Jack Tramiel died yesterday at the age of 83. Besides Jobs and Gates one of the driving forces of the early eighties homecomputer market. His vision of building a coumputer that was affordable and had enough power brought Commodore the C64, that is the most sold home computer of that time. Known for beeing a real tyran when it came down to giving orders and talking to his engineers – the game Jack Attack shows how some of the Commdore Staff was feeling.
Probably such a harsh manner is needed in order to get almost impossible things done. If I recall it right, the engineers only had half a year to build the C64 and under that pressure they made one of the best computers in the world.
Later Tramiel was basically thrown out of Commodore because he seemed to be unbearable to the board – once again a parallel to Steve Jobs. Tramiel was far from giving up. He took over the than struggeling Atari and setting sail to push Commdore out of market, building low priced Ataris.

More Infos and stories about the Tramiels and Commodore can be found “On the Edge”

A great read and a big picture of all the happenings in the Commouniverse and a great insight what could have been if some right decisions would have been made a the right time.

R.I.P. Commod, R.I.P. Jack…

This weekend it was retro time. The last month had been something of a no-time-for-anytging-fun period… even our game experienced no update at all. Recent happenings over in Japan are the biggest reason for us not to cary on at the moment…. we are not quite sure how things will be in the future an how and when we release the game.

So I was more than happy to dip m head into the past, took two of my best colectibles from the basement and went to visit the old school brigade. I paid a short visit to the previous HomeCon to find out that there are a lot of people collecting old hardware, building new add-ons, living up to the old times. I felt instantly at home (hence the name) so I was really looking forward to see the guys again.

The event was set to start at 10am. When I got there at 11 a.m. the room was full and if it wasn’t for Mug, who piled up his Amigas and provided me some space, I would have to set up my stuff on the toilet.

After setting up my Atari Video Music, I took a first look around. Noticeable things where a FM Towns II and a carMarty, two Vectrexes, some tabletops and tons of modified Amigas, Ataris and C64s. Foremost I have to mention Ankabantas C64 with imtegrated headphone amp, reset- and hardreset button, multirom switchboard, multicolor LED (pulsing through all spectrum colors) and a milliom things more I can’t recall. The other “object” was SailorSats Mother of all Amigas, as he called it. I didn’t notice for half the party It took me almost the whole party to notice that in his Amiga 500 was an PC running windows. He created some small routines that made windows look and feel like the real thing; he even vonverted the two topaz fonts….. Absolutly insane. Hopefully we will see a release as themepack, along with all essential scripts the scripts.

Some impressions…

After a long and uncomfotable night on the ground, most of the visitors were gone. I enjoyed the silence and started setting up my soldering gun. Two hours later I had hacked a wiimote to hook up a real joystick and arcade buttons. Since I first saw the iCade at thinkgeek.com and got frustrated by trying to order one right away, just to find out that it was an aprils fool, I had the idea of building one myself. Meanwhile you can order the real iCade and Atari is on the line with license some hits from their backcatalog, but I was kinda scared off. So hacking this wiimote was the first step and two hours, because I really had no sleep at all and had to things over and over again. After all you can see a little proof of concept, that it basically works, although the directions are rotated the wrong way. If it wasn’t for Muggy helping me with the voltmeter and stuff, this would probably would have all gone up in smoke. Thanks, man!

I had the opportunity to go to New York to help setup Rucker Park, Harlem for the Nike Basketball World Expo. Off course I had to go and see the big apple. I almost spent the whole week at the production site and when the show finally started, I sneaked out walked the city and finally got my iPhone 4, yess! To be true: it is not really nice what Apple puts you through in order to get one of these. On saturday I finally had some spare time and so I went to the Apple store on broadway, not far from my hotel. I was told to that off course I could buy an iPhone 4, no contract needed – only problem: they don’t have any. But I should come back next day. “I wouldn’t come too late. 7.45 AM is almost too late”. The next day, when I got there at about 7.20 AM the line was already around the next street corner. Some guys seem to have stayed there from 6 in the morning. Honestly, I can’t imagine that Apple has a shortage of iPhones. They keep their stock in stores low on purpose. Never the less after three hours I got one – just to find out, that it had no contract, but an AT&T Simlock. Thanks to iPhone dev team and redsn0w I can use it anyway and symio makes me feel far less ripped off than those Telekom prices and their way of doing business in Germany.

Last week I was on holiday and the rotten Telekom screwed up the account data of the house we stayed in. So no internet, partly bad weather outside, no sim card from symio yet… it felt just like in the 80s, where computing was mostly a single-man-on-an-island-thingy. Earlier I figured that you can make your own ringtones by converting an audiofile to aac and rename the resulting .m4a into .m4r. No Sidplayer installed and no HVSC in sight, I was somehow stranded with my idea to convert some old SID tunes to play as ringtone. Luckily I had a trial version of Rolands Liegers great Power64 that has a sound recording function and with the complete collection of Digital Marketing disks I was ready to go. In the end it turned out to be far more work than anticipated, mainly because I had no audio edit software as well. Audacity was on my mind, when I cut the tunes with the pro version of Quicktimeplayer, but here at home I found out that either the older version nor the new beta seems to work on my Snow Leo. So don’t judge the looping cuts on the tones to hard, as I had no real tools at hand.

Next part about Apple that I hardly understand. Why only 30 seconds for a ringtone? Steve, think of all the women searching for their iphones in their stuffed handbags…. this takes more than 30 seconds and repeating a tone over and over again gets on everybodys nerve. Anyway, here are some tunes I found worthy to convert. Some of my favorites are missing (No Lightforce, sorry Thomas) but the 30 seconds barrier is hard to keep when you have no real editing tools and so I keep the gems for the next release.

SID Ringtone Pack 1 (download 7.6mb)

1. Alleykat
2. Armageddeon Man
3. Breakthru
4. Cracker Mix
5. Dexion CoOp Intro
6. Double Take
7. Formular 1 Simulator
8. Frankie goes to Hollywood
   

SID Ringtone Pack 2 (download 9.8mb)

1. Game Over
2. Helikopter Jagd
3. Holiday Morning
4. Hunchback
5. Masters of the Universe
6. Max Headroom
7. Mission A.D.
8. Mutants
9. New Stars
   

SID Ringtone Pack 3 (download 8.9mb)

1. Phantoms of the Asteroid
2. Science 451 Intro
3. Ski Dance
4. Star Paws
5. Taipan
6. The Human Race
7. The Last Ninja – Palace Gardens
8. Times of Lore
   

SID Jingle Pack (download 1.2mb)

1. Arkanoid Start
2. Rambo II
3. decrunch noise 1
4. decrunch noise 2

So now go and bother your room mate, peer or who’s just around you, with your all new/old C64 sounds. Have fun!

Last week some good friends came over and we fired up Vice64 and played the old, classic Games from our childhood. Funny that you still know some of the moves in California Games although I haven’t played it for over 15 years. It was lot of fun. We hooked up the Acer ONE to my fat LCD tv and used two of those USB Competion Pros from Speedlink. Pure pleassure… they did a good job in resurrecting this classic.

Only having OS X on my ONE and the external Videoport is not working – hackintoshs have their flaws, you know – I was thinking about my good old xbox with Gamebase64 installed. No windows to wait for, no freaking ugly interface like Gamebase has on PC, not much hassle with configuration and twiddeling with the USB ports… sounds like a lot of reasons to get a Competition hooked to it.Asking google revealed that many people have already hacked their contorller and put a D-SUB9 in place. On xbox-scene bek postet a little tutorial. Sadly the pictures were far from usable and in his text he is mixing up left and right when talking about the D-SUB port and the solderpoint for the firebutton is TP76 instead TP78 which I couldn’t find at all on the both controllers I hacked.

Anyway, his tutorial is great for a electrical noob like me. I zoomed aroud in photoshop till I found the point he used for the firebutton… with a little luck, off course. So here is my little help fix for you, If you would like to play old games like they where meant to. This is for the original xbox crontroller, the big version.First off all the pinout for Atari/Amiga/C64 compatible ports, seen from the soldering side.

1 Forward – 2 Back – 3 Left – 4 Right 5 – not connected – 6 Button 1 – 7 +5V * – 8 GND – 9 – not connected

________________
o5 o4 o3 o2 o1/
 o9 o8 o7 o6 /
 ___________/

Unscrew the controller – 7 Screws on the outside, additional 6 on the inside, on the board. Here’s a picture that should be self-explanatory. Behind the “>” you can read the pin of the D-SUB plug.When soldering be careful not to stay long on the pins of the controller chip – I just killed my second controllers d-pad with too much heat.

Off course I will not take any resposability for any damage to you, your console, or controller. Try this at your own risk! If you are not familiar with soldering tiny spots, you better look for someone to do it for you. Like I should have done with the second attempt.

So, I will take my chances – which are by far now better than with the d-pad – and kick some reds ass on International Karate.Have fun!

EDIT: I recently got myself into the arcade stuff again and while browsing for some infos I found this neat tutorial, with all solderpoints listed…. far better than mine while easier to solder to. Thanks to Xerxes3rd for this one.

http://www.xerxes3rd.net/staticpages/index.php?page=GenesisControllerOnXbox

…probably one of the most used headlines, when it comes to blogging. Everyone running a blog knows, that it is a bit work to keep it up to date and writing sometimes doesn’t come easy. So what has happened the last month?

First of all, we moved up one level. Nadine are now in our new residence on second and thrid floor… still in the same house. There is still a lot to do in our new home.

Second thing and also a long time running was finishing the budocan.com webpage. Yes! I know… it looks a bit like this page… but hey, it looks better than most of those martial arts pages.

And before I disappear again I give you a little sample, from an old C64 game that kept me and my cousin playing all evening. Do you know which game it is taken from than post a comment. >> sampel.mp3 (160kb)

Do you remember the first time you got in touch with a computer? Speaking for me I still know when it was and what it was like. I was about 10 years old – must be around 1985 – and it was at Alex (nowadays the man behind mobileread.com) place. His father is some kind of early geek and had the whole house stuffed with latest gadgets, so it was no surprise to find a brand new Commodore 128D there. It strucked me like lightning, when Alex grabbed a joystick and controlled that little, jaggy guy on screen. I knew I had to get such a wonder machine for myself.

Long before mom and pop said yes, Alex passed me a floppy disk – my first floppy disk ever – with list dump on its back, printed with the old MPS 801, that made such a noise that the whole street knew when you where printing something. I remember flailing this disk in front of my dad, till he finnaly went on to buy a C64. This was my step into computing and for sure one step to this blog.

A couple of years ago I converted all my disks to D64 format and preserved them on a CD. Recently I tripped over an announcement on c64.com asking for old disks. I uploaded my full archive to their server and couldn’t resist to browse a few of my fist files. My very fist disk was also in there and on it I found some basic animation, that I almost forgot about. Back, when it all was so new and exciting, those basic stuff tought me alot of programming – thanks to whoever made them. Now they seem to be some sort of first demos/intros, written in basic; a precursor to all those popular flash movies nowadays.

Feel free to grab this early ancestor of digital animation. >> Basic anims.d64.zip

And please support c64.com with your old disks.