How one hack for playing a TRON lightcycle game went on an Apple IIgs

Folks, I was there in those ancient days of computing yore, and reading pixels off the screen for collision detection was exactly how I did games, too. I even still have code that does that lying around somewhere for some silly screensaver modules I wrote. Anyway:

"The algorithm to determine which pixel to check next used some fast assembler math to calculate a memory address – either one pixel above, below, to the left, or to the right of the current pixel.  But since any given pixel on the screen was really just a memory address, the algorithm simply calculated a new memory location to read.  So when the light cycle left the screen, the game happily calculated the next location in system memory to check for a wall crash.  This meant that the cycle was now cruising through system RAM, wantonly turning on bits and “crashing” into memory.

Writing to random locations in system memory isn't generally a wise design practice. Unsurprisingly, the game would generate spectacular crashes as a result.  A human player would be driving blind and usually crash right away, limiting the scope of system casualties.  The AI opponents had no such weakness.  The computer would scan immediately in front, to the left, and to the right of its position to determine if it was about to hit a wall and change directions accordingly.  So as far as the computer was concerned, system memory looked no different than screen memory."

Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs

You young'uns might recognize this game better as 'Snake' as played on your phone.

If this used to be TV, what happened?

Public Access TV in the 1980s - they were desperate for content! "It's the law." - Anybody could air their videotape and everybody did. For being such a wholesome enterprise, they sure pushed the sex, sex, sex. And drugs. And sex. And ventriloquist acts. And wacky costumes. And unbelievably untalented schmoos. But mostly lots and lots of sex. Basically if 4chan got to run TV, this is what it would look like.

We don't even have this much liberty on the Internet now - what happened?

Building Ms. Pac-Man machines - fascinating factory footage

Just puts 1982 in perspective, doesn't it? I almost can't see a Ms. Pac-Man game without smelling pizza because I saw them in Pizza Hut restaurants so much.

Also, keep your ears sharp for a Bosconian machine playing in the background. Yes, they had to test the games post-assembly, so at least some of them could say "My job is to play video games." Although they look bored as mud doing it, because let's face it, it's still a job.

Incidentally, Ms. Pac-Man was never conceived in the halls of Midway Games. Instead, rogue hobbyist programmers created mod kits - exactly like the indie gaming mod community today - and sold conversion kits for existing arcade games. When they made such a kit for Atari's Missile Command cabinet, Atari sued, but dropped the suit in exchange for an agreement from the makers - General Computer Corp in this case - to not make any more mod kits to sell to the public, but to come work for them instead. Ms. Pac-Man started out as a mod kit for Pac-Man called "Crazy Otto", which they sold to Midway, whom turned around and sold it as Ms. Pac-Man.

And now you know.

An awesome archive of vintage educational comics

A special media-geek treat just in time for Christmas: Head on over to the Educational Comics archive at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The archive is chock-full of charming, fun titles such as "Crack Busters" (an anti-drugs comic that is like Reefer Madness but in comic-book form for crack), "Mickey Mouse and Goofy Explore Energy", "Stop and Go, the Safety Twins", and "The Amazing Spiderman vs. the Prodigy" (a Very Special Episode of Spider-Man presented by 'Planet Parenthood', about sex education).

Credit to WFMU for tweeting the link.

Every issue I've looked at so far is an entertaining read combining the best rasas of corny, kitchy, informative, naive, hilarious, and progressive. It's tough to pick just one issue to show, so below I have a random one to share.

BTW, I did this using ImageMagick; a simple convert command (convert $FILE.pdf $FILE.png) does the trick.

And now, sit back and enjoy one underdog classic, "Dracons Visit Earth To Study Food and the Land", (which is mis-titled as "Dragons". They're Dracons, from planet Draco).

Just from the title page, you know I had to go for this awesomeness from 1984 first. Especially since it was produced in my home state.

We meet our principles, Generic White Geek and a guy who dresses like young Bill Cosby on his way to an interview. I can understand the typical trope of having aliens speak Earthling English for reading convenience (including labeling the hull of your spaceship with your mission's purpose in a font taller than you are), but having an alien who makes English puns on his own name is just an extra helping of cheese on top of that.

Well, Cosbyman and Plucky Sidekick waste no time recycling a Star Trek trope (only it's the Dollar General store version of a transporter, using flashlights and hope) to beam down in front of a restaurant which the proprietors have sensibly named "Good Food Restaurant". Wait, it gets better!

"Well, I'm kinda busy taking orders here, in case you can't see that, so I'll push you off on my Hispanic flunky." Meanwhile, Scoop has shape-shifted into a cat, to blend in. But he (she? Can you ever tell with shape-shifters?) still carries his telltale medallion communicator, because that's a lot less obvious than just walking around as a white college student.

Scoop's plan backfires on him just two panels later. Why does a shapeshifting alien need to be afraid of a dog? Anyway, we get on with our educational exposition, with our adorable Flintstone family just stone cold chowin' down on some bugs. What a relief agriculture was!

Maria cheerfully explains the elementary concept of bread to our alien investigator, completely nonplussed that he wouldn't know this. Meanwhile, Scoop, who has so far proved himself utterly useless on this mission, rejoins us on his Community College Sophomore setting.

Yeah, this was 1984 (remember "We Are The World"?), when Americans went through a naive period where they didn't take into account the role that African politics plays in African famine. They just tried to cure world hunger by raising awareness, so that third world people could sit down to bowls of steaming awareness every morning.

Maria takes that Libertarian hard-line stance: "Poor people are poor because they just won't work, the lazy bums!" Scoop doubles his uselessness by peppering the dialog with tangent questions just when it was getting interesting.

Anthropomorphic veggies! Will the wonder never cease? Memo to Scoop: That's the third pun on your name, IT IS TIME TO STOP. No sooner do the dynamic duo flashlight over to the farm - because fuck walking - than Scoop mysteriously bows out again, possibly to morph into a skunk so he can get run over.

"Ed Itor"??? Forget fact-gathering missions, these aliens need their own sitcom. Meanwhile, Scoop, during corn harvest time, decides that this is the perfect time to morph into an ear of corn so he can talk to the other corn and find out... something. Because I guess corn talks. Never, in any scenario of substance abuse, have I ever had a hallucination this bizarre.

Alright, show of hands, who do we elect as the obvious Gilligan of this mission? That's right, Scoop, who has managed to get himself into trouble again with his shape-shifting shenanigans. Meanwhile farm-dude continues the pro-Capitalist theme by practically cackling over all the money, money, MONEY he's going to make off his corn.

Oh, God, my sides! We get a glorious chain of production as Scoop volunteers himself to become food, and part of him even gets the honor of passing through an animal's digestive tract. I sure hope there's a scene coming up where Scoops gets deposited as cow shit before he just pops up and walks away in his human form, firing off yet another groaner like "I'd better get up before somebody pooper-scoooops me, hyuk hyuk hyuk!"

We finally get the explanation for that huge jagged line across Farmer Jim's crop. And what the heck, this is informative content after all, and a mercifully Scoop-free page.

Jim and Ellen need to get back to the office, so he can show her his windbreak, if you know what I mean. And Scoop is back in the truck as yelling corn, just when we were about to forget about him. Mod Squad  deliberates but decides to take Scoop with him back into space, saving all Earth life from being doomed to recycle Scoop through our digestive tracks forever.

Ye Gods, Scoop has a superiority complex! For being a bumbling shnook who mostly got in the way when he didn't need to be saved, he expects the Dracontis Prize??? Say it for us Chief: "No, I did all the work and carried the whole story, Scoop! Me, not you! I should get the Dracontis Prize, and then I should return you to Earth to fulfill your destiny of being poop!"

And that's our story, as our hero and his Load swoop away in their marvelous Captain-Planet-like spacecraft for further educational exploration. Which, come to think of it, you never really saw Star Trek do this sort of thing, did you? I mean for the Enterprise to have "explore strange new worlds" as part of its mission statement, you never saw Kirk go interview the natives about how they lived as much as he tried to either fight them, meddle in their affairs, or slip his tubesnake into the sexiest one.

Now, wasn't that a treat? Go to that link, there's tons more where this came from!

Radioactive Christmas trees

For this festive holiday season which we just kicked off today, we celebrate a time when radioactive Christmas trees were an actual headline - another side effect of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine. This story from 2002...

"Officials seized the fir trees at local markets in the southern town of Rovno, where they were being sold for the upcoming Orthodox Christmas, Itar-Tass agency reported.

"The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl was the world's worst
After the region was covered by a radioactive cloud, a complete ban on the felling of trees in the contaminated forests surrounding Chernobyl was imposed.

"Police said the local businessmen knew the trees from the Zhytomyr region were contaminated, and used forged documents to sell them. "

The fallout from Chernobyl was felt in many ways that were unexpected. The incident and area today provide an outstanding living experiment in just what happens to the environment after a nuclear meltdown. But along with this has come a tragic toll of death and weird tragedy - (warning, that page contains an image of a mutated puppy).

The eventual fate of Rainbow Man of John 3:16 fame

Remember him?

Rollen Stewart, better known as "Rainbow Man", made a flaky career out of appearing at sporting events with a rainbow clown wig, holding up signs with Bible quotes and generally making a pest of himself by mugging for the camera every time it passed his way. In the '70s and '80s he got quite famous, even up to getting his own Budweiser beer commercial (for a guy doing Bible quotes?) and Christopher Walken playing him in a sketch on Saturday Night Live.

But people bitten by sudden nostalgia for the lovable loony will be disappointed in his later adventures. Stewart showed increasingly unstable behavior, having been married four times and committed at least one reported act of domestic violence. But then, as told by The Straight Dope:

"He set off a string of bombs in a church, a Christian bookstore, a newspaper office, and several other locations. Meanwhile he sent out apocalyptic letters that included a hit list of preachers, signing the letters 'the Antichrist.'"

" On September 22, 1992, believing the Rapture was only six days away and having prepared himself by watching TV for 18 hours a day, Stewart began his last "presentation." Posing as a contractor, he picked up two day laborers in downtown LA, then drove to an airport hotel. Taking the men up to a room, he unexpectedly walked in on a chambermaid. In the confusion that followed he drew a gun, the two men escaped, and the maid locked herself in the bathroom. The police surrounded the joint, and Rollen demanded a three-hour press conference, hoping to make his last national splash. He didn't get it. After a nine-hour siege the cops threw in a concussion grenade, kicked down the door, and dragged him away."

The upshot of that is he is currently serving three consecutive life sentences. He was also the subject of a 1997 documentary Rainbow Man, directed by Sam Greene. A clip:

...and there goes another tragic monkey devoured by the media.

Blit, a Bell Labs computer with GUI capabilities from 1982

Fantastically nostalgic early precursor to our modern technical gadgets, even having voice simulation. Astounding how far we've come, and yet how well they envisioned the future!

More about Blit here.

Apocalypse Miau

The Internet keeps taking cat-worship to new heights... Along with extra-extra-cheesy '80s retro kitsch. Where will it all end?

Mr. T's singing career

Mr. T was basically the Mayor of the Eighties. And yet Michael Jackson out-charted him. Imagine that!