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I went to Vintage Computer Festival a few times, and when it stopped happening on the west coast, I started running my own, much smaller, very Atari-oriented Atari Party out near Sacramento.

Last weekend I took the train down to California Extreme to play some old video games (and my 4yo likes the older pinball games a lot). I wish Classic Gaming Expo weren't back in Las Vegas, or I'd go to it.

Plus, I still read comp.sys.atari.8bit on Usenet over an SSH connection to my ISP's shell server. :)

You can't? Ever see the emulations of Space Invaders that are colored? Space Invaders is black and white, the color was from plastic on the screen.

Bigger problem with the Vectrex is that it used a vector (X/Y) display. Although you can now draw lines on a raster monitor that are very smooth, and you can do glow effects that look pretty nice, it's not the same as drawing a straight line from point A to point B. No pixels, just phosphors emitting light.

Anyone who's played Asteroids on the original coin-op hardware (or even just played around with a CRT-based oscilloscope!) knows that if you dump a CRT's electron beam onto a single point, you get a spot of brightness that's radically brighter than a single white pixel on either a CRT or an LCD monitor.

For emulation purposes, I could live with rasterization. Sometimes, preserving the original hardware's important. Fortunately, there are communities in both the coin-op (big convention two weeks ago in San Jose) and console (big convention this weekend in Vegas) communities dedicated to keeping the hardware alive long enough for the software to be preserved (and as much as possible, the hardware to be reverse-engineered for emulation purposes).

It was eventually broken though - when someone found an ex-Atari hard drive with the encryption keys and tools on it...

More details here: http://www.cgexpo.com/encrypt/atari7800.htm
Source code here: http://www.atarihq.com/danb/a7800.shtml#encryption
And details on the Lynx and Jaguar crypto too (which IIRC was plain RSA and a proprietary message-digest algorithm) here: http://www.cgexpo.com/encrypt/

It was eventually broken though - when someone found an ex-Atari hard drive with the encryption keys and tools on it...

More details here: http://www.cgexpo.com/encrypt/atari7800.htm
Source code here: http://www.atarihq.com/danb/a7800.shtml#encryption
And details on the Lynx and Jaguar crypto too (which IIRC was plain RSA and a proprietary message-digest algorithm) here: http://www.cgexpo.com/encrypt/

At CGE this year she practically bowled over a kid on her way to see Al Alcorn , who I guess she hadn't met yet. It was awesome.

they are at cgexpo which is absolutely cool. there it one more day left tomororrow. if you are in the bay area, i would recommend going. there is also a bunch of other cool stuff there like 8 bit weapon and a cool lego thing at the MobyGames booth. So much fun!!!

The Classic Gaming Expo has gotten bigger and bigger over the years. They've had to seek larger facilities; in fact, this year, as a result of this expansion, they're holding it in San Jose rather than Las Vegas. And since I live in the Bay Area, I'm currently rubbing my hands with glee.

HEE HEE!

Classic gaming has been huge for years. It's unfortunage what happened with the "Great Arcade Flop" in the late 80's. If you are a real geek there is no doubt you've heard of CGE or the Classic Gaming Expo. They are boasted as the "worlds [...] largest event paying tribute to the people, systems and games of yesteryear."

Lots of great classic gaming events happening in August... a couple weeks after California Extreme, Classic Gaming Expo (now in it's seventh year) will be making its west-coast debut on August 21st at the San Jose Convention Center. There's sure to be even more classic gaming, arcade, alumni and other activities to make this year the best ever.

Check The CG Expo Website for more details!

Maybe you didn't play any PS1 games on your PS2, but nearly all of my friends did. One of my friends got hooked on my copy of FF9 and directly because of that, he went out and purchased FFX and FFX-2.

By definition, old games are...old. And crappy.

There are many who would disagree. I'm one of them. Classic games, by and large, are leagues better than the shiny 3D whiz-bang eyecandy that publishers shovel down the throats of consumers these days.

In any case, if I have a stack of old games, why wouldn't I still have the console?

Why would you want to keep an extra console hooked up and taking up space if your PS2 plays the old games even better? Let's also not forget that consoles break. The CD-ROM drive mechanism in PS1s (and PS2s for that matter) are notoriously fragile and are known to simply give up the ghost after a few years of moderate use. For crappily-built systems like these, backwards compatibility gives you a few more years at least before you have to resort to unfaithful emulations of your favorite games.

I'm a DP'er... (Digital Presser?) Joe, the guy that owns that nice video game setup, is one of the guys behind the Classic Gaming Expo that was held in Las Vegas for the past few years. He's big into the scene and really knows his stuff. He's the editior in cheif of the Digital Press Collectors guide. The guide shows the rarity and dollar values they believe older games are worth. DP is /.'ed now so I can't provide a link to the guide. He does sell the guide at a few places besides the dp site. Ebay is one of them :)

It's a great community. Everyone is friendly and welcome people of all ages to the community.

Then you'll be glad to hear that the Classic Gaming Expo starts tomorrow. :]

If you're in Vegas August 10th or 11th, stop by and meet some of the people who made it happen: cgexpo.

Ben is cool. I hung out with him a lot at least year's Classic Gaming Expo. The portable 2600s were cool, and I love the way you can 'link' them for two-player games like Combat.

Now if only Infogrames or JAKKS would hire this guy, we'd have a REAL retro system to stick in our pockets.

(Of course, I've got Stella on my Zaurus, but it's not quite the same.)

Then you haven't seen Atari's first game, Computer Space. Check out this picture of the very first (and very mod) arcade game. If the ugly word "rip-off" has to be used, CS is near the front of the rip-off line -- it's Spacewar for the arcade.

However, in an era where games quite freely, er, "shared" elements, Asteroids was rather novel at the time. I would certainly say that the gameplay, independent of the fact that it was a space game, was a revelation (of course, Robotron later took that gameplay to a new level). Check out the articl e about Asteroids from Microsoft Arcade.

How is this illegal???

Did you go to the show? I did. There were two exhibitors there selling restored full-size video games. Bruce and Cathy Carso were there selling Atari hardware and software as they have for the last twenty years. The Intellivision developers were there selling a legal, licensed emulator with their games. So was Cosmi. Hasbro was giving away CDs with its PC versions of Atari games. Telegames was there with its games. There was a new developer with his classic Ultima-esque game and several tables with new 2600, Colecovision, and Lynx titles. Plus tables of used games everywhere.

Only one person was selling an emulator-style arcade cabinet that could run many games. But guess what? They were all legal, licensed versions.

There was nothing illegal at the show, with the exception of some mid-80s Atari pirate cartridges from overseas companies that are now prized as rare pirated cartridges by collectors who already own at least one of the legal versions.

Perhaps next time you should investigate a little before you start running off at the mouth; get some journalistic integrity. The website for the show is cgexpo.com.

Those who are interpreting this as an attempt to ressurect the Jaguar are missing the point. All I can say to them at this point is "your loss." I'll definitely be ordering a copy as soon as it is available.

Thanks for all of your work. By the way, are you guys going to be at CGE2K?