| My childhood Atari! [message #927] |
Wed, 02 May 2012 02:04  |
bill
Messages: 165
Registered: December 2011
Karma: 0
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Senior Member |
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From Newsgroup: comp.sys.atari.8bit
I came up with clues (keyboard wear-and-tear, specific upgrades done
to it) to help Bob Woolley track down my Atari 1200XL, which got
jumbled into his pile of systems at some point over the decades. :)
Here in my home office, limping along with it's slightly unhappy
keyboard, and chroma-less S-video upgrade, sits my first computer (not
counting the Timex Sinclair 1000 I got as a hand-me-down, and used for
about a year before I got my 1200XL in 1983, it must have been).
I'm very happy to have it back. :) Overwhelming nostalgia and love,
for one thing -- I used it exclusively for 9 years (aside from
Apple IIs and such at school, and occasional C=64 gaming with my
brother), and programmed countless unfinished (and some finished!)
games in BASIC and TubroBASIC XL, and experimented with Action!.
I'm guessing I wrote Gem Drop on the beast, as well, back in 1997/1998.
Also, the 1200XL that Bob had given me in the meantime, about 2.5yr ago,
had some funky 512KB upgrade and a tweaked(?) OS, and it was generally
not acting particular compatible with some software.
I've been going through my collection of floppy disks, taking some
crappy cameraphone photos of some of my BASIC stuff and uploading
them to Facebook, as well as sticking PostIt-notes to the disks
that have one or more 'interesting' things on it that might be
worth putting online for people to laugh^H^H^H^H^Hlook at.
It's amazing how many of my games I just stopped coding, and they
languish at the end with this curse, bestowed upon them by their god,
me, the programmer:
999 GOTO 999
.... of course, I was looking at all my old BASIC stuff using TBXL,
and honestly so much of it was probably so dog slow in regular BASIC
(which I used until 1992) that I deemed my experiments unsalvageable.
Or I was just a kid and got bored and decided to do something else.
I didn't have Atari magazines growing up; I had some Compute!s
(I think I got them long after they were published) and 2 or 3 Atari
BASIC books. (Compute!'s First Book of Atari Games, IIRC, is well-worn.)
I had to figure out how to make character sets using binary math by
stumbling upon some bitmapped graphics printing routines in my XMM801
printer manual... prior to that, the DATA numbers and POKE 756 were all
black magic. :)
I also had almost NOTHING in the way of commercial games (Boulderdash,
Q*Bert, D-Bug, Delta Drawing, Pinball Construction Set, Chessmaster
2000; eventually AtariWriter II)... for years! Nowadays, I've
inherited a small collection of cartridges from other people's
collections, and of course almost every game can be had online, free
and illegally. :^P
But looking at my collection of self-written game attempts, that fact
is very obvious. I tried writing EVERYthing for myself. Baseball,
golf, Othello, clones of Nintendo (NES) games, clones of Atari 2600
games, various Tetrises, a graphing calculator for math class,
Scrabble, font editors, paint programs, GUIs, fancy DOS menus, word
processors, etc.! That's just the stuff I've found in 2 small boxes
of floppies. (Maybe 30 disks total.) I have GOBS of disks. :)
I look forward to finding more gems, more stuff to crack up at,
and sharing it with some of you all!
Here's what I've posted so far, crappy-photo-wise:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150680816790778. 386037.518895777&type=3&l=a14e2a39ce
(You don't need to be on Facebook to view that.)
Enjoy ;)
--
-bill!
Sent from my computer
--- Synchronet 3.13a-Win32 NewsLink 1.83
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| Re: My childhood Atari! [message #929 is a reply to message #927] |
Wed, 02 May 2012 03:29  |
Ken Springer
Messages: 41
Registered: March 2012
Karma: 0
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Member |
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From Newsgroup: comp.sys.atari.8bit
I still have my first Atari system, an 800 w/ 48K RAM, 2 floppy drives,
printer, and software. Monitor was a 10" Panasonic TV. Still have that
too, but got beat up in shipping by persons unknown. But I found a
working spare at a thrift store and bought it.
Getting it set up and running is another low priority computer project.
--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 12.0
Thunderbird 12.0.1
LibreOffice 3.5.2.2
--- Synchronet 3.13a-Win32 NewsLink 1.83
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| Re: My childhood Atari! [message #1032 is a reply to message #927] |
Fri, 06 July 2012 18:29 |
Clu
Messages: 72
Registered: July 2012
Karma: 0
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Member |
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From Newsgroup: comp.sys.atari.8bit
Wow Bill, that splash of pictures was amazing. Just reminded me of a
time when I saw the online world, and culture of the world through the
eyes and color of my Atari computer.
I mean looking at the Blake 7 pictures just reminded me of all the times
I would download gif files to view on my lantern viewer, or when I would
download 15 second LONG files just to hear Madonna or Van Halen sing a
quick clip.
And I loved the more recent material with Beavis and Butthead and the
ones that mention Facebook. So what was the Facebook ANSI BBS all about?
As for original equipment, I still have my Atari 400 (modified with
1200xl keyboard and upgraded to 48K), my Percom drives (not working at
the moment, but I have other drives) and my 1025 printer, 1030 modem,
and 850 interface.
Of course though my Atari 400 still works my current setup is a beige
800, 810 drive, and 850 interface. Trying to keep it all beige.
Currently looking for the double density beige drives, and also trying
to get a beige printer of some sort up and running. Have a 825 printer,
just need to get that dinosaur running. :P
Doc Clu
On 5/2/12 9:04 AM, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> Here's what I've posted so far, crappy-photo-wise:
>
> https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150680816790778. 386037.518895777&type=3&l=a14e2a39ce
> (You don't need to be on Facebook to view that.)
>
> Enjoy ;)
>
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