danwinslow

ow brane hert

Steve, there's an internal IDE kit you can get from Mr. Atari. If you send him an email he will direct you to the person who makes and ships them.

How bout a single blinking dot in one of the bottom corners?

I just put an internal Compact Flash 512MB in a 1200xl that atarimax stuck an internal MyIDE into. Works great. Also have his 32-in-1 as well, it is superb.

Yes, you can hook up a hard drive to an 8 bit. There is MyIDE, SIO2IDE, and the black box and MIO interfaces, just to name a few. You can also get prosystem from atarimax and hook up a 1050 to your pc and copy literally anything, including copy protected disks.

I have no issues with it. You gotta pay the bills. Just not IGE, please

I didn't say it was a *good* strategy

LOL Thats like the essence of the late 70's early 80's experience! needs boobies, though, for perfection.

And you, my friend, need to get your Humor module tuned up. I was joking.

The idea is to try and psych out a sniper by making him think you've freaked and bidded it WAY up high.

wtf I like boobs a *LOT* better than either coke or pepsi. What kind of dumb ass test is THAT?

Oh you have a reserve...yeah I suppose thats the way to go up to exactly the reserve without going too far over.

heres the perfect soltion, for sale right now : http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...5212044559&rd=1 No, its not mine, but I do have 2 of them.

lol @ maibock touche. Pun intended

vga is correct. Its the ebay equivalent of dogs pissing on a tree.

If its played on an emulator, you are keenly aware of the fact that the PC hardware is totally crippled, and yet could still blow the doors off of this poor old emulated machine from sheer power. If its played on the real hardware, you are keenly aware of the fact that the hardware itself is relatively weak, but the stuff the programmers have made it do despite the limitations is really amazing. Watching a powerful PC running something like Numen is a real yawner, but watching Numen on an actual 8 bit is *IMPRESSIVE*.

Well...good I have that one Thanks Mark.

To 'dessicate' something is to remove the water from it..to dry it. A dessicant is a little package of silica gel that sucks humidity out of the air.

Anyone know where I could obtain the Quick programming language? It's one I have heard of but never seen. I have found some demo .atr's but thats all.

Oh come on. I love Atari's and all that, but CAB is in no way a better rendering tool for web pages than IE. Be serious.

Ah, yes that's likely true, Emkay

Better Translation : Atari Sparrow Prototype VERY RARE Super Rare! A prototype of the unreleased Atari Sparrow! It belongs to a run of 100-150 prototypes that were sent to developers only. From this prototype the Atari Falcon eventually came. It's the computer with the serial number S/N A325 31 00000 8. The board is mounted in a dark Sparrow-grey housing. The keyboard might be from, or at least identical to, a Falcon keyboard. The top case has a thin crack, but it could be repaired with no visible traces. The device is not operational, and is something strictly for a collector or perhaps an artisan. One socket on the board is empty. It must therefore be sold as is. No floppy drive and no PSU. It comes from a large German development house that cleaned out its basement.

Well, I have to disagree with your statement about cars. It takes plenty of knowledge to rebuild and modify an old car.

I am a professional programmer, and have been for many, many years. I've worked on everything from old Burroughs 3500's through Unisys through Honeywell, Early PC's, Wangs, Perkin Elmers, and the whole spectrum of bizarre DoD computer stuff, many and various Unix/Solaris/Linux boxes....you name it, I've probably coded badly on it. Why, in this age of terabyte storage, gigaflop processors, and more RAM than the entire DoD had in 1975 on my frikkin calculator, would anyone still want to mess around on 8 bit computers? I have been having to explain this obsession to people. They don't quite understand. "He likes computers", they think. "He ought to like new, powerful ones, but he doesn't. He likes old crappy ones." Conclusion : "He's nuts". In thinking about this, I have reached the conclusion that the main reason for my interest in these older computers, aside from nostalgia, is that you can wrap your arms around the WHOLE thing in a way that is impossible with modern platforms. Anybody out there seen the ENTIRE windows API lately? Think you could memorize that? 1/10 of that? Anyone tried to learn every motif call? Anyone tried to punt Windows out of the way and take over the box? Anyone tried to write a new OS from scratch on a modern computer? There's just too much in modern computer systems to really handle as a whole. You have to specialize, and that means you are always at someone elses mercy in some regard. You have to put up with someone elses ideas. Hell, 'programming' in modern J2EE environments is not so much programming as using some kind of really complicated library of pre-written stuff. It's kind of like learning Word really really well; you get a lot of power but you live with the world as the designers of Word deemed it to be, and you won't get to optimize anything or to be clever in some low level way. You just stick glops of pre-written stuff onto other glops, and execution speed be damned. Buy More Hardware. It's cheap! It's kind of like people who work on old cars. Yknow, on an old car, you can take the sucker apart and rebuild it, optimizing, tweaking, changing, adding. Hell, a old VolksWagen beetle is practically a Go-Cart, more like a really big lawnmower than anything else. You can mod the crap out of them. A modern car, you get to hook up a computer and swap hardware modules as commanded to by the little diagnostic machine. Thats it. Attempts to modify things usually end badly, with the little 'Check Engine' light on. This light means that one of approximately twenty million different errors has occured. Engines don't 'break' any more, now they just won't boot. Working on an old 8 bit computer not only gives you the freedom and possibility to optimize, but it is also very hard. It takes skill. The 2600 guys out there, man you guys remind me of like Zen Monks or something, secretly practicing Really Hard Things in the darkness of the temple courtyard, then running out every now and then and kicking everyone's ass with Killer Ninja Assembly Hacks.

Wow Bry, thanks for that very informative post! Never knew any of that except in the vaguest way.