Posts Tagged “atari st”

In 1986 I went into my local Atari ST store and was furious to find a cheap Othello-type game selling for $30 – which was like 100 bucks in ‘86.  Why sooo serious?!  Well, because in my opinion it was a total rip off.  First off it showed no creativity – the graphics were just black and white circles for game pieces.  And second, it should have been free out of a magazine (back then you’d just type in the code).  It was a total rip off.  So I set out to write my own version of the game, and mine looked more like a 3D game table.  The rest of that story another time.

To my point, a similar thing has certainly happened to the makers of the iPhone app Bang!Bang! and Boom!BOOM! Shotgun Free (iTunes links).  They had what they thought was an original idea. They set out to make it professional, using realistic graphics and hollywood sound effects, and they worked it through the iPhone app approval process.  Only to find out that Apple was approving several ‘gun’ apps all around the same time.  No proof of this of course, but I suspect that Apple might have held theirs back to time the releases closer together. I believe theirs did hit the store first, but others soon followed, including what can only be described as an extremely cheap knock off called Shotgun Pro.  But plagiarism is the best form of compliment, right?  And competition is what makes this country great.

But still, the idea that Shotgun Pro had made it to #2 on the Entertainment charts got under their skin a bit.  And to be honest it also makes me scratch my head as it is a somewhat un-inspired soundboard app.  So to combat it they too set out on a mission, to ‘pop a cap in the arse’ of the competition.  Take the jump to read on and see the video…

Read… »

In 1987 I attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago as an exhibitor. I was 20 years old, working at Xetec and we were showing off SCAD, a drafting program I wrote for the Atari ST. Attending was an awesome experience for such a youngster. I remember seeing HD video for the first time at that show, but that is unlikely. Probably what I really saw was the first ever 100″ LCD projection system which Sharp showed that year. It was still impressive for the time. I was also offered a job writing games in LA, which I considered for a while but eventually turned down.

But one ridiculously influential thing that happened during the week was that I overheard someone use the term “19-2″ as slang to describe the speed of something – and for some nerdy reason – I thought it was very cool. Who ever it was said something like “It was fast. It was like 19-2.” Now this is going to take some explanation – and even after I do my best you’ll probably still scratch your head. But let’s try.  Travel with me back in time to Michael Smith Nerd World 1987… Read… »

ANTIC VOL. 6, NO. 8 / DECEMBER 1987 / PAGE 54:

SCADS OF CAD

The GEM-based SCAD lets you work on 16 drawings at once and is accurate to .001 inch. SCAD works on either monochrome or color and lets you save DEGAS-compatible pictures of drawings at any location or magnification. Images are exactly the same size on paper as onscreen, and you can define your page size up to 32 inches square. View controls include Zoom In, Zoom Out, Absolute Move, Ieft, Right, Up and Down. SCAD has loadable font styles, 128 user-defined line styles and 256 user-defined fill patterns. You can rotate items in .1-degree increments and enlarge or reduce them in .1% increments.

$99.95. Xetec, Inc., 2804 Arnold Road, Salina, KS 67401. (913) 827-0485, PRESS. CIRCLE 245 ON READER SERVICE CARD

This little girl has an Atari ST and a printer, but where's the monitor?

This is what I was doing 20-some years ago:  In 1985 I met John Flickenger (who owned Xetec) at an Atari users group meeting.  I set up a meeting with him and at 18 years old pitched the idea of me writing a music sequencing program for Atari ST. He passed on that idea but was very interested in a CAD program Rich White and I had written for Atari 800 while in High School. So John hired me to write a CAD program for the Atari ST. Read… »