- Who will be the first to compile up Elite II and run it?
- 2600 was my earliest console experience. Obviously the original joysticks are pretty horrible. But the main thing wrong with them is that you have to hold the base in your hand and waggle the stick, which is what these replicate.
Joysticks work when they have rubber suction cups and you stick them to the desk.
Otherwise regular D-pad controllers are supremely more useable.
- Long time (mostly) lurker. USA/UK. Anything retro, early PC, 8/16/32bit consoles, 8/16bit home computers.
Was a video game dev in the 90s. Co-hosted a computer TV show for a short while🤣
- Do you miss anything from doing the show?
- This was the show, though none of my episodes surfaced yet!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q6yPcUwatg
I miss hanging out with Kate Russell, she's an absolute darling. The show was ridiculous fun to do, only got paid 15 quid an episode, but the studio folks would treat you like a king from the moment you arrived.
- Looks like they uploaded this in 2014? What was the original URL when it was live for real?
edit: OK, looks like it was just on the root domain
p.s. I threw around an idea in 1995 of creating a page where you could order pizza and it would fax the orders to the restaurants and I'd get paid by the restaurants.. everyone said it was ridiculous lol
- Ghostbusters here too! Was impressive for its time.
- And if you click the link at the top of the article it tells you how they recovered the recordings:
https://www.nsa.gov/Press-Room/Press-Releases-Statements/Pre.../
- It's so frustrating knowing how much is thrown out every day, especially when some of it is irreplaceable.
I remember going to all those computer auctions in the 1980s and there was so much perfectly boxed PC software that would be left unsold and thrown in the trash. Software that you might spend years running a search on eBay now to find a single copy.
- It took me years to learn this. Basically everyone forever has stored their CDs in the worst possible way, thinking they were storing them in the best possible way.
- This is actually going to be very useful to some production designer one day.
- Been a huge number of changes since the final entry in here in 2019, since so many AI features have been added now.
- More
But, yeah fatigue did hit.
Agreed on the D-pad. First time I played an NES I was sold!
One of my favorite things about the VCS was all the controllers! Only Indy 500 used the driving ones, which is a shame. Another driving game or two seems like a great home brew project...
I took to that idea and made a button board for Asteroids. It was fun, but the game limits were too low. Then I found the STARPATH asteroids. The official version was changed enough to not be Asteroids. But, there was a great port that basically had the arcade feel and it had much better action and far higher limits. Was basically a sort of 160 ish x 192 ish bitmap game. The interleaved graphics were funky, and all part of the special charm in that machine. Jay Miner and team intended something far less great, and ended up with something far more!
And that has proven generally true of software driven video systems: C64, Atari 8 bit, Amiga, Coco 3 (to a lesser degree), PC CGA...
Where the CPU was coupled to graphics chips designed loosely, pure magic ended up the result. Literally almost every year, someone somewhere managed to squeeze a bit more out of those machines. The whole Demoscene essentially drove innovation in that way and still is!
Modern devices, like the Parallax Propeller being software driven ended up capable of more in the same way. It is really cool.
I also made analog sticks for my Atari 8 bit computer and created some simple projects that used it.
And the two button Apple style analog sticks always were great for me. Playing Robotron on the Apple, or PC for that matter as both were bitmap Atarisoft ports, was fun! One button rotated the firing, the other triggered it, basically creating a game variation on the usual two stick design the game shipped with.
I remember it because the guy who owned the Atari was talking about the Newsweek article covering the Jonestown tragedy with my dad while we played.
The sound, colors, way the paddle moved... it was intense!
Same for me. I can recall everything about that moment. Where I was, who, what the game looked and sounded like...
Anyone ever create anything that could take advantage of 8 paddles on the 400 and 800 machines? Or 4 analog sticks? Sure seems like a home brew opportunity of some kind.