I remember back in my college days when I used to have an enormous stereo setup in my house. This thing was a pair of giant Klipsch speakers with 18" woofers, 8" ? midrange horns and dual piezo super tweeters. Basically, loud as heck.
My roomates and I plugged an Atari 2600 into the TV and ran the audio out into the stereo and cranked this thing up with Space Invaders and Combat.
Man, the earthquake that ensued from the fat rumbling bass produced by these games on the 2600 certainly pissed off many a house mate and neighbor.
Maybe now with new playfields, its time to construct something like that again. Unfortunately, college was a long time ago, and now I have to be respective of my neighbors:-(
I'm still using a (not very old) 1996 Dell branded Trinitron 17" monitor. Not a darn thing wrong with it, except for a little discoloration from the days when I used to smoke heavily in front of the thing.
I wish I could still use my old Commodore 1960 monitor (Amiga), but I think there is a cold solder joint that went bad, and I've been too lazy to fix it myself, and a $60 bench charge on a monitor that most places probably can't get parts for isn't appetizing.
Actually, Palm OS 5.x DOES support some level of multitasking. While I can't claim to know any of the techincal details of how it works or how it is accomplished, you can observe it in action when you run Real Player (MP3 player) and then switch to any other application; the MP3 still plays.
I have been learning how to program the Palm OS for the last few weeks now (O'Reilly book V2 that covers v4.0), and I would imagine that an application would somehow register a callback that would be activated on a certain frequency. Again, I could be wrong, and yes, this isn't true multitasking, but it does allow for other apps to work in the background.
Yeah, and its also the reason that EZPass is in financial trouble. For some reason, they have trouble collecting on the "deadbeats". I'm not sure how it is really happening, but I've read something on it several months ago.
You don't have to take my word for it, and unfortunately I have no URL for you:-(
Hey, I agree that flying a propeller plane around a big city doesn't defame the lives of the 9/11 attacks, but at the same time, I would get slight hee-bee-jee-bees doing certain things in the game. Basically, because I was in tower 1 when it was hit (see this if you want). To this day, I can't quite watch people doing any kind of free fall (amusement park, cliff diving, bungee jumping, etc) and if I saw someone fly even a computer plane into a building, it hits a nerve with me.
Yeah, I'm more or less over the event, I've talked about it 1000s of times (literally, not figuratively), but there are some images I will have trouble with for years to come.
Regardless, I want to see this game get released some day:-)
My two cents are that I shelled out nearly $50 for the Dragon's Lair 3D game from Ubi Soft for the PC. There was obviously a problem with how the game handled the keyboard.
The game works with the typical FPS keyboard layout (ASDW/ALT/SPACE/Mouse). However, whenever you were walking forward (holding down 'W') and then wanted to jump (alt key), Windows XP would beep and then bring you back to the desktop. You could switch back to the game by clicking on the task bar, but this problem bugged me, since it made the game unplayable.
I opened a ticket with Ubi Soft's tech support, and I was told to do the "get latest drivers" routine. Did that. Still didn't work. Their solution? Remap the keyboard. For those of you that play FPS games, you know the layout I described is the most sensible way of doing it, unless you want to shift everything on your desk and use the number pad.
I was appaled by Ubi Soft's lack of an acknowledgement of a problem in their software and refusal to fix the issue. I vowed never to buy another product from them again.
Imagine how this could permanently squeeze out anyone who isn't associated with the RIAA (indie labels, or just people making music on their own). Since the RIAA would be the only source, and given their power they could push everyone else around semi-legally, everyone would be forced to buy into their world. I guess this would ultimately mean that I couldn't webcast my own music, I wouldn't be able to sell my songs from my website without paying them, etc.
I have faith that SOMEONE in the government will see the absurdity of this request and will stop it before it gets too far.
Yes, the Amiga Basic from Microsoft was pretty horrendous. Pretty much required a 68000 and ROM 1.x machine to work. Anything else and it wouldn't even do a "Hello World".
I do remember that there were a few demo programs written in it that were included on the Amiga Basic disk. Man, they were embarrassing speed wise.
Actually, I'd think that Excitebike was popular because not only was it a really fun game, but the NES "port" was identical to the arcade version. I spent MANY hours playing Excitebike at the local greasy spoon. When I finally bought it for the NES, I was quite happy to say the least.
Actually, I think the only difference was that when you lost in the arcade version, you'd kick a can or something, which didn't happen on the NES version. But thats it.
I once owned a Nintendo ROB, and yes, that was craptacular. I had both games for the thing and neither one was worth more than about 10 minutes of your attention before you started cheating by pressing the buttons that the robot was supposed to work.
However, I'll disagree about the Microphone argument. The original Famicom had one, the N64 did, and the Dreamcast did (others, I don't know). As far as I know, the Famicom never used it. I never heard of the N64 one, but at least with the Dreamcast it was used in a few games. Sure, it could add a lot to a game, but there are two things that prevented its use:
It changes the way games are played; most people aren't ready for voice activated games yet
The hardware isn't powerful enough, and the software isn't advanced enough to make use of voice activation that would be fool proof.
My case in point: Seaman on the Dreamcast. This game actually used the microphone for voice recognition, not just transmission of your sampled voice to someone elses' computer. While it did an amazing job for a machine with the specs of the Dreamcast, it still wasn't perfect.
Basically, I don't knock microphones; they're just not quite mature yet. Think of them, in the present, as a hint of what we'll probably see in 10 years.
The World Financial Center in New York City used to run their kiosk screens (hanging from the ceiling, announcing events and promotions) on (probably) and Amiga 1000. This was from the time they were opened (around 1986) until around 1998/1999, when the screens were constantly showing Guru Meditation screens (Amiga ROM 1.3). After a few weeks of this, the machine was upgraded to (I imagine) a PC. I imagine the person who knew how to maintain the Amiga was no longer on board, so they couldn't find anyone to fix it. I should have stepped in:-)
A friend of mine has an old 80486 based tablet PC that uses Pen Windows (remember that?).. this device does have some surprisingly good handwriting recognition, but it still is only good for two things: drawing pictures, and scribbling things that no computer could possibly interpret. Sure, it worked at least as good as a Newton when it came to figuring out what you're writing, but hardly good enough to figure out what the drawing was next to your sentence.
I think the whole thing is a stupid idea right now anyway. These things just aren't selling. At J&R in New York City, they had several of these on display. Besides being technological curiosities, they have slowly been disappearing from the display counters because they just aren't moving.
I think the only way these things will survive is being a hybrid laptop; i.e. there are some models that the screen can swing around (much like the Sony Clie` PDAs) so that you can use it as a regular laptop, or twist it around to be a tablet. Just looks to fragile to be practical, however.
We feared the XBox because the industry never supported 3 consoles before.
From a crusty old-sk00l gamer:
Atari 2600, ColecoVision, Intellivision.
If you want to add more to the supported platforms of the time, add in the C64, Apple II, Atari 8-bits, Odyssey 2. The big software houses at the time, if they were producing for both consoles and computers, would most likely support 4 or 5 of the 7 I listed above.
True, the computers aren't consoles, but the market at the time didn't limit itself to just consoles. The licensing of major titles (read: arcade games such as Donkey Kong) would be separate for computer and console (many a legal battle on this front). Today, you have at most 5 platforms being supported (Xbox, GC, PS2, PC, Mac).
If you haven't seen this week's new episode of South Park, you might want to catch it on Comedy Central. Basicaly, there is a stab at the music industry in general. Cartman starts a Christian rock band just to exploit it for the money (calling the music simple and bad), and a "ghost of Christmas present" of sorts shows the kids that because they downloaded a song, certain musicians won't be buying their 3rd gold plated Rolls Royce. Or something to that effect.
Not the best episode they've done, but certainly an open statement to the RIAA.
I keep reading about these iPod wanna-bes, but after never really using any of them, I have to wonder: if the big thing is that the iPod has a built in hard drive, ample memory for caching, and good sound, why can't the several competitors make something good as well?
In other words, what makes the iPod the "gold standard" over all the others which seem to have similar specs?
THAT would explain why I saw a Mini painted up with Napster logos driving down Broadway in New York City yesterday!
I was looking at Broadway and 50th Street yesterday afternoon, and saw a "Napstermobile" driving down the road. I was thinking, "Who the heck bought a new car and painted it for a dead product?".
Wasn't Netscape's talk back feature available in 1996 when Netscape Communicator 4.0 came out? That was certainly a "phone home problems" system, though you had to enable it first. I haven't seen much difference, from my perspective, between what Windows 2000/XP has and what Talk Back does.
I've wondered about this. Say you buy a large server or a Cisco router or something that costs a lot of money and has a support contract. If you buy the memory on your own for $60, does this void your support contract? i.e. will the company still support your hardware as long as the memory is in place?
1. Your game is tailored for the specific console; you assume all hardware is a constant. This is relatively safe, since this was exactly how everything worked until PlayStation 2 introduced backwards compatibility in consoles. No other console has ever been backwards compatible*.
(* = We're not considering re-releases or re-designs of consoles, e.g. Intellivision I/II/III, NES, NES II, Atari 2600's and JR model. Handhelds [gameboy] doesn't count here)
2. If a console is going to come out with a new generation that claims to be backwards compatible, they need to be 100% true compatible; this means speed, etc. If they can't provide that through emulation, then they can't claim to be 100% compatible. What I mean in this is that some games might rely on the idea that their CPU is so loaded down with some operation, that the game will take a certain amount of time to do the job, and it fits the timing of the game. Having this occur any faster would be like a brief fast-foward in game time.
Of course, these are just my opinions. I prefer that games follow the correct APIs instead of doing hacks; it allows them to be usable on later iterations of machines. In the PC world, take a look at the old DOS game Alleycat, and how it was properly coded to run with any hardware (works just as well on a 4.77MHz 8086 as it does on my 2.4GHz P4-Xeon) versus how Hard Hat Mack, of the same era, is unplayable. Consider also numerous Amiga games that showed disregard for the RKM programming specs when designed for MC68000 chips, and then were unplayable on later Amiga machines.
Frankly, this is good not only for P2P by showing a legitimate use, but also for the company distributing the software. First, the company can host it in one place and foots the bill for the bandwidth doing that. Next, someone downloads it to their machine. As long as the consumer keeps the download on their machine (which probably happens more than expected), future downloads can be made from that person's machine, using that person's bandwidth instead of the company's. Quite a good plan, actually. If anything, the company at least saves some percentage of download bandwidth, since at least a handful of them will not be on their bill.
If this proves successful, it will only help keep P2P around for a lot longer than the RIAA could hope.
I'm pretty sure that I've seen more than this, but you can find several tracks between Zappa, Lennon and Ono on the 1992 compilation album "Playground Psychotics".
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I didn't realize that talking about ant holes was so prohibited. I'll remember in the future to keep mum about my ant farms!
What, you mean like someone's sister who thought video games were stupid boy things 20 years ago now want to get a computer just for "The Sims"?
You'd be surprised, however, how much people of the fairer sex tend to like You Don't Know Jack or something like Space Channel 5.
My roomates and I plugged an Atari 2600 into the TV and ran the audio out into the stereo and cranked this thing up with Space Invaders and Combat.
Man, the earthquake that ensued from the fat rumbling bass produced by these games on the 2600 certainly pissed off many a house mate and neighbor.
Maybe now with new playfields, its time to construct something like that again. Unfortunately, college was a long time ago, and now I have to be respective of my neighbors :-(
OK, silly story over.
I wish I could still use my old Commodore 1960 monitor (Amiga), but I think there is a cold solder joint that went bad, and I've been too lazy to fix it myself, and a $60 bench charge on a monitor that most places probably can't get parts for isn't appetizing.
I have been learning how to program the Palm OS for the last few weeks now (O'Reilly book V2 that covers v4.0), and I would imagine that an application would somehow register a callback that would be activated on a certain frequency. Again, I could be wrong, and yes, this isn't true multitasking, but it does allow for other apps to work in the background.
Yeah, and its also the reason that EZPass is in financial trouble. For some reason, they have trouble collecting on the "deadbeats". I'm not sure how it is really happening, but I've read something on it several months ago.
You don't have to take my word for it, and unfortunately I have no URL for you :-(
Yeah, I'm more or less over the event, I've talked about it 1000s of times (literally, not figuratively), but there are some images I will have trouble with for years to come.
Regardless, I want to see this game get released some day :-)
The game works with the typical FPS keyboard layout (ASDW/ALT/SPACE/Mouse). However, whenever you were walking forward (holding down 'W') and then wanted to jump (alt key), Windows XP would beep and then bring you back to the desktop. You could switch back to the game by clicking on the task bar, but this problem bugged me, since it made the game unplayable.
I opened a ticket with Ubi Soft's tech support, and I was told to do the "get latest drivers" routine. Did that. Still didn't work. Their solution? Remap the keyboard. For those of you that play FPS games, you know the layout I described is the most sensible way of doing it, unless you want to shift everything on your desk and use the number pad.
I was appaled by Ubi Soft's lack of an acknowledgement of a problem in their software and refusal to fix the issue. I vowed never to buy another product from them again.
(ok, my rant is done)
I have faith that SOMEONE in the government will see the absurdity of this request and will stop it before it gets too far.
I do remember that there were a few demo programs written in it that were included on the Amiga Basic disk. Man, they were embarrassing speed wise.
Actually, I think the only difference was that when you lost in the arcade version, you'd kick a can or something, which didn't happen on the NES version. But thats it.
Of course, this is all IMHO.
However, I'll disagree about the Microphone argument. The original Famicom had one, the N64 did, and the Dreamcast did (others, I don't know). As far as I know, the Famicom never used it. I never heard of the N64 one, but at least with the Dreamcast it was used in a few games. Sure, it could add a lot to a game, but there are two things that prevented its use:
My case in point: Seaman on the Dreamcast. This game actually used the microphone for voice recognition, not just transmission of your sampled voice to someone elses' computer. While it did an amazing job for a machine with the specs of the Dreamcast, it still wasn't perfect.
Basically, I don't knock microphones; they're just not quite mature yet. Think of them, in the present, as a hint of what we'll probably see in 10 years.
The World Financial Center in New York City used to run their kiosk screens (hanging from the ceiling, announcing events and promotions) on (probably) and Amiga 1000. This was from the time they were opened (around 1986) until around 1998/1999, when the screens were constantly showing Guru Meditation screens (Amiga ROM 1.3). After a few weeks of this, the machine was upgraded to (I imagine) a PC. I imagine the person who knew how to maintain the Amiga was no longer on board, so they couldn't find anyone to fix it. I should have stepped in :-)
Also still have the habit of punching in babelfish.altavista.digital.com as well.
Maybe I should change that habit... oh wait, I already did.. its "google.com".
I think the whole thing is a stupid idea right now anyway. These things just aren't selling. At J&R in New York City, they had several of these on display. Besides being technological curiosities, they have slowly been disappearing from the display counters because they just aren't moving.
I think the only way these things will survive is being a hybrid laptop; i.e. there are some models that the screen can swing around (much like the Sony Clie` PDAs) so that you can use it as a regular laptop, or twist it around to be a tablet. Just looks to fragile to be practical, however.
From a crusty old-sk00l gamer:
Atari 2600, ColecoVision, Intellivision.
If you want to add more to the supported platforms of the time, add in the C64, Apple II, Atari 8-bits, Odyssey 2. The big software houses at the time, if they were producing for both consoles and computers, would most likely support 4 or 5 of the 7 I listed above.
True, the computers aren't consoles, but the market at the time didn't limit itself to just consoles. The licensing of major titles (read: arcade games such as Donkey Kong) would be separate for computer and console (many a legal battle on this front). Today, you have at most 5 platforms being supported (Xbox, GC, PS2, PC, Mac).
If you haven't seen this week's new episode of South Park, you might want to catch it on Comedy Central. Basicaly, there is a stab at the music industry in general. Cartman starts a Christian rock band just to exploit it for the money (calling the music simple and bad), and a "ghost of Christmas present" of sorts shows the kids that because they downloaded a song, certain musicians won't be buying their 3rd gold plated Rolls Royce. Or something to that effect.
Not the best episode they've done, but certainly an open statement to the RIAA.
In other words, what makes the iPod the "gold standard" over all the others which seem to have similar specs?
I was looking at Broadway and 50th Street yesterday afternoon, and saw a "Napstermobile" driving down the road. I was thinking, "Who the heck bought a new car and painted it for a dead product?".
Thought someone might find that interesting...
Wasn't Netscape's talk back feature available in 1996 when Netscape Communicator 4.0 came out? That was certainly a "phone home problems" system, though you had to enable it first. I haven't seen much difference, from my perspective, between what Windows 2000/XP has and what Talk Back does.
Check the contracts....
Yes, you're right. I completely forgot about the 7800. And what a difference those extra 12? pins made.
1. Your game is tailored for the specific console; you assume all hardware is a constant. This is relatively safe, since this was exactly how everything worked until PlayStation 2 introduced backwards compatibility in consoles. No other console has ever been backwards compatible*.
(* = We're not considering re-releases or re-designs of consoles, e.g. Intellivision I/II/III, NES, NES II, Atari 2600's and JR model. Handhelds [gameboy] doesn't count here)
2. If a console is going to come out with a new generation that claims to be backwards compatible, they need to be 100% true compatible; this means speed, etc. If they can't provide that through emulation, then they can't claim to be 100% compatible. What I mean in this is that some games might rely on the idea that their CPU is so loaded down with some operation, that the game will take a certain amount of time to do the job, and it fits the timing of the game. Having this occur any faster would be like a brief fast-foward in game time.
Of course, these are just my opinions. I prefer that games follow the correct APIs instead of doing hacks; it allows them to be usable on later iterations of machines. In the PC world, take a look at the old DOS game Alleycat, and how it was properly coded to run with any hardware (works just as well on a 4.77MHz 8086 as it does on my 2.4GHz P4-Xeon) versus how Hard Hat Mack, of the same era, is unplayable. Consider also numerous Amiga games that showed disregard for the RKM programming specs when designed for MC68000 chips, and then were unplayable on later Amiga machines.
My two cents. Take 'em or leave 'em.
If this proves successful, it will only help keep P2P around for a lot longer than the RIAA could hope.
I'm pretty sure that I've seen more than this, but you can find several tracks between Zappa, Lennon and Ono on the 1992 compilation album "Playground Psychotics".