Found an online (Flash) version of the game, this one is called "Barrier"... but that's not the original name, right? It was something like Fortress, or something similar.

But the online version plays exactly like the vintage. Great.

BwAAAAAAAhahahahahahahahaaaaa!

"Star Castle"

except the sound doesn't work on the MAME ROM.

The online game is much better.

I downloaded all the Tempests, and none of them work in MAME for OS X. It says "Loading 5%" then "Some files were missing."

Damn. Well, I can confirm it works on the PC MAME 0.103. That's probably not the latest version of PC MAME so, who knows? Maybe the latest PC version breaks it too.

Some of the Xevious-like "1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945" and a slew of other games of that genera are fun. Most of them, however, throw too much shit at you way to fast. It becomes just mindless. But a few a what I would consider well done.

I'll ask brothel about that one game and see if he can remember. In the meantime, I went back and downloaded Omega Race from ROMnation (eyeroll). I don't know if it was a different version or not, but I applied some of the same button assignment strategies that I had suggested to you for Tempest and, low and behold, the damn game now works perfectly. I can play Omega Race!

It's a simple little game, but I was first introduced to it on the VIC 20, as well as the very cool game, Lunar Lander. That game was a lot of fun. Made you feel like a real astronaut. Neil Armstrong holds nothing over me. It's just that he didn't crash about 350 landers on the moon while gaining proficiency. In real life, there often aren't any do-overs. What a great story that was. It wasn't made much of at the time, but apparently when Armstrong (or the computer, most likely) was piloting the Eagle to the planned landing area, it was much too rocky and crater-filled. There's only so much time they have to either commit to landing or to abort because there's only so much fuel in the lunar lander. Well, Amstrong decides to put the thing on manual and go hunt a little farther for a landing site. And if you listen to the replay of the Eagle landing, you'll hear things like "10 seconds" which actually translates not to "You've got 10 seconds left of fuel. Set it down by then our it will be a long walk home." These guys were the real deal, absolutely cool and calm under enormous pressure.

Lunar Lander is available for MAME and I think it works pretty well.

Oh yeah, I remember Lunar Lander well. That was a tricky one, with gravity effects and so forth. I'm about to load Defender, that was a fast-paced side-scrolling shooter.

I was never much good at the vertical scrolling shooters like Galaxian/Galaga... but Ambrosia came out with some pretty playable ones: "Mars Rising" and "Deimos Rising" for the Mac, pretty good.

I'm positive there was a Star Castle clone for the Mac, I remember playing it... but haven't been able to track it down.

I read my brothel the brief description you gave of that game you're looking for. Swear to god, cross my heart and all that, he immediately blurted out "Sounds like Star Castle." So I downloaded it and played it. I'm pretty sure this is the one you're looking for. Another vector graphic classic. And, yeah, I can't get the sound to work on that one either.

Yes, Mars Rising was an excellent version...particularly so because two people could play on the same team.

---

It's also cool that in the preferences of MAME (ones you access before you launch a game) you can set whether the vector graphics are Aqua-ized or non-Aqua-ized. I prefer the non-smoothed vector graphics. More authentic, and no doubt it might play a little snappier as well.

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Yeah, I remember when it was a HUGE deal when Space Invaders came out for the Atari 2600. I was never very good at the game so it wasn't one of my favorites. But it's a hall-of-famer, for sure.

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Scratch Lunar Lander working well in MAME...at least for me. It launches okay, but damned if I can assign the controls so that it works well.

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I tried another, "Space Invaders" which worked. Though the game window got really small (compared to Asteroids). Remember that classic? Love it.

I haven't downloaded the OS X version of MAME, but there could be some options under Options/Default Game Options... for setting the size of the non-full-screen screen size.

you must have missed my posts where I finally figured it out.

Meanwhile, I tracked down the --FRIGGIN' GREAT-- Mac port of that game, which is called "Cyclone" (and later "Cyclone II").

Unfortunately, you can't play it in OS X without Classic.

So for me, Seabiscuit is the only place I can play that game.

Yes, I see it finally came to you. You see, I'm actually a moron. IQ of about 75. I'm simply an interface for my brothel. I ask him a question and just relay the answer here to thalo.net. But about this kind of computer gaming stuff he's truly got an autistic-like grasp of trivia and facts. It astounds me sometimes.

LOL!

Thank brothel for me, just the same.

Man, this has me thinking how crappy gaming is on the Mac now. The 80's were such a Golden Age. The games I really loved were the early arcade/adventure shooters like "Pathways into Darkness" and "Out of This World".

I was just busy right now playing another vector graphic game. An oldie but a sort of goodie. I'm growing more and more fond of it now that I don't have to pump a stream of quarters in it just to learn it. It's Gravitar, which is along the lines of Lunar Lander. You really get the feeling for piloting a space ship.

Normally a lot of these user blog type things can get a little dopey. But I thought this was rather good, and certainly appropriate to the subject matter at hand: Coping with the Death of a Console.

Smithz, another Berzerk-like game (sort of in the overall genera of Robotron, I think) is Frenzy. I had forgotten about that one. It's pretty much Berzerk with some cosmetic changes. Oh, you can bounce shots and the walls don't immediately kill you as in Berzerk. Actually, it's a little more playable than Berzerk. The problem, though, is that sound doesn't work in the MAME emulator.

I guess there are ROMs, and there are ROMs. As I get more into this retro gaming thing, I'm trying to figure out the rhyme or reason why certain of these things don't work.

I still don't understand the "auditing" process, but I found that if I can't get a game to work, it shows up as "BAD" in the audit info window. Such was the case with Graviton, which gave me that same old problem as I'm having with others... doesn't load. So I go to another ROM source, download a different copy, and then replace the ones in my ROM directory. Then I re-audit. If the info window now says "good", which it did, the game works.

aside: holy crap, Graviton is challenging. Can you imagine each of those plays being a quarter? Goodbye tuition.

Got Tempest to work too, finally. Though it starts off weird and stretched vertically. You can correct that, but maybe that's the way the game was. And it's pretty much unplayable with the mouse or keyboard. This one needs a track-ball, which of course I don't have.

Still having problems with Star Castle. It plays, everything says it's OK, but I get no sound. Even with the volume cranked up. I've tried the ROMs from various sources.

I tried Demon Attack on the Stella 2600 emulator. That really transfers well to that. I couldn't find a MAME rom for it though. Maybe it never made it to a stand-up arcade console. Oh, I guess it originated on it. Yeah, the movement of the birds is maddening. The guy who created it was quite a prolific game designer.

quote:

Demon Attack closely resembles the earlier arcade game Phoenix, prompting a lawsuit from Atari, who had purchased the latter's home video game rights.[1] Imagic settled out of court, and Demon Attack went on to become the company's only hit title.

I just played Phoenix. I don't think the resemblance is anywhere near enough for a lawsuit. Just to see if Demon Attack looked much different (or better) on another system, I tried it in MESS in Intellivision, but couldn't get any Intellivision games to work. I mean, this stuff is free, but who the hell knows sometimes why they even bother to list this stuff in there if it doesn't work.

Demon Attack is another one of those long lists of games that are just too hard at the very beginning. I tend to just play games like that for just a bit and then set them aside. It doesn't really draw me in. I think that's a mistake that game designers make quite often.

I guess there are ROMs, and there are ROMs. As I get more into this retro gaming thing, I'm trying to figure out the rhyme or reason why certain of these things don't work.

It's willy nilly, that's for sure. And certainly the same game ROM can work with different version of the emulator, whether different versions on the same platform or between platforms. I think we're finding that out.

Yeah, Graviton is challenging. And because of the "eat quarters" factor, I never gave it much of a look before now. But having played it a little while, it's hard but I think it's a fair hard. I'm pretty damn sure that if you could make it through 3 or four levels of this game you probably could land the Eagle on the moon.

Maybe Rico can chime in on the best trackballs, gamepads, and joysticks (or an analog dial perhaps) that would make some of these games very much more playable.

Regarding Star Castle, it just sounds like the MAME emulator on OS X doesn't work as well as the one on the PC. Do you have one of those dual-boot MacBooks? It would be interesting to see how PC MAME works when booted into Windows on a Mac. I think you're doing everything right. It just sounds like some stuff doesn't work. You run into this all the time with these emulators. There seems no rhyme or reason much of the time.

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I did finally find a version of Demon Attack for the Atari 800. If there's a difference between this one and the one that plays on the Atari 2600, I couldn't see it. The Stella (2600) emulator plays it noticably smoother.

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Be sure to check out Gyruss. It's a lot like Tempest.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BN,

quote:

Do you have one of those dual-boot MacBooks?

Naw, but I have a PC. I just haven't fired it up in a while. Plus it has Veesta. Which is probably the kiss of death for emulation.

I downloaded the old Star Wars game. Just as I remember it, but fucking no way you can play it without a joystick. Impossible to steer with the mouse. Completely counterintuitive.

Did you really ever have an Atari computer? When you say "2600" was that a computer or a console? My family had an old Apple II... never an Atari. Though I think we had one of the old game consoles. Don't remember what it was called. It played Pong, breakout, some really primitive games on the TV. Most of the games I remember and love from those days were quarter-eaters.

When it came to the Mac. I thought the early adventure/arcade games were so damn groovy. There was a bunch of them, BEFORE the era of Dark Castle and Prince of Persia. These were like mini horror novels, early POV stuff, where you clicked on hotspots to examine artifacts, then proceeded through the story. Puzzle-solving kinds of things. Get this key, open that door, navigate through boobytraps. Wish I could remember some of those titles. They'd be so damn easy to port now. You could probably do them as a web site, even. These were some of the earliest games I remember on the Mac.

That's actually a good exercise... trying to remember the really, really early days. There was a missile-command knockoff, there was a little parachute/helicopter/tank game, I forget the name. There was "Pararena" kind of rollerball on skateboards... anyone remember any others?

Impossible to steer with the mouse. Completely counterintuitive.

It's probably worth it to pick up a $20.00 Logitech or other quality brand gamepad.

Did you really ever have an Atari computer?

My first computer was the Atari 800. That website gives a pretty good view of it. It had four joystick ports. Not many games made use of them, but some did. It was a great option to have. Also, it had two slots for ROM cartridges. Almost no game or software used both so that was definitely a feature that got phased out when Atari moved to the 800 XL (and 600 XL and some other models). Measuring testosterone levels in the usual ways, the 800 XL had the advantage of 64K vs. the 8K of the 800. The 800 was upgradable via RAM cartridges to a maximum of 48K, which I quickly did. Notice that the ROM cartridge was also swappable, but I don't remember Atari or anyone else coming up with an upgrade or replacement.

The 800 XL lost two game ports, which was sort of cheap and sort of sucked. The video circuitry was cheaper so it didn't look as good on TV. But it had a parallel I/O port and a general purpose I/O port. One of those got right to the heart of the computer, sort of like when the Mac finally added a card slot and became more open. But, again, I don't know of much stuff that made use of it. It certainly didn't spawn an industry. The 800 XL also had a better keyboard by far. But I like the looks of the old 800 and have been trying to find a bargain on one on eBay. They're going for about $60.00 plus shipping. And that thick outer plastic casing would likely be the fourth thing to survive a nuclear holocaust, along with cockroaches, the original Atari joystick, and I forget the third.

The Atari 2600 was a game console. No keyboard, although this prototype might be for real. And The Graduate was an almost-released add-on for the 2600 which might have been a nifty one had the bottom not fallen out of the market at the time. It came with Microsoft BASIC. I mean, say what you will, but this was certainly a nice way to smarten up video gaming. Imagine introducing people to the fun and power of programming languages. Cool! Geeky, for sure, but cool and a nice option to just mindless chasing pixels around the screen.

My family had an old Apple II... never an Atari.

I drooled over the Apple II. I used to buy "Compute!" and other magazines just to read about them. They were too rich for my blood, but I was absolutely in love with the idea of them. We also had a Pong dedicated console system. I think it played a few version of Pong, and that was it, but it was a lot of fun. Later we got the Atari Video Pinball system which I'm pretty sure was another huge seller for them. It played quite a few games and variations on the same theme.

There are system bios ROMS for a couple of the early Macs for the MESS emulator. I guess if someone found some ROMs of those early games for the Mac that you're talking about, you might get them to work. There's your assignment. I've seen Dark Castle, but I never played any of those games. And I remember you (I think it was you) a few months back posting a link to an OS X ported version of one of those Classic Games, although I don't remember which one it was. Castle Wolfenstein maybe? But maybe that's a genera I should tinker with some more and see if I like it. I certainly liked Myst. I like a certain amount of puzzle-solving. I think what really made Myst so attractive was the general ambience and atmosphere it created. That game was far more than just maniacally running around avoiding monsters and solving puzzles. There was a real Zen quality to Myst that I really liked, although that's been lost since after the 3rd incarnation. I tried the latest one last year and it just bored me to tears. I didn't have anywhere the same "vibe" to it.

I'll set brothel's mind to work on a couple of those games you mentioned. Yeah, there are no doubt some old games we could remember if we could just jiggle the right brain cells. That stuff still in there. The archives.

Speaking of online games, I don't know how many of these are retro, but here are some games at least.

One of the fun things for me (if you're sort of a glutton for punishment and humiliation) is these early computer systems gave one a chance to peek behind the curtain (there are actual commands in Atari BASIC to "peek" and "poke"). Now, granted, hundreds of people have delved into the innards and come out with complete and marvelous finished games. It is not all that much of an accomplishment to just write a "Hello World!" program in any language. But it is informative. Who really cares to see behind the curtain of their refrigerator? Okay, a lot of us, in fact. It's cool to learn about compressors and gasses, and how those gasses by way of being compressed can refrigerate things. But barring delving into the world at the level of thermodynamics, it's a fairly cut-and-dried procedure. It's understandable. And once understood, you may never have the desire to peer into the back of a refrigerator again.

This may also be true regarding computers. And yet there is so much to look at that I'm not sure that curiosity is so easily satisfied, no more so than merely peering at a DNA molecule tells the whole story of genetics. In fact, I find it overwhelming at times. On what level does one want to understand a computer? There are so many. There's the level of learning to plug it in and hooking all the cables together, and turning it on and being able to type something, to type anything into it. I remember the thrill of booting up my first Mac, a Mac SE. It was pure, unadulterated, gee whiz. But as wonderful as that first moment of sublime awe was, it was in great part all orchestrated by the people who made and programmed this Mac SE computer. I flipped a switch as if flipping a switch on a Christmas tree and stood in awe and wonder as it lit up. And further magic could be gained by running some of the programs that came with it, whether it was the first WYSIWYG word processor, or just a pretty cool file and folder system for organizing things.

And given a word process, for the Stephen Kings of the world, there is no need to look any deeper. There is no end of the things you can do with a word processor if you are a writer, or with Photoshop if you are an artist, or with Excel if you are a mind-numbed accountant. And yet there still is magic underneath all this. What makes those programs go? And thanks to languages such as BASIC or HyperCard, one could get a taste for what made those programs go. It demystified the mystical, but it never robbed them of their incredibleness. It just added to it, for once you understand how bleedin' difficult it is to make a program do something useful, you can't help but be in awe of programs and programmers who do far more than just say "Hello World!"

And beneath the world of the programs and programming languages lurks operating systems, machine language, microcode, and RAM addresses. To look at a single instruction code for a CPU is to look at a single atom of carbon and wonder how, in combinations complex and stupendous, they can create things that seem quite beyond their humble and very simple origins. Programming languages themselves can access the magic of the computer up and down the chain, as high and abstract as you want to go (Choose "New" in the file menu), or as low as you want to go ("CPX" in assembly language for the 6502 microprocessor means "Compare Memory Against X Register"). One can play in any of these worlds. But these worlds are so strange that you can feel like Alice through the Looking-Glass in any one of them. You have to stay in these worlds a long time to gain any proficiency. But these worlds are so weird to begin with, not many want to or can.

The relative simplicity of the Atari 800 and other early computers made some of this stuff understandable. Computers have gotten far more complicated since then, but the basics have remained more or less the same; temporary memory, processors, languages (high level and low level), permanent storage, input devices, and output devices. In the old days you could fire up the Atari Assembly Editor and do absolutely worthless "Hello World!" stuff. But the point was that you could actually do it. You could look behind the curtain and, with the appropriate guidebook beside you, play Oz yourself, if only with simple stuff. This isn't necessarily completely lost with modern computers, but I do think it's not only a lot harder, but abstraction is so built-in via the very nature of the graphical user interface that the complexity is thoroughly hidden and somewhat made irrelevant. These computers are now so easy to use that, if anything, we tend to want to personalize them (calling them names and such, and even relating to them as if they had personalities) rather than to deconstruct them and see their innards. What we now consider "real" is, thanks in large part to the GUI, what we see in the form of symbols and abstract forms such as folders and other familiar objects.

But it wasn't always so. With those early computers, you could see whole honkin' pixels right there on your screen....all four corners, most likely. The idea of bits and bytes was relevant and definitely in your face. And those were great times.

Here's a little history that I found interesting: Atari: The Golden Years -- A History, 1978-1981

quote:

Atari was founded in 1972, but its crowning accomplishments in console gaming and computers were the Atari Video Computer System (or 2600) and the Atari 400/800 line of personal computers.

This four-year period -- from 1977 to 1981 -- contains some of the most exciting developments the company ever saw in its history: the rise of the 2600, the development of some of the company's most enduringly popular games (Centipede, Asteroids) and the development and release of its first home computing platforms.

This comprehensive look back, filled with quotes from the original creators and other primary sources, offers a detailed peek into the company that popularized video gaming as the '70s turned into the '80s, and created the first viable market for home consoles.

quote:

Innovate, Kind Of Like You Did Last Year

"One of the guys at Warner said... I had made a proposal to make a really interesting set of games. I can remember him not even blinking and looking at me and saying 'Nolan, why don't you innovate kind of like you did last year, none of this new stuff?' He did not understand what he said, he was so out of tune with what the nature of innovation is, and I've been thinking I was going to get that put into needle-point sometime." - Nolan Bushnell

Here's another article about The History of Atari: 1971-1977. It's about Nolan Bushnell and the founding of Atari, and the early years. I'm still reading this one, but it's interesting how conceptual leaps are so difficult for many industries to handle. Nolan tried to license Pong to the existing mechanical arcade machine makers, and they had absolutely no use for it. The article states "The day Pong was released is marked by the coin-op industry as the first nail in the coffin of pinball." Nolan decided to go into manufacturing as well as engineering and designing, and the rest is history, as they say. Nolan was a bit of a dishonest creep but he was certainly the world's first engineer-entertainer. It's funny how dodgy, slightly unethical creeps are often successes. You wonder why the human trait of deceit developed. Well, wonder no more. It's damn useful. But we forgive Wunderkinds if they are successful and bring to the world something that we like. Hey, no one said the world of capitalism wasn't a little rough or dodgy. And it's really amusing to me to see the "hippie" types such as Nolan try to hide their naked ambition and ruthless tactics by lathering on the whole "social consciousness" jive. Nolan was a master at it. Very funny to see, but then what the hell. We're all play-actors of sorts. We all do what we want to do and then pretty it up after the fact. We see this sort of dill-weed culture in Apple and Jobs where they may do the most ruthless, dishonest things but come out smelling like roses because they cultivate this "nice guy" image of social consciousness, putting Al Gore on the board, or whatever. And the funny thing is that it works with a large number of rubes.

If the entire history of Atari's golden years could be summed up (and that's going by the information in that article as if it were true, and there's no way offhand to know for sure how accurate it is), it would be a clash between the hippie, laid-back creative types vs. the buttoned-down, arrogant and down-talking marketing types. It would appear that Atari was more lucky than good. Nolan and company created the VCS and then management milked it for a few years (due to the very good luck of some of their game designers creating some big hits such as Space Invaders and Asteroids) until they collapsed due to the brain drain. Read that Golden Years article and you'll want to punch that marketing schmoe in the face. Had a few dick-heads set aside their egos, Atari would surely be ruling the video game business and/or the personal computer business (or still be a major player) even today. But it sounds like 3/4 of the problem was that Nolan sold out to Warner, which was basically a music company back then. And swear to god, I harbor few prejudices against any particular industry, but the music industry is habitually populated by the most arrogant asshole cocksuckers you can find.

Here's a good quote from the early pages of the early history of Atari: "As a result of Pong, a player can gain a deep intuitive understanding of the simplest Newtonian physics" - Carl Sagan. I think Sagan was onto something. There was something very Newtonianly fascinating about Pong. It wasn't just tennis. Something I didn't know before about Pong is that it was apparently ripped off to the point that more Pong-clone arcade machines were being made at one time than Atari was making. Patents those days were apparently a slow process.

Another fascinating fact about the Golden Years days (and probably before as well) is that game designers for the Atari 2600 VCS basically went into a corner for six months or so and invented whatever video game they wanted to. There was no review process and all that crap. And this was even after Bushnell had sold out to Warner. Quite a nice arrangement, really.

Bushnell is an interesting study in character. He flattered himself as being a bit of a social conscious hippie, and yet his methods were as piratical and anti-trust as any robber baron. One of his best tricks to prevent competition from developing against the 2600 was to tie up all the chip manufacturers with make-work, basically phony, contracts. (There were only a half dozen or so manufacturers in the world who produced the kind of chips needed to make video game consoles.) And Bushnell wasn't above just outright shenanigans which the somewhat sycophantic writer of this article terms "creative":

quote:

Bushnell was not immune to Dabney’s fears, but he still believed in the arcade games business. But instead of quitting, Bushnell decided to expand the business. To do this he had to do something very creative. In October of 1973, Bushnell decided to grab as much market share as possible by signing exclusive contracts with distributors in each geographic area to buy only Atari games.

Because most geographic areas had two distributors, Bushnell separately (and semi-secretly) created Kee Games, named after Bushnell friend Joseph Keenan who became president of the company. Kee would sign exclusive contracts with the second distributor in a geographic area. The games that Kee and Atari produced individually were eventually released by both companies with unique names and some cosmetic differences. Steve Bristow went to work for Kee as their head of engineering.

All's fair in love and video gaming, for sure. There are so many video game first in reading these histories. Here's another big one:

quote:

By early 1975, the success of Tank! left Atari in a good position to start to seriously work on home Pong. They earned $3.5 million on $39 million in sales for fiscal 1974-1975, and could afford new R&D. The cost of microchips had come down to a level that would make the project economically viable, so Atari decided it is the time to go full-bore and enter the home market. Even though Bushnell was urged by advisors to stay away from the home market (the same one that Magnavox was struggling in), he decided to do it anyway.

“The next epiphany, if you would, was when we figured out we could put Pong on a single LSI chip... All of a sudden, we knew we could put one in every home. All of a sudden, we went from a very successful coin-op business to a potential consumer business.” - Nolan Bushnell

In some cases, while reading these histories you can go back and play the original arcade or home console games. You can see how wonderfully primitive these early games were. But they were primitive only by today's standards. Pong was a wonder of wonders, and rightfully so. And it's apparently quite true that Nolan found out that the initial Pong would be a success when a test-unit he put in some bar broke down. The problem was, it was so filled up with quarters that it had jammed the mechanism. Interesting to hear that Steve Jobs was an employee of Atari for a year or so and that Woz designed the huge-seller, Breakout. It was one of the last major games using TTL chips. And I'm not quite sure what those are, but they were not microprocessors. When Atari and other manufacturers moved to microprocessors for their arcade video games (either the MOS 6502 or the Motorola 6800) they could start putting AI logic in their games, which meant you could have great games against the computer instead of playing extremely simple games against other people. The age of the video game recluse had begun as well.

And as with any "visionaries," they obviously get engrained in the same old rat-race and can't see the forest for the trees:

quote:

1976: The Apple Mistake

With the focus on home video games and coin-ops, Atari did make one move in 1976 that, in hind-sight, could have been their biggest mistake. Steve Jobs, who had left Atari and was working for HP at the time, brought a piece of equipment to Al Alcorn that he and Steve Wozniak had been working on in their garage. It was a computer based on the same MOS 6502 processor that Atari had started using in their coin-op games. Alcorn thought it was a “neat engineering project” but did not think it was right for Atari.

“we said ‘no thank you’…but I liked him, I thought he was a nice guy, so I introduced him to venture capitalists’”lxxx - Al Alcorn

And the real reason for the push to cartridge-based machines as opposed to dedicated Pong-only home console units:

quote:

Bushnell was convinced that Atari needed to outthink their competitors -- and could. The 1975 hit coin-ops Tank! and Jet Fighter were suggested as dedicated follow-ups to the Pong units, but Atari was tired of designing and selling dedicated hardware that cost $100,000 to developlxxxi with only two to three months of shelf-life before it became outdated. The company needed to design a platform that could sustain a life of two or three years, and at the same time support incremental game sales to an already established user-base. Months before the Fairchild Channel F appeared on store shelves, Atari was well on its way to creating a similar, yet much more flexible system.

More Bushnell creative "brilliance":

quote:

It was at this point that Nolan Bushnell pulled off one of the most brilliant moves of his already brilliant career. Since Atari had been beaten by their competition at their own game more than once, he decided to head them off at the pass. Instead of waiting for competitors to emerge after the Stella project was released, he decided to tie-up all available chip fabricators that could possible make a similar piece of silicon. It would not matter if someone tried to copy Atari -- because this time they would not be able to get any chips produced.

“I always played business as a game. What a lot of people don’t realize is that I tied-up every N-Channel manufacturer in the world, except for IBM, who had no interest in the game business. In those days when you built with slight modifications to tie them up. I wanted to have everybody working for me contractually. They did not necessarily know about one another.”lxxxviii - Nolan Bushnell

It's truly ironic that a man who made money at making games didn't even want to play a competitive game with others. Again, the somewhat sycophantic writer of this article alludes to clearly anti-competitive tactics as "brilliant." I beg to differ, but all that is ancient history.

It's interesting to see in this entire story the same old story repeated again and again in other places and industries. First there is the creative drive for brilliance. A few truly novel and important things are produced. Step two is then milking those novelties and spinning off endless mindless, relatively uncreative derivatives. Yes, you guessed it, there is not Step Three unless you include the step of bankruptcy.

An interesting bit on what was always the much more appealing art on the Atari catridge while the games themselves were all but just different crude combinations of huge dots:

quote:

Besides engrossing two player action, Air-Sea Battle was packaged behind some of the best box-art ever created for a video game. The art was painted by Cliff Spohn, who also painted the amazing art for Combat, Street Racer and several later games.

"Those paintings on the box detailed exactly how I felt about the games. The graphics were so minimal at the time, the boxes formed an important part of game play experience. When I was playing Air-Sea Battle, I was playing in that painting." - Anonymous Atari Fan

"I was playing in that painting." Eyeroll worthy or were we all sort of doing that? Gotta go with the eyeroll although there's no doubt the fancy graphics on the packages helped to enhance (hide?) the games themselves. Rather than getting lost in the idea of playing in the cover art, we used to joke about how deceptive and phony the cover art was…even while maybe greatly enjoying the games packaged inside. I was one of the few who didn't hate the VCS version of Pac Man even though it was a quite unauthentic version of it compared to the original. But it played well. Looks aren't everything, which was damn lucky for these very early and crude video game systems.

quote:

Originally posted by BN:
Smithz, one of my favorite games is Arkanoid. I can find several working versions of it for MAME but I have yet to be able to make it playable with a gamepad. The little paddle at the bottom of the screen is always too touchy and I've tried tons of different settings. I just wondered if you or anyone else found a way to play it.

Hm, i think Arkanoid needs analog-controls, so i would use the mouse to control the game. The original cabinet had a paddle-controller. It's much easier to play with a paddle or a mouse.
Using Mame, you can define a default control-setup, plus you can define new setups for each game. (all this via TAB-key) ...
Have fun. :-)

Thanks, smithz. I don't know why I didn't think of using the mouse. I finally got it to be at least playable using the Arkanoid (World) version. And I had never thought to "Get properties" (before launching a game...stuff that has nothing to do with the tab key settings) on the individual games themselves so that they could be set up to use the mouse. I can't get the buttons on the mouse to work, but I can get reasonably smooth mouse movement. The problem is that once in a while it stutters, especially when making large side-to-side moves on the screen. I'm going to investigate whether or not I can increase the mouse "scan" rate for the PC. I remember reading about how to do that once, although I don't know if that will have any real effect. There's so much voodoo on PC's just like there is on the Mac. If someone spill coke on their keyboard there's always some Mac guru around to tell you to rebuild your desktop as a fix. That sort of thing. But I think if I get into device manager, I might be able to screw with the USB bus scan rates or something like that.

Well, i checked it out today, it works quite good. But i had to decrease analog sensivity a lot to achieve smooth movement (although it wasn't perfect). Strange that you can't use the mousebuttons, i had no problems using them.
Plus, I guess the OS X mousedriver screws around with its acceleration curves. It would be better to have a completely non-accellerated mousedriver and a pure 1:1 control scheme. I think you're using USB-Overdrive, this is a better driver. I'll try that out too...

Oh, i have to go now, i need TP!