tragic, like so much of his life after he found fame with the show.
After a very late night on Delicon's part, we managed to get queues functional again on the revision 10.0 boards. In order to make the timing work, you need to toggle a read/write mode hotspot but I don't think that will be a big limitation. When writing, you also have to leave at least two cycles between writing again. This would normally not be an issue unless you are writing the same value successively.
At the tail end we were able to add a very important feature. You can now have var
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?"
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
It's been a while so now is as good a time to post a Chimera update as any.
You may not know this, but there are two arm projects in the pipeline, Chimera, and something which doesn't yet have an official name. Call it either QuickCart or Chimera Jr. Batari is spearheading that project. The QuickCart does not use a CPLD. It's very similar to what Chimera was supposed to be initially, but we would have had to sacrifice CPU availability to do it that way. Anyway, Batari has been very succ
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'm about to ship out the AtariVoxes I built for the 25th anniversary 7800 project.The problems we were having with the PIC turned out to be firmware-related. So after we got the firmware resolved, I went back and fixed all of the boards that seemed not to work by soldering on the 10-pin headers and reprogramming the PICs with the good firmware. Since then I haven't looked back. I now have, oh, about 75 AtariVox+ boards built, and another 60 in progress. I have enough parts on hand to probab
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
I think I'm a little late to the party and my instincts tell me this startup may not be around too much longer but man, this is the most fun I've had since Software Automatic Mouth.
LINK
I swear I've laughed more in the last couple days than I have in the last 20 years combined.
A news article on it.
If this company goes out of business I am going to be so pissed. After all these years I've finally found a way to make movies in a way that gives me near instant gratification. If
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
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