Monthly Archives: February 2008

Vintage Computer Cables

I stumbled across the NKC Electronics ebay store via a post on the AtariAge forums, and purchased an S-Video cable for the Atari 800 so I could plug it into the tv in my office. Wow. The difference compared to RF is amazing:

Atari 800 via S-Video
(as seen on the tv in the Petroglyph lobby, it may not look it but the edges are crisp and the colors clean. Thanks for the lovely orange, iPhone)

If you’ve got an old Atari (or one of the handful of other computers/consoles he supplies for) that you’ve considered blowing the dust off of and plugging in, I recommend his stuff. Sent a couple questions that he replied to promptly, and I had the cable in hand within three days. RECOMMENDED WILL BUY AGAIN A+++++!!

Games we play, music we make.

Not much on their homepage aside from the above video, but here it is for safe keeping.

The guy on the iPhone is using the just-released iAno, by mister.aardvark. iAno features a complete keyboard (you can navigate up and down octaves using the buttons above the keys) and the ability to play chords thanks to the multitouch capability of the iPhone.

The 2nd iPhone player is using PocketGuitar, another recently developed app.

The DS is running Electroplankton in performance mode, with the plankton of choice being the Luminaria, little guys that follow a user-defined path on a grid (you can see him set up the paths at the beginning of the above video).

Bah, as I was finishing this up, I noticed that the instruments were listed on the gizmodo post that started the whole thing. Oh well, figuring em out was still fun.

Bestest evars.

For the record, my Personal Top 20 Games, from the F13 thread that didn’t become an article.

1. Warlords – Atari – Atari 2600 – 1981
2. Star Raiders – Atari – Atari 8-bit – 1979
3. Mail Order Monsters – Electronic Arts, Inc – Atari 8-bit – 1986
4. Eastern Front 1941 – Atari – Atari 8-bit – 1982
5. Archon: The Light and the Dark – Free Fall Assoc – Atari 8-bit – 1983
6. Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar – ORIGIN Systems, Inc – Atari 8-bit – 1986
7. TRON – Bally Midway – Arcade – 1982
8. Sinistar – Williams – Arcade – 1982
9. Cyberball – Atari Games – Arcade – 1988
10. The Ninja Warriors – Taito – Arcade – 1988
11. Herzog Zwei – TecnoSoft – Genesis – 1990
12. Space Empire Elite – Jon Radoff – Atari ST BBS – ?
13. Warlords – SSG Strategic Studies Group Pty Ltd. – Amiga – 1990
14. Myth: The Fallen Lords – Bungie Software Products – Mac- 1997
15. Fallout – Interplay Productions – Mac – 1997
16. Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos – Blizzard Entertainment – Mac – 2002
17. Halo: Combat Evolved – Bungie Studios – Xbox – 2001
18. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem – Silicon Knights – GC – 2002
19. EverQuest – 989 Studios – Windows – 1999
20. Starcraft – Blizzard Entertainment – Windows – 1998

No particular order, generally grouped by system…these are all games that at one time or another really struck a nerve. Due to the improving effects of nostalgia and my impressionable youth, most of the titles are from the old days. Sorry Madden ’93, no room for you.