The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Sunday, Debtember 26, 2004

We had 128 BYTES of memory and we were HAPPY!

Parker: Not really, because it was Atari and was state of the art back then.

Bobby: And because people were stupid and liked addictive games. People were like, “Wow—such good graphics! I mean, they got a dot with a key. Woooo!”

Via Jason Kottke, Child's Play II

Guess the kids really didn't like the Atari 2600 Adventure game. Growing up, my friend Hoade had that game and we played for hours walking around (as far as a large square dot can “walk”) slaying the ducks dragons and even finding the invisible dot.

Loads o' fun I'm telling you.

My absolute favorite Atari 2600 game, in terms of “my god this is so horrible I can't stop rolling on the floor, laughing so hard I can't breath and my side–my god does it hurt—I'm dying here” has to be the Atari 2600 Football game (which my friend Bill owned). The entire field on the screen (and given the low resolution of the system, that's a mightly small field), eight players (four badly flickering blobs per side) and a square dot for a football. Once thrown, you could control the football, moving it left and right as you tried to navigate it around your opponent's men (who tended to move offscreen as if going for hotdogs and beer) to one of your own (who tended to move offscreen at the other end for hotdogs and beer).

Popping that cartridge in was good for a solid hour of side splitting laughter it was that bad.

Kids today just don't know what they're missing.

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[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

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The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

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