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Laemeur

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Posts posted by Laemeur

  1. Posted

    IIRC, most of the Atari vector machines had a co-ordinate resolution of 1024x768.

    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.

  2. Posted

    There was an Enhanced Graphics Module known as "Tektronix Option 34" which provided full 12 bit resolution, with 4096x4096 resolution. (page 30, in the 4014 Service Manual). It is also emulated in xterm.

     

    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? :)

  3. Posted

    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.

     

    For the uninitiated, this terminal was capable of 4096x4096 monochrome vector graphics displays. It had a 9600 bps serial connection, and displayed graphics & alphanumeric info via standard ASCII escape sequences.

     

    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.

  5. Posted

    By the way, I said Macintosh because as far as I know, the Chicago font wasn't available on the Lisa -- it was created by Susan Kare for the Macintosh. And the possibility of an upgraded Lisa -> Macintosh XL is ruled out by the date (the XL launched in '85). Not to say that it's impossible it was drawn on a Lisa, just not likely -- but now I'm just splitting hairs. :) After all, this is an Atari thread.

     

    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.

  7. Posted

    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?)

  9. Posted

    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.

  10. Posted

    If you had any idea how much companies and governments have to spend trying to keep people like this out and cleaning up after them when they get in you wouldn't be so quick to defend him. Taxpayers pick up the tab for govt security.

    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.

  12. Posted · Edited by Laemeur

    I don't understand that. I thought hackers were the types who love DOS style text commands? Don't they have an instant orgasm whenever they hear the words "command line"? As far as I know, hackers hate drag and drop simplicity and ease-of-use. The harder it is, the harder they get. They don't see a computer screen, they see raining green on black Matrix code.

    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.

  15. Posted

    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?

  20. Posted

    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.

  21. Posted

    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).

  25. Posted

    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?

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