jaybird3rd

Excellent! I think Warlords would be a natural for the Amico, since it's already a "party favorite." Earlier this year, when I brought my Atari 5200 to my university for our Computer Science Club, four-player Castle Crisis (Bryan Edewaard's excellent Warlords conversion) made it one of the most popular exhibits. It didn't get a lot of attention at the time, but I still enjoy the updated version of Warlords that Creature Labs developed as part of the Infogrames "Atari Revival" triple-pack in 2002 (somehow I can't seem to find any video of it, but here is a review). It's a solid effort, and it even has four-player LAN support, which is close to the kind of local multiplayer experience that I imagine the Amico version will deliver. But it also has a few rough edges, and I think they went a little too far with the new power-ups, which interfere with the flow of the game. If the Amico version can avoid that, I think it would be a great addition to the library.

Yes! I installed the Innovative Concepts 128K upgrade in my XEGS years ago, and it's still working fine. I posted scans of the original documentation and installation diagram in another thread, and an ASCII version (minus the diagram) here.

The POKEY is one of the chips inside the 5200 console, and as the others said, it is very strange that you would be sold a console without it (unless the previous owner decided to remove the chip beforehand, in which case they did not sell you a complete console). The POKEY chips that I was selling would have worked as replacements, but they are all long since gone, and they would have had to be extracted from their circuit boards first. There are a number of vendors who still sell loose POKEY chips that you can install in your 5200 console as a replacement, if that is indeed what it needs. Feel free to post in the 5200 forum if you need help finding or installing a POKEY chip; I'm sure that the people there would love to help you get your 5200 working. You'll probably have to open your console anyway, since the 5200 often requires a certain amount of servicing and tweaking to get it back to working condition; I own three 5200s myself, so I know the process well!

I only wish I still had that many POKEY chips to offer at that price! Those Ballblazer carts were from one of the last O'Shea lots, and in retrospect I probably let them go a little on the cheap side, but I wasn't interested in making a huge margin on them. My main concern was getting them in the hands of people who could put them to use.

It started out that way, but it evolved in a different direction. See here.

Seconded! Because of the relative obscurity of the ECS, not enough people got to appreciate Mind Strike back in the day ... and it's the kind of game that would be a good fit for the Amico.

Thank you. This is the just the latest example of the complaints of "censorship" we've had to put up with for months now. When someone critical of the Amico comes here, and misbehaves to the point where we have to take steps—not even a full-on ban, just blocking them from specific threads—it must be because the mods are biased, or because we're "protecting Tommy," or we're "in Tommy's pocket," or "on Tommy's payroll," or any number of other tiresome refrains that they're still hitting us with, months after the fact. It's just another indication of their bias, against Tommy or against the community or both, and of their refusal to acknowledge the full picture, no matter how often or in how many ways we've tried to explain it to them. This latest case was a clear violation of our community guidelines and rules, which are unambiguous about forbidding multiple accounts. AtariAge is Albert's site, and the decision to enforce those rules was his call to make. If @Papy or anyone else doesn't like it, they should take it up with him, or take their discussions elsewhere.

@_The Doctor__: I granted edit permission to your earlier post, so you can now change it as needed.

(This is a slight aside, but we are aware of this problem. We are working on a solution which will make these previous questions, and Tommy's answers, easier for everyone to find; just bear with us as we put it together.)

When and if that happens, the correct thing to do is to step away and cool off for a while instead of responding in kind, which only puts the other person on the defensive and makes the problem worse. If there are specific users who repeatedly annoy you, you do have the option of adding them to your Ignore List, which hides their posts.

Welcome! It's always a pleasure to meet a new member!

Why is it necessary to ask? This is Tommy's Amico Q&A thread, after all; there's nothing wrong with trying to keep it on track. Remember, the more often it wanders off-topic, the more work it creates for Tommy when he has time to catch up with it.

Let's try to avoid making politically-laden statements, please, even in jest. There's no way of knowing who might be set off by them, and that would only create problems we don't need.

I'm not sure what you mean. When I spoke of "negativity," I wasn't referring to anyone here, nor was I referring to well-intentioned questions or criticisms, voiced here or elsewhere. I went out of my way to avoid assigning blame to anyone, and I think I've made it clear enough already that questions and criticisms are welcome here, as long as they can be expressed politely and respectfully.

Unfortunately, engaging with them at all—particularly here—is becoming a losing proposition for all of us. The prevailing narrative among the people on the "other side" of this thing is that this thread is being used as a platform for attacking Tommy's critics and critics of the Amico, and even that Tommy is actively encouraging the people here to attack his critics on other venues. If we try to persuade them, or if we try to demonstrate that they're arguing in bad faith, or if we speculate about their mental health, and especially if we quote their comments from other platforms for the purpose of responding to them here, it all feeds into that narrative, whether that is our intention or not. I can understand why you're all motivated to do this: we're all enthusiastic about the Amico, and some of you have had to put up with a lot of abuse for it—I have, too!—and I know that you all feel a natural need to respond to it when it happens. But I'd like to ask everyone to exercise more restraint, and to refrain from engaging in this kind of discussion in the future. As I've said before ... Remember that this is Tommy's Q&A thread, which is supposed to be all about positive and productive things as Tommy continues to take us on this journey. I think we're building an enthusiastic community here, made up of people who have come to enjoy each other's company, particularly during these difficult times. I predict that, after the Amico is released and we're all having fun with it, all the noise and the negative energy from the critics will quickly disappear. So let's try to retain that positive spirit, and not allow the negativity to get us down now.

... but unfortunately, it only fans the flames even more. Remember, we're talking about unhinged people who will loudly proclaim that "it is their right" to say whatever they want, but who will respond to any kind of counterargument or disagreement as if it was a "personal attack." If you go to them and respond directly, they'll claim that "you're just a mob of Kool-Aid drinkers" or that "Tommy is putting you up to it"; if you respond to them here, they'll only say that you're "bringing drama from the outside" or "unfairly attacking them when they're not here to defend themselves." They don't understand that, if they make a comment or post their ideas on a public forum, everyone else is and should be free to discuss them ... even people they don't approve of or disagree with. I've said it before, but trying to argue with these people is a fool's errand. It's best to ignore them, to stay focused on the positive, and to direct that energy into productive achievement instead.

I won't belabor the subject either, but you make good points. I would never claim that home-schooling is for everyone; it definitely requires the right family structure and the right resources. One of these resources is access to venues for extracurricular activities with other home-schooled kids, for building the kinds of connections that you mention, which are much easier to find today than when I was home-schooled.

Absolutely. I've heard the "socialization" argument before, but to me, that's one of the arguments for home-schooling, not against it. What do people usually mean by "socialization," anyway? They mean acquiring the social and behavioral skills to function in the modern world as an independent, autonomous, and productive member of society. The only way to get those skills is through learning, by observation and imitation, from other people who have already acquired these skills—in other words, adults. Students in public schools are crammed into rooms all day with other children of roughly commensurate ages, so they don't have the opportunity to acquire very many social skills that they don't already possess, because everyone is at about the same level. It's an artificial environment that (in my opinion) does more harm than good. This is one of the things I like so much about the social aspect of the Amico. As a system designed for families to use and enjoy together, I think it has the potential to be a powerful educational and socialization tool. This is just an example, but imagine a complex math problem being shown on the TV screen for a child to solve. Imagine the child being able to use the hand controller screen as a "scratchpad" for working the problem out step by step—think of the Math Input Panel on Windows and you've got the idea—while the parent looks on with their hand controller screen to see the step-by-step solution. This helps the parents (particularly if they're rusty in math) because it guides them through the problem also, and it helps the student because it gives the parents the opportunity to offer different levels of instruction depending on how the student is doing: if the student makes a mistake, the parents can stop them right away, or they can "bookmark" the step where the student went astray and then help them trace backwards after they arrive at an incorrect answer. Through it all, the parent and the child have had a social experience, because they solved the problem together through cooperation. Lots of exciting potential!

Well, thank you very much! (I'm sure Mom would be pleased to hear that, too.) In my "line of work," I usually get nothing but complaints about what I write, so I greatly appreciate the compliment. As it happens, I decided to get a minor in English to go with my major in Computer Science. I find that people who come from a technical background often do not put enough effort into developing their communication skills, so I was very concerned to learn to be a good writer. I usually edit my posts two or three times before I'm happy with them, so I sometimes take it too far, but at least it's been good practice!

We couldn't afford tutors, so it was either Mom teaching me or me teaching myself. (She also home-schooled my four younger siblings, including one with special needs, so out of necessity I was usually left to take care of myself, or to help the younger kids.)

Me, too! I'm an educator myself, and I am also a product of home-schooling—I was taught at home from the seventh grade all the way through high school—and I'm working on a few ideas of my own of how a system like the Amico could be used as an educational tool by home-schooling families. (Whether those ideas would fit into IE's long-term plans for the Amico is another question, but it's a growing market that seems to be largely ignored by the educational technology industry.)

Thank you for the insightful post! It crystallizes something I've also perceived about these "critics" of the Amico. The more I see of them, and the more I get a sense of their evident range of interests and their overall life experience, the more unimpressed I am. Whatever their incredibly narrow areas of interest might be, that seems to be all that they know and all that they do. It's no wonder their tiny little minds are boggled by the Amico, which is designed for the kinds of gaming experiences that would appeal to normal people, because they don't really understand normal people and don't seem all that interested in trying. It would also explain why they make such a big deal over trivial issues: for most people, such issues would barely be worth arguing over, but in their narrow context, those issues make up their entire world. I too am glad that Tommy is thinking of moving on to other venues and more mainstream audiences. He's made a valiant effort to address the "critics" and to counter their misinformation—I greatly enjoyed the most recent ReviewTechUSA interview—but after a certain point, the old saying about "casting pearls before swine" comes to mind.

My pleasure! If you ever need to edit or remove a post in the future, just use the "Report post" link at the top of the post to let us know!

I went ahead and took care of this post for you.

Thank you for the correction! I like that much better. The "hard questions" thing is a mystery to me, too. I think there's a perception that, for an interview to be "good," the interviewer must at some point shout down the interviewee and jump down their throat and harangue them over something, or else it's just a softball interview or an "infomercial." But there has to be a reason for them to do that, and I can't imagine what that reason would be when it comes to the Amico. What "hard questions" are there at this point that haven't already been addressed, usually multiple times, both here and elsewhere? Should these interviewers behave like hard-hitting attack dogs all the time just because they're "supposed" to? That seems so phony to me. My impression is that the people who shout the loudest about being "allowed" to "express their opinions" or "ask the hard questions"—like some of the troublemakers we've had here—are often the ones who have the least to say when they're finally given the opportunity to "put up or shut up." I think they just enjoy being disagreeable because they somehow equate that with being "independent," but again, it's all a phony affectation. They're ultimately not interested in hearing the answers to their "hard questions," because if those questions were to be answered satisfactorily, they might not have a motivation to be so disagreeable anymore ... until they find some other "hard questions" to latch onto.