Fort Apocalypse
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Posts posted by Fort Apocalypse
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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:
...until I looked at the FAT12 for the disk and saw that tons of sectors in an interleaved pattern were marked as BAD — very strange usage.A DIR on the disk shows that only about 256K of it is usable as space, instead of 360K. My Central Point Option Board’s Track Editor (TE.EXE) confirmed that every other track on side 0 cannot be identified as MFM data. So the manual is correct, and this truly is a mixed-format, mixed-architecture, mixed-sided diskette.
This diskette has officially blown my mind.
This is the very first time I have ever seen something like this. The data for the IBM program takes up more than 160KB as evidenced by a DIR. The C64 1541 drive is a single-sided drive; IBM’s is double-sided. Based on all this, we can deduce how this diskette is structured and why:
- The IBM version of the game required more than 160KB (ie. needed more than one side of a disk), probably because it has a set of files for CGA/Herc (4/2 colors) and another for EGA/Tandy (16 colors) and either set will fit in 160K but both won’t
- The C64 version required around 80K, based on the fact that every other track is unreadable by an IBM drive
- The publisher had the requirement of using only a single disk to save on packaging and media costs
- Not wanting to limit the game to either CGA or EGA, someone at Artech (the developer) built the format of this diskette BY HAND so that DOS would not step on the C64 tracks, and somehow the C64 would also read/boot the disk
I don’t know how the C64 portion boots since track 0 sector 0 looks like a DOS boot sector, but quick research shows that C64 disks keep their index on track 18. If anyone knows how C64 disks are read and boot, I’d love to know.
...
(note: if you can help him, please reply on that page in addition to this one)
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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?
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HeyHow is the progress on the FB3?
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?
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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/
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Gamepark Holdings, the makers of the GP2X Console, have today announced the successor, which is called the WIZ:
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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
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AOF got slashdotted! Well at least commented on in a slashdot article:
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=...mp;cid=24696951
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I like Mountain Dew as well... so I would be one of those guys to keep the artwork and marquee on there.They don't have a Live-Wire color scheme? Daaawwww!
Maybe I should start a mame cabinet company that customizes in caffeinated beverage branded cabinets. Talk about a niche!!
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If I didn't know better (and I don't) I'd guess that guy was involved in the promo or the creation of that machine and only registered here to defend it. Of course, that makes little sense given that the promo is now over.
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.
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Your right,a very wild guess.
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!
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Hommy is a generaly accepted word but you don't see that in the dictionary. Maybe if we say classic hommy then they will accept it? Fingers crossed.I challenge all who write articles for periodicals and other trusted sources to use "classic hommy" in at least every other article.
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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.
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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.
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Is there an XP X64 version of mess (incl. debug version) at the moment, i can only find xp x64 versions of mamethe debug version of latest mess seems to have serious hang up's on both normal XP and XP x64 (it takes an age to release the mouse pointer)
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
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.
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There are several FPGA based Apple II projects. Try google.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?
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Does anyone know if anyone is working on or had designed an Apple II (or I, II+, IIe, IIc, IIgs, III) on a chip? How about does anyone know if anyone is still making any of these MBs? How about any major sellers of them? I hear that some are throwing them away or smashing them for the metal in droves instead of selling them, which seems like a mistake.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).
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never heard of merrion webster...Perhaps you would have been better of going through OED (Oxford English Dictionary) THE de facto standard dictionary for the english speaking worldAgreed!
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Seeing as classic gaming is just the word classic in front of gaming I don't see why they would ever consider it. That would be better suited in an urban dictionary then in Webster. Do think that if I put the word classic in front of the word farting they would accept that? Tom lifted one cheak off of the chair and ripped a huge fart. "That's some classic farting right there" Bill said. I'm guessing that you did it just as a joke, but I could be wrong.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.
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A failed attempt to get "classic gaming" or "retrogaming" added to the dictionary:
Fort Apocalypse wrote:
> >I doubt that anyone has checked for this term, since it is composed
> >of two words already commonly used, but the term "classic gaming"
> >(a.k.a. "retrogaming" a.k.a. (less used) "old-school gaming") should
> >be considered for the modern dictionary. If you don't mind, please
> >mention this to those interested in new terms for entry. The primary
> >definition is "the hobby of playing and collecting older computer,
> >video, and arcade games". I know that adding new terms is not a
> >popularity contest, but I think you'll find if you search
> >publications from the past several years, you'll see that this term
> >is fairly well established and used in modern culture.
Here at Merriam-Webster, we have a series of criteria that a word has to meet to be considered for entry in our dictionary. We spend a certain amount of time every day scouring all sorts of published material for examples of new words, and when we find them, they go into our citation database. When we revise our dictionary, we check the database to see if any of these new words have enough support to warrant their entry.
Thus far, we have no examples of "retrogaming" in our database, which means that it probably won't go in any time soon. A further search of an online news archive turned up only a scant handful of hits for "retrogaming," a couple of dozen compared to the thousands that we usually look for when entering a new word.
For more information on the process and criteria we use to enter words in the dictionary, please visit our Web site at http://www.merriam-webster.com/help/faq/words_in.htm.
Daniel Brandon,
Associate Editor, Merriam-Webster Inc.
http://www.Merriam-Webster.com
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Is there an XP X64 version of mess (incl. debug version) at the moment, i can only find xp x64 versions of mamethe debug version of latest mess seems to have serious hang up's on both normal XP and XP x64 (it takes an age to release the mouse pointer)
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
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Are there any good histories of the fights between classic (or just plain old) computer and console companies/their users (PR wars, skirmishes, bad feelings, alliances, etc. - the whole she-bang)? I know there have to be references in a lot of books/magazines/etc., but just curious if anyone ever pooled that knowledge together into a single comprehensive history?
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Article on Lead 16k for the Atari 2600
in Atari 2600
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Retrothing posted an article on Lead 16k for the Atari 2600. See also the main thread.