Fort Apocalypse

You might ask- so what? We'll here are some cool reasons: * Recent blogs about Apple II * Recent blogs about Atari * Recent blogs about C64 * Recent blogs about NES * Recent blogs about TRS-80 Just to name a few...

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&topic=vg

Longhorn Engineer was selling some heavy sixers he refurbished a while back for something like $35 a piece and then he also was selling A/V mods for maybe $40 or so a piece (I forget the prices). If you're interested in getting another cheap one, just ask around and I'm sure someone will help. Nothing against atari2600.com though, as it sounds like they are pretty good too. Like you said, just sucks that the equipment is old and goes bad. We should all get a petition together to bring back the 2600 with stereo and A/V mod and slashdot it! Then sent it onto Infogrames/Atari and tell them to get Legacy Engineering to assist. I know, I know. Any further work on the FB line (FB2 portable and FB3) is on hold. I just want to start a petition.

Retrothing posted an article on Lead 16k for the Atari 2600. See also the main thread.

Meant to post this yesterday when it got slashdotted (sorry! I'm slow): http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/29/157232 Article here: http://trixter.wordpress.com/2008/09/28/th...-trixters-mind/ Description of how game "Mental Blocks" by Avantage (Accolade’s budget publishing title) was custom formatted so that it would work for both C64 and IBM on the same side of the diskette! Here is the section of the article by Trixter that you might find interesting: (note: if you can help him, please reply on that page in addition to this one)

Retro Thing just wrote an article on the Atomic Warehouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and I checked out the pictures of the place on their site. I found one that has an arcade game that I don't recognize to the right of the pinball machine. Does anyone recognize it?

I think it is stalled until Atari decides to tell Legacy Engineering (Curt and Marty) to start on it again. Atari (well, Infogrames) seems more focused on new games, since they have brought on some new hires and appear to be coming back from the dead. For example, according to this article, Paulina Bozek left Sony for Atari and her new studio will focus on innovating and developing mass-market consumer games and services for online-enabled devices including PC’s and game consoles. Looking at recent news that seems to be their only focus now, but maybe I'm wrong. It would be nice if someone would hire L.E. to do something else cool while we wait. The classic controller was cool- what's next?

http://www.retrothing.com/2008/08/retrospective-1.html

http://www.retrothing.com/2008/08/retrospective-1.html

Here's another option if you want something small, but it's slow: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/08/27/a-...ives-at-pc-pro/

Gamepark Holdings, the makers of the GP2X Console, have today announced the successor, which is called the WIZ: http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/26/170222

GoSub2 got slashdotted (in addition to AOF)! Well at least commented on in a slashdot article: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=...mp;cid=24696951

AOF got slashdotted! Well at least commented on in a slashdot article: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=...mp;cid=24696951

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3766...n_years__a_.php

Maybe I should start a mame cabinet company that customizes in caffeinated beverage branded cabinets. Talk about a niche!!

Yep, could be. I think it was the main guy from Game Cabinets, Inc., perhaps the President, David Flagg? D-avid... D-onger... hmm. Nah, couldn't be.

How about you give your guess then? Sounds like you might know a little about said business transaction... So my original total guess was ~$1900, I know that has got to be way above the actual cost, but that was what my guess for parts added up to (and I was obviously way off!). How about instead, $600 for parts, not including the graphic design cost, and not including licensing fees (maybe $200 per machine?). Which would make it (not including graphic design, and not including labor) be about $800 a piece, and assuming they gave a significant discount to Pepsi to make sure they didn't use another vendor, I'm guessing maybe the price each to Pepsi was close to $2000 (+/-$200). I just love wild guesses!

I challenge all who write articles for periodicals and other trusted sources to use "classic hommy" in at least every other article.

PC Gaming as long as there is no alternative to keyboards (for communication). Think of Infocom. Has any console game come close to it? NO! Even with microphones and voice recognition, is any kid going to want to say things into it, or will they be too embarrassed? PC Gaming takes games to a much deeper level than they get with console games, for the very reason that computers exist- they are meant for doing more than just games, so their input is different than the simplest thing that could possibly work to satisfy the normal gamer, thereby providing more human interface that is more complicated for the game developer to take advantage of in their games. IMO, text adventures BLOW AWAY most games of today for this very reason.

On the topic of compiling MESS for 64-bit XP, here is what I've found so far, if it helps. The MESS FAQ included with the source specifically points out that it is the 32-bit version of MinGW (minimal GCC)- however, I found reference to 64-bit version of MinGW and 64-bit windows here. Maybe you're just a stone's throw from a solution if you use 64-bit MinGW and recompile MESS in that.

I looked into this recently and although you probably already figured this out, sdlmess is the latest up-to-date version, and the other one is out-of-date. See this about 64-bit http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4352077 Ok- two problems with my posts here- I was misinformed that windows version of mess was out-of-date - it is kept up well. I must have been remembering something else (maybe some other linux version of mess?) that was out of date, and sdlmess was the project that is being kept up to date on the linux side, as well as seemingly having people dealing with 64-bit stuff. Sorry about that. I have a 64-bit processor but an using the 32-bit version of XP, and I haven't played with MESS in Windows in a long while (and back then I didn't make much progress with it). Assuming you didn't mind emulating within an emulator, you could try vmware player (free) and an image of some version of linux (also free) from the vmware site (or an image of a 32-bit version of windows) and try to get sdlmess working (or 32-bit mess in emulated windows) if you wanted. That sounds like a pain though. If I knew I could do it, it would be fun to try to compile MESS for 64-bit, but I don't know whether I could do that running 32-bit XP (on a 64bit processor) or not. I'm guessing not, but if you want me to try, I can.

Thanks! Sounds neat, but the it sounded like FPGA stuff is fairly expensive though, right? Do you know of anyone doing Apple II on a chip like they did the C64 on a chip?

Where did you hear that? Sorry, it was a joke between me and atarian63 who posted something to that effect here (he was just kidding).

Agreed!

If classic farting was a website, had a wikipedia entry, and was generally accepted to mean something significant than I would think it should be considered.