mos6507

I feel the same way. I think JMS is just hard up on cash to be returning to the well like this and it may just damage his legacy, not to mention devaluing the contribution of so many dead actors (B5 having had more cast deaths than any other property of a similar era). Fact is he has never had any real career of note beyond B5.

The problem is AI moderators running on flawed overly generic algorithms have been put in the role of judge, jury, and executioner. It was fine when AI was in charge of your spam filter. If something accidentally got flagged as spam that wasn't spam you pulled out. It's a different matter when 3rd parties are deciding how to censor or ban you based on these same flawed/incomplete routines. Nobody wants to have to pay real people to do this sort of work, even to review cases.

Tod Frye mentioned he was working on Ballblazer on my Stella at 20 documentary as well (which I probably mentioned somewhere in this thread years ago). It's kind of sad that his output was really defined by Pac-Man. He did have good coding skills. Save Mary was also a pretty impressive kernel.

A great innovation and long overdue.

Well, we don't live in that world. We live in a world where the central McGuffin of a big-budget Spielberg movie is a famous Atari 2600 easter-egg. The retrogaming hobby was niche back in the mid 90s after the 2600 was considered passe' and the gaming public was engaged in the bit-wars treadmill but it's been a mainstream niche of gaming at least since the first commercial emulators came out, followed by the endless Flashbacks, etc... I was thinking things had fizzled off but apparently not, thanks to the perseverance of homebrewers and the influx of newfound enthusiasm from younger demographics (as theorized upthread). It is true in any special interest that there are only ever a small group of the most hardcore enthusiasts, though. That doesn't mean these are the only ones we should consider part of the hobby. Level of engagement fades off and becomes more casual but it's still part of the mix.

I don't see that coming up with a figure different from mine. Is there some remaining controversy here I'm missing?

Site in question: https://www.inflationtool.com/us-dollar/1983-to-present-value?amount=24

Exaggeration and cost of base materials aside, according to this site, $24 in 1983 would be $64.09. As such the price of the base tier is reasonable, especially when you consider that the prime demographic are us Xers whose buying power is no longer limited to our paper-route money.

I had to switch to Edge because Chrome kept looping back onto itself and got a Collector's Edition. I have to say, given that I am a 20+ year web developer by trade, that there is no reason for this sort of thing to happen.

Well, the serial number is only six digits. So limited to 999,999.

I am having flashbacks to COVID vaccine signups...

I remember being shocked to find out that my XEGS carts like Lode Runner circa 1987 were 128K given that it wasn't a very pricey title. I'd really like to know what the economy of scale was on that at the time. Things changed so rapidly in the 80s.

From memory things like SpartaDOS X was big but that was a pricey cart. By the time the XEGS came out carts were converted disk games like Ace of Aces and pretty big.

It's highly unlikely we would have seen a 128K 2600 game back in the day. It would have been too expensive and probably required an extra long cart to contain multiple smaller chips. Consider that Fatal Run was 32K and came out in 1990. Had the 2600 lived into the mid 90s then maybe. The thing with these design decisions is they all involve tradeoffs of some kind. Activision always avoiding flicker tends to result in gameplay that always seems to resemble Pitfall 1/2. A lot of horizontal movement and not a lot going on within a single scanline, but everything is very pretty to look at. A looser policy can result in busier kernels with more action-oriented gameplay (think Stargate). And the more RAM you have the more depth of gameplay and less of a railed/scripted layout by virtue of more game-state.

Kinda reminds me of Swordquest, but done well.

The way they described music was out of step with how it can be done these days with driving soundwaves through vblank (but even then David did something similar in the DPC chip so he knows about it in theory). But hey, not every game needs to use the same techniques. David is aware of Harmony, for instance. I don't think they are totally oblivious to goings on.

Come on, man. You're manufacturing controversy up out of thin air.

OK, first off, David Crane did most of the talking, and David has a way of coming off as a little snooty and annoyed. His air about him is just sort of misleading. For instance, while he didn't write the check himself, he worked quietly behind the scenes to get my documentary funded. He has also, as everyone knows, been a fixture at conventions. He's very eager to talk shop about the 2600, almost to the point of being sort of a college professor type. The knowledge transfers he's done have fed into the homebrew community. So it's been very much a symbiotic relationship. Also, as said in the interview, they have been asked countless times to do this. So this is partly due to popular demand, or calling our bluffs, so to speak. For some to insinuate that they are trying to exploit or undercut homebrewers feels really unfair. The pricing of the standard cart is reasonable. If it were $200+ or they ran a kickstarter then it would raise red flags but how they are doing it is fair. Most importantly, the walk through of the game shows that there is solid value in the product. It's not slapdash. Homebrewers have been keeping the machine going for 25 years already. Any credit they are due has been earned many times over. Some technical achievements made have definitely met and exceeded tricks developed back in the day. There is no need for homebrewers to feel threatened or upstaged by this. Whether you classify this as homebrew or not is ultimately just semantics. I do think there is a generational thing where some homebrewers may think they've simply gone beyond what the OGs can do to the point where they can no longer be impressed. And that may be their biggest liability. But I did notice that the Zero Page people seemed to be a good 10-15 years younger than I would expect from retro gamers. I don't know if the hobby is passing down to Gen Y or Z or what but things do seem to be in some state of generational flux. It may be reaching a point where more active players will have encountered the 2600 as an already retro thing rather than having lived through it as kids. It's not something I would have predicted.

I've been too out of the hobby to answer that. As far as homebrew vs. OG I do recall one project a while back that had its share of controversy surrounding the exploitive price being asked. I think there is an awareness that there is a small number of collectors who are willing to pay a large premium for a limited edition item. You see this in different interests as well ($10K for a repro Hendrix SG or Flying V for instance). We don't know yet what these new games are going to go for but at least there will be two price tiers. The smaller the market the harder it is to pull a profit off of the investment of man-hours involved. Making a 2600 game is barely a blip compared to making a AAA game of course but if they think they can only push a couple hundred carts before saturating the market the math is difficult. It will be interesting to hear what they say about their motivation. I'm sure it's not just about the money.

This is something I never would have imagined 20+ years ago when I interviewed some of these people. All the philosophical discussions that have come and gone about the merits of a) continuing to write 2600 games and b) using more than, let's say 32K and here we are with a 128K game and a board layout that can handle 256K. Pretty amazing. I know this isn't the first time one of the OG's released a new game (or finished a proto) but this seems to be more of an ongoing commercial enterprise rather than a one-off. That's what is blowing my mind. I may have to consider getting back into this hobby again... That being said, it saddens me to read some of the reactions. There's more effort being spent speculating how the DRM is going to work and how one might go about breaking it than any sense of appreciation or respect. I also don't think we should conjure up any sort of turf-battle rivalry between the homebrew scene and these guys. If they want to make more traditional closed-source commercial games, more power to them. I love the communal aspect of homebrews but they certainly have the experience to know how to make quality games in private.

Correction, the CG Expo was Las Vegas, not Los Angeles, but I think readers got the gist.

I'm not active in the community anymore but I wanted to stop by to pay my respects. My most vivid memory of him was where I went to one of the CG Expo conventions in Los Angeles to panhandle for money to finish editing Stella at 20. Curt was gracious enough to devote a monitor at his booth for me to run a tape through with a leaflet. That was a really nice thing for him to do. I've come to realize that there's a continuum between being a fan or collector over to being a historian. As Generation X interests age more and more we rely on people like Curt to document that history for posterity. This is because more traditional "historians" don't see enough value in (relatively) recent history to document. But by the time they come around, much will have been lost. Surprisingly enough even some of the people directly involved discounted their past. So there are usually only a very small number of fans who have the passion, time, and skill to do this. Without them, this history will fade into legend and/or obscurity. I have started to gather up some of the fruits of these enthusiasts, these thick encyclopedias that tell you everything you ever wanted to know (and more) about stuff that (let's face it) normies might feel wouldn't justify the attention. I have stuff like Nick Nugent's Knight Rider Companion, When We're Singing about the Partridge Family, Jeff Bond who has archived classic soundtracks like the original Star Trek and has just released this book on The Motion Picture. Curt is part of this exclusive club, and it deserves more respect.

Just stumbled on this thread. I'm not a big fan of the fringe effect on the right hand side. I know it's an attempt at doing fake shading and to create more of a boundary between pieces but with only 5 wide pixels to work with it doesn't really sell the effect. This is especially true with pawns and rooks that look asymmetrical this way. If you went with evenly shaded pieces could you possibly use 1-pixel wide sprites colored blue to paint over the sprites and hence create a border? Can you get enough sprite copies to draw?

Wow. Two years and 839 pages later and what have we got to show for it? Frankly I'm surprised that consoles have soldiered on at all. PS4 and XBOX are both essentially glorified gaming PCs now (but without the added value of being full-fledged PCs). Any console you make is going to be all off-the-shelf. If the hardware isn't that unique then all you gain by making a new platform is DRM and locking things up behind a walled garden. How does the consumer benefit from that?