Slashdot Mirror
Atari 2600 Lord of the Rings Discovered
TheAlchemist writes "Eighteen years ago a Lord of the Rings game appeared in a Parker Brothers catalog for the Atari 2600. Unfortunately, the game was never released, along with several other titles that appeared alongside it. Just in time for the first Lord of the Rings movie release next week, AtariAge.com has discovered a long lost prototype of this game, probably one of the most sought after 2600 vaporware titles. You can look at screenshots, a picture of the prototype box, the prototype cartridge, and download the binary image that you can then run in one of several Atari 2600 emulators. More information about the game can be gleaned here."
* g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g g o / \ \ / \ o a \ a t `. : t s` \ s e \ / / \\\ -- \\ : e x \ \/ --~~ ~-- \ x * \ \-~ ~-\ * g \ \ .--------.___\ g
o \ \// ((> \ o
a \ . C ) ((> / a
t /\ C )/ \ (> / t
s / /\ C) (> / \ s
e ( C__)\___/ // _/ / \ e
x \ \\// (/ x
* \ \) `---- --' *
g \ \ / / g
o / \ o
a / \ \ a
t / / \ t
s / / \/\/ s
e / e
x x
* g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g o a t e x *
And I tossed mine out - eBay ho!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I know you guys don't like to discuss Slashdot as a whole on the site (and the slashcode). But after this comment by Jamie, admitting to author moderation and the infamous "bitchslapping" script, and the changes to 2.2 that weren't discussed (authors can see IP and subnet of all posts, including anonymous posts, and can sort based on them), I'd like to know what the slashdot population thinks of the changes? Do they feel that their anonymous privacy is being threatened? I understand this is a privately owned site, but it is always known to believe in "free speech", and "privacy", and "Your rights online". What is the community's reaction to the "unnamed changes"??
And This is post 3 or 4!
"He who laughs last is usually the dumbest kid on the block." - John Lennon
its been 30 seconds since it was posted and its already /.ed
oh well, i saw it at least ;)
I just rediscovered my old Atari, too. Missing 2x controllers, though...
I can add it to my ET game and run it on my cabinet!
The Slashdot Staff: Editors or Janitors?
Slashdot claims to have several editors on its staff. This is not true. Editors are people who edit. What does it mean to edit? Well, according to 'm-w.com' to edit means: to prepare for publication or public presentation. Does the Slashdot staff do this? Hardly. The readers who submit stories do this; they prepare the stories for slashdot. The staff just cuts and pastes them onto the front page. Editors also check for spelling and grammar. Editors also try to show both sides of a story; the Slashdot staff is some of the most biased people on the net. Just look at the icon for Microsoft posts to see this bias in action.
So, if they are not editors, what are they? They are janitors. Janitors clean up and put things back in place. The Slashdot staff cleans up troll vomit and crap floods. The janitor at my old high school was a big track star 'back in the day' but now he is just an old fool that the kids made fun of. He never really got it. He thought he ran the school just because he had the keys to the front door. It is the same with the Slashdot staff, they used to be important, but now they are just old fools who can't even remember what stories they posted just a few days back. The Slashdot staff also believes that they run the site, but it is OSDN that runs the show. The Slashdot staff doesn't see or hear the kids laughing behind their backs.
Please discuss
try z26, an open source atari 2600 emulator for dos/win95.
Wow it was slashdotted in a record breaking 10 seconds or so
They must be serving off an Atari cuz they're already slashdotted. :(
I am curious as to why this game wasn't released. Why did it remain vaporware? Its interesting, though, that apparently the binary image can be posted w/o fear of copyright infringement. Are all 2600 games 'free' now? I recall that for SNES games and the like the ROMs are still considered warez or bootlegged.
At what age does a game enter the public domain? If it was never released, is it automagically in the public domain if you can get your hands on it? I'll have to wait a few hours!
I haven't personally checked out this site, though I'd like to, apparently its already suffered the ill effects of /., too bad.
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Looks like Atari Age has been Slashdotted (at least the screenshots page):
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"I don't trust goats," --To Catch a Spy
About serving web pages from an atari, I've been planning to do just that, setting up a webserver on my old Atari 1040 STe.
Does anyone here know of any good places to get a network card for an old atari (preferably with ethernet), and/or any good s/w to get net connectivity in an atari?
So how long before Parker Bros, who made the game, the Atari people or Mark Lesser, one of the programmers, come forward and claim the copywrite on the game and force them to remove the rom image?
Yes, I know this is just a prototype for the game, but it is still their(not sure who's) work and they hold the rights to it.
/* so quick put it on morpheous and mirrors before this site gets shut down */
This is a no-no. Read the portion of the FAQ regarding caching.
HAND.
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
This is another site with a screenshot and box cover (and is not /.ed yet).
This
Its interesting, though, that apparently the binary image can be posted w/o fear of copyright infringement.
Wrong. Much abandonware falls under the "no suitor, no judge" rule. For example, it's OK to distribute the "Zero Wing" ROM because Toaplan, its publisher, no longer exists and therefore can't sue. However, in this case, both Hasbro (Parker Bros parent) and Tolkien's estate (licensor of LotR franchise) still exist and still maintain legal departments.
Are all 2600 games 'free' now?
Copyright on corporate-authored works lasts ninety-five years plus the rest of the calendar year. Blame Sonny Bono and Di$ney for such a counterproductively long copyprivilege term.
I recall that for SNES games and the like the ROMs are still considered warez or bootlegged.
You're probably thinking of mask work copyright, which Nintendo claims prohibits even fair-use backups of software that happens to be stored on a semiconductor ROM chip. (A careful reading may show that it prohibits only burning the data back onto a ROM chip; however, this depends on how the courts interpret "reproduction" of a mask work and whether or not ROM is a "commonplace design" that goes unprotected.) Such copyright lasts only ten years plus December 31.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Now, IANAL, however, I believe that it is "legal" to distribute ROMs when the console has been abandoned by the manufacturer. (IE -- you can no longer get the console anywhere.)
Direct link to the ROM:
LOTR and the emulators:
Stella & z26
Note that in order to get it working: "Because this is a new release, you will have to do a little extra work in order to get the ROM to work in either emulator, although the emulators will probably be updated shortly to support them natively." taken from http://www.atariage.com/features/lotr/
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
But does it support the paddles and the joystick? If I have to dig out my joystick I won't even bother to take the Warlords cartridge out of the box. :-)
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - E.W. Dijkstra
See here: http://www.classicgaming.com/vault/roms/o2roms.Que stfortheRings11624.shtml
I haven't seen that many warnings since the last time I turned on CNBC. There's a great advertisement for MySQL. The Postgresql fans must be very happy. Apparently everyone needs an enterprise class database if they're getting slashdotted.
They could at least cache the text before blowing it off the internet temporarily.
I realize it's only an Atari 2600 game, but it really sucks. What the fuck are you supposed to do?
/.ed:
Here are the files, since people are complaining that the site is
http://skylab.org/~plumpy/lotr/
Hey, before you look for an Atari network card, why not try to find a life? You might find that once you have that, the network card is not so important.
(and if you had a clue in the first place you'd probably choose an Amiga, if you must play with obsolete 16-bit machines)
It's "copyright", as in "right to copy".
There was a computer game version of Lord of the Rings actually published. It was made as a computer game on other platforms, the Commodore 64 among others. It was an Infocom-style adventure (except with some static pictures) which quickly became infamous. This was not just because the games were not exactly faithful to the books, but because they came on floppy disks and the game appeared to grind through the entire disk whenever a command was entered. Never before did the 1541 strike more fear into the hearts of men. You can find more information about the game here.
"The good die first." "Most of us are morally ambiguous, which explains our random dying patterns." --- MST3K
I think back then if you didn't put a (c) in your work it was by default in the public domain.
Nowadays everything is copyrighted unless the author decrees otherwise.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
The rule makes sense, but how many gaming companies truly stopped business, settled their debts with cash or assets other than their intellectual property?
It seems to me that the most common scenario would involve a company going bust and their most valuable asset, their intellectual property, being sold off to debtors. Second most common would be the company getting bought out, including IP, by some other company.
The least likely event is that the company just gave up and stopped. Even in that case, there was somebody who can claim ownership of the company's assets.
It would seem to me that there would *always* be someone who owned the IP, although it might not be the original company. Awareness of ownership and desire to enforce copyright are probably in question, but ownership?
"Someone posted a Slashdot article about some Lord of the Rings game on one of our sites.. and the movie premieres in four days..."
is that you get to find out that so many websites are running the open-source database MySQL. It's nice to see, but of course ironically we only get to see the MySQL error messages when it's broken.
;-)
More on topic, I wonder why this game was never released? If they got as far as the prototype I'd think that the game was somewhere near completion. I guess I'll just have to wait for the site to come back up again, or for a karma whore to post a mirror or a cache.
I posted to
Could somebody put up a mirror, please? :)
You can play through the entire game in 7 minutes!
..is what I am looking for. Not even Google doesn't have it in it's cache.
It would seem to me that there would *always* be someone who owned the IP, although it might not be the original company. Awareness of ownership and desire to enforce copyright are probably in question, but ownership?
Good point, but how can a company sue over something it doesn't know it owns? What practical difference is there between not knowing you own something and not owning it? If a company knew it owned the Zero Wing franchise, you can bet that at least some of the AYBABTU sites would have received nasty letters months ago.
----------
To all Slashdot readers: If you know who represents the corporation that currently owns the IP of the late Toaplan Co., please click 'Reply to This' below and give more information.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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The Galaxy card. Is a video ethernet card for the STe.
http://gem.win.co.nz/mario/hardware/galaxy.html
Someone seems to already have done it. And it was on slashdot as well.
Does Slashdot should warn sites that they are about to be slashdotted? It seems like the polite netcitizen thing to do.
[news for me, stuff that doesn't matter]
uhhh...
acshully...
4 colours (or maybe 8).
50x75 (or something else nice and low).
happy machine that runs at 1.soemthg Hz (no M).
without a graphic chip...
don'[t foreget taht... it also has 1 or maybe 2 sound channels (one for the blip the other for the bloop).
The later atari's (Falcon comes to mind) were 32-bit as well.
The first Tolkien game I played would be The Hobbit. The next? Shadowfax, on the Spectrum. Great animation for its day.
Cheers,
Ian
look I can actually download the game and see how
boring it is for myself
oooh, forests and a weird monster thing.
The holders of the copyright to LOTR will certainly be considering legal action against slashdot for this blatant encouragement of IP theft.
Woops, missed one. Here's the link to the page in the Parker Brothers catalog with the blurb about the Lord of the Rings game:
Parker Brothers Catalog
To quote the FAQ:
/. articles come a day to a week after the news is broken, this is not really the best excuse. An offer to colo sites for a week would work well for all involved.
"I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?"
Since most
I'm not bashing here, just suggesting a viable option!!
Not hardly. The source code was ASCII text. The rendering engine is still the most powerful one known.
Of course, with kids these days, the firmware seems to have deteriorated.
Those are both star wars ads, no LOTR at all there.
Woops, missed one. Here's the link to the page in the Parker Brothers catalog with the blurb about the Lord of the Rings game:
I think you mean:
http://www.atariage.com/catalogs/ParkerBrothers
where there's fish, there's cats
Let's see, do I want to wait six hours for a story, or do I want the site to be down so I cannot actually get the details of the story? Hmm, this sure is a hard decision!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is incorrect. You found a reference to the game. The rom image is not there, therefore the game is not there. Please think about your wording; You've just sent many many people to that website, including me, who thought they might be able to download the rom.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Thank you, this is the proper link. And I even looked at the image before posting it, but everything's a blur at the moment. :)
Here is the AtariAge message board with a discussion.
Man, I can't wait to find a ROM of the McDonald's game.
So how long before Parker Bros, who made the game, the Atari people or Mark Lesser, one of the programmers, come forward and claim the copywrite on the game and force them to remove the rom image?
About as long as it takes me to get from my house to the office downtown, sip a coffee/eat a scone, call up the site on my pc, and badger one of the interns into writing the letter. I'd say it's gone by 9:30 am Monday morning.
Sooner if I can wade through the /. effect.
A mirror of the ROM image is available on my web site:
http://gamanen.tripod.com/
Please sign the guestbook while you are there.
Calm down there, my man... That's some pretty harsh language.
Driving drunk is irresponsible.
Shooting guns into the air on New Year's Eve is irresponsible.
This, on the other hand, isn't that big a fucking deal at all.
Come on, give it up, that's
Yet another reason NOT to run MySQL.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
The SysAdmin is a little more hip than most of you are giving him credit for. He has aleady taken down the ENTIRE rest of his site just for speeds sake for /. The fastest way there is:
http://www.atariage.com
You will get all you need.
Good luck, and make sure you keep all your fingers and toes in the ride at all times (just ask Frodo!)
I find is suprising that this cartridge coincidentally appears a few days before the movie is about to premiere, at the height of hype. I'm betting whoever had it has been sitting on it for a little while waiting for the fever pitch, then sell it off on eBay or some similar thing. This atariage thing, is part of the marketing campaign for it.
I think the 2600 had about 8 or maybe 16 colors. you can't really "dither" all that much at that resolution either.
creation science book
And I get to see all the CGI errors, right there on my browser. Very nice.
The first thing you do on a production server is KILL THE ABILITY TO DISPLAY ERROR MESSAGES FROM YOUR SCRIPT ON THE END USER'S DISPLAY!
I know you can do this with Embedded perl. Not sure what these guys are using, but seems like the same behavior HTML::Embperl exhibits before configuring it not to.
Actually, I think that one has a lot to do with PHP, leave MySQL out of it.
Actually, it *probably* has neither to do with PHP nor MySQL specifically, but most like the admin is using "pconnect". Each Apache child keeps a connection handle open to MySQL, so if your MySQL is set to max out at 100 simultaneous connections (the default, which most people leave set for some reason) and your Apache is set to have more than that (200?) you'll get this. The solution is to either NOT use pconnect or to implement some type of pooling system. Yeah, pooling mechanisms aren't native, but there are sql connection pooling projects out there to use. Also, pconnect v connect on a decent machine with mysql local isn't THAT much of a difference. It'd be nicer to have a slower site that was UP rather than a site that delivers error messages FAST.
creation science book
That one's about starwars, I think he meant this one
Ok, so I didn't read the error messages :) They need to configure PHP not to display errors on the end user's browser.
MUME was one of the best MUDs I ever played. Not sure of address, but you can do a search for it.
Yes if I had added "information on [the game]". I would have been clearer.
99% of the time "whole copyrighted games" are not availble on internet sites (unless it's warez). I guess I was in the "99% of the time" mindset, even though the story mentions a rom image.
Never really was convinced by this. Look at google, they do the same thing, has anyone ever complained to them? Best thing would be to try it, and if people start getting litigious, take it down. What's the harm?
gee, I don't think I'll be downloading that ROM anytime soon.
Does google wait for permission before serving cached pages? It's not difficult guys.
Sierra Online is supposedly doing games on all the books, including the hobbit with the fellowship to be released in 2002.
Why do the kids in West Side Story have to join a street gang if they can afford $70 Gap khakis?
HA!
;)
Not even Sauron could withstand the power that is Slashdot.
We would sink his ass in a matter of minutes.
The age of machine and steel is upon us
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
-ft
he was a scientologist.
He did so to ensure $cientology documents can be properly "protected"
You do? Heaven forbid they should put things on their web site that are topical and related to current events.
Hell, I've even heard that Lord of the Rings was even mentioned on Slashdot! IT'S A CONSPIRACY!
Some thoughts on Atari 2600...
The cool cover art on Atari games always made the crappy game graphics look even worse in comparison.
In the game Combat when you ran your tanks together they looked like they were having sex.
The game Adventure had a secret area.
The manual for Pitfall implied that there was a secret area at the end of the game. My friend and I spent many all nighters trying to get to the end and never found it.
There's a reasonably good documentary about the insanity inside Atari at scottw.com
Aaah the Atari 2600. It had loads of games - it`s a shame they all consisted of legions of indistinct blobs pottering around the screen.
This would be almost amusing if true.
The guy runs it as a fan site. He designed it to be looked at about 100 people a day max.
He is doing it for fun.
You're such a genius, why don't you help him with the site rather than throw stones?
Unreleased LoTR's underRoo's have just been discovered at http://www.FreeADvertisingForAMarginallyGoodBookTu rnedIntoAMovie.com
Done. Learn something new every day. :)
As a poster below said, this is a fan site and our first attempt at using PHP/MySQL. The site has never been stressed like this until now. Probably a bad way of learning that your site will break horribly when too many visitors hit it at once. If it was a commercial site, we'd probably be fired by now.
There's also an Intellivision version of the game mentioned here. Looks like Parker Brothers had big plans for their LOTR licence. Too bad it was just as the 80's video game market collapsed!
Here's the blurb. Sonic burger-flipping? Attacking with ketchup packets? WTF?
the no
I am POSITIVE I had LOTR for my Commodore back in the 80's. If anyone can vouch for me that if existed, and I'm not hallucinating, that would be great! I even think I remember who "Cracked" the softwae copy I had...Eagle Warez
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
For every critic, there are probably a thousand happy readers of atariage.com. Keep up the good work!
Ah, you didn't buy the one with the cognital interface? The version of the books that I read had a very nice interface which enabled me to somehow view the scenes from the book within my head while reading it.
I was quite amazed and I still haven't figured out how they did it...
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
Here here! Where is a list of their affiliated companies so I can avoid them?
Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Sega, anybody else who rates games E, T, or M. Those ratings are trademarks of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, a division of IDSA. I can't even check the ESRB's web site because it's severely broken: every single page on the site redirects me to a 404 page.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Man, I can't wait to find a ROM of the McDonald's game.
Yeah, I wonder if McDonald's has "the subject of speculation for many years by Atari collectors" and "one of the most sought-after Atari 2600 prototypes". The sad thing is that it probably is.
(Actually, I collect old 2600 games, and 90% of them are crap, which is sorta the fun part. McDonalds would have no doubt supass other Atari spam classics like Chase The Chuckwagon, Kool-Aid Man, and Tooth Protectors.)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Hell, the Jaguar was 64 bit.
I think I played this game before.
Join frodo (reprsented by a small white sqare) while he tries to return home. Thrill to his narrow escapes while he attempts to recapure the one ring (represented by a single pixel), which has been stolen by a black bat, and is now guarded by three color coded dragons who reside in their corresponding castles.
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
Create something. Work hard for years to create something truly original and unique.
Not much is truly original or unique anymore. At least the stuff that gets copyrighted all the time (teen movies, teen music, etc.) isn't. Heck, the total number of possible eight-note melodies is less than a million.
Then answer this question: is being the only one allowed to decide the use and dispensation of your creation a right, or a privilege?
Privilege. The United States Constitution, article 1, section 8, clause 8, gives Congress power to grant this privilege; it doesn't state that citizens automatically have that right. Free speech is a right; copyright is a privilege that Congress can in theory quite easily take away in whole or in part at any time. (I say "in theory" because Congress is too bought to consider a more reasonable set of copyright laws.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Did you check out the catalog page?
What I want is that McDonald's game! Awesome!
You're going to claim that it's somehow your right to take someone else's work?
After a reasonable amount of time (perhaps 30 years, or 10 years after the author dies, both of which are more than reasonable in today's market), yes, I am justified that it should be my right to take someone else's work; that's the whole point of. Congress, on the other hand, listens to $$$ instead of reason and lets DisneyCo dictate the duration of copyright.
You want to take without giving anything back.
No, I'm upset at Disney for taking without giving back. Disney released movies such as Pinocchio and The Jungle Book the year after the copyright expired, and then closed the doors behind themselves by getting Congress to extend copyright terms.
How does this make you different from the plethora of twinks that complain about some hobbyist's open sourced software without ever contributing back so much as a meaningful bug report?
I do submit meaningful bug reports. For example, search bugzilla.mozilla.org for 'Damian Yerrick'. I've also submitted bug reports to several other projects, but the projects turned out to be unmaintained. I've wanted to submit an IE bug report for a reproducible issue involving MIME types for XHTML, but Microsoft maintains no public bug tracker.
But when you start to make the case that you somehow have the right to indiscriminately take and benefit from another man's work, you lose me
Do you feel that the copyright on the song 'Happy Birthday to You' (© 1933 or so) should still be in force?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually it did have more colors. Like most Atari stuff you had a larger pallet than you could normally show at once, but using hsync interrupts you could get around that somewhat (raster effects). That's why you often see those odd looking line gradients on the sides of the screen in old atari 2600 games.
At first, I could not get the ROM to work, but after a little work, figured it out. For anyone that might be having difficulty getting it running under Debian, just:
apt-get install stella
then get the "stealla.pro" file from the bottom of the page and copy it to ~/.stella.pro (notice it is renamed to be a hidden dot file). You're then good to go:
xstella LordOfTheRings.bin
Sierra shafted it when it was rather late in production, and refused to say why - hell, they didn't even admit they had cancelled it for months after they fired the dev team.
This link has more, although it seems to have been written quite recently, doesn't go into much detail, and has a slightly different memory of the events than I do.
I can't believe no-one has mentioned War In Middle Earth. Available for C64, Amiga and others.
Actually, I collect old 2600 games, and 90% of them are crap, which is sorta the fun part. McDonalds would have no doubt supass other Atari spam classics like Chase The Chuckwagon, Kool-Aid Man, and Tooth Protectors.
;-)
Don't forget about Swordquest: Airworld!
cpeterso
No. Nearly all of the pages I have on the net are cached by google, and I have never been asked for permission.
You can disable google caching with robots.txt. Seems to me that slashdot should cache unless the page is protected by robots.txt, and if it is, then they should ask permission first.
hawk
I can hear Sauron's evil laugh, then his quick glances around as he hears the 'drum sound' and the wraiths warn him: 'The /.ers... they are coming...'. The look of anxiety overturns his face :P.
it should cache the page every few minutes, and when the cache-er can't get a new page, it would consider the page "slashdotted" and start feeding out the cached page instead of the broken link. SIMPLE!
it's known as an "audio tape book". (they actually have LOTR on 13 CDs.)
But, the book itself was monochrome, and its primary interface was text-- not even color text at that.
Doesn't that mean that it has to be an improvement?
Certainly not an improvement in resolution - try scanning in a page from the book and viewing it at 160x200...
huh... and I always thought interpreted languages like that were not as efficient as compiled ones...
"And for kids of all ages -- there's a fact action game of skill, served up the McDonald's way!" Was it a branded version of "Burger Time," and you got to put together orders on the cook line as customers screamed at you? ROTFLMAO!
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
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really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
Love Dump by Static X
Wisconsin Death Trip
hand me a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
really hand it to me
i've always loved you
love dumpling
your shit's like chocolate cake
and your ass smells like a rose
i really hate you
love dumpling
now my bowels ache
drop down in a line
really hand me a line
really hand me a line
hand me a line
Isn't it? Bringing down a website from what is essentially a DOS isn't a big thing?
I thought that 1.5 years ago during the big DOS attacks we learned from the national media that even ONE MOMENT of downtime for a site costs them BILLIONS!!!
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
I think its a great Idea. Unfortunately, should the hosting community get wind of it, packages will come in flavors of "personal", "business", "business gold", "corporate" and "slashdot-proof". In order of least to most expensive, of course.
Your
And if that wasn't enough go visit the correct link and take a look at the McDonalds game on the opposite side of the page.
Cover Art
Description
It's "The Fellowship of the Ring", a.k.a. "The Lord of the Rings: Game One" for MS-DOS, from 1985. It was actually just sort of a text-based adventure with occasional illustrations, and as I remember I always got hopelessly stuck somewhere before getting to Bree (before which I got hopelessly stuck in Michel Delving -- the plot of the game is rather different from the book). It had amazing CGA graphics (wow! four colors!) and ran on two 5.25" floppy drives (our computer didn't even have a hard drive at that point).
The funny thing is, I was just thinking about that game a day or so ago. It's buried in a box of my stuff at my parents' place...*sigh*
I also was pretty amazed at how UGLY the Atari 2600 game looks. I was addicted to the 2600 in the late 70s/early 80s (and the 5200 was awesome), though I didn't have one of my own. But I never remembered the graphics being THAT bad. Just a sign how far we've progressed, I suppose...
Ah well, Memory Lane. *sigh* I feel old...
cya
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
>
> I was quite amazed and I still haven't figured out how they did it...
I think the cognitive interface used code from the old Infocom games... (Old Infocom ad from Byte magazine: "We stick our graphics where the sun doesn't shine", accompanied by an illustration of a human brain...)
Why have screenshots when you can play the actual games?
Lord of the Rings intro
Lord of the Rings part 1
Lord of the Rings part 2
Graphics chip? I doubt there was a whole chip dedicated to the graphics (or looking at it another way -- only one). The 2600 didn't have hardware acceleration, or even a bitmapped display. It had one register that you loaded the value to feed to the color guns! Want blue for 8 pixels? Load 0b001100 into the color guns and loop for 8 pixel durations. Oh? You wanted to do some work while the screen is drawing? Well then, you are in for a whole world of hurt...
Slashdot had an article about this webserver setup using an atari 800. It is apparently no longer up, but google cache is a wondeful thing.
They did not use a network card, but instead used a terminal server connected to a serial port and a very clever basic program.
I've seen /. sigs that have better graphics.
Ulrika Johnsson is not a man, and when this was posted she was the only one above Ossama bin Laden in anoyance.
However, she has now dropped to number 5, Ossama being fourth, and the top three being Scott Mosier (1), Amy Sedaris (2), and Jet (3) as of this writing.
Have the trolls had an influence on the voting? Only time will tell, or the elevation of goatse.cx man to the top of the hotornot.com charts!
Thanks for the link, I didn't know this existed.
No need for installing emulators on your computer, just load the applet!
If you THINK that's ugly, you should try a Graphical :)
PC game from that era!!!!
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
One look at the screenshots and the gameplay and I can see why it was never released.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Relax. It's a temporary phenomena, and a small price to pay for finding out about something that would have slipped by you otherwise.
/.'ed.
If you already knew about it, you'd have already checked it out and wouldn't care if it was
**>>BELCH
Don't need any help from Slashdot to maket his happen. Read all about it at http://wfw.sourceforge.net/
Can your IM do this?
Lots of things are rights, even if the Constitution doesn't prescribe that the Congress not breach them.
Such as the right to cop^H^H^Hshare information? One fellow's right is another's restriction.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Disney, as the creator of [Pinocchio and the Jungle Book], gave us them to begin with. They gave that much back.
No. DisneyCo gave us derivative works of those stories. Collodi gave us Pinocchio, and Kipling gave us The Jungle Book. And there's no way to fix the bugs I find in the plot lines of most movies (especially many action movies and teen flicks) because they're proprietary.
corporate greed creates issues and Congress's buyability compounds them.
So solving this buyability will solve the problems of patents on obvious inventions, patents on inventions that have clear prior art, effectively perpetual copyright, DMCA, and SSSCA. Where do we start in reducing this buyability?
your attitude re copyright (or what I could get of it from your message) was analogous to the attitude of those people that take open source software and disparage the hobbyists that maintain it
In that case, you could have used the "GPL violation" example.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Took a little digging, and a tapestry of profanities, but I got linux to run LOTR. First you need to dl stella from tucows (the source.) Then go into src, builds, and make linux-x
.stella.pro move xstella out to the builds directory, into your home and then ./xstella lotr.bin
After that you need to go to atari age and got the the LORT page. At the end of the page, there are two links, one is for the stella profile page, dl that, unzip it (-with a -a) and mv it to ~/.stella.pro . Then dl the lotr profile, and cat lotr.pro >>
Hope that helps. (I abbrevated a lot)
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
Now you've confused me even more
Sorry. I guess I was confused. By "these stories" I referred to the original novels, available on Project Gutenberg. I originally meant only to point out that the very year after each original novel entered PD, Disney brought out the perpetually copyrighted animated version and thus could in theory assert control of any other work derived from the PD novels by bringing frivolous lawsuits.
However, all this has little to do with Abandonware.
In that case, let's just drop it and work on faxing letters to our representatives in what ever republic we live in, asking them to repeal copyright term extensions and restrictions on circumventing access control on legitimately purchased copies of material for purposes of fair use. (I said "fax" because e-mail -> "spam" and paper mail -> "anthrax.")
Will I retire or break 10K?
:)
hawk
If you actually think this game has bad graphics, even for an Atari... then you obviously have no idea what Atari graphics look like. This game actually has some pretty amazing graphics when you compare it to some of the other Atari games out there.
Keep in mind some of the hardware limitations of the Atari:
1. You only have 20 bits for screen memory. Yes, you read that right... 20 bits. There is no fancy memory-mapped video RAM, you use that 20 bits to create the screen as it's being sent to the TV. Every scanline, you have to decide what goes into that 20 bits and is sent to the TV. The 20 bits are either mirrored or repeated to form an entire playfield scanline (which is 40 pixels wide). You can get playfields that are NOT simply mirrored or repeated by altering the 20 bits of screen memory before the raster beam gets to the middle of the screen... but you have to make sure you time this perfectly.
2. Aside from the playfield, you have sprites... but you can only have 5 objects on the screen at once: two sprite (8 bits of memory each), two missiles (1 bit each), and a ball (another bit). Each sprite essentially has height equal to that of the screen, and you alter what is shown for that scanline of the sprite by changing the 8 bits for it. Same goes for the missile and ball graphics, except you can only make squares and rectangles of various sizes. You can do some interesting things on top of this, such as having a sprite repeated across the screen (done in hardware), or changing the location, color, and appearance of the sprite halfway through the frame. You can only have two sprite per scanline, but there's nothing preventing you from moving it to a location the raster beam hasn't hit yet. Lastly, you can interlace your sprites, so that even though you have 4 sprites in play, at any given frame, only two of them appear. This makes things flicker. Remember Pacman for the 2600? That's how it managed four ghosts + Pacman.
3. To get meaningful graphics, like those in Lord Of The Rings, you have to write everything in assembly language, keeping track of exactly how many cycles you're using, and how much memory you're taking up (The Atari had only 128 bytes of memory overall... that's including registers used for sprite data and such). Not only did you have to alter screen memory on the fly even single scanline... but you also had to be able to read the joysticks, do any sound effects you need, and update the entire game status without losing track of the screen. It's not an easy thing to do, and it takes quite a bit of juggling to keep things in sync.
So next time you look at an Atari game and think "What the hell? Those graphics suck!", remember that this is NOT a Playstation... this is not even a Commodore 64... this is the 80's, and it is the beginnings of video games, and you're lucky to get graphics as good as those in Lord Of The Rings.
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
Ok I was playing this LOTR game and found out that the city to the left give you what seems to be Gandalf and an arrow that tells you where to go, but I cant seem to avoid the black riders, they move too fast! Another thing I found out is that its a game over once you get 3 wounds.