x=usr(1536)
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Posts posted by x=usr(1536)
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Was it illegal to pirate Atari games at the time?
Remember that the 2600 is a system that came out in the 1970s and was in production into the 1990s. A lot changed in that time, because a lot of the issues surrounding copy protection and software piracy had to be worked out during the lifetime of the console.
To answer your question: yes, but the laws surrounding piracy were much different from country to country than they are today.
It looks like Atari never attempted to prevent pirates from stealing their games.
They did bring lawsuits against a few.
Not to mention that the 2600 lacks security features like checksum checking and such.
Right, but remember: this is a system from the 1970s. Security features like that didn't really start to become common until the late 1980s, though there were various attempts at them before then.
What really kept 2600 piracy at bay was the cost to do it until about 1983 or so. After that, the cost of the technology needed to copy 2600 games had fallen to a point where the investment required to do so was more realistic for the average bootleg operation.
Brazil is an interesting case in that regard: massive import duties on foreign-made products in the 1980s caused a flourishing hardware and software piracy market. See this link for an example, but there are many more than that.
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Can we really talk about pirate games when it comes to the Atari?
Definitely. Cow Bay is a good example of that: it was originally Stampede, developed by Activision. Someone ripped it off, renamed it to Cow Bay (evidently they didn't know that the word they were looking for is 'cowboy'), and repackaged it as their own work. It's absolutely a pirate game, as is everything else on the cartridge.
I mean it's not like any kind of approval was needed.
If you're referring to this in the sense of how Nintendo required that all games receive their approval before being released for the system, then yes, this is correct. But the difference here (other than that Atari had no such requirements) is that one party took another party's work and repackaged it as their own. It's piracy (though I'd probably call it bootlegging, but that's splitting hairs).
I expected something like that, but how do the switches point to the adresses?
They function like DIP switches. Depending on how the switches are set, a different set of address lines are likely used.
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Wonder if the rom chip is degrading?
Or if voltages are fluctuating on the light sixer but not the others.
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Small scale bitcoin mining hasn't been profitable for years -- basically by the time the mainstream heard about it, it was already not worth the electricity consumed by most people. This activity is using a lot of energy as it is. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-energy-consumption-explained/
High end crypto miners are fscking with the supply of powerful GPUs. AtariBox as described doesn't have nearly enough power to be a player in that space, and they'll never sell enough units to make a competitive grid of miners.
Besides, who would want to bet on Atari "Speaker Hat" SA in this space? They're literally a punchline and their old school brand is a liability for this domain.
Yep. And this is why the people who are actually making money from bitcoin mining at this point are the ones offering it as a service, but even that market is over-saturated.
The thing of it is, this is exactly the sort of short-sighted, half-baked decision I could see Atariboxcorp, Inc. making based on their evident lack of planning or strategy for the Ataribox thus far - their thought process probably hasn't extended much beyond, "O HAY GUISE LETS DO SOME BITCOINZ LOL", but I can see where (as part of that blinkered thinking) they might try to integrate it into a business model.
Still, I freely admit that I'm wargaming the scenario here. In all likelihood, they're probably just incompetent and latching on to buzzwords.
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I'm a bit out of the loop with regards to the state of Atari 800 emulation these days, so apologies if this question is an oversight on my part - Googling the answer wasn't turning up the results I was looking for.
What I am trying to find is an Atari 800 emulator that can pass a serial device attached to the host OS through to the emulator. I'd imagine that the emulator would have to have support for the 850 Interface or similar in order for this to work, which is fine, but I just don't know what's out there that might do this.
If anyone can point me in the right direction, it would be appreciated. FWIW, a Linux- or Windows-based emulator would be preferred.
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If the box mines while you sleep, you now have an issue with it consuming electricity and bandwidth. I know I wouldn't welcome a box that would screw with my utility bills and data caps.
I completely agree. But how many people actually read the EULA, or its small-print-on-the-box equivalent?
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Actually this wouldn't work- Second Life had a huuuuge amount of on line gambling using Linden dollars. People would convert real money into L$, gamble with it, then cash it back out into real money. Linden Labs made it easy to buy Linden Dollars and then convert it back to real currency with a small fee right through their website. The Linden Dollars were also pegged to the dollar and since L$ was all bought (or nearly all) with actual money, there wasn't a danger of inflation.
The US government took a high interest in the massive amount of gambling and Linden Labs quickly announced a ban of all gambling. Just as well, too, since most of the machines were crooked. I know you were probably joking but this exact thing did happen before with a successful ecosystem (vs. a taco-based one, that while it might be tasty, currently doesn't exist).
True. But that really only applies to the US scenario, and it's easily worked around.
Locate offshore somewhere in neutral datacentres, redirect customers in regulatorily-sensitive countries to a, 'we're sorry, but the government in your territory says you can't use our online gambling service', then offer a low-monthly-cost VPN/proxy service to run those customers' traffic through to your neutral datacentres - just install the appropriate app from the Ataribox App Store.
It's another tier for them to make money at, and given that it would facilitate opening up the customer base for the gambling service, worth investing in since that's where the real money is.
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The thing about virtual currency or blockchain tokens -- even if Atari SA could artoculate their plans beyond the buzzword level, seems to me they'd need an outside partner with expertise and resources to pull it off. That means more risk of failure in my opinion.
Agreed, but given that it's possible to buy both blockchain mining and blockchain management as a service, they could conceivably contract with a third party to provide this.
I still think their business model looks like this, however:
- Throw buzzwords around like you know what you're talking about
- ???
- PROFIT!
But having said that, the potential for the gambling / Tacocoin business model is also there. It wouldn't surprise me, though, if the 'Ataribox mines bitcoins while you sleep' was also a definite possibility.
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I'm wondering if it may not have been a US model that was retrofitted with a PAL TIA, modulator, etc. from a later PAL 2600.
Do you have any photos of the inside (including the PCB)?
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Had to say it: every time I see this game mentioned, I think of this:
(Excellent game, BTW!)
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I understand what 1536 is saying about lightly regulated gambling, but that seems far fetched to me.
I'll admit that I was stretching things a bit with the example I described, but it's one possibly-workable way I can see for them to potentially have a business model surrounding the Ataribox, their gambling software, and their Tacocoin.
Having said that, I am entirely willing to admit that it's far more likely that they're just throwing buzzwords out there to see who throws money back at them in return.
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Also, I wonder if the Ataribox was postphoned so that they could incorporate Atari's Gambling and Crypto Token stuff into it.
I hate to say this, but... This might actually work in the marketplace - at least, in certain circumstances. Hear me out.
If they pitch this as a box capable of online gambling and use Tacocoin as a method of holding and paying out gambling funds, this may get around regulation in certain territories where online gambling is either heavily-regulated or illegal.
Think of it this way: you play <insert gambling game here> and win Tacocoin, not cash. But you can spend Tacocoin in the Atariboxcorp, Inc. online store - and one of the items you can 'purchase' is gift cards loaded with the dollar / pound / Euro / other local currency value of Tacocoin you happen to have amassed in the gambling games. Minus an exchange fee, of course.
It's actually kind of smart - they get to keep the players' losses as well as hit them with an exchange fee for pulling their winnings out of the ecosystem. And given that cryptocurrencies are low on regulation at the moment, it sidesteps a bunch of nasty legal encumberances involving the transfer and movement of real money.
If this is what they actually end up doing, I will have to give them some credit.
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Yes you're right, Belgium and most of western europe (except France) was pal. You're from Belgium x=usr ?
I'm from a couple of hops to the West of Belgium
I live in the US now, though.Growing up, I had family who worked in the entertainment industry. We had multiscan TVs and VCRs in our home as a result, because they needed to be able to play back videotapes that would be sent to them from the US and elsewhere. I was probably the only 10-year-old in the country who knew that the US' NTSC standard ran at 3.58MHz, while Japan's version ran at 4.43MHz.
One side effect of this is that we used to be sent movies that had already been released months prior in the US but that hadn't made it to the cinema in Europe yet. The Internet has kinda killed that, though
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Mon dieu, c'est magnifique!
Was Belgium PAL or SECAM? I always found it funny how many of the TV sets from France supported PAL and SECAM. My dad was a tech in Europe and he repaired a lot of TVs from French immigrants. I guess the advantage would be to be able to receive signals from RTL or ZDF/ARD if you were close enough.
Belgium used PAL, IIRC.
For what it's worth, we used to be able to pick up SECAM transmissions occasionally if the conditions were exactly right. They'd usually drift in and out, and the combination of distance weakening the signal, interference, and differences in the color fields made for some rather eerie visuals by the time they were showing on the PAL TV.
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Share news about the Ataribox on an Ataribox forum- get rude childish responses.
We've been through this before: tacos > Ataribox.
A better question would be why are you guys such assholes?
Don't worry about the 'why', just sit back and marvel at how well we do it!
But whatever you do, don't stop for a moment to think about the common denominator in all of your failed and / or contentious relationships. It couldn't possibly be that.
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SECAM was invented 14 years prior to the release of the 2600 in Europe so I assume it was widely spread in the country. Still I've never seen such a thing as a SECAM VCS.
True, but your original question asked about SECAM 2600s using a PAL TV connector instead of SCART.
We had SCART in PAL countries, too
The connection type had nothing to do with the TV scan the 2600 would output. -
Point taken, but remember that SCART didn't always exist
The PAL TV connector that you're talking about was pretty much standard across transmission formats in Europe. It didn't matter if the country was PAL or SECAM, it just fed the signal from the 2600 into the TV.
Anyway, to answer your question: as far as I know, France only received SECAM models.
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Or practically anywhere in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext
Granted, teletext wasn't interactive in the sense of it allowing two-way communication, but it was ubiquitous.
I miss it; it was really useful. Shame it never caught on in North America.
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Having run across this thread earlier, it occurred to me that there might be some interest in a project that I've been fiddling with on and off in my spare time for the last few months.
Some background: about four years ago, it became necessary to have an actual fax machine at home. Our printer already had the capability, but we didn't want to have to pay for a landline in order to be able to use it. In searching for a solution to this, I ran across Obihai, who make devices that can bridge Google Voice service to analogue phones - or faxes, or pretty much anything else capable of making use of dialtone and an RJ-11 connector.
As it turned out, this worked surprisingly well, and also proved that usably passing data over VoIP was at least possible. But it left me wondering if it was possible to run a BBS or other modem-based dial-in service over VoIP, a thought which I didn't put any real effort into at the time. Eventually, however, some free time fell into my lap and I decided to put something together to test the idea.
The environment that was built used the following:
- A pair of Google Voice accounts (one for testing, one to dedicate to the BBS)
- An Obihai 202 Google Voice to analogue telephony adapter
- A pair of TrendNet TFM-561U USB 56Kbps modems (one for the BBS, one for the machine I'm testing dialup to the BBS with)
- A V-Tech CD1103WH analogue phone for testing purposes ($6 at Wal-Mart)
- The VMWare ESXi hypervisor
- A rotating cast of virtual machines running under VMWare ESXi.
The first thing to do was to get dialtone to both the phone jack in my office and the BBS' modem.
Configuring the Obihai for both Google Voice accounts, one of its phone ports was dedicated to the test number with the other phone port dedicated to the BBS number. The test number port was plugged directly into one of the house's disused phone jacks, which conveniently brought dialtone to the phone jack in my office; the BBS' modem was cabled directly to its phone port on the Obihai.
One of the TrendNet USB modems was installed on the machine on my desk; the other was attached to the VMWare server that the BBS would reside on. The Wal-Mart phone was used to test that calls could be made from the test number's modem to the BBS number and vice-versa.
With that out of the way, it was time to build the proof-of-concept.
This went through a number of iterations. Frankly, I wasn't happy with any of them, and still haven't settled on a final configuration. For now, however, it's a Windows XP (more on that further down) virtual machine running a mix of SEXPOTS, the NSSM service manager, the ncat general-purpose network connector, and fortune for Windows. It's cobbled together so that the following happens (and all network connections are made on the loopback address):
- At boot, SEXPOTS starts as a service on its own; NSSM starts ncat as a service.
- ncat listens on TCP/17.
- SEXPOTS redirects dial-in sessions from the modem to TCP/17.
- When ncat sees a session come in on TCP/17, it runs fortune and sends its output over TCP/17 to SEXPOTS.
- SEXPOTS takes the data it received on TCP/17 and crams it back down the modem to the dial-in session.
- The person who dialled in sees the fortune printed on their terminal and the session is automatically disconnected.
Some notes on why this particular arrangement was chosen follow. Apologies for any gaps in the explanations; I've almost certainly forgotten things since this was initially configured.
- Windows XP was chosen for compatibility reasons with older BBS software. Yes, XP is an unsupported security nightmare these days, but the VM it runs under is configured without the network adapter connected to a vswitch. Even if it did get 0wned, there wouldn't be much that could be done with it that would be useful since it has no connectivity beyond the modem.
- TCP/17 is being used for the ncat listener because that's the same port as was originally allocated to QOTD (Quote of the Day). Since this part of the PoC basically replicates QOTD's functionality, I decided to be anal about things and use its port. RFC compliance is Serious Business in an undertaking like this.
- If I hadn't wanted to use TCP/17 and had instead stuck with the default port of 23 (telnet) that SEXPOTS uses, NSSM and ncat could have been eliminated and Net2BBS used instead.
- NSSM, ncat, and Net2BBS can all coexist without stepping on each other. This opens up the possibility of having Net2BBS handle connections to the BBS under normal conditions while ncat handles connections to, say, a message informing callers that the BBS is down for maintenance, etc. Just repoint SEXPOTS to the appropriate TCP port that ncat is listening on, restart the SEXPOTS service, and callers get a 'try again later' message when attempting to connect; flip it back over to pointing at Net2BBS to resume normal service.
- Doing this under Linux by way of mgetty is also a possibility - and, indeed, the original plan had been to do this on a Raspberry Pi. However, the BBS software options weren't exactly what I was looking for under Linux, so it ended up running on Windows.
- There are some batch files that glue various small but significant things together.
In a nutshell, that's how it does it. Now for the 'why'.
The more I thought about it, the more I was entertained by the idea of using a (mostly) modern technology stack to replicate the functionality of a communications method and medium that are largely considered to be obsolete - and ones that are particularly relevant to the career path I later took. There was also the 'can it be done?' aspect:
this almost certainly wasn't the first time that someone had tried it, but there wasn't any clear record of anyone else having done so.
One other thing was appealing in all of this: finding a practical use for old software. There is a surprising amount of BBS software still available, with many packages still being maintained and developed. All they really need is a modem to be useful, and those are easy to get.
There are plans to make some changes - a USRobotics Courier 56Kbps Business Modem (which are practically constructed to withstand harsher environments than cockroaches can endure) fell into my lap on Friday, and will probably end up being the BBS modem. This will pull a digital / analogue conversion stage out of the VoIP environment that's introduced by the USB modem, which may help with data rates. Or not, and it will just look completely proper.
There is one other thing I want to do with this, but I'm not certain that it can be accomplished in the way that I'd like it to be. But that's for later on
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If you're just interested in doing some BBSing, then yes, it's absolutely doable. If you want to avoid service or long-distance charges, here's what I recommend:
- Sign up for a Google Voice account.
- Buy an Obihai 202.
- Configure the Obihai 202 with your Google Voice account.
- Connect your modem to the Obihai's line (phone) port and go to town.
This is the setup I have an experimental BBS running on, and it's very reliable. VoIP doesn't give the greatest data rates, but 9600bps is fairly standard with the odd fluke connection at 14.4Kbps. For most dialup BBSes, that should be fine.
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I also began in the late 80's and early 90's, with things like DASarcade, and when MAME supported like 5 games, and Mike Cuddy's Gyruss sound emulator. The Windows 3.1 Activision Action Packs.. Is great to have watched the scene develop from day 1. I think the idea of emulation started to take off in 1995-1996.
The one other arcade emulator that sticks in my mind from that timeframe was the standalone Xevious emulator that the author (think he may have been Austrian) was trying to get people to pay money for. Didn't really work out for him, and especially not once MAME supported Xevious.
There were also the standalone Stern / Konami game emulators from the same guys who eventually merged them into RAGE. Retrocade was kinda interesting, but fizzled out after a while.
Definitely agreed that 1995-1996 was where it really started taking off. By '97 or '98 it was pretty much commonplace.
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I've had a question for a while, and since they keep harping on it.......what the hell is retro gaming design?
Is that the square shape, or the plastic frame, or is it the fact that it has a screen?
Retro Gaming Design is whatever you want it to be! Just use the power of your imagination!
(The secret ingredient is love. And by 'love' I mean 'desperation'.)
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I had an HX-20 aeons ago, complete with printer and microcassette drive. Unfortunately, it's long-gone, but here're my recollections of it:
They're a neat machine from an historical perspective, but overall practicality is somewhat limited. There's almost no original software available for them. The keyboard is better to use than it might at first look with a nicely-readable non-backlit LCD. BASIC is built-in and is a variant of Microsoft BASIC, IIRC. I think there may also have been a monitor mode akin to the one in the Apple ][, but that may be my memory playing tricks on me.
They're really a product of their time - and by that I mean that they're representative of trying to figure out what usable mobile computers would look and act like. That's not to knock them, but if you're interested in them I'd recommend asking yourself if you want it because of its place in the history of computing, or because you want something to use and enjoy regularly. If your answer is the former, you'll probably be better off in the long run than if it's the latter.
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Posted · Edited by x=usr(1536)
More specifically: a Western Electric 500. Mine has a base made in (IIRC) 1954, casing from 1968-ish, and various handset bits from up into the '80s. Think I dropped a whopping $3 on it in the early 2000s at a garage sale. And yes, they will outlast the cockroaches.
eBay prices for them tend to be completely stupid; there are still literally millions of them out there. Thrift stores and Craigslist are your best bet. Oh, and places that buy back old phone systems. People will toss anything in a box to get rid of it during an upgrade, and the phone system refurbishers don't want to bother with them.
$10-$20 apiece and no more. They should be working for that price.