Category: Gaming

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Cooking With Code Gaming ToyBox

Random notes of infintesimal importance

Sorry about my radio silence this week. I’ve been spending more time than is conducive to sanity policing the Digital Press forums, which seem to explode with crazies that scream out for a ban (sometimes quite literally) this time every year. All I can figure is that school’s out – and judging by this year’s material so far, I’m going to say between the fourth and tenth grades – and these kids have nothing to do. You’d think if they were going to DP, maybe they’d spend some of their summer hours, oh, I don’t know, PLAYING VIDEO GAMES. Sheesh. Send the little gits my way, they can mow my lawn, and I’ll stay inside and play video games, how’s that? Oy vey. Some people’s kids.

Hopefully everyone digs the redesigned music review section. For an encore, I’m doing my level best to revamp the entire toy section by Flag Day! It’s madness, I tell you, madness! I’ve been dragging out copious quantities of action figures and re-photographing them lately, pulling each one out of their individual Star Cases (we’re talking the little mini ones that are big enough to accomodate one loose figure), taking a couple of pictures and then putting them back away, consciously aware in the back of my mind that this may be the last time these things come out to play before there’s a little boy running around the house. I’d say it’s like one last quick jog through my childhood, except that the stuff I’m taking new pictures of is all stuff that I’ve collected long since I passed the age where one’s expected to get rid of all one’s action figures. The toy section also has a finite number of articles to port over into the database from the old HTML pages; nothing on the order of hundreds and hundreds of music reviews. So I see it as a Feasible Task.

Speaking of staying inside and playing video games, I just got my copy of Stella Gets A New Brain, so maybe I can squeeze some 2600/Supercharger lovin’ into my near future.

I’ll alert the media the moment I have anything of substance to say here. 🙂 … Read more

Categories
Gadgetology Gaming

The amazing true story of Frankencable

I have a bad habit of collecting video game memorabilia, and new games, and then letting it sit for a while before I get around to testing it or playing it. This weekend saw a collision of two items that were put on the back-burner…and one of them didn’t survive!

Case in point: a shiny new Starpath Supercharger for the Atari 2600. For those not familiar with it, the Supercharger was a huge honkin’ thing you plugged into an Atari’s cartridge slot, with a headphone cable dangling out of it. The Supercharger is sort of like a co-processor that boosts the graphics and sound abilities of the machine (which, let’s face it, wouldn’t take much). Since it’s eating up the cartridge slot, the headphone jack connects to a tape player, and the games for the Supercharger are loaded from cassette (this was 1983 or so, don’t forget, though I remember that I already had disk drives on my screamin’ fast mighty 64K Franklin Ace 1000 computer).

Exhibit B: a Texas Instruments “data cassette” player that I got from the great haul of TI gadgetry right before Christmas ’04. Haven’t touched it ’till now…and found out it doesn’t work. There were leaky batteries in there that had corroded their way right out of the battery compartment…ouch! So that baby’s going to the curb.

So how was I going to get the data from the tape to the Supercharger? I stood right in front of the Atari for about 15 minutes, thinking up all kinds of maddeningly convoluted ways to accomplish this task. Methods that would require a quarter mile of wiring.

And then I realized that, three shelves above the Atari, if I stood straight up, I was staring right into the controls of the cassette deck that I use maybe about once a month or so to make a tape to listen to in the car.

Oops. Funny thing is, I had to be staring at that tape deck for that entire time before it hit me. Sometimes I think I’ve gotten so used to my own cheap-ass, Rube-Goldberg way of hooking my gear up that I’ve forgotten that Simple Is Good.

But not so fast – there was no way the dangly short headphone cable from the Supercharger was going to reach three shelves up. I grabbed a short RCA cable and enough adapters and barrels to clobber someone to death with, and created…Frankencable.

Frankencable, savior of the Supercharger

Fun Facts: Frankencable = large headphone jack-to-RCA adapter + 1 foot RCA cable + large headphone jack-to-RCA adapter + large headphone to small headphone adapter + small headphone “barrel” (female both ends) + Supercharger cable.

After all this, I thought, this game better knock my socks off. Well, the Supercharger adds a heap of processing power to the 2600, improving its graphics and sound considerably – the one Supercharger game I have brings its A-game up to the level of a poorly coded VIC-20 game! 😆 I need to track down a copy of Escape From The Mindmaster or Stella Gets A New Brain or something.

This concludes the story of Frankencable. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog entry, already in progress.… Read more

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Gaming Home Base

Game room redux

My garage-sale-hopping this weekend didn’t produce any games, but I did spend all of $13 on some decent shelves and some baby clothes. Shelves are a good thing: basically, everything of mine that’s in the little bedroom has got to come out of there to make way for baby. That means tons of books, more than a few knick-knacks, boxes full of stuff that’s just been stored in there…and quite a bit of it will probably get tossed out, or set aside for a yard sale of our own that I hope we’ll have the time and energy to hold between now and baby time. So I’ve got my eyes open for storage solutions for the stuff I don’t want to toss.

These two shelves aren’t a bad start.

Earl's game room… Read more

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Gaming Home Base Music Television & Movies

A brief, and yet still boring, look at my day

The past 24 hours or so are really supposed to have constituted my “day off,” a concept which increasingly is fading from the realm of the real and being relegated to the realm of the mythological. (I know, I know – just wait until the baby arrives and “8 hours of sleep” also fades into myth.)

I spent a good chunk of my day mowing the front yard – as much of it as I could – with a weed eater whose battery goes kersplat after about 45 minutes. We have yet to pick up the push mower that I lusted after a while back, as Jan’s vehicle had another breakdown Friday. If the vehicle’s not a lemon, then the place in Rogers we’ve had to keep taking it to is, at least in my mind, highly suspect. I can’t come up with words to express how much we don’t need this go-in-for-one-repair-and-three-other-things-that-were-fine-suddenly-fall-apart-the-next-week crap right now. It’s just getting extremely suspicious. If I do find out they’ve been screwing us, I’m not going to walk in there and kick their asses. I’m going to let her do it – and trust me, that’s gonna hurt a hell of a lot more. (I know of what I speak here.)

Anyway, I also sprayed some weed-killer along our fence rows, tried rather not-at-all-successfully to install a screen on yet another window, and got some fallen limbs and hedge clippings out of the yard. I even remembered to wear something on my head – which is now a crispy golden-brown – during most of this activity.

Late last night, I got a bit of gaming in, trying out a few old friends and testing out some new ones I hadn’t played before, and I’m working on the reviews of those games right now. I set up a new video segment to render on the Avid today every time I came inside to get a drink, go to the bathroom, install some new weed-eater cord, etc., so it was digesting all that raw footage and farting up video segments while I was working outside. (On second thought, there has simply got to be a better way to put that.)

During the height of the mid-day heat, I came inside for a bit to wash, dry and fold clothes, and watched the Doctor Who Keeper Of Traken DVD with the commentary on. It’s funny how art imitates life (I’m one of the few folks out there who openly admits to enjoying Matthew Waterhouse and his portrayal of Adric, but by the beginning of part 3 I was mentally willing him to shut the heck up and let the other folks get a word in edgewise) and how it doesn’t (it’s incredibly sad that Anthony Ainley only got to do this one DVD commentary before his death a few years ago, because he seems like such a nice fellow, a real old-school British showbiz gentleman). There’s a nice dedication to him at the end of part 4. I’ll have a full review up, maybe as soon as next weekend, time permitting.

Jan and I watched the Olivia de Havilland / Errol Flynn Robin Hood tonight. Man, I love that movie. Flynn’s just the quintessential cocky-bastard-with-a-heart-of-gold in that one, and everyone from Harrison Ford on down who’s essayed some variation on that basic archetype owes him at least a nod. For the record, I have yet to see a movie or TV take on the Robin Hood legend that I like better than this. Seriously. And let’s not get started on Korngold’s put-the-whole-brass-section-right-in-your-face score.

I’m so looking forward to the push mower – I could actually listen to something on my minidisc player while I’m mowing the yard. And hear it. I was trying to listen to the score from The Incredibles today while doing my weed-whacking (hey, you have to afford me at least one big beefy delusion of grandeur a day), and that music is not quiet and it is not subtle, and I could barely hear it.… Read more

Categories
Gaming Home Base

Singing the praises of pants

Anyone who’s hung out with me over the past five or so years knows that my wardrobe isn’t exactly…well…diverse. I’m down to a couple of pairs of shorts, three pairs of sweats that I seem to wear incessantly, and one pair of jeans. I haven’t had a pair of slacks that fit me in ages. Tonight we went out in search of some new pants for me, and damned if I didn’t fall in love with the pair that we wound up getting. I’m gonna be goin’ back for more of those puppies as soon as the present budget squeeze lets up (more things to fix on Jan’s vehicle – I’m starting to wonder how close were getting to having shelled out enough moulah to have bought the damn thing twice over now). In the meantime, to celebrate the finding of the aforementioned pants:
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/podcast/wideworldofpants.mp3]

The reason I wear the sweats so much is that they’re comfy. They don’t slide off me, they don’t cut me in half when I sit down, and they’re not too long. Once I get more than one pairs of these slacks…well, frankly, you probably won’t see the sweats too often. I also sliced all the foliage off my face today, and tomorrow it’s time for the bi-annual haircut. 😆 One of these days I might almost pass for normal.

Colecovision Super Action ControllerA lot of today was spent on housework, but I did get in about an hour or so of gaming time. A while back, I finally got a working Colecovision Super Action Controller, which, if you haven’t already seen or held one, is like an arcade joystick and keypad mounted atop the hilt of a sword which has four triggers on the hand grip. It looks like it should be bulky and diffifcult to manage, but it really is a great controller, and you’re just not getting the most out of a Colecovision without one. (When it comes to holding a controller for an extended period of time, I rate the default Colecovision joysticks lower than either the 5200 or Intellivision, two consoles whose controllers seem to wind up on everyone else’s pet hate lists.) Tomorrow I’m going to try to set aside a little bit of time to hook up the Roller Controller I got at the same time and get some Slither action going. Needless to say, you can expect some Colecovision reviews (and videos) pretty soon, as well as more Vectrex fun. Hopefully you’re enjoying watching/reading the reviews as much as I’m enjoying…uh…researching them. 😉

Almost done downloading The Shakespeare Code, so all in all, not a bad Saturday. Not bad at all.… Read more

Categories
Critters Gaming Should We Talk About The Weather?

Cold snap

I guess I really haven’t been paying attention to the forecast (amazing how my concentration on such matters slips when I’m not actively working around it), so stupid me, this cold snap caught me completely by surprise (and here I was thinking my friend Kevin was crazy for complaining about where spring went on the DP forums). To give you an idea: it’s already close to freezing outside, the wind is blowing ferociously outside, and Xena’s in for the night, something which hasn’t happened much recently. I’ve also got the game room lights on to warm the place up, and it’s time to play!

Or at least it was after I rewired the RF output for the Colecovision. A couple of nice trades have recently brought some Colecovision goodness into my collection that I haven’t gotten to try before, including working Super Action and Roller controllers, and a few games I hadn’t really expected to acquire anytime soon. But the console itself was out of commission…because I’ve got kittens who like to grab dangly cables and pull. One new RCA cable later, I’m basking in the 8-bit goodness (and badness – one game which shall remain nameless until the review pops up was a real stinker!). It’s becoming clear that, in light of the next new addition to the family, the current system is going to have to be rethought rather drastically, and rewired rather drastically too. One possibility I’m looking at is taking some more-or-less briefcase-sized plastic tubs with hinged lids that I already have, and setting things up so consoles or computers can be stored that way, and (barring adding on something like an expansion or voice module) left in the tubs and plugged into some kind of patch bay in the game room. Machines that get the least play will be stowed away like this, and only a few frequent flyers will be left out on the shelves as they are now.

It’s a sad day when even the game room’s gotta grow up a bit, but just think, I’ll eventually have someone else who might want to play a round or two with the old man. 😀… Read more

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Gaming Television & Movies Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Lotsa stuff to look at

Plenty of stuff for you to gawk at today…

I’ve started a “promo blog” for the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD project here. I’ve left room for comments, though I’m not expecting anyone to actually make any, and I can’t put my hand on my heart and say it’ll be updated more than once a week. 😆 I figured it’s about time to start beating the drum, and maybe getting a finger on the pulse of how many people are interested in the thing.

The unexpected “re-discovery” of a long-lost DVD of my 2003 demo reel has enabled me to add something to ye olde work blawg that I’ve wanted to add for ages, but thought was lost for good: several news packages that I edited a few years ago. Oddly enough, I found a second DVD which contained the same stuff, only with a running commentary that I had recorded in 2003. This version of my demo reel was a bit of a vanity piece – I made several copies and handed them out at CGE ’03 just in case I made any valuable contacts. I can brag just a little bit here – Howard Scott Warshaw, creator/producer/host of Once Upon Atari (and, oh yeah, designer of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, E.T. and Yars’ Revenge for the 2600), liked it quite a bit. I’ve included the commentaries here just for curiosity’s sake. All of the packages were actually slated with the reporter/photog credits and original airdates, so credit is given where credit is due. Hopefully the talent involved doesn’t mind me posting this stuff after all these years – they should be proud, because it’s some of their best work too. (All of the reporters involved have since moved on to bigger and better markets – coincidence? 😆 ) … Read more

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Critters Gaming Toiling In The Pixel Mines

In slightly less melancholy news…

To offset yesterday’s melancholy-fest a bit, some slightly lighter-hearted news…

Oberon: declawed
Oberon is home from the vet and recovering nicely. If there’s anything that poses even the slightest threat to his speedy recovery from being declawed, it’s…Olivia. Her buddy is back and she wants to play! Thus far he’s taken to curling up on a sofa and going to sleep to avoid having to run from her. Olivia’s been locked up in a bedroom a couple of times too, to keep her from annoying the poor little guy – from birthday girl to bad girl in just one week! Oberon is slow to pick up on a couple of other hints though – he’s run outside twice, though I’ve recovered him both times. I don’t know at what point it’s going to occur to him that he is now more or less completely defenseless. Looks like we need to invest in those expandable “baby barriers” now. 🙄

Also, in PDF DVD news: the recently-rediscovered widescreen theatrical Dig Dug commercial will be making an appearance. It’s going to need a little bit of cleaning up on the visual end, but I’m really jazzed about being able to include it. Just one more nifty item to add to the already insane amount of stuff that’s going to be crowding this project.

While we’re talking PDF DVD, let me ask you (since, if you’re reading this, chances are you’re one of the target audience for this thing) – how much dividing up is too much dividing up? The organizational structure of something like this can get to be overwhelming. How I’m looking at it right now is that there’ll be a main menu from which you’ll pick a year from which to start (1971-1986). Within each year will be a menu that lets you look for a specific item within that – i.e. you’d be able to browse a submenu within each year to go directly to whichever clip you want to see. The problem there is that, once you get into years like 1982 that are absolutely drenched with products, you’re potentially talking about a single-year menu with 100 items on it (spread mercifully over several menu “pages,” with likely 8-12 items per page). I wouldn’t normally even contemplate that, except for two things:

  1. We’re talking about marketing something to a hobby where people obsess over typefaces and catalog numbers on cart labels and release dates and creases in shrinkwrap. Yes, I can see that there would be a call for instant access to a specific game’s entry.
  2. I’m a big fan of random access media – it’s why we went from cassette tape to CD, after all. If we’re not going to use that, this whole thing might as well be on VHS tape.

Let me know what you think there. I can’t guarantee it’ll change my mind on what I’ve outlined above, but I can’t guarantee that it won’t either.

Since there’s no OVGE show in Tulsa this year (a more detailed announcement should be forthcoming from the show’s organizers in the weeks ahead), I’m aiming for the PDF DVD to debut at CGE 2007, where it’ll be available from the Packrat Video Games booth. Whether or not the ones sold there will have any kind of special packaging or other whatsits, I simply haven’t decided yet – I’m more concerned with getting the editing finished at the moment.

Meanwhile, for those still toiling in the pixel mines…I couldn’t help but notice that the credibility of the Arkansas TV News Blog took a big hit, and right out in the open too. I visit it about once a week or so, but I’ve never felt compelled to post a comment there, because so much of the discussion there seems to descend into a pissing match between employees of rival TV stations, with just a dash of slander for extra flavor. Though I’ll admit that the World Of Warcraft spam right in the middle of this particular entry (in case it’s deleted: there’s a comment right in the midst of all the debunking that basically says “world of warcraft world of warcraft” over and over again, each iteration being a link to something different) adds a surreal bit of “calm the beef min” style comedy to the proceedings. There was a time when the ARTVNB was a useful, if slightly testy, way to keep one’s finger on the pulse of the industry; now I’m not even sure it’s good for much more than reminding me a little bit of the environment that I left behind.… Read more

Categories
Critters Gaming Television & Movies

Reality keeps calling me away from my dreams

Sorry for the lack of updates this week. I’ve been a little bit busy.

Now that we’re running up on three months since Oberon came into our lives, one thing is becoming quite dense: our Obi is denser than a neutron star. I love the little fuzzy guy, but by having him neutered, we’ve automatically raised the collective IQ of future generations of cats in this area by default. He’s fiercely loyal and lovable, and loves everyone who lives under this roof with him, but somehow he’s just missing some vital feline survival instincts, and I really question whether or not he’d still be alive if we hadn’t taken him in. Poor little furry doofus.

To make sure he does stay around, though, we’ve made an appointment to have him declawed next week. He’s a great cat to just pick up and cuddle, and he never bites or scratches unless something catches him completely off-guard. My youngest niece has a cat named “Spaz” who she hauls around like a sack of potatoes and plays with, and gives her no problems at all. Obi has great potential to be my kid’s “Spaz” – he’s got that same lovable, luggable and harmless thing going for him, and we want to keep it that way. The other kitties have taken him on board completely (though Othello still gets a bit irritated with him if the young’un is being a bit too playful). … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Gaming Television & Movies

Just a ton of stuff

This is going to be kinda choppy, kinda like my train of thought right now, which has zipped right off the tracks, straight through the guard rails, and off into the abyss.

Best MAME cabinet project ever? It’s bigger on the inside. I just hope he’s got Dalek Attack and Destiny Of The Doctors installed on that thing.

Best butt coverings ever? Take a look at these, folks with babies – we’re seriously considering them, not just for the hip biodegradable factor, but because it seems that most diapers are now coated in a common herbal skin-soothing agent that I happen to be highly allergic too (which has us concerned that the baby will be allergic to it as well). Septic tank safe, and very cost-effective next to disposable diapers, and therefore replete with awesomeness.

Best baby room ever? Nobody would believe this if I didn’t tell you about it: my wife has suggested that the walls of the baby’s room could be adorned with cute video game characters. Part of me is thinking “let’s see how long this lasts.” The rest of me will already be busy designing it in my head. 😆

O2-a-thon. Fired up the mighty Odyssey2 tonight to play my newly arrived copy of Puzzle Piece Panic, and did some catching up on other O2 homebrews that I’ve had for a while but have barely had a chance to play properly. I had four O2 homebrews or repro releases of prototypes sitting on the “to play” pile; Puzzle Piece Panic and Shark Hunter both rocked, while Impossible Mission was honestly a bit of a bore, and Calculator…well, it’s a neat idea, but more of a tech demo than anything. Still, as incongruous as it may seem now, I bet Magnavox would’ve put this puppy on the market back in the day.

It’s a funny old world. When I was a wee tot, I used to play this machine constantly, wonder where the ideas for the games came from and who made them, and even obsessed over the artwork style. Now I know who makes the games and to a certain extent where they get their ideas, and it seems like I do the artwork for about half of them. (In the case of Puzzle Piece Panic, I didn’t do artwork – I just suggested a name that met the vintage Magnavox style of “descriptive but slightly cheesy,” and it just kinda stuck.) Funny how these things work out.… Read more