Miyamoto And Crew Are “Princess Bride” Fans!

Posted on November 20, 2007 by Blake Patterson

It’s got to be the case! You see, I’ve been playing Super Mario Galaxy fanatically (well, when I’m able, given baby duty and a recent (current) flu) since getting it last week. It’s brilliant and sits, at least, in my “top 5” all time favorite games list. At any rate, I was playing this curious, one-star galaxy called “Bigmouth Galaxy” which involves dodging eels while attempting to collect star chips, when suddenly somehing grabbed my attention. It was the background music.

Have a listen.

It took me a few seconds to place it but that’s all it took. It sounded to me almost exactly the same as the music playing during the eels / Cliffs of Insanity section of The Princess Bride (the finest movie ever filmed)! I was so certain of this that I wired my Wii’s audio output to my Mac Pro and sampled the relevant section of the score. I came to find that it is not an exact reproduction of that Princess Bride melody, but seems to merge various pieces taken from here and there within the original track to produce a tune that, to me, is without question inspired by the soundtrack of that wonderful film.

Is it me? Am I just imagining things? Please share your thoughts, if you have any, on this matter.

Posted in Gaming | 2 Comments

25 Years Of My Favorite Games

Posted on November 14, 2007 by Blake Patterson

My recent acquisition of Super Mario Galaxy has put quality gaming in the forefront of my mind. Surely due to this, it occurred to me it might be interesting to post a list of my single favorite game over every year for, say, the past 25 years. And so I have.

For what it’s worth, I turned 10 years old in May of 1982, the first year on this list. And as this list would indicate, I’ve owned a few machines in my time….

1982 – Demon Attack ( Atari 2600 )

1983 – Parsec ( TI-99/4A )

1984 – Conan: Hall of Volta ( Apple //c )

1985 – Wishbringer ( Amiga 1000 )

1986 – Time Bandit ( Atari 520ST )

1987 – Starglider ( Atari 520ST )

1988 – Defender of the Crown ( Apple IIgs )

1989 – Hybris ( Amiga 2000 )

1990 – Shadow of the Beast ( Amiga 2000 )

1991 – Typhoon Thompson ( Amiga 2000 )

1992 – Spectre VR ( Macintosh LC )

1993 – Another World ( Amiga 1200 )

1994 – DOOM ( Intel 486 66MHz PC )

1995 – Descent ( Intel 486 66MHz PC )

1996 – Wipeout ( Sony Playstation )

1997 – Super Mario 64 ( Nintendo 64 )

1998 – Quake II ( AMD K6 225MHz PC )

1999 – Quake III Arena ( Blue & White G3 400MHz Macintosh )

2000 – Rune ( Blue & White G3 400MHz Macintosh )

2001 – Giants: Citizen Kabuto ( dual G4 800MHz Macintosh )

2002 – Rez ( Sega Dreamcast )

2003 – Unreal Tournament 2003 ( dual G4 800MHz Macintosh )

2004 – Super Mario 64 DS ( Nintendo DS )

2005 – HALO: Combat Evolved ( dual G5 2.5GHz Macintosh )

2006 – Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved ( XBOX 360 )

2007 – Super Mario Galaxy ( Nintendo Wii )

Game on!

Posted in Gaming | 4 Comments

Super Mario Galaxy!

Posted on November 12, 2007 by Blake Patterson

Yay! I got it a day early!

Thanks to Game Crazy. Screw GameStop. I’ve owned it a little over two hours now but have I played it? No. The wife’s watching TV. Maybe she’ll go to bed soon. This is my hope. :-)

UPDATE [11.14.2007]: I finally got to play! And the game is just awesome! As I’d heard reviewers comment, it feels much more like a sequel to Super Mario 64 than the quite lovely, yet somewhat repetitive Super Mario Sunshine does. It definitely has the “spirit” of good ole’ SM64 while looking better than any Mario before it.

Check out my “SMG on my 50-inch plasma” gallery – sexy pixels….

Posted in Gaming | 4 Comments

It Was Apple Garamond That Sold Me

Posted on November 4, 2007 by Blake Patterson

Apple marketing has long done a number on me. And not just in these flashy days of iPod “shadow dancers” and all that hipness. No, even back in the mid-’80s days of their classy, perhaps conservative product ads featuring the elegant Apple Garamond font, I was held in thrall.

I purchased what I believe was the first Amiga 1000 sold in Virginia, way back in October 1985. The Amiga was amazing, but it did lack software for the first (many) months of its existence. I was loving the Amiga but lamenting the dearth of software when, it seems, I was romanced by Apple’s elegant ads for their new, late-’85 Apple II offerings, consisting of new composite screens for the IIe and //c featuring a clear 80-column “mono mode,” the UniDisk 3.5 disk drive, and the Mac-like Quark Catalyst desktop interface that made the II shine anew. Yes, that Apple ad from the December 1985 A+ Magazine (shown in part above) was the main force that prompted me to sell the Amiga and go back to the 8-bit Apple II. (I was a //c user prior to the Amiga.) I grabbed an enhanced IIe, fully loaded.

Quark Catalyst for the Apple IIA smaller part of what pushed me back to the II, I believe, was the Apple dealer where I hung out frequently. It was just a really great place located in Williamsburg, Virginia called Next Generation Computers. I’ve long loved the historic colonial atmosphere of Williamsburg, and at that store it somehow meshed with the elegant stylings of Apple’s packaging and ads. The two together was a proposition I could not resist. And so, prompted by the ad above, I sold the Amiga and headed up to Next Generation to become an Apple II user once again.

I thought I would share this little twist in my computing history. Who says marketing style doesn’t affect the technical, the savvy? Going from Amiga back to the 8-bit Apple II.

I still love the II and the early Macintosh, and it is in part because of a typeface.

[ This post was updated — images and links — in February 2015. Motivation for this was Chris Phin’s recent Macworld piece, entitled “Think Retro: Apple’s fonts have always been as classy as its products.” ]

Posted in Apple II | 2 Comments

A New CRT For The Gaming Corner

Posted on October 31, 2007 by Blake Patterson

I’ve been having a lot of fun in the gaming corner of my own little Byte Cellar (the basement computer room). Not long ago I gathered up certain of my consoles which were scattered about the house, threw up a shelf, grabbed an s-video to chroma/luma cable, and tied it all up through an s-video switchbox to a nice little Teknika 13-inch CRT that was doing duty as my TI-99/4A’s display. Much gaming joy ensued.

But 13-inches in today’s world? This was my thought as I was wandering through Best Buy and spied a 20-inch, 4:3-ratio, oldschool CRT-based television. It occurred to me that these relics may not be sold much longer (there were only two other, similar units in the whole store). The set has coax in for cable, as well as composite, s-video, and component inputs. It sounded good to me, so I laid down a little over $100 and walked out with a new monitor for the gaming corner!

While not as sharp as the 27″ Sony VVEGA CRT that used to be the center of our entertainment center (no longer), it does a great job with these old consoles. The GameCube owns the component input while the rest of the consoles share the s-video input, and the good ole’ TI sits on the composite. Happiness abounds.

Posted in Gaming | 2 Comments

Scans: 1984 Review Of Epson PX-8 Laptop

Posted on September 14, 2007 by Blake Patterson

I listened to a good number of Earl Evans’ Retrobits podcasts while on my recent vacation to the Outer Banks. (Earl has even seen fit to make mention of Byte Cellar in a few of his shows.) While all I’ve heard so far have been rather engrossing, one topic particularly caught my interest. Earl, who worked for Epson years ago, has acquired a CP/M-based Epson PX-8 (aka “Geneva”) laptop – one of the first out there, and has been having much fun with it.

What I thought was particularly nifty is his effort to preserve the data on piles of PX-8 floppies that found their way to him. He was able to extract the CP/M applications off of almost every disk and is actually working on a hardware project to emulate an Epson PF-10 3.5″ floppy drive so that these apps can be run directly from a SD card. An awesome effort in every regard.

When listening to Earl expound the virtues of his PX-8, a mental image of the laptop sprang instantly to mind. When trying to determine just why that was, I remembered picking up a copy of a magazine years and years ago that featured a review of what I felt sure was this unit as well as cover placement. After a bit of digging, I located the magazine in question, a fairly battered September 1984 issue of Computers & Electronics, and sure enough – the PX-8 is indeed the unit I remembered. As far as I know it’s the only issue of this magazine I ever picked up and strangely I can recall the obscure, mom and pops drug store where the then-12-year-old me purchased it.

Inspired by Earl’s effort, I felt compelled to contribute similarly, if to a far lesser extent, to this cause. I have scanned in the PX-8-related pages of the magazine and placed them online for Earl and others who might share an interest.

As a sidenote, Earl informed me that an outfit in Colorado called Star Technology is actually selling brand new Epson PX-8s for $79. There’s really nothing like getting to experience that first unpacking moment with a retro machine….

::: Digg this story! :::

Posted in Other Platform | 5 Comments

Need An ImageWriter II Color Ribbon? Ask Me.

Posted on September 13, 2007 by Blake Patterson

So, I wanted to pick up (one) ImageWriter II color ribbon to do a few test pages from the Apple IIgs on my new Apple ImageWriter II printer. I’ve since found that one can still buy these at Staples, but — who knew? So I hit eBay. The best deal was a guy selling 6 ribbons for $25. A little more than I wanted to pay and more ribbons by far than I needed, but hey! So I ordered.

What arrived days later was a large box containing six boxes of ribbons. Inside each box was six individually sealed ImageWriter II color ribbons. So, I now have 36 of these ribbons! I will never use more than one.

So…if you need an ImageWriter II color ribbon, email me and I’ll mail you one if you cover shipping. Okay? Let’s give these a purpose.

Find my email address at blakespot.com.

Posted in Apple II | 1 Comment

Newton eMate 300 As A Serial Terminal

Posted on September 11, 2007 by Blake Patterson

Ok, my three regular readers may be asking themselves, “didn’t we just read this story?” They would be mistaken in thinking so, however. Back in late July I described the manner in which I configured my Apple //c to serve as a dumb terminal, tied via serial link to my Mac mini. In researching the project, I ran across a story of a user who had put an Apple Newton eMate 300 to similar duty on his Sun box. Being an eMate owner myself and having a vacant Mac-style serial port on my dual-port Keyspan USB-to-serial adapter, I felt I must get this going as well.

And today, I have. Have a look at the photos.

It’s hard to get as excited about this project as the Apple //c terminal since, well, I just did it with the Apple //c and I didn’t have to splice cables together and since – hey, let’s not fool ourselves – the eMate is a 25MHz ARM 710a (RISC)-based machine while the //c is powered by a mere 1.02MHz 65C02. But it’ still worth a post, I feel.

No, this won’t be a permanent office fixture. Just a little experiment. Sadly, the eMate will soon resume its typical roll as a paperweight to hold down my Apple Lisa 2 in the home “Byte Cellar.” Still – it made for a pretty interesting little exercise.

Posted in Handhelds, Serial Terminal | 6 Comments

Fun With My New ImageWriter II Printer

Posted on September 6, 2007 by Blake Patterson

I’m on vacation in the Outer Banks with my family presently – a sunny week at the beach. It’s all about relaxation and, to me, that calls for another retro computing post. I thought I’d share one of my latest projects with you folks out there.

I spent a nice bit of time with my Mac Plus recently while putting together my Macintosh Plus Gaming Gallery post. It’s a lovely machine to work with. Staring at its 9-inch, 512×342 screen (startlingly high resolution for the time) got me to thinking about those pixels and how they used to amazingly transfer clean and true to the page, thanks to Apple’s ImageWriter printer. I had one back in 1984, attached to my Apple //c, but I never had one hanging off of a Mac. Manufactured for Apple by C.Itoh Electronics, it was loud and built like a tank – a real workhorse. At any rate, I was struck with a desire to see those pixels printed to page once again, and so I rolled my chair over the the Mac Pro to do an eBay search and get me one.

But as my chair was rolling across the computer room floor, it occurred to me that I have an Apple IIgs as well, with a nice 4096-color palette. Why not grab an ImageWriter II, the color-capable followup to the ImageWriter that, while still built like a tank, boasted a rather more stylish design and improved general performance. In 1985, I added an ImageWriter II to the Apple IIe that was then my primary machine and it, later, saw duty on my Apple IIgs and Amiga 2000 as well. It would do fine double-duty on my IIgs.

Click, click, win and a very well preserved specimine was on its way to me. A week or so later I was sad to find that the US Postal service fulfilled my worst fears. After eagerly tearing open the package, what greeted me within was a sight that sent a distinct shiver down my spine. Despite the unit appearing to have been packed rather well, USPS actually managed to kill an ImageWriter II. I’ve heard it suggested that J.R.R. Tolkien might have saved a great deal of ink if he had simply had the Council of Elrond ship the One Ring to Mordor via US Postal – surely it would have been destroyed utterly.

Long story short, the seller was quick to provide me with a second unit that arrived soundly (by an alternate courier…), if somewhat in less pristine condition. A bit of plastics swapping from the original unit has me setup with a rather nice looking, quite functional ImageWriter II that has successfully generated lovely prints from both the Mac Plus and the Apple IIgs. I even had cause to generate one of those great, old Print Shop banners on the IIgs (tough with Print Shop for the IIe/c – I can’t seem to find a disk image for Print Shop GS). I actually found a large (5,000 sheet?) box of tractor-feed, fanfold paper on the shelves of the local Staples, happily – should keep me going for the rest of my life. All I need now is a mini-din 8 serial switchbox and the setup will be complete.

It’s been 15 years since I had a dot matrix printer setup in my home. Hearing it in operation is like listening to a pleasant melody to my retro-loving ears. I highly recommend playing with such a unit. There’s fun to be had there!

Posted in Multi-Platform | 5 Comments

A New Panorama Photo Series Of The “Byte Cellar”

Posted on August 30, 2007 by Blake Patterson

About two and a half years ago I decided it would be fun to share my personal “Byte Cellar” with everyone out there and took a series of photos of my (highly retro) basement computer room and stitched them together into a panoramic image as well as a QuickTime VR 360-degree movie. It seems to have intrigued a number of folks out there. Since then the room has changed a bit, and I decided the other day to create an update version.

I present to my readers the current “Byte Cellar” as I experience it daily. No, all the machines are never on at the same time unless I’m making a QTVR movie of the place and yes, I do use all of the machines pictured, if not at the same time or even in the same month or year. It’s a happy place to dwell, though.

I hope you like it.

Posted in Just Rambling | 13 Comments