My 15 minutes of Atari fame.

[El Destructo]

Are there any other old-timers hanging around here? What was your part in the glory days? Big or small, let's hear about it!

 

I've been an Atari freak ever since 1981, when I first set eyes on 2600 Adventure. I got an Atari 2600, a 400 computer, and jumped right onto the Atari bandwagon.

 

Finally, in August 1984, I got good enough at programming to make a small contribution to the community-at-large:

 

Antic Game Of The Month: Creepy Caverns

 

Later I wrote the Parrot sound sampler and playback package for Alpha Systems. But Creepy Caverns was my first and favorite published project.

 

-El D. (Anthony Ramos)

 

[ 01-09-2002: Message edited by: El Destructo ]

 

[ 01-09-2002: Message edited by: El Destructo ]

[Nukey Shay]

I remember those. Was that your voice in Parrot's number-guessing game?

 

For a goof, load the unformatted thriller.dig into guessnum.dig and press V...sounds like Micky's on fire.

[Big_Mo]

My 15 minutes was a few articles in A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing Magazine.

 

I had considerably longer fame in the ST world. At one Atari show people actually knew who I was on sight from my pictures in ST-Log magazine.

[eric_ruck]

I never really reached any sort of fame, not for lack of trying. The closest I came is that one game I wrote but never published (for obvious reasons) called "5 Miles To The Outhouse". I gave this game to some friends, and about a year later someone gave it back to me on a pirate disk. Moreover, at about that time I overheard someone talking about it at an Electronics Boutique.

 

Eric

[Jetboot Jack]

Well, I would never say my contributions made an impact on theh Atari World, but I did some Atari stuff in various roles:

 

Released On 8bit:

 

Zero War (urgh!) - Atlantis (I think)

Plastron - Harlequin

Contagion - Atari

Z-Force (double urgh!) - Atari

 

Unreleased On 8bit:

 

Menace - Harlequin

Last Ninja II - Harlequin

Shadow of the Beast - Harlequin

Project Xanthien - Harlequin

Pacland - Atari

 

Unreleased on ST:

 

Paintz - Atari

 

Then I got my first real job in the games industry at Microprose :-) and worked on loads of games (Gunship 2K, X-Com series etc)....

 

sTeVE

[Holmes Atari]

You havent still got copies of the unreleased stuff have you?

 

Be great to see them, complete or not.

 

Here's hoping.

 

Aaron

[El Destructo]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Nukey Shay:

I remember those. Was that your voice in Parrot's number-guessing game?

---

Yep. I was all of 17 years old.

quote

For a goof, load the unformatted thriller.dig into guessnum.dig and press V...sounds like Micky's on fire.

But he *always* sounds like that. "Whooo!"

 

Seriously, my desire to hear sounds at different speeds is a major reason for Parrot coming about. I had been recording arcade video game sounds on a portable tape recorder. Through Parrot, I figured out how the effects and music were put together.

 

-El D.

[Gunstar]

I always wanted to get one of those Parrots back in the day, but never got aroung to it.

 

Well, I certainly don't have anything to compare with you guys, since I never did anything but dabble with basic programming and never anything big enough or good enough to submit to a magazine even. But I did start contributing in the last days of Atari magazines; I did a article for Atari Interface magazine just before they went under, it might have even been the last issue. I also had a regular column on art and the 8-bit for AAAUA (Austin Area Atari User Association(?))users group news letter back in the early nineties.

[DEBRO]

quote:

---

Finally, in August 1984, I got good enough at programming to make a small contribution to the community-at-large:

 

Antic Game Of The Month: Creepy Caverns

---

 

Anthony I loved that game!! I remember playing this many times and defeating the Megawump . Oh and nice artwork for the article too.

 

I wrote a game that was published in Antic (Nuclear Reactor). It was nothing spectacular but it did get me some quick cash. I doubt anyone would remember that because it was published in the next to last issue of Antic. I also wrote a Tech Tip that was published in the last issue of Antic.

 

BTW does anyone know what happened to J.D. Casten? His Antic articles include:

Risky Rescue

Escape from Epsilon

Advent X-5

Biffdrop

Box-In

Rebound

Rebound Construction Kit

Easy 80

Maximillian B.

 

I thought he was very talented and just wondering where he is now and what he is doing.

[El Destructo]

Thank you very much DEBRO! I'm always happy hearing that someone enjoyed my games. Some said it was too hard; Of course, I thought that other homemade games were too easy

 

quote

does anyone know what happened to J.D. Casten?

I wondered the same thing awhile ago, but Googling his name turned up nothing.

Strange that web/e-mail/newsgroup land has no record of him.

 

-El D.

 

[ 01-12-2002: Message edited by: El Destructo ]

[DEBRO]

quote:

---

Originally posted by El Destructo:

Thank you very much DEBRO! I'm always happy hearing that someone enjoyed my games. Some said it was too hard; Of course, I thought that other homemade games were too easy

---

 

I thought it was great!! I loved the part where I had to which to the sword to defeat the Megawump. Holding the joystick while franticly pressing the cursor key added to the intense moment

 

I looked for J.D. Casten the same way and turned up nothing too He really made some great games for the 8-bit. I wonder if anyone has his Antic disk still. I never ordered one. I would be great to get it to play on an emulator now.

 

BTW have you sent in your "Where are they now?" submission to the Digital Antic Project?

 

How about picking up your 8-bit again now or maybe joining us in creating new 5200 games?

[Heaven/TQA]

jet boot jack:

 

the community is still waiting for your unreleased stuff...

 

can not wait to see ninja 2 & shadow of the beast...

[dschebek]

Hello, fellow Atarians. I'm new on this board (I only just learned of its existence - doh!).

 

My 15 minutes of Atari fame was Envision for the Atari XL/XE systems, even though I wrote it over a two year period.

[dschebek]

Hello again Debro.

quote

What a wonderful tool.

Thanks

[Gunstar]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Krokus:

Hello, fellow Atarians. I'm new on this board (I only just learned of its existence - doh!).

 

My 15 minutes of Atari fame was Envision for the Atari XL/XE systems, even though I wrote it over a two year period.

---

 

I remember that! I thought it was a cool program, although all I did was play around with it, I never actually did anything useful with it... I'm going to download it from your site-and your other two games and try them out. Thanks!

[dschebek]

The other two games have no sound and only use the keyboard. The solitaire game keys are kind of irritating - I just used the same keys as in the original Basic version I wrote long ago. Should've known better by the time I rewrote it in assembly.

 

I still play the yahtzee game every once in a while, sometimes between periods when I'm watching a hockey game on TV.

 

If you try them out, let me know how you liked (or disliked) them.

[DEBRO]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Krokus:

Hello, fellow Atarians. I'm new on this board (I only just learned of its existence - doh!).

 

My 15 minutes of Atari fame was Envision for the Atari XL/XE systems, even though I wrote it over a two year period.

---

 

Glad to see you on board Krokus

 

If anyone is interested go over to his Envision site. There you can download Envision.

 

What a wonderful tool.

[Mindfield]

I never really achieved much success on the 8-bit. Starting out with only a 600XL and no storage mechanism of any kind, or any games to play on first purchasing it, I was left to fiddle with the type-in example programs in the back of the manual. Though I hadn't bought it to learn to program, I quickly discovered I had an insatiable curiosity with each program I typed in to find out what would happen if I changed this or that value. Thus was born my desire to program.

 

In the end, my creations, singly and jointly, amount to a few:

 

- Dog Gone! (Written for, but never published in, Antic. Frankly it rather sucked and I'm glad I never submitted the final product)

- FoReM XM-DL (My revision of FoReM XM BBS, which included things like file attachments in messages, simplistic built-in games, etc. I used every available byte of RAM available to BASIC modding that thing up)

- Nibbler (nothing to do with the arcade game of the same name; it was actually my clone of an Analog type-in called Dark Star, which I wrote and compiled in Turbo Basic)

- Fortress (a Tetris clone co-written with Jeff Lawton, a.k.a. Zark Wizard. I did most of the graphics, the music, and wrote a few of the assembler routines for character set animation and music playback. I remain uncredited for this one 'cos I left the 8-bit scene midway through its development around late 1989/early '90, which rather ticked Jeff off, so he removed my name from the credits out of spite.)

- BULL.MOD, a news bulletin/visitor comment/leech list module for Oasis BBS from versions 03/08 up through 4.0, written in MAC/65. For some reason everyone was amazed at how fast the leech list calculated a user's time limit based on number of posts/uploads. Its speed probably came from the fact that I never understood why others were so slow; I just calculated everything in real-time using variables already accessable from memory. I also became a beta tester for Oasis during the Glenda Stocks days)

- Wheel of Fortune and Alternate Reality Online, both unreleased and unfinished online games for Oasis. The latter was admittedly a rather ambitious project to convert my favourite RPG of all time into an online ATASCII variation. Had I not abandoned the 8-bit, this probably would have worked.

- Various (and rather silly) graphic/sound demos in my early, formative programming years.

 

My ST years were a little more noteworthy, if no more prolific:

 

- FANSI!, to the best of my knowledge still the first and only full-colour, 80-column ANSI screen designer. My inspiration came dually from Tim Miller's ANSITerm for the idea, and from CrackArt for the UI. Written entirely in GFA, it rather wowed the crowd when I debuted it at a TAF user group meeting. Didn't sell many copies, though -- the ST was in the process of dying at the time, and the BBS market was being overtaken by the Internet, so it was an app that was a little past its prime.

- Gridhopper (unfinished). My first real game on the ST, inspired by a game whose name I can't remember, whose graphics were extremely bad, and whose sound was 2600-ish, but whose gameplay was unbelievably addictive. I never finished it 'cos I hadn't yet figured out how to use transparency in sprites. The game was pretty far along in development, though, despite the lack of knowledge.

- Mystic Tiles (unfinished). One day, on IRC in #atari, Hackbear (Torbjorn Ose) wrote the smallest, but supremely addictive game I'd ever seen. It was like a 3x3 version of Lights Out, but you had to match the pattern in the left with the pattern on the right. It had simple graphics -- shaded balls in a 3x3 grid -- and only 20 levels, and no sound that I recall, but he packed it all into 783 bytes. Yes, about 3/4 of a kilobyte. I was tremendously impressed. Later I started writing my own version. Written in GFA, then later reverse-engineered after I ordered the SpriteWorks package for GFA, it was to have quite nice graphics, a full digital MOD-based soundtrack, and all sorts of other goodies and effects (I discovered by accident how that "infinite sprites" illusiuon worked, so I made one with two gigantic sprites and shoved it into the pause screen along with a looping digital music clip). I figured it would have pushed GFA and even the ST's limits of CPU horsepower. I could still achieve 20FPS with two 120x60 sprites bouncing around the screen using no less than 6 frame buffers to achieve a really smooth "infinite sprites" effect while playing a musical digital sample sequence. :-) Not bad for a Basic language. But I digress...

- Wasteland and Hacker, two online games written for BBS Express PRO. Wasteland was based on an SSI RPG and PC Door of the same name. Hacker was my rendition of a Telegard door called BBS Hack, which I thought was a cool idea. They, too, were far along in development, but I lost interest in them when I discovered how to write real games. :-) My moment of pride with these was writing a universal terminal emulation routine that handled ANSI and VT-52 with the same routine -- and doing it all in one sitting without making a single mistake. :-)

- Super Polygrip. A poly-line screen-saver-esque program sort of like that old Windows screen saver, but with all kinds of options 'n stuff. Utterly and completely useless, and my only defense was that I was bored.

 

About my only other claim to fame is being hired by Andrew Whittaker (Jaguar Aliens vs. Predator, with Rebellion Software) to write the music for his then-upcoming Jaguar RPG. Unfortunately the Jag crashed and burned and the project got canned before he actually needed my musical talents, so nothing ever came of it. I can at least take pride in the fact that out of 20 people elected for the job, which then got winnowed down to 3 to be sent to Electronic Arts (the publisher) for final judging, I got picked, with the only criticism being that I should work with more channels. (I only did MODs, which were 4 channel) Even more ironic was that the tunes I sent for consideration were 5 of the tunes I'd written for my at-the-time-upcoming game Mystic Tiles, which were not my usual large-file, big-sample tunes, but were written for their small size, and therefore used a lot of tiny (128-byte) waveform-generated sounds. Go figure...

 

Now I've got a PC and virtually no desire to program it. I guess my desire to program was largely influenced by the system on which I programmed, and the PC has been the least inspiring architecture I've ever worked on. Probably 'cos I have to program 9 or 10 layers above the hardware for compatibility's sake, which always irked me 'cos it struck me as woefully inefficient, meaning it'd be next to impossible to write a game that made full use of the machine's potential -- something I guess you can only really ever do on the classic old, blackboxed systems. Maybe that's why I liked 'em so much... everyone had the same hardware (more or less) and programming could become an excersize in pushing the limitations of the hardware beyond what was expected of it. These days you just can't do that -- there are just too many limitations that aren't breachable without rendering it useless on other hardware configurations.

 

Okay, it's late (or early) and I'm rambling. I guess waxing nostalgic on the good ol' days sets me to blathering on endlessly about days I'd love to revisit.

 

Oh, and as for J.D. Casten -- he made, without a doubt, the most thoroughly enjoyable type-in games I'd ever played. I particularily loved Rebound and its attendant construction kit, as well as Escape from Epsilon and Biffdrop. All top games that could have made it commercially.

[atarian1]

I actually registered FANSI and used it on my Atari user group's BBS. Got kudos from PC users thinking Ataris couldn't show ANSI graphics.

 

Only bad point about it was that another SysOp tried to register FANSI, but the author cashed his check, never sent the key to him, and the author never replied to his email.

[Mindfield]

Well, I am that author. I do recall one final registration I recieved back in the day. Unfortunately, due to a hard drive crash (and my rather unfortunate habit of not making proper backups) I lost the key generator I wrote for it -- so I E-Mailed him explaining how he could get his own key because of a quite unfortunate "development hook" I left in at the last minute.

 

See, I had a user group meeting where I was scheduled to demo Fansi for the first time, and I was literally coding right until the last minute to finish up a few last minute routines. I was in a mad rush to write out 20 copies of it on disk to take with me to the meeting, then flew out the door. A few days later I realized something rather alarming: During development, I actually wrote the key generator and decryption routine into the main program and attached it to the F3 key of the registration dialog box. (Serial numbers were generated at install time, then encrypted and saved into the FANSI.DAT file, burried deep in the graphic data; the serial was divided into 6 parts, each of which would then correspond to a "word" or partial "word" -- I got the inspiration from Mindscape's game "Captive" which used the same method for generating computer passwords from sets of partial "words." :-) Fansi's dialog box buttons could be accessed through F-keys as well as the mouse, so you could use F1 for button 1, F2 for button 2, etc. The registration box had only 2: Register and Cancel, so I used F3 to actually generate and display a key, just to make sure the key generation and decryption worked the way it should between the main program itself and my separate key generator program. In version 1.0, this feature was accidentally left in, so if anyone knew about it, they could hit F3 and register the program themselves. I quickly axed the code and released a quick 1.01 patch, hoping no one would notice. (Apparently no one did 'cos one crack group released their own crack for it... if only they knew I did the work for them. :-)

 

I never got an E-Mail response from the guy I told about how to do this though, so I had assumed he got it and it worked. If this is the same guy, I'm thinking now that maybe he didn't. Oh well... if he's reading this, maybe now he can finally get that registration 5 or 6 years after the fact. :-)

[atarian1]

Hello Er...or I'll just call you by your initials: E.M.

 

Anyway, the guy never mentioned on my BBS anything about opening up his BBS, so I guess he abandoned the Atari ship.

 

FANSI was an excellent program in its time. I remember ABSOLUTELY HATING "TheDraw" program on the PC. It was a fun program to use creating graphics online (as primitive as it was).

[Mindfield]

quote:

---

Originally posted by atarimusician1:

Hello Er...or I'll just call you by your initials: E.M.

---

 

Indeed, that's me. :-)

 

quote:

---

Anyway, the guy never mentioned on my BBS anything about opening up his BBS, so I guess he abandoned the Atari ship.

 

I'm not entirely surprised. At the time I released it (1994) the BBS era, and indeed the Atari era, was coming to an unfortunate close. The potential usership of both BBSs and of my program was pretty slim even then, and dwindling all the time. Fansi recieved perhaps 12 registrations over a period of about 9 months, which is a little less than I'd hoped, but more than I'd expected, and several of those were from local SysOps who knew me and probably registered out of respect. :-)

 

quote

FANSI was an excellent program in its time.  I remember ABSOLUTELY HATING "TheDraw" program on the PC.  It was a fun program to use creating graphics online (as primitive as it was).

 

I'm glad you liked it. I'd actually intended to continue development and add some stuff that TheDraw was capable of doing, as well as other things I'd never seen in an ANSI art program. (ANSI objects -- basically ANSI clip art -- and ANSI fonts) However after I lost the Fansi keygen and source (and my only backup being MONTHS old beta source) I jumped ship shortly afterwards and bought into the world of Bill Gates. I can't say I really regret the decision, but I do miss my old Ataris. They were a joy to program and a lot of fun to use -- especially an ST with NeoDesk. :-)

[Heaven/TQA]

well... it is always a strange feeling when looking at the screenshots of some of my babies...

http://www.s-direktnet.de/homepages/k_nadj/i.html

 

what do you think? i love them all...

 

heaven/tqa

[Andreas Magenheimer]

Hello,

since I am not at all a programmer, I never did some software for the atari. All I ever did (and I am still doing) is writing texts, texts, texts (manuals, docs, infos, descriptions, comments, explanations, entertainment, etc.).

 

Hey Jet Boot Jack, come on - release your games. How about giving them to ABBUC or selling the rights to them ?!? I would love to see them being published...

 

Heya Mindfield, I remember Fortress very well, since I still play it quite often. But I removed the intro picture, since it crashed from time to time (when the moving clouds appeared and you pressed Start then to continue, the game crashed). You did the sounds ?!? Well, looks like you converted the Basic sounds from kemal ezcan into assembler or ML, I know these K.E. sounds like oxygene, amorade and digi-loo, digi-ley quite well. I even have the Basic sources laying around here - kemal won some prices for these sounds... by the way, I am missing a two player option in fortress, but otherwise its a great tetris game. you can even create a new highscore, if you lost the original one - just choose the option to erase the highscore and when there is no highscore and nothing to erase, a new highscore will be generated (and not erased then)...

 

enough said. it would be nice if all former atari programmers would publish their atari games online - especially those that have never been released...

[Joey Kay]

Debro

 

I remember spending hours playing Nuclear Reactor on my 130XE... thanks! I didn't get my Atari 8-bit computer until 1988 so I was a late-comer to the scene.

 

And is there a proto for PacLand anywhere for the 8 bit?

 

Cheers!