zekish

quote: Originally posted by Nukey Shay: It's probably due to games that were released before the GTIA graphics processor. Ahhhh, sweet memories of Translator! My Robotron never worked, though. Musta been too old for even the magic of Translator. I guess Translator was sorta an old emulator, eh?

I'm assuming I have the newer version (for the 800XL) because those things you said about the older one aren't true in my version. But I'm not a huge fan of the version I have, either. I always thought it was too flickery, especially when the bad guys turn into ghosts and float around. It's so bad the music stops and everything flickers. And I can't stand the fact that there are, like, zones, for loss of a better term, that you have to be in before you can change direction. Sorta like there's an unseen grid you can move in. Know what I mean? Then again, the arcade version might have been the same but I can't recall. Re: Qix... I theeeeenk I have it on disk somewhere. If you tell me what the lesser version looks like I can go check my version to see if it's similar? Again, fair warning, I don't know what versions of anything I have. Everything I have came from BBS's.

Well, if it makes you feel better, my old band made an attempt at writing a MIDI version of it on our Ensoniq EPS16+. We had some samples in the keyboard and wanted to write the main music in as a sequence that would play as we played drums and guitar over it. I personally liked the sound it made while you played. It was sorta like ghost notes on a snare drum, or maybe light 16th notes on a hi hat. Very jazzy if you play it on drums. I wanted to have it so we'd play the main theme for a bit, then I'd go into the jazzy drum thing with ghost notes on the snare, and once in awhile we'd "score" and go into the music it played when you scored. After that, of course, it would lapse back into the ghost notes with the sounds of you and the ball bouncing off things and the players rubbing into each other. I guess you can say I thought it'd be neat to play the song like we were playing the game, randomly each performance. With a little help from the sampler and my drum triggers I'd have been able to strike a pad in mid performance and bring up the score music. That'd be our key to go into that part full bore. Okay, I've spent too much time on this post, too. Maybe we're both crazy.

Normally I don't wander into the 5200 boards cuz I never had or played one but I do have the 800XL so there are similarities present. The games were basically the same for both systems. I just wanted to point out that I believe the original name for Ballblazer was Ballblaster. The disk version I have is Ballblaster. I don't know about the start up screen and all but I could check later. Most of the stuff I have came from BBS's so I prolly have lots of promos. I believe we discussed this briefly in the 8-bit section.

The space bar was pause if the game featured a pause. Funny you should mention just getting interested in the 8-bits cuz I just got done playing with my 800XL. I haven't been on it in awhile. It was refreshing! XE or XL? I dunno. The XEs came after and had slightly more memory options, I believe. I can't recall the main differences, though. I'm an XL fanatic. I was playing Necromancer, Captain Beeble, Ms. Pacman, DK Junior, Drol, Boulder Dash, Miner 2049er, and Joust tonight. I might have missed a few in there somewhere. I even hit the space bar to pause Boulder Dash while I did laundry.

For lack of a better idea where to post this, I'll post it here. I went to a gaming thing in Howell, NJ a few weeks back. June 9th, in fact. I recall the date because I had a show to play that night in Long Branch (I'm in a punk band), which was just around the corner, basically. God, it's great when those traveling things work out! Anyways, me and my bass player were at the convention thing and we wanted to come back later, after we played, but we went on stage too late to get back to the thing. I was wondering if anyone from here was there? In case any of you were there, we were there from 4:30 until, hmmm, maybe 6? We were early. And if anyone was there, did my Time Pilot high score hold up or get spanked? I played the game when I came in the door and got 200,000. I coulda done better but I only played once. The initials woulda been ZTG. Another side note - Since I'm on off topics or slightly off topics, lemme say I've been lucky lately when traveling out to play shows. Two weeks in a row I got to play a Galaga machine either at the bar I was playing or the convention that was near (they had it at the Howell thing). I also played Time Pilot, which was a fave of mine. Annnnd, we played this ill-attended show in Wilkes Barre, PA (2 hour trip from my home) but it was worth it because they have a Gyruss machine. Couldn't make it to Earth but I got to Mars! Let's hope future shows I play yield more video game fun!

Heyyy, you went and talked to the ex-CEO of Imagic? So cool. I have a post on here that I posted a ways back, basically asking anyone who knew anything about Imagic if they could fill me in on some detail. I used to send letters back and forth to a one Kathy Boothe. She was very supportive of my desire to be a game designer some day and she said she wished she'd see my name on a package some day. The whole email correspondence started as a result of them being nice enough to let me know I hadn't won the Riddle of the Sphinx contest. Anyways, I ain't a designer (though a friend and me are in the process of writing an online IF (Interactive Fiction) game, ala Infocom) but I am a programmer and I work in php, sql, etc. So maybe I done her well in some respect. In a nutshell, I'd be interested in hearing what you know about Imagic, as it was one of my favorite companies, even though it was short lived. They had good games and they were fine folk. How and what are they all doing now? How'd the company start? Whatever ya got, if you have the time to relate. Thankish! -Z

Well, uh, to be a tad bit nicer about it, I agree to buy another. If memory serves me correctly (correct me if I'm wrong, folks) the cable is a mere RCA style cable, with the one end connected on the inside of the unit. No soldering needed, just pop it open and there's a female on the inside. I could be wrong, but I think that's how they're put together. If not, there's soldering to be done on the inside. Radio Shack should do it, or any other electronics store. -Zekish

F of i: That Fortress of Infinitude is a cool site! I spent time in the inventions/futuristic stuff part. Some of that stuff I'd heard of but a lot of it I haven't. Cool stuff. Technically, the site looks fine. = I didn't view the source or anything, though. If you use a GUI to do it, I can bet there's orphaned font tags and stuff in there. But as long as the site does what it's supposed to and looks good, why worry? I'll prolly check it out more later but I don't feel like hitting back on my browser right now and losing out on this reply. I shoulda left it open in another browser, eh?

Good points on everything. I just wanted to add a couple things off the top of my head. For one, with images there's so many things you can do to improve on them it's hard to even know where to start. Most folks don't consider editing the image so that it's the best it can be for web display. In Photoshop this is made easier by the "save for web" feature. You can adjust your jpeg and gif quality accordingly so the image will load faster and a host of other options, including changing your matte color (so it doesn't have those white edges on black backgrounds). This annoying edge thing is usually the fault of someone who grabs images off of other sites because they're too lazy to make their own. If someone took an image I made off of one of my sites, chances are they'd notice it was customized for that site. Then again, they prolly wouldn't notice and would use it anyway. Another thing about image filesize and load times - using a feature like "save for web" in Photoshop will show you the estimated load time for an image on different connection speeds. You will see that sometimes it is better to use a gif for a bigger image than a jpeg when you would have thought the other way around, and vice versa. Moe on images - Animated gifs If you're gonna use em, put them together right. There are many options for making an animated gif smaller in size, the most important one probably being to tell the gif to reuse the same background in the pic if it remains unchanged for so many frames. Don't redraw the same background over and over for 10 frames if it isn't necessary. There are many other tricks for animated gifs that I can't even recall at the moment. Point is, work with it and don't just throw something together. About javascript - don't use it unless you have to do something that you can't do otherwise. Not only is javascript different in all browsers, but some people don't have it turned on. Same with cookies. Only use them if necessary. If you are lucky enough to have server side scripting to use, such as PHP (my fave!), use that for scripting over javascript if you can, especially for browser detection. I was reading the source to this site the other day and saw this multiline javascript function that's used just to figure out what to display for the current date. There's a one line piece of PHP code that would do that. Note: I ain't picking on this site! I happen to think it looks quite nice. The point I'm trying to make is that if you have PHP or another script source available to you, use it instead of javascript because it will be more reliable, as it doesn't rely on the user to be set up to implement it. That's all for now, I suppose. Once again, I was not picking on this site in any way! I realized it kinda sounded that way after I typed most of this in, at least with the javascript thing, anyways. =

I have to say, that even though I never got around to getting a modem (I was young and could only bug mom and dad for so many peripherals), my friend had one and his cousin had one. The BBS's were it. I have TLSF on disk and have played it many a time. Really cool game. I had no idea it was supposed to be cart only. But then again, I never really thought about it much. Lord knows where half the games we got came from. Some of them still had working titles, such as Behind Jaggi Lines and Ballblaster. Some were hacked so you couldn't die. To this day, I wonder if my version of Quasimodo was screwed up or merely incomplete. I can't explain what happens when it gets to the level after the one with the bells (The Castle Wall, I think it was called). All I can say is, the game is over and you die with the quickness, and you can't do anything to prevent it. It's kind of like the little guy gets stuck running forward and that level is not playable. I've gotten off topic. Sorry!

Hiya. First off, this is my first time posting here so hello to all! Now, my question. I used to enjoy Imagic games a lot. I think they made some of the best games for the 2600, along with Activision, of course. I am interested in finding out as much as I can about them. I'm not sure why, but just thought it'd be nice. I'd be interested in finding out how and why they started up, who programmed for them, and so forth. I also have fond memories of when I entered the Riddle of the Sphinx contest. I didn't win, obviously, but it was one of the first contests I'd ever entered and it was nice of Imagic to get back to me to tell me that they got my entry but I wasn't chosen to be the winner, unfortunately. I really hadn't expected to hear from them unless I won. It's kind of like when you apply for a job and they call you to let you know you weren't hired but thanks anyway. Don't ask me why I remember but the letter was written by a lady named Kathy Boothe. I remember stupid stuff like that in life but not what I did two days ago. Go figure. Anyways, she was cool and I'd actually written back to her a few times, discussing this and that. She turned out to be quite cool. It was almost like I had a penpal for awhile there, hehe. When you are a young kid, it's a wonder when you have contact like that back and forth with a company that you idolize. I even sent them game ideas I had, hoping they might like what they saw and ask me to elaborate further. Kathy got back to me and said thanks, but no thanks but she wished that one day she'd pick up a box for a game one day and see that it was programmed by me, encouraging me to hang with it. I was too young to even know how games were made, that they were programmed using a special language and all. If I'd only known, I probably would have been enticed into learning programming before I had picked up an 800XL years down the road. Even with the 800XL, though, I'd only gotten most of BASIC down. Nowadays, I do programming for websites using PHP. I guess you could say I hung on to the programming aspect enough that I can leave my mark in spots, even if it isn't programming games. Back to Kathy and Imagic... I had saved my corresponence with her for years but I must have gotten rid of it, as I can't recall having seen it in recent times. So, I've been wondering what ever became of those fine folks at that company and what their story was. They were a class act and I'd like to know more about them. Anyone have any idea where I can find such info?