I keep meaning to write some big sprawling thing .. sort of like I did before my daughter was born (about how we were cool once, really, trust me, but being a parent makes you by definition uncool.. I think I said that.. that the act of parenting puts you in a role that after so many years is hard to break out of, but the reverse is true for the growing child..)

Anyway, things have been busy in preparation for the twins; working on the basement, setting up a new guestroom for my mum to stay in, looking at new car options (3 car seats takes up a lot of space in a car..), and important life things for the girl — shes into soccer now, and school starting soon. And with school starting same time as the twins are expected.. all I really hope is ..

She doesn’t think we’re shoving her off to school to make room.

So I’m writing this, since someday she may read it — hey, kiddo, we sweat like mad how the twins may effect you; we’re so close, a little tiny 3 person family unit with two more suddenly going to burst in. And that first month or two will be a doozy! But you remember — we’re going to try like hell to make damned sure you get every piece of attention you deserve.

She’s a good smart sweet kid; an emotional little thing. She’s going to take this hard..

.. but she’s also brave and so sweet, she already talked to the belly; she helps little ones walk in the park and is so nice to her little cousin. Maybe she’ll be ready for this..

Our consolation is, most people go through this and turn out okay, right?

..

Doctor Who is still scary :)

I just sent this to a buddy of mine:

Given two circles (a drawn point with a circumference drawn around them) — if they don’t intersect, they’re just two circles; if they do intersect a little, the union would produce (say) a vaguely bow-tie shaped
affair.

Given N-points, each with a cirumference drawn around them (radius could vary, but for sake of ease, could make the radius a constant), what is the net _outline_. (ie: in the bow-tie affair, you’d drop the two arcs inside
the intersection, resulting in the outline of the bow-tie. Extend to N-circles.

What does that say about the kind of people I hang out with, and the kind of evil bastard I am?

(and yes, this does factor into a game I’m working on)

Someone has been asking me a few questions about locating and setting up a Gauntlet in their place; I should write up a nice detailed response as it might be useful for a few people, but I thought I might just paste in one of the quick emails I sent back. If anyone should like the topic or a part of it expanded upon, let me know.

Theres a lot of questions could branch into — plugging old arcade gear into a TV, running old arcade fear, running emulators or modern gear in a arcade machine, and variations thereof. But heres a tickler..

–

In this sort of hobby, finding ancient ‘ready to play’ and ‘good condition’ translates to $$, since it means someone else has done the finding, restoration, etc. Its like classic cars..you can find one cheap if you want to fix it

A Gauntlet is a pretty rare items these days, so finding one at auction.. I’d say theres a 5% chance or something. (A newer one .. Gauntlet Legends or the like, is doable.) Certainly, can be found; ebay “Gauntlet” and sort by highest price may find something, but shipping on a refrigertator sized machine is killer.

Something one could troll for, keep the feelers out for a few years and see if something comes up.. *shrug*

Another option is to simulate it; you already know about Emulation, but there are tricks to put an emulator into an arcade cabinet .. so it has the look and feel and plays abuot 95% the same as the original; the advantage there is much cheaper and easier, and you also can play hundreds of other games. (ie: I converted one of my cabinets so it has a emulator and also can play original game boards as well.) When booting to the emulator it pops up a menu with 50 game to choose from, which is pretty handy. (and yes, I own a large stock of game boards and ripped them into the emulator myself. I can post pics, I have a stupidly large collection of spare parts.)

ie: Can even buy a ready to go machine .. theres a ready to go closed box ‘MAME’ kit you can buy for $200 for instance, which plugs right into an arcade machine liek a cartridge, and you’re done. Finding an arcade cabinet is usually $50-$200 depending how picky you are.

So could go to an auction and see if theres a Gauntlet; if not, could just buy a good condition generic cabinet, and then plop an emulator box inside, and your total cost probably be about $300-$400 and good to go (with the option to plug other arcade game boards into it as well.)

If youw ant more info, I can fill you up with crazy ideas

okay okay, a few folks emailed me or otherwise bugged me…

- blog is ported to the new machine, so is physically up, you punks ;)

- bbs is ported to the new machine, so can stay up another 10 years! (telnet to bbs.skeleton.org, login bbs, password bbs)

.. and more shuffling of services around the old home cluster.  Even documented all the steps, so next time I have to do this, I’ll know what I did this time :P

Good to know (or creepy?) that you guys are still around ;)

We just found out we’ve got twins coming in a little while; *WOA*

I’ve been meaning to clear our some of the stuff in our ‘junk room’ and do audits of some of my gear; I’ve a number of very large collections of awesome junk, but sometimes you just don’t need so much; but nothing like getting news of twins to kick you into gear .. tick tock, only so many weekends before the big event, and then no free time for a year or two or decade after :) We’ve got bathrooms to finish, tiles to buy and lay down, cribs and highchairs and such to sort out, and who knows, maybe need to switch cars unless we can figure out a way to cram 3 carseats into the one we have now (!)

I’d relatively recently built a new shell server box to replace my existing older one, but hadn’t a lot of motivation to actually do the move.. so I’m running two shell servers right now; might as well get a move on that, and in doign so audit the services I’m running there. With Oracle’s takeover of mysql is it time to convert things to postgres? With so few people using the old BBS I keep running, is it time to shut it down and save myself the trouble? Should I keep this blog going .. do I actualyl have any readers, or is this jut for my own venting and occasional easy place to post reference material? Heck, at the same time could review .. I still host my own email since I don’t like Google reading it for me. I host my own blog, so I own the content and no worries. I host my own services in general.. but really, shoudl you worry, and just use the ‘cloud’ services and be happy, and have a lot less upkeep to do? hmrf. I mean, fighting spam and hosting my own crap is work sometimes and using gmail would be a hell of a lot easier sometimes…….

But I guess I should keep up the bbs; I mean, its been running (with a 6 year hiatus in the middle, sort of like Dr Who) more or less since 1988 or so .. like, nearly 25 years, or operating for say 16 or 17 years, mostly empty in the tail end of course. But its not hard to keep running, it basicly chugs along and runs itself. So, okay, a few people do seem to be using it and it makes me giggle.. and its a museum; so few BBSes are around today, and maybe a half dozen of Atari ones. Gotta wave the flag, I guess?

The blog.. hmm; wordpress is a security nightmare. I could use the official free wordpress service, but I’m ornery that way. Email me skeezix<boing>skeleton.org if you think I shoudl keep it up .. if I have a single reader ;) Otherwise, roll the dice :)

–

I’m selling off a pile of arcade stuff (but by no means the family jewels), and I must admit.. firing up my emu-cabinet (MAMEcab), my JAMMA arcade boards, my MVS Neo Geo games, sorting out which harness adapters I have in what condition, pouring over my original Pacman pcboards .. it does bring back The Lust, that any collector is familiar with. I’m proud of my collection of ancient gadgetry. Not giving it up .. just some, to make back a bit of space, to tidy up a bit, to make a few bucks to help buy some stuff for the coming twins. If we have to buy a new car, be nice to have a few more bucks…

Old Atari gear; I posted a supremely rare device to a few forums, if anyone is interested. An ST Book, one of the first laptops, a gorgeous little beast; if you’re interested, I posted here: http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=20662&p=182269#p182269

But I’m keeping my other crazy Atari gear!

Old Role Playing Games / Wargames; I purged a bunch last year, but really, I’ve still got a bunch of this stuff, last looked at again back in the 80s. Time to clear it out, send it to a good home that might use the stuff, or give it one good fondling.

–

So, yeah, time to clear out, be a grown up for once… well, pretend to anyway. Sure, selling off 25 arcade games is a bit of a help in the $$ arena, but I still have 50 more ….

*plays Galaxian*

<edit; I guess .. its easy to look at turning stuff off or selling it, until you give it one last whirl; it was easy to consider turning down the bbs, until I thought I’d just log in and see whats up .. and a few people were they hanging out. *damn* ;)>

A real RPG is one where you must painstakingly create a part of adventurers 4-6 members big. Each character will take approximately 2 hours to ‘roll’, where-in theres a certain element of luck (so you go through the whole process, then discard the guy, and start over, repeating 100 times per adventurer) and skill (where you pour over all reference materials, maps, species origins and strengths/weaknesses for a minimum of 2 hours each.) But as Square Enix is learning, a real RPG is not one in which there are no choices for the first 10 hours of the game, where there are no stores, nor turns on the road, nor abilities, but only endless pressing of the X button.

I’ve kicked off a new ‘retro gaming competitive league’ of sorts, over at my favourite home away from home, the GP32x forum. (Sister to the OPBoards, the home of the Open Pandora forums, which split off from the GP32x forum.)

If you’re into retro gaming (80s and 90s era, think SNES, Genesis, Turbo Grafx, Arcade, etc) and want an excuse to brag and trash-talk other gamers as a way to motivate yourself, this could be it; it is designed so that even time constrained people (like me!) can play .. got kids, a job, no problem! Games and scoring are designed so you can play in just a few minutes every other week and still be in the competition. You will not be required to play a 20 hour game of Civilization every other week!

Check it out, over at the forum:

http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/forum/107-gp32-offline-gaming-league/

Yes, you can!

(And yes, people are still using old Atari TOS machines like the Atari ST or TT030 or Falcon; and yes people are still developing and improving the operating system for sed beasts, and better still, people are still making new clone and TOS-compatible machines! I’ll write a bit about that when I get a moment.)

But for now, some news about Gentoo on MiNT (MiNT is a unix-like kernel you can run on TOS-machines. Essentially, its the new OS for that line of machines. Atari was shipping it near the end.)

The fellow releasing gentoo packages is doing a bang up job, but its a lot of work to do that, and he’s not got the time to maintain a how-to or wiki or the like and is hoping the community at large can help out; I emailed some newbie questions his way and thought I’d post a quick summary, in hopes it helps someone .. or possibly makes someone dig out their 20 year old hardware to get it up and going.

The hard part of course is getting files onto an old machine; for TOS machines, you can get EtherNet or NetUSBee or Hydra network cards, or get a UltraSatan SD card reader, or worst case.. a null modem cable with kermit or zmodem, a terminal application, and lots of patience :) If you need links, I can post some, but Google is your friend.

1. Get a MiNT kernel going, such as the recently posted 1.17.0 setup; pick it up from www.freemint.org or sparemint.org for instance; some install steps or installers are available, but that would be gentoo unspecific.. but will help get your brain around this; not sure about you, but these old memories are forgotten, so installers and guides are great at tickling back the old info! The mint download will include the bits for the Auto folder (the MiNT kernel itself) and some MINT folder contents, drivers, etc.
2. You’ll need an AES, such as XaAES (open source) or N.AES etc; XaAES is included in the MiNT download so should be no problem. AES is the GUI OS shell, and the one built into TOS is single-tasking oriented more or less; the newer AES can handle the multiple concurrent apps.
3. Optionally a replacement VDI such as fvdi (open source) or NVDI or whathaveyou; these are often faster than the VDI built into TOS, but optional. (VDI is the device rendering abstraction, letting applications print or render to screen or do fonts, etc.)
4. Optionally, set up a desktop replacement such as Terradesk (open source) or NeoDesk or whatever. Again, you can use good old GEM desktop and desk accessories.
5. Finally, just fetch and unpack the Gentoo distribution over at gentoo.atariforge.org — unpack onto an ext2fs filesystem. This can be tricky if you have a vanilla machine — I think hddriver can format an e2fs partition for you, and you can probably find a tar/gzip tool. If you’re already running a unix-like mint, piece of cake. Or set thing sup in ARanyM, then copy the disk image over your real disk, or boot from SD, or.. etc :)
6. Lastly, ensure your MINT.CNF is pointing to your boot choice — be it /bin/bash or XaAES or whatever, depending on what sort of look and feel you’d like.

Piece of cake, right?

This is a seat-of-my-pants posting to gp32x forum again, so its not really up to snuff to be posted here on the blog, but I like the sentiment, and I’m too busy/lazy to rewrite it :)

You know whats sort of sad –

When emulation actually _improves_ the original. I’m an arcade collector, and also an emu author .. those seem opposed in one sense; emulation is great, for carrying around old gear on new gear and for having the ability to switch games without carrying around giant carts or pcboards… but being inexact, its often better to have the original. Certainly, the original controls add a lot (arcade, say) and sometimes you need the right ’sound’ (consider QBert, which had a little hammer knocking on the side of the arcade cabinet; you just can’t reproduce that in emulation.)

But after digging out some of my old gear I’m getting less tolerant; I used to just love some of this stuff, or be blinded to the flaws because it was just so awesome, especially in its time. But looking back now ..

Aside form being _HUGE_..

Game Gear — a crap screen; one of those LCDs thats ‘brightness’ and ‘tint’ was controlled by the angle you looked at it; seriously. And batteries good for 2-3 hours, so you had to buy a huuuge battery pack, on top of an already huge machine.

Turbo Express (TG16, PCEngine handheld) — super crap screen; tiny little screen, but also ‘blurry’ .. ie: its less resolution or something than the CRTs it was replacing (but you could runm real TG16 games on it, not portable-versions of them), so text was unreadable, and anythign using a patterned texture would shimmer like mad. Battery life like 3 hours on 6 AAs.

Atari Lynx — now, this was a pretty masterful machine with a great screen (big, good colours, and atually a pretty nice screen); but huge device. Also a battery life of 3-4 hours. Unique in that you can flip the machine over and hit a switch to rotate the screen.. left handed friendly!

GameBoy — just crap, really.

Emulation improves these guys. Suddenly the size is managable, the screens are 100 times better, no worry about batteries running out just like that .. I’ve been too busy with having a kid and working on pandora and my own games, and real work etc, I’ve just not dug these out in years, and I gotta say .. wow, they still rock, but damned if I’m not more inclined to just fire up the emus

Just for fun, I thought I would dig out an ancient machine .. one of the very first ‘palmtops’ (they were called back then, I think.) I used to trot this out when talking about PDAs years ago, but lets just show it beside a modern clamshell device .. the Open Pandora for instance (which I work on, I must admit.)  The Portfolio is even closer looking to more conventional clamshells (the Pandora has a d-pad on it for instance.) To me, they just seem so similar in so many ways — the overall look and hinge and such. The details are all different of course — the relative openness of the OP, the d-pad and analog controls and so on, but take a 3 second glance and they coudl be sisters.

Pandora vs Portfolio (thumbnail)

For full size image click the pic or go here: http://www.walled.net/~jmitchell/skeleton.org/blogmedia/technology/atari/portfolio/pandora_vs_portfolio_1.jpg

Another pic with no flash: http://www.walled.net/~jmitchell/skeleton.org/blogmedia/technology/atari/portfolio/pandora_vs_portfolio_2.jpg

I posted to a thread on gp32x forum:

Notice the overall design similarity.

Atari Portfolio — 1989
Open Pandora — 2010-ish.

Theres 20 years of technology advancement, folks

For the curious, the Portfolio runs at just under 5Mhz and runs a modded DOS 2 if memory serves; due to low res (less than 80×20 columns, uses like 20×8 or something, I forget) it actually lets you pan the screen around, but well behaved DOS applications will (try to) adjust to fit; it runs old text adventures well .. I actually ported Frotz to it awhile back, just for a lark, and runs great