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Nathan Strum

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Posts posted by Nathan Strum

    Champ Games - Elevator Agent (aka Elevator Action) for the Atari 2600

    in Homebrew Discussion

    Posted

    On 7/21/2023 at 9:22 AM, johnnywc said:

    Hi there!  Elevator Agent has not been completed yet but is expected to be released this October with 50 copies available at PRGE at the Champ Games booth.  AtariAge will not be involved in the publishing as they have decided to focus on publishing original or licensed games.  If all goes well, we hope to have physical copies of both Elevator Agent (and Turbo Arcade) available in our store sometime after PRGE.

    I suppose I should get started on the label art... :ponder:

    • Like 4
    • Haha 2

    Store Reviews: Why so few?

    in Atari 2600

    Posted

    52 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

    ...and after ~100 games got removed (including many very popular ones), the store is lacking reviews even more. :sad: 

    Yeah. It's really de-motivating to write any reviews for the games that are gone now.

     

    But on the other hand, it's going to be *way* easier to write ones for those that remain. :roll: 

    2007 Holiday Cart Tease

    in Atari 2600

    Posted

    4 hours ago, s0c7 said:

    Any plans to return to the thing that was abandoned?

    You mean Holiday Carts?

     

    Nobody has seemed interested in spearheading a new project. A couple of half-hearted efforts were made at gauging interest, but nothing ever materialized.

     

    I think part of the problem is that the scale of the projects kept increasing to the point where instead of a fun little quick project, the games became major undertakings.

     

    Homebrew authors already have enough projects on their plates as-is, and with PRGE being a thing in the middle of October now, that's right during the time when a Holiday Cart would need to be produced.

     

    I think if something relatively simple was developed for a Holiday Cart, it would have a far higher likelihood of actually coming to fruition. No box. One-page manual. Simple gameplay, with some jaunty Christmas tunes playing in the background. (Yes. I used the word "jaunty".) A game that could be developed in weeks, not months. Make that the goal, and maybe it could become a thing again.

     

    Assuming you could find someone with the time and interest to program it. And Al had enough time to produce the carts and have a Holiday Sale that could happen in time to actually get the game to people in time for Christmas.

     

    So...

     

    Probably not. :roll: 

     

    • Like 2

    2007 Holiday Cart Tease

    in Atari 2600

    Posted

    4 hours ago, s0c7 said:

    David V is @espire8 and there's no way to be 100% sure about this, but I think Nathan Strum might be @Nathan Strum 😃.

    I haven't seen David online for a few years now. No idea how to contact him.

     

    As for that Nathan Strum guy, he'd probably make you change all the graphics so they wouldn't infringe on the original publisher's IP. ;) 

     

    (I'm fine with releasing the ROM. I've always considered the games to be the properties of the programmers who created them - including any graphics I've contributed - and it's their choice to do with them as they wish. But it's nice to be asked. :) )

    • Like 2

    2007 Holiday Cart Tease

    in Atari 2600

    Posted

    2 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

    After 16 years I wonder if the ROM might be released to public eventually. Any plans?

    I suppose we'd have to track down everyone who had contributed to it to make sure they were okay with that.

    Atari Mr Run and Jump

    in Atari 2600

    Posted

    1 hour ago, s0c7 said:

    I seriously doubt there is 30 hours of game play. Watching the video, the score appears to start @ 25000 seconds and counts down. So, close to 7 hours max if you take the entire time. Now, there may be variations with more time or whatever, but going by what's been shown....

    You just have to play it 4 1/2 times. ;) 

    • Haha 1

    Atari Mr Run and Jump

    in Atari 2600

    Posted

    2 hours ago, JetSetIlly said:

    The TV it's been played on might not be sensitive to whatever is causing the issue for the video capture

    There appears to be some RF noise along the left side of the picture, so that points to real hardware rather than emulation. But critically - it's running on an LCD TV. 

     

    My LCD TV was *very* forgiving of screen rolls. The technology behind drawing a picture on an LCD TV is entirely different than a CRT, since an LCD TV has to convert the signal to progressive to display it. So there's signal processing happening that's mitigating the screen rolls.

     

    The screen rolls are still happening though, because the transitions between scenes aren't "clean". Since most of the colors from scene to scene are identical, you shouldn't see anything change *except* the graphics that are different. But the entire screen dips in brightness between each scene. If you step through the video a frame at a time (press , and . in YouTube), you can see it happening at *every* scene transition:

    Screenshot2023-08-01at9_53_46AM.thumb.png.414cbdd81253ad552e3fa6188221241d.png Screenshot2023-08-01at9_53_58AM.thumb.png.cecf23f360203d46c9c906eb1ba4a22d.png Screenshot2023-08-01at9_54_15AM.thumb.png.d1ea65442504793649407b35adc891c6.png

    Also helping to mitigate the screen rolls, is that the video was only shot at 30 fps.

    • Like 5

    INTERVIEW QUESTIONS: David Paige (Atari VCS Marketing and Development) & Bob DeCrescenzo (Atari 7800 Developer)

    in Discussion

    Posted

    8 hours ago, Dionoid said:

    Just keep in mind that David Paige isn't part of Atari's management team, so probably won't be able to answer questions related to IP acquisitions or reasoning behind them. But he probably has a view on it :)

    David's job is basically to get more games into the Atari VCS store, thus developing the platform. Here is a short introduction of David from half a year ago: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/344546-someone-to-blame-at-atari-and-yell-at/

    Even if he's not part of management, he is doing this interview as a representative of Atari. As their conduit to this community, he should be communicating these questions and concerns to the higher-ups at Atari. Whether they respond or not will speak volumes about how much they're genuinely interested in engaging with this community and repairing their image.

    • Like 2

    INTERVIEW QUESTIONS: David Paige (Atari VCS Marketing and Development) & Bob DeCrescenzo (Atari 7800 Developer)

    in Discussion

    Posted

    2 hours ago, ZeroPage Homebrew said:

    I can anticipate him not being able to answer legal/trademark/copyright/IP questions but I'll try to pose them in a way that he may be able to shed some light on them.

    If used, I'd prefer the questions that I wrote to be asked verbatim (unless they just flat-out don't make sense, in which case I'm happy to clarify), then he can figure out a way to answer them as needed. How a question is answered (or not) is often as important as the answer itself. If you're re-posing questions to accommodate him based on what you assume he may or may not be able to share, then you're potentially leading his answers.

     

    He can always read this thread in advance, if he wants to prepare for the interview.

    • Like 2

    INTERVIEW QUESTIONS: David Paige (Atari VCS Marketing and Development) & Bob DeCrescenzo (Atari 7800 Developer)

    in Discussion

    Posted

    First, if anyone from Atari is reading this - welcome to AtariAge. We hope you're as passionate as we are about what we consider to be "Atari". Everyone has their own memories and definitions of what that is. For me, it dates back to playing Starship 1 in the lobby of the theater where Star Wars was showing in 1977. Being able to pretend I was flying an X-Wing or shooting the turret guns in the Millennium Falcon on that arcade game was like magic. From there, I played just-about every arcade game Atari made (Battlezone being my all-time favorite), and I finally got my own Atari 2600 in 1981. Since 2005 I've been involved in the homebrew scene, and have worked on over 50 homebrews published through AtariAge. I appreciate you taking the time to read and consider - and hopefully answer - our questions. I realize some questions probably cannot be answered because they may require speculation or revealing indeterminate future plans, but I hope you'll be forthright about why you're unable to answer them.

    1. Related to Andrew's question - will Atari be willing to work with the community for projects they wish to pursue that use Atari IP? For example a book about Atari games that was C&D'd a few years ago, or certain community awards previously shaped like Atari's logo that had to be changed to something else.
      Please remember: we're hobbyists. We don't have buckets of money to throw at licensing fees. But we have passion, knowledge, and ideas, and are glad to work collaboratively towards mutually agreeable goals.
      Remember also: we aren't to be taken advantage of. We shouldn't be expected to just hand over our hard work to Atari for them to profit from without appropriate compensation or acknowledgement.
    2. Related to licensing - AtariAge recently removed over 90 homebrews based on unlicensed properties from their store. Does Atari have any interest or plans to assist homebrew authors in acquiring licenses for homebrew games for Atari systems from other IP holders?
    3. Does Atari have any plans to re-license Battlezone back from Rebellion for its compilations? (Of all the games to lose in a bankruptcy auction...)
    4. Is Atari actively planning to pursue additional classic gaming IP acquisitions or licenses? 
    5. With all of the recent Atari acquisitions, is there a current, up-to-date listing of every IP that Atari now owns?
    6. Quantum is one of my favorite under-appreciated Atari games. Seems this would be a natural for touch-screen smartphones. Not so much a question, but a request. I'd buy it.
    7. Another request - it'd be great to see SuperImpulse Tiny Arcade versions of Atari arcade cabinets. (I've collected their whole series, including the Atari 2600.) Those are fun, affordable conversation pieces/toys/memory triggers.
    8. You'll find a lot of skeptics amongst Atari fans. I'm one of them. Atari has been badly mismanaged repeatedly over the decades, and has in many cases caused irreparable harm to their reputation and damaged relationships with those fans that grew up buying and playing Atari games. What has changed? What makes the current management at Atari better than what came before, and what are Atari's plans moving forward, that should make fans and skeptics alike believe that this iteration of Atari is any different? What is Atari planning to do to actually be taken seriously as a GAME company again, rather than just a licensor of the same few old IPs over and over, or a company making desperate cash-grabs at cryptocurrency, hotels and speakerhats?
    9. How long of a retail life do you expect the Atari "VCS" to have before its hardware is obsolete? Will there be a follow-up? How long does Atari plan to support the back-end of it (online store, tech support, software updates)?
    10. There are plenty of hardware platforms out there that Atari is already publishing software for. Wouldn't Atari be better off focusing on software, and moving away from their own dedicated hardware? Atari made hardware back-in-the-day because they had to in order to sell video games. This is no longer the case.
    11. Will Atari be publishing more games for iOS/AppleTV devices? Atari 50, Atari Mania, and most of the Recharged series remain unavailable on those platforms. (Two billion iOS users and counting...)
    12. Why should someone buy an Atari "VCS"? If you had to tell someone about it who had no knowledge of it, how would you sell it to:
      A classic Atari fan?
      A modern console/PC gamer?
      A casual (eg. smartphone) gamer?
      How would you sell it to someone who is a skeptic? Why should I buy one? My opinion of it is negatively colored by having followed it from its original announcement through a really sketchy development history. I can't walk into a local store and just play it for myself, either.
    13. Will Atari have a presence at PRGE, or other gaming events? If not - why not?
    14. The Atari "VCS" Collector's Edition website says "Offer ends April 9th". Not really a question, but a concern that Atari's own website hasn't been updated in over four months.
    15. Do you own and actively play any original (70's-80's) Atari consoles? If so, which ones? Which games are your favorites?
    16. Do you own, or have you played any homebrews for the original (70's-80's) Atari consoles? If so, which ones? Any favorites?
    17. Do you actively play any classic Atari arcade games? If so, which ones are your favorites?
    18. What are some of your favorite classic non-Atari games? (Other arcade or cartridge manufacturers/publishers.)
    19. What are some of your favorite modern games? (Modern can be anything post-1990. I'm old.)

    I realize this is a lot of questions, and I doubt James will have time for everything that gets asked in this thread. But it would be great to have the questions as least passed along, with the hopes of them getting answered here at some point. If Atari is willing to actually listen to our questions, then I'm willing to put in the time to ask them.

     

    I'd like to see Atari succeed. I just have yet to be convinced it can actually happen.

     

    Thanks for your time.

    - Nathan Strum

    • Like 8
    • Thanks 1
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