nudicle

I am convinced that this is pretty much the best blog in the entire world. Concept is great; writing is entertaining. Please keep going. Please accept my thanks.

I've been hunting in the Charlottesville, VA area for about 2 years and have found some Atari stuff but only a couple times. There are tons of garage sales every weekend within 30 minutes but I rarely see Atari stuff. A couple local flea markets have vendors who sometimes have Atari material. There's also a lady with a TON of Odyssey games, which I intend to go and buy but haven't yet. She's a nice woman and is also hilarious. When she saw my interest in some Atari stuff she was selling from the back of a pickup truck, she walked over and told me about how she used to have a lot more but had recently been emptied out by nostalgia seekers (which may or may not have been true, I'm not sure). She arrayed her games neatly for me and then tried to sell me a load of ridiculously common games for $5 a pop. I politely declined. She gave me a conspiratorial look, reached into her vest pocket, beckoned me to lean close to her, and pulled out Pacman. I almost laughed, but that would have been really rude. Anyway, it turned out that she separated Pacman from the rest and kept it on her person because it was so valuable and coveted. It was bizarre in this post-ebay world, although I guess it makes sense, to see that in rural Virginia the market for Atari games determines prices as a function of pure nostalgia. I'm going to relieve her of the Odyssey stuff as soon as I can justify spending a Saturday morning doing something other than studying for the damn Massachusetts bar exam.

supercat, This is slick. cheers.

"KGET TV 17 caught up with David Hasselhoff who said that the big-screen version of Knight Rider has endured a two year delay because producers wanted to mute the show's trademark talking car, K.I.T.T. Hasselhoff, who starred in the original '80s TV series and is taking the lead in the upcoming remake, has insisted the vehicle have a voice of its own or he wouldn't make the film. "It's stupid. There's no film without a talking car. So we waited for two years and we won. The car will talk," said Hasselhoff." Story Here This is huge. I wouldn't be surprised if Hasselhoff were in contact with the HardWork crew to coordinate a simultaneous release. It's also huge because I bet Hasselhoff is the first person ever to say "It's stupid. There's no film without a talking car." At least in English.

While in this context I don't disagree with your opinion at all, as someone who doesn't know what he's doing I can explain a benefit which would have been nice. The other day I converted a simple 2 sprite demo I was making into a 2 line kernel. For a day (well, the time I had to devote to vcs programming that day) I couldn't figure out why it messed up my sprite display. The problem and the solution were completely obvious. I was changing the Y vals of the sprites, whether on joystick input or automatic, by only one scanline. So on the "wrong" scanline the sprite graphics would be offset by one because the sprite drawing routine realized that we were already one scanline into that sprite's vertical space and offset accordingly. This is a really obvious problem and it's almost embarrassing to admit I didn't see it immediately. But it was my first multiline kernel and I didn't. I couldn't sleep the other night and at about 3:30AM I realized what was wrong. After that it took about 2 minutes to fix. If I had had a debugger, however, I could have seen the obvious mistake immediately. So, yeah, it would have helped someone who didn't know what he was doing. But I just started this stuff and don't think there's anything wrong with that. I thought about using a score routine to display relevant stuff at the appropriate time to look into it but since I don't know what I'm doing I haven't yet learned how to draw scores and didn't know how. Damn. This is completely irrelevant but I was just struck by how much debugging by printf()rocks.

I think Break My Stride was by Matthew Wilder. Until about 3 years ago I always thought the lyric was "break my spine," just because at the time that's how my young ears mapped the word.

Send it to Carol Shaw. In the alternative, since those carts look so frickin' sweet, send one to (and vote for) Pedro.

This thread reminds me of 1988. I can't believe it's happening in 2005. If your OS really slows down when there are more icons on the desktop than the bare minimum then I feel bad for you because your OS sucks. If you're so strapped for RAM that your OS pages when it loads file size info then that's also pretty amazing. That Atari Nebula graphic was cool and is now my desktop image. Otherwise, this is a very silly thread. I'm all for silliness as a matter of general policy. But I just though I'd point it out.

Twisted Sister. MTV used to love We're Not Gonna Take It.

In a desperate attempt to unhijack this thread, please note my new theory: Marian's hovercraft is full of eels.

Hi guys, I don't post much here but I've been lurking at AA and Stella for a while as I work (slowly) on my first vcs game. The other day I wrote a story which contains an embedded vcs programming joke. Ordinarily I really like the fact that no one but for some friends pays attention to what I write, but in this case I thought some of you might appreciate a vcs programming joke out there in the wild. If anyone's interested, the story lives here. Sorry for intruding and especially for starting a new topic, but I didn't know where else to put this. I hope I'm not being terribly presumptuous. I just thought it might make someone here smile. -nudicle ps -- if anyone saw a recent post of mine in the Alamogordo controversy thread, I repeat one tiny feature of that because the phrase amuses me so much

I don't collect or play with Transformers, but damn this is awesome.

I'm glad you're on board, since you're obviously a pretty central figure in the plan. If you can find a way for Vader to say "Attention all planets of the solar federation, we have assumed control" at any point I'll be your best friend, btw.

I have a cunning plan to convince Marian we are not a bunch of weirdos. It's actually quite simple. We sack El Paso. Interested AtariAge members hear our call to rally round. We instruct them to purchase hoes, spades, pitchforks, and the other implements of your standard agrarian revolt when next they are shopping for vcs games at a yard sale or thrifty. AtariAge descends on El Paso in the dead of night. We sack the town and banish the local government (we also tell stories to the town's younglings that this was accomplished with magic and necromancy in order to ensure a proper sense of awe and majesty in the next generation of our subjects). Are you with me this far? We've sacked the town and doomed the former government to an eternity wandering the deserts of the southwest, haunting armadillos or whatever lives out there. Next we find Marian, of course! So we march to her house and surround it. She appears at the window in fear. But then, Moycon appears in this totally sweet Darth Vader outfit and strides purposefully up to her door. Instead of force-choking her (which she's worried about) he politely knocks instead. Marian opens the door because she knows if you don't obey Vader he'll get all up in your sh*t pretty fast. Looking as imperious as possible, Moycon/Vader informs Marian that the Empire has been watching her for a while and is greatly impressed. Vader tells Marian that the Empire has sacked El Paso for the express purpose of installing her as regent, which entitles her to a seat in the Imperial Senate. Marian will now be totally psyched and will have recovered almost all control over her bowels. She will also forget that Vader ALWAYS alters the terms of the deal at some point and she will accept. At this point Moycon/Vader should probably bust out a can of force-choke on someone just on general principle. After a good force slaying, Vader/Moycon will express his hope that Marian and the Empire can work together effectively and that she'll do her part to help rule the Galaxy. One of our party (he should probably one of the guys with a pitchfork) will now approach Darth and tell him the Emperor wishes to speak to him and that they must leave the planet's surface in order to get a clear transmission. Before he departs, Vader (this is the cunning bit) will say to Marian : "There is one more thing. You have free reign over El Paso in the name of the Emperor, but you must understand that the people at AtariAge are not weirdos. You should work with them. Do not fail me on this account." With that last sentence he'll raise his right hand a little bit to emphasize the point with an implied force-choke threat. Then we all leave, but for a small contingent of AA agrarian revolters who keep order in the town until Marian has sufficient control to run the place on her own. And we all live happily ever after.

It's possible we're not getting responses because Ms. McQuiddy a) thinks a small community of people on the web with theories that something she saw and reported on never actually happened is probably a bunch of weirdos and/or b) isn't too enthused about basically being invited to justify a couple articles she wrote over 20 years ago and probably hasn't thought much about since. I don't mean to rekindle a debate about what exactly she saw, I'm just sayin' she might be ignoring the AA entreaties because she thinks this is a waste of time. Then again, maybe she's not responding because to ensure her silence Atari made sure she was sleeping with the Extra Terrestrials under a slab of concrete.