- Defender is my game. It's the one I played over and over in the arcades. One day I hope I can get an original cabinet in my home.
- Defender/Stargate, Robotron, and Joust have some of the most distictive sounds in gaming history. I can still close my eyes and recall unique sounds from each of them some 40 years on from my first playing them.
- My gut says both bits of lore are true.
- And it is a hopeful sign that it is going to be open-source.
- If the crowd funding rates of their other projects are an indicator this has a good bet to be good.
Not affiliated in any way - just an observation.
- Well I don't give a toss about the crowd proposing to buy it, but I also don't care much about who buys the name rights to a dead microcomputer brand from 40 years ago. It's not going to bring back the 1980s, it's not going to bring back Jack Tramiel, and arguably we are better off without both. History is indelible, which is one of the great things about it. What useful things is "Commodore" going to do in 2025? Sell licensing rights for stickers, evidently. What else-- perhaps go after anyone who doesn't pay them for using the IP? If not, why else own the IP? Copyright strikes for having a chickenhead logo on your website? $0.05 every time you type C= ? Rights must be enforced to remain legitimate, right? Suddenly this scenario sounds less like getting the band back together and more like rent-seeking behavior and possibly creating profits for lawyers. I think we could do with less of both. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.
- There are so many of these out there of varying quality. Retro Dodo(1) among others review them at times. Dunno where this one will fall.
- Interesting! A lot of his answers and thought processes are naturally influenced by the limitations of early home computer hardware. Others are still highly relevant, especially about code reviews.
- Another Atari project from Poland. What’s in the water over there. Fantastic.
- I bet revive machines wishes it had the design patents and Atari logo for its retro Atari effort
- Wargames was a touchstone in my youth. Glad to share the work.
- I dunno. I think commercial value for Commodore is what you make of it.
- Cool project but this isn't relevant content for Two Stop Bits. It's neither retro-computing nor retro-gaming. You should post it elsewhere.
- I made this project. It was first posted to various places a couple of years ago. I’m sharing it again now because this time of year is generally your best chance to catch an impression of The Great Wave on display.
About The Great Wave: the original woodblock prints were mass-produced around 1830, but only a limited number of impressions survive today. They’re sensitive to light and are rarely exhibited—typically about once every four years. That’s why I built this site: to help people time their visits and have a chance to see one in person. Art lovers will understand the appeal of seeing a classic like this up close. Others may find the idea pointless or ridiculous. So it goes.
About the Site: it tracks the display status of various impressions of Katsushika Hokusai’s "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" (神奈川沖浪裏) across museums worldwide. I monitor official museum collection pages and check for changes in “on view” status. In the ~30 years I’ve been interested, I’ve only managed to see two different impressions, and I want to see as many as I can.
The backend is powered by a series of Huginn scenarios that scrape museum websites on a schedule and track changes. Not every museum has a suitable website for this, but enough do to make the project worthwhile. The hardest part was initially finding all the relevant collection pages, understanding the structure of their data, and setting up the automation. I also run automated searches for press releases and news articles to catch anything the scrapers might miss. The whole process is largely hands-off, with only a final manual check before publishing updates.
Over the past two years, I’ve simplified and optimized the system. The final data is compiled into a small CSV file, which is used to generate the web page and an RSS feed. These are cached as static files and are only updated when there’s new information. The files are hosted on a free Oracle Cloud Compute Instance running Caddy web server. That’s pretty much it!
- @bmonkey325
Thanks for posting my web page to this site. I just signed up to post here now and in the future. I posted the companion page to the WarGames Terminal Fonts:
WarGames Title Fonts https://twostopbits.com/item?id=6236
Cheers, - Michael Walden
- Quote "They would literally type them in and write down good ones."
I read somewhere in the past that they had a development system that they used to make the sounds that would power-on with random junk numbers in its memory. They would play the sound and make note of the good ones and power cycle to get more.
This web page is great stuff and I am happy to see it created by its author.
- Hello classichasclass,
As the author of that web page I can point you to this text from the page:
"In the following section you will see all of the text in these images transcribed in the WarGames Terminal N W.woff (Normal) font used for this web page's text. This font is slightly ## vertically compressed ## compared to the font in the images. WarGames Terminal D W.woff (Double) looks closer, but I will not use it here now due to the issue with .WOFF font creation in FontForge that I described earlier."
Note where I put "##"s around "## vertically compressed ##" in the text above.
When I get the .WOFF file situation sorted out, I may change the font for the page from the Normal version to the Double version so that it looks closer to the images of on-screen text. You can see the Double and Raster fonts in the "Font samples" section of the page to get an idea of what they will look like.
Cheers, - Michael Walden
- Is it me, or is the aspect ratio not quite right? The letters seem wider than they did onscreen.
- I know it’s fashionable to hate on BillG these days, but the guy was an excellent software engineer and a shrewd (if at times unethical) business man. The two greatest achievements of his, imho, were mentioned and they made me smile: 8080/Altair BASIC and the Model 100 software system. Just outstanding.
- I get what is being said, but some like Perifractic owning Commodore gives me more hope. I just hope he exercises good judgement on who and what can use the trademark.
- This was one of the most influential books in my teen years. This and _Out of the Inner Circle_ cemented my desire to do CS at university so I could code to my hearts delight for a living.
- Another good story from Bill Atkinson on Folklore
- Well… that would be umm… amazing.
- Williams games, from the DEFENDER and ROBOTRON era played one sound at a time.
This code reproduces the Williams sound board, which ran a Moto 6800 at .85xx Mhz. It took arguments sent to it and or commands to play sound X via a parallel input. The classic Williams sound came from parameters input to this board. They would literally type them in and write down good ones.
Jarvis spoke about a sound priority system to give good players the right, most important sound at the right time. I hardly noticed! Read that and went to listen and defender actually interrupts sounds as needed! Which can actually make a new sound to the player. He has a GDC talk about all this.
- Possibly my most favourite story about Bill and lines of code as a metric of productivity
- Some of the insanely great things Bill gifted us with in his short time on this earth
• QuickDraw – Created the graphics engine for Lisa and Macintosh.
• MacPaint – Developed the first popular bitmap graphics editor.
• HyperCard – Invented a precursor to the modern web.
• GUI Innovations – Introduced “marching ants,” lasso tool, menu bar.
• Atkinson Dithering – Created a dithering technique for better image rendering.
• PhotoCard App – Built a postcard app post-Apple.
The Mac 🖥️ doesn’t exist without Bill …
- Lot of photos of Bill and the Mac team during its heyday.
- Lot of photos of Bill and the Mac team during its heyday.
- Some of the insanely great things Bill gifted us with in his short time on this earth
• QuickDraw – Created the graphics engine for Lisa and Macintosh.
• MacPaint – Developed the first popular bitmap graphics editor.
• HyperCard – Invented a precursor to the modern web.
• GUI Innovations – Introduced “marching ants,” lasso tool, menu bar.
• Atkinson Dithering – Created a dithering technique for better image rendering.
• PhotoCard App – Built a postcard app post-Apple.
The Mac 🖥️ doesn’t exist without Bill …
- You could make the argument that if the port was originally released that way, then it's 'authentic' enough to emulate it the same way on that particular target system. But yep, I can see why the squashed and stretched graphics would bother people, even if they match the experience on the actual hardware. The thing is, it's a bit of a slippery slope, because sooner or later you come across a case where some of the art was made on system A, and some on system B (with a different aspect ratio) to tweak or flesh out the port, or whatever. So some circles turn out perfectly round, while others are ellipsoid... and then whatcha gonna do? :) (IIRC the first Star Control suffers from this, although I could be thinking of something else here.)
100% agreed on the screenshot/video issue; that's kinda what I meant at the end of my last post. I've also discovered that Youtube respects PAR/DAR metadata, but I find it more useful to actually scale the video myself before uploading, by appropriate X/Y factors. That lets you sidestep the issues you commonly get when you leave the scaling to the YT backend/frontend, like blur and incorrect gamma... (and if your source is RGB, it's also a good idea do the YUV conversion yourself while you're at it.)
- More