pixelmischief

What makes Atari great for me - 8 Bits, ST's, and the Falcon - is that enjoying them is a cooperative. It requires some faith and a little patience to get to the goodies. Let's face it. The welcome mat is mighty small on these systems and I bet most of us have endured more than a few insults over the graceless face of the "READY." prompt and the GEM desktop in ST low. These systems don't hold your hand. They don't offer a myriad of brightly colored signs to light the way. Indeed, they are not very "intuitive". Well I say, "to hell with intuitive!" I say that "intuitive" is just a generous euphemism for "coddling". And I don't want to be coddled. Coddling costs cycles. And we are short on cycles. So don't waste a single one on the assumption that I suffer from diminished intellect or attention. Instead, give me a bare-bones interface through which I can perform the very few tasks required to configure and maintain the system, and then get it the f$%k out of my way when I am done with it. Give...me...the...metal. 'Cause when that white-haired son-of-a-bitch drags his Gi up over the top edge of one "craggy cliff"... 'Cause when the LucasFilm logo pops onto the screen and the precursor to THX sounds off... 'Cause when the "Obsession Pinball" "Aquatic Adventure" table scrolls smoothly onto the screen and that whimsical music fades in... 'Cause when the "Aggressive Party Invitation" demo ends and settles into that hornet backdrop and ominous tones pour from the speakers... ...I know that I am experiencing something special. I am experiencing the product of genius. It's the genius of the engineers who created the greatest computer platforms to have yet ever existed. It is the genius of the coders who live right down on the metal and are STILL mining video and audio gold out of it. And it is my genius; genius enough to know that the road less- and harder-travelled yields greater reward, if only sometimes for how much I had to put into it to get what I got out of it. That's what makes Atari exciting for me.

Scope creep. It can kill any project. Learn to love version cutoffs. It's the only way to actually finish. But then, I can see you have already learned this the hard way.

I am not an A8 coder, but a coder otherwise; not to mention a chronic optimist. When I read a discussion like this, I am reminded of the old saying, "Necessity is the Mother of Invention". Applied here, it might advise that you simply start the thing, even if you are not too sure how you are going to finish it. Code right up to the edge of the obstacles and then code around them. Invent new things. Grind it out. The journey *IS* the destination. Who knows where it will lead? You'll come up with new things; compromise on some requirements and exceed some others. In the end, the experience is what it's all about. Do you think the guys at Lucas were absolutely positive they were going to be able to get such a smooth scrolling checkerboard field out when they started coding it? I say "No!" But they did it. You might too. And if you don't, you'll have a hell of a good time trying. If you want to keep the platform alive, you gotta feed it. =) Again, I am not an A8 programmer, but I know a little bit about logic and animation. Here are my "knee jerk" questions to some of the problems I read in the thread. Even if they reveal my lack of understanding about the Atari, they might provoke some thought. - Have each z-axis version of the ball rendered in memory. Use a single pixel as the actual player, with a bounding box as large as the correct ball graphic. Render the correct ball, centered on the player. You might have to do some magic to get X offsets. - Thinking about the BallBlazer field, maybe the ball is stationary and the table moves around it. I suggest it because the scrolling on that was definitely finer than 160px. Combined with some sort of shrinking and growing of the ball. It could work. Maybe. - Are any of the potentially involved people demo coders? Can we get some of those cats involved? I love the platform. And I am betting there is enough power left in the midns here to squeeze a few more delicious drops out of it.

Supplement: 6. Warlords 7. Vanguard 8. Yar's Revenge 9. Space Shuttle 10. Dolphin

1. Pitfall II 2. Demon Attack 3. Kaboom 4. Defender 5. Asteroids

Am I too late? I would die for a 1200XL; even one that isn't working. Also want a 1050 and an XF551 pretty bad (who doesn't =))

Fellow Atari Fans, As many of you know, Jens Schoenfeld, of Individual Computers and Commodore community fame, makes a product called "Keyrah" It is a board that turns the keyboard of a COmmodore 64 or Amiga computer into a USB keyboard for a PC, mapping the joystick ports to the arrow keys and number block. I engaged him today for information (email thread copied below) in the hopes I could make one of my own for the 1200XL. He responded, instead, inquiring about what interest there might be in our community for him to make a version for the Atari. To that end, please comment about your interest (or lack there of) in such a device. Pixel Mischief ----- Dan, a hundred units is not much - I'd be looking for a single order of 300 or more to justify a produciton run. Maybe we could drum up some more interest by letting the community take part in designing some details? Is there a standard connector for the keyboard? What about schematics of the matrix, are they available? What about other Atari models, do they all share the same keyboard matrix, or are they all different? For using an 80's keyboard on a PC, you need to put quite some thinking into the keyboard layout. Remember that many keyboards back then had less than 70 keys, but today's keyboards often have 105 and more keys. If you want to keep everything usable, you have to think about every little detail. Keyrah is doing that quite clever, and we also have the switch that selects one of two keyboard layouts (one geared for emulation and another for Windows use). You'd have to specify exactly which key shall be which one. Next would be joysticks - the Atari uses the same kind of joysticks, and Keyrah is mapping them to cursor keys and the numeric block, which I could also change to different keys. LED connections are the same on most Commodore machines, but I don't know about Ataris. We have caps lock, num lock and scroll lock that can be displayed "somehow". If the Ataris have a special connector, I could add that. ciao, -- Jens Schönfeld At 16:00 24.01.2011 -0500, you wrote: >Jens, > >There is definitely a market for an "Atari Keyrah". The Atari enthusiast scene is as big and active as the Commodore scene. Modders like Ben Heck have been butchering PC keyboards and replacing keycaps to get the effect in their Atari laptop and desktop PC projects. Additionally, anyone who has ever used an Atari 1200XL will tell you it is the best keyboard ever made. I would buy 4 right away and have heard enough whining in the forums over the lack of such a product (even people referring to yours) to feel confident a production run of 100 units would sell. > >Dan > >-----Original Message----- > >Hi, > >Keyrah is a USB device, you need to get a microcontroller, preferrably with a base code for human interface device, then write code for scanning the keyboard and translate that data to USB codes. If you see a market for an "Atari Keyrah", I could make a special version with your keyboard layout that you can sell. Let me know how many you think you could sell to the Atari community (I'm totally in the Commodore world, sorry). > >ciao, >-- >Jens Schönfeld > > >At 12:56 24.01.2011 -0500, you wrote: > >> >>Jens, >> >>I would like to make a Keyrah-like device for my 8-bit Atari, and need some guidance. Can you help? >> >>Are you using an FPGA? If so, which. If not, what are you using? >>As a high-level design, I guess such a device polls the source pins, converts the data into a value in the source keyboard matrix, converts it to the equivalent value on the destination keyboard matrix, and writes it out to the destination pins. Is this how it works? If not, where am I mixed up? >> >>Thanks, >>Dan