Flack

A little over two years ago I ended up with four jukeboxes. I originally only wanted one. Actually, I originally only wanted an empty one, inside which I could mount a PC that would play MP3s and have the appearance of being a working jukebox. The guy who was selling me the empty had another jukebox that he could throw in, but could make me a better deal if I bought two, and a really good deal if I bought three. Over $1,000 later, I was the proud (?) owner of four jukeboxes -- three working ones and the empty one I had originally set out to purchase. As fate would have it, by the time I got the machines back from Kansas to Oklahoma and plugged them in, two of the three had stopped working. I had seen them working before I purchased them so I know fixing them couldn't have been difficult, but all the wiggling and jiggling I performed did nothiing. I sold the one working one and made some of my money back, but the other two just sat. I talked to the seller who gave me some fixing tips, but nothing worked. For over two years, the three wooden monsters sat taking up a large portion of my garage. I never installed a PC in the empty one and I never got the other two working. Earlier this summer I ran an ad for them on eBay. They didn't sell. I tried selling them on Craig's List -- same results. Eventually I put them up for sale for $100 each. No dice. Eventually I found someone who thinks he can fix them, and offered me a couple of arcade related items (a monitor and a nice cabinet) in trade. I'm sure I'm taking a huge financial hit, but I'm okay with it at this point. I never wanted to be in the jukebox business, and as of 5pm today, I'm officially out of it. This afternoon I delivered all three jukeboxes to a fellow coin-up fan and picked up the other items in trade. The items I got are worth less than the jukeboxes would be if they were functioing, but worth than what I've been able to move them for. If there's one thing I'm starting to realize as I get older, it's how to recognize projects that I'm never going to finish, or even start.

[The Drive] I have a terrible habit of leaving late when it comes to road trips. We spend our whole lives trying not to be late, so when vacation rolls around it’s like the one time when being on time doesn’t really matter. Inevitably I’m always late out the door when beginning a road trip, a habit I always pay for when I’m on the road late at night, wishing I were anywhere but driving on the road, late at night. Friday, September 29, I set out for Chicago. I had planned on leaving the house around six or seven in the morning, but a breakfast date with Susan and Mason at Waffle House set me back a couple of hours. I also had to make one last Wal-Mart trip. It’s the only place I can think of where I can get two bags of candy (for the show), a silver sharpee (for autographs), an FM transmitter (for listening to MP3s from my laptop on my car stereo) and a pack of AA batteries for my digital camera, all in one stop. The drive up north was basically uneventful. Around 3pm I took a short break on a picnic table in a Missouri rest area. Someone walked up behind me and said, “Can you take your hands out of your pockets, sir?” When I turned around I saw a Missouri State Trooper, with one hand pointing at me and the other on his holster. After slowly putting my hands where he could see them, the trooper asked me whether or not I had seen a teenager with red hair wearing a red sweatshirt. The funny thing is, I’m a people watcher, so I’d been watching everybody at the rest stop for a solid ten minutes and hadn’t seen a kid with that description. The trooper then systematically searched the rest stop, including the restrooms and the port-o-potties. I had my camera ready to capture any shootouts, but alas, no bullets were fired. Guessing I was not in the best neighborhood, I hopped back in the truck and pushed on. I arrived in St. Louis at rush hour which slowed things down a bit, but other than that the ride was uneventful and I arrived in Chicago a little after ten. Saturday morning, my aunt Mary brought over my cousin Patty, who was my partner and co-pilot throughout the day. With two sets of Mapquest directions, we set out on our trip. My backup plan (my laptop-based GPS software) failed miserably, as it was not able to contact any satellites due to the heavy cloud cover. Between my cousin and I we somehow managed to navigate our way over the suburbs via the tollway, to arrive in Lombard, Illinois only about half an hour late. In the parking lot I parked next to a white van with a Commodore logo on the back and a note that read, “I BRK for IRQ.” We found it. [The Show] My punishment for arriving late was that all the tables around the perimeter of the room had already been snatched up. No comfort zone for me. Instead, I ended up at two of the three tables that floated out in the middle of the room, dividing it in half. As it turned out, the show was small enough that there weren’t any “bad tables” to speak of. Before I tell you how the show went, let me tell you a quick (and on the surface, seemingly unrelated) story. When I was in fifth or sixth grade, my classmates and I were required to read a book and then make a mobile, which was to be hung in our school library. The night before our mobiles were due, I wrapped a shoebox in gold tin foil, hung a couple of pictures from it and called it good. The next day at school, my mobile looked like crap compared to everyone else’s. All the others looked like they had been worked on for months, and mine looked like a lot like someone the night before had simply wrapped a shoebox in some gold tin foil. I will never forget how embarrassed I was standing in the middle of the library floor, looking at my obviously rushed mobile hanging around all the others. Fast forward twenty years, and you have a pretty good idea of how I felt standing in the middle of ECCC. Obviously the main reason I drove 800 miles was to promote my book Commodork, but at the last minute I had also decided to set up a little demonstration on how to copy C64 disks to D64 images. I walked in to the show thinking about how I was going to impress everyone at the show with my great demonstration. Unfortunately for me, most of the people at the show were light years passed that. Just to give you an idea, one of the guys at the show has written a program that takes D64 images (like I was demonstrating how to create) and then allows you to edit them, do screenshots, and all other kids of stuff with them. Somehow, my display shot right through the middle of the two present demographics. The people who didn’t know what I was showing didn’t care, and to most of the people at the show, converting disks to D64 images was old news. And so, for the majority of the show I sat near my table, thinking about that stupid golden shoebox I had made back in elementary school. Some of the stuff that was on display at the show literally blew my mind. Many of the things I’ve only read about were there on display – stereo SID chips, FSD drives, TCP/IP connections to vintage Commodore computers, you name it. I’m sure many of them found my D64 demo to be “cute.” Several tables were set up near the front of the room for people to give demos. The three I remember seeing were Craig Ernster’s copy protection demo, David Murray’s C64DTV hacking demo, and The Wiz’s DirMaster (the D64 directory editing utility I referred to). All three demos were superb and I remember thinking that I could have sat down and picked any one of those speakers’ brains for an entire day or two. The Wiz’s DirMaster was particularly cool and I got a chance to speak with him later in the afternoon about his program. (I also gave him a wish list of features for the next release!) Two of the three designers of the C64 all-in-one joystick (the DTV), Robin Harbron and Adrian Gonzalez, were on hand to talk to people (Jeri Ellsworth was not in attendance). Robin was particularly friendly and I spent a good amount of time chatting with him (I even got him to sign my DTV unit). There were only a couple of vendors at the show, but if you were hunting for C64 boxed software then there was a pretty good chance they might have had just what you were looking for. My cousin Patty hung out with me at the show the entire day and seemed to have a good time (or at least did a good job of faking it!). My aunt Pam and cousin Kevin came out to the show as well and bought books. I was really glad that they came out. The best part of shows is always the talking to people, and there was no shortage of that at ECCC. I had a fairly steady stream of visitors at my table and I sold around 15 books, which was a pretty good person-to-sale ratio. The overwhelming interest I got from Slashdot readers this week left me pretty short stocked, so selling less books than I had hoped actually worked out great since it left me enough to divvy up to family members after the show. The show’s small size worked well and promoted intimacy. I can’t think of a single person at the show that I couldn’t have approached and talked to. I met a lot of really neat people at the show, hopefully several of which I’ll keep in contact with! From a business or financial standpoint it probably didn’t make a lot of sense to attend the show, but from a fun standpoint it was worth every penny! Check out my pictures from the show here: http://www.robohara.com/albums/ECCC

I'm off -- hitting the road, destination Chicago. I'll be back Sunday. Chances are, the only blog I'll be updating over the weekend is the one at robohara.com. Check there for trip and show updates. For everyone else, bloggage will continue Monday morning -- most likely with lots of show pictures! Wish me luck!

I am driving to Chicago tomorrow for the Saturday's Commodore Expo. I'll have to check Mapquest, but if this is on the way I'll definitely swing by!

On the way to work this morning I swung through our new neighborhood McDonald's drive-thru to pick up some breakfast. There were three people working at the first window; a supervisor of some sort, the order taker, and the button pusher. As the three employees spoke amonst themselves, I realized that I had no idea what race they were. Their skin was brown, but not too brown. They weren't Indian (Native or Eastern), I don't think they weren't Mexican ... and in fact I'm not sure what they are. And all three of them were the same. Their accents were unique, but unfamiliar. As I approached the second window, I saw more of the same. Generic-looking people. There was absolutely nothing specific about them -- they all looked the same, had the same smiles ... and then it hit me. MCDONALDS HAS CREATED THEIR OWN RACE OF PEOPLE. Think about it. You always hear people say, "I would <i>never</i> work in fast food," and yet McDonald's seems to have no problem in staffing their stores with these nondescript adult employees. There's no real egg in an Egg McMuffin, and they've always been dodgy about what kind of meat is in a Chicken McNugget. They have no doubt been serving synthesized and processed foods for years, and now, I suspect, they've begin creating synthesized and processed employees. There is absolutely no recognizable trait about these people -- no jewelry, earrings, anything that might connect them to a specific group of people. They are completely generic, unoffensive, and artificial. It makes sense to think about Mayor McCheese less like a mascot and more like a DNA crossbreeding experiment gone horribly wrong. It also explains the playgrounds, which must not be there for the children's enjoyment, but rather as a place where McScientists can study human interaction. Let's face it: joy, sadness, social norms, pecking orders, group dynamcis, all of these things can be witnessed on a regular basis on the average playground. These are the thoughts I have while driving down the interstate, McMuffin in hand.

I hated the SE versions too, but I was suckered into buying them when Lucas swore on all that is holy that he was nevah evah gonna release the originals. I've got one more purchase in me, the inevitable 30-year anniversary box set due out next year. After that, I'm done.

Yup, been there, done that too (still have a copy of Laplink 5 on a bootable floppy, "just in case" -- and God forbid I should ever run into "that case"). Back when I used to work as a computer tech for Best Buy many moons ago, we had people bringing in their computers all the time to have us install software for them. People were constantly buying games and then didn't have enough EMS or XMS to run them. The one I remember getting all the time was Sim City. Imagine buying a game, taking it home, and then hauling the game and your PC tower all the way back up to Best Buy and paying $39 to have someone install a game for you.

Already did -- it's an official NAMCO arcade, so if you inquire about purchasing games they just give you a card with the official NAMCO website on it.

Hey everyone, friendly bump here. The show is this weekend, so I hope people are planning on coming out! I had two boxes of 25 books at the beginning of the week, but after getting Slashdotted, one of them is gone and the other is still sealed, waiting for this weekend's trip. See you there!

I forgot about this, but MMF, my offer still stands -- if you would like a Koala pad and a copy of the disk version of the software on the house, let me know.

Yesterday, my website got “slashdotted”. Slashdot.org is a technology-oriented news site that is read by hundreds of thousands of people every day. When someone “slashdots” your site, that means that a link to your site has been posted on Slashdot.org, and those hundreds of thousands of readers (or some percentage thereof) all begin to visit your site at the same time. Not only did my website get slashdotted, but I feel like over the past 24 hours, my life got slashdotted as well. It all started just after 3pm yesterday when I received an e-mail order for my book. A few minutes later, I received a second one. Between September 15th and September 24th I sold four books, so two in one day wasn’t bad. As I was reading the second order I noticed it said the buyer had read a review for my book on Slashdot. What? I was on Slashdot? Two weeks prior, fellow writer and filmmaker Jason Scott told me he had submitted a review of my book to Slashdot, but after two weeks of waiting we had both decided they had passed on the story. But suddenly, there it was. As I went online to read the review, another order came in – and then another. I logged into Lulu.com to check my sales. Now I had sold four books. Four books in one day! That’s great! With each order came e-mails from potential customers, telling me about their own BBS stories. I read and responded to each one. Old friends I haven’t talked to in a while saw the story and e-mailed me. I check my sales on Lulu – I was up to ten books. Ten books in one day? This was incredible! As the day went on, things just kept snowballing. By dinnertime, I had sold 30 books through Lulu, and four from my own site (the ones I sell through my own site are autographed – some people prefer them signed, others could care less.) Jason Scott called to congratulate me on the successful comments the review was generating. When I went to bed, I was up to forty sales! When I woke up, I was past 50. The e-mails continue to pour in. Some people ask about books. Some people ask about books, but start conversations as well. Some people just want to chat. I respond to all of them. My Outlook inbox icon has stayed visible in my taskbar all day. I can’t remember a time in the past 24 hours where I haven’t had unread messages waiting. Have you ever been driving down the interstate and stuck your head out the window? The air pressure is so great that it’s hard to breath. Your chest pounds and your eyes water. The wind is deafening. You can force yourself to breath, but it takes effort. That’s what slashdotting feels like. In the past 24 hours, I’ve sold over 70 books through Lulu, and all 16 of the books I had on hand. I have 25 books set aside for my book signing this weekend in Chicago, and I am already receiving pre-orders from people who are waiting for my next shipment of books to arrive. People refer to having “15 minutes of fame” as a bad thing, but let me tell you, it feels pretty damn good.

Thanks man! Yes, the site seems to have weathered the storm, and the sales have been outstanding! The best part though is all the e-mails I've received from people sharing their own BBS stories. I almost have enough for an entire second book -- say, now there's an idea!

I have officially achieved geek nirvana. My book Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie was just reviewed here on Slashdot! The review is very positive (definitely reassuring!), and sales have just taken off! In fact, I've sold so many books in the past two hours (when the story hit Slashdot) that having enough books for my book signing in Chicago this weekend has suddenly become a concern. Hopefully I won't dip below that threshhold. I've already ordered more books through Lulu.com -- hopefully this system will last until the books show up on Amazon.

I've unsubscribed from the Oklahoma City Freecycle Group. Freecycle is a local mailing list that allows people to give and receive free items. Upon signing up, I assumed that the way the group worked was that people would post things they had available for free, and then people who needed those things would respond and acquire them. In reality though, it doesn't quite work that way. The first problem is, most of the stuff that's offered is crap. A lot of it is simply old, broken stuff that people are hoping you'll take for free so they don't have to pay someone else to take it to the dump for them. A lot of the posts are offers for freebies that are "left over from our garage sale." Anyone who's even been to a garage sale late in the afternoon knows what kind of "treasure" to expect from these people. No thanks. The funniest part of Freecycle are the wish lists. People are constantly posting for things they're looking for that they hope to get for free. The posts requesting box fans and air conditioners during the summer, I understand. It's the continual wishing for cars, laptops, computers, furniture, and other high dollar items that gets old. Saturday, there was a post requesting a computer monitor. I have several out in the garage, so I e-mailed the person telling them that they could come by and pick up an old 17" monitor I had. Their response? "I'm not looking for anything less than a 21 inch." Every e-mail I get from the group has a few people offering things for free (most of which are pets), and a long list of people asking for free cars and other things. The few good things that have come up are snatched in minutes if not seconds -- there are people watching the list every second of the day, requesting every single item that comes up. I've decided there was a lot less headache in obtaining things I want the old fashioned way -- BUYING THEM.

It's been a while since I've been to any local metal shows. Back when I was writing for WTD it seems like I was going to shows once a week or so. After taking a bit of a break, I got back into the habit of going to club shows while I was running Review to a Kill (RIP). After that site went down I kind of lost interest in "the local scene". At least part of that can be attributed to having two little kids now. It makes it harder to stay out late and still get up early. Not too long ago through MySpace I discovered that a guy from my old neighborhood ("Willo" now, although most of my old schoolmates would remember him has "Boner") was now playing guitar in a local metal band. I got a message earlier this week that his band was playing a show Saturday night, so I decided to get out of the house and check 'em out. The price was right -- five bands for five bucks -- and the club wasn't too far away. Without going into a full-length review, I'll just say Willo's band ("Self Inflicted") was pretty good. They definitely had a sludgecore thing going on, a Crowbar-esque vibe with a little Winter and Pro-Pain thrown in. Of the other three bands I saw, one was straight-up death metal, one was pretty brutal death metal (almost black metalish), and the last one reminded me of Clutch. I guess I've been listening to metal so long that every band sounds like some other band to me now. I left during the fourth band's performance and missed the fifth; not that they were horrible or anything, but it was midnight, I'm old, and my ears were ringing pretty good by then. But anyway ... good beer, good music, good times. Willo, from Self Inflicted

I've actually hooked lots of modern systems up to it. The monitor's color scheme doesn't match a Gamecube at all though -- it's two-toned cream and black. It looks okay with a C64 or a C128, but not much else matches it.

In the mid-80’s, my dad purchased an Amdek color monitor for our Franklin Ace 1000 computer (an Apple II clone). It’s a big plastic monster with an RCA input for video and an eighth-inch input (headphone jack) for audio. One thing I’ve always loved about this monitor is that on the top-rear portion it has a built in handle. After dad sold our Franklin, I inherited the monitor and used it on my Commodore 64 for almost a decade. The handle came in “handy” every time I lugged my system to a copyfest or over to one of my friends’ houses, which was quite often back then. I still have the monitor, and despite what some people think of its looks (Ice Breaker once referred to it as “the ugliest monitor he’d ever seen”), I still use it. The year before last I took it with me to OVGE and hooked up my Super Nintendo to it. The year before that, I hooked up a Genesis to it. When not on the road, the monitor sits upstairs, rotating between systems. For the past few months I’ve had my Amiga CD32 hooked up to it. A couple of weeks ago, my four-year-old son started asking about getting an Xbox for his room. I don’t have a spare Xbox to put in there, but I do have a spare NES. Last week I purchased 40 loose NES games from a fellow Digital Press collector, and when they arrived Mason and I opened the boxes together. He was quite excited, so I seized the moment and asked him if he wanted an old Nintendo in his room instead. He said yes, and so I went upstairs to find one for him. (I ended up giving him a Famiclone since I didn’t care if it got abused.) Mason doesn’t have a television in his room; the minute I remembered that, the Amdek monitor caught my eye. Even though I know the monitor’s only going downstairs, I also know how four-year-olds can treat things. This monitor and I have been through a lot together. I know it sounds stupid, but when I think about things like the fact that the entire time I used my Commodore 64 I was staring at this thing, it makes me not want to give it up. In the end, I decided that I’d already had 21 years of loyal service out of the thing, and it was time to hand it down. And so, without as much as a little ceremony, the monitor and NES were carried downstairs and hooked up in my son’s bedroom, at the foot of his bed so he can lie in his bottom bunk and play Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros. 3 to his heart’s content. Today at lunch, I decided to hit a couple of thrift stores in search of some more NES games for my son. I was thinking how neat it would be for the two of us to hunt together for games and stuff. What a fun way to spend the weekend! The first thrift store I walked into didn’t have any NES games, so I wandered over to the computer area and there it was. Another Amdek monitor, identical to the one I’d just given Mason. I’ve had that thing for 21 years and never seen another one like it, but here was its twin. On the screen, $29.95 had been crossed out as had $19.95 and $9.95. The final price on the monitor was $4.95. Although the two are essentially identical, I put the new one in Mason’s room and took my old one back. I think it was desperately trying to tell me not to get rid of it.

According to the documentation: Suggested command line to create game.wav: Cuttle Cart: makewav game.bin Supercharger: makewav -ts game.bin Depending on which format you're trying to get to work, try one of those two! If you are having trouble getting the paths to work, put the makewav program and your roms all in the same directory.

All the scanners I see at thrift stores are all either SCSI (many of which came with proprietary SCSI cards) or parallel (which is a pain if you have a printer). All the newer ones (especially the combo ones) are all USB and plug and play ... so yeah, those old ones are destined for land fills. I sold a Commodore color printer at OVGE earlier this year for $5. The guy asked me if it worked well -- I just started laughing and said, "hell, it was a piece of shit when it was new! I don't imagine it got any better with time!" He just laughed -- and bought it anyway. I agree, Commodore modems aren't worth much unless you find a 2400 baud one with an RS-232 adapter attached to it. And even then, the adapter is worth more than the modem. As for the topic question, I don't claim to know "a lot" about the Commodore 64, but I do love it and I did write a book about it.

Here's one that I'm sure I'll take some shit for. Every review I read about the Generation NEX had to mention that "games like Castlevania III" weren't compatible with the system. From all the reviews you would have thought that Castlevania III was the flagship game for the NES. Truth is, I have a couple hundred NES games and I've never even played Castlevania III. I could give a shit if Castlevania III works, works well, or even ever existed.

The blogs on Digital Press is what inspired me to start blogging. After doing it there for a while, I had someone mention to me, "I wish you were on Live Journal -- it's so much easier for me to keep track of all my blogs in one place." That's when I decided to start posting them on both DP, and Live Journal. Somewhere in the middle I installed WordPress on my own website, and began duplicating entries there as well. And then wouldn't you know it, I had people telling me, "it would be SO much easier to track your blog entries if they were on MySpace ..." ugh! So, I signed up for MySpace. With the imminent destruction of the DP Blogs, I also signed up here, and yesterday I signed up at 1UP.com as well. It has been my experience that while a small amount of people will read your blog no matter where it is posted, the vast majority of people who read it are people who blog the same place you blog, or are at least familiar with the site you're blogging on. In other words, MySpace users tend to read my blog on MySpace, LiveJournal users read it on LiveJournal, and so on. Each time I mirror my blog again, I gain more readers and make more friends. The one thing I didn't like about DP's blog system was that it wouldn't notify you when someone responded to your blog, something that this (AA) and MySpace do really well. Since Digital Press is moving to the same software Atari Age runs, I hope to see the same blog software installed at some point.

Our oldies station (KRXO) is slowly creeping up as well. It used to be 50's, then it was 50's-60's, and now it's 60's-70's. My neices think I'm cool because I listen to 80's music. They say I'm "so retro." I tell them I never knew it went out of style!

Here's hoping for the best! Working in radio must be both exciting and scary at the same time.

I'm sure I have the Back to the Future and Indiana Jones trilogies both on VHS and DVD. The only VHS tapes we watch anymore are the kids' Teletubbies or Bob the Builder tapes that we've picked up cheap over the years, but even those don't seem to get much play anymore. Here's what a CD and DVD family we've become. The other day I told my son I needed to rewind his videotape and he said, "Daddy, what does rewind mean?"

For several years I felt like I was immune to the decay of the arcade. While my online friends continually posted about how their arcades were closing one by one, ours remained open. But with one closing down last week (Star*Cade) and Le Mans appearing to be on its last legs, it seems like the trend may have caught up with the midwest.