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OldAtarian

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Posts posted by OldAtarian

  1. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    Maybe AtariAge members should buy up Atari Stock and throw out the existing board :)

     

    Barnie

     

    Are they even listed anymore? If they're listed anywhere it would be on the French stock exchange since that's where Infogrames comes from, who bought them out.

     

     

     

     

     

    "Atari Group

     

    In October 2001, IESA relaunched the Atari brand when Atari Interactive, Inc., at that time a wholly owned subsidiary of Infogrames Interactive, Inc., released MXrider. On May 7, 2003, IESA officially reorganized its Infogrames Inc. US subsidiary as a separate Nasdaq listed company known as Atari Inc., named its European operations as Atari Europe, renamed Infogrames Interactive, Inc. to Atari Interactive, Inc., (a wholly-owned subsidiary of IESA), rebranded Infogrames Australia Pty Ltd as Atari Australia Pty Ltd, renamed Infogrames Melbourne House Pty Ltd to Atari Melbourne House Pty Ltd, Infogrames UK became Atari UK, while IESA became a holding company

     

    Atari Inc. is a public company that, as of 2007, has as majority stockholder the company California U.S. Holdings, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of IESA. Atari Inc. licences the Atari trademark from Atari Interactive, Inc., a license which will expire in 2013. Atari Inc. has the rights to publish and sublicense in North America certain intellectual properties either owned or licensed by IESA or its subsidiaries, including Atari Interactive, Inc."

     

     

     

     

    So you'd never be able to buy enough shares to do anything because Infogrames will always control the majority. According to news sources, the NASDAQ listed part of the company was delisted at the end of 2008 for not being able to maintain a $1.00 per share price.

  3. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    the next thing you know the site admin gets a summons to appear in court on charges of libel or defamation for not policing the forums

     

    This simply doesn't happen. See below.

     

    It doesn't matter whether they get prosecuted or not, it's the inconvenience of it all. Most admins prefer to head these things off before they become a problem.Making unproven allegations against someone in a public forum has legal consequences and since the internet is considered a form of media like a newspaper or magazine and not a utility like some would have it, the admins have to be careful what they allow to be posted as the "publisher" of the material.

     

    No, it isn't, and no, they don't.

     

    http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode47/usc_sec_47_00000230----000-.html

     

    within United States code:

     

    "[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"

     

    This is a part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

     

    Nevermind the fact that practically every single website has an independent agreement that you electronically sign when you sign up for the site stating specifically that you are responsible for your own generated content and not the site itself. These agreements have held up in courtrooms for exactly what you're imagining to happen -- libel and defamation suits. They don't work for copyright claims, but they do work whenever a whiny dipsydoodle thinks that they've been "flamed" too hard. An individual could sue the person making the claims, sure, which has its own set of circumstances that have to be proven, and generally the "internet-flame" cases go absolutely nowhere, but bringing suit against an administrator of a website because another user posted defamatory content is definitely not going to go anywhere fast.

     

    To be frank, anyone bringing a suit against an admin or owner of a site for content generated by other users not only is going to get a judgment in favor of the site with prejudice against the plaintiff (meaning in this case the plaintiff will be paying the site owner's legal fees for the whole 15 seconds it was in a courtroom), but it is incredibly likely that said plaintiff will be receiving a countersuit within 24 hours for bringing forth a frivolous suit with the tables turned, as an admin can claim that the suit is legitimate defamation. That one won't get thrown out of court in 15 seconds, either... :ponder:

     

    NOTHING in what you just linked applies to someone libeling someone else on an internet forum. The only protection that applies according to that is if an owner of a site DOES censor someone else's comments to prevent someone else from taking offense, then they are protected from being sued for free speech violations by the poster of the offensive comment NOT if the owner of a site does nothing and allows the targeted person to be offended.

     

    If I posted a repulsive thread targeting people of color or of a certain religion and Al deleted it, then I have no cause to sue and neither does anyone else because the law you linked to protects him. If he allowed it to stand unedited, then he could be just as if a newspaper allowed a similar editorial or opinion piece to appear in it's pages. If I made a post disparaging blacks anywhere and it was left up the NAACP lawyers would be all over it.

  6. Posted

    weren't some ColecoVisions sold in Europe with an alternative game

    I'm not sure if it was in Europe, but I heard of a version sold with Mouse Trap instead of DK.

     

     

    The common European box for DK is this one :

    pdk_cbs.jpg

    which is different from the one I showed : pdk_cbs3.jpg

     

    I also look for any proof of existence of the one showed on the left on this picture (still from a brochure) :

     

    pdkbox.jpg

     

    This one is my graal :twisted:

    Your holy grail of DK boxes would be the German release version, correct. I saw the Intellivision box in a picture on eBay Germany and if memory serves me right, the seller listed the cart for CBS ColecoVision. The box clearly used dark blue and said Intellivision.

     

    Why would the German version have French text on the front? :?

  8. Posted

    The 2600 is more impressive now than it was then. Developers now can make bigger programs than they were able to then because the price of memory chips has fallen a lot since. Back then you were limited to 4k or sometimes as much as 8k for a really special project and you were usually time and budget constrained. Without having deadlines or budgets and limited memory no longer an impediment, the old consoles can really be unleashed. There are still hard limitations that can't be worked around, true, but you can still do things now that just weren't possible before.

     

    The original programmers were also pioneers, the first ones to work with the system. The knowledge that today's batch of homebrewers take for granted, they didn't know back then. They were learning as they went. That made it even harder to write quality programs. They also didn't have an internet back then where they could access huge amounts of information with a few keystrokes or consult with other programmers around the world if they got really stuck. They were pretty much on their own. They also didn't have huge development houses with hundreds of employees working on a single game. You usually had one guy per game who was under a lot of pressure to get the job done quickly. It's not exactly an environment conducive to creativity or attention to detail.

  9. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    also - disk access, and drive capacity

    360k floppy is still twice as big as atari ones, and most games were distributed as SD or ED for compatibility

     

    so, who does the porting? ;)

     

    I don't know who does the porting but as far as drive capacity goes:

     

    I was thinking more like using a banked ROM cart so there would be no disk drive access; that would speed up load times significantly over the CGA version which does pause as you go from one screen to the next. Imagery is compressed so the RAM requirements was I was worried about since you would need a place to decompress and room for a frame buffer for ANTIC (double buffered) as well along with all other RAM requirements for audio/text/etc. But 130XE or Rambo XLs should work fine. Or you make a custom cartridge that does RAM and ROM to support the Atari 400/800.

     

    King's Quest came on a 360k floppy. When was the last time you saw a 360k cart for an A8? Even the OSS supercarts weren't that big. I don't think even Neo Geo carts ever had that much memory.

     

    And if you're going to release as a cart, then you can't release only for people with ridiculous amounts of RAM installed or you won't sell any.

  11. Posted

    I thought TOS crashed on 68020 and above?

     

    I want the Vortex 80286 'accelerator' lol :)

    That would be awfully inconvenient for the CT63 owners if it did.

     

    The Falcon has already an MC68030 cpu running at 16MHz so the TOS 4.x has to accomodate for that. The ST and Mega ST TOSes did not support MC68010 and higher. My Mega ST 1 has a PAK68/2 and needs KAOS instead of TOS.

     

    Would swapping in a set of TOS 2.06 chips work?

  15. Posted

    Let's be clear, there appears to be two issues here.

     

    Most fundamentally, the site itself has gone 'pop', somehow the files that comprise the Atari-Forum have vanished from the webserver hosting it. I cannot explain how this has possibly happened but then I'm not familiar with how "250 host" (or whoever they are) manages slices.

     

    Secondly (assuming the first is resolved), there appears to be a filter in place at BT that affects all sites hosted by the same hosting company used by Atari Forum. Some users have reported success with the approach of using OpenDNS in order to circumvent this, however this is clearly far from ideal.

     

    There are other factors to consider here, the most important of which is cost. I'm not sure how much space the AF consumes (database and attachments must consume a lot) but I'd imagine hosting such a site on shall we say. A more 'reputible' host provider will cost serious money to maintain. This puts us in the realms of a subscription model - a scenario that immediately alienates all but the true Atari enthusiasts. We aren't a large community to start with so this is a bad idea.

     

    If anyone here can come forward and categorically state that they can provide hosting for a potentially huge site (must be gigabytes to support all the attachments over the years) and this can be provided for as close to £0 as possible, then please come forward with your offer and I will present it with a strong argument to those who can make it happen.

     

    http://www.free-webhosts.com/free-unlimited-webspace.php

  19. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    8086 wasn't speed deamon, so 4.77 086 and 1.78 6502 might be comparable

    issue here was memory requirements and resolution i suppose - not cpu speed

     

    i would love to see any of sierra's adventures or lucas arts ones redid on a8

    whatever it takes

     

    Memory would have been another issue. The PC probably would have at least 256k RAM to work with and the video card might have a few K of it's own.

  20. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    Forgive me if this has been mentioned before--I searched the forum and couldn't find it. Is there any reason why King's Quest wasn't ported to A8s? Was it just because of its late release in the A8 lifecycle?

     

    It seems like King's Quest I is at least doable since I used to play that from a 360K floppy disk drive on a CGA system and 4.77Mhz PC.

     

    CGA is still far in excess of what the A8 is capable of video wise and a 4.77mhz 8088/8086 is still faster than a 1.77mhz 6502 and ANTIC can't compare to a good video card in the PC.

  22. Posted · Edited by OldAtarian

    I have a Mountain King and a K-razy Kritters that don't work in my XL's. I was hoping someone could tell me so I don't have to unpack one of my 800's to test them. I don't know if they don't work because they are broken or because they are incompatible with the XL.

  25. Posted

    well, at least i would cancel my second bid 13 hours before the auction ends to pay the actual price it would have had.

     

    i'd call the second account f-u-sidealers, and the first one: maybeigetitcheaper :D

     

    Then I leave myself exposed to snipers. If an item worth $500 only has bids to $400 and I drop my second bid then the snipers will zoom in at the last second. I leave myself a $100 cushion against at least some of the snipers if they know they have to beat $500 instead of $400. I may be in there sniping a bid higher than my max myself if it's something I want badly enough to overpay for. A once a decade buying opportunity is definitely worth being in there fighting for no matter what it costs.

    I don't know why you bother with all this. If you are really concerned about side-dealers, you'd be far better off sending the seller a side-deal offer of your own at the start of the auction for what you are willing to pay. If the seller doesn't accept it, then you know that the seller is not open to side-deals and the auction will run its course. If the seller accepts it, then at least you get your item and the seller gets a reasonable price for it. You can get the seller to add a BIN to the auction so that e-bay gets its cut. Everyone's a winner... ;)

    I think he stated that he thinks side deals are shady. This would be akin to saying to someone who is opposed to steroids to just juice up on steroids if they are so concerned about weight lifting.

    Would he hav had a problem if the side-dealer had offered $1k and did a side-deal? Probably not. ;)

    ...but then poor Ebay would lose there fee money :_( :rolling:

    Not if it was done via a BIN. As I said, everyone's a winner!

    Okay, now I get it, everyones a winner...well except the guy that over pays but hey thats his own fault. :)

    That would be OldAtarian ;)

     

    Even if I did overpay for something, it wouldn't be for something that you can get everyday on ebay. It would have to be something extremely rare. I'd rather overpay a little and have the extremely rare item than not bid enough and not get it at all. Winning the item is all that matters.

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