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Games Entertainment

Atari Founder Debuts Linux-Based Game Machines 98

Posted by Hemos from the career-resurrection? dept.
jalefkowit writes "Wired News has a great story about uWink, Nolan Bushnell's new game company. Bushnell is the creator of "Pong" and the man who was behind the early successes of Atari, including the 2600 console and its pioneering stand-up arcade machines. Now he's launched a line of new stand-up, net-connected game machines that are powered by Linux."
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Atari Founder Debuts Linux-Based Game Machines More

Atari Founder Debuts Linux-Based Game Machines

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  • The site looks like crap, even on the "just for Netscape 4.5" version.

    They have a bad case of the bad HTML [w3.org].

    Why is it so hard to write valid HTML?

  • as I understand it, you don't have rights to the source unless a binary has been distributed to you.
  • none of the good parts.

    I mean, c'mon, if the list of games created is what they show, this is so last century as to be a total waste of time.

    Maybe they're counting on you being so blotto from the beer that you'd actually play one of these games ...

  • Nolan Bushnell didn't invent Pong (Score:5)

    by Zerothis ( 106974 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @11:39AM (#688541) Homepage
    Just to clarify Willy Higinbotham invented electronic "tennis for two" (Pong) in 1958, but sought no patent. If he had it would have been property of the federal government since he did it while at his job. There's a scary thought, the US government owning videogames. Ralph Baer did patent his electronic Hockey game (Pong) in 1971 and licensed it to Magnavox. Nolan Bushnell saw Ralph Baer's Hockey game at a trade show and later asked Al Alcorn to create a ball and paddle game (Pong). He did not say where the idea came from. Rumors that Nolan Bushnell did not actually see hockey at the trade show are false. He was there, he played it and HE SIGNED MAGNAVOX'S GUEST BOOK. Duffus. Nolan Bushnell also lied to Al Alcorn about a contract signed with General Electric to sell Pong (GE was never even contacted). Al Alcorn programmed Pong.

    Nolan Bushnell does deserve much credit for laboring long and hard to put Spacewar (Computer Space) on smaller cheaper hardware and inventing the first electronic arcade game. And he deserves credit for successfully marketing Pong as an arcade and home game. But he did not invent Pong
  • I'm not sure how the "stand-up" video game industry works, but I could see a scenario here where you don't "own" the machine, but maybe lease it from them. Or maybe just have the rights to receive a portion of the money going into it (since it's by credit card).
  • if you are drunk these classic games are going to seem a lot more fun. I have seen machines like these in arcades that have card games, tetris, and bubble bobble. Usually girls are playing on them. Not to say that girls do not ever play Capcom Vs Marvel or NBA Jam, but how many girls do you know like to play complex games that require a couple of years honing your skills to play them well? I never was good at Quake or Doom until I got into college and spent way too much time playing them. And I still do not have a very good aim.
  • I love Pong and most of N. Bushnell's games, but I went to see the screenshots of his games and they look like they will suck...

    They look like slightly glorified version of the Mastertouch 5000 or whatever that stupid thing is sitting in the corner of some bars.

    I'm not impressed. I'd much rather play Space Rocks [wildtangent.com] from WildTangent [wildtangent.com] in WinAmp [winamp.com].

    Damn /. and it's SPACES inside of long URLs!


    Refrag
  • When the hell are we going to have one of these? Something along the lines of what happened when the Pogo-damned brawling (street fighter) and Virtual-(sport/race/tank/plastic-gun-in-hand) games became popular?

    Back when I was a kid I fought and stole for quarters to play coin-op games like Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, Two Tigers, Heavy Barrel, etc. These were games that you could learn to play for a long time after a reasonable investment. Something that would bring you back for more. It was battle against the machine, not against another person.

    Virtual sport, etc, games provide somewhat of the same challenge, unfortunately usually the designers expend their efforts working on better hardware skateboards, skis, or rifles, resulting in gameplay that pales in comparison to the $1/play pricing system.

    I can only hope that these systems OR SOMETHING ELSE bring back the joy that you could have by playing for a little while, learning something, playing again, and then playing better. All at low cost, and as basically just a "fun" experience and not one with grand theatrics.

  • Re:Nolan's last company (Score:3)

    by Lumpish Scholar ( 17107 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @11:49AM (#688546) Homepage Journal
    ... was TouchNet [touchnet.com]. I found a News.com article from 1996 [cnet.com] about it.

    He also founded Chuck E. Cheese.
  • I'm no guru, but aren't there lots of things that you can leave out when you compile the kernel?

    And they're not necessarily even running a non-"standard" (whatever that would be) kernel. They may be using ONLY the kernel.

    But go ahead and be a gadfly. That's the sort of thing that keeps companies honest. It should cost them next to nothing to say "Yes, we're not violating the GPL, and to prove it, here's the process you can go through to produce the GPL binaries on our system - include these options, exclude those, and use this compiler."
  • Hmm, here's an interesting way to abuse the GPL:

    - Lease the box for your "operating system" for 100 years at whatever price you would have sold it at. Make it so you need the box to use the O/S.

    - Modify any GPL software however you like to make it work whatever (improved) way you want.

    - When they ask for the sources, simply tell the people they don't own the "operating system", and are only leasing the box and therefore have no rights to its source.

    Now we know how Microsoft Linux is going to happen.
  • Nothing about this is new, we have game centers where where you can play Online Q3/UT/HL.
    Also there is a Net Mame version that will allow you to play multiplayer.

    As for Credit Cards, hell ya, at 2 bux a play for some of these new games, you need a big bag of quarters...

  • Enhancing your time in the pub? I thought that's what the booze was for...
  • as Kasparov is defending his title, currently Champ: 3 Challenger: 4 [kasparovchess.com].

    Oh, was that offtopic?
  • "Bushnell is the creator of "Pong" and the man who was behind the early successes of Atari, including the 2600 console and its pioneering stand-up arcade machines"

    I really object to this generalization. If you do some research, I think you'll find Bushnell did not program all the early Atari arcade machines (or 2600 games) by hismelf nor de he build all of them by hand in his garage,

    This kind of over generalization really minimalizes all the hard work and genius of the OTHERS who worked on these projects. (A few of whom it has been my pleasure to know later in their careers.)
  • Its about time coin-op arcade games joined the networked multiplayer arena. By far the most fun coin-ops are the ones where there are multiple machines next to each other (e.g. Sega Rally et. al.), and you can play your friends (and shout at them when they overtake you).

    What would really get me to fork out more than fifty cents a play (but no more than a buck, please) for networked games would to be to have a bank of, say, four systems next to one another, connected to three other banks of four. Racing games, tank games, whatever. You work in teams, able to shout at one another over the din of explosions and racing engines, and you do your work.

    Incidentally, this sort of thing is the best way to get things done playing networked team games on the PC; Some of us in my office will play Unreal Tournament while sitting in the same room, and we'll do better than average, because we can communicate freely. Of course, there's always teleconferencing, which would work pretty good, too, but this way you can hear your friends and the speaker sounds both very well. Otherwise you'd need some sort of attenuation and mixing system so that you could pipe the phone signal into your headphones along with the game sound.

    Being able to play in arcades in that way would be very excellent. I can't get too excited about playing tetris with someone in Manhattan, though. At least, not for more than a quarter.

  • like any comp., they have the capability to be updgraded to DSL or any high broadband when the operator is able... all they'll need is a network card they can install themselves...
  • Bitmap Brothers [bitmap-brothers.co.uk] made it. Its kinda old, one of the last commercial dos games, but there's a new full 3d sequel in the works. Its an RTS where there's no building construction, only flags you capture to take over all the buildings within the sector. Each building makes units, defences, or works as radar or repair. Each sector you have also boosts the speed of your individuation construction buildings. The game is all one non-stop rush, as you have to try and conquer territory quickly or you'll fall behind your opponent in unit construction.
  • well, if you took the time to read the articles about the company you'd find that they're not going after the 13-20 year olds that spend hours on Quake. Sure, GLQuake is an awesome engine but they're marketing towards bars and hotels. The average person who plays quake couldn't even get into a bar. it all goes back to the company's purpose and it ain't the quake crowd. it's the drunkards who'll pop in quarter after quarter to play a pong-like game...it's ingenious
  • This Lbox (if you will) system uses a standard linux distro, tweaked in setup to be robust in standalone and power-out situations. The games run only on our hardware. Broadband support is no problem because of linux itself (dialup is more trouble, but a LCD.) Realize this is an introduction offering of a flexible platform, produced in months instead of years due to the power of the underlying system. The games are aimed at an audience which is probably much different than that of slashdot.
  • It was suposed to be:
    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of s***ch, or of the press; or the right of the people ***ceably to ***emble, and to pe***ion the Government for a redress of grievances.

    But slashdot CENSORED me!
    Or rather they restriced me
    (restriction != ban) //for narrow definitions of ban

    It really agitates me to know there are Americans out there spewing fourth vacuous dribble from their tiny little minds and they have no idea why they are allowed to do this. Not that you, Anonymous Coward, have a tiny little mind. You are allowed, if you are not from the USA. But I know there are Americans out there that don't have a clue about the first amendment and that just pisses me off!
    Maybey I should just erase my sig, and enter this manually.
  • The existence of certain patents [oreillynet.com] would tend to suggest otherwise. The fact is someone was able to patent making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich [delphion.com].

    Ralph Bear patented Television Gaming Apparatus and Method [delphion.com]". Basically all videogames had to be licensed from Sanders Associates, Inc (Mr. Baer's company). The fact that this was allowed can be chalked up to ignorance. No one person or group should be blamed, there was enough ignorance to go around. While everyone could understand saucer shaped crafts that fly, this was not the case with videogames. No one, not even Mr, Bear himself, had a clue how prevalent videogames would become and no one else knew what they were.

    As I understand it, the court case involving pong (just one of the things I mentioned) was not so much about any specific games (Hockey vs Pong) but rather Mr. Baer's 'videogame patent' was being defended. The similarity between hockey and pong was just a damaging bit of evidence against Mr. Bushnell and supported the claim that he deliberately stole the idea as opposed to the claim that any resemblance between Magnavox's product and Atari's was purely coincidental. I do admit I have not read the entire court transcripts from beginning to end but I'm pretty sure I got the important details right.

    I'm not bitching that PONG was second hand, just stating the facts. Willy Higinbotham invented it, Ralph Bear patented it, Nolan Bushnell successfully marketed it. Magnavox took Atari to court, where the name Willy Higinbotham was never mentioned. Nolan Bushnell technically lost, but managed a slick licensing deal out of the mess. Videogames began their rise to total entertainment domination. That leads to the present, where many people continue to think Nolan Bushnell invented videogames and don't hesitate to pass on this false rumor, often in credible forums.
  • Those little sets are everywhere in a few coffee shops around here. Oddly enough with all the rinky-dink games they have(some feature nudity in them like Gals Panic), they never seem to be idle.

    Of course, there's a Centipede machine at another coffee shop I know of that is never idle either.

    I hope someday to see a MAME cabinet/cocktail at a coffeeshop so I could play alllll day long from a selection of 400+ games.

  • Buy one first (Score:4)

    by Royster ( 16042 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @11:06AM (#688561) Homepage
    The GPL only requires that they provide the source to people that they distribute the code to. There is no requirement that they make it available to anyone who asks. And it also means they don't have to provide anything until the ship.
  • as I understand it, you don't have rights to the source unless a binary has been distributed to you.

    Good point. If however, I was a kiosk owner, and I purchased a console, then I would be recieving the binaries (and the device) and I could then ask for the source, and distribute it freely myself.

    Volunteers?

  • Seeing as how Linux uses UTC as the basis for setting the time, the "time" thing should work out quite a lot better. Using NTP [ntp.org] would make this quite a non-issue, and that wouldn't consume terribly much in the way of network resources. I suppose there might be some concern if motherboard BIOS was set up to be "DST-aware," but if they control the hardware selection, that's not much of an issue.

    ... And tools like RPM, [rpm.org] dpkg, as well as scripting systems like cfengine [hioslo.no] provide ways of readily deploying upgrades and of otherwise maintaining "system cleanliness." After all, you don't want to have the box go down when a log file fills up, and then need to ship out new hard drives to fix things if they do...

  • If that's all the games that they're going to have, well, I'm not impressed. I want to be able to sit down and play something a bit more graphically impressive.

    Why not simply put something together using the GLQuake engine? It's GPL, and I'm sure id wouldn't mind selling them a license. You could have something closer to the original vision of Quake - a networked system of worlds leading off into games through portals.
  • Eh? They aren't talking about games 'like Pong'. The 'Pong' reference is due to the fact that Nolan Bushnell is widely credited as having created Pong (though he had help).
  • There's a reason for that - they're stupid puzzle games. I'm so annoyed that they're sticking to such boring games for this concept. While I agree that the overgraphicked monstrous racing games of today's arcades would be a bad move, this isn't too good either. I mean, all they offer are a ton of variations on solitare and mindlesssweeper. They connect ot the internet, but most aren't even multiplayer. Its idiotic. While I realize they are looking for simple games that wont maul the newbies, that doesn't mean they have to be so boring. Simple games I'd like to see on one of these 1) cybersled (really easy to learn but intricate) 2) Z (really fast and easy RTS game) 3) scorched Earth (this is great over coffee, I've tried) 4) Liero (always a classic) 5) some sort Space War remake. 6) Ballistix (wierd psygnosis pinball/sport hybrid thing) 7) Ballblazer - the original (1 on 1 soccer with hover vehicles) 8) Cannons and Catapults (old BBS game that would be great for multiplayer) 9) Rampart You're probably noticing that I list old mainly old games. This is cause new ones are waaaaay to0 complicated for newbie gamers. Do you remember the first time you played Quake with a mouse? Not much fun. I mean, think of all our big hits right now - the Sims, UT, StarCraft, HomeWorld, Diablo, etc. About the only one I'd wanna really get into in the first game, without prior experience in the genre, is Diablo. There are very few recent games that are really easy to play. 3d is part of the problem, as 3d makes steering more complicated. The most complex 3d game I'd put in one of these would be a really oversimplified flight/space sim, like Line Wars, or VR Slingshot, or Pyrotechnica. Thats why Cybersled is on the list - its a simple game, but the 2-joystick system is dead easy to pick up, and there's just two buttons to worry about. Z would be nice because it has none of the traditional learning problems of an RTS game - its got no buildings to build, no rescources to manage. Its just one non-stop rush. I think the main things to consider when planning one of these games is A) is it easy enough to play decently first time? B) is the match short enough that a person wont play for hours on 1 payment? (Total Annihlation games are hours long, so that's not happening). These things have to make money. A game shouldn't last more then 5-10 minutes. That's why Z is the only RTS I'd consider. C) is it casual? You don't really want to play Q2, with all its gore and splattering and gunshots, in a coffee shop. That's why I think Scorched Earth would be a good move for that. Of course, I'm being unrealistic anyways. I know that, if they're trying to pander to the average joe, the only non-puzzle games that'll sell will be the sports games.

  • Windows Devices (OT) (Score:3)

    by DrCode ( 95839 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @11:13AM (#688567)
    Reminds me: A few weeks ago I was waiting in line at a "Home Club" store to check out, when the guy running the cash register in the line next to mine asked my line's cashier for help. She looked over at his screen, then told him to hit ctrl-alt-delete.

    "Are these registers running Windows?" I asked incredulously when I got to the head of the line.

    "Yes," she answered, "that's why they go down so often."

  • How ironic is that.

    Well, slashdot won't let me post the link. It keeps inserting spaces. Anyway, just plug http://www.uwink.com/netscape/4_5/i nde x.html [uwink.com] into http://validator.w3.org [w3.org]

  • Until you try to get broadband into every bar/pub/arcade/K-Mart in the country and realize that most of these places have a tough enough time getting phone lines installed. A couple of weeks ago I went down to the Radio Shack in the mall (seems they were giving away free barcode readers ;) and I noticed that they were showing "internet connections" using a standard dialup, worse apparently the store only had one dialup line, so whever someone went and showed off "that internet thingie" the people at the counter would have to wait (apparently there computers have to be dialed up to do anything). Talking to the guy behind the counter, I learned that they had applied for an ISDN line (the only kind of "broadband" you can get in the mall) over 6 months ago and still hadn't recieved it. Is this the kind of hassle you want people to face when they put your box in their back room? No, most owners would just return it and buy something that didn't require them to deal with the phone company.
  • Nolan didn't just start Atari. He was also the pioneer of Chuck E Cheese [chuckecheese.com], that annoying pizza/playspace chain. It's a sad commentary on American consumerism that Chuck E Cheese is the $300 million company it is, while Atari, his true love, has all but slipped of the map. It must be truly frustrating, or at least as frustrating as things can be when you're still as rich as he is.

  • Inside Your Bar Owners Head (Score:3)

    by Fatal0E ( 230910 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @11:58AM (#688572)
    "Hmmmm, mechanical bull or pong?"
  • What is this Z Game? Who makes it? any URL?
  • Odds are that their linux-derivative OS is just Linux, with different startup scripts, that then runs non-free software. This would mean that in return for buying a kiosk and hassling them, you'd get a copy of the kernel, and a couple libraries.

    Oh yeah, let me help with that genius project.

    --
    "Don't trolls get tired?"
  • actually, they look childish, and simplistic. they are all fairly non-complex games. most of them look like variants of memory or tic-tac-toe.

    Yeah, just like the tabletop games that are in bars all over the world now, which rake in money from drunk people.

    Personally I think they should include a breathalyzer. Those things are great fun. Every now and then we drink our asses off to see if we can blow a 0.4 on the drunkometer. If you want to make cash on coins, put a breathalyzer machine in your bar.

  • I think the whole point is if it had been running Linux it wouldn't matter if it got hit with the millenium bug or the Love bug, it wouldn't have freakin' crashed :P
    --

  • Nolan founded Chuck E. Cheese but somehow I don't think that's the company you are referring to.

    Maru

  • There is a really cool book titled "The Rise and Fall of Atari" that explains exactly why Atari went down the shitter. Of course, Nolan was well out of there by that point.

    Maru
  • Of course, there's always teleconferencing, which would work pretty good, too, but this way you can hear your friends and the speaker sounds both very well. Otherwise you'd need some sort of attenuation and mixing system so that you could pipe the phone signal into your headphones along with the game sound.
    The PC equivalent of this is Roger Wilco [rogerwilco.com], but I've never tried it; I have pretty much zero confidence of it working over a modem connection.

    When 'fat pipe' higher bandwidth connections begin to be standard in home networking, then it's more likely to be usuable.

    Having said all this, having an ADSL connection on an arcade machine surely isn't infeasible; arcade machines are pretty pricy on their own, and an ADSL connection would be peanuts compared to the purchase price.

  • Haiku (Score:1)

    by 575 ( 195442 )
    Network all bar-flies
    Now we know how it begins
    Soon we will be Borg
  • $2 a game?

    2 AUD per game is typical for most up-to-the-minute games - for something *really* special you can occasionally pay 3 AUD. Of course with the Pacific Peso the way it is at the moment that's less than a pound anyway . . .

  • i always wanted to play some of the two player atarii games over the network!

    Yippie!

    :)


    -- Thrakkerzog
  • They didn't mention any names of games compelling enough to make 20 somethings play.

    I hope it's better than Gnobots or XTris.

  • Makes sense... (Score:3)

    by Christopher B. Brown ( 1267 ) <cbbrowne@gmail.com> on Friday October 20, 2000 @10:44AM (#688584) Homepage
    • Linux is good at networking... uWink involves networking a whole bunch of game machines together...
    • Linux licenses are free of charge ... Thus making it cheaper to deploy uWink systems ...
    • Linux means that uWink does not need to be dependent on Where Microsoft Is Going Today ...
    I doubt it involves "free" software in "user space" to any meaningful extent; this proposal sounds pretty much a "poster child" for the scenario where it makes sense to use some sort of "Embedded Linux" to implement a networked graphical system.
  • Having multiplayer games (outside of the immediate vacinity) and an international ranking system seems (to me at least) to be the direction most games were heading anyway...

    Capt. Ron

  • I never considered this before, but it would really be cool to walk up to one of these guys and pop in $0.50 and be able to play Team Fortress or something.
  • Wow... mindless games with sub-standard graphics! I'm so impressed! But wait! They run Linux! Can anyone imagine a Beowulf cluster of these linked together? Think of the FPS we can get in PONG! It'll be so lifelike!

    "Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"

  • NTN (Score:3)

    by bguilliams ( 68934 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @10:46AM (#688588)
    Playing against people across the country in bars and restaurants? Well, if you like trivia, several thousand bars across the US already have NTN trivia [ntn.com] which uses a satellite dish and a modem dial up to connect tens of thousands of people at a time to compete in a variety of trivia games. Some of us are hopelessly addicted...
  • So are we gunna be able to play these games on our own linux boxens? It seems like there are few nice ones in there.... :)

  • There was a Quake Arcade [flashnet.it] machine, if you care.


    --
  • Does that include the network connection?

    Either way, I would easily pay a quarter to play some of the classic games against someone else. It would really fit in with the college crowd. We grew up with these games. After high school, most of us went in different directions. Something like this would let us play our favorite classic games against each other from across the world.

    How much does an ordinary arcade game cost?


    -- Thrakkerzog
  • Don't get your hopes up yet, all they're offering is silly puzzle games. Yay solitare.
  • that they'll be about as popular as the Atari 7800 was. Or the 2600. Or maybe the Jaguar...
  • I'll go ahead and say that I'm in Mississippi which is not known for its addoption of new technology (they are just now making braodband ubiquitous in the state's capital), but none the less I can't help but notice that a good number of the arcades in Jackson (the captial) and some other places I've visited are either closing or haven't bought a new machine since Tekken 3. It seems hard to imagine how an arcade can compete with PC and console machines that can produce close to or better graphics and game play, and cost a WHOLE lot less. There is the atmosphere and all that, but at 50 cents a pop, it had better be some damn good atmosphere. Now, I'd be interested to know how small to medium arcades are doing, I only have my one area to see, but the best I can tell is their dropping like flies. The point of all this is to say that perhaps arcades aren't the best places to bet your brand new company on. Then again, perhaps this could mark a new beginning for arcades. The only real draw to an arcade in the first place was to play a game that looked better and was more fun than anything you could have at home. If they could get this massively muliplayer enough, in a way that PCs and regular dial=ups simply couldn't, perhaps that part of arcades could be regained. If its nothing more than 32 people in a room shooting at each other, then this is more likely something that I could just as easily do at home in my underwear, rather than going to the mall and spending $10 on a couple hours of game play.
  • Atari coming out; finally! Now, a few things I might want to say that the creator of Pong shouldn't do unlike his company Atari:

    -- Put too much time into classics. Yes, classics are awesome, like Space Invaders, but really, it's nothing new

    -- Have too much "exclusive" games done in-house. Remember Jaguar, anyone?

    -- More importantly, get some new titles, etc, that going to rule :)

    I love the fact that this will be based on the Linux kernel (read: XBox will cost a fortune just in the fact of making the NT kernel work. Royalty? Would M$ really charge themselves one? :P) and also with modems to connect. Seriously, though, it should have ethernet as well... hopefully he'll wise up and allow connections to any ISP :)

  • I don't know if you checked out their site, but, when broadband becomes more accessable, these seemingly flexible console-kiosk things boxen can probably be retrofitted with equipment to allow a variety of services. The flexibility of Linux allows a lot more leeway than older, size-constrained (and proprietary) ROM setups.

    I'm thinking, more or less, about videophones... but I'm sure there are a lot more useful ideas that will come about with more flexible kiosks.
  • but he didn't invent tv ping-pong, anymore than Msft invented 'Windows'. That honor goes to Ralph Baer, excerpt:

    On 29th May 1972, Nolan Bushnell (later President of Atari) visits the "Magnavox Profit Caravan" at the Airport Marina Hotel in Burlingame, CA. He signs the guest book for Magnavox Odyssey Demo and plays the Odyssey Ping-Pong game hands-on. Later, he hires Alan Alcorn to design and build a coin-op version of the Ping-Pong game: PONG. This will mark the begining of the coin-op market.

    I was about to chime in with that, but I read before doing so. Mr. Baer is a family friend, and I have spent many an amazing trips down gaming memory lane in his basement. Talking GI-Joe? Simon? Those are only a few of his masterpieces...

  • cool! (Score:2)

    by jafac ( 1449 )
    I would like to play "Disk of Tron" with millions of people across the world, because I really kick ass at that game, and I believe myself to be the Kasparov of "Disk of Tron".
  • $2 a game?

    Hm.

    The most I'd ever put into an arcade machine is a pound a game, and only if it were a really good game (multiplayer, and/or with some sort of gimmick like Silent Scope's zoomed sniper scope rifle).

    And this is London prices, so everything's about double what you'll pay in the rest of England.
  • for $28 Million [arizona.edu] but remained on the Atari board. Don't know if anybody could have brought Atari out of the '84 crash, or the Tramiel rein; maybe a successful partnership with Nintendo [nintendoland.com], but it's all just speculation over what 'could have been' now.
  • The IE5.0 code is just as bad. <sarcasm>Thankfully tidying their code hasn't prevented them from making a really kickin' set of innovative games that push the limits of interactivity and really enhance one's time in the pub</sarcasm>
  • and here [pong-story.com]'s a link with pictures of the "first video game" at BNL.
  • I watched the machine boot; it took at least ten minutes to get to the point where the system was actually operating.

    I don't care in the slightest what proportion of that time involved:

    • Doing a memory check
    • Loading the OS
    • Doing a "scandisk" because the system went down uncleanly
    • Connecting to the network and identifying oneself to the corporate environment
    • Starting up the "cash register" application

    The point is that it took ten minutes from the time of pressing the power switch before the cashier was able to Enter My Order, which is, after all, the whole point of having the computer there.

    And, as for the "journalling" issue, I have gotten myself a journalling filesystem, at least as far as metadata goes. I've been using ReiserFS [devlinux.com] for probably the last 18 months, thank you very much...

  • I worked for Pizza Time back in the early 80's. Nolans *corporate* Pizza Time Theatre crashed and burned. He was out of that and on to his "Catalyst Ventures" before the complete demise of Pizza time. Half of the CC-PTT stores where franchises - and I suspect the Chuck-E-Cheese that still exists today must have arisen from the ashes of the remaining franchise outlets. I dunno for sure - I lit a cigar with my Stock option certificate and walked away - never looking back. Nolan is a fascinating guy - VERY charismatic - and definitly a visionary in his own right! Despite the disappointment of PTT/Sente crumbling beneath my feet - I still have great respect for him. LUX ./. owen

  • Re:Inside Your Bar Owners Head (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The mechanical bull is a lot more entertaining than pong if you can talk some urban cowgirl into riding it.
  • Actually, Baer was the second guy to invent pong. Higginbotham was the first. Check out:

    http://www.pong-story.com/thefirst.htm

    BTW, it sounds like Mr. Baer is quite bitter about this. At the same web site, he is quoted:

    His demo used an oscilloscope as a display and an analog computer to move the CRT spot around. To qualify as a video game, you have to have to pass one major test: Can you play the game on a standard home TV set or a TV monitor?

    Of *course* Higginbotham's pong qualifies as a video game. It was interactive. It was entertainment. It included a display. What does TV or a monitor have to do with it? A gameboy doesn't use a "standard home tv set or monitor", and it certainly plays video games. And in 50 years, when games pipe images straight into our optic nerves, they'll still qualify as video games too.

    Baer's other argument that is that it's not a real game because it wasn't a commercial venture. I guess all us open source guys aren't real programmers either, eh?

  • I never touched a key; the only human intervention involved in the process was in the Post process; that was when the ten minutes started ticking.

    How Sears configures their systems is none of my business.

    Had I done anything more profound than telling the cashier to "just press enter" at the right moment, I might quite legitimately have been considered to be trespassing on Sears' information systems; whatever is slow is their problem. You feel free to walk into a Sears store and start hacking on their systems.

    Hi! I'm an MCSE, and I'm here to help!

    If security comes to take you away, then be happy; you tuned their application boot-up time by five minutes, and can now Go to Jail. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200.

    Enjoy.

  • Having said all this, having an ADSL connection on an arcade machine surely isn't infeasible; arcade machines are pretty pricy on their own, and an ADSL connection would be peanuts compared to the purchase price.

    Actually, for multiple machines you'd be best off with something like a SDSL connection. ADSL is bad because when you are receiving at half speed, you can only send at half speed. You also can't do both at once, of course. SDSL doesn't have that limitation. SDSL ranges from being the same price as ADSL, to about five times the cost, but if people fork out $2 per game, that pays for itself fairly quickly, which is a reasonable scenario in some places (Like Vegas.)

    For a single machine though, ADSL is plenty.


  • Oh man, TGI Friday's has those at their bar and I did get addicted to NTN and those bowl-sized margaritas Friday's has. The poster who said that the questions get harder as the night goes on is right!

    Maru
  • I was one of the 3 fools in the world (and im being generous) who bought an atari jaguar. It seemed like a good idea at the time!! Anyways, the demand for this doesn't seem big enough for them to make the venture. Maybe I'm wrong, but I see this either never surfacing or going the way of the Jaguar. (no games, no support)
  • i work a radioshack and sadly our POS's use windows... so i know her pain.

    hmmmm... my POS's take about 5min to reboot, they boot into bios, then run scandisk, load keyboard drivers, reboot into bios then start windows, lastly startup the pos software...

    luckly they are mostly stable... but my powerplug is much too easy for custumers to trip on. :(


    nmarshall

    The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
  • I dunno how many of you have played NTN [ntn.com] trivia, but it essentially lets you compete within a restaurant. Then it takes the scores, averages em out and ranks locations worldwide.

    Now I realize that they are talking about games like pong, but does anyone really think there's a market for these? Sure, it might be fun once to play PONG versus somebody in another state in a bar, but I really don't see these machines as *game* machines going anyhwere.

    just my thoughts.

  • Nolan's last company (Score:5)

    by cathryn ( 133574 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @10:51AM (#688614) Homepage
    I heard a story about Nolan's last company. And I'd give you the name if I could remember it. They had a similar product. It was a little set top box, that was meant to be located in bars around the country. They had cute little trivia games and some simple reflex games on it. Basic stuff, but seemed like a reasonable concept.

    The machines had some networking support, so they could download new trivia questions and software updates and high scores and things. So, every gamebox shipped with Windows NT on it. They had a custom touch screen driver so you could tap on the screen to push buttons.

    As I heard it, everything was going okay, until they got hit by two things. First Microsoft announced some kind of Microsoft based coin-op box. I don't know what ever happened to this. But, it was big competition. Now, the venture capital was a little harder to find.

    The second problem they had was that the game machines were all working fine -- that is until Daylight savings time changed. On that day every machine out in the field popped up a dialog box from some driver in Windows NT. Which for some weird reason crashed the machines, and they were no longer able to talk to the central servers. They had to ship out new hard drives to every one they had sold. Ooops.

    Maybe they'll have better luck with Linux.

  • Multiplayer arcade games (Score:4)

    by andyh1978 ( 173377 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @10:51AM (#688615) Homepage
    Its about time coin-op arcade games joined the networked multiplayer arena. By far the most fun coin-ops are the ones where there are multiple machines next to each other (e.g. Sega Rally et. al.), and you can play your friends (and shout at them when they overtake you).

    Adding more players over a network could make it even better... if done well.

    The logistics are difficult though. On lots of multiplayer games on a PC you end up spending most of your time in the 'lobby' area waiting for a game, or searching for one that you can connect to with reasonable latency. Coin-ops need a quicker, more reliable process of game selection; put your coin in, and play, without any fuss.

    As for the credit card aspect of it, well, I don't know. There's something to be said for just putting a coin in, having a quick fun game, and leaving.
  • nope, they're not. they are just variations of solitare and whack-a-mole unfortunately.
    ---
  • they have one of those in the college bar here. It gets harder and harder as the night goes on! ;-)


    -- Thrakkerzog

  • shortsighted (Score:3)

    by websensei ( 84861 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @10:54AM (#688618) Journal

    From the wired story [wired.com] (emphasis mine):

    Even though the uWink machines use only a dialup connection, credit card transactions take between five and seven seconds to validate, according to Moore.

    This seems incredibly short-sighted to me.

    To go to all the trouble of creating and marketing these boxes, getting them into the venues, and connecting them without broadband is just silly. Especially since they accuse the industry of remaining in the dark ages....

  • Have you looked at the screenshots? They look like the games you sometimes find on the mini-consoles at some bars. Nothing of arcade quality. The action games are very 80's.

    Where are the 3D action games????
  • Here's a link [uwink.com]to the games that they are working on providing.

    actually, they look childish, and simplistic. they are all fairly non-complex games. most of them look like variants of memory or tic-tac-toe.

    ugh.
    tagline

  • I was at Sears getting passport photos, and wound up having to walk the cashier through a reboot. They're running Windows NT on some fairly nice HP hardware; there is the substantial downside that a reboot takes close to ten minutes.

    Unfortunately, the day I was there, the system got confused, and was sitting stuck in the BIOS configuration screen. Had I not told the cashier to "Just press enter when it says to," she was cruising for getting really frustrated watching it cycle through the "Post" routine.

    At least there was a regular keyboard...

  • Before "Pong" started the coin-op video game market, Noland tried to market a coin op game called Computer Space [geocities.com].
  • You can get away with that on the 7800 and the Jaguar..but the 2600 was very popular in its day. I certainly saw a lot more of them at the time than, say, Colecovisions. After all, that's probably why they made that little adapter that would let you play 2600 games on your Colecovision. And, on the same token, why Atari made an adapter to play 2600 games in the 5200, and the 7800 had built-in support for 2600 games. You don't normally go through that much trouble for compatibility with an unpopular system.

  • Maybe they can use QNX now that the pricing for their licenses are down-to-earth
  • ... find their logo a little disturbing? A bald disembodied head playing Tetris on a wearable computer? Atari doesn't own Tetris, do they?

  • No joke...
    The funniest thing I've seen this week was a President's Choice banking machine in a grocery store, proudly displaying a BSOD to all passersby.
    ---
    Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
  • There was doom2 (yes, doom) arcade machine. There was two of them hooked together in a laser games place i went to, needless to say I was mighty impressed at the time.
  • Yes the GPL dose require you make the source code publicly available..
    It dosn't require you to make the source code available before the product.
    It also dosn't mean anything if the source code is burnt into the hardware.. Meaning it's no good for anyone who dosn't buy the machine.

    Anyway it dosn't matter.. He dosn't need to GPL his own software (just becouse it runs on Linux).
    All that is needed is to provide the changes made to Linux.. Those changes would purely be to make Linux work better on the hardware and of no use to anyone who dosn't have that hardware.
  • I'd vaguely heard about Higginbotham, and thought it was only a 'bouncing ball' gravity simulation. Interesting that Dave Ahl was influenced by it.
  • Finally I have a great excuse to wear and explain why I have an Atari T-shirt (Other than my GF got it...)
  • I don't think there is enough booze in the world to make most of these games even mildly exciting.

  • Bushnell may have created 'pong' (Score:4)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Friday October 20, 2000 @10:56AM (#688632) Homepage
    but he didn't invent tv ping-pong, anymore than Msft invented 'Windows'. That honor goes to Ralph Baer [pong-story.com], excerpt:

    On 29th May 1972, Nolan Bushnell (later President of Atari) visits the "Magnavox Profit Caravan" at the Airport Marina Hotel in Burlingame, CA. He signs the guest book for Magnavox Odyssey Demo and plays the Odyssey Ping-Pong game hands-on. Later, he hires Alan Alcorn to design and build a coin-op version of the Ping-Pong game: PONG. This will mark the begining of the coin-op market.
  • After reading the Indrema replies, I noticed the big question was: "Well what large game companies are going to support them?" The same could be asked of this setup, but I suspect otherwise. If the arcade machines are cheap to deploy, and cheap to develop for (similar to Indrema's free SDK), then large companies would probably love this as it gets there game out there quickly, cheaply. So now think of the ports over to the Indrema! It seems to be an obvious progressive alliance possiblity for the two (If it's not already there).
  • They run a Linux- derivative operating system.

    This statement implies that they have modified the OS. Any direct modifications to linux would fall under the GPL. I searched their site and couldn't find the source.

    I just sent them a polite email asking for the source code. I'll keep you posted, but feel free to join me in politely asking where all their GPL'd code is dropped.

    Sure would be fun to play with.
  • There are already country wide ranking systems for bar game in France (on a console similar to the MegaTouch) that can be find in some bars on the US. And let's not forget the aboxious trivia games with the wireless consoles in US bars. Can't wait for Doom at my favorite watering hole so...

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