bmcnett

Must be about 40 by now.

IMO the ban is good. This is the Internet, if he wants back he can just make a new account anytime. I don't think anyone would mind if he did, as long as the new persona isn't a dick like the old one. It's not like there's money or property at stake. Also, look I've known this guy since 1990, and lessons like this are a rare treat for him. He was a clever kid, so people cut him slack for being stubborn and petty. But we aren't kids anymore, and sometimes clever isn't good enough, so tough noogies.

This is catalyzing into a "Metal Gear Solid" spinoff.

This thread is now about the terminology of New Religious Movements. ISKCON can be opaque to the Western observer because much of it takes place in the context of Indian tradition, and it can be difficult to determine if an idea comes from ISKCON or the Indian culture at large. For example, references to "skunks" in this forum seem to derive from a Bengali proverb and are not religious per se. From my ongoing (limited!) research, it seems now that "envious snake" in ISKCON is roughly equivalent to "Suppressive Person" in the Church of Scientology (link). That is to say, someone whose only intention is to disrupt and destroy, and therefore must be destroyed. When the charismatic leaders of both organizations passed away, those who did not accept the transfer of power were branded such and punished. For an introduction to ISKCON, The Church of Scientology, and other New Religious Movements, I recommend Steve Hassan's "Freedom of Mind Center" (link) which though shallow has quite a breadth of useful information.

Really? Where did you work on games for both Game Boy and Playstation 3? That's quite a long career you had making games. Can you tell us the name of a game you shipped? My Game Boy publisher (Acclaim) never shipped a GB or GBC game that called an API... because Nintendo never provided an API for those platforms, which also have no OS and are more primitive than A8 in many ways. PS3's SPU has (almost) no API either. In practice its "API calls" are skinny wrappers on hardware DMA registers.

Thanks for asking - I don't plan on porting anything I did professionally to A8, because the only stuff that would fit are licensed kiddie games for Game Boy, and even then only with a lot of work, because GB has a lot of 4-color hardware sprites. I guess I'll try to totally rewrite some of my old A8 BASIC games for ASM, now that I understand ASM a little better. What a vanity project! As for how is games programming different from platform to platform, as a practical matter it's largely the same for all platforms in a given generation. When I worked on PS2/GC/XB my company intentionally ignored any feature that made a platform different, because by definition that wouldn't port to the other platforms. PS3's SPU processor is an exception - coding for it feels very old school to me. It has a RAM smaller than some modded A8 machines (!), no cache, and is very hackable and "deterministic" in that you can sit down with a pencil and figure out how fast your code will be with great confidence.

Actually A8 looks like a really sweet platform compared to GB. GB had only four shades of gray at 160x160, 8KB of RAM, no persistent storage, and no pixel-addressable display modes. There's no OS or IO controller, so for peripherals like printer and infrared, you need cycle-accurate Z80 code to match the IO port frequencies! Since we're talking about making games, and there seems to be some confusion about the terminology of making games (?) I'll explain just in case somebody misunderstood: To "ship" a game means to have worked on the game until it's done, and then for the game to be assigned a SKU and sold at a game retailer. It's possible to work in the games industry for years, and due to circumstances never ship a game.

Yeah that doesn't demonstrate sincerity or clear understanding. The primary motivation for nearly everyone who comes here is to relive warm feelings of nostalgia for a beloved old computer. I'm no different - I owned an 800XL for years and loved it to death. Nowadays, I run my favorite old games in emulators sometimes. I'm not hardcore like some people, but there's room here for everyone. I came to visit atariage.com for... about five years? before realizing that you were even here. I don't even remember you talking about Atari years ago, but I guess you've been at it all these years. You keep generalizing as if there were two groups of people here, when in fact there are three: 1. THE VAST MAJORITY - wishes this whole thread would vanish into a black hole, along with all memories it ever existed 2. A HALF DOZEN GRUMPY OLD MEN - taking a rhetorical bat to atariksi's pinata 3. ATARIKSI - attempting the troll to end all trolls, all by his lonesome To be frank, your beliefs are fascinating to me but I don't care all that much about them. I think they're a useful prism for attempting to make sense of your outlandish words, and that's it.

even if atariksi spoke in a familiar lingo, you'd have to wonder what his motivations are for doing this on a computer nostalgia forum. every day, real people die for lack of ability to control their car with an analog wheel and pedals. every year, terrorists escape assassination and innocent civilians are killed for lack of ability to control robot airplanes with an analog stick from a trailer near Las Vegas. millions of dollars are at stake in auto racing with analog wheels, and hundreds of thousands are at stake in professional computer gaming. witness this unfortunate Korean who knows no better than to use an analog mouse to play games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbpCLqryN-Q if atariksi sincerely believed that digital controls are always provably superior, he could save many lives and perhaps make money for himself and others by acting on his belief. since he has already proven his theory beyond any shadow of a doubt on this forum, atariksi has a moral duty to stop engaging with trolls and step out into the real world, where the absolute truth about joysticks can save real human lives. every day atariksi chooses to spend hours in pointless argument with envious snakes and skunks, living human people continue to die for lack of knowledge about digital control.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7xH72dFySg

Yeah... sorry to push the Krishna so hard, but I've been trying to make a point. An analogy will help illustrate: atariksi is Buzz Lightyear and doesn't realize that he's just a toy like the rest of us. The logic and pace of his arguments, and the utterances about "envious snakes" and "skunks" and "refrigerator bugs" seem random and crazy until you read the text on Buzz Lightyear's package, which tells the backstory of "Emperor Zurg" and "Star Command." I've been trying to point at atariksi's backstory to show that he's not simply insane - he's just a fish out of water. There remains the problem that atariksi doesn't realize he's a fish. Pardon me for making sweeping generalizations, but we're all middle-aged men from Western culture with a fondness for engineering? You could hardly get further away from the kind of person who's likely to resonate with the logic of "Krishna Consciousness." Let me tell you a brief story. I was about eight years old and one of my best friends was from South India. He brought me to some kind of lecture event where I was the only person who wasn't South Indian, and this was a novelty. After the lecture, they brought me on stage and asked me what I thought about it. I said "It was cool" and felt a cold reaction from the crowd. Instantly, I realized that American slang was inappropriate for this audience - they thought I meant the lecture was unmoving! So I quickly said "It was very interesting, thank you" which communicated effectively. AFAIK atariksi's been in America for at least 25 years, and he hasn't learned that lesson yet? You can't escape the suspicion that he doesn't want to learn.

No, you see, I know almost nothing about Hare Krishna. That's why I Googled it and then asked you for the correct interpretation so many times. You aren't required to answer my questions, but you can't fault me for a lack of interest.

hey that's exactly what I was looking for, thanks!

Looks like when the charismatic founder of the Hare Krishnas died in 1977, those who remained loyal to him were branded "envious snakes" and punished: In this context "envious snake" becomes a badge of honor! original text

I guess we're talking about me now. You are right! I know almost nothing about you Hare Krishnas. But I've demonstrated an eagerness to learn. Since I have no tools with which to do so, I have no choice but to Google. If you have constructive suggestions for me, I'm all ears. Since you clearly know more than me, perhaps you could teach me a thing or two.

so far, i've shipped games for these platforms: game boy game boy color game boy advance playstation 2 xbox game cube playstation 3 xbox 360

I don't know much about your philosophy, but I'm eager to learn what I can. I don't see what the harm is in speculation, either. Speculation seems to be a necessary component of scientific inquiry, for one thing. If speech were limited to truths and facts, there wouldn't be much we could learn via language. You may not be aware that the concept of "losing brain parts to the refrigerator bugs" isn't familiar to your audience. Maybe it's another Krishna reference? How would I know. Maybe you could explain. As for the Sun and Moon - I honestly don't remember what the question was. It would be polite for you to restate a question when it is from days or weeks ago. I dimly remember an argument about the Sun being closer to the Earth than the Moon? After some Googling, it seems that atariksi's religion requires him to believe that the Moon is large and far from Earth, and that the Sun is small and near to Earth. A nuanced opinion from the Internet states: So the nuanced view is that there exists both an "ancient science" Sun and Moon, and a "modern science" Sun and Moon, about each we can hold mutually exclusive beliefs. I dunno, that's just from five minutes of Googling. What do you think?

Yep I saw the videos, and the engine is a technical wonder. Since I don't think I can compete with such genius (I've never even written ASM for A8 before) I aim for the simpler goal of doing something like BallBlazer with a sideways TV! Sounds reasonable - but all my nostalgia neurons are already locked on A8. I'm not really interested in NES per se (I could write for NES if I were) but I don't remember a lot of A8 games that sacrificed colors in the name of more sprites etc. so it's a little corner I'm interested in exploring?

hiya, i program contemporary games for a living, but i dream of a8 in my spare time. two ideas have been percolating in my mind lately, but i doubt they are new ideas - maybe some wise atarians can set me straight. 1. i've been thinking of making a wolfenstein-like game for a8 where the TV is turned sideways, and vertical slices of wall are selected via HSCROLL and DLI, since scanlines go vertical when the TV is sideways. i haven't seen this before - has it been done? i figure 60hz would be easy as long as there aren't any textures. 2. if i set the playfield narrow, is it feasible to make a 60hz or 30hz engine that double-buffers the playfield, PMG and DLI, and spends most of the 6502's time generating the offscreen PMG/DLI to multiplex a few dozen 1-color sprites? if i can write such an engine, then i can write NES-style games for it that have lots of sprites without too much fiddly-daddly about which sprite is which PMG.

I present a theory about the female sock puppet: I met atariksi's parents, seemed like nice people. Since atariksi's English is more fluent, from time to time he may have written English on behalf of Mom or Dad. This eventually extended to the Internet, where he'd have opened and ran accounts on their behalf. It's not hard to imagine atariksi one day being clobbered in some forum somewhere, where somebody also argues that he stands alone. Since A. he knows his family would back him up and B. they've trusted him for years to Internet on their behalf, it follows that C. it's okay to use their accounts as backup in a troll fight. The rest of us would have immediately thought D. people are smart and will figure out what I'm doing! and E. this reduces my credibility, destroys my argument and makes me look like a whack-a-looney! But there is some kind of shield in atariksi's mind that prevents thoughts like this. I don't know if the sock puppet on atariage.com is supposed to be the voice of his wife or his Mom, or some other female relative, but that's my first guess.

Turns out that "envious snake" is a Krishna reference, despite atariksi's attempt at abject denial: original text So... the idea is that black snakes are by nature envious? And that there also exist people with the qualities of black snakes, including an envious nature? And that a bunch of these snake people populate atariage.com? I don't quite understand how a black snake is envious by nature - far as I can tell, a snake is essentially a rodent-killing machine without any significant relationship to humans. Maybe I'm missing something because I believe in evolution. As atariksi rolls out the unfamiliar phrases going forward, Google the phrase along with "ISKCON" or "Krishna" or "Prabhupada" and you may understand better what he's talking about. In my travels I also found krishnatube.com which has a lot of interesting video tutorials like this one about bulimia: video link

So atariksi, when the web links to your products went missing suddenly years ago, and you posted a cryptic message about "copyright concerns" what was that all about? and as for the BBTI meeting notes on the web about limiting you to selling out your inventory of 500 copies, what was that about? what was the BBTI's side of the story, and what was yours?

atariksi, so you have permission in writing from your church for the new derivative works you're selling which are based on their copyrighted media? I better contact them to make sure. wouldn't want them to have to shut you down like a few years ago...