Atari 2600 fun

[moogslob]

Little Phatty gaming soundtrack! The drums are looped from the beginning of Hall and Oates' "Kiss on my List"
http://youtu.be/_OdS0FvWfXs

[EricK]

Awesome.


This is part of my start of the art recording studio:

[moogslob]

what is that? reminds me of the Fairlights! except THAT is in color! haha

[Voltor07]

what is that? reminds me of the Fairlights! except THAT is in color! haha

That is a music making program being run on an Atari 400. Quite rare, those.

[thealien666]

Aaaahh the good old days of 8 bit personal computers... The Atari 400 was a serious contender against the famous Commodore 64 back in those days. MIDI was new and music programs, mainly sequencers, was the trend controlling newly MIDI equiped synths. That was a few years before workstations appeared which would combine the two in one keyboard around 1988 with the first Ensoniq ESQ-1 and very shortly after the well known Korg M1.

[EMwhite]

You guys must have been rich! We never had the $$ for an Atari 2600 and forget about the Atari 400/800. I remember the year they hit the Consumers Distributors/Service Merchandise catalogs prior to Christmas. There was a special feature on them that was several pages long.

It wasn't until a few years later that my dad sprung for a CBM 64. And yes, Dr. T was the killer app. Unfortunately I could only muster up the CZ-101 that my friends dad gave me. But a close friend ran a midi equipped Juno (106 I think) and actually put together radio commercials for KQED in San Francisco on it.

I think we've moved on a bit from that cutting edge tech. Thanks for the memories... nice soundtrack.

[moogslob]

You guys must have been rich!

haha- No, ironically the first Atari 2600 I've owned I bought in 2008! I got it via Ebay for my wife-
When I was a kid in the early 80s, my mom's boyfriend attempted to win me over by lending me his , and it worked! But of course my mom had to dump him- It was a sad day when he came over to get his Atari back- But for a month, I was in video game heaven! It's funny, I never really got into any system as much as I was into that one, as primitive as it was- I was just playing Berserk today!

[thealien666]

Oh, I forgot to say, nice "8 bit flavored" music Moogslob !

[moogslob]

thanks! I thought you'd appreciate the sequencer-free jerky bassline, considering your Moroder revamp-

[thealien666]

You guys must have been rich!

Not! I was about 18 back then and had to work overtime in a hosiery factory to be able to afford a $500 C-64. The floppy disk drive cost me another $400 ! It's crazy to think about that today...
I didn't have a MIDI synth until years later. So I played video games and learned programming on it mostly. I was always, and still am today, an analog kid rather than a digital man when it comes to synthesizers.

I do have an Ensoniq SQ80 (deluxe ESQ-1) but it's gathering dust in a cupboard...

[Voltor07]

My dad bought an Apple//e in 1983. It had an RGB 13" monitor with B+W switch as well as a dual floppy drive. We also had an Image Writer II color dot matrix printer...you know, the ones you could hear a mile away? Years later, Dad told me he paid over $3k for it...and now, for $90, you can buy calculators that are capable of twice as much.

[thealien666]

Yeah, my relatively slow (by today's standards) Mac Mini is around 8000 times more powerful than my C-64, some twenty eight years later.

But my even older Minimoog D still sounds better than anything else today (Moog wise)!

[EMwhite]

I take it back. Voltor is the real rich kid. haha

We we so poor (how poor were you), there was only one computer in the entire town and it was in the library. I remember going there after school walking 2 miles in the snow up hill both ways (mind you) to watch some BBC videos on VHS on some computer called the ACORN or something like that only to get 30 minutes on the Apple II. Of course Choplifter was the big draw.

[Voltor07]

I take it back. Voltor is the real rich kid. haha

We we so poor (how poor were you), there was only one computer in the entire town and it was in the library. I remember going there after school walking 2 miles in the snow up hill both ways (mind you) to watch some BBC videos on VHS on some computer called the ACORN or something like that only to get 30 minutes on the Apple II. Of course Choplifter was the big draw.

I loved Print Shop, The Black Cauldron, and Muppet Learning Keys, which had a neat music section...I actually remember some of the funny sounds the internal speaker made while trying to play Mussorgsky...sounds easily created on my Little Phatty using the pulse and triangle waves. Of course, the LP cost a lot more than a used Apple //e.

[thealien666]

I take it back. Voltor is the real rich kid. haha

We we so poor (how poor were you), there was only one computer in the entire town and it was in the library. I remember going there after school walking 2 miles in the snow up hill both ways (mind you) to watch some BBC videos on VHS on some computer called the ACORN or something like that only to get 30 minutes on the Apple II. Of course Choplifter was the big draw.

My very first computer was indeed a Sinclair ZX81 (received as a gift) when I was 16! I remember seeing a BBC Acorn ad in a computer magazine, back then, and from the specs it seemed comparable to a C-64.
But before that, the only computer I had access to was at our school. Well, it wasn't even a computer. It was a computer terminal, hooked up via 300 bauds (30 letters per second) acoustic modem over telephone lines to an HP3000 Mini Computer located downtown in the school system's head offices. It didn't even have a monitor! It was all going out on paper ! Yes, you read right. The terminal had a daisy wheel printer (noisy and slow as hell) and would spit out hundreds and hundreds of feet of continuous computer paper !

Luckily, paper recycling was in effect even in those days, for businesses and schools.

And all that just to learn the BASIC programming language....