mos6507

Kind of like Patrick Stewart, who was presumably supposed to be a frenchman on ST:TNG but in no way shape or form acted like one.

It's my feeling that the ambiguity of the pronunciation of a lot of computer terms is a sign of the social isolation that most computer geeks suffer from, where these things exist almost exclusively as characters on a computer monitor rather than spoken in conversation. Maybe that's less so now, but not entirely gone when dealing with more specialized terms. That being said, I remember being in a store once and overheard some idiot pronounce CD-ROM as "ROME". Not sure how the hell he came up with that one.

Terminology changed with the PC era. In the 8-bit era, an operating system was closer to what the BIOS is in a PC. Since the early computers didn't multitask or have windowing systems, they didn't need much more than that. DOS on the 8-bit systems merely provided the file system support. Something like Diamond GOS would be closer to what we think of as an "operating system" as far as the windowing API goes. It is kind of a pet peeve of mine, though, to refer to these old OS ROMs as "BIOS" ROMs, though. I don't like backdating modern terms onto these platforms.

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 probably build probably about 100 more at least, except for the Speakjet. Speakjet supplies have dried out through normal channels and I'm going directly to the source now.Pricing has been established and Albert should be starting a label contest soon but I don't want to steal his thunder. So stay tuned.

IMHO, the 2600 was not really "ready" in 1976. At least not based on the dates that I saw in Larry Wagner's notes. Some of the launch titles weren't even started until early 1977. The memory map of the 2600 also changed at least once, at least Jay Miner's names for them. So if the 2600 had been released earlier, it probably would not be the same 2600 that we think of today, but something even more primitive. So they were not exactly sitting on their hands for a year.

Indeed. Works well with a stelladapter.

It's impossible to discuss FMV without talking about larger concepts such as games on "rails" and determinism in general. For instance, the determinism in Pac-Man's ghost patterns, or the Galaga swarms. Determinism in Wing Commander's scripted missions which was carried forward with X-Wing and Tie-Fighter vs. the randomness of Star Raiders. Just because a game is more interactive, if the level design is linear then it gets repetitious. Most modern games are highly interactive, but also highly linear. You're still on rails in order for the game to have a storyline. They have a beginning, a middle, and an "end". The main goal is one of revelation, to see what's beyond the next corner. Once the novelty of seeing everything there is to see, you've effectively "beat" the game and there is little motivation left to replay it, similar to how after you watch a movie, you don't immediately want to pop it back in the DVD player. From a business standpoint, this is ideal. Entertainment with a limited shelf-life encourages more new game sales. The classic games took their inspiration mostly from coinops, which were designed to eat quarters. So the experience was more akin to sports than movies. That was, until the dreaded CONTINUE was implemented, where people could just buy their way across all the levels. This to me is a big dividing line between classic game play patterns and modern ones. I can appreciate both, but the true classics are the twitch games.

I think that says more about Java than anything else.

Death Derby is active in kind of a Chinese Democracy way After this thread maybe I should certify it dead so I don't look like a hypocrite.

To be fair, some homebrewers have opened polls about which coinop should be ported next, as if the only purpose to code for the 2600 is to port games. So to say there isn't an institutionalized culture of porting in homebrewing is just not being accurate. It's been going on for so long and has been so dominant that it is almost synonymous with the practice of homebrewing. And once it's institutionalized like that, then it kind of perpetuates itself from generation to generation of coders (and the homebrew scene has seen a few cycles of developers come and go already). So a thread like this was meant to kind of challenge the establishment, so to speak. Not necessary to slam the process of porting, since homebrewing in any form certainly has merit, but to try to say that the OTHER side of homebrewing, namely game design, has kind of gotten short shrift all this time.

Ladybug has lots of flicker in it. Is that not a 2600 trademark?

In the past this stuff would have required Shockwave and a compiled Xtra like the old Midway games that Digital Eclipse did, or Java applets like the old games.com site. Flash has come a LONG way to be able to pull these off so well. If Flash can't run compiled binaries then these are technically ports, though. Here is the link describing the technology. However it's being done, it's impressive.

I loved all the voice in games back in the day but the voice in . Also, the voice in Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator. "Welcome Aboard Captain."

IMHO, I see add-ons as a catalyst. Homebrewing for the 2600 has now been going on for about as long as the Atari 2600 was originally on the market! Pretty amazing, isn't it? And I've watched the homebrew scene go through phases. The early days were spent kind of developing a standard bag of tricks. Finding the most efficient path to do certain tasks like determine when to draw sprites, read paddles, etc... Come up with useful techniques like the multisprite trick that was used for Space Instigators. Back in the day that intellectual property was hidden in corporate silos and was only filtered from company to company via subterfuge. So once that was opened up, and everyone was collaborating, we started to see a level of spit and polish that was rare even back then. This kind of culminated with the various hacks and improvements of the original games like trackball support in Missile Command, balloons in River Raid, and the Dennis Debro redo of Pac-Man. And then you have the amazing music engines that are being used, like the multichannel technique in Stella's Stocking. So it's clear to me that the top homebrewers today are at or beyond where the best and brightest were back in the day, due to the combination of open collaboration, a much better toolset, and the freedom to use large banked ROMs. Likewise, the barrier to entry is lower than ever with Batari BASIC which is also good for the hobby. I just think game design has been kind of devalued in this whole evolution. Since most of the technical hurdles have been overcome, maybe it's time to focus a little more on that. I mean, isn't the whole manifesto in favor of classic games that it's all about the gameplay? Well, what is it that makes a classic game special? What gets you into the zone? You know, the theory. When you port a successful game, you don't ever learn anything about that. You're just leveraging a play pattern that is already tuned to perfection. It's really kind of a left/brain right/brain thing, which is why maybe it's not such a bad idea for developers to work in pairs, a designer/coder, or for there to be a clear goal from the start for playtesters to act as de-facto designers via committee. But in order to do that, developers have to exercise a little humility, and give up some creative control. That's sometimes been a challenge, I think. But the best homebrews (ports included) that I've seen produced tend to come from developers who are keen listeners and who are very responsive to feedback. A game like Oystron was molded like a sculpture. Most of the chisel marks were put there by the feedback from Stellalist. Some of the less enjoyable homebrews (and I won't name names) were victims of developers who would either veto suggestions or never ever opened up their games for feedback to begin with.

BTW, most of the original game ideas I do see have been in the holiday carts, and they sell like hotcakes. Of course, those are "themed" so maybe they don't count.

It's not about overt force. It's about a cultural inertia. When I first got into the hobby, we thought we were a weirdos being interested in these old systems. But now it seems like all entertainment these days is pop culture recycling. So the retro stuff couldn't be any more mainstream. Hence the 2600 sticks, the commercial emulators, the Playstation Network. To me, having a new game on a classic system is all the nostalgia I need. It doesn't have to itself be a port of a 20+ year old coinop game for me to feel the retro vibe. Maybe I'm weird that way.

Official Atari home pong was always color. The ubiquitous pong consoles from other vendors were mostly B&W.

What I'm seeing lately is games get more complicated and require more collaboration in the art department. So already it's moving beyond the one-person-one-game metaphor. And that's still with the 2600. Once you move off onto the 5200/8-bit or anything more elaborate than that, then games can get hopelessly lost in the process of creating graphical assets. I think this explains why the 2600 and the Vectrex remain the preeminent homebrew platforms. The 2600 has a pretty hard limit, even with banked ROMs, on the artwork, and the Vectrex is just line graphics. Then you look at something like the Jaguar which can host some pretty elaborate stuff, even if you just look at 2D gaming, and you'll never see a homebrew that looks like, let's say, Rayman. So simpler platforms provide a convenient rationalization for limited graphics. You're both doing everything the platform can do and everything your rudimentary artistic skills and limited schedule can produce.

But there is a fine line between nostalgia and boredom. Like if I turn on classic radio, I can not stand listening to "Taking Care of Business" by BTO anymore. There is a long list of coinop titles that, no matter how good they are, have been done to death on every platform imaginable. Am I going to get a nostalgia high playing Ms. Pac-Man on yet another console? Probably not. That was the reason I chose Death Race 10 years ago, because it was obscure and could not even be emulated in Mame. Now, I don't want to insult anybody's efforts, but let's look at what's in the store for the 7800. Every single one of them is a port (Beef Drop being Burgertime) of a well known coin-op except for Wasp. The ironic thing is that one of the criticisms that people here made of Atari's handling of the 7800 was that they commissioned yet another batch of aging coin-op ports rather than doing new games the way Nintendo did for the NES. And 25 years onward we're still doing just that. The question is, is this really want people want to see the most or what they've become conditioned to expect due to the lack of originals? Is it the chicken or the egg? This thread is meant to be provocative because I think the hobby deserves a little introspection. I think things have gotten a little too formulaic and predictable lately.

Have you played the new games on Flashback 2? That's what you get when you pay programmers peanuts to write 2600 games rather than it being done for the love of it.

This may be awkward timing to start this topic, considering that I've been plugging Juno First every chance I get, but I was reading the topic in the Colecovision forum that pushed the idea that it ONLY makes sense to do arcade ports, and it kind of ticked me off. So I really want to bust open this issue because it's been gnawing at me for a long time. It's my opinion that the hobby has kind of lost sight of the creative process of making new game designs, and is almost exclusively concerned with either porting coinop games or adapting trademarked properties from movies, TV, comic books, etc.. (usually with hacks). Now, I don't think ports are necessarily a bad idea. On the Vectrex for instance, the official library left huge gaps just waiting to be filled, and homebrews have done just that. I also like the technical challenges of porting coinop games to the 2600. Juno First with all of the moving objects is a good example. Prince of Persia is hopefully going to be another example. But I think when the inevitable topic of "what would you like to see next for a homebrew" the assumption is that we're talking about which PORT would you like to see next. The idea that someone would come up with a totally original game, like Oystron which I hold up as the gold standard, is not even considered. And in the Coleco thread people are making a justification why originals are a bad idea that sounds like the marketing department of Infogrames! "Sorry, new ideas are too risky. Known properties will sell better." Is this what the hobby has turned into? And I'm not sure this way of thinking is a homebrew thing. This is true of all entertainment in general, where everything seems to be a remake, a reboot, or a "port" from one medium to another (superheroes and graphic novels being the big thing right now). Now most if not all of us have MAME and if we want the perfect arcade experience we can have it. And so many of these games have been played to death already, I'm wondering how much true play value some of them offer rather than just getting put on the shelf as a collector's item? But remember when you brought home that new Activision game and popped it in for the first time? That was a new experience. A new play mechanic. A new theme. That has value and I just don't see a lot of appreciation for that in the homebrew scene these days. When I was interviewing Tod Frye, paraphrasing him, he said that management at Atari Inc., after the success of Space Invaders, went from thinking that coinop ports were a good thing to do, to thinking that they were the ONLY thing to do. And while this was lucrative, it was not very creative. Activision on the other hand tried to avoid ports, and while Kaboom was inspired by Avalanche, Megamania by Astro Blaster, and Dragster from Drag Race, none were advertised as direct ports. As such I think the Activision catalog stands by itself more as a creative body of work. So I'm not saying ports are bad, but I really would like to see more passion for new game ideas. It's so easy to take that creative short-cut and start from a preexisting idea. That's something that you really have to resist because once you go down the port route, there is almost an endless number of ideas to cop if you count everything that's come and gone in the industry. You have to make a commitment to start from a blank slate and I don't see a lot of people doing that, nor do I see many people other than myself even clamoring for that. So it's a self-reinforcing thing. My feeling is that homebrewing becomes too routine or (dare I say, corporate?) if it's only about "what do we port next".

I'm just bitter about the latter-era Atari keyboards since the 800 and 1200XL keyboards were so superior. They had the metal spring feel of the PC keyboard but without the clacking (except for the spacebar on the 1200XL which was noisy as hell). People who wax nostalgic about the original IBM keyboards must never have used an 800 or 1200XL.

We're making some progress now.

There is a 10-pin header that is for in-circuit programming of the PIC. That header is really expensive on Digikey so I didn't order it but I found a cheaper supplier. I'm having a really hard time getting the PIC wired in reliably and I now have a stack of boards that may or may not be redeemable with a PIC firmware upgrade. This is why I didn't want to formally announce something. I want to start consistently building working units and so far the only ones that are coming out functional are the hardwired AtariVox ones without the PIC.

LOL! A Yule log program would be a great addition to a holiday cart! Stella's Stocking's menu screen is already like that. The music driver is so awesome on that thing. Pitfall II eat your heart out.