NONE of these machines even had a standard floppy drive marketed as an option
I assume by "standard" you mean MS-DOS compatible. The Atari 8-bits' drives (for example) were all standard 5.25" models, though this is still of limited use unless the magnetic tracks/data its drives write can be read by non-Atari 5.25" drives.
Actually, IIRC the XF551 (the final official Atari 8-bit drive) had an interface that could support other mechanisms, assuming that the DOS you were using also supported that.
and to prevent them from being inserted on "side b" since the heads wrote across the entire width of the tape at once (making the tapes 256kbyte "single sided" media in a sense).
Ah, I see. I guess they could also have done this by recording a periodic signal that when played backwards on the wrong track (i.e. tape upside down) would have invoked a user warning. But I guess the physical thing is easier, doesn't waste space, and lets them sell their "special" tapes!
Not only that, the data transfer rate for a Coleco TAPE was faster than for a Commodre 64 DISK;-)
And I can walk faster than most 110-year-olds can sprint;-) Yeah, I've heard that the C64 drives were *not* fast, due to a VIC-20 compatibility kludge in the design that didn't actually work anyway.
I don't know of any software similar to what I've seen for Speccy's and such, where you take a WAV of the tape and process it into the binary image, for the ADAM, but it should be feasible.
I was going to agree (since you say that they were effectively just chrome cassettes). They'd have to be transferred at standard audio speeds (not a problem unless you're impatient) if you were using an ordinary deck, and I assume that this would reduce their frequency to audible range. (If you were to play them back at the "usual" higher speeds, there may be problems with cables, digitising hardware and such only designed with 20-20000Hz audio signals in mind).
As I said, I was going to agree, but one obvious problem is that the Adam uses the full width of the tape and most standard audio equipment *doesn't*- so even assuming that the Adam used a similar track layout to audio cassettes (four tracks), you could still only do two at a time, you'd have to reverse two, and then sync them.
If the track layout was even more non-standard, you'd be totally out of luck, I guess!
The tape drives were a bit of a boneheaded idea
I think they were an okay idea for a time when floppies were still expensive. And as you suggest, at least they exploited some sort of standard. No worse than other disk alternatives like Sinclair's ZX Microdrive in that respect. And I'd rather (e.g.) Atari had been cleverer with *their* tape drives. Like Commodore's and everyone else's, these were effectively just ordinary cassette players adapted for data use (i.e. standard speed, had to push down play to load, had to manually REW/FFWD yourself). Thing is, the Atari tape deck was stereo anyway- it supported data on one track and audio on another, even while loading. But they didn't support two tracks of data to double the loading speed- that's an improvement that could still have been built around a standard audio cassette mechanism, and therefore wouldn't have increased costs much.
BTW, you're absolutely right that the lack of formatting sounds appalling. The cynic in me thinks that this was a convenient way for Coleco to sell people more tapes...
so now you're left with all your Amiga stuff on unreadable floppies and just a bit of old schoolwork that is reasonably easy to access without a working Amiga.
Yeah, but I have a working Amiga, and I transferred all my own stuff.:) (Didn't bother with the games, I'm sure I can get the disk images on the net if I ever want them). Even if my Amiga was toast, I'm sure I could grab a secondhand Amiga or (more conveniently) find someone
Neither would I, which is why I Googled it first;-) Googled what *exactly* first? The strength of this proof (or non-proof) depends on what and how you searched. Your query would have to be chosen such that we could be sure (with almost complete certainty) that if such a case *did* exist then it would be found by that query- and then we could be equally certain that its non-appearance would signal that there was no such case.
Personally, I think it's improbable; it's just not something I'd be that sure about!
Thanks to you (and sibling posters) for pointing out my false assumtions about digital watches:) What's really going to bake your noodle is that apparently many of the early arcade games such as Pong, Computer Space and so on didn't have CPUs either, and were built in a similar way. They used discrete logic components to create what were essentially finite state machines. By their fundamental design they were not reprogrammable and could only be used for one purpose.
(Anyone else, feel free to correct me if anything I've said here is misleading or downright incorrect).
For those who have never had the pleasure of writing Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code , there is no testing keyword I wouldn't bet my life on that... there were countless different and incompatible versions of BASIC from the 1970s until the 1990s. Virtually every personal (in the generic sense) or home computer had a version that was specific to that machine to some degree.
Remember that- unlike most modern languages- BASIC's facilities were usually more "hardwired" (and less flexible). For example "PRINT" (whose equivalents in C would be functions) was a "keyword". So was "SOUND".... well, it was on my Atari, but that's a straightforward example of how nonstandard BASIC was. The ZX Spectrum had "BEEP" instead, and apparently the Oric 1 also had a "ping" keyword. No, not the Internet utility, it was a keyword specifically for making a "ping" sound.
IIRC some computers' BASICs had a "TRACE" keyword (a sort of primitive predecessor to gdb and the like). So would I be so sure that some BASIC somewhere didn't have a "TESTING" keyword? I would not.
Putting the dish on the roof would reduce latency too since the signals don't have to travel as far. Satellite radio signals travel at nearly 300 km per millisecond through vacuum or the near-vacuum of Earth's atmosphere. So you'd need to put your dish 150 km off the ground to get even a 1 ms reduction in round-trip time to and from the satellite. Did anyone just hear a massive Whoooooooosh?!
I think it must have been the satellite going past.
Tepples replies:-
No, it can't have been the satellite going past! There's no air in space to transmit the sound and even if there was, it probably wouldn't carry that far. :)
it's not like writing your own string library is any monumental task. Your string library still looks somewhat clumsy, particularly for small projects. And I note that your functions only concatenate two strings; what if you want to stick a few together at once? (Yes, you could use var-args, but what's the checking like on that)
What if you want to append a number to a string? Given that standard C doesn't support overloading, would you have to write a new *differently-named* method? It'd be a nuisance to have to keep track of all the different methods when (e.g.) PHP can simply do the whole lot using the '+' operator.
it's a scripting language, it makes no sense to resemble C in any respect. Wrong; it makes perfect sense to use C-style syntax. That's almost certainly the most common syntax by far, used as it is in C++, Java, JavaScript, C# and many other languages.
Visual Basic's syntax is different, and I had to learn this all over again when I used it for the first time, because I'm used to C-influenced languages. The mental context switch required and my tendency to keep inadvertantly using C-style syntax (leading to syntax errors) is a PITA.
I wouldn't mind if the VB syntax was nice to begin with, but it's not. It's inelegant and clunky; probably not bad considering it was derived from BASIC, but still inelegant and clunky. It probably got that way because it mutated from BASICs MS-DOS/PC programmers were familiar with, carrying them along with it. However, if (like me) you're not already used to that flavour of BASIC and haven't even used BASIC for years, it's not easy to use at all. It's not even that much like the old BASICs I used to use. Though this is getting away from the main point...
There may be valid reasons for using a different syntax, but those should reflect underlying differences in the structure/approach of the language (even Perl syntax is somewhat C-flavoured in various respects). However, using a fundamentally different syntax just for the sake of it is a Bad Idea. PHP is easier to use because it has a C-derived syntax.
Actually that's false. When the Amstrad first came out, 5 1/4" drives were the norm. 3 1/2" drives were available but expensive and not at all the standard. That's true, but it's not the point I was making. Blu Ray is still a minority product at the present time, and ordinary DVD remains the standard. However, we *do* know that if hi-def discs take off, then the standard is certainly NOT going to be HD-DVD! Even if Toshiba hadn't thrown in the towel, it was clear a while back that HD-DVD was *not* going to win.
My understanding is that the major players in the industry had already moved towards the 3.5" standard by the time Amstrad's drive system came out.
Unfortunately for Amstrad the Sony format was the one that won-out in the PC world From what I've heard, Amstrad chose the 3" format because they got a job lot of the drives cheap- I assume because it had already clearly lost the format war. So the use of a nonstandard drive was probably intentional and down to Amstrad being cheapasses rather than being unfortunately caught out.
Course, I'm willing to bet that after having to track down and then shell out for the rare (and hence expensive) 3" discs, the owners didn't appreciate the choice.
Amstrad put the disk drive on the Spectrum after they bought the company but the Spectrum was already in its death throes. I doubt they sold more than a few dozen of them. Despite it having dated very badly since its launch (IMHO, and even with the 128K enhancements), the Spectrum was still doing reasonably well around that time.
IMHO, the problem with the +3 was that it was basically just too expensive and came out around the same time (late 1987) that the Atari ST came down to 299 pounds.
The Spectrum's appeal was that it was relatively cheap and had a vast, established base of tape-based software sold through countless shops and copied/exchanged via every playground in the land. The +3 cost (according to Wikipedia) 249 pounds when it came out... I remember it selling at its later price, 199 pounds, but that's still closer to ST territory than that of the original Spectrum. Who'd want a +3; essentially a 128K Spectrum with a nonstandard floppy drive and little software, when you could buy an Atari ST, even if it was still a bit more expensive?
Z80? That's the CPU my Timex-Sinclair 1000 used. I didn't know the Amstrads still used it in 1987! 1987 was the year I bought the (used, of course) IBM-XT and started hacking its hardware. Well, the CPC series wasn't originally released then; it first came out in mid-1984. Even in the US, the 8-bit C64 was still being sold in 1987, I'm sure! (And even the NES which may have eclipsed the 8-bit home computers in some countries was itself 8-bit!)
That having been said, the CPC was probably one of the final "all-new" 8-bit formats to be released. The market was already pretty well established, with the ZX Spectrum and C64 already entrenched, so the CPC did reasonably considering. The first "next generation" 16-bits, the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga (which were popular in Europe) came out in 1985, although they were too expensive to displace the 8-bit formats until the price came down a few years later. The 8-bit market eventually went into terminal decline around the turn of the decade, although games were still being sold in mainstream shops until around 1991/92.
Anyway, Amstrad launched their first 16-bit PC clone around 1986 (arguably the first really affordable and successful PC clone in the UK), so although the CPC was still doing quite well, it wasn't Amstrad's "leading edge" at the time.
They also sold Z80-based word processors well into the 1990s, but those were never meant to compete with mainstream computers; they were sold to people who would otherwise have bought a typewriter.
OTOH, I don't know why they decided to launch an enhanced CPC in 1990- three years previously, it'd have been a good move, but it's not like anyone was going to be really interested in the machine, let alone support the new features when the 8-bit market was clearly on its last legs.
I was laughed at by Commodore and Apple fans for going with "toy" Coleco and Atari computers, but in a sense I got the last laugh, because I ended up with computers that had amongst the most easily recoverable media of all those computers of that era. The Coleco one is a bit disingenuous though, because the floppy discs you used weren't the standard method of storage that came with it- that was the tape drives which were very non-standard and (you state) not very reliable!
I've heard that although the system was derived from the standard audio cassette, the special tapes used weren't identical- perhaps they used a nonstandard tape formulation?- and the drives ran at a higher speed than ordinary audio cassettes. So I don't know if it would be possible to even transfer the signal by digitising it via a standard cassette player. If that wasn't possible, I suspect that the *only* way to get data off them would be to find a working Adam and transfer it via some sort of hookup cable to a modern computer.
As for the ST... yeah, the IBM compatibility was a nice touch, but I'd rather have the extra storage space (880K vs. 720K) of my Amiga floppies. You could read and write PC discs on the Amiga if you wanted to (I did this with schoolwork and years later used it to transfer a limited number of Amiga files to my PC).
The Chinese stopped being communists in everything but name twenty years ago. Heck, they don't even have a social saftey net worth talking about. That is why everyone in china puts so much pressure on their kids to succeed. In China, your kid's job is your pension. America is more "communist" than China. It's been said that present-day China is in truth the world's first example of a mature fascist society- and I would assume that this meant fascism in its original sense, which was strongly corporatist.
It's also been said (something like) China went straight from communism to corporatism, bypassing democracy.
The main problem I see is that they are using mostly unlicensed copy of windows That's a problem from whose point of view? Not Cuba's, so they likely wouldn't care.
Any targeted security risks from using a closed-source unaudited OS like Windows (via US-government-endorsed backdoors) would likely apply whether it was paid for or not. Ditto lock-in issues, etc etc
At $800 for a new PC, I think that Cubans are going to resort to doing what they did with cars; taking pre-revolution ones and keeping them going for 40-50 years.
Unfortunately, I think they'll have trouble getting the valves/tubes for those old 1950s models, and they probably won't be of a high enough spec to run the latest malware.
I was annoyed when I upgraded to Hairy Hardon Sounds more like you're talking about puberty than Ubuntu.
Yeah, the "Hairy Hardon" upgrade can be damn annoying until you get used to it, and it's always forced through- you don't have any choice in the matter.
Plus, there's no downgrade option. Though come to think of it, I doubt anyone would want to...
The Atari 2600 version is essentially the same as the Atari computer version. It's a static screen If it's true that the 2600 version has a static background, then I really don't see how you can say that it's "essentially" (or even remotely) the same as the 400/800 version.
Part of the reason that the home computer version was so impressive for its tiime was the full-depth 3D effect, with objects and background "stars" moving past in response to your ship's movements (also in full 3D) as if seen through a moderately wide-angle lens. It was anything but static!
The only way that what you say makes sense is if you were referring to the absolute core gameplay minus the pretty graphics, but I really don't see how you could replace the original Star Raider's 3D with static backgrounds without fundamentally altering the playing style of the game.
(BTW, thought I'd replied to this earlier, but the post apparently didn't go through).
In case anyone doesn't get it, the above is a reference to the Stanley Kubric film 2001: A Space Odyssey If we're talking about self-healing computers, surely the one in Superman III is a better example. Anyone remember that?
It could heal itself and (most memorably) even turn one of the baddies into a robot to defend itself, but its graphics were on the level of an Atari 2600.:-/
if you like Star Raiders, you should look up the Atari 800 version of it. It's very much improved over the 2600 version. Uh, the "much improved" Atari 800 version was actually the original! It came out in 1979 (or at least is copyright dated then) and was one of the first games for the system.
Although the 2600 itself was the older system, its version of Star Raiders came out much later (1982 according to Wikipedia). I haven't played that version, but given how primitive the 2600 hardware is compared to the 400/800, I'd give credit to *anyone* who could get a passably faithful version of Star Raiders on that system, regardless of the limitations.
Anyway, the 1979 original was an incredible feat for its time. Yes, it was running on (what was then) state of the art hardware, and of course more polished games came along later (for both the 400/800 and other 8-bit machines). But by the standards of its contemporaries, it's just incredible- relatively advanced "full" 3D graphics, basic strategy elements and (for what is basically a shoot-'em-up) real hunter-killer depth to the fighting itself. Yet running in 16K (8K ROM + 8K RAM) on new and relatively unknown hardware.
This was just a year after Space Invaders had first been released, and it wasn't even running on "arcade" hardware, but a home system (albeit an expensive one).
Yes, Elite probably had more depth (and deserves credit for its influence too), but that came out five years later, during which time both the market and experience in developing software on the 8-bit machines had improved massively. Look at the first and last games to be released for a long-lived console and you'll see a massive difference in technical quality- experience with the system and techniques is just as important as having advanced hardware.
Star Raiders came out around three years before the Commodore 64 was even released!
Get yourself a cheap phone from a few years ago off ebay. Decent battery life and a clear display. Hardly worth the hassle of eBay unless you want a specific old model, to be honest. Brand new phones with a similar specification to (e.g.) the old Nokia 3310 are still being sold today, but as bottom-of-the-range models. These cost next to nothing, even on pay-as-you-go (actually, I suspect that most of them *are* sold on pay-as-you-go to people who just want a cheap, no-frills phone "just in case").
If they state their own article itself as the only reference they have, isn't that useful information in and of itself? This just tells people that the article is effectively pulled direct out of someones head. Did you read the article? That wasn't what they said. (I wonder who the idiot was that modded you up as well).
The problem is very simple:-
1) Some random idiot adds the "fact" that "Rob Malda is made entirely of Grape Nuts" to a WP article.
2) Then some people at someothersite.com use WP to research their own article on Malda. They (unwittingly) repeat the bogus fact.
3) Finally, someone working on "improving" the WP article attempts to verify and cite all the questionable uncited facts. Lo and behold, someothersite.com has an article which states that Rob Malda is indeed made of Grape Nuts. Someothersite.com's article (not Wikipedia) is used as the reference for this incorrect information.
I agree; legally, uploading the unpublished games may be the worse of the two, but morally (even after twenty years), I'd say that publishing the emails was more questionable.
You can argue legalities, and expectations of privacy *with the benefit of hindsight*, but at the time it probably would have been reasonable to assume that these emails would not have been published in public; for professional reasons if nothing else.
The descriptions bested anything Level 9 could do That's not entirely fair. As Level 9's releases were available on tape as well as disk (they were a British company, and the UK market was primarily tape driven), they were restricted to what they could fit into the computer's memory. Infocom games only came out on disk, so they could load things as required.
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In which case, having your support inquiry routed to the US would probably suck. Those idiots can't even speak proper Hindi!
NONE of these machines even had a standard floppy drive marketed as an option
I assume by "standard" you mean MS-DOS compatible. The Atari 8-bits' drives (for example) were all standard 5.25" models, though this is still of limited use unless the magnetic tracks/data its drives write can be read by non-Atari 5.25" drives.
Actually, IIRC the XF551 (the final official Atari 8-bit drive) had an interface that could support other mechanisms, assuming that the DOS you were using also supported that.
and to prevent them from being inserted on "side b" since the heads wrote across the entire width of the tape at once (making the tapes 256kbyte "single sided" media in a sense).
Ah, I see. I guess they could also have done this by recording a periodic signal that when played backwards on the wrong track (i.e. tape upside down) would have invoked a user warning. But I guess the physical thing is easier, doesn't waste space, and lets them sell their "special" tapes!
Not only that, the data transfer rate for a Coleco TAPE was faster than for a Commodre 64 DISK ;-)
And I can walk faster than most 110-year-olds can sprint ;-) Yeah, I've heard that the C64 drives were *not* fast, due to a VIC-20 compatibility kludge in the design that didn't actually work anyway.
I don't know of any software similar to what I've seen for Speccy's and such, where you take a WAV of the tape and process it into the binary image, for the ADAM, but it should be feasible.
I was going to agree (since you say that they were effectively just chrome cassettes). They'd have to be transferred at standard audio speeds (not a problem unless you're impatient) if you were using an ordinary deck, and I assume that this would reduce their frequency to audible range. (If you were to play them back at the "usual" higher speeds, there may be problems with cables, digitising hardware and such only designed with 20-20000Hz audio signals in mind).
As I said, I was going to agree, but one obvious problem is that the Adam uses the full width of the tape and most standard audio equipment *doesn't*- so even assuming that the Adam used a similar track layout to audio cassettes (four tracks), you could still only do two at a time, you'd have to reverse two, and then sync them.
If the track layout was even more non-standard, you'd be totally out of luck, I guess!
The tape drives were a bit of a boneheaded idea
I think they were an okay idea for a time when floppies were still expensive. And as you suggest, at least they exploited some sort of standard. No worse than other disk alternatives like Sinclair's ZX Microdrive in that respect. And I'd rather (e.g.) Atari had been cleverer with *their* tape drives. Like Commodore's and everyone else's, these were effectively just ordinary cassette players adapted for data use (i.e. standard speed, had to push down play to load, had to manually REW/FFWD yourself). Thing is, the Atari tape deck was stereo anyway- it supported data on one track and audio on another, even while loading. But they didn't support two tracks of data to double the loading speed- that's an improvement that could still have been built around a standard audio cassette mechanism, and therefore wouldn't have increased costs much.
BTW, you're absolutely right that the lack of formatting sounds appalling. The cynic in me thinks that this was a convenient way for Coleco to sell people more tapes...
so now you're left with all your Amiga stuff on unreadable floppies and just a bit of old schoolwork that is reasonably easy to access without a working Amiga.
Yeah, but I have a working Amiga, and I transferred all my own stuff. :) (Didn't bother with the games, I'm sure I can get the disk images on the net if I ever want them). Even if my Amiga was toast, I'm sure I could grab a secondhand Amiga or (more conveniently) find someone
Personally, I think it's improbable; it's just not something I'd be that sure about!
(Anyone else, feel free to correct me if anything I've said here is misleading or downright incorrect).
Remember that- unlike most modern languages- BASIC's facilities were usually more "hardwired" (and less flexible). For example "PRINT" (whose equivalents in C would be functions) was a "keyword". So was "SOUND".... well, it was on my Atari, but that's a straightforward example of how nonstandard BASIC was. The ZX Spectrum had "BEEP" instead, and apparently the Oric 1 also had a "ping" keyword. No, not the Internet utility, it was a keyword specifically for making a "ping" sound.
IIRC some computers' BASICs had a "TRACE" keyword (a sort of primitive predecessor to gdb and the like). So would I be so sure that some BASIC somewhere didn't have a "TESTING" keyword? I would not.
I think it must have been the satellite going past.
Tepples replies:- No, it can't have been the satellite going past! There's no air in space to transmit the sound and even if there was, it probably wouldn't carry that far. :)
What if you want to append a number to a string? Given that standard C doesn't support overloading, would you have to write a new *differently-named* method? It'd be a nuisance to have to keep track of all the different methods when (e.g.) PHP can simply do the whole lot using the '+' operator. it's a scripting language, it makes no sense to resemble C in any respect. Wrong; it makes perfect sense to use C-style syntax. That's almost certainly the most common syntax by far, used as it is in C++, Java, JavaScript, C# and many other languages.
Visual Basic's syntax is different, and I had to learn this all over again when I used it for the first time, because I'm used to C-influenced languages. The mental context switch required and my tendency to keep inadvertantly using C-style syntax (leading to syntax errors) is a PITA.
I wouldn't mind if the VB syntax was nice to begin with, but it's not. It's inelegant and clunky; probably not bad considering it was derived from BASIC, but still inelegant and clunky. It probably got that way because it mutated from BASICs MS-DOS/PC programmers were familiar with, carrying them along with it. However, if (like me) you're not already used to that flavour of BASIC and haven't even used BASIC for years, it's not easy to use at all. It's not even that much like the old BASICs I used to use. Though this is getting away from the main point...
There may be valid reasons for using a different syntax, but those should reflect underlying differences in the structure/approach of the language (even Perl syntax is somewhat C-flavoured in various respects). However, using a fundamentally different syntax just for the sake of it is a Bad Idea. PHP is easier to use because it has a C-derived syntax.
My understanding is that the major players in the industry had already moved towards the 3.5" standard by the time Amstrad's drive system came out.
Course, I'm willing to bet that after having to track down and then shell out for the rare (and hence expensive) 3" discs, the owners didn't appreciate the choice.
IMHO, the problem with the +3 was that it was basically just too expensive and came out around the same time (late 1987) that the Atari ST came down to 299 pounds.
The Spectrum's appeal was that it was relatively cheap and had a vast, established base of tape-based software sold through countless shops and copied/exchanged via every playground in the land. The +3 cost (according to Wikipedia) 249 pounds when it came out... I remember it selling at its later price, 199 pounds, but that's still closer to ST territory than that of the original Spectrum. Who'd want a +3; essentially a 128K Spectrum with a nonstandard floppy drive and little software, when you could buy an Atari ST, even if it was still a bit more expensive?
That having been said, the CPC was probably one of the final "all-new" 8-bit formats to be released. The market was already pretty well established, with the ZX Spectrum and C64 already entrenched, so the CPC did reasonably considering. The first "next generation" 16-bits, the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga (which were popular in Europe) came out in 1985, although they were too expensive to displace the 8-bit formats until the price came down a few years later. The 8-bit market eventually went into terminal decline around the turn of the decade, although games were still being sold in mainstream shops until around 1991/92.
Anyway, Amstrad launched their first 16-bit PC clone around 1986 (arguably the first really affordable and successful PC clone in the UK), so although the CPC was still doing quite well, it wasn't Amstrad's "leading edge" at the time.
They also sold Z80-based word processors well into the 1990s, but those were never meant to compete with mainstream computers; they were sold to people who would otherwise have bought a typewriter.
OTOH, I don't know why they decided to launch an enhanced CPC in 1990- three years previously, it'd have been a good move, but it's not like anyone was going to be really interested in the machine, let alone support the new features when the 8-bit market was clearly on its last legs.
I've heard that although the system was derived from the standard audio cassette, the special tapes used weren't identical- perhaps they used a nonstandard tape formulation?- and the drives ran at a higher speed than ordinary audio cassettes. So I don't know if it would be possible to even transfer the signal by digitising it via a standard cassette player. If that wasn't possible, I suspect that the *only* way to get data off them would be to find a working Adam and transfer it via some sort of hookup cable to a modern computer.
As for the ST... yeah, the IBM compatibility was a nice touch, but I'd rather have the extra storage space (880K vs. 720K) of my Amiga floppies. You could read and write PC discs on the Amiga if you wanted to (I did this with schoolwork and years later used it to transfer a limited number of Amiga files to my PC).
It's also been said (something like) China went straight from communism to corporatism, bypassing democracy.
Any targeted security risks from using a closed-source unaudited OS like Windows (via US-government-endorsed backdoors) would likely apply whether it was paid for or not. Ditto lock-in issues, etc etc
At $800 for a new PC, I think that Cubans are going to resort to doing what they did with cars; taking pre-revolution ones and keeping them going for 40-50 years.
Unfortunately, I think they'll have trouble getting the valves/tubes for those old 1950s models, and they probably won't be of a high enough spec to run the latest malware.
Yeah, the "Hairy Hardon" upgrade can be damn annoying until you get used to it, and it's always forced through- you don't have any choice in the matter.
Plus, there's no downgrade option. Though come to think of it, I doubt anyone would want to...
Though you'd have to watch out for (a) the police, and (b) the 1990s wanting for their drug back
Part of the reason that the home computer version was so impressive for its tiime was the full-depth 3D effect, with objects and background "stars" moving past in response to your ship's movements (also in full 3D) as if seen through a moderately wide-angle lens. It was anything but static!
The only way that what you say makes sense is if you were referring to the absolute core gameplay minus the pretty graphics, but I really don't see how you could replace the original Star Raider's 3D with static backgrounds without fundamentally altering the playing style of the game.
(BTW, thought I'd replied to this earlier, but the post apparently didn't go through).
It could heal itself and (most memorably) even turn one of the baddies into a robot to defend itself, but its graphics were on the level of an Atari 2600.
Although the 2600 itself was the older system, its version of Star Raiders came out much later (1982 according to Wikipedia). I haven't played that version, but given how primitive the 2600 hardware is compared to the 400/800, I'd give credit to *anyone* who could get a passably faithful version of Star Raiders on that system, regardless of the limitations.
Anyway, the 1979 original was an incredible feat for its time. Yes, it was running on (what was then) state of the art hardware, and of course more polished games came along later (for both the 400/800 and other 8-bit machines). But by the standards of its contemporaries, it's just incredible- relatively advanced "full" 3D graphics, basic strategy elements and (for what is basically a shoot-'em-up) real hunter-killer depth to the fighting itself. Yet running in 16K (8K ROM + 8K RAM) on new and relatively unknown hardware.
This was just a year after Space Invaders had first been released, and it wasn't even running on "arcade" hardware, but a home system (albeit an expensive one).
Yes, Elite probably had more depth (and deserves credit for its influence too), but that came out five years later, during which time both the market and experience in developing software on the 8-bit machines had improved massively. Look at the first and last games to be released for a long-lived console and you'll see a massive difference in technical quality- experience with the system and techniques is just as important as having advanced hardware.
Star Raiders came out around three years before the Commodore 64 was even released!
The problem is very simple:-
1) Some random idiot adds the "fact" that "Rob Malda is made entirely of Grape Nuts" to a WP article.
2) Then some people at someothersite.com use WP to research their own article on Malda. They (unwittingly) repeat the bogus fact.
3) Finally, someone working on "improving" the WP article attempts to verify and cite all the questionable uncited facts. Lo and behold, someothersite.com has an article which states that Rob Malda is indeed made of Grape Nuts. Someothersite.com's article (not Wikipedia) is used as the reference for this incorrect information.
I agree; legally, uploading the unpublished games may be the worse of the two, but morally (even after twenty years), I'd say that publishing the emails was more questionable.
You can argue legalities, and expectations of privacy *with the benefit of hindsight*, but at the time it probably would have been reasonable to assume that these emails would not have been published in public; for professional reasons if nothing else.