Ward Shrake

Pretty cool that they did what they did; even if it's just an exploratory dig, in a sense; and didn't satisfy everyone's cravings. (And even if the gist of what they found was pretty much known to long-time Atari fans, all along.) Cool to see (as others have recently mentioned) solid confirmation that it wasn't just that one specific cartridge that was buried. Kinda sad, at the same time ... but cool and interesting, on some level, to see that a bunch of different titles were all buried there when the market switched; and when things like the Commodore 64 home computer (and many other much-more-powerful machines) were becoming more and more popular, on the home entertainment / gaming market at the time. I for one loved "the crash" and the resulting super-low prices it caused in places like Toys R Us, once upon a time. Lastly: others may have mentioned these points already, but one reason that particular city in New Mexico probably did some of what they did, contract-wise, might relate to the state's constitution having banned any governmental agency being able to "donate" anything of value to pretty much anyone or any organization. From my perspective (as a person who has lived in another small town in New Mexico for about a dozen years now) that's what it sounded like the city's attorney may have been talking about; in those quotes a few pages back. Once people started talking about how valuable this stuff might be, I could see a municipality's attorney warning city officials that they could possibly get into some potential hot water, legally speaking. The purpose of that law was basically (as I understand it, anyway; as a non-lawyer) to try to cut down on governmental corruption and such, and doesn't really apply to something as one-off as this scenario ... but still, you'd think that the job of a municipal attorney would be to warn their clients about potential dangers ... even if the dangers in question are not something super-likely to happen. (Keeping in mind that global attention being put on people digging up trash from a landfill isn't super-likely, either: it's worth a mention, I'd think, to the municipal clients! Kind of an "If that can happen, then maybe this could, too; so ..." sorta thing.) As for some of the earliest comments in this particular thread: some doubt was cast on how the old newspapers that Spud had scanned in or whatever, actually looked. (Questions politely came up as to print quality / layout / etc. and how much it didn't look like a big, professional newspaper might look; from a much more populous place. Or how a writer might also be a photographer -- as if that wouldn't happen, normally.) Just for future reference, when the next mystery comes up: a lot of small towns in this state have newspapers which would probably seem like some random high school's paper, in terms of production quality -- even now, I mean. Heck, I worked for a summer around 2008 at a now-defunct (after 124 years in print) newspaper called the Raton Range. Their printing presses would never cooperate very well when you tried to run color, but were good enough / reliable enough in black and white that a few smaller papers, from 100 miles away or so, would bring their hand-laid-up pages to us. We'd use a heated wax device to stick their (too small, by our standards) pages onto larger sheets, set up for the system we used for our twice-weekly newspaper. We'd use a process camera and film negatives and all of that Old School stuff, in all of those cases. Tools that all the big cities presumably dumped ages ago!? And we'd print their small print runs for them, in a matter of minutes. They'd carry the printed materials back to their home city; all loaded up in their personal cars or whatever. The drive to get to us was a lot more time spent, than the actual print run itself took! But it was economical for them, to not have to own much machinery. Back when I lived in places like Los Angeles, stuff like that would be unheard of -- but out here in the middle of nowhere, people still use whatever's available. And yeah, writers often take their own photos; even these days. Anyway ... kinda cool seeing all that stuff being dug up ... while being kinda sad, too. And definitely weird, that technology that's only a few decades old, and is still fresh in many of our memories, is now "archaeology" in a very literal sense! (Those t-shirts definitely rock, by the way!)

That's not it. Sorry. Thanks for eliminating what will probably become the most-common "false hit" for proper game identification. . . Does anyone else have better, more-solid information on what the game's correct name is? . . Or, would someone here point some fans of 1980s japanese-made games at this thread, to get their feedback on what the game's name might be? Thanks.

What we're looking for is the name of the exact game, so we can go look at the original, and possibly play it. So ... can anyone be helpful and ID the original game? Please? Thanks!

Adam asked me to make and upload some screen shots of the "Mirror Devil World" game ... so, here are some screen captures. Title screen: Sort of a round-beginning or intro screen, after start is pressed: A shot of the game's first level, while the game is in play. (Your little guy is at the bottom center of the screen; with his back to the viewer.) Another shot of the first level, while the game is in play. (Your little guy has created a bridge, and moved to the top, in front of a mirror; and he or she or whatever is looking at him/her/whateverself in the mirror.) So, to repeat / paraphrase Adam's question ... is the game seen in these screen captures based on some other game? If so, what's that game's name? Any details of what this game might have been based on, or was a copy of, would be helpful to Adam and his son. Thanks!

Way, way too much time is spent endlessly talking about how grand and glorious all sorts of stuff is, in the Classic Gaming World ... and after 30 years of hearing it, yeah, it gets old! Been there, seen that, got the t-shirts(s)! The reality is that a lot of stuff sucked. Some stuff, it's hard to tell if it sucked or not ... because ads ran, but from the prices charged and other factors, it seems unlikely more than a handful of people ever shelled out the cash. Sci-Fi author Ted Sturgeon once famously said something to the effect that yeah, ninety percent of science fiction stories were crud ... because ninety percent of just about anything is crud. (See Wikipedia for the exact quotes.) In any given field or possible way of categorizing things, you end up with a small percentage of excellent items; a small percentage of absolutely awful ones; and a LOT of stuff that's just basically sitting there, in the middle. This is why it's not only challenging, but d*mn near impossible to keep inventing (truly) new things to say, that are not only of a positive nature, and informative, but also entertaining. Something worth reading; let alone writing! I like old games. I prefer the "one screen, forever" type of gameplay, most of the time. If you can win the game, then I'm probably not going to bother playing it. That's just me. That's just the kind of thing that I personally want. But, brothers and sisters, I'm hear to tell you: it's a royal pain in the arse to keep trying to invent reasons why one obscure old console or home computer or other should have "made it big" in the marketplace ... but, for reasons some folks will jump up and down over and loudly chant (as if volume was interchangeable with facts or logic), and others will have a more skeptical outlook towards ... well, frankly, some systems basically deserved their quick, quiet deaths! (Or, some might argue, their long, lingering, "everyone know's it's coming" exits from the marketplace.) I won't declare Classic Gaming dead, but it does occur to me to wonder if maybe it needs better health insurance. When three out of the last four CGE expo's failed to happen (if memory serves), and classic arcades are going under ... Keep in mind that the people looking at the seedy underbelly of things, here, are writing about the smaller systems (in terms of popularity). Folks in the Atari Mainstream may think we're just doom and gloom types ... because their insulated little world hasn't felt any major shocks (that I'm aware of?) ... but those of us who can hear the crickets chirping, over the din of all the fans clamoring for more games and more info about the "also ran" game systems ... in other words, to wrap this up quickly: we who inhabit the lower decks question moisture, when it's well past our ankles, and knees, and is rising above our chests. The folks on the upper decks don't even have their little toes wet, yet, perhaps ... but that doesn't mean that things will always stay the same. For that matter, they never did stay the same. Guys like myself can remember back, just fifteen years ago ... and it'd take a small book just to set the record straight as far as what folks think happened then, that didn't; because the technology just wasn't advanced enough to allow the things that today's users take for granted. Example: I was archiving the cartridge library for the VIC-20 before things like emulation existed, or web sites with pictures were the least bit common! Paul LeBrasse and I did what we did, over about a two year period; averaging about one new game or utility cart per week -- each, mind you; so, two per week total -- and that wasn't by just taking our personal libraries of carts, and dumping them. We had to literally search the globe just to find every one of those old carts ... because, it really seemed at the time, that if we didn't, most of that old stuff was going to Landfill City! And people today probably just assume that we went onto eBay, and bid on stuff!? Ummm ... since eBay didn't exist, no, that's not how things happened. We exchanged literally thousands of e-mails with people all over the planet, trying to track down the truth behind whether Cart XYZ existed. Only to pay someone (via snail mail!) for that cart ... only to find that even the most knowledgeable people back then mistook an MPT-03 cart for a VIC-20 cart, and sold it to you as if it was some unheard of VIC-20 cart ... and once you figure out that's what happened, everyone involved has to sit around, scratching their heads, and wonder what the h*ll this odd-ball cart is, that looks like the same pin set-up as a VIC-20 cart ... but that, internally, isn't even remotely like a VIC-20 anything! Repeat sending out dozens if not a hundred e-mails, by yourself, for every VIC-20 cart that I or Paul LeBrasse tracked down and archived, and then, after that week's (totally unpaid!) "work" ... repeat the whole process a hundred times. Then have some rude (insert two hours of cussing) individual tell you, after a couple of years of work like that, that if you hadn't have done it, someone else would have ... and you'll have some TINY idea of why guys like me "are angry". Not to make things too unpleasant for previous posters, but when a person like me writes something genuinely new, and gets it published for all and sundry to read ... only to be met with one person mistakenly believing there's nothing of interest in regards to what you just wrote, from a certain era ... well, that bites, but to then have several other folks agree with that mistake (that there's nothing of that sort in the issue in question; even though there is!!!) ... I don't know whether to laugh or cry, at situations like that. Guess I'm just glad I'm 99% retired, these days! (My other hobbies take nowhere near as much work, and the appreciation factor is orders of magnitude greater / faster.) Folks, if you want genuinely new stuff to read, THEN START ACTUALLY READING EVERYTHING THAT'S HANDED TO YOU! (I'll just say that I find that younger people's attention spans can be measured in milliseconds, these days. Sigh.) People have already forgotten the answers to things that only happened ten years ago. (Like why the VIC CD-ROM project had started: because most people had never seen the actual carts, or ads, or whatever; and suddenly things like full color photos were possible -- albeit only after expensive computer upgrades! -- on a person's personal computer. And flatbed scanners got down to the price range that average mortals could afford, without hocking all they owned.) Back then, a single picture on the front page of a small web site, had people whining (that it was fat-ware). Just a short fifteen years later, we're in a world where sending small-format movies to one another, over the Internet, is absolutely common; and people with fast connections can download whole music libraries, or even full studio movies. But guys like Paul and I were using e-mail and FTP services, over telephone lines -- I still remember mounting an external 9600 baud modem in a spare drive bay slot, at one point -- and we were paying for our internet time by the hour, mind you! -- and all because that's all that the average nerdy person had available to them, at that time. (And even then, it wasn't easy: I can remember one month's phone bill costing me $200 USD!) Too many people, these days, substitute what is true, today, for what they mistakenly think was true then ... which is fine, except that when they're calling themselves historians as they do it, it takes on an unintended comic tone! People think that the earliest I'net archiving efforts happened because of emulation; and that web sites existed. Not true! Back in the early days -- just 15 years ago! -- guys like me, that were going out of their way to wait to see if Windoze 95 was going to be all it was advertised to be, and who were still clinging to Windows 3.1 as their basic OS (I actually still considered DOS to be my main operating system, in the early to mid 1990s) ... well, anyway, most of what I hear being discussed today isn't even remotely the situation that existed, or why folks like me did what we did. So, I find it easy to believe that folks that were doing their thing back in the 1980s are very misunderstood, as well. Truthfully, there are times when I feel like the thousand incorrect assumptions with the other person's questions or comments would take so d*mned long to break down and "fix," before I could even "simply" reply to what they said -- well, it gets to be too pointless of busy work; and, these days, I simply shrug and don't bother replying. It's not that different, in a sense, from waking up one day to find out you're one of the only people left, from some old race of beings; and the new beings don't understand anything you try to tell them. Sooner or later, you quit trying. Guess that makes me a dinosaur. C'est la vie! (In my other hobbies, that's not the case at all; which is fabulous!) In any case ... you racka-frakkin' darned whipper-snappers don't know the pain of having to walk to school in huge snowstorms ... miles and miles of endless walking, I tells ya! ... and uphill, both ways! -- Ward Shrake --

Fabulous! Glad to hear it! We can expect one or more RTM articles from you, then, before the year is out?

Like most sites/publications they are probably dependent on material that is donated to their magazine so it is probably a case of no one wrote anything for them about 80's home consoles and games. That, yes ... but maybe it's also a case of "what is there left to say, after nearly 30 years of talking about a given subject?" Sooner or later, any topic is bound to be "talked out". It's inevitable. I am primarily posting because I'm a bit confused about the wording of the first post, quoted above. I wrote an article about a late-1970s / early 1980s game console slash home computer that virtually no one has ever heard of, or wrote about, online ... and here's a reader implying that they read the whole issue, and found no content of that type. It's there ... that particular reader just failed to find it, and read it. That's hardly the online magazine's fault! I can only assume that since another post complained about the tone of one (other, different) article, and the tone of my article wasn't "Oh Golly Gee, what a fabulously wonderful old gaming system!" ... that the complaint is that some folks only want to read about game systems that were massively popular? ... or, that no writer is allowed to voice the ugly truth that some game systems never became more widely popular than they did, for the simple reason that they were never all that good in the first place? In every horse race, there's only one horse that's going to win first place. The odds of any horse winning vary. In some races, certain horses had virtually no statistical chance of winning that particular race, at that point in time. And there are usually a lot of very legitimate reasons why there's a big difference in each horse's odds of winning. Speaking only for myself: more and more, I'm losing interest in the horses that, statistically, really shouldn't have been in a particular race in the first place. But by the same token, talking about "wasn't that the greatest race ever seen, anywhere on earth?" isn't something that can really sustain (interesting!) conversation, for three decades plus. We may be seeing the beginnings of the end of an era. An era when the positive things have already been said, many many many times before. And where, if people want to be entertained with NEW info, a different tone is going to be common. It's not a new situation, really. Even the big magazines like Electronic Games had their fair share of things to say, of a less-than-complimentary nature, about certain consumer products. Some games kick butt. Recently, I'm rediscovering how fun certain old games were to play ... and why they still are fun. But, realistically, quite a few games should have stayed in development, for another six months. That period of tuning up a functional game, and making it into a FUN game, was skipped or short-changed, far too often. And, realisictically, some games (and/or gaming hardware) could have not bothered to show up, in the marketplace, at all. Which systems? Well, that's a matter for personal opinion. But the biggies still are; and the others ... well ... As a writer, I'd rather retain my credibility, by calling an iffy game or console or situation, just that. As a reader, there's only so many times you can hear puffed-up comments, before they turn into background noise. -- Ward Shrake -- P.S. -- This isn't intended as some sort of flame bait. Just food for thought. If anyone's tempted to react as if it were flame bait, I'd gently ask that they push away from the keyboard, and go find a favorite game, and go play it. If, after a long period of doing that, you still feel some need to comment ... write up an article about it, and submit it to Retrogaming Times Monthly. Because, as noted above ... they're dependent on what writers write, and then send in. (One possible suggested topic: "Classic Gaming is dead. Long live Classic Gaming!" ... with some folks arguing that it died, or is in the process of dying; and others arguing -- hopefully, realistically and logically -- the other way.)

Never mind ... we figured it out. "Starship Titanic" was the name of the game, and there was a Mac version. So, my friend is happy again.

I'm hoping someone can come up with a game's name, based on a description. This is for a friend of mine, who isn't really a gamer, per se -- but he had a PC game at one time that he really really liked, and he'd like to find a copy of it, again, if he can. But first -- he's gotta remember the game's name. Game description: He thinks it might have had the word starship in the game's title, somewhere. He remembers playing the game on a CD-ROM, on a Packard-Bell PC; at about the time that Windows 95 (or possibly Windows 3.1?) was around. He's a Mac guy, now; but he once owned an early PC of some kind; and (other than remembering Pitfall, fondly, on the 2600: wasn't a "console guy".) The gist of the game is that you're in a house or something, and some starship comes crashing down, and the bow of the spaceship -- which might have been a luxury liner? or something roughly equivalent to one? -- ends up sticking through your living room. You enter this spaceship thing, and you go from room to room to room. There are all kinds of things wrong with the spaceship. Each room, from his description, has puzzles to solve. Things you have to figure out, and fix. And you're the only person on this spaceship; everyone else is more or less like a robot or android or something. I thought, at first, that he might have describing one of the early Infocom "all text" games ... but he says it was all graphics; and that (for the time) the graphics were amazingly good. And there were a lot of them. For the time, he says, it was a really "deep" and wide and immersive game. Sound familiar to anyone? -- Ward Shrake --

Adam's talking about me. He and his son visited over at my place, for a week or so. It was fun! His son kicked our old butts at almost every game -- but we each had one that we'd put the quality time into, over the years; enough to beat his scores, anyway. But mostly: Dominic trounced us both! I'd have to say that the Behr-Bonz multicart for the VIC-20 was a welcome toy, too. I purchased one back around Oct 2008 (or so says the envelope it was mailed in!) and hadn't previously made the time to plug it in, and play some of the games on a real machine. (Can VIC-20's be called "real machines?" I guess so, since I just did! Ha!) Anyway, I'll be breaking out that multicart again, to play some more Video Vermin, and other fun old games. Anyway ... yeah, that was a fun week. Heck, Adam and I even enjoyed playing (two-player) "Combat" on the Arcadia 2001, using his copy of my old multicart. That was more fun than I'd have expected. As a one-player game, it didn't register in my mind as a really fun game. But losing a lot of guys, mostly due to stupid mistakes, has its share of charm. Same principle with playing the new game, War, on Adam's Astrocade ... that was a great game, and a lot of fun for 2+ players. But back onto the topic: back in the day, after a couple of weeks of near-solid "quality time" playing Oil's Well on the C64, I once beat all of the first nine levels, and then beat the next (second time around) eight levels ... and only had one dot left to eat, on level 9 (times two) ... and I got killed. As Adam says: these days, I'm way out of practice. Getting through the first half dozen levels or so is still pretty fun. It's one of my all-time fave games! -- Ward Shrake --

Not to sound unsympathetic, but why didn't you pursue a manufactured board? It's not that expensive, really. Sigh. Literal answer: they were manufactured boards ... 100% manufactured by hand, 100% by me. Each one was a piece of technological art. I know you didn't mean it exactly this way, but having it implied that I'm stupid isn't really conducive to future homebrew retro-game efforts! (By me or anyone else quietly giving the idea some thought.) In my opinion, it was exactly that sort of "Empathy? What's that? Shut up and gimme product!" attitude that had me and other homebrew types, in private e-mail, wondering if we were mentally ill, to be trying to sell stuff to others at a guaranteed loss, when we'd just be slapped in the face for doing it. Or in some cases, badmouthed because we stopped production while demand still existed. Helpful answer: My reasons for hand-manufacturing those boards and carts were all documented in detail in a very long and quite detailed FAQ that I wrote, at the time. It's all a fairly painful memory for me, so I don't even read the thing, any more. I'd rather play with my dogs, or read a novel. Changing subjects, a bit: It's easy to tell others what to do, and sit back and wait. No offense meant, but if any of you are wealthy enough to plunk down hard cash to get professionally-made PC boards made, hey: go for it! For semi-obscure, non-mainstream (for Retro Gaming) systems like the Bally Astrocade, I'm fairly sure you'd make perhaps another dozen or two or even three people happy, before sales slowed and then dry up entirely ... but don't count on hundreds of people ponying up their hard earned dough, to make back your large initial investment. Been there; done that; it ain't gonna happen! For what it's worth, a month or two back, on the Bally Alley message boards on Yahoo!, I announced that while I really was totally retired from making any more of the Bally multi-carts I once made, that I was going to (and did) release both sides of my hand-drawn PC board artwork to Adam Trionfo. The idea being that when he found the time, it'd be made available on his Bally Alley web site. (See messages above, for relevant links.) If some other person wants to do more than talk, and wants to take that artwork as a starting point and make a brand new Bally Astrocade multi-cart board design: be my guest! I'm sure there are a few people that regret not taking me up on one of the ones I once made; now that they go for much larger amounts; if / when you can find them at all! Just be aware that homebrewing retro-gaming stuff isn't a profitable affair, in 99% of all possible non-Atari-2600 cases. Even then, I don't see how it could be wildly profitable? It's usually a labor of either love; or something done out of near-total obsession. I don't super-duper regret doing what I did, once upon a time. I just have quite a few better things to do, these days. Some itches, once you've scratched them a time or two, quit bothering you altogether. Done the multi-cart thing; in no hurry to do that again. And in terms of other talented folk's desires to do stuff, for the first (or second or ...?) time: why would I want to hog all the fun? So ... "Welcome aboard!" As for me, I'm posting too much lately, and not doing enough of other things ... so I'll likely go quiet again: still around ... just not interacting, much. -- Ward Shrake --

Damn, I didn't realize that Mike had let the cat out of the bag yet. Major cool! Almost makes me want to get another Astrocade. I'll have to at least pick up the "War" cart when it comes out; in case I ever do get another Bally. You know these Internet Elves and their habits ... gotta learn to snap stuff up while the window of opportunity is still open; rather than waiting, and wishing you had! -- Ward Shrake -- P.S. -- man, did this topic ever drift! But hey; it's all in good, clean fun.

There are two projects at the moment doing just such a thing... unfortunately I can't link to Denial cos it's down again (blooming hosting)... Sounds good to me. It wasn't something I planned to do -- even just one for myself -- due to all sorts of reasons. The 34 multi-carts I made by hand for the Arcadia 2001, and the 43 I made for the Bally Astrocade both took about 12 hours of labor to create. (No commercial boards: every single board was etched by hand!) If you do the math on that, it adds up to 77 total multi-carts built and tested. Take that figure and multiply it by 12; and you get 924 hours of labor. In terms of eight-hour days, those 77 multi-carts takes a theoretical six solid months. (Not that I did any 8-hour days: it was much more like 10 or 12 days, with me working on them, probably six days out of any given week, back then.) There's a reason I'm not in any hurry to make any more multi-carts, for any system! Did I mention that after parts and postage, I likely made about five bucks an hour, for all of that highly-skilled work? Or ended up losing my apartment of 12 years, soon afterward; and spent six weeks sleeping in the back of my 1980's mini pickup truck with camper? I'm living proof that homebrew guys can end up homeless. Sorry, but I'm quite happy to let others pursue things like a "complete" VIC-20 multi-cart! -- Ward Shrake --

Thanks again, folks, for the warm "welcome back"! At this point, I have no plans to do anything with the APF except tear one apart, and learn what I can about it. Other guys archived most of the carts for the library, already. I'm not even so much dumping carts for that console, as just confirming what's already been dumped; as it were. (With one big exception: a loaner copy of "Space Destroyers" is winging my way, for me to dump that one; and learn what I can about the technical innards.) Anyone interested in the APF MP-1000 or related hardware should definitely check this place out: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/apf_con..._and_computers/ -- Ward Shrake --

The short, silly answer is: "Heck if I know. People just hand me stuff, and tell me to archive it." Wordier version: In this case, it's pretty much the truth. I'm just putting a toe back in the waters, as it were: so my knowledge of things like game libraries isn't as finely honed as it once was. (Gotta do memory refreshes, or it all goes away! Which is one reason I write stuff down: so it's "saved," and I can "forget it". Wipe the mental workbench clean, after finishing off one project; and get ready to work on another project. My brain will hold a lot of stuff at once; but not everything, all at once. Gotta off-load some stuff in the mind's buffers, as it were; to make room for incoming stuff.) I don't even have an Astrocade system, any more; so I can't even play the game, on real hardware. Could play it under MESS or something, I imagine ... but have too much on my plate right now, to even do that. (Reverse-engineering carts for the APF system, just for the heck of it.) When I did the reading of the somewhat obscure old (TMS 2516) EPROM chip, to see what if anything it had on it -- could have been totally empty, for all we knew -- I had to hand off the dumped code to others, who are much more familiar with the Bally system and its software library. They identified it as a more-complete prototype of a particular dungeon-style game, than anyone (collector-wise) was previously aware existed. (Obviously, the programmer had to know about it; but ....) Where did that chip / game come from? Adam Trionfo and another gent bought up what used to be the Bob Fabris collection of stuff related to the Bally Astrocade; which I think Larry Anderson owned, after Bob. I know that Adam has at least nine of those "holds ten reams of paper" boxes stacked up, with paperwork in them. Some he's scanned in; some will (obviously, with that volume!) take a while to be scanned in. As I understand it, the other gent got most of the hardware items; that's just the way they decided to split things. But Adam got a few hardware items: including a cart board with a socket and that EPROM. He showed me a few hardware items that may as well have been Martian-made. No idea what some of that stuff was/is. Anywhooo ... best place imaginable, for finding out anything you'd want to know about the Bally Astrocade is this web site: http://ballyalley.com/ with this group (message board, to us old timers) on Yahoo! being another great resource: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ballyalley/ If more (modern, up-to-date) info / pics about Fawn Dungeon are to be found anywhere, online, they'd likely be where it was. You didn't ask this, but I'm gonna throw it out there, anyway (as is my wont!) ... THIS is the game that has the Bally folks (including me) all going, "Ooooh! Oooohh! That just looks so cool! I gotta have that! I gotta play it!" It's the first post-internet, homebrewed Bally game: http://www.riffraffgames.com/cgi-bin/aboutriff/ballywar.cgi -- Ward Shrake --

Thanks much! And yeah, it's nice to know the poor little VIC gets a little respect, once in a while. Adam Trionfo showed me the recent "Retroinspection" article in "Retro Gamer" #46. Kinda nifty. Seeing that mention of my old web site (archived in static form over at Digital Press, apparently) was cool. The article made me want to fire up some old VIC games, and play some of them. -- Ward Shrake --

I'm equally curious. Nothing very exciting, guys. A back-burner "just curious about some things" exploration project. Keep in mind, too, that my interest areas are the more obscure, pre-NES consoles and/or computers ... so it's pretty much guaranteed that any of my current projects would be non-mainstream ones. Sorry to dissappoint! -- Ward Shrake --

That helped oodles! Thanks much! -- Ward Shrake --

Sorry to follow up my own initial posting, but you gotta admit, in the "Is it really him?" context: who ELSE would ever ask such a nerdy thing!? Heehee! Not like questions like that normally grow on trees!? -- Ward Shrake --

Could be anyone signing up with that name. yea you are right, i forgot all about his 'im outta here' thing I read long ago. Yeah, I said it with a touch of irony, but you never know. It's me ... I promise! Thanks much, folks, for the kind words and such! I did retire completely, around the end of 2002 / beginning of 2003. But I know Adam Trionfo personally, and I visit him a few times a year ... and he eventually used enough of his Dark Side influence on me, to un-retire me around January of this year. Sort of: I'm limiting my activities now ... so I guess it's more accurate to call myself semi-retired, than un-retired. (Anyway: Adam lives about 200 miles away from me, now: I got tired of a lot of things, but especially California's traffic and congestion, etc., and moved to New Mexico. MUCH much much happier, in this beautiful, serene state!) I needed that five years off! But I'm still interested in old hardware. Adam Trionfo, Lance Squire and others have me playing with the APF MP-1000 game console, now. I'm making all sorts of nerdy hardware-related postings over on a new Yahoo! Groups, called "APF_Consoles_and_Computers". I occasionally also chime in over at the "Arcadia2001consoles" group, or over on the "BallyAlley" group. Adam even recently loaned me an unmarked, possible proto (from the Bob Fabris collection) for the Bally machine, which no one else had good luck with, on trying to read the old, window-was-never-covered 2532 EPROM chip. Anyway, I did get unrusty enough to archive that one. Turned out to be a version of Fawn Dungeon for the Bally system, that was newer than any other version anyone knew about. I'm still taking my time, getting my feet wet ... but so far, it's kinda fun "being back". -- Ward Shrake --

Does anyone know where to look, to find online pictures of the INSIDES of a Supercharger device, for the Atari VCS? I'd like to see both sides of the PC board layout; in particular, what the "BIOS" chips look like. Are they slices of silicon placed right onto the PC board; with blobs of an epoxy-like substance over them? Or are they "normal" (DIP-packaged or similar) chips which can be desoldered and replaced? -- Ward Shrake --