Revision 2017 - Atari VCS Highlights

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Published: Wednesday, 14 June 2017 00:00
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This year's Revision Party turned out to be the event of the years for the meeting VCS coders. Roughly 80% of the active VCS coders in the world were present. To give the right context: In absolute numbers we're talking about 5 people :-). And I had the once in a life time chance to meeting Nick Montfort, professor for digital media at the MIT one of the authors of Racing the Beam. That is the book that triggered my interest in coding on the VCS by making it seem easy, which it is not. We gathered all the Atari VCS guys and were photobombed by the usual Atari ST fanboys. Here's the result.

The Atari crowd

So now I have my copy of the booked signed by Nick. It's been great talking to you Nick, and to all you other crazy people there. I hope to see some of your again at Sillyventure. Keep on racing!

The Atari crowd

Revision 2017 - Atari Mega ST

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Published: Tuesday, 13 June 2017 00:00
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As a surprise, D-Fox approached me at Revision 2017 an had an Atari Mega ST for free from the former facility manager. As you can guess I didn't say no, even though am an 8-bit Atarian. I've spent quite some time taking it apart and giving it a proper cleaning. Here's how it looked in my bath tub.

Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 - Puzzle with 102 pieces Board in very good condition

And this is the final result. I gave it to Biobern and he's trying to make the Mega File RLL hard disk work. And we plan to release something small and Atari ST related at Revision 2018 to say thank you guys!

Final result

Site Update

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Published: Sunday, 05 February 2017 00:00
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Finally I had the guts to update my Joomla version to the most recent one. Doesn't sound like a big deal, but... when I first installed Joomla and made it look the way I wanted to, I had no clue about PHP, CSS and Joomla. Consequently I simply modified all kinds of files to fit my needs. As part of the recent update I extracted all my changes into separate PHP and CSS files and adopted the CSS so it should work better on big screens and mobile devices. I can you find something is broken now, please contact me.

Apart from the I spent some nights chatting with Kevin Savetz this week and (in his own words) "harassed him to actually" perform the port of his "Kaverns of Kfest" game from the Apple ][ to the Atari 8-bit using WUDSN IDE. You can find the details, download and source in the AtariAge thread.

Click to watch video

The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets

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Published: Monday, 16 January 2017 00:00
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My passion is coding- And whenever I came across a game that I liked in my life, I immediately tried to take it into pieces and find out how it works using monitors, hex editors, freezer or screw drivers. There are actually not many games that is really played. But one of them the "The Legend of Zelda" series, starting with the original "Link's Awakening" that I played on a grey brick with monochrome display 2 decades ago. Every since I've tried to play every Zelda game on every Nintendo console. Currently I'm playing "The Minish Cap" on my DS and I'm almost done.  And here a nice surprise which I found on Indie Retro News and wanted to share with you. 

"What an incredible end to the week especially for Zelda fans across the globe, as BS Zelda no Densetsu, also known as 'BS The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets', has received a full English dub restoration. If you've never heard of the game, which until today included me, it was a score attack version of 'A Link to the Past', featuring high quality CD music and voices, but had to be played during a satellite broadcast. This rather jaw dropping release on the SNES according to Romhacking, is a full 4 hour English dub restoration available in both the original music arrangement and a custom orchestral arrangement. It also features a full voice cast including professional voice actress Kira Buckland (Danganronpa, Disgaia, Skullgirls) as Zelda, and is even playable on real hardware with a sd2snes."

Here's just a small screen shot and it looks great to me. Read the full article on Indie Retro News and visit the The BS Zelda Home Page for the download.

The!Cart - Comparision, Video and 3D Printed Shell Update

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Published: Sunday, 01 January 2017 00:00
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I've updated the The!Cart page with: