bmcnett

The "envious serpent" reference from before is probably taken from a Krishna parable that none of us are likely to know. In a civilized discussion, necessary context such as this would be provided without my help.

I suspect atariksi is at a critical juncture in his life, and trolling y'all is the only form of therapy he knows. Did he say in another thread he has a daughter now? Not too long ago he bought a house. Without knowing his situation too well, I can't speculate what the problem is with too much specificity.

gonna post the story soon of how atariksi ripped off his own church's clearly labeled copyrighted images and audio, and sold them from his web site for years before being caught by the church's copyright enforcement arm. did the church approve the sale of the new atari and amiga derivative works that sell with his MPDOS cables? i'll go into detail later. for now he can explain his side of the story, which cats him as a perfect moral agent?

well said potatohead. i'll add my two cents. atariksi, twenty years ago you showed me your Bhagavad Gita megademo and Vedic planetarium game. They were technically on par with the best commercial game software. Every five years or so, I tried to download your demos and relive the magic, but they stopped working on any PC I had access to at some time in the 2000s. Now it seems like your ongoing development of these products has routed through the MPDOS project, which uses an Atari or Amiga as the audio/video display for a PC old enough to have a parallel port. Like most people, I haven't laid eyes on an Atari, Amiga or parallel port in more than a decade. To see your work, I need to invest in a very specific hardware platform that probably only a few dozen people have ever owned. I may never believe in your message, but I think your work is interesting and I think a lot of other people would too, if they had the chance. Please consider also developing software for modern platforms, such as the web.

You think God might have better things to do than play with joysticks? Or for that matter, Atari computers? Cause we sure don't.

The spiritual impossibility of moon landings is apropos to this discussion because it may explain this nonsense about digital control. Perhaps digital control IS spiritually superior, albeit in a way evident only to those who have devoted their life to Krishna. In which case, this forum is not the place to argue the issue without first explaining the Krishna angle.

atariksi may believe the moon landings were faked, but he is coy about why. You see, he believes it's spiritually impossible for a man to visit the moon via technology, despite all this talk about F=MA. I don't know if he thinks unmanned interplanetary travel is likewise spiritually impossible, but that sounds like an interesting topic perhaps not for an atari forum. Is the function of semen to travel up into the brain and support cognitive function? atariksi says so...

After some thought, I'm convinced that the truth is some combination of the following three: 1. atariksi is sincere; he actually has such strong convictions about commercially irrelevant technical trivia that he is also effectively unemployable. Imagine being his boss and asking him to implement analog control. 2. atariksi is a valuable engineer who doesn't actually believe what he says here. He just comes here to troll old people who don't know/care about trolling him back IRL. 3. atariksi has a kind of "don't ask don't tell" policy about the strange beliefs. ask him about the moon landings sometime!

@atariksi IIRC you were using some kind of false color with alternating pixels of green only and red/blue only. 8 bit color planar formats only, various resolutions. Can you name the two animation formats I supported? I remember discussing these with you. I had been broadcasting news about your big video debut a week or two before it went live. People sure enjoyed seeing your live video after months of my canned animations. For many including me, it was the first live streaming network video they had ever seen in their life.

@potatohead did you mention a game project? I sometimes hanker to join one. never wrote asm for Atari but I shipped a few hundred thousand copies for game boy which is (unbelievably!) more primitive. I mean, hblank interrupts required to get an all points addressible display!

I can say that I've learned something today. I had always thought atariksi was a cool hacker and stood up for him back in the day, when people gossiped about his appearance or beliefs. Seeing him here try to "edit the matrix" to assert moral and technical dominance over me puts an end to all that. It hardly matters, but the college projects we talked about here were both pretty trivial - like 1000 lines of assembly or so. I freely admit that neither was worth fighting over.

I have no idea when you conceived of your thing, but I heard of it the same time everyone else did - weeks or months after I'd been broadcasting my thing and talking with you about my thing. Never before today have you ever claimed that the idea of broadcasting was yours first. I'm starting to get the idea that there is a malicious and disingenuous side to you that I haven't seen before. Nice dig about how I didn't own a capture card at the time. Guess I should have had more money, like you did. BUT more importantly! This whole shebang sounds like a silly thing done by foolish kids long ago. I don't bear any ill will toward you. I know today that my anger toward you at the time was wrong, because I'm a little older and wiser. SERIOUS QUESTION: are you wiser today than you were twenty years ago? Is there anything you've ever done that you feel was wrong? Ok Mr. Morality, let's roll. Your brother ordered it for his company, but was it for his company's use? Or did he fib and hand the card off to you once he got it? Is it moral to fib? What's the dividing line between a fib and a lie? I don't think Krishna had much to say about Donkey Kong, but he definitely had a lot to say about this kind of stuff. I'm not sure if I buy your story about the corporate discount yet. I have a pretty clear memory of you bragging to me about how you played the company's representative by claiming you were going to use the card for a purpose that they felt was worth donating a card, and then using it for some other purpose.

Digital joystick control is awesome and I love it. You know what my favorite digital joystick games are? The Super Mario Bros. series for NES. Those games project an interesting illusion of horizontal speed control that feels analog, but isn't. When playing those games, I really feel like my horizontal movement IS Mario and by extension, I am become Mario. Even now that I'm pushing 40 and my beard is gray. Hats off to Miyamoto (its designer.) I bumped into him at the 2004 E3 in Los Angeles. You'd be surprised how short he is in person. I may have learned the Japanese language just to understand him better. His name and the name of his company - 宮本茂 and 任天堂 - are two of the first Japanese phrases I memorized. What is your favorite digital joystick game, and why?

Long ago in college, before the Internet exploded, there was a kind of campus network forum called VAXNOTES, and there were two guys I remember who started their own subforums where they tried to derive the nature of the universe from first principles - atariksi and someone we'll call JVC. One was a member of ISKCON and the other was an Objectivist (i.e. Ayn Rand fanboy.) Things proceeded as you might expect - both subforums became instant troll magnets, and I'm not innocent of a little trolling here and there, though ad hominem attacks weren't my MO. What surprises me here - decades later - is to see the same dynamic playing out, with similar actors employing almost the same stances - and phrases - as in the troll wars of yore. I'm literally seeing paragraphs verbatim from all sides. I'm starting to imagine our collective future in nursing homes, hunched over keyboards, arguing about the DIVINE TRUTH of some trivial aspect of consumer product nostalgia, such as the patterns on Dixie cups or colors of Play-Doh. Which is the ONE TRUE Dixie cup pattern from 1975? After a hundred man-years of trolling, sock-puppetry and back-trolling on the subject, no consensus can emerge. Just for the hell of it, a few years ago I Googled JVC and it seems like his new hobby is "research" into Artificial Intelligence using Visual Basic. His "findings" are presented on the web with breathless enthusiasm, as if it were bleeding edge and leading to some kind of "singular" discovery about the nature of the universe. In fact it is just the kind of work you'd expect from someone who dicks around with Visual Basic for a few hours after work. I tried sending him links to peer-reviewed papers in Artificial Intelligence, to show that he's doing stuff that other people were doing in the 1960s, but he seems to have an anti-reality filter that blocks him from understanding such things. Perhaps at some level he knows he's just a schlub like the rest of us, how could I know. So yeah, some people are "a piece of work" and there isn't much we can do about it, despite our best intentions.

Here there's a simple confusion of terminology. I work on the software side of game development, and because the buttons aren't on/off - because they deliver a value in a range from 0 to N - we think of them as "analog buttons" even if there isn't any analog hardware, because the value we get in software is the same as if the hardware were analog. I do remember also seeing the term "pressure-sensitive buttons" which is what you've been calling these buttons. As a software guy, any hardware project seems intractably expensive to me! The great cost I referred to was the cost of getting exactly the same hand feel as the original controller, because the goal is to fool experts into thinking one's analog controller is a very familiar digital controller.

Yeah, I have to admit that was a dick move on my part. You deserve an apology. I apologize. Apparently unlike you, I'm cursed with a permanent memory of the dick moves I've made in my life. I think I'm the strange one in this case - most everyone else I know has a more selective memory that erases the bad stuff over time. I don't have a photographic memory or anything, but I can play a lot of memories back like videotapes, and I've been told not everyone can. My motivation for jamming your Krishna Channel was not jealousy, as you assume. At the time, I felt that you had stolen my idea of a broadcast channel - and then gave credit to Lord Krishna for the idea! I was angry because I thought I'd been ripped off. With twenty years' hindsight, it's a silly story that reminds me how foolish young people are

You are right, of course. An analog joystick is not the best digital joystick. After all, you are judging both sticks by their respective ability to express one of "9 states" which is the very definition of a digital joystick. If we were to judge them by their ability to express one of "10 states" the analog joystick would win. Are you really claiming that you got that $500 video capture board twenty years ago without deceiving the representative from the company? I remember how proud you were to have pulled it off - to have not paid cash like a sucker (like me) would have. Far as I know, this kind of denial is a first for you.

Potatohead is right that a discussion of whether A is "better" than B is meaningless without also qualifications that can be tested objectively. In the case of analog vs. digital joysticks, I'm satisfied by the qualification "does the control scheme make it impossible to win a game?" It would seem that a control scheme that guarantees failure is not "better." Arguments to the contrary are guaranteed to get a laugh. Every mainstream game sold for a TV game system in about ten years has had analog joysticks. I suspect that at least one of these games would be impossible to win with a digital joystick. Having worked on only about five of them and spent not too much time in the joystick code, I have no proof to offer that this is the case. It would seem that if there is such a game, probably it is one where you need to quickly identify targets on the screen, like you would with a mouse on a desktop PC. Unfortunately, there is a trend towards making games easier to win that makes it harder to prove unwinnability. I also refuse to spend the time necessary to do so, because I have a life. Atariksi made the claim that I am even more jealous of him than twenty years ago! To be honest, I was briefly jealous of him twenty years ago. We both were busy acquiring computer peripherals that cost about $500. I was working as a janitor in a supermarket for minimum wage to earn the money I needed. And at least in one case, atariksi scammed a company out of a $500 peripheral by lying to them about who he was, and then bragged to me (and presumably many others) about this deed. I'm not a religious man, but according to my Catholic upbringing, that would be morally equivalent to stealing the peripheral from a store. I was briefly jealous of atariksi's ability to act without morality. I don't know much about what atariksi's been up to in the last twenty years, but I'm happy with my life and I hope he is happy with his, as well. If he were a software mogul worth billions, I sure would be jealous again!

For maybe the first time ever, I actually went back and looked at the numbered posts you mentioned. I gotta tell ya, most people don't do that because it requires the other party to dig around a lot. Ok so in #674, I say that I like analog control (BTW I like digital too) and I say that there's circumstantial evidence that analog is sometimes better. Then I say that you were my mentor but arguing with you on the computer is punishing. In #669, I say this thread fits your MMO but with way m0ar crazy! Sock puppet is new. Thought you did it for the Krishna, but doubt Krishna had much to say about Atari 5200 Donkey Kong joysticks... Said a little about the game industry, where I work. Tried to explain that trolling is just your way to make friends on the computer. Said that I like digital joysticks - when playing digital joystick games. I don't see a contradiction. Why don't you say what that contradiction was? I don't have the energy to fight the robo-posting like in the old days. I have a wife and two kids and a job now, and I guess you have something like that too.

In fact, any digital joystick - let's say the original Atari 2600 joystick - could be replaced (at great cost!) by an analog joystick that looks the same, has exactly the same hand feel, and which outputs the same digital signal (after filtering.) It would be impossible to determine whether the stick is analog or digital, without opening it up to examine its guts. By this same means, many modern video game systems have analog push buttons, which in most games are interpreted as digital buttons. There is no way for the game player to know that the buttons are not digital, as long as they play digital-only games and do not Google posts like this! Twenty years ago, atariksi's flame wars read like the words of Yoda the Jedi Master. Stuff like "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering" but taken from the scripture of a major world religion. Sure it was corny, but at least it seemed earnest and consistent. Now with the female sock puppet and the prosaic subject matter, the narrative has lost its internal logic. Imagine if Yoda had said "Chevrolet leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Buy Ford you must" and occasionally pretended to be female. That's how this religious flame war about joysticks in Atari 5200 Donkey Kong feels to me. It is difficult to sympathize with Yoda's point of view. I'm here because I'm concerned about atariksi's state of mind. Something seems amiss.

I'm not going to respond to the points here, because I don't understand them. This was nominally a response to my post, but (I think) contains no reference to anything I said. The broken English is a strange touch, because atariksi's spoken English is fluent. I guess I can refute the idea that analog joysticks require feedback and digital joysticks do not, though it's probably been refuted here a few times before. 1) The Intellivision joystick is digital, but since it is a flat disk with no markings, there is no way to know confidently which direction you've indicated without feedback. 2) The Apple joystick is analog, but since its limits of motion are bounded by a rectangle, no feedback is required to know when it is at a diagonal limit.

For giggles, I present a simple thought experiment: Imagine a game. The video display shows a single number between 1 and 100. The CPU is very slow, or busy, or far away. Once each second, the CPU can sample the input hardware, select a random number, and update the display to show the new number. The goal of the game is to, somehow, using the input device, indicate the number on the display before it changes. There are ten rounds and the number of correct indications is the score. A score of ten indicates victory. A digital input sample can express only three possibilities, while the number can express one of a hundred values. An analog input sample can indicate any of the hundred numbers. While it is possible to win the game with digital controls, it becomes a game of chance where at each round, there is a 97% chance of losing regardless of skill. With analog controls, this is purely a game of skill where there is a 100% chance of winning if you play skillfully enough. There can exist no corollary game that is more winnable with digital than analog, because any analog input can be filtered to become a digital input. So at least in theory, digital control has now been proven not always superior.

Potatohead, I like analog control, too. But even if I didn't, there exists plenty of circumstantial evidence that analog control is objectively superior in some cases. For example, video gaming is nowadays a professional sport with large cash prizes, and none of the hundreds of people who have made a living at this sport have ever foregone analog for digital control. Another example: I know of no military vehicles that operate via digital controls (a few may?) If digital control were always superior, it would have shown up as an advantage in warfare long ago. atariksi was the mentor who introduced me to game programming, and I am grateful for that. But I do not recommend you argue with him on the computer. It will be punishing and nobody will win.

I've known atariksi for twenty years, and this thread fits his MO, though IIRC his flame wars from back then were about less prosaic things than Atari joysticks. A sock puppet would be a new twist. Until I read this thread, I thought atariksi's enthusiasm for trolling arose from religious conviction, but now I'm not so sure. You might say I suffer from uncertainty - like an analog joystick user! Anyway, so I've been programming videogames professionally for about ten years, and I'm no expert on joysticks, but I don't think they sell a videogame system today without analog input. In fact, what look like digital buttons in today's game systems are often analog, though not all games interpret them as such. For the last five years, the game industry has adopted wireless and debated getting rid of buttons and sticks altogether! If I had to translate atariksi's words into the sort of thing that you or I would say, it would go like this: "When playing thirty year old digital joystick arcade games on thirty year old home computers, I prefer digital joysticks of the era to analog joysticks of the era." I think that everyone I know who cares about old games would have the same preference, too. So we are in violent agreement! Warm regards, Bryan McNett