Keatah

Never associated a computer with the word "console". Except for the Atari 400/800. They accepted a pop-in cartridge and could sit on a carpeted floor. Systems like the vic-20 or c-64 needed ventilation and therefore couldn't sit on the carpet. And the cartridges slid into the back, also not an ergonomic comfort. And of course they were worse than toy-like, and couldn't stand up to the rigors of rough'n'tough console play styles.

First, now, these past 5 years, I'm discovering the benefit of not being able to purchase and own every bit of Apple II hardware when I was a kid. Oh I had a grand setup alright, Apple II+ and //e. And a good number of accessories for the Apple II, like a clock card, memory expansions, disk drives, and hard disk, 2 modems, mockingboard, joystick, CP/M, paddles, and a host of other odds and ends. Printer and microbuffer.. All of it fit into a coupla 2-4 rubbermaid tubs. My childhood stuff. Sprawling things like the AlphaSyntauri keyboard, Mountain Expansion Chassis, and IIgs I didn't acquire till the 90's on ebay. And by that time I was utterly bored of the Apple II - having moved into the Amiga briefly and then the PC permanently. So there was this big gap where I didn't do Apple II stuff at all. Or honestly appreciate it. Mid 90's to perhaps as late as 2 years ago. More or less. Did nothing except accumulate junk. None of which meant anything to me. I was futilely trying to re-ignite the passion from the late 70's and early 80's. The engine got flooded, the rooms filled with junk. Junk bordering on garbage even. The wife started to complain, rightfully so. My head got clogged trying to keep track of it all. The only stuff that's truly & genuinely nostalgic and sentimental and important to me is the exact same stuff I had as a kid. And there is the silver lining, it isn't a whole lot compared to the million-dollar collections youtubers brag about. No sir. Not even a fraction. And that makes it manageable and fun and rewarding. Not ever worrying about the whereabouts and condition of filler hardware. So the stuff I had as a kid remains "keeper material" and is the core essence of my collection. All the other stuff I have discovered is best enjoyed virtually through magazine scans and ads. Exactly the same way I had enjoyed them as a kid. My original childhood hardware is most important and a keeper. Things purchased on ebay after the early 90's is now being gotten rid of in another round of purging - it has failed to become nostalgic, even after 20 some years. I recently focused on this "revelation" or "state of affairs" not all that long ago. But now, today, I'm dialing it in!

Is openGL with vsync broken on windows?

Shouldn't gamers be smart enough to avoid crowding in lines and small stores..? Maybe it's too much to expect..

I had so many of those things. With so many generic names. Probably something like WarCat, DemonDialer, Metro-Hacker, Joshua ][, MicroDialer, and a whole bunch of other things me and buddies wrote up. They were easy enough for anyone just learning BASIC to figure out. The firmware file is likely available at ftp asimov but of course you'd need to burn it.

Basically what's being asked is how much randomness is in Atari games. If you recorded all the inputs and played them back to the game, would the game have the same outcome? Would the characters move in the same patterns? Or would it diverge at some point to where the inputs were simply not appropriate.

It's downright wasteful and pointless - especially when there are perfectly viable platforms already established.

Most likely, yes, the stuff keeps piling up and up. And the experience becomes a hollow one. the stuff just sits and sits and sits. It's best to pick 2 or 3 fav systems and treat them like queens. And have a good time with them too.

That's always something I wanted to do when I was a kid, starting in like 1980, with PFS (Personal Filing System) for the Apple II. I only had like 48K or 64K of memory at the time and 1 or 2 drives of 143K each. And it was working really well till I hit around 400 records OR tried to search for anything by any other field different from the title or first record. It was one of the few times I was disappointed with the Apple II+. And I lost interest in the whole thing, not even considering the superior AppleWorks package that came some years later. Or even the 486 in the PC era. But today I have a "pseudo-database". I rely using a file search program or Windows File Explorer and its search function to scan a library of images with descriptive filenames. I started doing that vaguely in the second decade of this century. Not wholly unlike TOSEC, but more. In a roundabout way it is a database, but a database of disk images and their contents. I also have a secondary disk image scanner that makes a text file of each disk's files. And I scan that, too, if I'm looking for something like a BASIC program I entered when I was a kid. The whole thing works incredibly well. It doesn't give an accurate count of what I have as there are sometimes dupes and multiple versions/cracks. But I can find literally anything in like a minute or two - out of like 40,000 files. More if you count individual files on a disk. Might as well throw in docs, scans, text files, notes and magazines. It works incredibly well and would've been THE database to die for as a kid trading WaReZ in grade school and high school. If there's a lockdown I'll spend some time evaluating the whole shebang and see if there's any room for improvement in technique or whatever.

There came a point in time, when I was doing that same thing for the Apple II, where it all became overwhelming and I gave up. Overwhelming to me because of the slowness of a large database running on an 8-bit machine (with minimal memory and minimal disk space). I didn't have success till I dumped all the disks to the PC and ran a catalog program on the PC itself. Once that happened I could make categories, lists, charts, and more. Not to mention having the disk images instantly available for emulation.

Absolutely. It will be over before you know it. As far as keeping busy, any extra time I have will be taken up by storytelling, playing and updating emulators, maybe wrapping up my 486 restore, starting on rebuilding my PIII, and a host of other projects. I personally welcome the downtime coming from all this.

A very nostalgic pic. Seems to capture the moment of when me and my 1981 buddies would be trying to decide what to play next.

My buddy has a Retron77 and the same things apply. The Stella team here on AA are doing what seems like heroic levels of support. And that is great. But should that be necessary to get a product to work in an enjoyable manner? I don't have one. But from the last year or so of reading about it I formed the opinion it's tedious and NOT harmonious mix of components. C'mon, a cartridge reader and an emulator?

The Retron77 is a half-assed combo of emulation and hardware. If you want to experience the grandness and full scope of emulation, just use a PC. I'd keep the original VCS. It's nice bit of engineering that's almost 50-years old.

I would say PC. Though in a way they already exist if you think about the uber-small form factors like Intel NUC and R-Pi running Linux. Load it with emulators and PCEM, MAME, Altirra, DosBox, Stella, VirtualBox. And more.

If you can find the ingredients, namely #1. All stores in a 20 mile radius here are sold out!

Handwashing with soap and water is much more effective. People are thinking the sanitizer kills the germs, it does, but it takes time. Up to 8 minutes IIRC. Handwashing sloughs it off and down the drain. So I wouldn't go chasing it down or spending big bux on it.

I'm fairly certain your Conner drive has a voice-coil actuator and will park the heads on a specially textured section of the disk surface. Usually the inner tracks. All by itself. When you are instructed to (or required to) park the heads manually, that usually means you have a stepper motor band arrangement.

Care to share your parts list?

If there were ever a course in classic computing, this would have its own chapter for each different machine. This is a very valuable skill or procedure. What with floppy disks not being the most reliable.. And the vast amount of stuff that's been archived already.. AND you may have personal stuff, logs, diaries, programs, text files, and more; that you want to preserve and enjoy on emulation even.

Well for shutting down the system for the evening, just flip the switch, or use a powerstrip w/switch. For resetting DOS, a ctrl-alt-delete usually works. Or a power off. I think there are utilities that do that for you, but it's pretty much the same. Power cycle, or ctrlaltdelete.