A Christmas Tree in the Window

Back in the day, my dad bought a KoalaPad drawing tablet for our Atari 800. Perhaps that very December — in 1984 or 1985, he drew this scene of the front of our house at Christmas time, complete with a view of our Christmas tree through our living room window. So proud was he of his creation that he snapped a photo of it with a Polaroid camera, and that’s the print I am showing to you now.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Did you draw any Christmas art on your computer when you were a kid? Tell us about it.

Jingle disk, jingle disk, jingle all the way

Throughout the ages, fans of Christmas have found new and varied ways to express their love for the holiday. In the 1980s, personal computer users joined in the fun, using their machines to host a new breed of animated Christmas greetings that were distributed through magazines, BBSes, or even sold on disk like Thoughtware’s JingleDisk, seen here.

Upon inserting JingleDisk into your Commodore 64 or Apple II computer (It’s a double-sided disk with data for the different platforms on each side) and booting it up, the user is presented with a Christmas-themed animation set to various holiday musical standards. It’s fun to watch.

There is something about the warmth of the glow from a cathode ray tube screen that lends itself well to computerized Christmas celebrations — perhaps it echoes some primal link to prehistoric man sitting around the fire telling stories.

By the way, this JingleDisk came to me by way of a family friend who just turned 40 years old today. Happy Birthday, Chris!

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever programmed a Christmas-themed demo or sent a computerized Christmas card? Tell us about it.

After 94 years in business, it is likely that Radio Shack will soon be no more. And sadly, it has taken the impending death of Radio Shack for me to realize how absolutely ingrained its products have been in my life.

As the son of an electronics engineer living in the US, our home growing up held at least five Radio Shack products per room (or those of its related brands: Tandy, Realistic, Optimus, Archer, or Micronta).

I am not joking or exaggerating. I could go through my parents’ house today and fill a moving van with that stuff: speakers, tapes, radios, hi-fi receivers, turntables, headphones, microphones, clocks, intercoms, outlet timers, telephones, cables, wires, adapters and more.

It’s almost absurd. My first IBM compatible PC was a Tandy 1800HD laptop. My first cassette recorder, microphone, telephone, cordless telephone all came from Radio Shack. My first kiss…well, a Radio Shack robot, of course.

And who can forget the batteries. The batteries!

Above and beyond all that were the games, the toys, the amusements. The Armatrons and Cosmic Fire Away 1000s. Pocket Blackjack, electronic chess, Pocket Repeat, RC cars, tiny kid DJ stations, microphone FM transmitters, electronic coin banks, joysticks, talking alarm clocks (Dare I add the Tandy 1000 series and the TRS-80 Color Computer). The list is endless, I tell you.

In honor of the foundering electronics retailer, I pulled together a slightly massive collection of Radio Shack toy and game box art from the late 1960s up to the early 2000s. For good measure, I threw in a handful of non-toy product boxes as well (such as one for a Zack Morris-sized cell phone and a pocket TV set).

As you look through them below, I have but one question to ask:

How many of these have you owned or played?

[ Continue reading The Glorious, Colorful World of Radio Shack Toy and Game Box Art » ]

If I were riding a flying ostrich, I’d probably be smiling too.

I don’t normally take scans out of context, but I made an exception for this amazing illustration. It comes from the instruction manual for Joust for the Atari 2600. I isolated the image years ago for possible use in one of my Halloween costume ideas posts, and I’ve been staring at it in my scans folder ever since.

Joust is one of my favorite arcade titles, and I’m particularly fond of the Atari 7800 home version.

I’d like to find out who created this glorious piece of video game art. I’ll do some digging in a bit, but if you know already, please leave a comment and I’ll update this post. (The illustrator may be referenced in the manual itself, but it’s packed where I can’t get to it.)

By the way, I think this illustration would look awesome on a t-shirt. Anybody want to make one?

Discussion Topic of the Week: Which is better: Joust or Balloon Fight?

Since I missed last week’s column, I decided to fold some of those links into this week’s edition. So there may be a few older newsbits, but at least they’re still interesting.

Recent News

• 2300 Console Games Now Playable on Internet Archive

  ‘Ole pal Jason Scott writes about the sudden influx of games playable on the Internet Archive website

  For the last couple of weeks I’ve been working with a range of volunteers on a massive expansion of what we call the Console Living Room at the Internet Archive. Previously weighing in at about 800 game cartridges from seven console systems, the new collection is roughly 2300 cartridges and a total of 21 different consoles.

• George R. R. Martin Writes Using WordStar 4.0 in MS-DOS

  I’m not surprised. To avoid distractions, I sometimes write using Word 6.0 for DOS on a Compaq Aero 4/25 laptop.

  The ‘Game of Thrones’ author confessed to late-night talk-show host Conan O’Brien that he prefers to write his popular books on a DOS word processor instead of the latest laptop.

  ‘I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don’t want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key.’

• Nintendo Forces Takedown of GBA Emulator for iOS

  From the not-very-surprising department

  In order to play titles like Super Mario and Zelda on your iPhone, then, you have to look at unofficial alternatives. GBA4iOS was one of the most popular — but after its creators received a DMCA notice from Nintendo this week, it is no more.

• Analogue Interactive’s $499 NES Clone Up for Pre-Order

  TinyCartridge reports on this fancy console with a healthy grain of salt mixed in. (Memories of Generation NEX still make me shudder.)

  Analogue has opened pre-orders for its Nt, the Famicom/NES device with RGB output, four controller ports, and purported ‘unparallelled'” compatibility with American and Japanese games and accessories.

• New Book About How Sega Nearly Won the Console Wars

  Chris Kohler provides an overview of Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo and the Battle That Defined a Generation.

  If a few small things had changed, might we be gaming on a Sega PlayStation right now? That’s the picture Blake Harris paints in his new book Console Wars. It is a narrative history of the brief time period in the lifespan of the videogame publisher Sega when it was on top of the world.

• Midway Planned HD Remakes of Mortal Kombat Games

  I would have really loved to see this

  With the [ Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection], Midway’s initial plan was to release HD remakes of the original games with new actors, and even though that’s not what happened in the end, these images with Liu Kang, Sonya, Shao Kahn and the others show that the remakes would have been quite faithful to the original

Cool Links

• The Last Survivors of Meridian 59

  A rare examination of obscure Internet game culture from a mainstream publication (The New Yorker)

  Today, almost eighteen years after Meridian 59’s launch, Barloque’s streets are quiet and vacant, its cobblestones buffed and rounded by little more than a digital breeze. They are rarely visited by more than twenty people in the world at any one time.

• The Great Works of Software

  Paul Ford muses about a software canon

  Is it possible to propose a software canon? To enumerate great works of software that are deeply influential—that changed the nature of the code that followed?

• How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch

  Woz himself writes for Gizmodo, re: BASIC 50th anniversary

  The problem was that I had no knowledge of BASIC, just a bare memory that it had line numbers from that 3-day high-school experience. So I picked up a BASIC manual late one night at HP and started reading it and making notes about the commands of this language. Mind that I had never taken a course in compiler (or interpreter) writing in my life.

• How Sega is Rejuvinating its Classic Games in 3D

  I’m not sure if “rejuvenating” is the right word here, but I welcome Sega dipping into the past

  Few games have had as much attention lavished upon them as the Sega 3D Classics series. The first wave of titles was released between November and December of last year, in pairs over four successive weeks.

• Super Mario Bros. Level Belt (Etsy)

  Incredible artistry — an entire Super Mario Bros. level crafted into a leather belt

  The images are of a belt that I crafted for my brother, who is a big Super Mario fan, and depicts the last level of Super Mario brothers where Mario finally rescues the princess.

Submit News

If you want me to include something on a future Newsbits column, send me an email with “[Newsbits]” in the subject line.

Back in January, I wrote an article about the world’s earliest known figurative computer art for The Atlantic. It it is also likely the world’s first digital computer artwork as well.

(Check out this timeline of computer art history to get an idea where this piece fits in.)

The only known physical record of this circa 1956-58 pin-up diagnostic, which ran on SAGE computer systems, comes from a Polaroid photograph snapped by U.S. airman Lawrence A. Tipton in early 1959. Tipton retains the original print, although it will likely go to a museum soon (more on that when it happens).

The digital image of the photo used in my Atlantic article was provided by Tipton to a SAGE historian over a decade ago. It was previously the highest-quality version of the photo I had access to, and that posed a few problems. Someone (likely Tipton himself) had hastily retouched the image, removing various scratches, and it was not presented in a high enough resolution to examine in detail.

To remedy that, Tipton was kind enough to make a high resolution scan of the original print and mail it to me on CD-ROM back in February. With his permission, I am providing the high-resolution scan of the pin-up console photo unretouched and unmodified below so that (a) others may learn from it and (b) to ensure that our only record of this important achievement in art is not lost.

[ Continue reading High-Res Scan of the World’s First Digital Computer Art » ]

Click to see other views of this image: [ Original Size ] [ 2X Zoom ] [ 4:3 Ratio ]

Have you ever seen an edible still life rendered in 16-color EGA?

It appears that this image, which shows fruits and vegetables, cheese, and a napkin or folded tablecloth, originated as either a video capture or a scan of a photograph that was then digitally cleaned up to isolate the centerpiece in absolute blackness.

[ Continue reading [ Retro GIF of the Week ] Digital Still Life » ]

Click to see other views of this image: [ Original Size ] [ 2X Zoom ]

This particular image, titled “Another Day at the Office,” is one of the gems of my personal GIF collection. I believe I downloaded it from CompuServe, and I likely downloaded it on the file date, June 16, 1996.

The image itself is a computer-crafted ode to Doom II that merges a real digitized photograph with imagery ripped straight from id Software’s famous first-person shooter.

Such a passion for Doom II in the workplace isn’t foreign to me. In an office where I worked in the mid-late 1990s, certain engineers were known to play late night four-player Doom deathmatches over the company LAN.

[ Continue reading [ Retro GIF of the Week ] Doom II at the Office » ]

Just in time for Christmas: Macworld has posted a slideshow of vintage Christmas-related Macintosh art and ephemera that I created for that site. I hope you enjoy it.

Click to see other views of this image: [ Original Size ] [ 2X Zoom ] [ 3X Zoom ]

This eye is more than meets the eye. You probably can’t see it at this size, but click on the “3X Zoom” link above and you might notice a face and what might be a shoulder (or a six-fingered hand) reflected in the pupil of the eyeball. Neat detail.

Unlike many GIFs that circulated back in the day, this one is signed — twice, in fact. In the upper left, we see a small box containing stylized letters spelling “The Mage.” In the lower right, we see “A.H.”

I’ve seen other GIFs with the same resolution and color depth signed “A.H.”, so I assume that is the artist. “The Mage” might have been the name of a BBS that happened to tag the image, or perhaps is was simply an alias of A.H.

When combined with its 320 x 200 dimensions, its odd 5-bit / 32-color color depth reveals that this image was created on an Amiga. That means it is likely that it did not originate as a GIF file, and that it could be older than the 1992 file date. But until I find an older source of the image, I won’t know for sure.