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Blogs

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  • Kelp Entertainment
  • 2600 Fun Blogs
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  • The Word Of Ogma
  • GC's blog
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  • ivop's Blog
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  • Cheat Blog
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  • ...
  • Rybags' Blog
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  • grafix's Bit Mouse Playhouse
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  • EricBall's Tech Projects (PRIVATE)
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  • I created this second blog on accident and now I can't figure out how to delete it.
  • keilbaca's Blog
  • TestBot4's Blog
  • Old School Gamer Review
  • The Mario Blog
  • GideonsDad's Blog
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  • Horst's Blog
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  • Blogpocalypse
  • simonl's Blog
  • creeping insanity
  • Sonic R's Blog
  • CebusCapucinis' Blog
  • Syntax Terror Games
  • NCN's Blog
  • A Wandering Shadow's Travels
  • Arjak's Blog
  • 2600Lives' Blog
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  • Kiwi's Blog
  • Stephen's A8 Blog
  • Zero One
  • Troglodyte's Blog
  • Austin's Blog
  • Robert Hurst
  • This Is Reality Control
  • Animan's Blog Of Unusual Objectionalities
  • Devbinks' Blog
  • a1t3r3g0's Blog
  • The 7800 blog
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  • The Wreckening
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  • lost blog
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  • Robert @ AtariAge
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  • edweird13's Blog
  • edweird13's Blog
  • That's what she said.
  • Hitachi's Blog
  • The (hopefully) weekly rant
  • Goochman's Marketplace Blog
  • Marc Oberhäuser's Blog
  • Masquane's AtariAge Blog
  • satan165's Dusty Video Game Museum
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  • Retail hell (The EB years)
  • Vectrexer's Blog
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  • Retro Gaming Corporation
  • Hulsie's Blog
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  • Dryfter's Blog
  • Why Are You Even Reading This?
  • Xuel's Blog
  • GamingMagz
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  • caver's Blog
  • Atari 2600 for sale with 7 games 2 controllers
  • A Ramblin' Man
  • toiletunes' Blog
  • Justin Payne's Blog
  • ebot
  • Markvergeer's Blog
  • GEOMETRY WARS ATARI 2600
  • LEW2600's Blog
  • Pac-Man Vs Puck-Man's Blog
  • Bri's House
  • Les Frères Baudrand's Blog
  • Secure Your E-Commerce Business With ClickSSL.com
  • raskar42
  • The P3 Studio
  • Bydo's Blog
  • defender666's Blog
  • TheSSLstore - SSL certificates Validity
  • Chuplayer's Blog
  • pacman100000's Blog
  • POKEY experiments
  • JPjuice23's Blog
  • Gary Mc's Blog
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  • ScumSoft's Blog
  • The Social Gamer
  • Ping. Pong. Ping. Pong.
  • kgenthe's Blog
  • mapleleaves' Blog
  • Dallas' Blog
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  • Esplonky's Blog
  • Fashion Jewellery's Blog
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  • CJ's Ramblings
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  • dragging through the retro streets at dawn
  • Please Delete - Created by Accident
  • Nerdbloggers
  • Algus' Blog
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  • Appliciousblog.com
  • frederick's Blog
  • longleg's Blog
  • Brain droppings...
  • Sandra's blog
  • Bastelbutze
  • polo
  • VectorGamer's Blog
  • Maybe its a Terrible Tragedy
  • Guru Meditation
  • - - - - - -
  • The 12 Turn Program: Board Game Addiction and You
  • Tezz's projects blog
  • chonglily's Blog
  • masseo1's Blog
  • DCUltrapro's Blog
  • Disjaukifa's Blog
  • Vic George 2K3's Blog
  • Whoopdeedoo
  • ge.twik's Blog
  • DJT's High Score Blog [Test]
  • Disjaukifa's Assembly Blog
  • GonzoGamer's Blog
  • MartinP's Blog
  • marshaz's Blog
  • Pandora Jewelry's Blog
  • Blues76's Blog
  • Adam24's AtariAge Blog!
  • w1k's Blog
  • 8-bit-dreams' Blog
  • Computer Help
  • Chris++'s Blog
  • an atari story
  • JDRose
  • raz0red's Blog
  • The Forth Files
  • The Forth Files
  • A.L.L.'s Blog
  • Frankodragon's Blog Stuffs
  • Partyhaus
  • kankan313rd's Blog
  • n8littlefield's Blog
  • joshuawins99's Blog
  • ¡Viva Atari!
  • FujiSkunk's Blog
  • The hunt for the PAL Heavy Sixer
  • Liduario's Blog
  • kakpu's Blog
  • HSC Experience
  • people to fix atari Blog
  • Gronka's Blog
  • Joey Z's Atari Projects
  • cncfreak's Blog
  • Ariana585's Blog
  • 8BitBites.com
  • BrutallyHonestGamer's Blog
  • falcon_'s Blog
  • lushgirl_80's Blog
  • Lynx Links
  • bomberpunk's Blog
  • CorBlog
  • My Ideas/Rants
  • quetch's Blog
  • jamvans game hunting blog
  • CannibalCat's Blog
  • jakeLearns' Blog
  • DSC927's Blog
  • jetset's Blog
  • wibblebibble's Basic Blog
  • retrovideogamecollector's Blog
  • Sonny Rae's Blog
  • The Golden Age Arcade Historian
  • dianefox's Blog
  • DOMnation's Blog
  • segagamer99's Blog
  • RickR's Blog
  • craftsmanMIKE's Blog
  • gorf68's Blog
  • Gnuberubs Sojourn Dev Journal
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  • iesposta's Blog
  • Cool 'n' Crispy: The Blog of Iceberg_Lettuce
  • ahuffman's Blog
  • Bergum's Thoughts Blog
  • marminer's Blog
  • BubsyFan101 n CO's Pile Of Game Picks
  • I like to rant.
  • Cleaning up my 2600
  • AnimaInCorpore's Blog
  • Space Centurion's Blog
  • Coleco Pacman Simulator (CPMS)
  • ianoid's Blog
  • HLO projects
  • Retro Junky Garage
  • Sega Genesis/Mega Drive High Score Club
  • Prixel Derp
  • HuckleCat's Blog
  • AtariVCS101's Blog
  • Tales from the Game Room's Blog
  • VVHQ
  • Antichambre's Blog
  • REMOVED BY LAW AUTHORITY
  • Synthpop Universe
  • Atari 5200 Joystick Controllers
  • Top 10 Atari 2600 Games
  • Is Atari Still Cool?
  • Buying Atari on Ebay
  • matosimi's Blog
  • GadgetUK's Blog
  • The StarrLab
  • Scooter83 aka Atari 8 Bit Game Hunters' Blog
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  • Gamming
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  • Manoau2002 Game and Vinyl Blog
  • Diamond in the Rough
  • Linky's Blog
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  • Atari 2600 Lab
  • jennyjames' Blog
  • scrottie's Blog
  • Draven1087's Blog
  • Omegamatrix's Blog
  • MegaData Manifesto
  • Selling Atari on Ebay.
  • Unfinished Bitness
  • TI-99/4A Stuff
  • eshu's blog
  • LaXDragon's Blog
  • GozAtari8
  • Bio's Blog of Randomness
  • Out of the Pack
  • Paul Lay's Blog
  • Make Atari 2600 games w/o programming!
  • Rudy's Blog
  • kenjennings' Blog
  • The Game Pit
  • PShunny's Blog
  • Ezeray's Blog
  • Atari 2600 game maps
  • Crazy Climber Metal
  • Keith Makes Games
  • A virtual waste of virtual space
  • TheHoboInYourRoom's Blog
  • Msp Cheats Tips And Techniques To Create You A Better Gamer
  • Tursi's Blog
  • F#READY's Blog
  • bow830
  • Gernots A500 game reviews
  • Byte's Blog
  • The Atari Strikes Back
  • no code, only games now
  • wongojack's Blog
  • Lost Dragon's Blog
  • Musings of the White Lion
  • The Usotsuki Crunch
  • Gunstar's Blogs
  • Lesles12's Blog
  • Atari Randomness
  • OLD CS1's Blog
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  • Flickertail's Blog
  • Dexter's Laboratory Blog
  • ATASCI's Blog
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  • --- Ω ---'s Blog
  • mourifay's Blog
  • Zsuttle's gaming adventures
  • Doctor Clu's Space Shows
  • TWO PRINTERS ONE ADAM
  • Atari Jaguar Game Mascots
  • Learning fbForth 2.0
  • splendidnut's Blog
  • The Atari Jaguar Game by Game Podcast
  • Syzygy's Story Blog
  • Atarian Video Game Reviews
  • Caféman's Blog
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  • player1"NOT"ready's Blog
  • Alexandru George's Blog
  • BraggProductions' Blog
  • XDK.development present Microsoft Xbox One Development
  • Song I Wake Up To
  • Jeffrey.Shamblin's Blog
  • Important people who shaped the TI 99/4A World
  • My blog of stuff and things
  • David Vella's Blog
  • Osgeld's Blog
  • CyranoJ's ST Ports
  • InnovaX5's Blog
  • Star_Wars_Collector
  • Alp's Art Blog
  • Excali-blog
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  • Retro VGS Coleco Chameleon Timeline
  • Geoff Retro Gamer
  • Geoff1980's Blog
  • Coleco Mini
  • Coleco Mini
  • 7399MGM's Blog
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  • Fultonbot's Atari Blog
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  • Kaug Neatos Crash Bandicoot Bandwagon
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  • Atari 2600JS
  • Doctor Clu's Dissertations
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  • Atarimuseum.nl
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  • Arcade Attack - Retro Gaming Blog
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  • GG's Game Dev, Homebrew Review, Etc. Log
  • dazza's arcade machine games
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  1. I've often wished that Atari had done a number of things differently, which would have resulted in a larger or better ecosystem. I probably missed it, but I haven't seen such a thread here at least recently (if you know of such threads, please post links here). So my thought is to encourage everyone to post one thing they wish had been done differently, and for us to discuss whether that was really practical at the time and to what extent it would have really improved things. If you have a ton of different ideas, I would encourage you to split unrelated ones into separate comments and to have a bit of a delay between them so that each idea gets its fair share of discussion.
  2. In my previous blog post I opened up about the history of Radio F, the multimedia group I work with, regarding its early years as a comedy troupe and gradual evolution into a game publisher. I skipped over some of its history for the sake of brevity since it wasn't really applicable to the topic at hand but some recent developments have made them relevant again. From 1995-1999 Radio F existed as a comedy act, and from 2004 onward it became a publisher of games when "Software" was added to its name. Between those years, though? Radio F was actually a techno music group! The friend I started the group with in 1995 and I went our separate ways just before the turn of the millennium. My memory is bad but I think we had some argument over Pokemon of all things and we just stopped hanging out after that. In 2001 I started tinkering with music sequencing in my free time and this caught the attention of another friend of mine who was also interested in working on music. We didn't really take things seriously however by the end of the year we had a handful of tracks and no real way of sharing them in any meaningful way. We also didn't have a name for our project at the time. I suggested just reusing "Radio F" and my friend was fine with that. I collected seven of our better tracks and put them together into what would be our first album/EP, No More Lonely Nights. "No More Lonely Nights", 2001 Yeah... when it came time to design an album cover we settled on "Amy Rose upskirt" for some reason. In order to promote our music I registered a new account on GeoCities, which was still alive at the time, and designed a webpage for Radio F. I think Yahoo (owner of GeoCities) only provided something like 15 or 20 megabytes of storage space and given that the average size of an MP3 was around 3.5 MB for your average three minute song there was no feasible way for us to host the entire album on our website. Instead I took one of the better tracks from the project ("Thumper") and crushed its filesize down to somewhere around 2 MB. It sounded like garbage because of all the compression but it was the best we could do given the limitations. Visitors to the website could download the track for free and listen to it and if they liked it they could send us a mail order for five dollars plus shipping and we'd send them a physical CD in return. We actually sold a few CD's this way! Not many but enough for us to want to keep going with this project and maybe do a follow-up. 2002 would prove to be a very productive year for the group as we'd been inspired to work on music and thus had a second album ready to go after a few months of work. Titled Stuck on the Rollerslide (a reference to something that happened to me at a Discovery Zone when I was a kid) the second release was more of the same just better. We used the same sequencing software and method of recording as our first album. When it came time to release it we followed all the same steps as before; I added a page for it on the Radio F website and managed to find the space on the group's Yahoo account to fit another highly compressed "single" from the album to promote it. If you wanted one it was the same process as the first album, just send us a money order and we'd send you a CD. I want to say that we kept track of the names of who bought CD's from us and if you had purchased No More Lonely Nights then we'd charge you a dollar less for this album but I'm not 100% certain we did that. This was 20 years ago. Later that same year we'd release a third album, Eleven Dollars in Ones (an inside joke between my friend and I for how to give someone a cash gift and make it look like more money than it was). By the time I added the page for this album to the Radio F website we'd run out of storage space on our Yahoo account; the single from Stuck on the Rollerslide ate up the last little bit of space we had. I needed to find a way to include a sample track though! I'm surprised it took me as long as it did to think of this (two years and three albums) but the solution was as simple as registering a "radiof2" account on Yahoo and using it solely to host our MP3's. File size was still something to consider so again the track was compressed. The track we chose from this album, "FM", featured radio static in certain parts of the song and this did not compress nicely at all. It sounded horrible. Thankfully there were a small number of people who listened to our stuff who let us know that the song was perhaps a bad choice and because we now had a few more MB of upload space to work with we picked another track to offer online to sample the album with. It was now 2003 and my friend and I had one more album left in us. We weren't making bank selling CD's online because barely anyone knew about us. This was all just for fun and after a few years I think we were both kind of looking to do other things (for example I'd start working on Atari 2600 games the following year). Our fourth album, Reptilian Agenda, was in my opinion at least our best work. We couldn't pick one single track to upload online as a teaser so we actually uploaded three. By now we'd mostly figured out how to get the sound we wanted out of the programs we were using and it showed. Despite being our best release I don't recall selling very many copies of this CD. Each one sold less than the other which is weird to me because I feel the quality of the albums only ever increased. But I guess it was just a result of being so hard to find and how a lot of our "popularity" came from word of mouth on places like MSN Chat. After releasing Reptilian Agenda my buddy and I stopped working on music and focused on other things. "Monster Truck Rally" (single), 2003 So, that's twice now that Radio F has existed and twice now that the group has disbanded. I kept the name alive on my own through "Radio F Software" but it seemed our days of releasing comedy and music albums had finally eclipsed. In my previous blog post I mentioned the creation of the website "Radio F Software Headquarters" (RFSHQ) which acted as a hub to host all of the original comedy content I was writing and filming for the web. Despite being a multimedia-oriented website our previous album releases never saw the light of day there until close to the website's closure. In 2006 I thumbed through the four music albums that we'd made in the years prior and picked out ten tracks that I felt epitomized the group during its musical period. I wanted to feature a collection from all four albums however because I was going by song quality the majority of the tracks I chose wound up being from our third and fourth albums when we were putting out our best work. I named this collection F-Sides: The Best of Radio F and offered it as a premium download on the RFSHQ website. I believe the price was still just five dollars however instead of sending out physical CD's the advancement of technology now allowed us to accept payment online with PayPal and in exchange provide the buyer with a link to download the album digitally. F-Sides was available for purchase from its release in 2006 to the closure of RFSHQ in 2008. After going solo for nearly half a decade I had a growing interest in working on music again after being inspired by the rise of mash-ups and "YouTube Poop music videos" where creators would compose backing tracks and then pepper in "vocals" that had been sampled from viral videos and memes. In 2007 I tried my luck at this and created Radio F's first single in four years, "Hello My Future Dance Mix". This track sampled Michael "Mikey" Blount's infamous "hello my future girlfriend" audio recording that went viral in the late nineties. It was amusing but nowhere near as good as the mash-ups that were growing in popularity on the recently launched YouTube. I didn't get a lot of encouragement so I just kinda stopped working on new music, though the following year I made another remix mostly for the amusement of my younger brother and I. This track, "The Golden Fantasy Dragon", sampled TV salesman Tom O'Dell during a segment on the Cutlery Corner infomercial where he was hyping up a decorative knife of the same name. I didn't really have any intentions of releasing this song as a proper thing, I just uploaded it to YouTube where views wound up trickling in over the years. Like I said I kinda just lost interest in making music after the Mikey song flopped and the one about the dragon knife was just a one-off joke. That was until I stumbled upon the ongoing misadventures of Christian Weston "Chris-chan" Chandler. I'm not even going to try and catch you up to speed on this guy if you've never heard of him before, just understand that he used to be a bumbling idiot on the internet who overshared way too much about his personal life and situations. In one video that was released Chris attempts to demonstrate how he would perform oral sex on a hypothetical girlfriend. The original video is disgusting and I won't link it here but back in 2010 I was floored by it and felt compelled to sample Chris' vocals with raunchy porn music backing it. The result of this effort was the song "Tickle Yo Pussay". Given the active community surrounding Chris this song actually did gain some traction and garner several thousand streams but I never capitalized on it because the curse of Chris-chan is that once you involve yourself in his life yours gets ruined in return. I made a joke song and that was enough. Radio F, 2002 The Chris-chan single and its accompanying "B-side" marked the end of Radio F's output as a musical act. In the years that followed 2010 I graduated from university and went on with my life. Radio F's spoken word albums hadn't been in circulation for over a decade and the four music albums from 2001-2003 had long since been out of print and unavailable. F-Sides, the best of album, stopped being available for purchase when RFSHQ closed. The account associated with the mash-up singles I'd made eventually caught enough copyright strikes from YouTube to be terminated. Everything just sorta faded away. Only recently have I started caring about all this random stuff from way earlier in my life. I spoke about it a little bit in the previous blog post but there was an era of my life where I got led astray by some real bad actors and wound up getting hurt pretty badly. It's taken several years of therapy for me to work through all this and process it in a healthy way and only now am I really starting to feel "better" in a sense. I am now looking back at all the things I've accomplished and I find myself gravitating toward the more innocuous and wholesome things that dot my history. Radio F is something harmless and fun that I can be proud of and it's something I want to celebrate. I want to keep it alive in some way. At the beginning of this year I started re-compiling everything I could find from my Radio F days with the intent to put it back into circulation. I'm not yet sold on the idea of putting our entire back catalog out there again but F-Sides, the "best of" album, is a good starting point. As the name implies it contains our best work from our four musical releases. The mash-up singles I made from 2007-2010 were inklings of a fifth album, Conglomeraté, that was never completed. I compiled the highest quality recordings I could find of these tracks as well as their instrumentals and turned them into Conglomeraté: The Singles. Both of these releases are now available for streaming on Spotify, iTunes, and YouTube Music. If you use Pandora then Radio F's music is something that can be suggested to you based upon the music profile you've curated. I dug through the archives of everything I had across all of my hard drive backups and found a few pictures of my friends and I that would suffice as makeshift photos of "the group" and added them to our music profiles. It was important to me to find photos of us that were era-appropriate to match the time period when our music and recordings were made. Radio F, 2010 So now we're at present day. Next year Radio F turns 30. Three decades have passed since the day one of my best friends and I had the bright idea to record our material to cassette tape and use that to distribute it among the people we knew. I am very grateful that after all this time I am still on good terms with everyone who's ever been a part of the group both from its eras as a comedy and musical act. We are currently in the planning stages for a reunion album to celebrate 30 years. I'm thinking about something akin to a 50/50 album of recorded comedy and new music. Perhaps I can make a mash-up of new music featuring samples taken from our old spoken word releases of the 90's. I'm honestly kind of shocked that the idea never came to me back when I was making mash-ups in the late 2010's. I also want to reach out to the people I've met over the years who are either musically or comedically inclined and invite them to participate on a track or two. I'm very fortunate that for the most part everyone still lives in same geographic area so a reunion to record new material and such won't be too hard to pull off so I want to do this now because there's no guarantee something like this will be possible for a 40th or 50th anniversary. In the meantime I invite you to listen to the selected works I've made available on all the major music streaming platforms. It's nothing incredible but it's special to me and maybe in some way the fun and innocence of the recordings will rub off on you.
  3. The year is 1995. President Bill Clinton is currently on the DL with Monica Lewinsky however it would be a couple of years before that bombshell would come to light. SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron was a runaway success on the newly launched Cartoon Network however it was cancelled after its second season. Microsoft launched the wildly popular Windows 95 operating system and began their reign as the dominant OS provider. I'm currently in grade school and while I guess you could say I was a "gifted student" who made high grades I was also constantly getting myself into trouble. Personally? I blame the fact that doctors at the time were (over)diagnosing ADHD and were completely oblivious to the autism spectrum which I most certainly was on. I made friends with a kid named Adam and we bonded over our mutual interest in Sonic the Hedgehog. We hung out often and when one of us was up to something we shouldn't have been the other wasn't far away. I remember spending many physical education classes in detention because when "run laps around the playground" day reared its ugly head Adam and I would instead just walk along the fence talking about whatever and the teacher hated us for that. Adam and I used to entertain people at recess by telling jokes. Usually we'd just wind up roasting our classmates but we also drew humor from the video games we played. At some point one of us got the idea to start recording our routines to tape and before the end of the year we had produced "Justin & Adam's Stupid Stuff", a 50 minute cassette tape filled with our "greatest hits". We would pass the tape around to classmates for them to listen to and then return to us. This whole thing ran on the honor system. But what was a spoken word album without a group name to go with it? Adam named the group with the first thing that came out of his mouth when we pressed the Record button: "This is F.U.C.K. Radio". We actually wrote that on our first tape. It was constantly getting confiscated by teachers who would always tell us we should know better than to use that kind of language. Inevitably they would begrudgingly give the tape back to us after a period of time and we'd just add more to it and pass it around again. "Justin & Adam's Stupid Stuff", 1995 (2006 Digital Re-issue) A couple of years passed and in 1997 Adam and I were still making nuisances of ourselves at school. Our first tape had been passed around and played so much that the first 15 or so minutes of tape were damaged and the audio pitch sounded way higher than it originally was. We decided it was time to retire the first tape and make another one. By now our classmates knew about the Radio F thing. Also in between 1995 and 1997 we retconned the group name to "Radio F" because that was more likely to fly under the radar and was something you could say aloud without getting into trouble. Our second tape was titled "Adventures & Shit" which entirely defeated the purpose of taking the sting out of what the "F" in Radio F stood for. Our content had evolved over time and now one of the bits we would do was talk about amusing hypothetical situations in video games. In a sense I guess what we were doing was akin to writing a purposefully humorous fanfic except we were relaying the content verbally. We did also write things down though as at one point we made a couple of issues of "Radio F Magazine" and passed them around school. Unfortunately none of these zines survived being handled and confiscated constantly. Fast forward another couple of years. It is now 1999. Radio F is still around but Adam and I have done a lot of growing up. We're in high school and although our peers remember us for our comedy of yesteryear we are rapidly aging out of it. We decided to start recording one more tape before it was too late. There was no funny name for this one it was just the eponymous "F.U.C.K. Radio". We'd gone back to using the old name because this was high school now and we were basically grown ass men who no longer whispered profanities at the back of the classroom and got in trouble for giggling too loud. Now we'd gotten into pulling pranks on people. Our best prank was when I reverse engineered the block page for the school's NetNanny software and produced a fake error page that made it look like the school's own website was blocked for containing "child pornography". The IT department disabled the site filtering software for months trying to replicate the error which meant we could all go play games on Miniclip or whatever and not be denied access. In hindsight that prank was probably a little extreme. Our third tape was passed around by classmates but the enthusiasm just wasn't there anymore. It was time to move on. Adam and I wound up having a major falling out toward the end of the year and we went our separate ways. Time marched on in a world without the inappropriate wisecracks of Radio F. In 2003 the game Robot Arena 2: Design and Destroy released. I've always been a huge fan of BattleBots so I bought the game day one and couldn't get enough of it. I immersed myself in the online community that surrounded the game and after only a couple of months on the market the game was blown wide open with the revelation that it was incredibly mod-friendly. Players started making new parts to build with and new arenas to fight in but I focused my attention to the game's roster of AI opponent robots. The first AI mod dropped some time around September 2003 that replaced all of the stock enemies with brand new harder designs. I was inspired to design an AI mod of my own so after teaching myself basic Python skills I churned out a mod of my own. But who would it be attributed to? I couldn't think of a good name at the time so I fished "Radio F" from the gutter and tacked "Software" onto it. The Radio F Software AI Pack for Robot Arena 2 launched to... lukewarm reviews. A pirated copy of Robot Arena 2 pre-patched with The RFS AI Pack. (2005) I didn't push the envelope enough like the first guy did. If I wanted to get recognition for something I was going to have to go real big. In the Robot Arena 2 game you can have up to six robots in your team but the AI teams were limited to only three. A friend I'd made through the BattleBots community hypothesized that you could somehow change the AI's team limit from three to six. With some tinkering he figured it out and since we were friends he gave me permission to roll out this tweak in the follow-up release to my AI mod. The second installment of the mod doubled all of the AI team rosters while keeping the designs from the first version playable. Nobody had ever done this before. This was the big thing I needed to get the attention I wanted from the community. But I didn't stop there. I found out through my own code exploration that there was nothing stopping you from increasing the total number of AI teams from 15 to theoretically anything you wanted. I released a third AI mod update that increased the number of opponent teams from 15 to 30. There was now 180 AI opponents you could fight in Robot Arena 2 if you were running my AI mods. The Radio F Software AI Mod for Robot Arena 2 soon became the most downloaded mod of all time according to the download trackers on the website that hosted all of the known mods for the game. Someone once sent me a screenshot of a popular torrent download of Robot Arena 2 that came pre-patched with my AI mod. The AI mod was eventually dethroned as the "most downloaded" when more experienced programmers arrived to completely overhaul the game. I was at the top of my game so I decided to branch out into other ventures because there was realistically nothing more that I could expand upon within Robot Arena 2. In 2004 I opened the website Radio F Software Headquarters (or the impossible to remember "RFSHQ" for short). Programming stuff was cool and all but I was starting to miss the days of being a comedian so RFSHQ would be my place to host writings on various topics that amused me, usually bad video games though which for 2004 was very much era-appropriate for the internet. I also (re)joined AtariAge because I'd lost access to my original account that I'd signed up with a few years prior. The account I'm using today to post this blog entry is that same account from 20 years ago. With my own website at my disposal I was able to essentially recreate the "Radio F Magazine" of old in a new digital form. My first post went live on May 9, 2004 and was a snarky review of The Adventures of Bayou Billy for NES. Concurrently with writing content for RFSHQ I was also learning how to decompile Atari 2600 games and modify them. I hacked up a number of games but the first one I ever posted about was Pineapple 2000, released on September 13, 2004. "Pineapple 2000", 2004 (Radio F Software) I was very much enjoying myself and having fun online. I was in my element. What's that meme? "Moisturized. Flourishing. Relaxed. In my lane." That was me. But the good times were not destined to last. I ran RFSHQ sort of like a bootleg version of Something Awful and my sense of humor very much aligned with the talent on that website (I had actually applied to be a columnist on Something Awful multiple times but was turned down every time). I made a lot of enemies online because the type of person I portrayed online was still that of the mindset of Radio F in 1995; I would take pot shots at people and places except rather than the targets being people I went to school with now it was things that had an online presence. They could also strike back. The forums on RFSHQ wound up becoming a hot spot for web drama and over the years this slowly ate away at my nerves. But there was another more nefarious thing in my life whose presence was growing rapidly. There's no appropriate way to phrase this without sounding like a freak so I'll just be out with it, Spyro the Dragon was my first real crush back in 1998. When I wasn't writing content for RFSHQ or working on Atari games I maintained a secret double life on sites like VCL and FurAffinity. It was not feasible for me to be an internet bad ass while also maintaining a presence in the burgeoning furry fandom. It was the one thing people I made fun of could nail me back with that I'd have no recourse to deflect. I kept things under wraps for as long as I could but by the time 2008 came around I was also becoming quite the notable person in the furry fandom under my alter ego (whose name I will not disclose and I've worked extremely hard to erase from the internet). Something had to give and in June 2008 things reached a breaking point. I retired from RFSHQ. I made the decision to pursue a presence among the furries full time as I thought this was the higher road that would lead to a better life. I revoked my administrative status on my own website and handed the keys over to my best friend Dan who had helped me work on RFSHQ over the years. Radio F Software died on that day but I don't think that ever really sank in until much later. RFSHQ hobbled along for several months before the website was gutted for its database of users which would go on to form the base of the newly formed TrackMill Games, a company spearheaded by my friend Dan that would see immense success for several years as one of the first "social gaming" websites on the web. All of the content that existed on RFSHQ such as the articles, comics, and videos were discarded without any consideration for what value they once had. I went on to become a very prolific writer within the furry fandom which led me to securing invitations to some of the largest conventions in the country to speak on panels as a guest. I was invited to private room parties. Publishers wanted manuscripts from me sight unseen. I rubbed elbows with the fandom's elite. I let all of this get to my head and I believed myself to be invincible, that I had outgrown my rank as a lowly internet comedian into something far greater. Self Portrait, 2011 I got a big head about things which culminated in a very humbling moment years later. Without naming names and going into details I was visiting someone very well known. Other noteworthy people were present. The owner of the property then brought out something that was highly illegal. Like, felony illegal. It was at that moment I realized I was not in good company. None of these people were my actual friends. I was surrounded by hedonists whose only aspiration was to chase thrills and highs. Everything I'd invested myself in over the past several years led me to this very moment and in that moment I wanted nothing more than to be anywhere else. I did not partake. The moment I returned home I opened every profile and portfolio I maintained online and blanked them all. I phoned in every single favor I was owed to get webmasters and other people to unperson me and make it appear that I never existed. There is no trace of me on the Internet Archive whatsoever which was no easy feat. Most would consider the lengths I went through to disappear outrageous. To me this was a matter of self preservation. I vanished so quickly and so wholly that most people assumed I had died. I took that as a compliment. I've spent nearly a decade in and out of therapy including several stints in psychiatric hospitals. Only last year in 2023 did I really start to make progress getting over what happened and move on with my life. Today I am working with my doctor to wean myself off of my psych meds to see if I can handle being on my own for the first time in nearly a decade. Things are looking good. For the first time in what feels like forever I feel like I am going to be okay. I lost a significant chunk of my life, all of my 20's and most of my 30's, and I regret that I didn't get to have the life experiences of a "normal" person and likely never will. I'm almost 40 now and I have a lot of catching up to do. I wronged a lot of people. I'm still making amends to this day. Radio F Software may have died on the altar of depravity but its legacy lives on. Remember the AI mod for Robot Arena 2? There was meant to be a fourth expansion but despite my best efforts I was never able to see it through to completion. After 19 years in development hell The Radio F Software AI Pack v2.0 for Robot Arena 2 released on February 18, 2023 -- the twentieth anniversary of Robot Arena 2's release. There is a special Easter egg for skilled players to find in the form of a selected anthology of some of the best work from RFSHQ. F-Sides, a collection of techno music that was originally released in 2006, was remastered last year and reissued online with physical copies to follow later this year. Gator Love, a romhack whose origin can be traced back to the year 2007, is now my current project and its connection to Radio F Software history won't be left out. I still have the original tape masters of Radio F skits that were recorded in the nineties. Despite their damage and age I am working on remastering them and next year I will be releasing "This Is F.U.C.K. Radio: The 30th Anniversary Collection" on physical disc in very limited numbers. Later on down the road I'm planning on working with my old friend Dan from the RFSHQ era to bring an archive of the website's content back online for its upcoming 20th anniversary. For a media label that's been defunct since 2008 there sure is a lot on the horizon for Radio F and I for one can't wait to experience it again. Radio F, 1997
  4. Geeks-Line Publishing recently launched their Kickstarter for a four-volume history book on the PS2 that will be released Winter of 2024. Each volume will have specific dust jacket artwork: PS2 Anthology Vol.1 - God of War Dust Cover PS2 Anthology. Vol.2 - Okami Dust Cover PS2 Anthology. Vol.3 - Prince of Persia Dust Cover PS2 Anthology. Vol.4 - FFX Dust Cover Geeks-Line books sell out pretty quickly, so it might be a good idea to pledge/order the PS2 Anthology Book set priced at $164 which gives you 10% off compared to buying the books separately. Learn more here at this link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pcengineanthology/playstation-2-anthology
  5. Hi fellows! I'm writing about history from Mattel Intellivision and I came across a narrative that I can't validate. That narratives say these Mattel stoped the Intellivision project in 1977 or 1978. But the can't be true as Intellivision was ready in 1979. Setting up the timeline these narratives make no sense. Does anyone knows how is the history?
  6. This weekend, I've been publishing the previously lost 1980s software of Yaakov Kirschen, which I rescued from various disks with the help of Kevin Ng and Keith Hacke. After years of research, today I'm happy to share a condensed version of the fascinating story behind Murray and Me and Mom and Me — two of the earliest entertainment offerings for the Atari ST. Despite being profiled by the New York Times, London Times, and other big newspapers in 1985, the programs didn't sell well, and went mostly unarchived (until today). But "Murray" was never meant to be sold. In fact, he began life as the "artificial personality" interface to an Atari ST-based greeting card kiosk project that Kirschen proposed to Jack Tramiel in 1984. Read more (and download the .ST disk images) at: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2022/11/28/unearthed-kirschens-atari-st-projects/
  7. I wish I could do something more dramatic for this historical event, but this September marks the 50 year anniversary of the home video game console. Like a lot of these things, there is no real set date, in May of 1972 there were a few demo units used to promote the upcoming Magnavox Odyssey and it appears the serial first production run began in August, with a September release. Its very likely that across the US release dates were local and when supply arrived at stores. Magnavox originally pushed exclusive access in their own stores with a number of complications as inidividual stores tried to claim it specifically required magnavox televisions to work, but the system still made its mark. With an extra set of games and the shooting gallery sold separately the same year, and a second extra bundle of games sold in 1973, it pails in comparison to later system offerings, but outside of the dedicated pong systems that followed its production continued into 1975 pretty much exclusively until 'console in a cartridge' systems like the Coleco Telstar arcade, pc-50x line and the Philips telepiel line arrived to little fanfare. 1976 Fairchild beat RCA to the punch of the first ROM based cartridge console system. RCA was one of the companies originally approached for the Odyssey but rejected it and went ahead with their own system. Fairchild itself had pinched a number of experts in the field and some later moved on to found or join companies like Intel. In 1977 the atari 2600 was of course launched and undeniably changed the face of gaming, now considered on par if not surpassing other media industries. Nolan of course was sued by Baer for Pongs resemblance of the odyssey, starting a number of trials that shaped the landscape of copyright of the industry. Magnavox was just the company with the cash to get the odyssey produced though, and it was Baer that was the mastermind of the home video game console on consumer televisions. Magnavox would be bought out by Philips around the time of the development of the Magnavox Odyssey 2 / Philips Videopac G7000 which had superficial similarities in style to the original console. A failed deal between Nintendo and Philips led to the CD-interactive with some Nintendo licenced characters. Common for the time, electronic companies tried to bridge the gap between a gaming device and other functions but like Panasonic and Commodore the CD-i failed to make a huge dent into the market. Sony broke that mold when it broke into the market and famously unseated long time Nintendo rival Sega. The PlayStation 2 stepped up once again with its inclusion of a DVD player that played commercial film releases, and while many consoles before it had CD support, its simplicity and the emerging market for DVD videos replacing VHS finally broke video game consoles into the true complete home entertainment market. Sony tried to do the same next generation with its proprietary blu ray medium at great financial cost, but the generation alongside the Xbox 360 made Internet connection and immersion with live and recorded TV programming standard which continues to this day with Sony and Microsofts ongoing rivalry. But while those two fight amongst themselves, Nintendo finally succeeded in merging handheld devices and home gaming with the release of the Nintendo Switch, gaming has been handheld nearly as long as the Odyssey, but the merging of both systems at an acceptable consumer level had finally arrived. Its difficult to tell what the next 50 years hold for home gaming, but often failed concepts such as Internet connection and downloads, handheld gaming, merging of functions with other consumer products and wireless controllers found their way into the mainstream gradually. Virtual reality has been tipped as the next best thing for decades and has been a viable idea since at least the Atari Jaguar for those lucky enough to have tried it, but has still yet to fully break out and is often a niche interest. The television still has its place... But for how long!
  8. A Youtuber with the channel name 8-Bit Show and tell posted a video on our beloved system:
  9. This was a great watch. Thank you for posting!
  10. Just want to gauge the interests about the Coleco / ColecoVision (ADAM) History Book The book is first going to be available as hard copy Then later will become available as Ebook Are you interested by this book? Also, feel free to post questions, suggestions, comments and critics
  11. Herman Schuurman by Klaus Lukaschek Interview taken December 2015 Herman Schuurman had a 36 years career at Texas Instruments, from November 1977 to his retirement in 2013. In March 1978 he got promoted to be Lead Programmer for the Consumer Products Group in Lubbock. The description of his work is taken from LinkedIn for that designation: Software design for advanced personal computer products. Design and implementation of Text to Speech system based on TMS5200 speech synthesizer; TI 99/4A mini memory development system; I/O section of 99/4 Home Computer; I/O section of BASIC interpreter; system software for various peripheral devices. [https://www.linkedin.com/in/herman-schuurman-60584b9/] Q) What was it like to work for TI in the Consumer Products Group? It was a lot of fun. Lubbock is a relatively small community (around 180,000 when I lived there), so we had a tight-knit team there that also got together outside of work. Lubbock itself is desert-like – dry heat in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s part of the south plains; flat as a pancake, with no hills around to speak of. The names of surrounding towns reflect this: Levelland, Plainview, Shallowater, etc… I was hired in for the Personal Computer Division in Lubbock, but I worked for the Consumer Products Group in Almelo, The Netherlands while my American work permit came through the system. In March 1978 I finally moved to Lubbock, having never actually seen the place. Q) Can you describe your relationship to TI as an employee? You almost worked your whole life there. Until recently, TI had a lot of different subdivisions. This allowed me to work from consumer to industrial systems to research, etc… Lately TI has been concentrating more on analog, so I guess it would be more difficult to stick around for your entire career and still have a variety of assignments. Q) How did it came that you left the Consumer Products Group at TI in 1981? I joined the Dallas-based group that Don Bynum originally came from, the Corporate Engineering Center. By the time I left, most of the system design was over, and the team was moving to application design. Q) Can you describe in detail your involvement with the TMS5200 speech synthesizer? The original design for the TMS5100 was done by Larry Brantingham, Paul Breedlove, Richard Wiggins, and Gene Frantz. Gene was heading up the speech group (home of the Speak & Spell) when I joined TI in Lubbock, and Larry moved to TI France (Nice) soon after. I eventually wound up in a group with Richard Wiggins when I joined the Corporate Engineering Center in Dallas. The second generation of the TMS5100, the TMS5200, was used to power the speech peripheral. My involvement with the speech synthesizer was to create the text translation and allophone stringing software in coordination with Kathy Goudie (who worked for Gene), who was responsible for creating the allophone (sound) set and the translation rules. The linked article by Sharon Crook is basically a rehash of the internal documentation on the text to speech software. Q) All TI-99 Speech Synthesizers have the door that was meant for inserting Speech modules, early units even have an interface for such modules. However no modules were released. Do you have an insight on this? Can you enlighten us with a story about how this was planned and later abonded? The speech module came with 200-odd canned speech phrases that could be used in software modules. There was a provision for phrase ROMs to be added later to expand the available vocabulary, but the introduction of the text to speech capability made that a moot point. Q) Can you describe your involvement in the TI-99/4 project? The Home Computer (99/4) project started about a year before I joined the team in Lubbock. I believe the original promotors of the project were Granville Ott and Len Donohoe. I was originally hired to work on the SR-70, a small scientific computer, but by the time I landed in Lubbock, that project had been moved to the Data Systems Group in Austin, and I was put to work on the SR-62, a small self-contained computer that shared most of its software with the Home Computer. In addition to the Home Computer stuff, the SR-62 had a small built-in monitor and a thermal printer. When the Home Computer eventually fell behind schedule, the entire SR-62 team was moved over to complete the 99/4. Since my background was in operating system design, I worked on a lot of I/O related stuff such as the audio cassette, thermal printer, etc. I also was responsible for the I/O section of the BASIC interpreter, including formatted I/O, etc... One of the more complex peripherals was the floppy drive. Bill Nale and I split that design, with Bill responsible for the hardware and the low level software, while I took the file system design and implementation. This was the only time I remember having contact with anyone from Microsoft, even though a lot of 99/4 websites seem to think that Microsoft was responsible for a lot of the software on the 99/4. We had Bob Greenberg come out once to validate the file system design (there were no design changes). Q) The TI Dimension 4 almost looks like the TI-99/4 and is from 1978/1979. Do you know anything about it? Link for Schuurman to the dimension4 atariage Thread It sure looks like an early 99/4; I don’t remember the Dimension 4 name, but it may be an early marketing name for the 99/4. It was definitely not the Z80-based version, since that looked more like a high-end stereo component, including the wooden side panels. Compared to the 99/4 it was extremely fast, since the video was memory mapped (and you had a speedy processor). Before I arrived in Lubbock, there was some work done on a native GPL chip, but by 1978 that had been replaced with an 8-bit TMS9985 based design. Unfortunately, that chip never ran correctly, so we had to eventually fit a 16-bit TMS9900 into an 8-bit design. If you like to see more info on the 9985 design debacle, check out Karl Guttag’s page at http://www.kguttag.com/2013/08/10/if-you-havent-tested-it-it-doesnt-work/. Q) Do you still have a TI-99? If yes, can you describe what you have kept. When was the last time you used it? A few years ago I gave all my 99/4a related hardware and software to Joe Zbiciak, since I hadn’t touched it for quite a while. Joe is more into legacy systems, so he had a better use for it. I kept the Panasonic monitor, but it failed a few weeks ago, so now I’m totally out of 99/4a related stuff. Q) Was your Text to Speech system reused for other Speech products from TI or other companies? Not to my knowledge. A remember Ute Marcotte was working on a German version of the text-to-speech rules/allophone set, but I don’t know if that ever made it out. Most of the later interest seemed to be in speaker independent speech recognition, which I worked on several years later in the Telecom Systems group. Q) Having some relationship with Speech, what is your opinion on Apple's Siri? Compared to the early work we did on speaker independent speech recognition, both Siri and Cortana are phenomenal. Of course the amount of CPU power and available memory space are also incomparable. I use the speech recognition on the iPhone quite a bit, and it is really good. Q) Does your name have an origin in the Netherlands or some close-by country? Can you enlighten us? I was born in the Netherlands and spend the first 24 years of my life there. I graduated from the Technische Hogeschool Twente (now known as the University of Twente) in Enschede, the Netherlands. After graduation I joined TI and moved to the USA. Although I graduated in Electrical Engineering, a lot of my background was in embedded systems and Operating Systems design/implementation, which is why I was hired by TI. Q) Do you know how it came that the command to load a program is called "OLD" on the TI? It probably came from the original Dartmouth BASIC, where OLD was used to retrieve a program from storage, and NEW to start a new program. Q) Bill Cosby was the front face for the TI-99 to the public, was it a person the employees looked up to as well? Advertising was all handled by the marketing team, but Bill Cosby was very popular in those days, both from his earlier I Spy series, and through the Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids show. In addition, the fact that he had a Doctor of Education degree didn’t hurt. Q) What was the role of Don Bynum you worked with? Don was working on a redesign of the 99/4 while in the Corporate Engineering Center in TI Dallas (the Ranger). In late 1980 he moved to Lubbock to take over the home computer group from Pete Bonfield (who moved on to become Chairman and Managing Director of ICL in England). He drove the 99/4a and peripheral box efforts, and later the 99/2 and 99/8. I never actually saw it, but he was rumored to have an old piano cabinet with the 99/4a peripheral chain taking up the entire cabinet. A few months after the introduction of the 99/4a I moved from the Lubbock team to Bynum’s old group, the Corporate Engineering Center in Dallas. Q) Was it clear from the beginning that there will be some Text to Speech software or was it some brilliant idea by an employee? I don’t know who came up with the text-to-speech idea with the speech group, and Kathy can’t remember either. I’ll check with Gene Frantz to see if he still remembers. Keep in mind that it was not a given that text-to-speech would actually work acceptably in the 9900 until we actually implemented it. Q) So we could say, that your work on the Text to Speech made the speech modules for the Speech synthesizer irrelevant, right? Yes. Q) On what scientific work was your Text to Speech software based on? Was there any linguist or phonetic scientists involved? TI already had an active speech team located in the Lubbock (one of their best known products is probably the Speak N Spell). The person I worked with, Kathy Goudie, has a Ph.D. in Linguistics, and the allophones used in the text-to-speech software were created from an extensive speech database that had already been developed within the speech team. Q) I couldn't find much information on the SR-62 and the SR-70 computers, have they ever been released? What have the specs of the SR-62 been? Since you said it should have shared its software with the 99/4, this might be interesting for our people to know. Not surprising, since these are internal designators, and neither product ultimately made it to market. The SR-62 was essentially a self-contained home computer with a built-in monitor and a thermal printer. Q) Do you know how much Microsoft or Bill Gates was involved in the TI Basic / System Rom of the 99/4? Microsoft was not involved with the 99/4 development. They (in the form of Bob Greenberg) were contracted to develop BASIC for the SR-70 (which is also sometimes referred to as the 99/7), but the BASIC for the 99/4 was developed in-house. Q) Why was the native GPL chip replaced with the TMS9985? How far was the GPL chip developed? Although it was before my arrival in Lubbock, the GPL chip was supposed to be developed for an external customer. When that customer dropped out, the GPL chip was also dropped, and was replaced by the TMS9985. Q) Accessing peripheral devices through a DSR interface allows us to connect modern devices to the TI without modifying the System Rom. Do you know who came up with the idea on this? Did TI had that before the 99/4 already? It’s been too long to remember the exact details, but it was probably worked out between Bill Nale and me. Bill would have handled the level 1 features (hardware communications, sector read/write, disk formatting), and I would have handled the file related features. Since the hardware was developed concurrently with the software, it allowed me to work on the file system code by simulating the low-level routines on a TI-990 minicomputer, using a large file on the minicomputer hard drive to simulate a floppy disk. Keep in mind that I already developed a similar system for an Intellec-80 (Intel 8080 based) system using 8” floppies as part of my thesis. Q) How did you feel when you heard that TI will leave the home computer market after being involved in setting it all up? Sad, although it was probably inevitable due to the financial losses. I’m still glad I had a chance to work on it though. Q) What was the policy of TI with hardware/software/documentation/schematics on canceled projects? It seems a few lucky employees got a TI-99/8 when TI left the market. Typically you have to get official permission to legally get any of this stuff. That said, it is entirely possible that management at that time gave away some memorabilia. Q) How do you feel when you hear that those machines are still running after all those years and there are some people still doing stuff with them? Absolutely amazed and delighted. I would have never guessed the 99/4 would survive for over 35 years, especially with the typical rapid turn-over in the computer age. Best Regards, Herman Schuurman
  12. Our intention is to collect as much historical background to the Why, When, Who and How GPL came to be. Please contribute by commenting to this topic. Things like : 1. When did it all start ? 2. Why ? 3. Who worked on it's development and interpreter ? 4. What was the real purpose ? 5. How does it compare to other languages ? 6. What can we do with it today ? 7. Coding in GPL in the 1980's compared to 2020 the stark difference. 8. What commercial software was written in GPL ? 9. Who were the important people around this language ? 10. Links to important material. If we can collect snippets of information from as many people as possible we can then compile it into a solid web page that will serve as a historical snapshot of this quirky yet beautiful language that time almost forgot. Thanks for your contributions. We will share a link to the webpage that will contain all you need to know about GPL as soon as we set it up.
  13. This is probably the best documentary on the Amiga that I've ever seen (and I've seen quite a few). I only know a tiny bit of German, but even if you don't understand it, you can get the gist of things pretty easily. Plus, I think most of us know the main plot points in this story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuAsF245G4Y&t=1s
  14. Hello all! As some of you know, Braxton Soderman and I (Tom Boellstorff) are hard at work on our book about Intellivision (and having a wonderful time with it). I've recently run into a wall looking for a document and wanted to see if any of you could leverage your superpower sleuthing skills on our behalf. In February, 1982 a report “The Video Game Industry” was issued by an analyst at Goldman Sachs named Richard Simon. References to this report appear in places like PlayThings magazine, and also three times in the New York times in 1982-83: https://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/17/business/video-games-industry-comes-down-to-earth.html https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/24/business/what-s-new-in-video-games-taking-the-zing-out-of-the-arcade-boom.html https://www.nytimes.com/1982/12/19/business/the-game-turns-serious-at-atari.html But I cannot find this report anywhere online. Folks at the Strong Institute of Play have tried as well with no success. I have contacted Goldman Sachs but they are so secretive they will not even confirm if they still have a copy or not. I'm going to keep trying to find someone at Goldman who would be willing to help track down this 37-year-old report that can't possibly be of use to them now lol. But given that the report was quoted in PlayThings, the New York Times, etc., some copies of it must have been distributed to some folks in the industry. It might be lost forever, which would be a shame, but I'm going to keep trying on my part. But if anyone out there can find a copy of this, we'll be more than happy to thank you in the acknowledgments to our book (if you would like that, screen name or regular name lol). It would be so cool to find out what Simon's analysis of the whole situation was at the time! I'll watch for replies in this space, or you could email me at tboellst@uci.edu if you find any leads!
  15. Reading through an old technology related time line, I came across this: "From Saturday, June 15, through Sunday, September 15, Videotopia debuts at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The traveling exhibit offers a hands-on interactive look at the history of video games." (Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20001207070200/http://www.icwhen.com:80/book/the90s/1996.html) Looks like their website's still up: http://www.videotopia.com/ So... anyone been to this? It traveled around for a few years. What was it like? Was their an earlier videogame history exhibit, or was this the first?
  16. I was pointed in the direction of this forum by some good folks over on Reddit. I have come into the possession of what seems to be a PAL release of Star Strike by Telegames. I have not been able to get much information about it, other than a few mentions, and its appearance in a few databases. http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-star-strike_7809.html and http://www.completeroms.com/dl/atari-2600/star-strike-telegames-pal-/1760 I've been provided with a little more information about Telegames and how they came to license the game, but putting a value on it has proven very difficult. There are no eBay listings that I have been able to find, let alone a finished auction. I am aware this game -even though, perhaps rare - might not necessarily be that valuable. I'm not an Atari collector, my preference lies with the PC and PS1/2 consoles for now, so this game would probably be part of a trade in the future. https://imgur.com/a/1XhNZel Thanks for your time.
  17. For those unaware, Warren Robinett has been beavering away on a book about his masterpiece for the Atari 2600, the game simply titled Adventure. According to his website the e-book should be released this year. Last September I sent him an e-mail to have my name placed on the mailing list for the eventual announcement of the book's completion, and I couldn't resist adding some "fan mail" stuff to the message. Mr. Robinett was kind enough to send me a reply, some of which I will now share as I (and hopefully many other Adventure fans) eagerly await his first-hand account of the genesis of one of the most popular video games ever made. I hope these excerpts will serve as a sort of preview of the book (or perhaps a mini-interview). I gather he is putting the book together on the side as he stays busy with professional engineering work, so patience with the process has been my way of looking at it. ************************ EBM: "Dear Mr. Robinett, I anxiously await your e-book The Annotated Adventure. I like your idea of having the C and assembly versions run parallel on the pages, for comparison's sake. Most important to me is your commentary: I have enjoyed your various writings and lectures concerning the game and I'm eager to learn more. One of my favorite aspects of the game is the translational symmetry of two rooms in the grey dungeon (including the dot room), contrasted with the reflectional symmetry of the majority of rooms in the kingdom. An interesting choice... I wonder if there was a reason behind it. I also enjoy exploring the way the rooms align for all the non-player objects as they travel unhindered by walls. It is fun to discover how these paths devolve into loops, and to map these paths using different methods: graphical, symbolic, numerical, etc. Starting in any given room, and determining which rooms lie along a path of travel in one compass direction, reveals many interesting aspects of the kingdom's layout. As of course you are aware of, some paths of travel are revealed to go from screen to screen in a "circular" pattern i.e. 01-02-03-01-02-03, whereas other paths follow an initially linear pattern that falls into a subordinate "circular" pattern i.e. 01-02-03-04-05-03-04-05. Some paths are lengthy, while others (originating in the gold castle room and the number room [game select screen]) are abbreviated greatly. What I am most eager to learn from you and your e-book is how you made decisions regarding the manner in which the rooms communicate in an architectural sense (ignoring the walls, of course). Some of the reasoning seems easy for me to suss out, but some of it eludes me. Limiting access to the castle rooms is sensible for gameplay reasons. The horizontal loop of the main hallway directly south of the gold castle seems intuitive. Many areas of the kingdom constitute somewhat self-contained realms like this, lending a sense of place to a potentially bewildering layout. But there are some long routes, like moving south from the black castle through the blue labyrinth which ultimately results in a small "circular" route that doesn't revisit most of the screens that preceded it. Was every path like these strategically planned, or are there any "accidental" results that follow from other layout decisions in a natural way?" WR: "One thing I can tell you is that you have analyzed this topic more deeply than I did when making the game. I did make the castle gates the only way in and out of the castle interior regions. And I did try to make regions like the Blue Maze mostly link to themselves (but there had to be at least 2 exits from the Blue Maze, since it stood between the Yellow Castle and the Black Castle). Beyond that, every room had to have 4 links that went somewhere, because a Dragon or the Bat was going to sooner or later cross every edge of every room. If there was an apparent problem, I fixed it. But beyond the foregoing stuff, the precise topology of the game world just sort of evolved, as I added new regions during development. Regarding the 2 rooms that did not have reflectional symmetry in the Catacombs (dark maze) inside the Black Castle, I had an attribute bit in my room-list data structure that controlled which Playfield symmetry was used. I had never used anything but reflectional symmetry up to the point I added this attribute bit to the data structure. I didn't really need the one you call "translational symmetry". But the Atari VCS platform didn't give you much to work with. I was trying everything I could think of to make the game more interesting. It was really quite pitifully boring in its earliest stages. So I added the alternate symmetry in a dark maze so that it would not be instantly obvious that I had the broken the symmetry — it would slowly dawn on the player that those two rooms were different. So my reason was not all that deep. I was just grabbing some low-hanging fruit to add just another little piece of variety to the game." ************************ I believe the forthcoming book has been discussed elsewhere in the forums, but I am writing this to remind everyone about the book and to encourage those who are interested to sign up to Mr. Robinett's mailing list and confirm interest in the project. As I said, it's not like it can be rushed (nor would I want it to be) but making it known that interest is there will no doubt help the work see the light of day in good time.
  18. It's been 11 months with over 200 hours of weekend editing but I've finally finished my 41 Years of Console Gaming History video. In this video I take a look at games year by year from 1975 to modern times. Initially this was a youtube series but this is a combined and heavily edited down version. Viewers picked different consoles and games to try each year as we moved through time. This video is the final result of our journey and I've got to say, the Atari 2600 when it first came out in 1977 really impressed us with its huge colour pallet. Atari 2600 games were popular and almost always got the most votes in this video. Anyway, enough rambling... If you want to just see the Atari 2600 games skip to 5:12 and watch for about 8 minutes. If you're interested you can keep watching the whole journey as we move to the Atari 5200, NES, Sega Genesis and so on P.S. I know... you guys hate the fact I mapped all the games to a DS4 controller
  19. Greetings Atarians! Books on videogame history still keep coming and tend to be even more focused on specific topics. A recent (Jan 2016) example is the catalog accompanying the FILM AND GAMES. INTERACTIONS exhibition, which was organized by the German Deutsche Filmmuseum. This one presents reflections, interviews and scientific considerations regarding the intersections between film and games and is a worthy addition for a gamers library. (For details click HERE ) How retro-grade is this one? Naturally Tron, Tomb Raider and Wing Commander are touched more in-depth, whereas other "oldies" like E.T., Pac Man or SW: Empire Strikes Back are at least mentioned within certain contexts. For me FILM AND GAMES. INTERACTIONS is a worthy addition to my (scientific, historical) bookshelf on videogames. Check it out, if you are aiming for completion in this domain as well.
  20. http://www.jeuxvideo.com/videos/chroniques/431783/l-histoire-du-jeu-video-la-jaguar-console-rugissante.htm
  21. Part I: Who's Your Daddy? I was going through my e-mail archives today looking for a particular topic, when I inadvertently stumbled upon the actual birth of Christmas Carol! It's a conversation I had with Joe Z. during December 2010, while working on my port of Pac-Man. We were commenting on the colour limitations. It's funny how things turn out. It started out as a quick-and-dirty distraction and it ended up taking over my life for a significant period of time. Notice those fateful words at the end of the first message, "I'll continue with Pac-Man after Christmas." Well, I've seen that movie and I know how it ends! Anyway, below is the full conversation, at least those pertaining to the Birth Of Christmas Carol, which occurred at noon on Sunday, 19 of December, 2010. Watch the story unfold and read how the characters came to life. I've included the different versions of the ROMs as they were sent throughout the conversation. Subject: Re: Pac-Man auto-pilot test From: DZ-Jay To: Joe Zbiciak Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 11:55:22 -0500 On Dec 19, 2010, at 11:44, Joe Zbiciak wrote: > You're using color 13 (light blue, which is a bluish purple). Is color 12 > (pink) too close to red? Exactly. Color 13 was the only one that worked for Pinky. #12 looked more like bright Fuchsia than Pink, and so was too close to red--at least in jzIntv. > As for the eyes... yes, low res is a pain, isn't it? Tell me about it! *sigh* dZ. P.S. I decided to take what I have of Pac-Man right now and transform it into a quick and dirty game with a Christmas motif by changing the sprites and the maze. This is just as a "treat" for the guys on the list. I think I can pull it off in a couple of days, since it's mostly graphics changes. The logic will be just stupidly scripted antagonists moving around. I hope to have enough time to even include Arnauld's tracker playing a little Christmas ditty. It should be cool! I'll continue with Pac-Man after Christmas. dZ. Subject: Re: Pac-Man auto-pilot test From: DZ-Jay To: Joe Zbiciak Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 18:29:12 -0500 On Dec 19, 2010, at 11:55, DZ-Jay wrote: > P.S. I decided to take what I have of Pac-Man right now and transform > it into a quick and dirty game with a Christmas motif by changing the > sprites and the maze. This is just as a "treat" for the guys on the > list. I think I can pull it off in a couple of days, since it's mostly > graphics changes. The logic will be just stupidly scripted antagonists > moving around. > > I hope to have enough time to even include Arnauld's tracker playing a > little Christmas ditty. It should be cool! > > I'll continue with Pac-Man after Christmas. Here's a first test. I just redrew the background and re-configured the maze. Right now it's just blue blocks (ice cubes?), but I plan on changing it soon. The ghosts are there for testing, they will go away soon. Pac-Man will be replaced by a little elf sprite. The antagonists will be two: one ghost and an evil snowman. The power-pellets have turned into magical snowflakes. The fruit will be a wrapped present. The game is called "A Christmas Carol: The Ghost Of Christmas Presents". Yes, that's "presents," as in gift Here's the premise: An evil snowman has stolen Santa's Christmas presents and hid them away in a cave near the North Pole. The cave is haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Presents, who enjoys very much the company of wrapped packages and will not easily let them go. Santa has sent Elvin the elf to hunt down the snowman and bring back his presents. You must avoid the Ghost and retrieve the package from the cave before the evil snowman returns and kills you. There are four magical snowflakes strewn around the cave which, when touched, will temporarily make Elvin invincible. dZ. cc_test1.zip Subject: Re: Pac-Man auto-pilot test From: Joe Zbiciak To: DZ-Jay Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 18:24:23 -0600 dZ, Cute! I think everyone will love it! BTW, I played around with it for a couple minutes and found a couple minor bugs. In the first screen shot, you can see that I managed to get PM to stop at a "dead end" at a half-card boundary (ie. I turned at the right spot, and I think the cornering logic did something funky, since you have some wide-open spaces that it's not accustomed to yet). In the second, PM is stuck. Once he hits the indicated spot, he stays stuck. --Joe Subject: Re: Pac-Man auto-pilot test From: DZ-Jay To: Joe Zbiciak Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 20:13:07 -0500 Regarding the half-card boundary, that was by design, but admittedly a stupid idea. I thought it would give the sprite a bigger range of motion, but it just ended up being weird. The other bug (screenshot #2) was real: That tile had a an open exit toward the wall, so as soon as Pac-Man enters the block, he can't get out. I fixed that. I also removed the half-card movement, so the Pac-Man can only move within the center of the paths, as you would expect. Can you try it now, please? dZ. cc_test2.zip Subject: Re: Pac-Man auto-pilot test From: Joe Zbiciak To: DZ-Jay Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 20:23:16 -0600 dZ, Yep, the one hanging location is fixed. I did find another... --Joe Subject: Re: Pac-Man auto-pilot test From: DZ-Jay To: Joe Zbiciak Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 21:28:53 -0500 Gosh, I saw that one, sorry. I think that's all of those. The "maze" is defined as an ASCII map with exit attributes. What you are finding are those boo-boos such as this: ........ .######. ........ #......# ...^.... #......# ........ #......# .....>.. #......# ...v.... #......# ........ #......# ........ .######. Where a tile has an open exit pointing to a wall. I think there aren't any more. I'm working now on a simple Auto-Pilot script to move the Ghost around the maze. That way I don't have to worry about AI (at least not for the ghost). dZ. Subject: Re: Pac-Man auto-pilot test From: Joe Zbiciak To: DZ-Jay Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 20:36:02 -0600 On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 8:28 PM, DZ-Jay wrote: > Gosh, I saw that one, sorry. I think that's all of those. Cool. > The "maze" is defined as an ASCII map with exit attributes. What > you are finding are those boo-boos such as this: > > ........ .######. > ........ #......# > ...^.... #......# > ........ #......# > .....>.. #......# > ...v.... #......# > ........ #......# > ........ .######. Ah yes, that makes sense. You can make similar sorts of "inconsistent world data" in Space Patrol by placing rocks and craters too near each other. Leads to some fun graphics glitches. > Where a tile has an open exit pointing to a wall. I think there > aren't any more. I'm working now on a simple Auto-Pilot script > to move the Ghost around the maze. That way I don't have to worry > about AI (at least not for the ghost). Coolness! :-) --Joe Subject: Re: Pac-Man auto-pilot test From: DZ-Jay To: Joe Zbiciak Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 21:54:43 -0500 OK, got the script ready! The Ghost goes on a pre-determined pattern, and your goal is to avoid him. Right now, collisions are not being checked, so it's just visual. Collisions are detected easily with the Pac-Man engine: it's a matter of comparing the virtual tile coordinates of the sprites after every move. Attached is the latest build with the Ghost script. In case you are curious, I have attached the script file. I also include the maze source file, in case you feel adventurous and want to play with the configuration (or search for more inconsistencies). I can honestly say that this silly, simple game is about 80% complete! dZ. cc_test3.zip Subject: Re: Pac-Man auto-pilot test From: DZ-Jay To: Joe Zbiciak Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 22:01:00 -0500 Oops! There's a rather big bug: When you eat an energi^H^H^H^H^H^Hmagical snowflake, the ghost disappears after flashing white. I went cleaning up the code that loops through four ghosts at a time and I may have messed up something there. I'll deal with it tomorrow. Talk to you later! dZ. Subject: Re: Pac-Man auto-pilot test From: Joe Zbiciak To: DZ-Jay Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 21:02:34 -0600 I was just about to report that. Guess you found it on your side. :-) Yeah, the AI state machine stuff can be easy to mess up in unique ways. I remember having some weird crashes in SP when trying to get ships to exit, for example. Subject: Re: Pac-Man auto-pilot test From: DZ-Jay To: Joe Zbiciak Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2010 06:42:53 -0500 OK. I fixed the frightened color issue. Although in this mini game, the frightened mode should just make the elf twinkle (for invincibility) instead of changing the ghost. I also altered the script to introduce pauses every so often, where the Ghost looks around. Sometimes he does a "double-take" before moving It's all definitely non-random, but my focus is to use my already existing assets, and I don't have any AI or random elements pre-fab. I'll spend some more time in the maze (my wife wants me to add Christmas trees), and then I'll start working on collisions. Oh, and a slight change of title. The game is now "Christmas Carol vs. The Ghost of Christmas Presents." Carol is the elf, you see. (Please don't kill me dZ. cc_test4.zip
  22. The poster for the upcoming Gameplay: The Story of the Videogame Revolution documentary film is now ready, and shown below. When the Website is ready, I'll post again, and also once distribution details for this year are finalized. The film, which is based on the Vintage Games series of books by me and Matt Barton (we're also writers and producers on the film), covers the history of videogames from the perspective of those who made it happen. Those interviewed include Nolan Bushnell, John Romero, Todd Howard, Daniel Murray, Darion Lowenstein, Eric Lindstrom, David Crane, and many, many more. The narrator is Cain Devore. The film also has a Facebook and Google+ presence, although Armchair Arcade is still a great place to find out new details (in fact, here's the same thing as a blog post there so you can see the PDF).
  23. Let me know what you think! Details about the trailer for Gameplay: The Story of the Videogame Revolution here: http://www.armchairarcade.com/neo/node/5676 Direct link here:
  24. The Starpath SuperCharger was a powerful add-on for the Atari 2600 that allowed games to be loaded from cassette with better graphics and deeper gameplay. The Immortal John Hancock shows us all the games for it plus much more. I imagine there are a lot of people on this forum who own a SuperCharger - Correct? Which are the best games for it?
  25. Writing this because: - People on YouTube seem to be missing some history - I'd like my kids to maybe read it (someday) - Some of these things I can't find on the internet Please add your own stuff and corrections. What would you highlight (add asterisks to) as being significant? ------------------------------- Early 70's I remember being in Disneyland with family waiting for "American the Beautiful" Circle-Vision 360 and they had a play tic-tac-toe agents a computer or electronic something. I just remember it winning every time. Watching rockets blast off going to the moon. Mid-70's Balsa wood airplanes w/rubber ban windup propeller. Tandy Leather co (get tools and kits to make designs in leather mostly for wallets. My dad had a lot of tools)(Tandy co owned Radio Shack) Burning wood kits (no lawsuits back then) No 8-track tapes but still had cassette adaptor for the car 8 track player. ONLY 3 TV channels! (Maybe a UHF fuzzy channel)(something called VHF and UHF (one dial U-2-3-4..12-13 and the other channels 15-20-25-...–80 that didn't click) Saturday morning cartoons (Hanna-Barbera: Speed Buggy, Scooby-Doo) CB radios (new language "breaker one-nine"), 8 mm home movies (no sound), board games (master mind, monopoly, battle ship), bikes (kid would do wheelies, and jumps ala Evel Knievel) First calculators (I remember a magnifier on each digit) Library no computer! card catalogs, microfilm, microfiche 1972 Magnavox Odyssey home ~pong system with gun (Magnavox latter sued Atari and others for Pong) 1975 Oct Saturday Night Live 1975 Monty Python and the Holy Grail 1975 Atari/Sears pong 1976 Bicentennial (USA 200 years old, Red, White, and Blue everywhere, posters with 1776-1976 on them, special quarters) 1977 May Star Wars IV (was such a hit that having a Star Wars T-shirt made other boys envious)(Kenner Star Wars Early Bird Kit) 1977 Space Wars arcade (my big brother and I played this in Disneyland after riding Space Mountain in the Starcade (currently they have Fixit Felix with Wreck-It Ralph they look like Donkey Kong machines)) 1977 June ****Apple ][ **** $1,300 (Atari employee #40: ) 1977 June TRS-80 computer $600 (Radio Shack) 1977 handheld electronic mastermind 1977 Sep **Atari 2600** heavy 6er $200 with Combat, fun but you need another person. 4k rom addressing 9 games (all early games are 2k, it is more expensive to make 4k) 3 different controllers: joystick, paddles, driving (Indy 500 only(game was to bring home a fun arcade game that had big steering wheels for multiple players) 1978 Merlin game, Handheld LED Football, Simon 1978 ****2600 Space Invaders ****(Atari 2600 killer app) (pretty much first game you can play by-u-self for hours. (Well maybe Surround or Code Breaker) Otherwise you had to get a friend over or convince a sibling or parent to play with you) 1978 Dr. Demento (radio show of funny songs, this show will start "Weird Al" Yankovic, Space invaders by Uncle Vic, ((Locked In The Closet With You by SuLu))) 1978 Adventureland text RPG on the TRS-80 1978 Basic Computer Games book (a book with basic programs to type into your computer to play games) (We also would have magazines with type in games and latter some would be rows of data statements : "100 DATA 4E 00 48 63" and the basic program would write the data to a cassette tape and then you could load the games and play Late 70's - Early 1980's Shacky's Pizza all you can eat with the whole family with video games silent moves would play on a big screen and a player piano would play music. 1979 Galaxian arcade game (Shacky's had one we would flick pennies up the return slot to add a credit until the owner bent the metal on the return slot) 1979 Steve Jobs goes to PARC and see a GUI! 1979 Nov 2600 Asteroids (first bank switching game:8k) 1979 Nov Atari 8-bit computer With Star Raiders killer app Arcade: Pac-man, Missile Command (first trackball), Battle Zone 1980 Commodore VIC 20 1980 Intellivision $300 1980 ***Adventure*** (OMG saw this at a friend’s house and got this game within a couple days) 1980 first Activision games 1980 July Airplane! Movie (A friend was playing Adventure at my house. He saw the maze blinking with only one object. He said there must be something in here. I'm all naw. We said there is a little square right here and he got the ladder and got in there and hit something in the corner. It was a dot but it was late and he left to go home. I was so excited. While carrying the dot I went to the main hall way and the line on the left disappeared! But it didn't let me through ahhhh! Well eventually I got through the other line but didn't know what it said.) 1981 we started seeing arcades in strip malls with tokens! (I use to go after school and play Gorf and centipede and they expanded the arcade and Robotron: 2084 and Donkey Kong came.) And Golf and things had a ton of arcade games. 1981 Arcade: Gorf, Donkey Kong 1981 Dec Pac-Man Fever song 1981 Aug IBM PC (thus starts the monopoly switch from IBM to Microsoft (also hardware to software). 1982 July Tron movie 1982 Aug Commodore 64 1982 Aug ColecoVision with ****killer app: Donkey Kong****** 1982 Sep Star Raiders 2600 with touch pad 1982 Tron arcade game 1983 Kid controller 1983 Dragon's Lair (first laserdisc video game) 1983 Oct Coleco Adam home computer attachment to ColecoVision video game (a quick story: Adam was sold in JC Penny's (Tucson El Con downstairs) in Video games in the toy department and they had a computer department. Someone walks up to the guy behind the counter at the computer department and asks “where is the Adam computer?” Reply: that would be in the toy department. The person leaves and we both crack up laughing.) 1983 video game crash(or home video game console crash) I remember outside the KayBee toy store ("where you guna find a KayBee toy store?" (Tucson mall bottom floor) loads of 2600 games in a bin, one box I remember had a big tank on it with the title: "Tanks but no Tanks" and no one wanting to buy them because they mostly sucked and we wanted computer games. (watch David Crane video on Pitfall (54 min in): no quality control/lockout chip and 3rd party crap games) A stupid home computer commercial with a kid going off to collage on a train and coming back because of "lack of computer skills". Part of the Video Game crash for me was that parents said if we are going to spend money about $200 on a video game thing why not buy a computer that plays video games and my kid will learn some programming and not just waist time. 1984 Firefox video game with laserdisc background (based on Warner Bros (parent company to Atari) Firefox movie. (First 7800's had a laserdisc port) Arcade: Paperboy, Marble Madness 1984 March IBM PC Jr (home/cheep computer w/ inferred keyboard) 1985 Oct *****NES *****(rebirth of console gaming) ... Bulletin board systems distributing pirated software
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