Hello, my name is Dan and this is my DT Log.

Q: Why do people study dead languages?

A: To experience what it was like to live in the past.

Same thing with programming C-64 games, they’re like archaeologist engineers working with sticks, stones and mud.

Creating Guitar Hero for the Commodore is quite impressive:

(source: Toni Westbrook via Fark)

Dug up from The Book of Lists 2:

In his book The Shadow Presidents, author Michael Medved relates the extreme disappointment of H. R. Haldeman over his failure to implement his plan to link up all the homes in America by coaxial cable.  In Haldeman’s words, “There would be two-way communication.  Through computer, you could use your television set to order up whatever you wanted.  The morning paper, entertainment services, shopping services, coverage of sporting events and public events… just as Eisenhower linked up the nation’s cities by highways so that you could get there, the Nixon legacy would have linked them by cable communications, so you wouldn’t have to go there.”  One can almost see the dreamy eyes of Nixon and Haldeman as they sat around discussing a plan that would eliminate the need for newspapers, seemingly oblivious to its Big Brother aspects.  Fortunately the Watergate scandal inteverened, and Nixon was forced to resign before “The Wired Nation” could be hooked up.

***

A very prescient article, because it seems like Haldeman’s plan to wire up the nation has come to fruition.

It comes from author David Wallechinsky’s list 6 OUTRAGEOUS PLANS THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN.  And while Wallechinsky laments the “Big Brother aspects” of such a technology, he couldn’t foresee the ability of users to be able to communicate freely with one another while the rest of the media becomes consolidated into a huge corporatocracy.

To think we could have had something like Fark 20 years earlier.

This was an actual ad clipped from the 1983 edition of Street and Smith’s Pro Football Yearbook:

What a tagline… “THE CLUB THAT BEATS THE STREETS.”

I wonder how many people O.J. has beaten on the street with a club.

Ben Heck is at it again:

I am always amazed at other people’s modding skills.  Wow.  I can’t even put together a kid’s model of a Ford Thunderbird.

Great attention to detail, including the color scheme of the early 80s C-64.  I also love that it uses SD cards.

(via Fark and Make Online)

Yesterday, the Brainerd Public Library concluded its seasonal book sale by offering a paper bag full of books for $2.00. (Sadly, the bag, overloaded with my choices, didn’t make it into the house and now rests in the recycle bin.  So it goes.)

I grabbed two by Stephen King, a couple of tomes by Erma Bombeck, the last poems of Allen Ginsburg, The Millionaire Next Door, a couple of retro educational books, The People’s Almanac #1 and some children’s books.

I also picked up this vintage computing book:

For the retail price of 5.95 plus tax 1983 dollars – you have 31 games to play on your Texas Instruments computer!

Wait, there’s a catch.

YOU have to type the code into computer, and you also need the Extended Basic cartridge to program and play half of the games.

After all that work typing in the codes, you can begin playing Zombies in the Swamp, Shark Hunt or Las Vegas a Go Go. But how do you save your work?

Presumably, according to Wikipedia’s article, a tape deck and floppy drive were available as peripherals to save TI basic. Though nobody I knew in the early 80s had anything more than the basic console, which cost $600. Add $50-200 for the read-write peripherals, and that’s a lot of money to invest in programming BASIC games with limited appeal and simple vector graphics and/or sprites.

Maybe I’ll get a TI emulator and code these games just to pique my curiosity.

***

Parsec was the star of the TI-99/4A, and more than once a couple of us stayed after school in Mrs. Graham’s classroom playing it.

YouTube via Fark:

Was this public access?

In the video, Crane briefly touches on the synergy between movie and game releases.

Most of the time these days, the game that is released concurrently with a film is rushed though the production process and is usually poorly received by the public.