almightytodd

I love the look and the concept, but wouldn't the entire presentation layer need to be programmed on the client-side using whatever GUI platform is available?

I love it how retro-memes are used here at this retro gaming forum... ...how many licks you had to be there

There you go...

I liked that video. I wasn't in a financial position to get a Jaguar when it came out (even at less than $200), and my kids were already heavy into Nintendo and then SNES. When the N64 came out a while later, that was the 64-bit cartridge system my kids wanted. Also, at that point, I had a used 486 PC from work and I was able to play shareware games like Doom on that while the kids were at the TV with the Nintendo...

I experienced my first coin-op games at a Shakey's Pizza place in San Luis Obispo, California. They had "Pong" and "Space Race". I also remembered playing games on the Odyssey system that my friend had, but there was no sound and no on-screen scoring. I can't remember which I experienced first. It seems like it was some time in 1975 that an arcade opened up at the north end of town, filled with only Black & White games. I recall that they also had a few pinball machines and an Air Hockey table. I think the pinball machines disappeared as more space was needed for the new video games that came out almost monthly. The growth of video games between 1975 and 1980 was just crazy, along with the introduction of microcomputers and the first home-systems. Within a few years, southern California theme parks such as Magic Mountain, Knott's Berry Farm, and even Disneyland had arcades inside their parks; or in the case of Disneyland, the "Starcade". By the mid-80's I was married and already had two kids, so my video game playing was limited to the occasional machine I might find at a pizza joint or maybe a laundromat. If we were at a mall that had an arcade, I might walk through just to see what the latest games were like.

Another amazing work of art by Bob...

I've been emulating the British Acorn Atom computer after hearing about it on Randy Kindig's Floppy Days podcast. It's a 6502-based machine with some very interesting features including inline assembly language built into the BASIC interpreter. Here's a short example: (Add two 16 bit values together using low/high bytes) 10 DIM P(-1) 20[ 30 LDA #80 40 CLC 50 ADC #82 60 STA #84 70 LDA #81 80 ADC #83 90 STA #85 100 RTS 110] 120 END You assemble it by typing "RUN", then enter the input values as hexadecimals (the BASIC implementation has conversions back and forth): ?#80=#8C; ?#81=#00 ?#82=#96; ?#83=#00 They you type, " LINK TOP" to run it... This seems like a very nice way to "ease into" 6502 Assembler from a BASIC language starting point.

Maybe this topic should be renamed, "That new Smart Watch GAMEBAND?"

Ouch!

Am I understanding correctly that the keyboard buttons on the "Mini" aren't actually functional? Rather, you need to plug a PC keyboard into the USB port? If that's the case, I don't see any advantage of this over buying a Cloanto "C64 Forever" license... ...In fact, with the software, it's one less thing to "plug in" to my HDMI TV.

I will have no other Todds before me, for I am a jealous Todd...

But wait! Can we talk emulation? I'm curious about the Jag, but not ready to sink money into it. How much of a challenge is it to get set-up with an emulator and get ROM files for it? My feelings about this system are all over the map... ...it's not TRUE Bushnell era Atari, but it was the last Atari-branded home console system. It was a 64-bit system (sort of), but it had this bizarre mix of 16, 32, and 64-bit chips that did different things. It was (I guess) "blessed" by the Tramiels, but designed by Flare Technology. At this point in my life, I was programming Windows PCs (486) using Borland C++ and then I later moved to Microsoft Visual C++, but I couldn't afford to own anything for home use. I ended up with a hand-me-down Tandy 1000 and then a 486 when the company I worked for had moved on to Pentiums. I had stopped any hobby programming at home at this point, and my kids were playing Nintendo; then SNES, followed by a Nintendo 64. I was aware that the Jag was out there, but also Amigas (the true offspring of the Atari 8-bit machines), Macs, and the Atari ST line. But then came Play Station, X-Box, and Game Cube and I just sort of fell-out of interest in home consoles at that point. This was about the time I started to discover emulators for the Atari 2600 and 7800. And then there was MAME and MESS and ColecoVision, Classic 99, VICE, and on and on. I love reading through these forums and occasionally firing-up an emulator to try out some things, but I don't have a lot of time (or money) to invest into any of this stuff. Thanks for talking about the Jaguar here, and any information you could share about trying it out in emulation would be appreciated.

All the best to everyone in 2018!

Ah! Now we see the violence inherent in the system. COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE SYSTEM! HELP, HELP! I'M BEING REPRESSED!

I think it's okay as long as your you're correcting the grammar of a post that was correcting the grammar of another post... (Grammar correction recursion?) Oh, and I think "nazi" is supposed to be capitalized; "Nazi".

Okay, so now I'm confused. When I log onto my PC shortly before midnight on the 31st, am I supposed to come to this thread? Or do I go to the Knight Rider thread? Or... ...will we be updating the Coleco Chameleon thread now?

I maintain that if Coleco had properly executed on their vision of the Adam computer - if it had been released at a price $200 less; if it had been rock-solid reliable, our conversation about ColecoVision would be radically altered. A dedicated word processor system with a letter-quality printer, that was also a general-purpose computer, and an arcade-graphics quality home game console, all for less than $550... ...that would have been killer in 1983. Even if the game titles available for the CV had continued to be mediocre throughout 1984, hundreds of thousands of families who'd started out with a CV for Christmas in '83, would have upgraded to the full computer system for Christmas of '84, and that would have kept CV sales alive for hundreds of thousands more. Additional expansion options would have been inevitable; new floppy-drives, dedicated higher resolution monitors, memory expansion, and so-on. Computers were crazy expensive back then; getting into a very basic IBM or clone PC system with floppies and a printer required thousands of dollars. Even a fully expanded TRS-80 system with memory, floppies, and a letter-quality printer was thousands of dollars. The strategy of starting out with something useful for a few hundred dollars; a ColecoVision console, and then growing it into a full system for a few hundred more dollars at a time, was brilliant. But the marketing side promised more than the engineering could deliver. Coleco should have recognized that if a technology company like Texas Instruments was having so much trouble getting the right mix of technology and economy, this move of a toy company into technology was overly ambitious. Of course, hindsight is 20/20. I suspect that the thinking at Coleco was somewhere along the lines of, "To have any hope of winning the race, you've got to be in the starting blocks before the gun goes off".

Wow, I've never even heard of this machine, let alone seen one. How did I miss it? Motorola 6800 CPU and 9Kb RAM for about $700. Looks like it came out around the same time as the Atari 800/400 - possibly sooner. Maybe we need another thread to talk about why "this" machine is almost never brought up historically?

I agree with these sentiments. I would expand Bill's comments regarding the Adam computer, to say that you simply cannot talk about the ColecoVision without talking about the Adam. So many of Coleco's ideas about what a home computer should be were dead-on. All of the proponents of "home computers" at the time were pushing the idea of, "get this for your kids' education". But without a letter-quality printer, "your kids" had nothing of substance to bring to school the next day after hours in front of the computer "learning". The idea of applications on ROM cart; user data on a specialized cassette drive was brilliant too. The idea of "faster than regular cassette", "cheaper than floppy" was sound, if it could have been implemented reliably. The balance struck between game machine, word-processor, and general-purpose computer was sound. You have to remember that most "typing" during that era, was done on electric or electronic typewriters. In the end, the Adam that was produced was a couple hundred dollars too expensive, and way too unreliable, compared to the Adam that was promised. And yes, it didn't help that the company that was trying to produce this new technology, was funding the project from the sales of Cabbage Patch dolls. Mattel suffered from this same lack of focus, and to a degree even Atari - with their separate coin-op division.

I don't mind if you reference it and plug away!

I think perhaps there should be a separate topic for favorite B & W vector game, versus raster game, as I feel these are really two different categories... With this in mind: - Raster: Space Invaders - Vector: Space Wars This gives me another opportunity to shamelessly plug my YouTube video...

First, let me say that I love topics like this. It's so much fun to speculate with the clarity of perfect hindsight. I'm going to go in a radically different direction and propose that TI shouldn't have tried to compete in the "home computer" arena at all. Rather, I think they would have better leveraged their brand by creating a more science and engineering focused portable machine based on their 990 Series Mini computers. This could have competed quite nicely with what HP attempted with their Series 80 machines. As a producer of microcomputer chips, plus a science and engineering pedigree that included National Defense contracts, they could have brought legitimacy in more expensive computing gear that could be designed to interface with equipment such as multi-meters and oscilloscopes. This would have kept them out of the home-computer price wars with Atari, Commodore, Tandy, and eventually Coleco. When I look at the form-factor of the Kaypro II, I can very easily imagine that machine with Texas Instruments branding and a 16-bit TI chip-set; a portable version of what they eventually released as the DS990. I think it was TI's success with the Speak & Spell that fooled them into thinking they could compete successfully in the consumer electronics market. I think they could have "dabbled" in that market with simple, low-end devices like those later produced by Tomy and V-Tech. But if they'd devoted their main engineering (and marketing) thrust to a "real" microcomputer - a professional technology "instrument" (...I mean hey, it's right there in their NAME!), I think they might have gotten a foot-hold ahead of IBM in the legitimate "professional" micro-computing arena.

But it would just be ever so much more cool if it were an officially "blessed" and branded collectible product; even more so if they could bring in Woz to collaborate. The same would be true for a plug-and-play Lisa and Mac Classic. Apple could sell these things at huge margins (It would be expected - part of the identity of Apple as a premium brand). I know the leadership at Apple feels like they need to be always moving forward, but they would do well to observe how skillfully George Lucas made millions by repackaging the same three films over and over again, even as new material was being added to the established brand.

...Oh, and then Ferg went on to say how cool it would be if someone would come up with a portable Atari device, and then he basically described the ATGames Atari Flashback Portable that's all the rage here. That was fun!

I just listened to this and found it very enjoyable. I wasn't sure Ferg fully understood the role of the B & W switch, but maybe it just didn't express it well (...he might have also expanded on it in later episodes). I had a friend who had worse red/green color blindness than I do, and we had to switch to B & W mode on the color TV, because he couldn't tell the red and green biplanes apart. Another interesting podcast recently, is one from Freakonomics, discussing the pricing scheme for video games at Chuck E. Cheese's, which includes some discussion with Nolan Bushnell. http://freakonomics.com/podcast/chuck-e-cheeses-kid-can-learn-price-theory/