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Knimrod

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Everything posted by Knimrod

  1. Same for me. It startled the bejeepers out of me when the alien popped up and started banging on the window. Gave me quite an adrenaline rush that first time. I was always into flight simulations and this was about the best available at the time so I was attracted. Bonus for the gameplay! When I originally played it, it was called "Behind Jaggi Lines". Other than that, Jumpman was the hands down family favorite and I was a huge fan of the arcade game Berzerk so when it became available on the 8-bit, I was all over it. It was about as close to the arcade game as you could want with even the voice phrases; "Stop the humanoid! Stop the intruder!", "The humanoid must not escape!" and "Chicken! Fight like a robot!" (among others). Awesome!
  2. Did anyone notice that the label on bottom of the 800 is for an "ATARI 400"? Not sure if that's unusual or not but it caught my eye.
  3. I was really impressed with Defender and especially Berzerk which had the robot voice and played very much like the arcade version.
  4. Oh yeah. The first time, it was quite the adrenaline rush. Scared the heck outa me!
  5. I remember that! I think the pilot was Doug (?) from the Atari club CHAOS and I think he was from Mason. In that trip, we flew from Mason to Muskegon to pick you up and fly to Meigs CGX and back. I don't remember for sure but either at start of trip or end of trip, our pilot departed Muskegon without clearance and was subsequently chewed out by the controller over the radio. Oops.
  6. I love car threads... Older hi-tech muscle here.. 87 Buick Grand National, 3.8L Turbocharged. Running on an EFI system I designed.
  7. LOL.. I think I may still have the wire wrapped prototype around.. It's only been 35 years or so.
  8. This is not true and a despicable attempt to tarnish the reputation of a true Atari pioneer who still actively supports this hobby.. ?
  9. I still have that controller Claus. It performed perfectly at the Gala opening of the Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose back around 1990 I think. Woz was a benefactor there and was in attendance wearing a white tuxedo with children's hand prints in all different colors. Very down to earth guy. We got a chance to talk and he was impressed with our homebuilt laser light show controller. He also signed your book "Hackers" by Stephen Levy at which point it then became my book....which I also still have.
  10. After I got my original ZX80 and started programming it, I bought a copy of "The 8080a Bugbook" by Peter R. Rony. A lot of mysteries about microcomputer design and programming were revealed to me... Excellent, comprehensive book.
  11. I loved the commentary on Star Raiders development. Until then, my PC exposure had been a Sinclair ZX-80 which I built and learned to program on. I was looking to move into something with more power and that's when I met Claus.. When Claus demonstrated Star Raiders for me, I was blown away. I had never seen anything like that before. That was definitely a major selling point for me.
  12. How Atari took on Apple in the 1980s home PC wars BY BENJ EDWARDSLONG READ Forty years ago, Atari released its first personal computers: the Atari 400 and 800. They arrived in the fall of 1979 after a prerelease marketing campaign that had begun the previous January when the company unveiled the machines at what was then called the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Then as now, “Atari” was synonymous with “video game,” and the new machines packed more technological potential than any game console at the time, with custom graphics and sound chips, support for four joysticks or eight paddles, and the ability to play games on cartridge, cassette, or disk. At launch, one of the machines’ first games, Star Raiders, defined cutting-edge home entertainment. And yet Atari initially marketed the 800 and its lower-cost counterpart, the Atari 400, as “second-generation” PCs—productivity machines with enhanced graphics and sound capabilities over the 1977 holy trinity of personal computing: the Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80. The company intended them to crunch home budget numbers just as often as they simulated space battles. Idiot-proof and rugged, Atari’s Home Computer System machines (I’ll call the platform “HCS” for short) represented a huge leap in consumer-friendly personal computing. Unlike many PCs of the time, the Atari machines exposed no bare electronics to the consumer. Unique keyed connectors meant that all of the machines’ ports, modules, and cartridges couldn’t be plugged into the wrong places or in the incorrect orientation. The 400 even featured a flat spillproof keyboard aimed at fending off snack-eating children. And due to restrictive FCC rules that precluded the open expansion slots on the Apple II, Atari designed a suite of intelligent plug-and-play peripherals linked together by a serial IO bus that presaged the ease of the much-later USB. More: https://www.fastcompany.com/90432140/how-atari-took-on-apple-in-the-1980s-home-pc-wars
  13. Don't forget the metabolic urine analyzer with MIDI output for playing music to metabolic profile... Cool stuff!
  14. Probably my favorite period t-shirt was my Elephant Memory Systems shirt. This is around 1980 or so...
  15. Had a similar issue when pulling my 800 out of mothballs.... I re-seated all the ICs that were socketed and it's been fine since. Kind if a pain to tear it down that far but it did work for me.. Good luck.
  16. Has anyone else seen this? https://twitter.com/KevinSavetz/status/654837470157139968?s=04 (my apologies if this is old news)
  17. No... The discussion is about the sio2sd.xex on-screen loader. This feature does not appear to work on the 800 as stated in the thread you mentioned (which is also the thread I posted above).. However, the SIO2SD unit itself works just fine as a drive emulator if the image is selected from the SIO2SD buttons first.
  18. Ran into this same problem: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/230538-sio2sd-with-atari-800/?do=findComment&comment=3087209 Whatever the reason, it doesn't work on the 800 but works on my 800XL. As stated, it's probably some incompatibility with the 800 OS.
  19. Nice try but I think that distinction goes to Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). The Xerox Alto GUI in 1973 (followed by the the "STAR" workstation GUI in 1981) "inspired" Apple and Sun to do their own GUI which ultimately inspired Microsoft to do Windows. Many people assume Apple invented the windows type GUI but that's not the case. Indeed, many of Apple's great "innovations" were bought, borrowed or stolen from somewhere else.
  20. I dunno Claus.. You steered me to Atari. After that, CHAOS and MC2 did a pretty good job of turning people on to Atari as well.
  21. OMG!!! As your "cohort", I remember this! We snickered over this for days...
  22. That was about 30 years ago? I remember a few things. I remember being amazed at how ledgible a 4 pixel wide character set could be. I remember burning EPROMs and assembling cartridges. I remember choosing a company name that started with the letter 'A' so we would be listed first in any new product or company listings in the magazines (it worked!).. My best memories are of forging a life-long friendship and working relationship with Claus who I still think is a flat-out genious with computers and digital electronics.
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