Chuck Peddle on the Big Screen: VCF East 4.0 2007Well, I finally got around to posting the VCF East 4.0 2007 photos from the Saturday session on June 9, 2007. Unfortunately I was not able to find a single online photo sharing service (since I didn't want to kill bandwidth here at AA or on my personal Website) that met all of my needs, but Flickr took care of the album part of it all and Photobucket took care of the easily-embed-photos-on-here part (though I doubt I'll use it much as it's a lot of work to get it to display right).

Check out the full set of photos here. I'm still working with Bill Degnan of the MARCH club on getting the audio hosted, so hopefully I'll have that back up soon and easily accessible. Enjoy and don't forget to leave your comments here!

Classic computer, meet arcade Donkey KongWhile it's amazing to consider, it looks like through a combination of emulation, compensation and flat-out clever programming tricks, Nintendo's arcade version of Donkey Kong has been replicated on Tandy/Radio Shack's TRS-80 Color Computer 3 (CoCo 3). All that's required is 512K and a disk drive. It's really an amazing story and well worth checking out for all fans of programming and classic technology. As we've seen time and again, where there's a desire to make something happen, there's almost always a way to do the "impossible". Thanks to L. Curtis Boyle for the heads-up on this fascinating bit of news!

Check out "Sock Master's Donkey Kong Emulator for CoCo 3" for the full story and "Press Play Then Any Key - Revisiones - Donkey Kong" for comparative screenshots of many of the Donkey Kong translations for home systems.

Thexder for the Color Computer 3 (Sierra On-Line)As fans of Tandy's venerable and mostly underappreciated Radio Shack Color Computer (CoCo) line of computers know, finding much information on the Web about their beloved system line - particularly in regards to games - is a tough proposition. As opposed to the more popular home computers that were the CoCo's contemporary competition, like the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64 (C-64), it seems that much of the focus these days on the systems is more from a hacking/programming perspective (thanks to the ability to use the powerful "OS-9" operating system) than from a gaming standpoint. This also is no doubt due to the simple fact that the early CoCo machines - the Color Computer 1 and Color Computer 2 - weren't particularly conducive to great gaming, with a rather garish 4 color pallet for most games and single channel sound (though there was limited support for speech/sound expansion cartridges and of course the usual programming tricks to get more out of the stock system). While the backwards compatible Color Computer 3 had mostly rectified the situation by becoming a "super 8-bit" (faster processor, more memory, more colors), with performance similar to the early Apple IIgs and Atari ST computer lines in many cases (though still single channel sound!), it was never a premiere entertainment platform.

Stan Veit's History of the Personal Computer, authored by--you guessed it, Stan Veit--is a roughly edited collection of memoirs and editorials Veit wrote during his tenure as editor-in-chief of Computer Shopper. Veit's personal experience with personal computer history is tremendous. He was the first personal computer dealer in New York City, and got to know almost every early luminary in the industry on a first-name basis. He's one part technician (he can talk chips and boards with the best of them), one part salesman, and one part patron. In short, it's hard to find an author better qualified to take us on the journey from the Altair to the IBM PC. However, the book is not without its flaws--it's poorly organized, and the typos make your head hurt.

DynaMicro's Dungeons of Daggorath, released in 1982 for the Tandy CoCo, is one of the earliest examples of a first-person computer role-playing game. I recently had the chance to play this innovative title a few weeks ago as part of my research on the Tandy CoCo, and I must say that I'm impressed with the title--and can easily see why the game has managed to retain such a devoted cult following that's lasted nearly a quarter of a century. So, what makes the game so great? What I want to talk about here are three features--the immensity of the game world, the intensity of the action, and the creative use of sound. Although Tandy's CoCo arguably suffered from a rather dismal game library, DoD really stands out as a true classic.

"Willy Byte in the Digital Dimension" for the Apple III don't know if this'll show up on my profile page, but I felt like writing up a short history of me and gaming. (ed.: I bumped this to the front page of AA)

1978 - Mmm. Coding basic text games on our Apple II+. Plus I could make a cool string of wine goblets run up the side of the screen.

10 PRINT "Y"
20 PRINT "I"
30 GOTO 10

1980 - The folks bring home an Atari 2600. Love blooms. The games I remember most from this time are Pac Man, Space Invaders, Berzerk, Swordquest: Earthworld, and Combat. Like many people I've talked to, you always had to have one friend with an Intellivision and one with a ColecoVision so that everyone could play every system. :)

BETS (1980) for the Commodore PET: While many games for Commodore's PET computer were purely text-based, some, like Randall Lockwood's BETS (1980), seen here via the VICE: PET emulator, implemented comparatively excellent visuals and animationsAs part of the editing process for my upcoming US home videogame and computer entertainment systems history book, I've been logging the software I mention in each section. I thought it might be interesting to list the software I'm mentioning in the book for the 1976 - 1979, computers section, which I just finished going through. Most of these are the cream of the crop or notable titles.

How many of the following are you familiar with?