almightytodd

Yes, to get back on topic - cost was the initial barrier to using a DOS-based computer, not the complexity of learning commands for file management and launching programs. Backing all the way up to the initial release of the IBM 5150 PC; it was sold as a professional, commercial computer that just happened to fit on a desktop. And the way it was sold was part-by-part. The "base" price of the computer included the motherboard and the case; no power supply; no RAM; no CGA video card; no keyboard; no monitor; no disk drives... ...you even had to pay separately for the power cord! By the time you assembled a complete system that would boot up and display something on a monitor screen, you were in the neighborhood of $4,000 dollars ($4,000 1981 dollars...). For the first few years the most serious competition to IBM was the Apple II. (Remember that ad, "Welcome IBM - Seriously"). A lot of businesses and colleges used Apple II's to run VisiCalc. Money was the barrier to the first GUI-based computers too; remember, the "Lisa" was a $10,000 computer when it was introduced. That's why my first computer was the "First computer for under $100 - The Timex/Sinclair 1000"...

For me, the VCS/2600 combines two new life-altering technologies: Video Games and Microcomputers Video Games: For those of us who were there at the time, we remember that playing a coin-op video game was still a somewhat new phenomenon. Remember that only five years had passed since the introduction of coin-op Pong and the introduction of the VCS. Coin-op games were still very much in the Black & White era, when the VCS brought video games home and displayed them in color. The original pack-in cartridge was Combat; which used the arcade game "Tank" as a starting point to demonstrate how the player/missile graphics system in the VCS allowed for multiple game variations per cartridge. Microcomputers: The year of the Atari VCS was also the year of the microcomputer Triumvirate. While most American households could not spare the $600 cost of entry for a home computer ($2,500+ in today's dollars), the VCS was pricey, but do-able. The text above the cartridge slot said, "Video Computer System". And those of us who were paying attention knew that it wasn't just rhetoric; there really was an honest-to-gosh 6507 microprocessor in there; as Wikipedia explains, "essentially a 6502 chip in a smaller, cheaper 28-pin package". For those of us who lived close enough to a Radio Shack to spend a Saturday afternoon writing an "I'm thinking of a number between one and ten" BASIC language program on the 4K Model 1, until the manager kicked you out... going home afterwards and playing "Space War" on the family VCS would fill your head with fantasies of storing physics formulas inside a computer memory to calculate the motion vectors offset by the gravity of the "sun" in the center of the screen. And a final thought; this was "The Atari Age". There were some other names in coin-op video starting to appear, but there was this feeling that "Atari" was the original and the best. There was a definite connection between "Atari at the arcade" and "Atari in your living room". I can't think of another intersection of technology, entertainment, and a brand-name before or since.

Maybe Elio Motors should offer a free Atari VCS with every new pre-purchase...

Yeah Toast!

I think I reject the entire premise of the argument. The Atari 800 and 400 were designed to compete with the Apple II, which they did quite nicely... Each of the Atari 8-bit machines that followed were designed to be compatible with those that came before; allowing an Atari XEGS machine to play the same cartridge games that had been manufactured years before. The VIC-20, which came after the initial Atari 8-bit machines, was still inferior; with its only advantage being its sub-$300 price. And then when the C-64 came out two years later, it was incompatible with the VIC-20, and carried a price-tag close to the Atari 8-bits of that time.

I just can't get past this...

Is there a game called, "FUBAR"? There should be. Maybe an Atari Box exclusive?

...and the 2019 necro-bump award goes to... (I'm not knocking it, mind you. Much better to necro-bump than to start a new thread that has already been hashed and re-hashed over the years...)

I found this entry from the Wikipedia article mentioned above quite interesting: "On teletypewriters and early keyboards, holding down the Control key while pressing another key zeroed the leftmost two bits of the seven bits in the generated ASCII character." Take a look at this ASCII chart and it becomes clear why "Ctrl G" sounds the "bell" in a command line window Notice also that upper-case letters come first, followed by lower-case that are offset by 32. I was wondering if this gives a hint to the keyboard layout of many (most) of the 8-bit computers prior to IBM; look at the ASCII chart for the numbers 0 - 9 and their corresponding symbols. Now look at this TRS-80 keyboard: I was noticing this recently when I was playing with some emulators of the early Acorn 6502-based computers (Atom, BBC Micro, and Electron). I find it interesting that the same shift-patterns correspond to the keys for * - + < > , . / = I read somewhere else on Wikipedia that the IBM PC keyboard layout came from the Selectric typewriter layout. That would explain the change in the placement of characters like, "@ & ^ _ + * ( ) ".

Greetings and best wishes for the New Year everyone. Hope to see you again in this thread next year!

Hmmmm

This has been done before by Motorola/Oakley...

Good times

I'm glad to see continued interest in this game. If you haven't already, I strongly recommend you take a look at the Random Terrain website about E.T...

So... You do know that there was an Apple II clone computer called, "Pineapple", right?

Do they have one that comes with 4,230 games? ...they may have misunderstood people not buying desktop computers anymore, to mean the same as people not having desktop computers anymore.

Original Flashback - Curt Vendel's "proof of concept" NOAC-based plug-and-play to test the waters for interest Flashback 2 - Curt's "masterpiece"; the only "real" Atari 2600 redo - the printed circuit board has tracings and end-points for adding a cart-slot; mostly compatible with the original VCS, but some cart titles won't work (including some of the recent homebrews). Flashback 2+ - Like the "2", but with the Activision games removed and replaced with some sports titles Flashback 3 - 9: Emulation-based units by AtGames - Each iteration adds more games and features. Wired controllers are compatible with original Atari hardware. Wireless controllers on some models. The "Nine" connects to HDMI and has an SD card slot; includes Activision games "Pitfall" and "River Raid".

So... I've been taking a look back at the famous David H. Ahl "BASIC Computer Games" book from 1978. I was 18 when it came out; didn't have access to a computer, so I never bothered to buy it. I was aware of it though, and through the years I've browsed through it at bookstores and libraries. But now I decided to take a look back at it. Images of the pages of the book, and text files of the source code are available here: http://www.vintage-basic.net/games.html So of course, I started with the first featured program "Acey Ducey". My thought was I would edit the code to allow it to run on several of the different emulators I have, including Atari, Commodore, TRS/Radio Shack, Sinclair/Timex, and the Acorn line that I've recently discovered. But when I pasted the source code (http://www.vintage-basic.net/bcg/aceyducey.bas) into an editor and started looking at it, I quickly realized that this is a horrible example of computer programming. I remember looking at stuff like this years ago and thinking, "Wow, the guy who wrote this must be really smart to keep track of all these "goto" jumps and make the logic all work out". I know BASIC language has a reputation for not being a structured language, but it isn't just the language, it's how you use it. Take a look at this snippet: It's the exact same lines of code repeated for card "A" and card "B"! Later in the program, the author does this a third time for card "C". I guess he's never heard of a subroutine... So I decided that rather than simply getting the code to run on different platforms, I would re-write it in a structured way, using string variables instead of in-line literals, and avoiding the use of unconditional "goto's". The result is a version of the program that is a few lines shorter than the original, even with the addition of several comment lines, and breaking up multi-command program lines (PRINT:PRINT) into separate lines. Since the book states that each program example was written to be compatible with Microsoft BASIC, I used the "PC BASIC" emulator (http://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/) as my test platform and then ported the program with minor changes to some of the different 8-bit home computers I listed above. The PC BASIC emulator doesn't have a way to paste source code in, but what it does do is take a text file as an input parameter using drag-and-drop on the icon. Here's the source file: aceyducyV2.bas aceyducyV2.txt Next, I created modifications for some of the Commodore computers, since their versions were licensed from Microsoft. The one interesting change, is that all of the source code had to be converted to lower-case. But after that, for the 80-column PET models, it pretty much runs as-is (the orignal source does too). The VIC-20 was a challenge with its stretched-out 22×23 char/line screen layout. Both the Commodore and Atari 8-bit models use a "PRINT CHR$()" command to clear the screen (...really guys? Even the lowly ZX81 had a CLS command). For Commodore it's CHR$(147); for Atari it's CHR$(125). I'm also not a big fan of having borders around my screen, so I do some minor color changes to get rid of those. cv20aceyducyV2.bas Here's the program running on a VIC-20 emulator: ...and here's the same thing, but with the aspect ratio squashed, so it's actually readable: I think it's a shame that Commodore didn't consider some kind of option to have the 22 characters per line display in a narrow column in the middle of the screen instead of stretching them out. The main difference for the Atari 8-bits, is that the string arrays have to be dimensioned before they can be used. ATARIaceyducyV2.bas Here are some screenshots of the running program... ...and here's the C-64 version (in glorious black & white): c64aceyducyV2.bas ...now if I could just start getting a handle on 6502 Assembly Language...

My first exposure to BASIC was around 1969, when the local college had their annual "open house". It was kind of a, "Hi, what's your name?" program running on a teletype. It was fun, because you could take the print-out of your session home with you as a souvenir. Just this past year, I've become somewhat intrigued by the version of BASIC on the British Acorn Atom computer. It has several features that really set it apart - such as the ability to have inline Assembly Language code that uses the "LINK" command with a label to access the entry point. Here's an example program that converts Arabic numerals to Roman: This image was created by merging screenshots. Just for fun, I made an inverse copy of it, and I think it looks like a cash register receipt: Even without knowing much about how Assembly Language works, or even BASIC for that matter, you can kind of follow the flow of the logic. When I'm experimenting with a different version of BASIC, I have sort of my version of a "Hello World!" that I like to use. I display the numbers from zero to 255, and then the Hexadecimal equivalent, followed by the Binary equivalent, and then the ASCII character (if it's within a certain range). Here's my Atari 8-bit version: Notice that I can indent the code within a "for" loop while typing it in, but that is lost when I "LIST" the program. Now, here's the Acorn Atom version: Not only does the LISTing of this program retain the indentation, this version of BASIC also allows for the use of inverse letters as labels, so you can change line numbers around without having to go back and change all of your goto's/gosub's. But wait! There's more! There are short-hand equivalents for most commands; the program can be condensed even more... I'm aware that several versions of BASIC did this, but something I've never seen a "BASIC" do, is automatically convert decimal to hexadecimal. You simply enter "PRINT I" for decimal, and "PRINT &I" for hex... AND, the print-out is in neat columns with no additional formatting. The one draw-back to the "Atomulator" emulator I'm using, is there is no way to paste text into it. This is possible with the "Beeb" emulator for Acorn's next 6502-based computer, the "BBC Micro"; and that model also allows mixing of BASIC and Assembly. There's also an emulator for the next model, the Atom Electron - which was basically a simplified model of the BBC Micro created as a low-cost model to compete with the computers coming from Sinclair. Sadly, I haven't found an emulator for this one either that allows pasting in source code. You can play with an online JavaScript "Beeb" here: https://bbc.godbolt.org/ ...and there's an online "Elk" here: http://elkjs.azurewebsites.net/ Here's the output of this program on the Atari: ...and here's the output on the Atom:

So anyway... I thought I'd give Twitch a try. I created an account and then it offered suggestions of categories to try. I chose "Retro" and here's the channel that came up... I like how he's the self-proclaimed "video game player of the century"...

I like the "look" of the Atom and Electron emulators better than the Beeb... ...but Beeb is the only one that lets you paste in text from the clipboard. Hmmm...

Another delightful thread for me to follow...

This is so awesome! You guys are geniuses!

Built-in CRT ...Portrait orientation ...Monochrome ...Raster Hmmm...

I love the name of this... ...was the ZeroPage concept unique to the 6502? Or did other architectures also use it?