vidak

One of the really interesting things I've noticed by going through the Stella Mailing List is the different netiquette people had in the mid-nineties! Also I find uuencoding really interesting! It's such an amazing way to compress and transmit files when you have limited bandwidth. Uuencoding is encoding a binary file into a really long text string that you then copy and paste into an email client. We obviously don't have to do this anymore, but I find it really interesting! Wouldn't it be fun to come up with a uuencoder that compressed files really effectively? It might be completely impractical now because we have files in the gigabytes and even terabytes. Imagine the text strings for those files!! Uuencoding originates from UNIX, which is an operating system which is structured around a philosophy that every program should be able to output text strings and accept text strings as input.

Please find the Commo Dig completed up until April 1997. Link: http://bootlicker.party/commo-dig

Thanks Thomas : )

I love the N64. It's easily one of my favourite consoles. My parents bought a PlayStation first, but I didn't enjoy the PS1 nearly as much as when we got our N64 second hand. I thought Mario 64 was really the revolution in technology that the PlayStation didn't have for a long time. I played hours and hours of the N64, and it's the reason I always advocate for cartridges over CD ROMs.

You can learn so much from threads like these! I don't know many if these games at all!

I am just going to announce here that I am going to slowly work through the Stella Mailing List and try and document anything useful I find.

We would probably need a lot of resources to come up with the new BASIC or the next most effective way of teaching people about computers

Well that's not really true, many of the most famous computer languages were written by people with university degrees. Take C for example. That was done with the enormous resources of Bell Labs

I suppose there's nothing wrong with big teams working on games, I just wish they were run democratically. Frequently game direction is a dictatorship by marketing or corporate types. Big business got more in control of video game production, and have turned it into a bland landscape.

Sorry I didn't realise you're not allowed to talk about political or religious issues. I spend my life talking about nothing but politics and philosophy and I'm not used to having a filter. I've learned a lot from this thread. It is the assessment of many that there is not a market for reproductions, and even then many besides myself think it would be immoral if not illegal to make reproductions. The one thing someone probably could do is manufacture new shells for carts, seeing as there is a dwindling amount of them out there. I was wondering about whether there is much abandonware out there on the Atari 2600, but it seems as if it is the opinion of many that there isn't much abandonware worth reproducing. Abandonware is a made up term, and it means intellectual property which belongs to no-one. Has an indeterminate owner, or belongs to an owner with rights which are unenforceable. I think perhaps there are better ways to allow oppressed people to have video games. Sure, workers want bread, but they also want roses. Video games are actually a very inexpensive art form when done correctly. They cost way less than travelling, and in the long run, less than expensive food.

I do love BASIC though. It really captured my imagination as a child. If it wasn't for BASIC I never would have come to understand and love computers as much as I did. I wrote countless games and programs in BASIC. I think that's something old computers really had to their advantage: the fact you had to use BASIC to use them. Computers control us now, but computers used to be useful tools in the household because of BASIC

That's why I really want to get I involved in this community! One of my favorite things about Atari games is that they're almost always made by one person. The reason why consoles and games now have lost all their soul is that games and consoles have become so complex that incredible bureaucratic structures have been set up to manage them. All the Atari programmers from the 70s and 80s tell you at the GDC conferences how stupid marketing departments are. Well now almost every AAA titles are run by them. There's something pure about 8 bit hardware. One person, one game. Amazing artistic direction as a result.

I think if it is built around Stella, they should release the hardware as open source. They should also make some sort of financial contribution to the Stella project. Just to return to a discussion about "high definition" 2600 earlier on in the thread, I honestly don't see the point of a 1080p Atari clone. The system is so closely tied to producing analogue TV signals that I think it's pretty unparsimonious (probably not a word) to try and make digital a system designed around analogue principles. I personally love the snow and the distortion of the 2600 the way it was intended. The whole issue of latency revolves around the fact that HD Atari requires converting an analogue signal into digital. Emulation solves this at the price of compatibility. Someone has already made a prototype FPGA 2600 clone: http://hackaday.com/2010/09/15/atari-2600-recreated-in-an-fpga/ I'm pretty sure that's open source...

I'll do a little work on organising things and I'll post in the forums about it. Thanks Random Terrain

YES. I LOVE HUNCHY 2.

Totally agree. Atari represents cutting edge technology and unbridled imagination. I'd say there's way more of the spirit of Atari in these forums than in this new console.

I agree. Let a thousand flowers bloom, the saying goes.

It's actually a pie in the sky dream of mine to be the first to return to manufacturing CRT TVs hahahahah

The first thing I'd suggest is that you move the Useful Links at the bottom of the index of your reformatting of SpiceWare's Collect Tutorial into the main programming index. If you never click on the Collect Tutorial and scroll down the bottom of the screen, you'll never see those REALLY REALLY important links! I would also reorganize the batari BASIC commands page. Having everything in one big webpage with just anchors from an index linking everything is too unwieldy. I hope this doesn't offend you, but the batari BASIC page is the best example of what a lot of the programming section of the Random Terrain website is like: kind of a nest of disorganised links. I would centralize the structure of links to make sure absolutely everything gets noticed. Frequently there are links everywhere that can be easily missed. Sometimes even the text of the site is misleading. A key suggestion I would give is directing people's attention to the latest version of batari BASIC, and dropping all references to version 1.0 from 2007. I also do not understand what the DPC kernel is and how it works. There needs to be much more information explaining the latest and greatest features and techniques of batari BASIC (what I assume is v1.1 with the DPC kernel?)

I think it's a pretty established principle in the gaming community that you should never pre-order items. It's a complete scam, and it is never worth the money you pay for the stuff. That said I am always excited for a new console. But personally I think the people making this console don't care about gaming at all. There are so many important things we need to achieve to push gaming forward, but this console is not really what we need.

I am a nice guy! I'm super chill. I also don't like to tell people what to do, but I do judge people on their actions. When I develop my own Atari 2600 homebrews, I'm going to licence them accordingly and release the source code so that everyone can benefit from my efforts. That's something /I/ can control. Would I ever make seamless repros of homebrews? No way. Do I disagree with the decision for people to deliberately hide their source code? Completely. I think it's immoral. Like I have always maintained, if I ever manage to pull together the money, I'll focus on titles out of copyright. I will sell at cost and will absolutely run not for profit. Everyone deserves video games, especially 2600 games, but they're the best games and they're loads and loads of fun. We should have a preference for helping the poor.

I'd do it to make video games accessible to more people. To the poor, really. The harmony cart is 95 Australian dollars shipped to Australia. I want to make Atari games (which are wonderful) accessible to many more people moving forward in time. ROMs are one way of enjoying Atari games, definitely, but they're not the full experience, are they. I suppose the full experience could be delivered with a USB joystick. Maybe manufacturing those would make Atari games more accessible - that I hadn't thought about! But in any case I don't see why making repros wouldn't be an economical way to make video games accessible to the poor. Modern video games are marked up $20 more in AUD than US games. I find much gaming completely unaffordable. Retro gaming in an authentic guise is now completely inaccessible to the poor, NES consoles and modern reproductions frequently just as expensive as discount modern consoles.

I'm in the process of learning how to code 2600 games using machine code. I'm finding a lot of the resources difficult to find. There is an enormous wealth of information on these forums but a lot of it isn't indexed or documented. Random Terrain's website is incredible, but I disagree with the way a lot of the content has been organised and presented. So I decided to make a page on my blog indexing as many links and as much information about Atari 2600 programming as possible. I have, for instance, included some special technical information about drawing pictures in machine language 2600 kernels (DoDraw, FlipDraw, SwitchDraw etc) cross referenced against the discussion that originated the techniques in the Stella Mailing List. This is a big project, and the index will grow over time. I was wondering, does anyone have any links which they'd like to include in a centralised index about Atari 2600 programming? I will include batari BASIC documentation, of course. Much of what one needs to know about bB is already on Random Terrain, however. Please find the page here: http://bootlicker.doubledashgames.com/atari-2600-programming/

I'm unashamed about this, I'm a communist. I don't see how that's an issue. I'm not an anarchist, I'm a Marxist, but I'm comrades with a lot of anarchists, and I really liked the quote from Kropotkin. Communism isn't about shooting people or invading people's private space at all, and I think your thought experiment is really silly.

Rad game!! Slot racers was a classic!