Classic Arcade Joystick Coat Hangers
Retro Arcade gaming has a charm that none of the technically advance and graphically rich modern games can match with; Arcade games were especially popular when we were young and they have remained the favorites after all these years.
The hangUP Arcade coat hooks are arcade joystick designed for the lovers of these classic retro games in order to bring back the old school spirit back to our lives. Most of us would nostalgically remember those days anyway, when we used to play those simple games with utmost concentration and relish. The hangUP coat hooks are hand crafted and only the most genuine arcade parts are used.
These Arcade Joystick coat hooks also come with a genuine black walnut finish which adds to the retro quality of the product.
You can go ahead and choose your favorite color and the number of ‘players’ you want on your cloth hangUP. The colors include black, red, blue, green, pink, yellow and even white to make the whole retro deal a riot of colors. The prices would depend on the number of hooks you would buy and hence, try buying and you would know how much you would need to spend.
Link: http://www.surface-tension.net/hangup-arcade-coat-hooks.php
From: http://www.walyou.com/blog/2009/04/09/classic-arcade-joystick-coat-...
The CCAG 2009 Show is Coming Soon!
Buy, sell, trade, play, and see classic video games, computers, peripherals, memorabilia, and more at the Classic Computing and Gaming Show (CCAG) on May 23, 2009 at the American Legion Hall--Clifton Post, 22001 Brookpark Rd, Fairview Park, OH from 12:00 PM - 8:00 PM. Vendors, clubs, and collectors will be displaying and selling their retrogaming and retrocomputing goods, from Pong and Atari to Nintendo, Apple and IBM to Commodore and everything in between with many set up for you to play with and explore. The cost for admission is $2.00 for adults and 1.00 for kids 12 and under. All paid admissions come with a FREE Special CCAG Edition Video Game Trader Guide, 3 FREE Chinese Auction
Coupons to win some cool and valuable prizes, FREE Arcade and Tournament Play and so much more. We have 4000+ square feet of space. Help us fill it all up!
Link: http://www.ccagshow.com/
From: http://www.atari.org/
Starcat Development looking for MOD musician for Atari Jaguar game
Long time Jag hobby developer Starcat Developments is looking for a skilled MOD Musician to create Audio for current and possibly future Atari Jaguar game projects. If you enjoy creating music using trackers in mod format, maybe even on an Atari machine, and you would like to help brining new games to the Jaguar, you are welcome to contact Starcat Developments. You help is highly appreciated.
To get in contact send your mail to: mail$contact@starcat-dev.de$
Link: http://www.larshannig.com/
From: http://www.atari.org/
New Phenix Web Site
Rodolphe says:
I'm happy to announce you that www.czuba-tech.com will be terminated in few days and a new web site is now active: www.powerphenix.com
It contains CT60, CTPCI and a link to OLD projects & designs (this last will be active in few days).
PLEASE : CHECK all web pages you created related to me AND :
- REPLACE old link by the new one.
- REMOVE my NAME and replace by powerphenix or rodolphe.
I do not want more to be matched by the search motors as private person.
Link: http://www.powerphenix.com/
From: http://www.atari.org/
Paradize today releases another utility for you
Simon Sunnyboy / Paradize writes:
The Paradize Rasterbar Generator is an utility for game and demo developers on the Atari ST/STE/TT and Falcon range of computers. It allows to prepare tables with color data. It helps with calculating smooth color gradients for the STE palette for use with nice Timer B raster routines.
Download The Paradize Rasterbar Generator http://files.dhs.nu/files_gfx/rastgen.zip
Visit the Paradize website http://paradize.atari.org/
From: http://www.dhs.nu/
Jeroen Tel live at Outline 2009
Havoc of Lineout writes:
A new addition to the line-up of artists performing at Outline 2009 was announced today. Legendary C-64 musician Jeroen Tel will be making his Outline debut in Eersel next month. Possibly being the most high profile composer of SID tunes, and also known for his highly acclaimed livesets, it is expected that the demand for Outline tickets will exceed the number of available places by an even wider margin than predicted previously. Book yours now- you know you want to! :)
Additionally Skrebbel of Matt Current writes: We are happy to announce that Jeroen Tel, aka WAVE / Maniacs of Noice has agreed to lighten up Outline 2009 with a kick-ass live performance! So if you have not done so yet, get yourself a ticket now!
Visit the Outline page http://www.outlinedemoparty.nl/
Visit the Maniacs Of Noise page http://www.maniacsofnoise.nl/
From: http://www.dhs.nu/
Commodore 64 Original Hardware Laptop
[Not quite Atari, but I have a fondness for the old C-64. Sue me. -Troy]
This project somehow has the distinction of being both the longest and fastest portable electronics project I have ever done. I originally started making a C64 laptop in the fall of 2006, and kept pecking away at it every so often. Finally, a few weeks ago, I said “screw it” and started over.
I redid everything in a week and a half - the shortest project ever. (The previous record hold was the Wii portable at 2 weeks) The goal this time was to make something that looked exactly like a computer from the early 80’s, yet in a new form. Including the color beige and texture.
Anyway, about the project itself. This is a fully functional Commodore 64 laptop using actual hardware, specifically the C64C motherboard which was one of the last and smallest revisions. It uses a Gamecube power supply in place of the original power brick.
For storage there’s a device called the 1541-III DTV to “emulate” a floppy drive using an SD card. (Click here for more info) The SD card is formatted FAT-32 so you can dump disk images on it using a PC, and read it with the C64 - pretty cool!
For more information, the making-of, pictures and video read the rest of the story below.
Link: http://benheck.com/04-05-2009/commodore-64-original-hardware-laptop
From: http://benheck.com/
Atari on Flickr
No, not a collection of pictures of games or box art. Apparently, this kid's name is Atari. I'm trying to decide it that's cool or not.
Link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gracinhamarco/3177017713/in/set-49571/
Hide your old pictures or get caught in the Dork Yearbook
Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and blogs. All of these things have made us exhibitionists in one way or another. Sure, you might think that there's no harm in sharing pictures of you rocking the Michael Jackson "Beat It" jacket since only your friends are going to see it. With so much going in the internets, no one is going to care about this little slice of your life.
Wrong. Things can go horribly wrong when you share old photos online if you're not safe about it. Take the tumblr site Dork Yearbook. The site is a compilation of unsuspecting kids photographed in horribly nerdy situations. Remember that picture you took when you got an Atari for your birthday? No? Dork Yearbook sure does. How about that snapshot your mom took of you during the 1994 Blockbuster World Championships? Surely no one would care to see that. Oh, but people care. They care enough to scan it and upload it to Dork Yearbook.
So let this be a lesson for anybody who has a Facebook photo album titled "for friends only." Make sure they are your friends, or else. You've been warned...
Link: http://dorkyearbook.com/post/94907852/matt-bloch-received-an-atari-...
From: http://www.examiner.com/x-4080-LA-Classic-Game-Examiner~y2009m4d10-...
Atari 2600 made history - without memory
It is an unmistakable artifact: the woodgrain deck with its bank of switches, the rubber-gripped joysticks with their single button in inviting PUSH ME orange, the primitive-looking games with their bright, blocky graphics and bleep-blorp sound effects.
But for authors Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, the Atari VCS – more popularly known as the Atari 2600 – was and is much more than a piece of '80s iconography; it is a unique piece of technology that changed the world forever.
In Racing the Beam, their new book which inaugurates the Platform Studies series at the MIT Press, they explore how the arcane inner workings of the once ubiquitous system shaped and informed the games that went on to shape and inform human culture.
"It's just a wonderfully weird computer," laughs Bogost, an associate professor at Georgia Tech and founder of game development house Persuasive Games. He is understating; by today's standards – and even by the standards of its day – the VCS hardware was bizarre in the extreme. With an internal RAM memory of 128 bytes – a tiny fraction of the memory required to, for example, store this sentence on a modern computer – and a capacity for accessing only 4K of cartridge data, it forced programmers to extremes of economy. On top of that, the minuscule RAM made the now-standard graphics technique – setting up a complete frame of the display and then sending it to the screen – impossible.
Instead, the VCS directly controlled a television's electron beam, drawing the screen line-by-line; all computing and game logic had to be accomplished in the microseconds-long intervals when the machine wasn't busy telling the TV what to do. This is the "racing the beam" of the book's title.
"It's astounding to the modern reader looking back," says Montfort, an assistant professor of digital media at MIT. "They just left off a wire from the cartridge interface, so you can only address 4K. Why did they do that? How could they just forget to give you the ability to address twice as much ROM? Well, in 1977, that would have been an outrageous question! They never anticipated that they would ever need to use more than two K."
It's this extreme level of technical limitation that makes the VCS such a compelling case study in how such hardware limitations affect the resulting software art.
"With any kind of creativity," says Bogost, "there are material constraints that the form of the medium imposes upon you. Those things are completely endemic to the creative process, they're things that artists and creators think about and know full well. But when it comes to the computer, that perspective has been lacking. There's nothing articulated in a way that can be passed down to people who are students of digital media."
Racing the Beam doesn't spare the technical details, but is always accessible and compelling. Downright thrilling at times, in fact, a sort of The Right Stuff of video game development.
As Montfort and Bogost examine five case-study games, the reader is treated to heroic tales of designers not only coping with the limitations of the VCS, not only transcending those limitations, but turning those limitations – the limits of a machine conceived for no higher purpose than replicating Pong on '70s rumpus-room TVs – into advantages, into avenues for innovation: witness David Crane pioneering the side-scrolling action/adventure game with Pitfall!; or Howard Scott Warshaw turning what was conceived as a straightforward adaptation of the arcade hit Star Castle into Yars' Revenge, a high-water mark for Atari game design that holds up beautifully almost 30 years later.
It's this kind of page-turning drama, this code-cowboy adventure, that Montfort and Bogost hope will propel platform studies.
"It's a way of looking at technology from a humanistic, cultural perspective, not just what's new and what's great and what's the next advance, which is pretty much what we get from the tech industry, the trade publications, the news media."
Link: http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/616857
