Comments on: Once Upon Atari

By: landon

landon — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:28:45 +0000

@Anon: Yes, that Doug Crockford.

By: Anon

Anon — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:06:55 +0000

Doug Crockford? As in Yahoo’s Doug Crockford – http://www.crockford.com/ ?

By: Oisín

Oisín — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 21:24:21 +0000

Wall-walking? I did a quick google for this intriguing-sounding trick but found nothing. Care to elaborate?!

By: ShaneG

ShaneG — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 08:06:10 +0000

A quick question (the contact page for Once Upon Atari is blank and the remaining pages aren’t clear on the issue) – is the DVD region locked or not? I would love to see this documentary (and show it to a few of my younger co-workers) but being in AU I don’t want to order something and find it only works on DVD Zone 1 players.

By: Adrock

Adrock — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:46:44 +0000

128 bytes of RAM…The people capable of doing this were not your average Joe Programmers.

No doubt, us youngsters are so spoiled. I get to pass around 64-bit integers with no penalty. I don’t know how you guys did it. There’s still plenty of stress in the environment though, but the tools at our disposal are so enormous and unless you’re working in embedded or real-time environments, worrying about memory and/or disk space isn’t that large of a concern. I have no doubt its leading to bloated programs and lazy programmers (myself included.) Come to think of it, having limitations is probably a good thing.

By: landon

landon — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:47:08 +0000

@Dougie

Yes, the landfills were real. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_video_game_burial

[Yeah, Wikipedia, but I remember seeing news footage of kids with cartridges].

By: peterb

peterb — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:33:26 +0000

You might want to pass on to Howard that there are at least some of us out here that would like to see his documentary, but don’t particularly want to buy a DVD. It would be awesome if he’d make it available for digital download (and to be perfectly clear here: I’m more than willing to _pay the same price_. I just don’t want the disk.)

By: Dougie

Dougie — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:26:51 +0000

You mention landfills, was that really the case? I saw an interview years ago where Jack Trameil denied it but have seen it mentioned elsewhere too and have always wondered if there are a load of ET carts buried somewhere…

By: landon

landon — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:29:09 +0000

@Adam:

http://www.onceuponatari.com/

My roommate worked in Chris Crawford’s group, and I knew some other people (Doug Crockford, Aric Wilmunder, etc.) who were there. I didn’t talk with Chris much, though [and didn't like his games much, either].

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:13:27 +0000

Sounds like a fascinating documentary, where can you get it?

Chris Crawford worked in the HCD at the time as well, if I recall, do you have any recollections of him?