With all this talk of CoCo stuff lately, why not about a coco3 on a chip?

http://www.geocities.com/gary_L_becker/coco3fpga.html

The downside to me is it it uses a serial port interface for floppies so it reads sectors from a server over a comport line...

There are things I always search for on ebay and get notified by emails etc...

so up pops this nice looking collection of Scott Adams classics (one I've not seen before)..

http://cgi.ebay.com/Scott-Adams-Limited-Gold-Edition-Atari-8-bit_W0QQite...

Hi, guys. I'm about 99% done with my text adventure (hopefully!) and thought I'd post it here for you guys to try out (if you so desire). If you find any bugs (i.e., if it crashes), please try to tell me what happened so I can find and fix the bugs. I think I got most of them, but it's been tough.

I'm still editing it on a small scale, too, so if you see any typos or grammatical errors, I'd love to hear about them, too.

Well, we've been at this for a couple of months now, and I daresay that we're beginning to settle into a nice groove. Everyday there are at least two news items that we hope you will enjoy checking out--and of course plenty of commentary on these items from your editors. Sooner than you think, we will be rolling out what we hope will be one of the best issues of Armchair Arcade to date. However, I think it's safe to say that we are still officially in a "beta state," and still open to suggestions and ideas about the future. You all have been very forgiving and patient with us during this transition, and I really, really appreciate it. Thanks.

GamaSutra has an interview up with Rand Miller, co-architect of the famous Myst series. The interview seems to be an effort to grab some free publicity for Cyan's new project--resurrecting Myst Uru for live play via GameTap. I'm not sure what to expect, but judging from the project's homepage, Cyan has big plans...And I hope things work out well for them.

Every now and then I find a true gem on the net--more than just some tidbit about a new piece of hardware or some developer ranting about the lack of innovation in modern gaming. When I find something like Culture: Games and Metaphor, I like to slow down and really see what the author is trying to get across. Waugh's point in this essay is to get us to think about metaphors--specifically, metaphors in games and how they relate to the real world as well as the game world. He also talks about how the videogame industry has essentially been inbreeding for a few decades, rehashing and making questionable "progress" as it attempted to "revolutionize" the previous generations' hardware and games: Ever since Super Mario Bros. came out, basically all we've done is build on it. Waugh would like to see a revolution in game metaphors--rather than merely point back to earlier games, it's time to start thinking sensisbly about a new kind of metaphor, one that functions like great metaphors in books and films. Waugh uses a number of great examples to illustrate his points, including several from classics like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy.

Best of Armchair Arcade
Issues 1 - 8, Volume I
(color cover, b&w interior, not to exceed ~100 pages)

(Rough Draft of Pages, in Order Follows)

Color Cover

Legal Page

Table of Contents

Issue 1 Cover

1 - A Treatise on Videogames
by Matthew D. Barton
2 - Atari - A Tale of Two Systems Part I: Atari 5200 and Atari 7800
by Bill Loguidice
3 - Game Packaging - A Look to the Past When Treasures Beyond the Game Were Within the Box

Logo Idea with Drop Shadow 1

Logo Idea with Drop Shadow 2 (for black backgrounds): I'm thinking the drop shadows on these can be shortened a bit...

GNUMitch Meyran has started an interesting discussion over at Free Software Magazine about the lack of big budget games for the GNU/Linux platform. Mitch asks some good questions: How hard could it be for a company to develop their games in OpenGL (of which DirectX 9 is a clone), something several actually already do, compile a binary and an installer for Linux, and sell it - or even wrap it along with their Win32 PE binaries? Indeed, why not? As it stands, I strongly concur with Mitch that the lack of A-list titles is one reason many folks haven't already switched to to the free OS. And, yes, we all know about Wine and the like, but are these options really practical for the typical PC gamer? While you're browsing at FSF, be sure to check out my article Games in Captivity.

We can obviously use ANY image as a texture at any zoom level, as these two examples show. (again, these are low res GIF's from the vector source files)

Atari Joystick Odyssey2 Keyboard Faded Thick Border Low Res GIF: I obviously wanted to play on the idea of the top "Armchair" featuring a videogame-centric texture, while the bottom one a computer-centric one (I didn't have anything handy more computer-centric)

Pitfall 2 Keyboard Thin Border: I think I like thicker borders a bit better than these thin ones, though it might create an interesting sucken effect on the black background