Uber retro
Not that any of you really CARE, but the first computer I ever owned was an Atari 800 that my grandfather bought for me in 1984. I don’t think I could have had a better computer. I learned so much about programming, and how computers work, and how something that cost so much money still wasn’t perfect. How things haven’t changed.
One thing I’ve always wanted to do was write an Atari 2600 game. It’s so simple nowadays. The problem is coming up with something truly original. There were about 1000 different games for the 2600. It seems like when I think of something original, I find that someone did it 20 years ago. So I just dabbled in it for a while, making images and backgrounds, learning how the whole system works. It was fun for a few days but in the end I figured it would be better to spend my time doing other things since I don’t think I’ll be writing the next best 2600 game anytime soon.
The other thing I wanted to work on was archiving all my Atari 800/800XL floppies. I have TONS of them, and they’re not going to last forever. I already lost the binary of the game I submitted to the Star Wars Fan Club Creativity Contest (and won 10th place with). I have the printout of it in the attic so eventually I’ll have to type the whole damn thing back in. I seriously doubt that Lucasfilm has a copy of it, and as it is, I sent it in on cassette since my mother wouldn’t let me open the disk drive my grandfather bought until several weeks after I got the computer. I even have the original notes I wrote for the game when I was writing it for the TRS-80 Model III computers we had in school. So, I checked out the Atari 800 XL I have and it’s deteriorated for some reason. One of the keys has always been missing and I keep the thing in a nice spot, but it’s shot. I ordered a new one on eBay for $27 so I can’t complain about that. Oddly enough, a few hours after I won the auction I got an email from another bidder asking me to sell him the one I just got. An odd request considering that one didn’t sell the day before (for $9.99!) and there are three others up for auction. Why was mine so important? Eh… /shrug
I haven’t decided if I’m going to so anything with the Atari 800 besides back up my junk. It would be nice to consolidate all the boxes of floppies onto one large hard drive. The floppies don’t take up a lot of room, but we’re trying to get rid of as much stuff as we can in the house. It would be fun to run the games on the original hardware since the emulators aren’t 100%. I can’t tell you how many times I played Encounter! or Landscape or Ballblazer. I even ran a BBS at one point which didn’t last long. Hell, I might even have the floppy from that lying around somewhere. The thing about computers back then is that they were so much simpler. Writing an program nowadays takes so much time and effort because you have to deal with multithreading, windows, events, networking, patching code exploits, and a host of other isses. The 8-bit days seem like walk in the park compared to today’s overcomplicated systems.
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