What I Learned About Life From My Atari And The Spoiled Kid At The End Of Our Court
By Kevin Staszkow
I’m the oldest of five children. My father was a teacher, and my mother didn’t work outside the home. We lived in a suburb of San Francisco on a safe cul-de-sac. Needless to say, in the 70’s and early 80’s when I was growing up, there was not a lot of money for video games. We had an Atari 2600 and a few games that we played the hell out of. We would drool over the Service Merchandise and Sears catalogs each season wishing and hoping for the latest releases. And we did manage to score a few carts every Christmas and on our birthdays.
At the other end of our court lived this kid named Michael. Michael was an only child. But what Michael missed out on as far as siblings, he made up for in Atari 2600 cartridges. Michael’s dad drove a truck and was away from home a lot. When he was around, however, he always seemed to appear with the latest Atari release. Every few weeks, Michael would invite us over to check out the latest releases from Atari or Activision. On rare occasions, Michael would even let us play. On Christmas and his birthday, Michael would always rate a stack of great games. I think the reason I stopped believing in Santa was that Santa was so unfair. For my brothers and I, Santa only could manage 2 cartridges to share among the three of us, but for Michael, there were five or 6 games waiting just for him. Why would I want to believe in such a jerk?
I learned a lot about life playing Atari with Michael. For me at least, like most things in life, video games are not nearly as fun without other people to play them with. Even if the game is for one player only, it’s always more fun to have a buddy by your side cheering you on or taunting you. The best games were the ones that required two players or more to play. Dodge ‘Em, Tennis, Indy 500, Video Olympics, Home Run, Combat, Fishing Derby, Maze Craze, Basketball, Air-Sea Battle, Outlaw, and of course Warlords; these were the games that led to our biggest conflicts, but at the same time, strangely brought us together. 8-bit games require imagination. Trust me, back then it wasn’t “in the game.” What games lacked in graphics and sound, we created in our own minds. We put ourselves into those games and they became a part of us. In our minds we were flying aces, race car champions, tennis stars and space pioneers EVERY afternoon, right on our court. If it wasn’t for the Atari, Michael and I never would have been friends.
Link: http://www.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?t=106696
Exploring Atari's Star Raiders
Doug Neubauer’s Star Raiders, released in 1979 for the Atari 400 and 800 computers, left its mark in memory for "a level of realism that few people had seen in a video game before," as Fleming explains:
"Experienced primarily from a first person, 3D cockpit view, with larger 2D map overviews for longer travel distances, the deep space environment of Star Raiders featured motes of space dust and asteroids drifting outside the cabin. As the ship’s velocity increased they would slide past, giving a convincing sense of speed and direction."
Published in 1979, Star Raiders was a launch title for Atari’s new 8-bit computers, demonstrating their superior graphics and sound; Neubauer, just out of college, worked on Atari's POKEY [which stood for POtentiometer and KEYboard] chip and, prior to the completion of the Atari 800, decided to make Star Raiders as a side project, "just... for fun." Neubauer recalls some of his impressions of the time:
"Neubauer had something in mind that was well beyond the single screen video games of the past. He wanted to simulate a real environment in three dimensions. “The 3-D algorithms had to be developed and no one at Atari had done this before so I had to figure them out on my own. I remember stupidly floundering for a couple weeks or so, before I finally sat down and worked out the geometry on paper,” he said. “Finally the visuals started looking right! Also, I had to invent (or re-invent) cordic rotation, since trying to calculate sine/cosine on a 2600 or using huge lookup tables, would have been a computational disaster. And of course trying to fit everything into 8k bytes.”
Link: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1890/video_games_first_space_...
From: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15557
Xbox 360 “Duke” Controller
BenHeck writes:
For some reason I have put the guts of a wireless Xbox 360 controller inside of an original, huge, 2001-model Xbox 1 controller - commonly referred to as “the Duke”, though what it has in common with John Wayne is beyond me.
Believe it or not this mod is suggested to me every once in a while so I figured I might as well take a crack at it and see what happens. It’s not often you get to work on a controller so large it’s classified by NASA as a low-level Earth-orbit object. For this reason, during the modding, I was careful not to drop it as this would have created an impact crater sufficient to snuff out all life on Earth and the dinosaurs, whichever comes first. Aerosmith and Bruce Willis were standing by to save the day in case of mishaps.
All ripping aside, it ended up being about as difficult as the PS360 controller, nothing I couldn’t handle. Since I did this on my own accord it is unclaimed and up for grabs. Best price gets it, so make an offer! Could ship just in time for Halo 3.
Based off the difficulty of this mod (harder than I would have liked) and the number of other projects I have going on I probably won’t duplicate this anytime soon, so first come, only served. More pics and a video available.
Link: http://benheck.com/09-18-2007/xbox-360-duke-controller
I still want to make a game, you know
BenHeck writes:
Just thought I’d take this moment to soapbox about my continued desire to make my own videogame. Yes, I’ve made some cool gaming system projects, and there’s new ones yet to come, but of course a system is nothing without a game to play on it. In this regard it feels like there’s more I could do.
The idea I’d really like to pursue is non-violent, somewhat Myst-like and would actually, as much as I hate to admit it, fit very well on the Wii. Target demo would be adult and about 50/50 male/female.
Link: http://benheck.com/09-20-2007/i-still-want-to-make-a-game-you-know
Atari 2600 Connection #89 Published
The September/October 2007 issue of the 2600 Connection newsletter is now available. Highlights of Issue #89 include:
* Classic Gaming Expo 2K7 (CGE2K7) – Show Report
* Just Like The Real Arcade Game – Popeye & Donkey Kong - Article
* Spotlight on Homebrews / Prototypes – Elevators Amiss, Encaved, GoSub,
N.E.R.D.s, The Last Ninja, Lasercade, Rent Wars
* Classic Game Room – a DVD review
* A-VCS-tec Challenge - Easter eggs
* Letters
* News & Notes
* Classifieds
* Trivia Contest/Results
The 2600 Connection is a printed newsletter published bimonthly. To learn how to purchase this issue or buy a subscription, please visit the 2600 Connection website.
Link: http://2600connection.atari.org/
From: http://www.atariage.com/
Retrogaming Times Monthly #40 Now Online
Issue #40 of the Retrogaming Times Monthly is now online. Highlights from the September 2007 issue include:
* Our 10th Anniversary
* Many Faces of Astrochase
* Nintendo Realm - Before the Famicom
* Taking the Pole Position
* Gaming in the Magic Kingdom
* Old wine in new bottles - Namco TV Games
* Nintendo Amusement Park
* Inside the Numbers of the Many Faces
You can find all these and more inside the Retrogaming Times Monthly, which has been published for 120 months in a row! If you've missed any back issues, you can browse through their archives to get up to date.
Link: http://my.stratos.net/~hewston95/RTM/RTM_Home.htm
From: http://www.atariage.com/
NAS 1995 demo sort of resurrected
Let's start our time machines, set it to June 1995, Gothenburg, Sweden.
The first Nordic Atari Show back in 1995 was pretty cool, Unique Development Sweden were showing off their new Substation in multiplayer mode, Jaguar networking (Doom) were on display and a pretty good amount of resellers on place. Thanks to NoCrew, a demo party area of the event was held with compos. People from ICE, XiA, DHS, NoCrew (..), New Core, Impulse, New Beat, IMPonance and many more were on place, all in all a pretty cool party.
Less cool however was the winning Falcdemo: Something thrown together during a day at the party by New Beat, DHS and IMPonance. Buggy, ugly, short, bad effects are some words to describe it. The demo barely ran at the compo, and no effort was ever made to make a release-worthy version of it.
Yesterday I found the old floppydisk from the compo, and decided to see if it worked. No it didn't. However, after messing around I managed to run the parts separately, and I had to code a picture converter for the title pic so it could be viewed. Ok, no point to try make a working demo of this mess, most of the sources were gone anyway. So instead I made a cut-together video which should resemble pretty much how it looked back at NAS 1995.
Ok I know this is a long news article with no good content in the end, but with the current Atari-scene stall I gues it's better than nothing..
So, download the video or visit Youtube and have a laugh!
Download an MPEG-4 AVC video http://movies.dhs.nu/avc/new_beat+dhs+imponance-bitte_warten.avc.mp4
View the video at Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAUPBgF4LWA
From: http://www.dhs.nu/
Atari music entries from Sundown 2007
Sundown 2007 saw two Atari entries in the Synth (chip) competition.
The tracks are made by 505 and Monk, where 505s entry is an ACE Tracker file without samples and Monks conribution is a maxYMiser file in SNDH-format.
Download 'Calling' by 505 (ACE Tracker file) http://files.dhs.nu/files_msx/calling.zip
Download 'Calling' by 505 (MP3 recording) http://files.dhs.nu/files_msx/calling.mp3
Download Monks 'Disturbance Bilocated' SNDH-file http://files.dhs.nu/files_msx/monk-disturbance_bilocated.sndh
From: http://www.dhs.nu/
ET Video Game Commercial Atari 2600
I never get tired of seeing these old commercials. Which is weird because I'd always ignore them when I was a kid.
Link: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x30zfj_et-video-game-commercial-at...
Computer Chronicles: Amiga vs Atari (12/3/1985)
How much computer can you get at the bottom end of the market - comparison between the Commodore Amiga and the Atari 520ST.
Link: http://media.revver.com/qt/407795.mov
