Laemeur

I've seen that figure a lot, too, but I think it's been spread by the emulation community. Jed Margolin's info on the Atari DVG (http://www.jmargolin.com/Vgens/vgens.htm) indicates that it took the full range of 10-bit coordinates for X and Y, but the deflection circuitry timed X and Y deflection differently to squash-to-fit the vectors to a 4:3 picture tube. Although I don't remember noticing any squashed effect (which would be immediately noticeable when rotating the ship) when playing Asteroids. This might require a walk down to the arcade to ogle the real thing.

Well that's pretty cool. Although, I'll bet if you had an actual Tek terminal and told it to draw two parallel lines separated by one "pixel" of space (1/4096th of the screen) you wouldn't actually be able to discern the two lines anyway on account of beam diffusion. I could very well be wrong, though. Anybody out there with a Tek terminal who wants to take a macro photo of that for us?

That's funny, I was just talking with my dad about those old storage-tube terminals a few weeks ago (he worked at Tek back when they were still producing them). I had no idea the 4014 was emulated in xterm. I've been thinking on and off about ways of driving a vector (or emulated vector) display with an A8 for a while, and while 4014 emulation isn't exactly going to have us all playing Asteroids, it'll still be cool to see. If I'm not mistaken, isn't the 4014 like Atari's vector display hardware in that its addressable resolution is only 1k x 1k, and 4k x 4k is the interpolated resolution of the yoke control circuitry? So calling it a 4096x4096 display is a bit misleading. Like saying an old TV has a resolution of ∞ x 525.

Rats. Initially, I was just going to be a smart-ass and write "maybe he borrowed a Mac". I didn't think I'd be right.

Going by the inventory list we have, generated on 4/16/85, it was all Lisas. About 10 of them, each with profile drives. To me the fonts look like the Lisa "system font" as shown on page 2 here: http://www.1000bit.it/SUPPORT/Manuali/APPLE/LISA/craig/LisaFontCharts.pdf Most likely, the drawing was done in Lisa Office, which was released in '83 and included LisaDraw (later ported to the Mac as MacDraw) and LisaProject (which the Gump drawing looks like it could have been done in either) - http://toastytech.com/guis/lisaos1LisaTour.html RedWolf is right, the font in the drawing is unquestionably "Chicago", which didn't come on the Lisa or Lisa 2 (the V and W glyphs are a dead giveaway when comparing Lisa's "System" with Chicago). However, that still doesn't mean the drawing wasn't done on a Lisa; Wikipedia tells me that the floppy version of MacWorks XL (Mac OS for the Lisa hardware) came out in April '84, just in time.

Finally broke 40k. Woo-hoo! 46,200 Lv.11

The Atari/Magnavox settlement was made out-of-court, so there isn't any public record about what it entailed (aside from the $700,000 cash, and Magnavox owning the rights to all Atari developments for 1976). Atari appears to have retained the Pong trademark, though, so I don't think there's anything that would have legally kept them from putting out a straight Pong cartridge. I think it has more to do with the fact that by the time the VCS launched, Pong was already five years old in the arcade, and two years old as a home game. "Pong", as a brand, was old news, and with the launch of the VCS and competing color consoles, another black-and-white pong game would have been a flop with consumers of the day ($20 for a black-and-white pong cartridge when they could buy a brand-new, color, Pong Sports IV standalone for $25?)

Those fast shopping carts are tough.

Wow, lots of plugs for the Tac-2. I'll have to keep my eyes open for one and check it out. My fave is the Epyx 500XJ. It's a noisy little guy, but the action's great. I have a couple Genesis controllers that I try every now and again, but they're just too twitchy. Either I'm too ham-fisted for them, or they're worn out.

I'd almost say the guy did a public service. I'd much rather have an innocuous UFO-hunter highlighting major security flaws than an actual malicious foreign power. I don't even think he deserves jail time. They ought to just hit him with a nasty fine and move on.

Boy, it sure as heck sounds like it; I think you're right. Although I noticed that they had C64s (or VIC-20s) in mission control earlier in the movie. Link for further verification: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM7GcpI00RY&NR=1 (@~6:30).

Hackers, like musicians, aren't all playing the same tune. I think most of the old-school hackers were all striving for ease-of-use, they just had different ways of seeing things. For some people, if you've already got both hands on the keyboard (because you're slinging code or writing a sonnet or whatever) and need to move some files of a certain type, it is faster to just alt-tab to a console and bang away "mv ~/someplace/*.ext ~/someplace_else" than it is to open up a file browser, navigate to the folder where the files are, sort the files by extension, drag a rectangle around them, and drop them into the other folder. But then you've got guys like Ivan Sutherland, Alan Kay/Dan Ingalls, and numerous others (hackers indeed -- making computers do what others didn't see possible) who just weren't happy with that CLI-oriented way of operating computers and gave us pointing, clicking, dragging, and dropping. And as far as making computers "fun" --- SPACEWAR was absolutely a hack.

I wish you could manufacture keyboards, too. 'Cause I'd love to buy a b-s keyboard replacement for my XL.

To my knowledge, no one "controls" the inclusion of seizure-inducing flash/flicker effects in video games. Some companies include the warnings as a preventative measure against potential lawsuits, but the FCC or any other gov't body (in the U.S., at least) doesn't require them. People with epilepsy have to be careful when watching TV or movies, too, and when's the last time you saw a seizure warning on either of those?

Very interesting, thanks. It's a shame that Commodore couldn't find the people to carry on the innovation that Miner started. That machine was so far ahead of the curve in '85, but by the time of that interview, five little years later, heck, even Miner himself is concerned about the lack of progress on the platform.

Hey, excellent timing. I was just looking for Falcon030 stuff earlier today. Now if only somebody could post a free Falcon.

Personally, I love Minter's stimulate-all-the-neurons-at-once approach. I read about Gridrunner Rev. a few months ago and am happy that: 1) the demo is out, and 2) my PC can actually run it! Fun, but the demo's too slow-paced. My frame-rate looks fine, so I don't think it's my computer, but the pace on Rev seems slothful next to GR++.

I remember playing Space Lords a couple times in a mall either in Eugene or Portland area, then never again. I completely forgot the game existed until I saw it in a MAME listing a few months ago. Last I checked, emulation was only 80% or something, so it might still be a while yet before I get to play it again.

Kids who post videos on YouTube are certainly not representative of kids in general. I sold an Atari VCS to a kid a few months ago, and he was really into it in an honest, earnest, "wow, this is HISTORY" sort of way, and he'd come back to the shop every couple weeks and ask all sorts of questions about "the old days" -- a lot of the same questions I had to ask as a young guy because I wasn't born when the VCS came out, either.

I don't know if this is the right channel to put this in, and I sure as heck don't want to be spamming-up the place, but I wrote an Asteroids play-alike in ActionScript and thought maybe some of you fine folks might like to have a go. The game's at: http://www.apocalyptek.com/asteroid_i-x/index.html I'd really appreciate any feedback, bug reports, and so-on. Hope you dig it. And if there's a better board to post this in, let me know and I'll move this post (or delete it, or whatever the equivalent action is).

Heck yes. Probably the only Master System game I've spent any time on in the last few years.

Well, I'll agree with you that it really doesn't make sense for it to be called Time Pilot when you're stuck in the same time period for the whole game, but aside from that, I think it's a fun little blaster. Looks pretty good, not too hard, but not too easy either. I like it.

I'll also plug GrafX2, although I use the older version available from Eclipse's site: http://www.eclipse-game.com/?dat=7 My comp doesn't seem to get along with the video mode switching in the newer, GoogleCode-hosted releases, plus a couple other nitpicks.

Aw, man. What a bummer. I was actually considering picking up one of those, but I had no idea until this thread that they were rotting away like this. Is it a universal condition, or were there maybe some batches of the print heads that were a slightly different compound that aged better?