Our Viking Future

Earthdate: 2264. These are troubled times for the planet. After centuries of peace, the renegade Red Lord of Darkness has led his cyborg fanatics in a bloody revolution that has overthrown the United World government. Millions of political prisoners are being tortured in his infamous Labyrinth of Doom far beneath the surface of the planet. Very little is known about this subterranean maze of brick-walled catacombs. Just vague rumors about the hidden millions in stolen gold guarded by a ruthless army of mutant cyborg zombies commanded by the merciless General Zod, governor of the Red Lord’s death camps. Only one thing is sure…none of your predecessors have ever come out of this dreaded place alive. But, you must find a way out with a lode of gold big enough to launch the counterrevolution. You are the last hope; the last of the great Lode Runners.

I don’t know what’s scarier about the future: the Red Lord of Darkness or the United World government. Hard to choose.

Discussion Topic of the Week: In your opinion, what computer or video game has the best plot/story of all time?

A deleted scene from Disney’s Fantasia.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Tell us your copy protection horror stories. Have you ever tried to copy a disk but couldn’t? What did you do about it?

Atari Corporation premiered the first member of its ST series, the Atari 520ST, at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show 25 years ago this January. After the 520ST shipped mid-1985, Atari released an upgraded model in 1986 called the Atari 1040STf — variations of which remained best sellers throughout the ST’s run.

In honor of the Atari ST series’ 25th anniversary, I’ve dissected the popular Atari 1040STf in my usual style for PC World, making this the ninth entry in my “workbench series” of tech autopsies. I think it turned out very well, and I hope you enjoy it.

I have fond memories of the 1040STf because my father bought one for the family back in 1986. Games like Phantasie, SunDog, Exodus, and Gauntlet always come to mind when I think of Atari’s GUI-based wonder.

Is anybody else out there a fan of the Atari ST series? If so, tell us about it. What ST model(s) did/do you have? What are your favorite ST games? Bonus points to anyone who can provide a picture of themselves using an Atari ST before 1990!

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Here are my previous workbench teardowns, if you’re interested: Atari 800, Commodore 64, Nintendo Game Boy, Nintendo Famicom, Apple IIc, IBM Model M Keyboard, TRS-80 Model 100, and Macintosh Portable.

Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom (NES)

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s the weirdest video game you’ve ever played?

“Look over the Rainbow”

In the early 1980s, mainframe giant Digital Equipment Corporation (aka DEC for short) tried its hand in the personal computer market with the DEC Rainbow (1982). Since the market had not settled on an industry-wide PC standard at that time, DEC decided to support the two major operating system platforms of the day: Z80-based CP/M and 8088-based MS-DOS. The Rainbow contained both these processors and was capable of booting both OSes. Interestingly, despite the machine’s use of the 8088 and MS-DOS, the computer remained largely incompatible with the IBM PC from a hardware standpoint.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Imagine a world in which Digital Research CP/M, rather than MS-DOS, became the standard operating system for PCs worldwide in the 1980s. (That is, far beyond CP/M’s market share of the 1970s.) How might PCs today be different?

In the early 1990s, I rented quite a few video games from my local Blockbuster store. I felt compelled to try any and all new games that showed up for rental — up to the point my parents would allow, anyway.

Around the same time, I figured out how to disassemble video game cartridges. I thought myself very clever and began disassembling NES and SNES games I’d rented to see what was inside. Blockbuster wouldn’t have liked this, of course — to prevent such a practice, the chain sealed its game cartridges with tamper-resistant security stickers designed to show if someone had opened them up.

Luckily for me, the stickers didn’t always cover the screw holes, allowing me to work around them. With a careful bend at the sticker joint between two sides of the plastic cartridge case, I could examine the cartridge interior with impunity.

It was then that I struck upon a weird idea. Similar to how kids would scratch their initials on a tree or a school desk, or perhaps draw their initials in wet concrete, I realized I could leave my own mark hidden within the cartridges themselves, gaining a small form of immortality in the process.

The key idea being that I would stick a note on the inside of the cartridge case, so people (most notably, Blockbuster employees) could not normally see it; one would have to open the cartridge again to reveal the secret message.

My youthful imagination fantasized about exchanging covert correspondence between video game renters this way. Even better, I could imagine someone, some day, far in the future randomly opening up an old SNES cartridge and finding a note from me inside. They’d be completely perplexed and amazed, and my goal would have been achieved. But even if no one ever found my message, it still would feel good to have it out there.

Placing The Golden Ticket

The next time I rented a game, I disassembled it and set to work with my plan. I found some small self-adhesive labels and wrote a short note on one, along with a date. After sticking the label to the inside of the cartridge, I closed it up and later returned the game to Blockbuster as usual.

I probably only wrote my initials on the first label (simulated above), but on the subsequent labels — maybe two at most — I might have written a short phrase such as, “Greetings from the past!” I don’t recall exactly. I believe I left the first such note inside Super Mario Kart in the Raleigh, NC area around 1993.

If you find it, let me know. It will be even better than finding the Golden Ticket in a Wonka Bar. As a reward, I’ll give you a personal tour of the VC&G Museum — and I promise you won’t drown in a river of chocolate.

“Get Pocket Power!”

I scored my first Neo Geo Pocket Color (NGPC) along with Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure and SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium for my birthday in 1999. It was an amazing little machine — in my opinion, the only US market competitor that stood a chance against the Game Boy in the long run.

SNK clearly studied Nintendo’s winning handheld strategy and succeeded where previous Game Boy competitors failed by keeping the Neo Geo Pocket Color’s technical specifications minimal and omitting a backlight, allowing for low retail cost and long battery life.

The NGPC even sported an innovative and satisfyingly clicky thumb stick that in some ways surpassed the traditional D-pad in functionality. Still, SNK couldn’t keep up with Nintendo’s first party franchises and voluminous third party support, and the NGPC died on the vine, never to realize its full potential.

Along with the Sega Dreamcast, the NGPG lives on in gamer memory as one of those rare consoles that failed due to commercial reasons alone, not technical ones. The NGPC hardware is currently cheap and plentiful, so if you don’t have one, I highly recommend picking up a unit and a handful of games.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What are your favorite Neo Geo Pocket Color Games? What game you think was best, over all, for the system?

Atari’s best 8-bit keyboard?

The Atari 1200XL (1982) is something of a cult favorite among Atari 8-bit computer fans due to its keyboard, which probably has the nicest feel of the entire 8-bit line. 1980s critics, while appreciating the unit’s keyboard, simultaneously derided the 1200XL for minor incompatibilities with existing software created for the earlier Atari 400/800 computers. I personally don’t like its recessed cartridge slot, but if you have an AtariMax MaxFlash multi-cart, you don’t need to change cartridges very often.

Over the past decade, I’ve often used my Atari 1200XL as an ideal machine for Atari text adventure games. Whenever I encounter software incompatibilities, I just break out the Atari 800XL or 130XE. Each Atari model has a flavor of its own, and it’s a pleasure to use most of them — if you choose the right machine for the right task (hint: don’t try to write a term paper on an Atari 400’s membrane keyboard).

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite model in the Atari 8-bit computer series? To recap, you’ve got the Atari 400, 800, 1200XL, 600XL, 800XL, 65XE, 130XE, and XEGS.

“You are the weapon!”

I was a big fan of the original NES Renegade back in the day, but I seem to recall the sequel, Target: Renegade, being a major letdown. Did anyone out there actually like it?

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite Taito game of all time?

PC World recently published my latest slideshow, The Evolution of Removable Storage, which examines removable computer storage media of the last 60 years. You’ll find plenty of fascinating pictures and lots of written history as well. It’s less like a slideshow and more like an illustrated article in spirit. I hope you enjoy it.

Technologizer also posted one of my latest pieces yesterday: 15 Consumer Electronics Design Mistakes. It’s not perfectly VC&G-related, but it is part of a series with two previous Technologizer articles of mine: 15 Classic Game Console Design Mistakes and 15 Classic PC Design Mistakes.