mos6507

Maybe I was weird, then. The first thing I did with my 1200XL was start writing stuff in Basic to open up a graphics mode and start plotting lines at the foot of the X-mas tree. I was using BASIC like a paint program. That's what got me into computers after I had taken a summer computer club course on computer graphics with Apple ][s.

Unlike today, programming was a major part of computer interaction in the 80s. So BASIC speed did matter. Only a select few graduated to Assembly or ML subroutines. So it did matter as far as the reputation the computer developed in the eyes of the consumer. It was the first thing you'd experience with it in the store displays or when you unpacked it at home. As a finished product, the floating point in the BASIC is probably the A8's biggest weakpoint. Its weird syntax didn't help in porting over type-in programs either. That's why Atari had to release an official Microsoft BASIC, and OSS built a company out of offering better languages. I always felt a little disadvantaged compared to Apple users who had the de facto standard BASIC that was taught in computer classes. I couldn't just take my programs home and run them.

I never thought the Jag controller was that bad. When the PSX controller came out it kind of vindicated the banana-shaped controller idea. And we've seen controllers since then that put stuff in the middle like this:

Isis is a serious collector's item these days. I still have some carded Mego figures when they first became collectors items, back when they tended to average around $20. I haven't checked to see what they are worth but it's probably a lot.

Not music videos, but music. One very specific moment I remember in Fun n Games in Framingham was during the hair band era and they were playing Still of the Night by Whitesnake. So they definitely had a PA system playing AOR type stuff from that era.

What made that time different was consumer electronics was new. Moving sprites around the screen with a joystick was new. Getting a home computer and poking hardware registers to generate sound and plot lines was new. Getting a walkman was new. Having a VHS deck with stillframe and timeshifting was new. Special effects blockbusters were new. Everything that we now take for granted was new. All it took was stuff like the swooshing 3D credits in Superman: The Movie to impress a kid. Today people yawn their way through the latest X-men sequel. We're totally desensitized, spoiled brats. The internet was the last great innovation. I caught my first glimpse of the internet way back in 1991 at my friend's college (RPI in Troy). Even then I knew it was a killer app, if only they let mere mortals use it. Everything since the mid 90s has been merely evolution in a fairly predictable way. Processors get faster, higher density memory and storage, graphics get incrementally better, mobile devices get more powerful. This is the same treadmill we've been on for 30 years. I think that's why, try as I might, I'm never able to really connect with modern gaming. It just seems so ephemeral. Games like Adventure are for the ages. Who cares about the latest FPS or driving game if there will just be another one just like it soon after? Hey, GenX had to live through the arab embargo. It's just that we weren't the ones paying the bills so it didn't seem to impact us. Not on our soil, but our troops were blown up in Lebanon in 1983. Then we had the case where we bombed Kadaffi. When we were growing up you would be stigmatized if you had a computer. You had to be an antisocial nerd. Now EVERYONE has become imprisoned by them. To a certain extent this is a monster that we helped legitimize. When I was growing up I only ever had one friend. I got the sh*t kicked out of me a few times. I have good memories from that time but it was not all good by a longshot.

He's been assimilated.

For the 2600, Phoenix and Journey Escape are both too easy.

Can someone redo this in a format emulators want to see?

The Adventurevision, even though it is worth a lot in large part because it's rare, has a lot more intrinsic playability than the Microvision.

That's pretty much what Pandora is, only with a PC architecture rather than Pandora's ARM. Good luck trying to close the case if you attempt something like that. The buttons will push down but the D pad will not. You have to design the case with that in mind for it to work.

I knew someone would eventually make a model of Pike in his Yes/No state. What a world we live in. Imagine giving that to a small kid "hey, Jonny, here's a guy horribly disabled by radiation! Laugh at him as he blinks his lights!"

Me too. How about someone hacking this TV into a real monitor with a small LCD in it?

I made a documentary about the Atari 2600. I see geocities is still up. Not sure how long

That's why most of us are in our late 30s. We don't have a very long memory before videogames came out. I'd say my favorite toy aside from videogames were Mego 8" figures. The end of the 8" clothed figures, brought on mostly by Kenner Star Wars toys, was tough to take growing up, but I got the tail end of that. It's no surprise why some companies like EMCE are making repros.

That depends on the company. The working conditions at Activision were pretty amazing.

Yeah, a big part of my motivation to make Stella at 20 had to do with envy. But then I started trying to code the 2600 myself and realized how hard it is, even with modern tools.

IMHO, these are the sorts of things that should be plugged into a 1090XL sort of card cage. It just seems kind of wrong to hang them on the cart port without a pass-through.

The Cosmic Ark art did a pretty good job of kit bashing. Some of the other boxes were way too obvious for what they were made from-- like the Falcon in Star Voyager.

The problem is that nobody really associates the Atari brand with anything modern. So having a Fuji symbol on a modern game doesn't really do anything. The brand has been debased to the point of irrelevance. Out of all the post-Tramiel iterations I think Hasbro made the best effort. They were racking up some good retro titles there. Frogger was a huge hit. The new Pong did well. It's just at the tail end with dogs like Galaga that they started jumping the shark.

What I'd really like to see is a tech demo of the A8 doing what Space Invaders does. 3 copies of two players, evenly spaced, but then shifting the whole width of the screen left and right.

You're trying to get these to render on the Harmony menu?

He has had a lot of serious medical problems. I'd cut him some slack, unlike 8-bit domain who really has no excuse.

The A8 just seemed slow because of the terrible Basic floating point routines. I remember the first time I played with TurboBasic. It was a revelation. Disabling ANTIC does speed up the A8 quite a bit. Bob Puff's arcer/unarcer routine was a good case of that, where it disabled everything but a one line text strip.

Does anyone know of a game that actually does this manual sprite copies thing on the A8? I've heard about this a million times but have never seen it done as far as I can tell. It seems like it would be about as much of a pain as getting the dragster to move around in 2600 Dragster.