Mindfield

The thing is, this method of hard-coded copy protection was already recently attempted in the manufacture of hard drives. The scheme was to incorporate a method of copyright authentication that would recognize a piece of digitally signed material, such as an MP3, and allocate in permanent space on your hard drive. Once stored there, it could not be moved, and once removed, could not be replaced unless the appropriate restitution was again provided. In the end, though the technology is still being developed, hard drive manufacturers flat out refused to incorporate this technology because they knew the public's reaction: Do it, and we won't buy it. Making it law won't help matters, and will only direct the public's ire at the government, rather than the hardware manufacturers. It would also direct the ire of the hardware manufacturers at the government, as they know it would dramatically impact their sales to the point where they may not even make enough money to continue operating. And it's not just hard drive manufacturers. It's manufacturers of modems, external recording/reading devices, CD players and recorders, MP3 players, Smart Media, backup devices of all sorts, handheld computers, and so on, and so on. It would have such a widespread, negative impact on the industry that I have to believe it will never be passed. The potential financial repercussions alone would bankrupt half the companies out there, and the others would be hit hard enough to get royally pissed. There's no way the US could, in all fairness, allow such a law to be passed if they at all consider the consequences.

No, Famicom stuff is the same as the US stuff ... only the power cords differ, and, of course, it's all in Japanese. :-) I can't say the three prong arrangement is at all familiar. As Wintermute brought up, the only three pin controllers I've ever seen are N64 controllers.

Okay, this is a little confusing. The DMCA already contains provisions for fair use under Title III sections 301-302: "Computer Maintenance Competition Assurance Act." In short, it states that any archive that is made for personal use and with the sole intention of being a safeguard against failure of the original media upon which the data is stored is perfectly legal. It also states that said archive is also legal in the case of the failure of the hardware that it runs upon provided that it is used solely to restore that hardware to working condition, and that in this particular case, the archive is deleted upon restoration of the hardware to the condition of working. In other words, the first part provides a legal means to archive (make one working copy of) your legally owned software, music, or any other media which contains data and could be subject to failure of the original media. Though it is not provided for in the DMCA, it logically follows that this includes "hard" storage -- ROMs, generally, be they console cartriges or your own system's BIOS, as long as they are archived only for your personal use for the purpose of ensuring a working backup in the event the original fails. By the account of this proposed amendment to the DMCA, this would make any portable device that is capable of copying, transmitting, or otherwise has the potential to infringe upon copyrights, illegal. This would not only include the likes of the Cuttle Cart, or GB/GBA copiers, it would also mean Zip/Jaz/Sharq drives, external CD-RWs, external floppies, dialup/cable/DSL modems, and so on, unless these devices utilize unspecified "approved" security technologies. I do not think however that this covers hobbyist development devices. This proposed amendment, as nefarious as it is, is intended to protect the interests of copyright holders against copyright infringement. Hobbyist/homebrew developers usually give permission to distribute their ROMs freely, as well as many offering their games for sale in cartrige form in limited quantities. By the author's own actions, (s)he does not fall under the DMCA's jurisdiction as their permission has already been given to allow the transmission of their work in digital form. In any event, I still think this law is a very bad idea, as it will raise a great number of hackles for those who legitemately own software and want to ensure they have backups of it in the likely eventuality that the originals fail. I'll bet the IDSA is just foaming at the mouth to get this one passed...

<nitpick> Um, don't you mean David Crane? Or was he unavailable so you had to take the next best thing and get his little brother to sign it? :-) </nitpick> [ 09-12-2001: Message edited by: Mindfield ]

Out of curiosity, what kind of interface would be needed for Sony Memory Sticks? They're quite compact by themselves, and even the PC attachment is quite small. Expensive, mind you, but just a curiosity. Sony use the same technology (MemoryGate) in their Playstation/PSOne and PS2 as their other devices that take sticks, so I'm thinking that it needn't be all that complicated -- would they bother using a full ATA/IDE interface for such a thing? Especially for a PSOne? I'm thinking it might be possible either to use Memory Sticks, or PSONe/PS2 memory cards for such a project. PSOne cards are relatively cheap, though very small (128k?) and PS2 8 meg cards are generally $39.99 (CDN) for Mad Catz or $47.99 (CDN) for Sony. Then there's InterAct's 16 meg card for $49.99 (CDN). Alternatively, what about Dreamcast's VMU? It's cheap ($19.99 CDN) and has its own CPU, LCD screen and buttons that could be used to develop the menu system. It's also larger than a PSOne memory card (both physically and in terms of the amount of memory) so it might be an idea as well.

I also noticed a few other undumped ones -- Revenge of the Jedi Games I & II, Lord of the Rings (which I believe someone speculated about some time back on these boards) and a few others I noticed. Were these real or just shrinkwrapped mockups?

O'Shea's have been selling those Atari carts for years. They're a big closeout store. You can see their (rather ugly but functional) main website at www.oshealtd.com where you can grab up various other closeout bargains. (Tupperware pizza cutters for $0.05 ea? Sign me up! :-) They still have the assorted Atari jerseys, too.

True -- but in cases like this, bulk can go a long way towards making up for the lack of what passes for substance these days. Just look at the bundles available for PCs: 5-in-1, 10-in-1 and various other packs full of older PC games repackaged into one box to try and squeeze that last ounce of marketability out of games that would otherwise have been shelved 'til that magical day when they become classics, and therefore fashionable (and profitable) again. Retro is in, man. Like a fine wine: It's all trod upon grapes gone bad 'til it's aged long enough to become palatable once more. And yes, cheap is definitely a factor for many people. Working the retail end of the software biz has taught me one thing: the cheaper it is, the more they'll clamour to buy it, especially if it's something they would never have otherwise bought at a higher price. Our store often has "free" (after mail-in rebate) titles on the shelves, and it draws people in droves. Even the crappy titles sell. Give people a bargain -- any bargain, and they'll salivate at the prospect of all the money they'll 'save.' As for the age question -- like I said, there are some few who are too young to properly remember Atari's salad days (just what the hell are salad days, anyway?) but have nevertheless been drawn in by the machine's engaging yet deceptively primitive titles. These too are the blessed, for though they may not have enjoyed these machines in their prime, they're nevertheless enjoying them now, and discovering anew what we discovered back in the day: blocky and noisy and ultimately unrealistic though the games be, they're still damn fine entertainment equal to or greater than anything on the shelves today where pure gameplay is concerned. Just as you've been fortunate enough to discover -- and more power to you for it.

Doh! I'm usually careful about such things. It was late when I wrote that; names were not exactly floating at the top of the bowl, as it were... ...no pun intended... (Uh... bowl ... John ... never mind. :-)

I think that, even cheaply, Combat could be done right. The control mechanism is simple, the gameplay is easy (one-player AI, which the VCS version lacked, notwithstanding) and the graphics -- well, tanks, artillery shells and hedgerows and/or buildings. Nothing that can't be whipped up in Photoshop in 15 minutes. I sort of envision something like this for an updated, yet faithful Combat: - Multiple tanks to choose from. Difference in performance and weaponry, perhaps, but not necessary. - Different weapons. Artillery shells, of course, guided missiles (guided just like they were in the original), grenade launchers that can lob grenades over obstacles, chain guns... - Varied, destructible obstacles: Hedgerows, war-torn buildings, rock formations, whatever. And of course, rivers and streams and stuff. Maybe have a set of preset levels, plus an optional random land generator. How about making the playfield larger than one screen with scrolling, and have a radar pinpoint enemy locations? - Edge effects: Rubber, Spring, Sponge, Wrap-around, Concrete -- anyone remember Scorched Earth? Yeah, like that. I think this could be done cheaply and effectively. I mean, no matter how you slice it, this isn't some big project requiring complex AI, multiple, large levels, and so on. This is a single-screen (or multiple scrolling screens) simplistic tank game, hopefully with some improvements. If I did it for a living, give me devkit, unlimited coffee, and maybe a month or two. That's a perfectly resonable development cycle for such a game.

Oh, I'd certainly be impressed. I'd love to see a retro re-release of the VCS. Price it cheap, remanufacture some of the better carts, maybe inspire a few old-time game companies to do the same, and I'd buy the whole dang lot. Unfortunately the cost involved in that would be prohibitive, both for the console itself and the carts. There would be little margin in it for the companies -- certainly not enough to make it worth the hassle, especially considering the small demographic it would be aimed at. Then again, look at the TV Boy and similar products. Retro releases cheaply made and, I presume, selling at least well enough to garner the attention of many retrogamers. But then, the companies needn't manufacture cartriges for them; the games are built right in, and I think that's the key. Maybe Infogrames could still release a cartrige-based console, but manufacture multicarts with, say, 10 games apiece on each. I think that could sell...

I hate to be the party pooper, but I doubt the amount of respect Infogrames would garner from such a project would be worth more than a little word-of-mouth PR. Consider the modern video game demographic: kids. Kids who, for the most part, are too young to remember the NES or SMS, never mind first generation consoles. Kids who were weened on flashy graphics and realistic sound. Kids who have Spyro and Mario burn-in on their retinas. Kids to whom Don Madden is merely a name slapped on a line of football games for PS2 and PC, but for whom Dave Mirra and Tony Hawk are sports Gods. Mention Atari and you'll get responses like "Oh, you mean the company that did Frogger 2: Swampy's Revenge?" A VCS project, as cool as we all think it would be, would only draw the likes of us -- old fogeys who owned the machines they're to be played on when they were new, plus a fortunate few who are too young to remember that, but nevertheless have cultivated an affinity for gaming's roots. Neither do I think Infogrames would have a chance at making a new gaming console. With Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all going head-to-head late this fall for the 6th generation console wars, there's no room for another system, and certainly not for a system from a company as comparatively small as Infogrames, and one who's never done the console thing before. Sony in part lucked out with the PSX back in '95 because -- hey, it's a Sony, and they had the funds to push it hard. Microsoft will probably have good success too because -- hey, it's Microsoft. They have the funds to swallow everyone else. That pretty much covers the whole pie, leaving Infogrames little more than crumbs and a smear of filling, which isn't worth fussing over. Now, the portable market right now is a little thin. In fact, the only thing going now is the GBA. GBC is slowly dying out, with barely 5 GBC titles scheduled for release between now and Christmas. Ignoring for the moment the failures of the Ban Dai Wonderswan and the SNK NeoGeo Pocket, neither of which really had much of a chance given Nintendo's lock on the portable market, I think Infogrames might have a shot there. At the right price point, and with the right technology, Infogrames could concievably revoke Nintendo's claims to the most powerful handheld system on the market. Give it a similar sized backlit or reflective TFT screen, a low-power high-speed RISC CPU like the Crusoe, a decent amount of main/video RAM, a good GPU and a 32-bit bus, then bundle it in a sturdy, lightweight casing with plenty of available accessories (comission Mad Catz, InterAct or Performance to make 'em), and I think they could have a competitive product. Provided they could get good third party support of course. I know, it's a pipe dream. But the portable market is the only one where there's even a chance of survival because there is only one competing product. Sure, it's Nintendo's, but that boils down to semantics. A market with only one competitor is ripe for plucking by anyone who does it right. A market with three well-established competitors is just picking over bare branches.

Because Combat is a perfect candidate for a one-Game-Pak, Four-GBA-linkup ala Mario Kart Super Circuit. That's one rather dry area for the GBA at the moment, so it stands to reason that more such games would be comissioned for it. Of course, being that it may suck as a result of the company that's been comissioned to do it, it may not make a very big splash even in spite of the linkability. Still, maybe Raccoon Lad might have some pull on the project and see that perhaps it gets at least a marginally respecful treatment. Of course, all things considered, we're talking about Combat here. You can't possibly do worse than the original, even with a shoestring budget and a large, angry man with a stopwatch hovering over your right shoulder, so how bad could it possibly turn out? Or are those famous last words? [ 09-05-2001: Message edited by: Mindfield ]

I go through phases like that, where something that once held a great deal of interest to me has suddenly become lacklustre, losing its appeal. Generally I just move on to something else for a while. I've had a lot of times like that. For a while I was into programming a great deal -- wrote a few programs and such. Then in the middle of writing my piece de resistance on the ST, I fell into a funk. I just didn't feel like coding at all. The very idea sent waves of nausea coursing through my veins. So I spent more time writing music, surfing the net (inasmuch as one surfed back in those days -- Lynx, anyone? Er, the Unix browser, not the Atari console :-) calling local BBSes, watching TV, going out with friends to play cards at a local donut shop, go clubbing, whatever. I was like that for months until I finally missed coding enough to get me back on track. Took me a week or two to pick up where I left off, but I got right back into it and everything was cool. As has already been said, everything in moderation. As they say, too much of a good thing can be bad for you. Stick your nose firmly and exclusively in one thing long enough and it's bound to start smelling sour eventually.

No, they work. The only difference is that the Gemini stick/paddle combos has the pins present for the paddles -- the equivalent of using a Y connector to connect both paddles and a joystick to one port, except the Gemini's sticks had integrated paddles.

Yeah. Jack got his three stooges--er, sons to run things. Jack was at the helm of Commodore and ran it quite well. Once over at Atari however, and after a brief period of leadership, he handed the reigns ... er ... reins, over to his sons, who then proceeded to display their business acumen by spending the next ten years putting the company on a steady diet of worferen and arsenic. Which is to say sinking the majority of Atari's remaining funds into all sorts of losing R&D propositions while all but ignoring the power of the press, not to mention alienating dealers in their spare time. Don't get me wrong, they never ceased to bring innovation to the forefront of the creations that did make it to the fore, but their conspicuous lack of advertising all but doomed them from the start. Sure, they simply didn't have the funds to launch an effective campaign -- but again we come back to all the money they sunk into R&D projects that didn't and would never see the light of day. I mean, it's important to continually develop and test new ideas, but of considerably more importance, especially when you have a limited budget, is the ability to decide beforehand which projects will be most likely to succeed, and which will fail, and then trash those that will fail so you can direct more funds to those that likely won't. In that, the Tramiels were alarmingly inept. Of course, Warner weren't all that much better -- need I mention AtariTel? -- but the Tramiels took it to the extreme. After all, the Tramiels were practically pioneers of the term vaporware, and that shook a lot of what remained of people's confidence in Atari every time a new product was announced but never appeared. It's not too hard to see why the Tramiels are relentlessly blamed for the death of Atari. They presided over its funeral -- a double plot, with JTS Corporation right next to it. In the end though, they simply finished what Warner's Kassar started.

You know what they say ... you can't keep a good thing down, and the 2600 was probably one of the greatest things. Little wonder then that it's still kicking and making news 24 years after its birth. Let's face it: The VCS created the console market. Oh sure, machines like the Odyssey tried to start the fire, but let's be honest: that was soggy kindling and old matches. Stella was dry brush and kerosene, and Atari had a Zippo. The resulting bonfire simply consumed even Mattel and Coleco. After that, video game consoles were to forever be a recurring item on every kid's Christmas wish lists. Sure, I'm certain that were it not for Atari, there would still be a home video game market, but I really don't think it would be anything like it is now. In fact, many people's Christmas wish lists still include the VCS. All the classics have come back again. And that's quite a good thing. I could do without the beehives, however...

I read all about that CD-ROM drive. It was an excellent idea at the time. The company that was developing it had it running a full encyclopedia on CD, with fulltext searching capabilities. Very avant garde, particularily since CD-ROMs for computers didn't even become commonplace until the late 80s. Atari _did_ eventially release that drive, by the way. It was the CDAR-540, a 1x speed CD-ROM drive for the ST line that connected directly to the ACSI bus. IIRC, not many were made, so it's a bit of a rare property. A friend of mine (one of the directors of the Toronto Atari Federation user group) actually had one, though I never got a chance to see it at the time. :-/ As for who Jack is, he was the former CEO of Commodore who, in 1984 left the company and bought Atari from Warner Communications. Why he is blamed for the downfall of Atari I think is simply a matter of chronology: Jack, and later his sons Gary, Leonard and Sam, were the last owners of Atari, and it was under their reign that everything crumbled. However, the foundations were already cracked and eroded from the poor, totalitarian leadership of Ray Kassar under Warner's rule. His iron-fisted command of the company left many of Atari's employees disgruntled. Ironically, this autocratic leadership caused Ray to be indirectly responsible for the formation of one of the biggest and oldest software companies on the planet: Activision. Activision were formed by a group of former Atari employees who, unsatisfied with the working conditions and the restrictions upon developers not getting credit for their work, left Atari to form Activision, which went on to become the first third party developer for the VCS and, ultimately, a giant in the software industry even today. Still, Ray Kassar started the ball rolling for the death of Atari. The Tramiels merely hastened its demise. The difference is that Ray's problem was that he was a bit power mad, and at the same time ignorant of the necessities of developer licensing. The Tramiels were simply bad businessmen who made bad decisions frequently, the biggest of which I think is the lack of advertising.

As long as we're sharing, I'll be hitting my 30th in a little over 3 weeks. And I was around when the first generation console wars were hot. Colecovision, Atari and Intellivision all vied for attention. I had a Coleco Gemini (Coleco's VCS clone), a Colecovision, and eventually, a real 2600. I enjoyed 'em all, but the 2600 of course stuck with me for the long haul. At least, until I went and sold it all shortly after I got my first computer (an Atari 600XL). I went up through the gamut of 8-bit, then 16-bit Atari computers until finally biting the bullet and getting a PC. Now in many ways it's all come full circle, as I use my PC to emulate the old VCS, as well as all the old Atari computers (and many others, to boot). One of these days, time and money permitting, I'll get into buying an ol' VCS again, and collecting all the new games. I'm rather looking forward to re-experiencing the excitement of buying a new VCS game, as I used to do every weekend back in the day with my allowance. :-) Welcome aboard, Steve. I think you'll find a comfortable seat in which to park, and a lot of good conversation amongst like-minded people who for the most part all grew up through Atari.

nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;I find the whole concept of this guy's E-Mail a little ... misguided, to put it kindly. "It makes rumors such as the Beta-testing Airworld cart or the possible existence of a partial Airworld comic all the more exciting." What I don't get is that it's been pretty well concluded that neither of these existed. It never even got to the coding stage. No artwork was ever done for it -- apart from the final prize, of course -- and no comic had even been started. Atari knew they were in trouble before they even finsished Waterworld; the Fireworld winners were asked before the Waterworld contest was even held to accept a settlement in lieu of participating in the Waterworld contest as they were cancelling the whole thing. It stands to reason then that Atari wouldn't have bothered wasting any more resources starting the Airworld project. nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;More to the point however, is that the creation of this Homebrew finale to the series does nothing of the sort to anyone's illusion of the possible existence of some scrap of an official Airworld project. It is simply that: A homebrew effort. Even if an official scrap of the Airworld project exists, be it an unfinished comic or a very early beta EPROM, the existence of a homebrew version of the final chapter doesn't change that. I see no reason to cancel the project based on one person's rather misguided E-Mail. His assertions are absurd.

There really is no way of preventing profiteering on E-Bay. Take, for example, the now rather antiquated card swapping game Magic: The Gathering. Wizards of the Coast had at one time produced relatively few of a few types of cards -- powerful cards, such as Moxes, Time Twisters, etc. To add fuel to the fire, they were limited runs, existing only in the Second Edition series of cards. These cards virtually became currency among hardcore Magic players, with Moxes at one time selling for in excess of $1,000, which "pro" Magic competitors gladly shelled out for. For a piece of cardboard. WOTC didn't like this, and the only way they were ever able to stop it was to devalue the cards by producing more of them. Of course, printing more bits of cardboard is cheap. Producing more cartriges most definitely is not -- especially not in the sort of quantity you'd have to produce to move them off the "Rare+" rating. So, there will always be vintage gaming profiteers who can potentially end up selling a rare homebrew cart on eBay for more than its author made in the whole production run. That, unfortunately, is life, and a generous slice of the sleazier portion of humanity.

Damn. I haven't seen an ElBo here in Canada sell anything like that. They just seem to concentrate on new stuff for current machines. Maybe next time I'm in there I'll have to take a closer look.

That's something I've been anticipating for a very long time -- a working Jag emu. I've had the entire gamut of ROMs sitting dormant on my hard drive since they were released into the public domain, just awaiting the day that someone, anyone finally did a working Jag emulator. RealityMan's progress is showing some real promise finally. Hopefully we can look forward to a real working emulator in a few months' time, and I can blow the dust off those lonely ol' ROMs and bask once again in the glory of those wonderful Jag games. I think this'll be the first emulator that I'll actually collect ISOs for; I'm not into the PSX or DC scenes 'cos for a start they're not dead, and for another I just can't be bothered, but the Jag's a whole different story...

The Jag's 68000 was also used for handling user input (joystick functions) and often for game logic, since it was best suited for high priority, low overhead stuff like that. But yes, the Jag was true 64-bit, since it had a 64 bit bus that could be accessed in its entirety by any combination of chips, or by the 64-bit BLiTter portion of Tom when placed in Hog mode. What threw people off most of the time was that Blitter was the only component of the Jaguar that was truly 64-bit, and people, in their ignorance, usually failed to recognize the blitter as a primary component. The object processor and DSP were only 32-bit, and the 68k was only 16-bit, and these three portions of the Jag were considered by the self-proclaimed pundits to be the main processors in the Jag -- the real dillweeds going so far as to claim the 68000 was the Jag's main CPU. Thus, the Jaguar earned the 32-bit myth. Most of them were far from technically minded, though, and therefore failed to recognize the significance of the Jaguar's ability to have, say, the Object Processor and the DSP both accessing half of the 64-bit bus simultaneously, or having the Blitter hog the whole thing for itself. The ones who were technical minded and still derided the Jaguar's "bitness" usually had something against Atari, and so fabricated arguments to fit their narrow-minded perceptions. For a perfect example of such narrow minded misconceptions, you need only look as far as Peter Sinclair's ("Sinclap") posts for the last 7 or 8 years on comp.sys.atari.advocacy...

I do recall it. A bit of a wierd game as I recall, but I liked it all the same. Unfortunately, I don't have a disk image of it that I know of, and LGD has been down for a few months for a redesign, so I can't search the compacted disks to find out if it's on one. :-/