Topic: Prophecy come true?
started by: Leisher
Posted by Leisher on Apr. 28 2014,09:52
< And they awoke a great evil... >In the name of all that is good and holy, some things should stay buried!
Actually, I look forward to this documentary.
Posted by GORDON on Apr. 28 2014,09:55
I think it is amusing. Someone spent money for that silly little feel-good quest, ha. Ordinarily I would say, "Good thing no kids are going hungry today," but quests like this that feed the soul are important, too.
Posted by TPRJones on Apr. 28 2014,10:12
Nice!I remember really liking that game as a kid. I never understood the hate.
Posted by Malcolm on Apr. 28 2014,10:15
(TPRJones @ Apr. 28 2014,12:12)
QUOTE
Nice!
I remember really liking that game as a kid. I never understood the hate.
I remember really liking that game as a kid. I never understood the hate.
1) I had it on the Atari as well.
2) < Seanbaby > shreds it like no one else.
QUOTE
If there was no chunk of telephone in the pit, which was only the case in 97% of them, you could leave by stretching out ET's neck until he slowly, SLOWLY floated up.
...
When you make it to the top of the pit, which if you started in 1983 should be about... NOW, you have a fraction of a second window to immediately stop making ET's head stretch. This is important. If you miss it, he'll fall right back in and you have to start the floating process all over.
...
When you make it to the top of the pit, which if you started in 1983 should be about... NOW, you have a fraction of a second window to immediately stop making ET's head stretch. This is important. If you miss it, he'll fall right back in and you have to start the floating process all over.
Posted by TPRJones on Apr. 28 2014,10:25
Well, first don't go in pits that didn't have the glint which indicated that there was something in it and you won't be wasting all your time in empty pits. And secondly if you went to the edge of the pit before going up it was much much easier when you got to the top than if you went from the middle, enough so that you'd never fall back in if you went up on the edge. It's because of the curve of the pit on the upper screen being round while the landing spot for the exiting E.T. sprite was a constant distance on the Y coordinate plane. At the middle of the pit they practically overlapped but on the edge there was plenty of space to react.Sounds like Seanbaby was just bad at playing games.
Posted by thibodeaux on Apr. 28 2014,15:25
I remember the Christmas this came out. This and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Those games made NO FUCKING SENSE.
Posted by GORDON on Apr. 28 2014,15:40
My family was too poor back then... never owned an Atari 2600.
Posted by Malcolm on Apr. 28 2014,16:01
(thibodeaux @ Apr. 28 2014,17:25)
QUOTE
I remember the Christmas this came out. This and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Those games made NO FUCKING SENSE.
Wait, there's a movie version without Indy going up on a giant scissors-like platform?
Posted by TheCatt on Apr. 28 2014,17:08
I don't think we had either of those 2 games. But we did have PacMan, and god that was a disappointment. I had been waiting WEEKS for it to come out, our family had gotten on some kind of waitlist to get it... my sister brought it home with my mom, I loaded it up, and saw this:
What the fuck?
I was so happy when we finally got the 5200.
Posted by GORDON on Apr. 28 2014,17:11
One of the most distinctive sounds in video gaming history has to be that rubber-bandy "beng-beng-beng" of eating dots in that game.My buddy had one.
Posted by Malcolm on Apr. 28 2014,17:49
The craptacular port of PacMan slipped my mind. Probably because I had the C64 port to fall back on.
Posted by TPRJones on Apr. 28 2014,18:19
Yeah, PacMan for Atari was a mess. This reminds me I should mention this book to anyone interested in the story behind all these games with some of the more interesting technical details and why things were done the way they were: < Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System >It's technically a textbook for a media studies course, but I just read it for fun and I thought it was pretty awesome. But then I got my hacking start with Atari 2600 cartridges and a soldering gun, so I may not be a typical reader for this subject.
Posted by Malcolm on Apr. 28 2014,18:57
Never got into the hardware until way, way, way too late.. Kicking myself for that. Software, on the other hand ....
Posted by TPRJones on Apr. 28 2014,19:06
The technical details in the book mostly revolve around how the software was constructed due to the constraints of the hardware. The Atari 2600 was unique in that it didn't have graphical frames. The screen was drawn in real time by the software directly instructing the electron gun how to draw the screen. So each frame of game has the overscan time to do non-video processing and otherwise had to limit itself to dealing with three clock ticks for every firing of the electron gun; two ticks to figure out what to draw next and one to draw it. That's some high-efficiency programming right there.Even PacMan, as bad as it was, must have been phenomenally efficiently written by modern standards to keep up with that, much less fit into the cartridge and the limited RAM. Just amazing to ponder. But using one sprite to represent all four ghosts was a horrible idea. That's why the ghosts flickered in that game; it was showing them on the screen one at a time with each one getting every fourth frame.
But Pitfall was the real gem. That game had 256 unique game screens, and all that info was crammed into a mere 50 bytes of code. Madness.
Posted by Malcolm on Apr. 28 2014,19:10
Goddamn. The Carmacks of the day. I assume writing in assembly?
Posted by TPRJones on Apr. 28 2014,19:13
Originally yes, Adventure and Combat and such were written directly in assembly. Later on as tech improved they had compilers, but even those weren't all that far removed from direct assembly. I'm not even sure we'd call them compilers by modern standards, more like editing tools with some common chunks of code ready to be plugged in here and there.
Posted by Malcolm on Apr. 28 2014,19:22
Probably was such a tiny amount of memory available you could barely stuff in enough registry lookups and jump tables to go slower than the rays. Maybe a few escaped the tubes and branded "IT" on my forehead.
Posted by Vince on Apr. 29 2014,02:44
They also had the first easter egg in a game on Atari. Wanting to say it was "Adventure"? Some attempt at a D&D themed game.
Posted by TPRJones on Apr. 29 2014,04:54
Yup, if you dragged the key from the end of the game all the way back to the start you unlocked a screen that had the creator's name on it.I think he was eventually fired for it after it was found. Atari had this thing where they considered all employees of exactly equal importance, with the coders being no more or less important than the janitors. Taking personal credit for the game was a big no-no.
Atari was a bit weird.