jakeLearns

I bought Fast Rob's place in line, so the possibility of someone purchasing my place in line was something I considered. However, at this moment in time, VBXE's are available from Lotharek. Given that VBXE's are readily available from Lotharek, it's probably not going to be the first thing someone thinks, that nevertheless someone will want to buy a place waiting in line for Sloopy to deliver VBXE's that he sold in 2011 - and will deliver at a vague - and pointedly unspecified date in the future. You may be right. Maybe that would have happened, but that didn't happen. the offer I got was from a person that specifically does not want this thread to continue - so that it wouldn't continue. So - as long as the payment goes through, this will be my last post in this thread. bye all.

I don't appreciate the visceral response to my request to have Sloopy have a date set. I've heard some people discuss legalities - let me state that I have not elevated anything - at any time - to the level of 'legal action'. So don't you all elevate it to that - it's not necessary. Secondly - asking for a date to set is appropriate when a year has past without action. If you don't agree - then we'll disagree. My feeling is its appropriate. Pixelmischief, even though your tone was rude - I will sell you the board. I will PM you with details.

Thank you Sloopy. Your tone is correct, and I appreciate that. " I am hoping to have this all done within weeks. " Understand that I have been waiting a year - and I feel that my request for a date is reasonable, and I'd like you to give me a date. Since you feel it can be done in weeks - set a date 3 months from now. If you get it done early - great. But I am tired of sitting and waiting on a vague, seemingly neverending schedule. The message from your friends has been loud and clear - you are a good guy that simply got overwhelmed. As a single parent myself, I understand your situation and I am sympathetic, but I have not found in life, that I can use that as a never ending excuse to not manage a business. Set a time frame that is reasonable and manage the time. Now that we are back in communication, I don't mind going back into private discussions, but I do want that date.

Agreed. He's here all the time, and while I use messages, and not chat - he's gotten my messages, but he hasn't responded to them with a date for delivery of the VBXE. It's not like he doesn't communicate - as I stated from the first post, he communicates all the time. He isn't communicating with me, and I have to believe thats for a reason - I'm essentially one of his creditors, and I feel like I'm being avoided.. I absolutely did not want to have to go to this effort to receive my VBXE but after a year having past - it's reasonable for me to worry that I'm being managed. Most people don't want to be attacked. To be called delusional - to have it suggested they are ruining the atmosphere of Atari age- all the things that go along with expecting receipt of a purchased VBXE. Well we make purchases here all the time - I've bought from Lotharek. I've bought from others - great experiences. The main thing is - if one vendor isn't supplying what they promised, I think like ebay or like in real life - people should be able to supply their experiences to the community.

You've spent a lot of time in this thread trying to turn this into an attack on me - or some argument between you and me. But that isn't going to be my focus. I'm asking for a date. I've written Sloopy directly - he has not supplied a date. He can come into this thread to supply a date - or in private - his choice. The date is a reasonable request. He should estimate the time remaining, come up with a plan of action, and then achieve his goal. The date conversation won't be long - it's 1 sentence. No need for long conversations on IRC. You are not the voice of Sloopy on Atari Age. If you are his representative, I'll need to hear that from him.

By the way Metal Guy, you've made a few allegations in your post about things that Sloopy specified - he made no such specification. You really aren't part of this - and you are supplying misinformation.

@Metal Guy - honestly you are using language that I wouldn't use. You are characterizing my posts - and frankly you don't need to do that. I am asking for a date. That's what I'm going to keep focus on. A date is a reasonable thing to supply - and one needs to be supplied.

@MetalGuy You may characterize my post any way you see fit, but I asked for a date to receive the VBXE card. What you call whining - I call a reasonable request. You seem to suggest that going to some IRC is the magic formula to get Sloopy's cooperation. Sloopy has read my messages. He has not set the date. Until he does - he's not managing his business. Not past tense, not because he can't communicate with other people and on other topics - he communicates all the time - he's not communicating with me - in regards to setting a date for delivery of the VBXE card. Sloopy, set the date, dude.

Sloopy, As you know it's been a year since I bought Fast Rob's place in line for the VBXE card. You agreed to the transaction, and now a year has passed. I have contacted you in private, in fact I wrote you this email last week You are still engaging the Atari community, almost every day. But you owe me a VBXE card - and you are silent with me. On ebay - we rate vendors. On the better business bureau - we rate businesses. I personally think new members to AtariAge should be warned about sloopy. I made a reasonable request for you to set the date - it's been a year. Set the date Sloopy - manage your business.

Oh man I was very steamed by MetalGuy's post. But let me edit - to say just this - thank you Syfo-Dyas for sharing your experience. Sloopy didn't contact me for 11 months - and yet he's often logged in. Contacting him did yield an excuse - but not the VBXE. I think it's OK to understand if Sloopy became overwhelmed, at the same time - lets allowed for us to be disappointed in what happened as well.

oh. p.s. if the pre-order is still open, you can put me down for one if sloopy ends up delivering, then I'll have an extra one. Actually I just got a XEGS off ebay so it would have a waiting home....

So you've gotten the VBXE and are waiting on an adapter now? I took FastRobPlus' spot in line - and I've been waiting since September 2012 with no update of any kind, and certainly not the VBXE. Still if he's working through the list - then I'll get it eventually. But- the main thing is, I don't want to have to work with daily complaining in order to get the thing. I'm not going to do that. Well I am so glad that there is another VBXE pre-order! Good news. I ordered an incognito from Candle - and I could not be more happy with that experience. Candle is awesome. Also I just ordered a Side 2 from Lotharek via ebay, I can't wait for that!

This type of encouragement would totally push me away. Maybe that's just me. And I'm not convinced this is strategy, more like venting. Well venting is fine, I can understand it. Don't know how much good it will do, from what I've read, I'd guess that Sloopy has basically no money to ship anything, to offer a refund, or to build the devices. That's the bad news, and it is bad. But the good news is that, it also sounds like Sloopy knows how to build VBXE's - it's in his own best interest to solve all his financial woes, and probably he will do so eventually and - he's going to want to ship all the VBXE's and someday do the next project, because this one has to feel like a burden by now. I'm betting on Sloopy, that's why I bought someone elses place in line - someday I'll own the VBXE - woot! I'm looking forward to that, this is my favorite piece of hardware in the Atari scene, right now.

In my particular application I'm using this RLE scheme, 1 byte is the run length, 1 byte represents a screen byte. That works great for what I'm doing. But I'm not writing this 3d line art type game. one could have a different RLE scheme, where your run length has nothing to do with the way the atari actually stores it's screen data. It's just kind of an abstraction, but one that both saves memory and could be converted to screen data (haha - that's my theory, I know, it might be wrong).. Say in this scheme you are anticipating a blue background with white 'lines' ...1 byte is the run length of white pixels, the next byte is the run length of blue pixels. Sometimes you'd waste a byte, say you needed 500 blue pixels in a row...that'd be represented by 255 blue, 0 white, 245 blue, etc. Still that's great, 500 pixels in 3 bytes. But if you don't exceed 255 run length for a color, you just waffle - 10 blue, 3 white, 4 blue, 7 white - the string ends when you come to the impossible 0,0 pair. And these types of single pixel two color images, ...one would expect to get decent compression because you'd have all these background areas with big run lengths. There'd be nothing difficult in that particular scheme about tossing column data - in my limited experience in assembler, you are setting up registers and decrementing values, constructing bytes to eventually blast - on a per byte basis, to the screen. If you don't want to count every 5th column -just skip the value, as you build your byte, take the next value, every 5th column. Skipping whole rows is easy enough too -just need to know when you are on a skip row, and skip all that data, until you are on the next row. oh well, I'm thinking out loud here - argh, maybe I'll see if I can get some times....I gather what you are saying, is expect that to be too slow. If this isn't the right method - and that wouldn't shock me at all, how did the guy do the mercenary game?

Thanks - I'll try that CLR statement sometime, if I use VT tables again. At this time, my program is using RLE strings. First byte is the run length. Numbers 1 - 253 are the length. 0 in the run length column signals the end of the string. 254&255 are reserved for a special use. Second byte is the actual screen byte. And so you now have these byte pairs - and for me, this dramatically reduces the size of my screen, as represented in BASIC strings. I have to do a USR call to get that RLE string onto the screen - I wrote a small assembly program to help... in this scheme I can't use the VT tables any longer to do the 'block poke' since I need the RLE to be decoded....but for my particular application, this is a whole lot less strings to deal with - they were downright massive before. Now, back to the original topic - although I don't have any hopes for speeding up PLOT and DRAWTO, I'm thinking one could pre-render objects. You have frames for all the rotation, rotating on one axis. Do the initial rendering in the largest side you need, then making the objects smaller - I'm thinking by just tossing some of the rows and columns - the object would collapse on itself, would it not? So, once you get to have rotation on one axis, the ability to place it left/right on the screen, and magnify, shrink - the fact that you aren't doing true 3d rendering wouldn't be completely noticeable in a fast moving game - that's my guess. I have no idea if this is true or not, I simply don't write games very often. But it's an interesting thought, now if only I had the time to experiment and see if it'd work, lol