Salvaging E.T. In Software, Instead of New Mexico 146
Yesterday, we mentioned a just-approved effort to uncover the remains of goods dumped by Atari in New Mexico decades ago.
New submitter Essellion writes "Among the games that legend has it are there is the Atari 2600 E.T. game, infamous for how bad it was. However, an excavator of another kind has cast doubts on how bad it was by exploring in depth the E.T. ROM, how it played and why, and designing some bug fixes for it."
My friend had that game. (Score:5, Interesting)
It sucked. With or without any bugs that I have forgotten in the mists of time, the gameplay was horrible, the field of play was idiotic, and it lacked any immersion into the movie storyline. It sucked.
Re:My friend had that game. (Score:4, Insightful)
It sucked. With or without any bugs that I have forgotten in the mists of time, the gameplay was horrible, the field of play was idiotic, and it lacked any immersion into the movie storyline. It sucked.
I think you hit onto its key problem, which was immersion into the movie storyline, or any storyline for that matter. Contrast that game to Adventure for the Atari 2600. I really felt I was wandering mazes and entering castles with that one. (Okay, not like a modern first person RPG, obviously, but this was a 2600, after all.)
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Re:My friend had that game. (Score:5, Funny)
Well, you are right on the second point. I have no idea what that game was.
As for being spoiled, notice I said my friend owned the game. At that time (late 70s to early 80s), my games included climbing trees, running through the fields, and splashing in the crick (that's a creek that is too small to actually swim in) then pouring salt on the bloodsuckers to get them off our legs.
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The Fabulous Wanda, by design, cannot be beat. You lose in every possible scenario, BY DESIGN! You get punished for playing.
Re:My friend had that game. (Score:4)
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That's not necessarily a bad thing. (Score:2)
So it's kind of like Dwarf Fortress? Or even like real life where you always die in the end?
Re:My friend had that game. (Score:5, Funny)
Hey kid. Wanna go see a dead body?
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I would, but they tore up the train tracks behind the farm I grew up on. Just can't make the journey if it isn't on train tracks.
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I think you hit onto its key problem, which was immersion into the movie storyline, or any storyline for that matter. Contrast that game to Adventure for the Atari 2600. I really felt I was wandering mazes and entering castles with that one. (Okay, not like a modern first person RPG, obviously, but this was a 2600, after all.)
Exactly. Just because it was low-graphics, didn't mean it was impossible to have an immersive experience. Many games were very likable for their gameplay, but were just blips and blocks moving around. ET was a spinning cement block, with rat shit falling out onto you.
And if you were a balrog, I would certainly mod you up. For me, I'm just wondering how my first post was deemed to be redundant. Maybe someone doesn't know the meaning of the word. ;^)
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Re:My friend had that game. (Score:5, Informative)
yeah, but for what I had as a kid, it was the most complex game available (to me) at the time, and was a sink for MANY hours at a time (until I would inevitably hit into one of the bugs that caused you to be unable to continue). I can't recall if I ever finished it or not, but I doubt it. It's still in my parent's garage somewhere, probably right behind my C64 stuff.
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I finished E.T. repeatedly. I thought it was a pretty snazzy game. I could read, though, and I read the manual.
My favorite 2600 game was Star Raiders. I got it when it went on sale at Kay-Bee toys because nobody wanted to pay extra to get a keypad they'd probably never be able to use again (and they were right about that.)
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I was able to finish ET as well, but not every time. I used to be able to hack Haunted House too, but I can't do either of them anymore.
My current favorite 2600 game is Seaquest.
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My favorite 2600 game was Star Raiders.
Hmm. Did you ever try Activision's game Starmaster? I thought Starmaster was a much better Star Raiders game than the official Star Raiders cartridge. (We had both.)
The original Atari 800 Star Raiders was a classic. I need to get an emulator and play that again.
I also played the Atari ST version of Star Raiders and it wasn't as good as the original. Better-looking, though. I did love the fact that there was a button that did something dangerous, and you had to hi
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Re:My friend had that game. (Score:4, Interesting)
Hating of ET has become popular in recent years. Honestly, though, it's neither the worst game ever, nor even the worst game on the 2600.* It was even one of the best-selling 2600 games at 1.5 million copies--unfortunately, Atari produced somewhere around 5 million copies. That, combined with the high cost of licensing it, made for significant losses.
*I actually enjoy it somewhat.
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I loved Star Raiders. "3D" space flight/fight simulator that was way ahead of its time.
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No, it was Howard Scott Warshaw. The same guy who made Raiders of the Lost Ark and Yar's Revenge. Spielberg specifically requested Warshaw for the project after the success of Raiders.
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Which is funny, because Raiders is the only Atari game I could never figure out how to do anything with, and generally died on the second screen. I couldn't tell what I was looking at, couldn't figure out what areas were safe or deadly, and couldn't figure out how to accomplish anything. I didn't have a manual. That's probably most of the problem. But I didn't have the manual for a lot of other games and muddled through well enough. Raiders had to be about as unintuitive as it gets.
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I still have the game. I know exactly where it is, along with my Atari consoles and controllers. I played it not too long ago - I pull it out from time to time to demonstrate it and other Atari games to those who missed out. I thought the game sucked when it was new, and I still think it sucks now. The game was horrible. Its contribution to Atari's downfall may be overstated, but the game really was terrible. It was one of my least favorite Atari titles, and that's saying a lot.
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next thing you know an assload of fly by night companies are cranking out such "gems" as Chase The Chuckwagon and a ton of really lame one trick games.
It is common knowledge that the plethora of horrible games led to the crash, and ET is just used as a poster child.
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The point was that they didn't have anything to lose until, all of a sudden, they did. They had to buy the games up front, but were guaranteed to be able to return those they didn't sell for a refund. But then the fly by night companies selling on that model packed up shop and couldn't or wouldn't honour returns. I wouldn't be surprised if Atari itself started taking longer and longer to actually honour its refunds as well.
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ANYBODY could make a 2600 cart and the next thing you know an assload of fly by night companies are cranking out such "gems" as Chase The Chuckwagon and a ton of really lame one trick games. [...] by the middle of 83 instead of paying $20+ a game I was buying games at a buck a pop or 12 for $10
This actually reminds me a lot of the current state of iPhone games. The difference is just that there's no per-sale cost involved and there are many more customers, so this might actually be sustainable on the business side in the long run. However, it's just the same issue with the gameplay.
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Well, the price is the same (actually, many iPhone games are cheaper due to inflation), but it isn't quite the same thing. The publishers make the games with the plan to sell them for a dollar, and they get a dollar for every copy sold, and nobody loses anything.
Some factors that make phone apps different:
1. You have a single retailer (the app store / play store / etc). That means that even if they were stuck with inventory they could make the strategic decision to not depreciate the market without worry
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All of those games sucked that had the movie genre however kids still wanted them and with the novelty (yes novelty) of the 2600 people would buy something new just to show it off. Game Stop hadn't been invented yet but I'm sure that after you paid $20 for ET in their store, they'd charge you a disposal fee if you tried to return it.
What's even funnier about all of this is now I have this vision of a bunch of archaeologists out in the middle of the desert trying to find the ancient runs of the lost city of
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That was pretty much ALL 2600 games. I don't remember ET being all that much worse.
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And then after the tedious neck-stretching levitation, you'd get back to the surface, and inexplicably fall back in, maybe a couple times in a row. And on the third exit, you've run out of energy, and ET just anticlimactically dies in the pit, and nobody cares.
Yes, the game had no logic and no point. Why are ET's radio parts sprea
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As a callow ant, I remember getting it as Christmas gift. I was all happy. Haha.
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The Fine Article explained why the GP probably thinks of the pits as unpredictable. The collision detection is at the pixel level, so if any pixels of the ET sprite touch a pit, ET falls in. The problem is that the sprite itself is on more of a side view, so you intuitively feel that ET shouldn't fall in as long as its feet are on the ground. So, whether you fall into a pit or not seems to be unpredictable.
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Improved E.T. game. (Score:2)
Two articles (three pages NetworkWorld [networkworld.com] without images and one page PCWorld [pcworld.com] with images) on "How hacking fixed the worst video game of all time... So why should you give it another chance? Because code hackers managed to fix some of the games most glaring problems, and now it's actually fun to play..."
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the gameplay was horrible, the field of play was idiotic, and it lacked any immersion into the movie storyline. It sucked.
Compared to the other Atari games? Custer's Revenge was worse, aside from issues with projection. Hit detection seemed pretty wonky with the arrows.
Plus the game was nothing aside from dodging arrows and raping a woman tied to a cactus. ET had very little rape in it.
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Eh, it wasn't that bad. I kind of liked it actually. It's certainly not as bad as its reputation. Pac Man was worse in every way.
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RTFM?
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It's true. The game was unplayable without the manual, but actually an OK game with it. It was not great by any means, but it was playable and there was some challenge to finishing in the time allotted.
I got the game on cartridge when it came out. The copy I got came in a box without the manual for some reason. My friend and I tried to play by guessing what you were supposed to do. It seemed a lot like the old Superman cartridge which we liked (and which could be played with no manual). But after falling in
related Pac-Man hacks (Score:5, Interesting)
If you like this kind of investigation, you might be interested in hacks of the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man. The port from the arcade was notoriously bad, because the hardware of the Atari basically didn't map well onto the graphics needed for the game. As a result, everything is basically wrong: the pills are fat dashes, the elegant outline graphics of the original are blocky opaque colors, etc. But worst of all, since the Atari's two sprite registers are used to draw both Pac-Man and the ghosts, whenever there are more than 2 ghosts+PacMan on a horizonal scanline, they start flickering because the porters resorted to the horrible hack of round-robin rotating which sprites got to be drawn in the 2 sprite registers. (This looks slightly less horrible on a CRT with phosphor decay, but it still looks bad.) Anyway, if you want more on the details of why this port sucked, and how it can be traced to hardware mismatches, it's covered in detail in ch. 4 of the book Racing the Beam [amzn.to].
But on to the hacks: Rob Kudla discussed and did some work [kudla.org] towards a better Atari 2600 port in the late 1990s, and there are now a number of attempts [strategywiki.org], though many of them do cheat by doing things like using an 8K ROM rather than the original 4K.
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And yet Ms. Pac Man on the same system displayed nowhere near the same amount of suckitude.
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My understanding is the original developer claimed to be able to not use the goofy scanline hack if he'd been on a larger ROM. Maybe Ms. Pac Man was a 16K ROM rather than 8K?
Re:related Pac-Man hacks (Score:5, Informative)
Pac Man wasn't 8K. It was 4K, which is one reason it sucked so badly. Tod Frye begged for 8K but Atari wouldn't let him have it. Ms Pac Man got an 8K ROM.
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Seems legit. I really have no idea.
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No, the problem was not the hardware, as the ports of Ms. Pac Man and Jr. Pac Man for the 2600 were pretty decent. The problem was bad management. Tod Frye was given an unreasonable deadline and only 4K, despite repeatedly requesting 8K (which is not "cheating", mind you). Atari's CEO even dismissed warnings that the game was not up to par. So what they released was pretty much a prototype.
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Wasn't so bad (Score:3)
Re:Wasn't so bad (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm in your boat - while I never owned ET, I did rent it for a couple of weeks, and I'm pretty sure I beat it a couple of times. I did read the manual, mainly because I had a lot of time between renting the game and getting home (we lived 10 miles out of town and a good half of that was city). While I didn't have fond memories of it, I didn't abhor it like some people. Now 2600 Pac Man was abhorrent, especially after playing it on a ColecoVision and Intellivision first.
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I liked the 2600 Pac-Man. Not a patch on the other versions, but if someone wanted to play Pac-Man in our house, it was fun, it worked, and had a decent pace.
And then after we ran it for a few hours the vitamin would sometimes split into two pieces placed randomly that couldn't be picked up. And then there was time my mom got the score to roll over and was annoyed that there was no victory message or kill screen. Good times.
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Dude, congrats on having a cool mom.
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Seconded. I posted above about how unintuitive Raiders was. I had the manual for ET and managed to figure it out. It may have been aggravating, but I could do it. On Raiders, I didn't have the manual, and couldn't tell what I was looking at. Often I died just by moving onto a wrong part of the screen without even understanding what there was killing me.
ET's big failure... (Score:5, Interesting)
Its integration with the actual story was pretty lackluster too, like a five year old relating the film to a distracted parent, who went on to explain it to a coder in a foreign language.
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I don't agree. Adventure was pretty highly regarded, and I dare you to find someone who can pick that one up in a minute without the manual.
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I don't agree. Adventure was pretty highly regarded, and I dare you to find someone who can pick that one up in a minute without the manual.
How about this refinement, then?
Adventure did need some reading of the manual to figure out the mechanics, gameplay, etc. But, and this is the crucial difference: playing the game was rewarding after doing do. And things actually made a degree of sense. Some things were attracted to the magnet, some weren't. Different dragons behaved differently. Objects had specific purposes. And so on. And then there were the undocumented things which one had to discover the old-fashioned way: word of mouth, luck, or just
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I'd very much have to disagree. Atari games were often quite opaque—Yar's Revenge is a good example of a game that didn't make a lick of sense unless you'd read the manual. There wasn't room on the ROM for any handholding. Plus, most games had dozens of different modes of play available through the game select switch (like Combat, or Space Invaders), and figuring out the differences between them absolutely required a manual.
I can't imagine this is worth it (Score:1)
Atari video game burial: [wikipedia.org] The goods disposed of through the burial are generally believed to have been several million copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a game which had become one of the biggest commercial failures in video gaming and is often cited as one of the worst video games released; and the Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man, which had been commercially successful but critically maligned.
E.T. was a commercial failure -- do you really think it would be worth recovering a few million reproductions of
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The copies of Pacman may be worth a little more, because hey: people still want to play that.
Not really. I had it and at the time it was fine as the expectations of 2600 games was pretty low for most of us. But I've read that years later people were returning pacman due to it being so unlike the original arcade version. They made 12 million units, so there are plenty out there. My daughter has one of those Jaks Pacman games that can be plugged into the TV and looks and sounds just like the original.
They Should Have Checked Snopes (Score:2)
You got that right, A.C. If these "documentarians" had done a smidgin of research, they would have found that the cartridges were destroyed long ago [snopes.com]. So this means they are either too lunkheaded to have spent a small amount of time to find the relevant information, or they do know the truth and just want to cash-in on the legend and rumors.
Quote from Snopes:
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What would copyright law say about restoring and reselling boards with a copy of a copyright work that was not sold, and the author ordered destroyed?
Absolutely nothing. As copyright law has nothing to say about boards. About the software in the ROM? Again nothing, if you manage to salvage the ROMS, then you aren't making copies of the ROMS.
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Absolutely nothing. As copyright law has nothing to say about boards. About the software in the ROM?
The point is copyright restricts performance, distribution, and modification, not just copying.
The first sale doctrine has been used to establish a precedent that allows you to re-sell copyright works you have purchased. The right of the copyright holder to make the copy exercised by the first sale, flows; that is: this allows you to resell the work, the first sale permits it.
But there's a problem
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Not really. It sold 1.5m units. It's just they actually made way too many. It was a failure only inasmuch as they paid too much for the licence and made too many. In terms of sales it did OK.
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Maybe they'll sell seven million copies of E.T. for the Atari 2600, covered in human waste and for a dollar each, proving us all wrong and freezing hell solid.
Yup.
I see plenty of E.T. available on Ebay with box and manual, doubtlessly taken better care of, and in better original condition for ~$8 to ~$10.
The best use of digging it up would probably be to recycle the components; unless they intend to collaborate to make a magic cartridge modification to fix all the issues with the game, and sell an a
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I figure they intend to profit on the documentary, not whatever they manage to unearth. Prices are up right now (thanks to the AVGN movie and the documentary project) but you used to be able to pick-up a pristine copy of E.T. (with box and manual) for less than $5. They'd have to be crazy if they thought they could profit from that.
There may be a small market for E.T. carts actually unearthed from the legendary landfill. The history would make the piece much more interesting.
Not a troll - no pun intended (Score:2)
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Indeed, that is why the previously linked arstechnica.com [arstechnica.com] story includes:
The "oh we'll find 3.5 million copies of E.T." is just the satire -- that they'll have to dig through waist-deep crap to get to the gems.
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I really don't understand why people are even discussing this anymore. I have this game, it sucked, it was 20 something years ago - no one should care. Moon Patrol was the shit.
There's often more to learn from failure than from success.
Also, the failure was spectacular. It's become sort of a legend, as spectacular events will.
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Apparently E.T's second name was "Cetera"
Not -that- bad (Score:2)
The 2600 had a bunch of trash released for it (along with a handful of great gems) its just that
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E.T. Wasn't that bad of a game, it was just a terrible, terrible, terrible financial decision on Atari's part, neither was Pac-Man. But Atari paid a stupidly-high licensing fee for E.T. then rushed the production and then produced far more inventory than was needed for demand . . .
E.T. may not have been the worst 2600 game ever. I played some no-name cartridges picked up in a sale basket at the drug store that were worse. "Sneak and Peek" comes to mind. It was hide-and-seek. On TV. Seriously, one player looks away while another hides in one of the oh, four, available low-res hiding places. If you had a TV and a room for it, you'd have more fun just playing actual physical hide-and-seek in that room.
But dollar for dollar, E.T. was amazingly awful, and set back movie-inspired video gam
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Where's My Perry? is the only licensed game I've been bothered to care about in as long as I can remember.
What a bewildering game (Score:2)
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...I've never known how to play it. Had the module, but no manual. It was almost as bewildering as Raiders of the Lost Ark. Didn't help that I hadn't, and still haven't, seen either movie (honestly...). Sadly my favourite 2600 games are rarely mentioned any more (most are by Imagic and Activision, not Atari).
Dragon's Lair and Kaboom FTW!
The ET movie had essentially nothing to do with the game. Seeing or not seeing it would in no way change your understanding of the game.
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Now fix raiders (Score:3)
I beat ET repeatedly back in the day as a kid. I guess being able to read was what did it. But even though I literally have seen someone do it, I've never been able to get into the cave while parachuting.
ET was terribad. (Score:2)
I inherited a 2600 and a ton of games from my cousins when I was 5 or 6 years old, back in 1986-ish. No manuals, just the console, an assload of games, and a few different controllers (joysticks, paddles, etc). It was AWESOME!
ET was superbly bad. Loved the movie back then, was amped to play the Atari game, and it was all a total clusterfuck of terrible, and a complete waste of time to even my fledgling mind at the time. Combat, PacMan, Pitfall, Keystone Kops, Tapper, Pole Position, Missle Command, Defender,
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The Tron arcade game was great though, also released in 1982. And after the terrible ET game, the early arcade games based on Star Wars and Star Trek from 1983 are all great fun to play. Not all of the home games based on movies are bad either. The Atari 2600 "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" was decent.
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There were worse games out there (Score:2)
I've still got my ET cartridge somewhere. I played it back in the day, an I don't recall it being all that horrible. Like most games of the time you HAD to read the manual to know what each little pixelated object was supposed to be and what to do with it. There was one really nasty "bug" or perhaps mis-feature where trying to get out of a pit involved immediately changing directions right as you reached the top. Not obvious, no visible indication it was needed, and not mentioned in the manual - but most Wi
It's relative (Score:5, Insightful)
There are millions of people who have spent as much time watching TV game shows. YMMV.
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or being on slashdot
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Just to clarify: crude by the standards of 1982, when the E.T. game was released, not by the standards of 1977 when the console was released.
6502 still around, huge (Score:5, Insightful)
the CMOS version of the 6502, the 65C02 and the static core version (clock can be slowed down or stopped without data loss) are still made and still used for embedded applications. We're talking annual volume in the hundreds of millions of units!
http://www.westerndesigncenter.com/wdc/ [westerndesigncenter.com]
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I wonder if I still have my 6502 manual anywhere. My brother and I had an Ohio Scientific Superboard 2 and I programmed the game of life on it in assembly. Saved the code off to an audio cassette using Kansas City Standard (that part was my brother's doing, he was the hardware guy). That pre and post indexed addressing through page zero was pretty cool, but the 8 bit stack pointer... Well, it meant you had to be careful.
You dont understand. (Score:3)
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Do you complain about fisherman, who sit for hours. People who lay at the beach to tan? Perhaps anyone that goes to a movie, sits in a hot tub. Plays a game. Sits around chatting with friends. What does one have to do, in your eyes, to not be wasting their time?
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Agreed.
Just because your comment reminded me, I think later on I'll pull out my old Atari 2600 and hook it up to the CRT TV in the basement, and play for a couple of hours.
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That was our favorite one, for that same reason.
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An emulator isn't the same thing. When I turn on my NES, I use the original controllers and gun with a device those games were designed for, a CRT TV. Same goes for my C64. It's about the experience, the ritual, like pulling out a record from its sleeve, put it on the platter and gently lower the needle.
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Interesting. Now I feel even sillier for running back and forth on the same first few screens, thinking I was probably missing something. "I'll try this way for a bit. No? Okay, let's try the other way. Gah, I'm dead again."