x=usr(1536)

Thanks for that - the clarification is definitely appreciated. This was pretty much the conclusion I'd come to as well regarding his string of failed businesses. There just isn't another explanation (apart from gross incompetence, which is likely a contributing factor as opposed to a cause) that makes sense. I'd be very interested to know which of Apple's European offices Feargal Mac Conuladh has (or claims to have) worked in.

Ah, gotcha. Have to admit that my experience with the handhelds is nil - we only worked on titles for the retail console. This would have been from very shortly after the PS3's retail launch to a couple of years into its lifecycle; I moved on after that.

Thank you for posting that. Out of curiosity, is this personal opinion formed from watching Feargal Mac Conuladh's various failed ventures from the outside, or have you been involved with any of them directly? Note that I'm not asking this to antagonize; I do understand how well-intentioned people can get roped into this sort of thing without realizing what's going on behind the scenes until later. However, it would help us to understand where your perspective is coming from if you could let us know what has shaped your perceptions.

Buy an Apple //e with numeric keypad for $99 on eBay (no relation to auction; only providing link for price comparison). Gut the case, sell the innards and disk drive to reclaim some of the purchase cost, then clean up the case and house your motherboard in that. You'll be around $150 up on the deal over the cost of the 3D-printed one by the time you do that. It's neat, but not $250 neat.

I think you'll find that your best flatulence value is the shart. It's a fart that comes with a prize EVERY TIME! It's like a Kinder Egg for your undergarments.

We actually tried that. The problem was that with a devkit under the desk on, say, a filing cabinet, there wasn't enough room at the desk for a dev, their backpack, the devkit, and a wastebasket (and the fan noise transmitted into the filing cabinet from the devkit was f***ing obnoxious). So we tried directly-mounting them to the underside of the desk. Then we discovered that the company that made the desks used the cheapest, shittiest, least-load-bearing MDF known to man in the assembly of the desks our devs were sitting at. You could thread screws into them... For a while, anyway. I can neither confirm nor deny that this may (or may not) have led to a PS3 devkit ripping itself out of the underside of the desk under its own weight, leading (or not) to its demise and subsequent disassembly (which may not have happened) when it crashed (or not) to the floor, violently (or gently), and with (or without) tremendous clatter (or gentle, mellifluous sounds) For that, I'd suggest a light bench vise to hold the sucker. Just make sure the devs don't over-tighten it

I find that putting baby mice in beer bottles helps to pass the time in cold weather

L.A. Noire and Doom we've already got elsewhere, so will probably skip those. Haven't given Skyrim a shot yet, so that's certainly a candidate along with the Stern Pinball stuff. Somehow missed those on the first run, but could definitely go for them. I remember the PS3 devkits - they were something ridiculous like a 4U rackmount (and f***ing heavy), whereas the testkits were exactly the same as the retail units, just with a firmware swap. Doing the devkits as a rackmount always stuck me as being particularly idiotic, because no dev in their right mind would want to be stuck in a datacenter or IDF just to get their work done; all of them ended up taking up way too much real estate on their desks. Not admitting to anything, but a dead PS3 devkit may or may not have once been opened up out of curiosity by a person or persons within an IT department before it was shipped back to Sony. Theoretically, that person or persons may have been really anal about tracking which screw came out of which hole and reassembling it with them all in the correct locations, and Sony may or may not have been really pissed when they received it back, much to the confusion that did or did not ensue on the IT department's behalf when Sony's ire was or was not made very clear to their executive management.

Mario Kart 8 is on the to-acquire list, definitely. Blossom Tales looks interesting; I'll point her towards it. Definitely more her sort of thing than mine, but that's cool - it's her Nintendo I've heard that they're really well done. Probably going to skip them, though, since we've got a MAME cabinet for the arcade stuff. Should have mentioned that at the outset. Thanks! I'll have her check into those.

Any recommendations for games to check out? She's already picked up Super Mario Odyssey (which I'm looking forward to clocking some time on) and is also planning on getting The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I'm not much of an RPGer, so that's one's all her Been going through the store and was pleasantly surprised to see both Doom and L.A. Noire in there. But is there anything a bit off the beaten track that's worth looking into, or other major titles we should pay attention to?

This is really cool. OK, he's porting it to the C64 and not the Atari, but... For extra-bonus cool points, port it from the C64 to the Atari and Spectrum and slap a Mastertronic logo on it That really would be a nostalgia trip in one of the more unusual paths possible for a game to take in that regard.

"Christmas morning is gonna be so sweet this year for hundreds of thousands of gamers when they unwrap that sleek, stylish, can't-wait-to-play Ataribox that's going under the tree tonight!" I propose the above as a candidate for a 'Phrases No-One Uttered in 2017' thread.

With respect to BeOS, the two major shortcomings were: No true multiuser support. There were bits and pieces of it in various parts of the OS, but it wasn't a comprehensive multiuser environment like you'd find in Linux. To be fair, it wasn't intended to be multiuser from the outset, but it was something that would need to be changed. The networking stack. The stock one as shipped through R5 was proprietary to BeOS and didn't have the greatest performance (or, in some cases, compatibility). This was fixed with the development of the BSD-based BONE (BeOS Networking Environment) stack, which (IIRC) could be applied to an R5 system. It was intended to be an integrated part of R5.1, but the company tanked before that officially saw the light of day. It was floating around out there a few years ago, however. There are other things I can think of, such as improved USB device and 802.11 support. Those were in the pipeline, but the company's demise meant that they never saw the light of day.

It really, Really, REALLY makes me happy to see BeOS keep popping up. There was so much potential there, and it did things that even now other OSes haven't caught up to. Sure, it had its shortcomings, but in many ways it still has no equal. So nice. Shame it didn't get another three years of life; it really would have been something incredibly spectacular by then.

Somewhere around the time of Return of the Jedi being released, there was a competition in which the first prize was (IIRC) an Atari Star Wars cabinet. Don't remember if it was the upright or the environmental, but I really wanted to win one of those, so I entered. I didn't win it. But I did get a Darth Vader speakerphone out of it, which, for 1983, was pretty awesome. It was the third prize, IIRC, but given that speakerphones were pretty uncommon at the time it was fairly cool. Only did pulse dialling, though, which I thought was kinda lame. It did have a red LED in the middle of his chest, though, and it lit up when it was off-hook. That was pretty nifty. These should also be brought back, but as hands-free units you can adhere to your dashboard. That would be tits.

I speak French. Not as well as I used to, admittedly, but still well enough that I will confirm The Historian's translation as being close enough to the source material as doesn't really matter. With that in mind, even in the original form it says nothing. It's really no different to what was said in English regarding the 'delay'.

Just an observation: Gameband: Feargal Mac Conuladh's involved; no actual product available. Ataribox: Feargal Mac Conuladh's involved; no actual product available. Speakerhat: Feargal Mac Conuladh's not involved; an actual product is available. Correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation, granted, but it is interesting.

It will. And don't call me Shirley.

The least reliable: whatever the one you happen to have at the moment is. The most reliable: the ones that everyone else has, even if they're exactly the same as your own.

Words no-one has ever uttered before in this context: "can we get that in a Brazilian?"

Advertise the watch as having selectable moisture resistance and include a small tube of silicone sealant in each box. Problem solved!

Quoted for truth, and also because you've hit on something that I've believed for quite some time now. The Internet has made it possible for anyone capable of mashing their palm into a keyboard to communicate, at virtually no cost, with nearly anyone almost anywhere on the planet. But by virtue of the fact that it removed the cost equation, most of the communication that takes place has no value. Remember when making a long-distance call cost money? You didn't waste your words because there was a cost attached to each one. Similarly, there was also a time when making or receiving an international call was a big deal, largely due to the cost and (particularly depending on the decade when you were making said call, or where it was originating from or being terminated to) being technically involved to accomplish. Similarly, in the 1970s and '80s, if you wanted to sell a game console, you invested in R&D, manufacturing, marketing, sales, distribution, and aftermarket support. Before the first console was sold but by the time the first TV commercial had aired, you were invested in that sucker for millions of dollars and looking to not just recoup your costs but to sell enough of them that they made you a ton of money. And that meant that you, to put it succinctly, had to have your shit together. Hype had to have substance in the form of a competitive product to back it up, or you were screwed and quite substantially so. Now, however, the Internet makes communication dirt-cheap by comparison to get your advertising message out, and to a wider audience, or a more targetted one if that's what you want. Congratulations, you've learned to leverage a tool that didn't exist in its present form in the '70s and '80s, and you have marketing and advertising ability beyond the wildest dreams of anyone who was trying to sell a game console at that time. What you don't have, however, is a variance from needing to have something tangible to put in customers' hands. That still exists, and no matter how much attention you may be able to garner for your product, unless you can actually build, deliver, and support it, you haven't learned one of the most fundamental business lessons this industry has known for nearly half-a-century. All this really does is illustrate the old maxim that talk is cheap, but in a modern context where 'cheap' can be taken to mean 'virtually worthless'. And I never cease to be amazed by how many people seem to think that pesky little details like having the ability to actually bring a product to market are secondary to things like social media presence.

Okay, rolling with the delay angle for a moment... Based on parallels with other projects, this fits with the pattern of failure typically exhibited by projects of this nature. Is there anything to suggest that the delay is simply that - a delay - and not an indicator of problems that are likely to lead to a future cancellation? I can accept that this may in fact be just what it has been stated to be, but it is walking and quacking like a duck at this point.

It's funny: I take no real joy in watching the Ataribox enter the tailspin exhibited by every half-baked crowdfunded hardware project that fits its lifecycle pattern. Having something like it on the market could have been cool, provided it offered more than just being a repackaging of the Flashback concept that's been around for a decade-and-a-half. But my give-a-damn is most definitely broken on this one. Observing the saga has been similar to watching someone say, "we can totally be our own bosses - let's open a coffee shop!" followed by them doing exactly that then subsequently seeing their business augur in as they discover that they have absolutely no clue as to what running a business actually entails. We all know that Feargal Mac Conulaidh loves branding. So does Atari S.A., from whom the Atari name was presumably licensed for use on the Ataribox. Now that F-Mac has damaged the brand's reputation by very publically showing a total inability to execute while bandying the Atari name about, I'm wondering if Atari S.A.'s lawyers won't be looking for a pound or two of his flesh in compensation for that damage - metaphorically speaking, of course. That's just speculation on my behalf, but it doesn't seem to be outside of the realms of reasonable possibility.