Retro Rogue

Keita being in Japan has nothing to do with anything, it's a website not a local store. Websites are international last I checked. Keita was originally going to shut the site down two years ago since the original co-designer left and he didn't have the time to do anything to maintain or update it. I volunteered to help and undertook a complete redesign which is still in progress. The current problem is with the server host. For some reason every month since August they've been declaring us as over our bandwidth. There's no way we suddenly became that popular. They've done nothing but screw up all the time. When they upgraded their servers they screwed up and mapped our DNS to another site which for some reason they took forever to correct. Then they corrected it and had us well past a gig over the storage limits when the site uses nowhere near that ammount. Turns out they had archived our directory twice. Then a month or two later our bandwidth problem started happening. Consequently we're looking for a new host that supports php and mysql, has the room we need and is cheap. I froze all further development (which includes a large searchable database being put together) until this is taken care of.

Perhaps in the beginning, but Ray Kassar demanded that Atari get into the computer business once he heard about Apple's first computer. I don't think people at Atari thought the system was going to be a game console for long. -Bry Based on my interviews with Joe Decuir, initially the 400 was meant to be the next gen game console, with a keyboard built in to allow direct programming of games on the console by developers. (this was of course the same concept intended when they moved to do Amiga). The 800 was inteded to be the actual high end "computer". The graphics and sound chips were also initially to be designed to be used in coin-op as well, but the graphics chip use was soon scrapped because of the differences in display technology in coin-op monitor vs. television. Only the Pokey made it over. The coin-op releases of the time period support that crossdivision idea with the use of the 6502 as well as Pokey - Missile Command, Centipede, Warlords and the vector games Lunar Lander, Asteroids, and BattleZone. The decision to get in to computers (and this game console and high end computer in general) actually started under Nolan's watch, not Ray's. (While it's been popularly reported that Nolan passed on the original Apple 1 in 1976, this later fact has been woefully under reported). The idea was (as someone else mentioned) the 2600 was to be only temporary, a bridge between the dedicated and programmable systems with a "higher end" game console to be released a few years later. What changed it was when Ray took over and had no desire to abandon the 2600 nor create competition for it. Keeping the two in development and then seeing Apple's success, he held a meeting with management and engineering where he pushed development towards "computers as appliances". Some of the views in the speech actually wound up offending some of the women at Atari (without going in to much detail). But in general, his view was much like Steve Jobs' view with the iMac some 20 years later. So the 400 was pushed as more of a low end introductory computer mainly for novice computer users (hopefully eventually leading people to upgrade to a full blown 800). The 800 was seen as the serious computer and business machine and considered high end. This is also what lead to the initial "closed system" view he had (much to the protests of engineering), where he viewed third party software development across the board (consoles and computers) in a negative manner. With the "computers as appliances" view, he felt all parts (including software) should come from the manufacturer (what else would you expect from a former towel man). Of course Ray was forced to change not long in to the computer market, as ultimately he had no control over it when talented hackers like John Harris started to explore and doccument the hardware. Likewise the success of Apple's support of third party development kinda kept hitting him over the head.

It really didn't have anything to do with faith. It had to do with Ray Kassar's decision to downplay everything else in order to not overtly "compete" with the 2600. Ray wanted to keep the 2600 as the flagship to squeeze as much life out as possible. After all it was his "feather in the cap", where his practices and management "rescued" it from the abyss. Of course depending on who you talk to, there were other reasons for the 2600 eventually taking off to the success that it enjoyed. However, having the management views that he's now infamously legendary for, the "non-competition" view ruled all. Hence the decision not to originally make the 5200 2600 compatible. It's also what lead to the 400 not being pushed in it's original game console idea (see next post).

Just saw this topic today when it got bumped. As a stock owner in Coleco at the time (I still have some of the quarterly reports), it was because the goal was pushed to the ADAM. The home computer market was seen as the future by many before the market crashed. Since the ADAM was to be able to play Colecovision cartridges, the Colecovision system was deemed unnecessary. The ADAM was of course released in two version to allow those with the Colecovision units to upgrade. The reason for the 2nd crash is a bit more involved than that. There are a number of factors that lead to the market shift, including oversaturation of competitors (Over 11 consoles on the market at once, plus the low end game computers).

Altair is an S-100 bus computer system designed by MIT's and made the cover of Popular Electronics, its the very cornerstone of personal computers. Pop a Dazzler graphics card into it, some serial cards, jack up the memory and install a plethoria of other cards into it and you've got a computer, disk drive, hard drives, even ethernet cards too... You've got the great great grand daddy of the personal computer, its a piece of history, or a really big payout on ebay. However you view. Curt That would be one Ed Roberts. If you guys are interested in a good book on the overall history of personal computing, check out Fire In The Valley. If you don't have the attention span to actually read a book any more, check out Pirates Of Silicon Valley a glossy dramatization of the founding of Apple and Microsoft that was originally broadcast on TBS back in '99. Some of the story includes Gates and Paul Allen's days programming BASIC for the Altair and their deals with MITS. I have an IMSAI 8080 I rescued from UW-Milwaukee when it was being tossed, that goes on display at the MGC every year. As far as what can be done, just like Curt and others said - it's a fully expandable 8 bit computer. It was designed look like a mini, hence the large boxy look and front panel display. Back in the days before most of you were spoiled by scripting languages, Java, C++, etc. people actually still programmed in binary, taking the time to learn the opcodes of the computer and write out your program code by hand. And they had to know what the different registers were, and it was actually usefull to know what was in them while the computer was running. Hence the front display. So yes, you could program with it, generate output, etc. if you were versed in that material (which most hobyists and system operators at the time were). You could add a plethora of output, input, and storage devices as they were developed over the next few years of that system's life, including other processor cards etc. S100 was an open architecture, so there was a decent third party market. The IMSAI I rescued had terminal connections (didn't take the VT100 terminal though), a keyboard, and the internal cards were several ram cards and an EPROM burner card.

That would be a hoot! Throw an HDTV tuner on the Radeon and you might be onto something. Of course, the processor would probably choke just trying to display the mouse...oh, wait, no mouse. Imagine storing your favorite episode of Icons on paper tape... Actually, IMSAI is still around (was bought out by one of the original employees). You can still get parts, etc. And the big news.......he developed a new updated version whose parts can also be used to upgrade the original model (still uses the S100 bus). Called the IMSAI Series 2. Some of the features: 50 MHz. Zilog eZ80® Acclaim! microprocessor (can address 16mb of memory), USB front panel, 32k flash memory (bios), 1 meg static, Back-panel interface connectors for PS/2 keyboard and mouse; IDE interface for hard drives, Memory Cards (when using our optional four-slot IDE Memory Card Reader), CD ROM, etc.; four RS-232 Serial Ports, two configurable for TTL interface; one parallel printer interface, System and software support available for CP/M, DOS interface, and ZS-DOS. Windows and Linux support on PC side.

Haven't seen one of those in years, I remember playing them (or trying to, since my age was still in the single digits) in the mid 70's at the airport. That cabinet style and typeface/bezel reminds me of the old hot wax mold machines as well.

Apparently you guy's haven't seen Blip which is tabletop sized EM version of pong.[/url]

At the risk of you having to kill your self, what's under the hood? Actual updated 2600/7800 on a chip, or more NES on a chip garbage with ported games? If the updates that "might" come out after this one do wind up having a cartridge adaptor, I would think at least the updates would have to be using actual updated 2600/7800 intenals.

Ahh, that was you and your girlfriend on the Fairchild. I was the guy who set it up for you, you should have said who you were. By the way, that was an original '76 VES as opposed to the renamed Channel F. The nameplate and controller tips are a little different. Sorry one of the controllers didn't work in one of the directions. Trying to figure out a way to repair it without splicing up the cable covering to bad.

It's the Village Voice, what did you expect? Didn't Xerox create the mouse and try to sell it to Atari? There actually was a mouse for the Atari called RATS but I don't think it ever saw wide distribution. Tempest No. As stated, Doug Engelbart invented the mouse back in the mid 60's. Some of the workers from his lab left when Xerox created their lab in the early 70's and brought the mouse concept with them. There's actually a nice picture of it in the book Fire in the Valley. Check out the link I posted, there's footage of his exciting demonstration. Networking, tiled windows, overlayed video feed, and more - all in 1968.

Just read that. Where did the author get that nonsensical rumor about Apple creating the mouse by turning an Atari Trak-ball over? I hate when non-technical people write articles like this. Doub Engelbart invented the mouse back in the mid 60's at SRI. Here's his 1968 demo for anyone that's interested.

I want to see a networked 8-bit Midi Maze display. That would be neat. Tempest Well, if Mark (or anyone) has a couple of Atari 8bits with the needed equipment, we'd be happy to have a small 8 bit midi-maze display right next to the 16 bit one in the computer/lan room.

Besides Lynx networks, don't forget we'll be having the original GenCon Midi-Maze display of networked ST's as well! About the only thing we'll be missing out of networked Atari systems is a battlesphere network of Jaguars like we had as Jagfest in 2001.

Except that nobody is using basic on Atari computers here. 5200Bas is a PC based program that allows you to program for the 5200 using it's (5200Bas) own version of Basic. It then saves it as assembly code (which can then be assembled in TASM). A homebrew author decided to create it to allow people not as familiar (or comfortable) with assembly to still be able to write games. Completely different than programming on an Atari system in Atari Basic.

Guy's don't forget to head on over to the Midwest Gaming Classic forum to vote on what games you want to be able to play in the museum area. The MGC Museum is one of the few museums where everything is available for play, and there will be actual seperate console and computer play areas in the museum (so don't forget to vote for computer games as well).

That was a regular production television model from Magnavox that's known among collectors and covered at Pong Story. It's not a seperate box on the back, it'ls literally built in to the television, and the controllers plug in to the back. I've seen them on Ebay before, but they usually go in the $150 range, not anywhere near what the buy it now is. And who knows what the reserve is then with that kind of buy it now price. Probably at least $200. Those controllers were OEM'd to other pong manufacturers, which is why you'll often find them seperate as well.

Well, I know the cost of living here compared to east and west coast makes MGC comparable to the first 4 points. And being it's in Milwaukee, we definitely have the cheap BEER point in the bag.

He seems pretty sincere when I talked with him the few times. On a related note, I'm still working on/kicking around restarting the original Milatari as a Milwaukee area video came/computer collectors group.

Head on over to the Midwest Gaming Classic forums to vote on what games you want to be able to play on your favorite consoles and computers this year. Everything at the Midwest Gaming Classic's museum will be playable, so now's your chance to say what you want to be able to play! The Midwest Gaming Classic is the midwest's largest electronic entertainment event, dedicated to console, computer, coin-op, and pinball entertainment from past to present! May 22nd and 23rd in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the Brookfield Sheraton. Visit ]MidwestGamingClassic.Com for more info.

That's the name I was trying to remember the other day! Thanks! I saw that movie on cable in the early 80's and still remember one of the kids getting stoned and lying on his bed with the AVM going on the TV. Was a cool movie at the time when the locked all the parents in the school.

That is a bit high for that. I can understand it reaching over $150 though because of the boxed The Voice (which is one of the rarer pieces in that condition) and the Odyssey Adventure magazines along with the boxed Master Strategy System games (All have a 6 rating at the O2 homepage), as well as Powerlords (a rare rated game). Plus, that appears to be the removeable joystick model which is less common than the hardwired one.

That is actually what the 400 was. It was originaly supposed to be the actual replacement to the 2600, with the idea of a game console with a keyboard. What became known as the 800 was to be the serious high end computer. Kassar didn't want to take away from the 2600's marketing steam at the time and also had the idea of pushing the "computer as appliance" thing, even going as far as talking about marketing it in different colors to appeal to women (about 19 years before the IMAC). So instead it became pushed as the low end computer system, "little brother" to what became known as the 800. The original concept of a console with an actual keyboard (for programmers to be able to program the games directly on it as well) was carried through eventually at Amiga. At first with the initial proto designs (which were nixed by the time of Commodore), and eventually realized in the Amiga 500 design. When I talked to Leonard Tramiel, he mentioned that the XEGS was their attempt to do the 5200 "right".

Actually, there's 7 including the duo set. Three released: Area 51 (4 megs ram) Maximum Force (6 megs ram) Area 51/Maximum Force Duo And 4 prototypes: 3 on 3 Basketball Fishing Frenzy (which you called "freeze that fish", rom based) Freeze (which is rom based, not hard drive based) Vicious Circle Area 51 = 68EC020 Maximum Force and all the prototypes = R3000 Both Primal Rage and T-Mek used the GT Hardware system (68020 and CAGE audio), so if Primal Rage was ported over to the Jag hardware for the home then T-Mek would have been feasible as well. On a side note, Area 51: Site 4 did not use Jag hardware but instead used a literal PC board made by Cyrix.