Robin Harbron

Back to wrapping up my geek trip stories… One of my goals for the trip was to buy a couple Hummer Off-Road Racing Challenge plug and play games since I was involved in the development of it. I wanted one to play around with, and the other to keep in the box – a useful prop for future job interviews, and also handy to throw at no-longer-potential-employers who claim I can’t program. I was too cheap to buy them at full price and have them shipped (since they’re only available at Radio Shacks in the USA) but now they’re on clearance, and starting to get scarce, it was time to get a couple.

We spotted a Radio Shack while searching for lunch near the resort, and dropped in. As I took the last one from the shelf, Jason mentioned that I was one of the game’s programmers to the staff helping us. One of the employees was quite kind with comments like “Oh, that’s really cool, congratulations!” etc. while the other one stuck 100% to her script, informing me that this toy required 4 AA batteries, and that batteries were on sale, and would I be buying batteries because I wouldn’t be able to use this without, etc. “Uh, yeah, I know, and no thanks, I don’t need batteries,” was my fairly restrained reply (attempting to hold in the giggles).

Later, during the drive back to Thunder Bay, I found one more Hummer at the Radio Shack at Miller Hill Mall in Duluth, MN. The employees there were too busy talking to other customers in person and on the phone for me to talk about how famous I was. Probably a good thing.

Finally, I have to mention how much I enjoyed hanging out at the AtariAge booth at the MGC again. This was one of the highlights of the 2004 show for me, and again this year. I spent a lot of time talking to Al who runs the AtariAge website and store, which does a lot to promote newly developed games for the Atari 2600 and other classic consoles. I still want to get a 2600 game finished some day. Al is a really friendly guy, and quite interesting – he’s worked in the video game industry before, so we swapped some stories. I’m glad he made the effort to drive all the way up from Texas.

As I mentioned in my first post of 2006, over the Christmas holidays MEF brought me a bunch of computers that had belonged to her dad. I’ve had time to pay attention to my older computers again lately, and having finished going through all my C-64s, today I started checking out the Tandy (Radio Shack) Colour Computers that live at my house, starting with the one from MEF.

Commodore and Apple mostly dominated the 8-bit computer market in North America, though Atari and Tandy distantly stayed in the race through most of the 1980’s. A very interesting history of the CoCo series of computers can be found here. Although Commodore and then Atari hardware interests me the most, I like all 8-bit stuff.

So, I hooked up the CoCo1, and it powered up fine, but the keyboard wasn’t working well – several keys didn’t work at all, others repeated several times with one keypress, etc. One close-up look at the keyboard gives a pretty good clue as to the cause of the problems – it was pretty grungy.

I briefly felt motivated, so before I could stop myself, I took the computer apart. You can see in this picture the three layers the keyboard seperates into. The bottom layer actually has 3 layers itself – the keyboard tray that the keys stick through, the keys themselves, and the rubber cups that are used as springs to push the keys back up when you push them down. The middle layer has two layers as well – another plastic tray, and sitting loose in recesses in the tray, copper conductors that get squished down when the key is pressed. The top layer is the circuit board – it’s upside down in the picture, but on the other side are the traces that the copper pieces sit on top of.

I used contact cleaner on the circuit board and on the copper conductors, and the keyboard keys and rubber bits I washed by hand with a bit of dish soap, scrubbing them one by one. I let everything dry out thoroughly, then reassembled the keyboard (yes, this was quite tedious).

I put the whole computer back together, and the keyboard now works perfectly, as if it was brand new. It also looks really good, except for some yellowing that nothing can be done about. Unfortunately, I made a bit of a mistake putting the keyboard back together which you might notice in this picture. 21 screws later I had it apart and back together again, 100% right this time.

On Saturday, Jason, Kati and I climbed in the Dragon Wagon (the nickname for their 3rd car, an older Subaru station wagon purchased for $800 so Jason could learn to drive stick-shift – it’s been remarkably reliable) and drove about an hour to Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, where the MGC was being held at the Olympia Resort.

The location and event itself was much better than the last show in 2004 (which I blogged about here and here) mostly because all the stuff was concentrated in two large rooms this time, rather than spread throughout many small rooms all over a hotel.

A video tour of the main room can be viewed here, and there are many pictures to check out here. The main room consisted of many vendors set up selling classic video game related stuff, and also several dozen pinball and arcade games. All the arcade and pinball machines were there to be sold, but were set to free play while prospective purchasers tried them out. We played a lot, especially pinball, because that’s something that emulation just can’t properly replace.

I made several purchases. The Mattel Aquarius and original Atari 400 computer (with a membrane keyboard) were the coolest – both being computers I’ve known about for 20+ years and never had the chance to own before – I’ll probably blog about those seperately later. I also found a bunch of video game related stuffed animals, and bought one for each of my four oldest kids – Yoshi, Toad, Princess Toadstool (aka Peach) and the main monkey from Super Monkey Ball. The kids know these characters from their GameCube games.

The MGC had a number of guest speakers, and I sat in on a couple sessions. Ellen Lurie is an (the?) Audio Lead at Raven Software, a Madison based game development company. She discussed how she got into the industry, and described what she does at work, all with the slant of how those interested could get into the industry. It was weird, just a year or two ago I would have been thinking “boy, I wish I could work on a game” but instead I was feeling like a bit of a veteran. After her talk, people were asking her questions about how to get into the industry, and some of them had a programming angle that wasn’t her area of expertise. With some encouragement from Jason, I answered a couple of the questions, sharing my wisdom with all.

I also listened to Benjamin Heckendorn (aka “Ben Heck”) who is pretty famous for his console hacking – he makes portable versions of full-size video game systems. Pretty neat – his presentation was fun as he’s got a bit of that “mad scientist” thing going. Apparently he wrote a book on the subject recently too, so I’ll have to check that out.

More next time…

I got back last night from my first geek trip of the year. My dad allowed me to borrow his car which was great, because I did the whole trip for only about $100 in gas, compared to the (estimated) $250 my truck would have eaten. I can no longer take our fairly fuel-efficient minivan on these trips, since that would leave the other 7 people at home (including my mom-in-law) with only the truck as a vehicle, and it can only seat 6.

Friday I drove to Middleton, Wisconsin, to stay at the home of my friends Jason and Kati. Along the way I killed dozens of butterflies in Minnesota, and checked out the nearly dead Mariner Mall in Superior, Wisconsin. In my childhood, this mall was almost as good as Miller Hill Mall in Duluth, since it had a great arcade, and a Kay-Bee Toys & Hobbies store. Now, including store employees, I believe I counted a total of eight people while I walked the length of the mall. Even the dollar store that had provided some amusement the last few years had closed (last year, I got two Sixpence and None The Richer CDs for $1 each there).

I really like staying at Jason and Katie’s place. I get my own room there, and we always order some tasty food in – this time we got some Chicago style deep-dish pizza. It had a 1/4″ mozzerella cheese layer, with huge beef chunks and chunky tomatos on top… it just doesn’t get much better than that. Jason gave me a cool tour of his independent role-playing (you know, kind of like Dungeons and Dragons) computer game he’s making. He’s shooting for high quality, so he’s contracting people to do the art, some of the writing, the music, etc. Really neat.

Saturday we went to the geek show, and I’ll blog about that next time.

More frequent blogging should resume a-pretty soon. My game project is in the final stages of playtesting, and will be sent to the big N today or tomorrow. If they don’t find any faults, off it goes to be manufactured!

In the meantime, I think I have a few loose ends from my music series I was doing some months ago that’ll make easy blog fodder.

Besides our one official album “New Material Only”, many other recordings exist of North and the Sea material. Here’s one that most folks won’t have heard before.

Listen to Freeform Jazz Odyssey.

A couple weeks ago I heard a weird rustling sound coming from the furnace room which joins on to my geek room. I crept in (feeling a bit extra anxious/wired because I had pulled another all-nighter to meet a deadline on the game I’m working on) and found that the sound was coming from behind a bunch of boxes on a shelf that Carla stores craft supplies on. I thought maybe it was a mouse or something, but it didn’t seem quite right.

I pulled the box back, and found that the sound was wings fluttering against the boxes in the cramped space! It was pretty frightening for a moment, for sure. I had to take a few pictures, and then opened the outside door in that room, got some gloves and safety glasses on (yeah, I do things like that) and then pulled the box right out… the bird flew out into the room, I ducked down, and thankfully it went out the open outside door, rather than flying into my geek room and making a mess of things.

I haven’t entirely figured out how the bird got in the house in the first place. There does seem to be a small gap in the wall where that pipe comes into the house, but it seems too small for a bird to get through – I mean, it couldn’t even move around behind the box, how did it pull itself through a little gap? I can see a mouse doing something like that, but not a bird, weird.

In other news, my game project has officially reached Beta stage, and we’ve been told the publisher is going to be showing the game off at E3 which is *the* event for the video game industry. Pretty cool!

Long, long ago, I had a can or two of Pineapple Crush at Darren’s house. His dad worked for the local Pepsi distributor and they handled the various Crush varieties at the time. Pineapple Crush is a real oddity in most of North America, and I don’t know how a case ended up in Thunder Bay back then.

Darren didn’t think much of this pop, though I liked it enough to still remember it nearly 20 years later. Occasionally I’d mention Pineapple Crush in relevant conversations (you know, the same conversations that usually mention Count Chocula and Pac-Man cereal), but folks would never know about it. Sometimes they’d even doubt it’s existence!

Then I found a Pineapple Crush believer in Tony – he remembered the stuff from way back when too – and then he even found the stuff in Thunder Bay! A local seafood shop imports it from the east coast, which is apparently the one place it’s made. Transplanted east coasters craving it are willing to pay the extra money it costs to truck it in.

It’s like liquid gold, but I bought a case to celebrate the achievement of a major milestone (and paycheque) in my latest programming venture. Mmmmmm.

Happy Birthday Peter: 5 years old today. For Peter’s 4th birthday we made the Super Mario Cake pictured here. Carla did the majority of the work of course, but for a change I actually did a fair share.

We had no idea that this would be such a popular picture. Unbenownst to me, but benownst to Nintendo, they were going to announce that 2005 was Mario’s 20th birthday. Of course, it’s not completely true – Mario goes back to Donkey Kong from 1981 and perhaps even earlier – but I guess they were celebrating the 20th birthday of the Super Mario Bros. game from 1985.

So when various forum-ites all around the Internet posted about Mario’s birthday, they did google searches for mario+birthday+cake etc. and ended up with this very picture, and then instead of copying the picture, they’d just link back to the original hosted on the good ol’ psw.ca server.

As of today, mario_cake_small.jpg has been downloaded 69,649 times. To compare, the next most popular images on my site are the psw.ca splash image, and Darren’s Live Drive blinking Bearded Fish, which have about 1,300 downloads each.

And because I know one of you will ask, here’s the least popular image on psw.ca.

Note: This is a slightly revised version of what I posted on lemon64.com – cheap, I know…

Well, I had my last class (4 classes in total) yesterday. We had a bunch of fun modifying the simple “Row Your Boat Ashore” song program from the C64 User’s Guide, making all kinds of noise. Then I gave a brief (5, maybe 10 minute?) lesson on binary numbers and I kid you not, half the kids totally had it figured out in that time. Then we used that knowledge and played with the classic C= Hot Air Balloon sprite program also from the User’s Guide.

3 of the families took a C64 home on loan. One 11-year-old in particular is really into this – he had taken a User’s Guide home last week and apparently read it all week long. He had half of it memorized, and showed up early for class so he could type in a short program he had seen in there… now that’s a kid I can relate to.

Anyway, it was more of a success than I had hoped for. They learned a bit of computer history, some computer architecture, some programming, and seemed to have a lot of fun doing it. All 8 kids showed up for every class, and I got a really nice thank you note and gift card from the parents.

I might continue on in June, maybe make it a “computer camp” and squeeze it all into one week?

I’ve been thinking about doing this for years, and I’ve finally done it. I set up a small lab of Commodore 64s (4 of them), got a bunch of kids from our homeschool group to sign up (8 of them, ages 8-12 or so), and have been teaching them how to program in BASIC for the last two Tuesday afternoons.

It’s gone better than I had hoped. They seem to be having fun the whole time, and are grasping many of the concepts really well.

The first week we played around with the C64’s screen editor (changing colours, drawing things on the screen just by cursoring around and using the built-in graphics), then immediate mode commands like PRINT. Then we started using PRINT in a program, integer variables, then FOR/NEXT loops, INPUT and string variables, and PRINTing the INPUT back out.

All that in just 1.5 hours, and we had time to play some Splatform at the end (which the kids really got into – a big cheer went out when one of them finished the first level).

The next Tuesday we played around with POKEing first to change the screen colours, then to screen memory, showing them how screen memory is laid out. We then explored IF/THEN by again INPUTing strings, and then printing different things depending on what the string was equal to. There’s always fun to be had by using goofy words. Finally, we got a * moving left and right on screen under keyboard control, which the kids thought was really neat. Some figured out how to get it moving up and down to, by adding 40 (the screen width) at a time. Then we played my much maligned minigame called “Marz” – and they liked it too!