raindog

I was on GEnie, Compuserve, and Qlink (C64/Apple specific, with a proprietary client that eventually became AOL). I was also on other pre-Internet dialup services briefly, like Delphi, Prodigy, and some weird proto-web thing for MS-DOS that spread across BBSes in the mid-'90s, I think based on Citadel. Like others, I used some GEnie client, maybe Aladdin, maybe macros in some terminal program I was using, to do as much as I could offline. Compuserve I vaguely remember getting free access somehow, but always found it too byzantine to enjoy. I would just log in and race through my messages and boards, and then read the log file after I logged out. Qlink was a lot cheaper and I spent quite a lot of time in their chat rooms, especially the ones called "swapin" and "AlternateLifestyles". But there was no logging, while somewhere on floppy disks I probably have logs from GEnie and Compuserve from my Amiga days, along with logs from many, many BBSes I called, most of which are not really appropriate to discuss here, and my university's chat system, and the early days of IRC. I just found a USB floppy drive on Saturday; I wonder if I could read any of those disks today. I don't remember my IDs on any of these services, though toward the end of my Amiga days was where I settled on "raindog".

No American work since 1976 has ever entered the public domain. (Few since the mid-1920s have, but a few fell through the cracks before the law changed in 1976.) Legal opinions differ over whether it's even possible to dedicate your work to the public domain explicitly, though it's a moot point since the person making that dedication would be the person who'd have to sue someone for subsequently infringing the copyright. Someone, somewhere, still owns the rights to the Cinematronics games, most likely Warner Bros. since they bought most of Midway's assets through bankruptcy proceedings, while Midway had bought Williams who had previously bought Cinematronics' assets. They may not know or care the way First Star does, but they could pop up at any time. Trademarks, of course, are a different story, and Star Castle as a video game trademark expired decades ago. But the American copyright system in particular is ridiculous and extreme (see also: Nintendo able to get "Let's Play" videos of their gameplay removed from Youtube).

When I saw the email in my inbox telling me there was a new post, something about the subject line finally clicked. What "costs" do you need to defray when writing a homebrew game, exactly? All the tools are free. I never tested on real hardware back in the day because there was no such thing as a Harmony or even a Cuttle Cart, so that's not really necessary. And if your time is a cost that needs defraying, why aren't you doing Android or iOS games where you might actually have a chance at selling enough copies to cover your development time at minimum wage? Android and iOS games have business models. Anyone who writes Atari 2600 homebrew games as a source of income is frakking high. If you're not doing this because you love the challenge, you should just stop.

Aww, no more source?

I don't know if the 2600 could do justice to the game's theme song, even with DPC. Edit: what do you know, Atariage embeds Youtube links without asking now. How fun.

In some cases (and for me, Tapper is one, in its original form -- I can't stand beer, but you can't exactly make a game about pulling taps and have Maker's Mark be the brand) I'd agree the increased immersion is good, and when the brands are subsequently removed because the marketing arrangement only went so far (Tapper, Crazy Taxi, etc.) it takes something away. But when you're going for comedy, I think an over-the-top fake brand name (e.g. the brands in Ratchet and Clank, GTA, etc.) or no brand or description at all (best exemplified by "FOOD" and "BEER" in Repo Man) is better. In a 2600 game, the branding might be applied to the name, label and maybe title or intermission screens, but it seems unlikely to work as well in gameplay as it does in Crazy Taxi or the arcade version of Tapper. In a way I wish it were easy to do this sort of thing, in which case I might be able to hope to someday have a double-ended cartridge entitled "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell".

I think it would be a lot cooler if someone else did their own competing version of it, though... you know, just like Thomas and cdw did with Star Castle. Gonna go out on a limb and guess they didn't get the current Cinematronics rights-holders' sign-off on that (kind of doubt DSW did either, for his version.)

Mountain Dew was the intermission screen in Tapper? I thought it was Budweiser... they even played the Bud jingle. I think that the first company to sponsor a successful homebrew might get some minor press out of it despite the small audience, but only if the game itself was interesting enough to get the likes of IGN/Kotaku/etc. to cover it, which is unlikely unless it were a port or demake of a much-loved game, which brings licensing issues into the picture. It's not unprecedented in old games; besides Pole Position, in that same period there was Chase the Chuckwagon, Kool-Aid Man, Mr. Boston on the Vectrex, etc., and of course Tapper. But today it's less a novelty and more an annoyance, and the coverage would probably reflect that if it got any coverage at all. On the other hand, a demake of a game with product placement that included that product placement would be hilarious (and also probably C&D bait). Edit: unless it's product placement for a dead company, like the South Park producers did to Braniff.

Woohoo, motivation for a new project! (Ebivision's inability to release their Pac-Man clone was what made me decide to make Pac26. Granted, Boulder Dash is a little more demanding and not a game I actually liked back in the day, but if it's not my motivation, perhaps it'll be someone else's.)

(I'll even post pictures of the sexual lubricants with each of these names if people get too finicky. I probably still have bottles of stuff named Platinum and Elite. They're probably pretty grim after being packed in a box for 7 or 8 years in a garage with no climate control.)

I think I'm out till the product ships at this point. No name is going to be good enough because every modifier has been used already for something terrible (Kia Forte, Microsoft Plus, Golden Girls, etc.)

Well, that would explain why even 32K bB games rarely wow me compared to even 4K games written in assembly. If bB is set up to use zero-page memory for variables (as I imagine it is), no amount of RAM will give you more variables. Maybe there could be the concept of "local variables" that live in the same bank as the code that refers to them and are slower to access than the normal ones, but that would introduce a lot of complexity for the compiler, I'd think. Still looking forward to what people produce (never expected to see something like Princess Rescue made with bB, for example) but also looking forward to the inevitable resurgence of the code equivalent of haiku. Nothing but good is going to come of the Harmony Forte (yay, sounds like we have a name!)

And how many bB games have appeared since the earliest of those three? I'm not a purist, and have no problem with bB (though I'm most impressed with bB games I can't immediately tell are bB games). But you can't deny that since its appearance, volume-wise it's kind of taken over. The Harmony contributed to that and the H+ or whatever its name turns out to be will contribute further. Certainly if I do what I've been thinking about doing since this thread started, it'll require the Harmony if not the H+. I actually get a little disappointed when someone goes "Yeah, this could be better, but I'm sticking within 4K." But a 16, 32, or now 64K and up game has to impress me a hell of a lot more than a 4K/no extra features one.

Man, I'm glad to not be that much of a purist. We just finished re-watching the entire series, movies, Crusade and all, starting on the 20th anniversary of the pilot broadcast, completely by accident, it was just when I'd finished ripping the first season to our Plex server. While there was a lot that hadn't aged well (mostly cheap costumes, props, some soap-opera-level acting and terrible fight choreography), I didn't think it looked any worse on our 46" screen than any other SD-only content. Certainly it's a hell of a lot better looking than my Star Blazers DVDs.

Perhaps the best part will be the resurgence in 4k and maybe even 2k games that'll happen in a year or so as the purists get sick to death of all the enormous brute-force batari BASIC releases.

Yeah, any bar that calls itself a "sports bar" without at least a couple of enormous TVs and half a dozen smaller ones (most or all of them HD) is not going to last long. People go to sports bars to watch games, not see a ticker they can get on their phone. (While I'm not into sports, I go to a sports bar one night a week for trivia, and we've been to 4 different venues, all of which have had a dozen or more screens, and only our first venue back in 2009 had any CRTs.) I could see doing something like this in a barcade, though, where a good-sized chunk of the clientele is men of a certain age who have a fondness for old video games and tech. Coding the 2600 part of this might actually be pretty easy. The big-digit display for time/temp could easily be done with an asymmetrical playfield. A crawl would be harder and you'd probably have to use a flickery kernel, something like Stellar Track or Suicide Mission if you have extra RAM available, to make the crawl cover the screen horizontally. The tough part would be getting the data into the 2600. You'd need to basically have another computer hooked up to the net scraping web pages for the data you want to present, digest it into a tiny amount of text data and send it to the 2600 over the joystick ports, maybe emulating the keyboard controllers. Handling the data on the VCS side shouldn't be too tough, but the hardware would be pretty far beyond me. I'd probably just write a Linux or Android app with big, chunky pixels, myself, and use a Raspberry Pi as outlined in my earlier post.

I think Harmony+ sounds the best too, while leaving room for Harmony++ in the future (even if Harmony++ is what a C nerd might say today if he obtained another Harmony). Of the music ones, Harmony Forte seems the least bad because a successor or special edition could be Harmony Fortissimo. (I don't like Allegro because after packaging o2em for a few different Linux distros over the years, I think it's a terrible, unmaintainable library.) "Reprise" is usually a brief restatement of an earlier theme, if I remember correctly, and this Harmony is an expansion of the original, not a brief restatement. Weren't there some 64K compilations in addition to the Boulder Dash demo? Regardless, I'm more curious about what kind of RPGs people will attempt with 512K of RAM -- and then add in the SD card multi-loading that to my knowledge no one has used on the original Harmony for some potentially massive games.

Really? You felt another bump was necessary after 9 hours?

This is awesome, every time I come back there's a new name! Even though I don't have anything to hook a VCS up to anymore, I'll be in for 1, whatever it's called.

Unfortunately, the days in which you could turn on a TV and instantly see headlines without some kind of smart TV app or external box like this one are, for most people, in the past. Headline News abandoned the "all headline stories, all the time" format a decade ago, Weather Channel and most 24-hour news channels make you wait anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes for a forecast, I haven't seen a constantly updated scrolling sports score ticker since the videotex days, etc. When I was home sick from school in those days, I would switch the cable box to one of the videotex channels and just leave it on, reading books and looking up periodically to see if something interesting was happening. No blaring commercials or endless "analysis" by talking heads killing time till something shinier comes up, just the news and weather, repeated endlessly. Even if those things did still exist in their '80s form, having a device like this will let the user tailor the output to his or her taste, so that, for example, an expat Manchester United fan living in New Jersey can see those scores instead of what the Giants are doing, someone who lives an hour outside a city but is still on their cable network will see their own weather and not the city's (which is often very different even half an hour outside a city, where we live), someone who never wanted to hear the names Obama or Romney again could filter those stories out during last October's election coverage, etc. Additionally, I would always rather look at information than listen to it, and something like this wouldn't need sound at all unless it was something the user specifically wanted. I use my smartphone for all those purposes, but it seems to me that the object of the exercise is to recapture the late '70s-early '80s look and feel of videotex services with updated flexibility, combined with the awesomeness of a computer that fits in an Altoids tin.

In all seriousness, that article is from back when a computer in an Altoids tin was a big accomplishment. Now you can just stick a Raspberry Pi in there and write some custom software --- a browser in full screen pointing at a back end or a really pixelated XBMC skin should both work if you're going for that 1980 Videotex/Minitel look. You could probably even write some VCS software with a hacked copy of Stella to read data from a file or socket and display a nice flickery ticker, but I'd just simulate the blockiness in HTML/JS myself, maybe with a woff font. http://snapguide.com/guides/make-a-raspberry-pi-case-from-an-altoids-tin/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=28814 However, it's Peppermint or GTFO. Edit: Swype sucks. Been using it for 3 months to try to wean myself off of my Bluetooth keyboard for anything but coding, but it just makes my posts more typo-ridden than they already are.

Mine was actually this one (or looked just like it): www.bygone-binds.ecrater.com/p/9111729/tandy-electronic-computerized-chess-game Knowing Radio Shack, I assume they just rebadged someone else's. I did about as well (or not) with the chess games I later tried on the C64, though, and even Battle Chess on the Amiga. And, for that matter, every non-real-time strategy game or RPG I've ever played since then. If the objective is "make this machine produce output Y from input X, in such a way that you don't have to rip it out and start over when it's time to add more features", I have no problem strategizing, even if "this machine" is made up of half a dozen different APIs connecting to 10 different data sources over which I have little to no control. If it's "there's this guy who's out to get you and you need to whack him first, and you need to politely take turns doing it, so figure out all his possible moves 5 turns in advance" (or the modern RPG variation of "you need to politely take turns doing it (but while you're picking an action he can sneak up on you while you're thinking"), I'm toast.

Wait, you want to make a PS2 version? That doesn't seem all that retro... yet...

Well, I would have been a broom pusher in those days, since I've written everything from assembly to BASIC to COBOL to Lisp to Perl to Javascript for money but could only sporadically beat my electronic chess game even on its easiest level as a teenager, to say nothing of the chess club kids. But then, working at Cold-War-era IBM wouldn't exactly have been a good fit for me, anyway. Dated one of their coders in the early '90s and it had certainly changed, but... To keep it retro, I have fond memories of getting Geoworks Ensemble to run on an IBM PC-XT with an amber monitor, serial mouse, and a keyboard that could be used as a lethal weapon. (It was neat, cooler than my Amiga in some ways, but it didn't have emacs, or even a proper shell.)

Wow, that actually looks kind of awesome, especially for larger C64/NES projects. While I've used graphical tools like Hack-o-matic (which I threw together in tcl one evening 11 years ago; these days I would have found a way to make it a web app) to make it easier to look for player data in ROM files I wanted to hack, this is really the first IDE for assembly language projects that's caught my attention. I already have Eclipse installed anyway, so... might as well give it a go