LoTonah

I love this idea, and I'd love to see it come to market. ...but... I can't help but think its over-engineered. Wouldn't a Raspberry Pi with a hat/daughterboard for joystick/reset switches/cartridge slot do everything needed? Then add a bare-metal emulator so it boots directly to SmartWriter. The three RPi Zeros connected to an x86 looks like too much silicon for the job at hand. But yes, I would likely buy this if it comes to market, because its something I've wanted for a long time.

Yeah, but as the article also pointed out: "Of course, as with so many words sullied by the crimes of colonialism, not everyone agrees on what to do with Eskimo. Many Native Alaskans still refer to themselves as Eskimos, in part because the word Inuit isn't part of the Yupik languages of Alaska and Siberia." This is all relatively new, I know most people don't even realize the problem with the word. I didn't until about a year or two ago. Not sure if I'd take up pitchforks over this, maybe just mention it to Milli. That is, if he comes back: he announced he's done with making games for the CV and ADAM.

It's being widely reported on FaceBook and callapple.org that he has passed. I've only had good experiences with him. He was a font of knowledge, and will be missed.

I'm curious: did you do any upgrades to your system, or is this all on stock hardware? I know if I finally pull the trigger on buying one I'll be swapping out the RAM and doing some of the tweaks that ETA Prime did. It's coming down to the VCS or a new laptop (I'm moving into an tiny home, so I need to downsize). Luckily my PC is several years old, a bit of a beast but the VCS is still faster... so it will actually be an upgrade for me.

Sorry for the necro, but I just had a 1550v given to me. Did you ever find out if it worked? Thanks!

Oooh, I'll have to get in on that 6th run. Having it look like the Adam is much more enticing!

The first GUI I used was the original 128K Mac. I found it quite limited--the 128Kb of memory and 400kb floppy drives meant a lot of disk swapping which drove me insane. Of course, when I got my Amiga 500 it was practically the same problem, at first. But yeah, I think I've played with pretty much every GUI that made it to market at this point. Emulation is fun!

Love it! Although if you're looking for feedback I'd have to say the only thing its missing is the line that zips up from your bases to where the cursor is. I don't know why, but that was my favorite feature as a kid. I could understand why you wouldn't want it (another bunch of lines to calculate might slow things down, I don't know how much slack you have to play with here) but yeah, it would make your version one of the best for any home console.

Any chance we can see some screenshots or maybe a WIP video? Thanks!!

Huh. Just read up a bit on this system, I didn't know of its existence. Love the controllers... wonder what their inspiration was Nice to see that they're compatible. They actually look better than the ADAM controller, in my opinion. Couldn't find any videos of any software running, besides booting into the BASIC and the BIOS screen. I'd love to see what other software there was, maybe it could someday be ported? I'd love to play around with that BASIC to see what it could do.

Any updates?

Hi Kay. I couldn't find a link to the interview on here (this AA post). I got to it by going to the last podcast and navigating back to the main menu. Here's the link for anyone who can't find it: https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-392-dorothy-siegel-pioneer-in-computer-music Thanks! Love the podcast, as always.

He had my attention with CP/M 3 in ROM and the SD card. Please be real... please be real...

If you're interested, Ben Heck made his own Dina-like system, but his could run Sega Master System games because the TI chip used in the SMS is backwards compatible.

There was a similar thread on vcfed.org, along the lines of "What would the world be like if Microsoft hadn't happened?". I personally think that clones would have happened with or without IBM, it just would have been a clone of whatever worked best for the cloners. Before IBM, Taiwanese cloners were making tons of Apple ][+ clones. Apple sued, but I don't think that did any good... the only reason those went away is because they could make more money cloning 5150 boards instead. And if CP/M hadn't taken over as the Numero Uno OS, then something else would... maybe a CP/M clone. Or something completely different and original. I read somewhere that prior to IBM coming onto the scene in 1981 that the actual #1 computer company was Tandy (I was shocked too!) that we'd be working on machines evolved from the TRS-80 Model 4 machine with a 64-bit GUI based on LDOS instead. Actually that sounds more interesting than what we ended up with.

A decent Adam emulator would be welcome. All the ones I've tried seem to get about 80% there, but are missing some features that ultimately make them barely useable. It's like they got the colecovision part working and lost interest.

I have one of the original ones, with the external floppy drive. I'm think I've located a good multisync LCD for it but it hasn't arrived yet. I'd like to make this my one and only ST. I have two others, a 520STfm and a 1040STf... I no longer have room for all this. I like the smaller one because of the footprint and the fact that its the original model. I've tried, briefly, to figure out what my options are, but that was a few years ago and I'm sure things have changed. So, what are the recommended upgrades? It has TOS in ROM, but I'd like to get a better version. Or maybe a switcher board for more than one TOS version. As much RAM as possible. USB port? SD card reader? PS/2 mouse adapter? I'd also like to put a high density floppy drive in the external drive if possible... would that just need a 1.44Mb mechanism and a floppy controller chip upgrade? Is there a blitter available? Is the BEST Electronics keyboard upgrade any good? My original STfm, before it died 20 years ago, had a 4096 color mod board and 4Mb of RAM in it. Is there something like that? My other option is stuffing a raspberry pi in it, but that seems... dirty, somehow. But also compelling. Any help (and links!) would be awesome. Thanks!

I've been watching your progress on Facebook. I'm *very* impressed! You've banged this out pretty fast, too. My game? Ten years and counting. My daughter is 9 and my son is 6, so you can see what happened right there. LOL

I really liked the look of your version of Flappy Bird, there were a lot of nice graphical touches (like who, besides you, would have made the pipes have more than one solid color?). I look forward to what you can do with Venture, one of my favorite CV games!

I have to say SimCity. It was the only game I imported from Europe for my Atari ST. It was the only game I bought three times (ST, Amiga and IBM-PC). It was that good. Populous was amazing. Star Raiders sold me on the Atari 400 and Kings Quest sold me on the Atari ST. But I think I put more hours into SimCity than any other game in that decade. Other runners up were Empire (bought that on my Amiga and then on the ST), Rogue and Shanghai. But the 90's were dominated by Civilization. And the 00's. And the 10's. On track for the 20's. Dammit, Sid Meier!

I gotta say, whenever this topic pops up on my screen, I feel far more excitement than a grown man should. No idea why it matters so much to me, maybe as a "screw you" to the C64 boys 'cause they've had GEOS and Wings for so long and its time they were bested. I'm not usually like that (hence my room full of Atari, Apple, Commodore, TRS-80s and more retro stuff) but this program is so sweet. You've got a first-class program here, Flashjazzcat.

Crazy Kong III !! Anyone else remember the orange DK clone back in the day?

I'm looking forward to seeing the progress on this one. As for feedback, maybe if I had read this 2 hours before bedtime, not 2 hours after...

Sure they do! Combat for the VCS had 27 games. Space Invaders for the VCS had 112 games (aka variations). See where I'm going with this? ?

Looking forward to what you come up with next. This is really well done!