ASCII by Jason Scott

Sometimes I find someone weblogging who in fact is holding some very unique knowledge. One of the recent such discoveries made aware to me by a gabillion links is that of Dad Hacker, the weblog of Landon Dyer. Landon worked for Atari and later Apple and a bunch of other concerns, but for the moment it’s his very occasional entries about working at Atari and on Atari projects that’s holding my interest. His weblog goes back six years and is of a wide variety of subjects, so it’s not like he just started down this road.

Like my own little site, one specific post has gotten a lot of attention, and fans have now clung on awaiting further similar pearls to arrive. In his case, it’s Donkey Kong and Me, which is worth the price of admission and much much more. It brings to mind some of the stories of Sinistar, but this narrative of Dyer’s is very personal and very technically specific as he works through his project.

Before you particularly strong-memoried folks jump down his throat, this is about the Atari 8-bit version, not the Atari 2600 version. Just so we’re all clear here.

If you browse through his back archives, very little is about his days of Atari, but the few that are more than make up for it. I hope he continues to dig deeper. Until then, enjoy the handful of worthwhile essays of someone on the ground in the hand-hacking of a classic work.

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By now a lot of what we consider the world-wide-web’s most popular destinations combine into one big social club, with a good number of trendmakers and pundits whose opinions represent the general consensus. Occasionally we disagree with them or vehemently agree, but woe to us who go against the grain.

That said, I find myself agreeing with two positions that the opinion captains are steering around.

The first is the idea that the April Fool’s Day Web Prank is perhaps rife for “you’re doing it wrong” type mishap. People do tend to see what others are doing and implement, clumsily, the same general ideas, so we have an awful lot of upside-down logos, “special announcements” that something completely crazy has happened, or statements of changes or terrifying outcomes that are not, ultimately, true. Even more important than the natural distaste for shallow copycatting of the “I am being hilarious” prank is that the natural of information duplication now means that insane statements done in the name of April Fool Comedy are joining streams of information far away from the original sources, leading to problematic and needless confusion, and not of the “oh you sure got me” variety. If the hilarity to mishap/blandness ratio is high, then I’m all for it, but I can’t help but feel we’re getting heavily toward 1:1 as the years go on and we celebrate our little web holidays.

The second position is a proposal: instead of utilizing April 1st as a day for hilarious non-hilarity, instead use it to announce site-changing or vision-changing creations. Whereas you would normally provide people with a claim that you were moving to China to work in a gold farming boiler room, instead announce that you’re engaged. Instead of claiming to be able to send your pets into space, announce a program you’ve been tinkering with for months that nobody would believe could actually be that cool and exist.

In other words, turn April Fool’s Day into Surprise Announcement Day.

April’s a nice month, far away from the end of year holidays, not quite to the summer’s dullness and warmth, rife with opportunity to brighten the growing days with something really amazing that you did. You tinker and slave away in darkness, and then spring onto the world your showpiece, something that makes all work stop and days of playtime commence as your newest fans explore the gift you’ve given them.

There are examples of this already. I hope there will be more.

I am a tiny, wavering light in the wilderness of opinion, and my idea is not original, but I can certainly hope it might catch on for 2009.

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April 1st is essentially ruined for any serious discussions or essays; everyone thinks you’re playing a joke, or you’re not getting into the spirit of it all. So here’s a photo of me directing MC Frontalot. I’ll swing back by tomorrow.

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One of my speakers (which I will not name), essentially agreed to Blockparty but didn’t, you know, totally go crazy studying what the heck it is. I was offering a flight and hotel and a chance to visit some old friends in the area, so they were all for coming. But after browsing the schedule and events at this combined conference/demoparty, this week I got what was essentially a “Hell yeah, this thing is gonna be good.”

There’s no easy way to solve this problem; a lot of people who would really enjoy this event I’m helping to put on will never hear of it. A demoparty is one of those things which a person doesn’t just sit down one day and look for, i.e. “I wonder if there’s any demo parties in the area” or “Hmm, I have this demo sitting around and nowhere to submit it; I’ll check the usual places.”. Some folks don’t even know what this event is at all and would have to be severely assaulted to get them to look at all the great things happening with it. This is how the world works, and there’s little to do about it without becoming a loud-mouthed, inappropriately-shouting-things advertising dumbass. So nope, the tragedy will continue.

I leave for Cleveland tomorrow (April 2nd) and between now and then there’s a lot of gathering, collecting, planning and last-minute calls to be made. It’s going to be quite the event and I’ll be spending a lot of time and money between now and then on it. It’ll all be worth it, too.

To the people who, in late April or May, will hear this went on… sorry, man. Maybe next year.

To the people who just heard of it before it happened… drop everything. You have new plans.

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After spending many hours scanning at Steve Meretzky’s, house, I got a small amount of sleep and hopped a flight down to Washington, DC to drive over to Peter Hirschberg’s Luna City Arcade. I’ve gushed about this place quite a bit, and the family that is willing to open their home to complete strangers on a regular basis to enjoy a mortgage-swelling personal project that has inspired many.

The impetus for this particular event was a visit from an NPR reporter, and sadly, I didn’t get the chance to be there before the reporter left. I had many things in mind to tell that NPR reporter, things which I had hoped to get into the final story. I know how these things go, so the chances of this were not so great. So I guess I’ll just have to tell you in here.

What I wanted to stress was the style inherent in how Peter’ s gone about his creations; how his Vector Dreams emulator was an attempt to not just emulate the gameplay and program, but the actual behavior of a vector machine, the sounds that came with it beyond just the stuff on the circuit board, and the variations in the machine that would mean the difference between an echo for someone looking back and an intense memory. I wanted to tell the reporter how much this guy sank into this project, and to then turn around and not charge one thin dime for its use for people, how wonderful that is. A lot of people have private arcades or game rooms; Peter built a living shrine, a temple of video arcades, and invites the world to come by and pay respects. That’s special.

I played a number of games (Q*Bert and I like each other) and twirled some knobs, but I mostly like walking around soaking up the ambiance of the place while dozens of people are milling around. It feels so right, in there. (The windows are all blacked over, giving the impression of a late summer night and trying to get those last few games in before you have to go back home.) A choice phrase I overheard, multiple times, was “Wow, this is so much better than the emulator.” The emulator brings the core functionality of the arcade game into a realm of ease and accessibility that is hard to overcome, but it has to do so at a great sacrifice of environment. Even a custom cabinet running an emulator has a lot of potential to miss both the intensity of a dedicated game (especially with custom controls), and the better-than-the-sum feeling from standing near a row of such games. Obviously it’s not realistic for every person who desires the feel for the old arcades to have one in their homes, which makes a place like this that much more special.

After taking a few shots of the place, I went upstairs where he had snacks and chairs, and hung around talking with folks. Peter and I made the acquaintance of a set of people stopping by to congratulate the Hirschbergs on having such an incredible place. This is the payment they choose to get over turning this into a profit-garnering concern; you play all the games for free, games that in some cases predate the people playing them, and then you stop by the thank them for the opportunity. A lot of people did just that.

It was an excellent trip.

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Saturday put me in Steve Meretzky’s basement. There are worse places to be than Steve Meretzky’s basement.

As part of the GET LAMP project, I’ve been collecting artifacts and images throughout the commercial heydays of text adventures, and nobody got bigger than Infocom in the early 1980s. And Steve was one of the big designers at Infocom, creating or co-creating some of the most lasting games in the genre: Planetfall, Sorcerer, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Stationfall… and then went on after Infocom to make many other classics as well. He is a towering figure in the games industry, recognized as one of the greats, among other designers who have produced one-tenth his output.

But beyond his place in the history of text adventures, he’s also acutely aware of the history of text adventures, and the process, and the trends of a gaming industry. Unlike a lot (and I do mean the vast majority) of commercial text adventure authors, he’s still in the game-making business; a lot moved into other programming jobs, or contract work, or basically stepping upwards into management of other programmers. (A few walked away from computers as a livelihood, too.)

But even beyond that, beyond the fact that he was this great designer and also associated with this great company and has been a willing participant in recounting the history of this genre, is the fact that he’s been a tireless archivist of all the history he’s walked through or been a part of.

This can’t be trumpeted enough: Steve saved everything.

He’s let me go through a lot of what he saved, to scan parts of it for use in my movie. And there was a lot to go through.

He followed one of the core tenets of archiving: save everything you can, because you never know what will end up being the most important items in the regard of history. He saved memos, handwritten notes, ad copy, correspondence with printers and PR folk. He saved invitations to parties, softball game announcements, photos and sketches.

This is also critical: it’s sorted. He didn’t sort it to the level of fanaticism that would require someone to only keep a subset of stuff, but he has it in arrangements that made my life a lot easier: memos by years, folders for sales, folders for drawings, and game design binders. Did I mention the game design binders? Every scrap of paper related to the design of his games, thousands of pages of revision, discussion, improvements, dead ends and so on.

He also had a really nice copy of Cornerstone, the ultimately-failed Infocom business product:

I can’t imagine there are that many pristine copies of this product left; that one of them would be in the collection of someone whose company partially failed because of this product shows his stellar attitude to saving the artifacts.

I wish more people who worked in firms of great fame or whose company has or had great influence in the minds of the world would be like this. While for many it might not be informative to browse over the castoffs of a commercial enterprise, for others it’s a perfect insight into what came before. Infocom had to pioneer many now-common ideas in marketing, production and programming approach; the academics that started the company threw a lot of very interesting incubated ideas into the mix and I personally believe that’s what led to its initial success. Beyond that, though, you can’t discount the work of their creative teams to turn very good game ideas into must-have classics.

I must state clearly that not every step of Infocom was a sure-footed midas touch, and not every choice made came back a hundred-fold in riches. Contained in these documents are silly demands, poorly-considered options, badly-handled maneuvers, and the failings of people all too human.

These are not items saved to trot out at every gathering of folks to self-aggrandize. They aren’t trumpeted in every piece of post-1990 correspondence to win arguments by fiat. This is a collection of influential writings and behind the scenes artifacts that a serious student of games and self-proposed archive of gaming materials would have to acknowledge as a world-class library. We are all very lucky that Steve had the forward-thinking approach to his work to keep such a tight record of the last few decades of his productive life. We will all be better for it.

How lucky I was to have contact with Steve Meretzky. How lucky we all are!

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It almost sounds like a joke, doesn’t it. DVDs for the blind. What are the blind watching DVDs for. There’s nothing to watch, really. Go listen to an audiobook or something, blind people.

Well, you might be surprised to hear that the blind do buy DVDs, and play them, and enjoy the movies. Not all of them, but not everybody watches DVDs at all, so this isn’t surprising. In another useful bit of evidence on the side of the anti Digital Rights Management crowd, the blind often end up having to rip the DVDs and extract the various titles/parts out of the DVD so they can play stuff without being hung up on menus and special features and easter eggs and the rest. They turn a DVD into a series of audio tracks in a playlist and go through those, basically.

A number of the interviewees of GET LAMP are blind. Just like the BBS Documentary put me in the homes of midwesterners for the first time, so has GET LAMP caused me to spend time with blind people for extended periods, in real conversation. One thing I learned was that blind is relative; a number of my blind interviewees can see, just not very well at all; one was born with no lenses on her eye. One is aware of some aspect of light, but it’s absolutely an abstract hue. And so on.

Another thing I learned (or re-learned) is how flexible the human mind is; it will try to place items even though one might think it wouldn’t have any context. “Flame” means one thing, “mountain range” another, and interviewees mentioned how much text adventures expanded their knowledge of the world because you could “walk” among places with no guidance and all the salient features explained to you, right there. One mentioned how he didn’t understand how big an ocean liner was until he played a game that took place on one, and so on. Another was very sad for sighted people because of all the years we’ve watched television at 720×540 resolution. That’s so sad! His resolution is infinite.

As I interviewed someone who was deaf for my previous film and resolved then and there they should enjoy it like everyone else, so too does the interviewing of several blind subjects mean that I want them to enjoy the DVD as well. Hence, a blind-accessible DVD.

As opposed to my militancy regarding subtitles, I realize that I’m much further out on the edge with wanting to make a DVD blind or visually-impaired accessible. There’s just not a metric ton of these things.

I found a DVD that claims to be the first blind accessible DVD, with menus and the rest. That’s true, as long as you know what submenu to magically navigate to to turn it on. As my friend Andy loves to say, FAIL.

What is likely to happen with my DVDs is that when you put them in, it acts like any other DVD, but the first selection is an introduction to the disc, which says, out loud, what to hit to start audio menus. From there, we can have a bunch of other features, but then both “types” (blind and not blind) are happy. I hope. It’s the wheelchair ramp problem; functionality vs. aesthetics. I’ve seen it done right and wrong.

This means the episodes or films on this set will have descriptive video. Experiments are underway for that. It also means that everything gets descriptive video. This delays the project, or more accurately, the project takes the right amount of time to do this properly.

If you’re feeling cynical, you can also tell me how brilliant I am to market to the blind; the blind, after all, often were big customers of text adventures because these were games that were basically complete and total when read to you. You could play them in audio and get the same experience as others. And they were easy to hack into screen readers, since they always wrote to text rendering instead of doing graphics or whatever else your system used. So these were very popular so hooray, more potential customers. If it’s not obvious, this isn’t my main motivating factor, otherwise I’d “spice up” the whole movie with stuff that might, somewhere, appeal to a general audience even if it didn’t have anything to do with text adventures. Where does that crap end, anyway.

As I work this point, it also means I look at my editing in a different way; when you know your work has to be portrayed as much as it’s shown, you really want to smooth the thing out to the best quality. If I’m going to spend an extra week recording descriptive video, then it should be something worth describing.

We live in this great modern age, where machines can do an awful lot for everyone to enjoy content like never before. I hope this DVD set will be a favorite for blind viewers for a long time to come.

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I’ll give you what I’m doing, what I have, what I want.

I’d like to add a level of Invisiclues to the packaging for one of the versions of GET LAMP. Let me explain what invisiclues are in this context. They’re a method of printing in “invisible ink”, such that you can’t see the printing on paper until you take a marker, which has a different chemical on it, and rub it on the paper, causing the printing to turn opaque. It’s very neat to watch. It appeals heavily to children.

The massive giant in this field/approach currently is Lee Publications, who make a mass of products that utilize this invisible ink technology. I do not really see a way to hire them to make booklets and there’s no indication of if there’s some other printer they use to make this stuff (i.e. someone I could contract for a few thousand booklets).

Way back when, Mike Dornbrook and the folks of Infocom’s marketing department had to go around searching wildly until someone let them know they wanted “Latent Image” printing. Then it apparently fell into place. A citation because citations are awesome:

He was getting quite bored explaining what to do about the Thief, and giving the answer to the riddle. He wanted to do hint booklets if only he could find a way which would be easy to use without spoiling any part of the games for anyone. After months of searching for a solution, he came across an invisible printing process and InvisiClues were born.

An additional one:

At a party, a friend suggested using invisible ink, which could be made visible by running a special developing pen over the hidden answers. Mike loved the idea and immediately tried to get started on it – only to find a major obstacle in his path: Where to find a company to produce the books? It turned out there are only two manufacturers in the U.S. capable of printing up “latent image process” books, a fact Mike discovered after exercising the same sort of perseverance that helps him solve adventure games. Luckily, one of the printers was nearby.

This is less an easy process in the modern era because a lot of things call themselves latent image printing.

Good luck with the term “invisible ink”, too: I find way too many places sell ink pens that work under blacklight, like this one. Cool, but not what I want.

I am sure it will be a process of finding “the printer” who almost never deals with end-user customers, who has this buried in their catalog, which almost nobody uses but which I will produce a sizeable order for.

If you find this, you will get a credit in the movie.

Go.

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I had the pleasure of attending the ANSI Gallery showing this past January, and I also had the chance to purchase one of the items being shown; one of the small handful of ANSI display boxes against the wall.

Today, the box with the ANSI displayer arrived.

No complaints here! I’m glad to be the owner of one of these little pieces of history.

These are customized boxes with circuits designed to show off a specific ANSI artwork, scrolling it slowly on a VGA-connected monitor. They were all hand-assembled, of course, polished, and cobbled together in time for the very successful gallery opening, which then lasted about a month. It was heavily, heavily attended.

I believe this is the first time I ever bought something hanging on the wall of an art gallery, with the little red pin next to the price and everything. I paid $200, in case you are of the vulgar sort.

Into the archives!

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Trixter, that master of the truly old school IBM PC programming, has done it again. Already world-famous for his 8088 Corruption demo that put a type of full-motion video on an original IBM PC, has begun work on a music program. Big deal, your jaded mouth forms, but hear me out. He has made a music program that works with an IBM PC speaker.

The program is called MONOTONE, and after months of working, Trixter has finally come out with an alpha capable of both allowing input of music and playing it on the simple little barely-the-size-of-a-quarter PC internal speaker. Here’s his weblog entry on this marvel.

He’s begun making video entries about his work, so feel free to skip right here to his impressive demonstration of his little project:

In case you don’t have the time to listen to his presentation, be assured; he has written a music program for some of the most obscure objects sold to generate sound in the last 20 years. The Bank Street Music Card, for example, may not actually exist in anywhere but dreams at this point. The whole work is object-oriented, meaning he can add and remove modules within it as needed. He has set it up, in other words, to be an utterly flexible, utterly expandable work, while working on some of the simplest hardware from the dawn of the personal computer era. To prove his work, he shows a winning work from Blockparty last year and renders it on his program. And you can hear it.

MONOTONE is going to be amazing. How lucky we are to have people like Trixter working so hard to give old machinery new life.

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