almightytodd

Well wait a second... ...you bring up a good point. Is the TI wrapped in aluminum? Or is it in fact stainless steel?

That's awesome that you did that! I did the same thing at my local Radio Shack! I bought the BASIC language tutorial book and everything. I would study it at home, then spend hours on a Saturday in the store typing in a "I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 10, can you guess it?" program.

It's here too, and you can "flip" through the pages...

My recollection, was that in the U.S., the 1040 ST was the first computer with a megabyte of RAM for under $1,000... ...but it was still "just" under $1,000 for a computer... ...in 1985 dollars (Thats over $2,200 2016 dollars!). So what would you do with this computer? Play games with it? If this year... ...Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo announced a new $2,000 game console... ...but it's a REALLY good console, but it's $2,000... ...how well would it sell? I recall there was an add-in card that would let you run Macintosh software (...but you needed a "grey-market" ROM for it?) and there was some software or something that let you run IBM compatible DOS programs on it... ...I don't know. It did Desktop Publishing. It had MIDI so musicians could use it for sequencing synthesizer music... Now to be fair, I think a decent Macintosh system was still well over $2,000 and IBM compatibles were in the range of $2,000 to $8,000 depending on the configuration. It was like, this was all brand new technology in search of ways to create a competitive business advantage over rival businesses that were slow to embrace the new technology. In our current era of $50 Kindle Fires, Raspberry Pi's, and the $9 "CHIP", I think it's easy to forget that in the early years of personal computing, you either had to be an entrepreneur taking a gamble, a fairly wealthy person with spare money to spend, or someone so passionate about new technology that you were willing to shift your priorities and spend ridiculous amounts of money to own the computers of this era. I think the media coverage was a reflection of the economic realities of the time.

I thought I had replied to this thread ages ago, telling Joe how impressed I am with this awesome interpretation, but it doesn't seem to be coming back into "My Content". So I may be repeating myself when I say that the approach to use vertical scrolling to compensate as a way of playing a portrait-oriented arcade on a landscape-oriented home console is brilliant! I know some are anxious to get the final product, but I just love being along for the ride...

Awesome!

I've been giving a lot of thought to the early 8-bit home computers lately. Although our family bought the original 1977 Atari Heavy Sixer video-game console; for computers, I found myself drawn to the TRS-80. Its monochrome text display (...okay, I didn't know it was simply a black-and-white RCA television) seemed to make it more of a "real" computer than something you "hooked up to your television". But then again, the video-display terminal was at that time, still a relatively new development. I haven't been able to track down the price of a DEC VT52 computer terminal when it was introduced in 1975, but the 1980 price was still over $1,300. So in 1977, when Radio Shack and Commodore offered complete computer systems for under $1,000 including video monitors, it was quite remarkable. I wandered into a computer store in early 1981 and the sales associate demonstrated how the Atari 800 could start a program instantly, like "Star Raiders" on cartridge, instead of having to wait for a slow floppy-drive or even slower cassette. Still, it made me wonder if an Atari computer wasn't so much a computer that used cartridges, as much as it was a cartridge-based video-game system that had a computer keyboard. Later that year, I visited that same store when the IBM 5150 "PC" came out, and noted that to put together a whole PC "system" - with floppy drives, monitor, keyboard, RAM, and power-supply (...yes, sold separately), you were looking at more like $4,000 (To be fair, Radio Shack's 1981 Model II "business computer" had a price tag close to that, and they offered a letter-quality daisy-wheel printer that cost almost $2,000 all by itself; pages 172-173). I've been fooling around with the VICE Commodore emulator, as well as the C64 Forever free-version (...which appears to be an enhanced setup/front-end to VICE, with some bundled software titles). Again - it "feels" more like a game machine than an actual computer. That seems to be echoed in the decision to market the C64 Direct-to-TV as a joystick plug-and-play device for games, instead of something with a keyboard. I feel a little bit sad that Commodore's 80-column 8-bit business machines never gained traction; I think they could have offered small-businesses computing power at half the price of what IBM and even the early PC clones provided, if they could have gotten the marketing right. But I can't feel too sad for the company that had the best-selling computer of all time in the C-64. Jack Tramiel is such a polarizing figure; I can't say whether he saved Atari or ruined it - or perhaps he was just trying to run it as best he could, while the world was moving on. Radio Shack computers suffered a similar fate and now the Radio Shack brand itself is on its last legs. The irony is that I think the Coleco Adam could have been the most useful home computer of that era, if they hadn't failed in the execution. Having a letter-quality printer at the center of their strategy was actually brilliant in the argument for "this machine can help your kids with their homework". This was happening near the end of an era where there were girls at college supplementing their income by typing term papers for the guys, because typing "wasn't something that men did". Being a typist was a specialized skill. The typewriter wasn't nearly as forgiving as the word-processor and noticing a mistake in the middle of a typed-page meant doing the whole thing all over again. I've been thinking about and working on this post over the course of hours and I've gone back and made revisions repeatedly - this would have been much more difficult if I had to resort to typing on a typewriter or writing it out long-hand. And without the Internet, and the AtariAge website, how would I share it? Another curiosity - or maybe an irony; the computer I'm using is hooked up to a TV... ...a 22" 1080p HDTV that I'm using for a monitor. And my primary use for this machine is entertainment; playing classic games via emulation, watching video content and social networking. So it seems that I've come full-circle; I have a computer, in my home - a "home computer", that's hooked up to my TV. Through the magic of emulation, I can experience owning an entire collection of technology from the past; home computers, game consoles, coin-op arcade machines, and libraries of software that if tallied up at their original selling prices, would be worth tens of thousands of dollars. It's a nice escape from a world filled with violence, injustice, strife and unrest. I'd enjoy reading your thoughts on the matter...

Happy New Year everyone. I'm glad to see this thread still running...

It could be done, but it won't be done - there's no viable business model where it makes a profit. There are many here with more knowledge than I have to explain why. But as long as we're dreaming... 1. Black & White era coin-op games plug and play 2. Vector graphics coin-op games for plug and play into your HDMI display 3. Steve Jobs 1984 edition Macintosh flashback (for the rest of us... ...who didn't have a spare $1,500 lying around in 1984) (apologies to those of you who've noticed that I keep posting these same dreams every time someone brings this up)

Um, how about Flash Jazz Cat's 8-bit GUI in ROM? Duh!

Hey, thanks so much for the interest in this topic. It gives me another opportunity to resurrect this thread...

You should probably also look at this thread...

Like it or not, KISS is part of the Atari Age. I'm pretty sure there are a couple of Kiss hacks out there - the Journey game and Space Invaders.

When I first saw the coin-op version of this game back in the day, I was amazed at the sophistication of the graphics and the animation. It was like "playing" an interactive cartoon.

The video looks awesome but I'm having trouble figuring out the right settings to run it in Altirra... ...maybe it's time to RTFM...

PONG... ...immediately followed by Space Race at a Shakey's Pizza Parlor in San Luis Obispo, California

I always enjoy these kinds of calm, reasoned discussions.

Here's the kind of thing I'd like to see in an HDMI plug-and-play flashback unit... (These are 720p mock-ups) ...of course I realize it could never happen - too many IP owners to track down. But one can dream...

There's a setting for that... It's under Options > Input Settings

The "MOST DELUSIONAL" thing? Really? Have you read the Knightrider thread?

Post pictures please! Prove it! ...easily done

I did some more exploring with my Flashback today, using the PDF Manuals provided by this thread. I feel like I have a lot of unresolved feelings about Intellivision and these experiences of trying out the games is bringing them back. At the time the Intellivision system was starting to hit the stores in a big way, I was working at an electronics repair shop as an apprentice fixing car stereos, home audio equipment and similar pieces of gear. The guy who was teaching me was very enthusiastic about Intellivision. I was from an Atari family, with an original 1977 Heavy Sixer (I still have it), but within a year I would be married and moving to another state to attend college, so it wasn't like I was going to be coming up with the 300 bucks to buy one even if I was all psyched about Mattel ushering the future of home computing electronics. I also felt there was a little bit of snootiness coming from the Mattel crowd... ...Intellivision was the Mercedes to Atari's "Chevy" - it was going to grow beyond a mere home video game system and become the center of home computing and entertainment for the enlightened family of the future. I felt a lot of a similar vibe from Apple in 1984 when they introduced Macintosh - the "Computer for the Rest of Us"... ...those of us who have spare cash in the 2015 equivalent of about $10,000. Of course, to be fair, businesses that were buying IBM compatibles around that time were spending between two and five thousand dollars for their systems, and Macintosh was supposed to be a professional computer system (...even though at the time of its release, there wasn't any software to support that usage model)... ...but I digress. I'm fascinated by the relationship between the Intellivision CPU and the PDP-11. I'm wondering if Mattel was thinking there would be a bunch of hungry, enthusiastic Computer Science grads with PDP programming experience who would jump in and start churning out more software once Intellivision was firmly established in households across America... The quality of the graphics seems inconsistent across games. I look at games like "Space Armada", "Shark Shark!", and "Astrosmash" and they're not that impressive to me. On the other hand, a lot of the games have graphics that seem more reminiscent of what we'd be seeing on Commodore 64 computers and NES a few years later - Inty games such as "Auto Racing", "B-17 Bomber" and "Motocross". The graphics in "Motocross" in particular, look every bit as good as those found in Nintendo's "Excitebike" - maybe even a little better. But I can't seem to get the controller to be responsive enough to have as enjoyable a game-play experience on the Intellivision compared to playing NES on PC emulation using the keyboard arrow-keys. Is the flaw here in the Flashback implementation? Or was the experience equally frustrating on the real hardware? I never could get used to using my thumbs to control everything on an NES the way I used an Atari joystick or a computer keyboard. For a lot of games in emulation (MAME Asteroids, for example) keyboard button-pushes feel the most natural and similar to how I remember the arcade game controls working. Ultimately, the Intellivision feels to me, like an astonishing level of unrealized potential. If the full keyboard component had become available as originally envisioned, and the system had continued to grow and expand, it does not seem beyond the realm of possibility that it could have eventually been a full Unix system with hard-drive, connected to a real 80-column monitor, and running serious software. But even without the collapse of the home video game market in '83/'84, it would have been a hard-sell for serious computer users to accept an offering from a toy company to go in that direction. I think Exidy faced similar challenges for their "Sorcerer" computer, which from what I can see, seems to have been a solid piece of gear. At the end of the day, I still seem to find it to be more "fun" to play a short list of my favorite Atari 2600 games over-and-over. It may be years of bias, or a mind-set that just "wants" Atari to be the more appealing game system, or it may be the excitement and enthusiasm surrounding the Atari home-brew scene of the past ten years. Sorry for the long post, but these thoughts have been simmering over the past several months...

At one time I had a Z80/CP/M emulator that included Zork! in the distribution of included software. In a way, some of the early Z80-based computers of the 1970's seemed more like "real" computers to me - as opposed to machines that hooked up to your TV set - which seemed more like "video game machines with a keyboard" (...I'm talking about PET and TRS-80 mostly). I remember when the Commodore 128 was announced, part of the appeal to me was that it could be hooked up to a "real" 80-column monitor and run CP/M. (...I've only recently made the connection between the 80-column text monitor format and the 80-columns found on IBM punch cards since the early 1930s...). I've also only recently noticed how the IMSAI 8080 looked so similar to the PDP mini-computers of the time (...the 8 and 11 in particular). Text-based games on these machines also seemed to be more in the spirit of "portable code" that didn't require specific video hardware the way that video game playing on an Atari computer would be a wildly different experience compared to say, a TI-99/4A. I remain nostalgic and interested in all of this... ...but it has the same problem for me that modern gaming does - it requires a level of investment in time that is beyond what I want to devote to this.

Check out "Guitar George", ...He knows all the "chords"...