Take a moment to reminisce and share your top 10 moments as an Atari lover.
1. LOVE AT FIRST SITE: When I walked into my 6th grade BASIC Programming class, I had no idea that my entire life had suddenly been laid out before me like railroad tracks. I fell in love and have been a computer junkie - Atari especially - ever since.
2. PIE FACTORY: Donkey Kong on the 8-Bit Atari is a masterpiece; vastly superior to the arcade version. The squished, chubby sprites are, style-wise, more whimsical and endearing that the coin-op. The first time I beat the Pie Factory stage, I was 12 years old. It was a Friday in computer class and on Friday, we were allowed to play. I was 1/2 hour into several attempts. My last Mario (Jumpman back then) and I did it! I jumped out of my chair and yelled "Fuck Yeah!". My teacher kicked me out for the rest of the day.
3. ONE OF MY OWN: I had already been in love with the Atari for a year, but I only got to use one when I was at school. My folks were fairly poor, so I hadn't even dared to dream of having one of my own. But one Sunday, we were at an outdoor fund-raiser for my church. There were all kinds of things for sale: clothes, baked goods, used electronics. And that's when I saw it. A complete package: 800XL, 1050 disk drive, and a 1027 printer. All of them complete with the brown vinyl dust covers. The asking price for the set was $250. I told my Dad that I wanted it more than anything in the world and that I would pay back every penny. He did it and it is to this day the kindest and most important thing anyone has ever done for me.
4. A 130XE, XF551, and 256K MIO: The 800XL and 1050 is where it started for me. But after high-school, I was making decent coin writing complex Lotus 1-2-3 macro pages for a construction company my dad worked for. My girlfriend's brother told me he had a friend who was selling his Atari gear and was I interested. I was, indeed. He had the gear in the title for $500, with a boat load of floppy disks. I took the lot and was in bliss for months afterward exploring the booty.
5. ENVISION: Among the software I got in the deal mentioned previously was a program called Envision. It was basically a font design and tile mapping program. I never did much with it myself, but it came with some cool samples. Among the best was a side view of the Enterprise. The file was NCC1701.MAP. And when it loaded in the viewer and you got to move around with that super smooth viewport scrolling, it was WOW! It really gave you a sense of the power and usefulness of the system.
6. DISK WIZARD II: In the early days, cheating wasn't as easy as hitting the "`" key to bring up the console. You had to really work for it. Disk Wizard II was my weapon of choice. And the first time I sector edited my Ultima IV Britannia save to have max gold, I felt like the most powerful person on the planet.
7. LUCASFILM: The first time I saw the LucasFilm splash screen on BallBlazer and Eidolon, my lid was popped. The colors were so good and the deep bass-ey sound in the orchestra drop were really impressive. I had the audio on my Atari lined out to a Pioneer Rack with a pair of 12" woofer towers and it was THX, years before its time.
8. XF551 3.5": I'm not much of a hardware hacker. But I simply HAD to move to 3.5" floppies. They're so stackable and modular and cool looking. The project to gather all the information together on how to do it and buying the chip burner and chips was super cool. Then actually taking the thing apart, swapping the chips, and having it work was insanity. Now I have big boxes full of 3.5's with custom labels and the feeling of flipping through them, popping one out, sticking it in, and booting up is a great big bath of warm nostalgia.
9. SWAN DEMO: Xanth's Swan Demo is still one of the most elegant and impactful graphics demonstrations I have ever seen on any platform. The spinning Fuji and the way its blue edges brighten and darken with the rotation is so well done. The swan has a real organic feel to it. And the little space-bar easter-eggie is neat, too. I like to leave this demo running in a little window on the bottom right of my screen. A little nostalgic furniture.
10. BLACK BOX: When I got Bob Puff's Black Box working with an old 245MB SCSI-II drive I harvested from a Sun SPARC 2, it felt like serious business. I was creating sector maps and dumping disk images by the hundreds, for hours every day. It was sheer bliss. The whole instant load thing was heady stuff.
1. LOVE AT FIRST SITE: When I walked into my 6th grade BASIC Programming class, I had no idea that my entire life had suddenly been laid out before me like railroad tracks. I fell in love and have been a computer junkie - Atari especially - ever since.
2. PIE FACTORY: Donkey Kong on the 8-Bit Atari is a masterpiece; vastly superior to the arcade version. The squished, chubby sprites are, style-wise, more whimsical and endearing that the coin-op. The first time I beat the Pie Factory stage, I was 12 years old. It was a Friday in computer class and on Friday, we were allowed to play. I was 1/2 hour into several attempts. My last Mario (Jumpman back then) and I did it! I jumped out of my chair and yelled "Fuck Yeah!". My teacher kicked me out for the rest of the day.
3. ONE OF MY OWN: I had already been in love with the Atari for a year, but I only got to use one when I was at school. My folks were fairly poor, so I hadn't even dared to dream of having one of my own. But one Sunday, we were at an outdoor fund-raiser for my church. There were all kinds of things for sale: clothes, baked goods, used electronics. And that's when I saw it. A complete package: 800XL, 1050 disk drive, and a 1027 printer. All of them complete with the brown vinyl dust covers. The asking price for the set was $250. I told my Dad that I wanted it more than anything in the world and that I would pay back every penny. He did it and it is to this day the kindest and most important thing anyone has ever done for me.
4. A 130XE, XF551, and 256K MIO: The 800XL and 1050 is where it started for me. But after high-school, I was making decent coin writing complex Lotus 1-2-3 macro pages for a construction company my dad worked for. My girlfriend's brother told me he had a friend who was selling his Atari gear and was I interested. I was, indeed. He had the gear in the title for $500, with a boat load of floppy disks. I took the lot and was in bliss for months afterward exploring the booty.
5. ENVISION: Among the software I got in the deal mentioned previously was a program called Envision. It was basically a font design and tile mapping program. I never did much with it myself, but it came with some cool samples. Among the best was a side view of the Enterprise. The file was NCC1701.MAP. And when it loaded in the viewer and you got to move around with that super smooth viewport scrolling, it was WOW! It really gave you a sense of the power and usefulness of the system.
6. DISK WIZARD II: In the early days, cheating wasn't as easy as hitting the "`" key to bring up the console. You had to really work for it. Disk Wizard II was my weapon of choice. And the first time I sector edited my Ultima IV Britannia save to have max gold, I felt like the most powerful person on the planet.
7. LUCASFILM: The first time I saw the LucasFilm splash screen on BallBlazer and Eidolon, my lid was popped. The colors were so good and the deep bass-ey sound in the orchestra drop were really impressive. I had the audio on my Atari lined out to a Pioneer Rack with a pair of 12" woofer towers and it was THX, years before its time.
8. XF551 3.5": I'm not much of a hardware hacker. But I simply HAD to move to 3.5" floppies. They're so stackable and modular and cool looking. The project to gather all the information together on how to do it and buying the chip burner and chips was super cool. Then actually taking the thing apart, swapping the chips, and having it work was insanity. Now I have big boxes full of 3.5's with custom labels and the feeling of flipping through them, popping one out, sticking it in, and booting up is a great big bath of warm nostalgia.
9. SWAN DEMO: Xanth's Swan Demo is still one of the most elegant and impactful graphics demonstrations I have ever seen on any platform. The spinning Fuji and the way its blue edges brighten and darken with the rotation is so well done. The swan has a real organic feel to it. And the little space-bar easter-eggie is neat, too. I like to leave this demo running in a little window on the bottom right of my screen. A little nostalgic furniture.
10. BLACK BOX: When I got Bob Puff's Black Box working with an old 245MB SCSI-II drive I harvested from a Sun SPARC 2, it felt like serious business. I was creating sector maps and dumping disk images by the hundreds, for hours every day. It was sheer bliss. The whole instant load thing was heady stuff.