RE: Vector programming

> Are you so new to the list that you're not aware of Vector Breakout?
> It's
> one of the games in Clays Multigame. He's got a lot of Tempest programming
> knowhow, but probably not all there is. I suspect he'll respond too.
>
Gads. And here I thought the vectorlist had gone dormant for winter or
something. ;-)

Yeah, I'm far from "knowing all" on Tempest. In fact, I'll wager that I've
probably forgotten about 30% of what I did learn since I'm off doing other
stuff now...

> This always makes me wonder why people do such things. Why document the
> Tempest code? Why write new games for obsolete hardware? I'm not saying
> these activities are bad, but why do them?
>
"Because it's there" as the mountain-climbers would say. :-)

Good question. Probably a mix of things for me. A bit is just nostalgia (I
always held Atari in something of god-like stature as a young-un) -- lots of
fond memories of the arcade when I was "little". Another good chunk is just
doing something that's regarded as "cool" or a "first"-- new game for
Tempest, new game for Vectrex, hardware hack for whatever...

Vector Breakout in particular was something of guilt-ware. I knew where I
needed to be price-wise on the Tempest Multigame, but I didn't really feel
like the $99 final price was a *great* value for what you got. Vector
Breakout was my way of adding some novelty and "gee-whiz" factor back into
the package.

It's also just my old hacker mentality manifesting itself... I have a
management day-job and although I get to define product architectures and
direction and ask the engineers if they put pullup resistors on the I2C bus,
it's not the same as getting your hands dirty with assembler code. ;-)

> So I kinda understand why *I* did some of those things. Does anyone else
> have
> some other motivations for such goofy activities?
>
It's a good challenge. Probably some sort of investigative/creative
compulsion some of us have. Some people build 1:100 scale Devil's Mountain
in the living room -- some of use spend three hours debugging a $5
Wrestlefest board... Beats me why, but it just doesn't seem *right* to throw
it out. ;-)

-Clay
Received on Tue Sep 28 20:07:56 1999