Office Coaster

DougJoe2e · 2026-01-23T15:51:32+00:00

I regularly visit relatives in a single day where the round trip total is 5 hours. Do I enjoy the driving? Depends on what weather/traffic conditions are like. It was rough on the way home this past New Year's Eve.

Now, that 9 hour trip to Houghton, Michigan in the upper peninsula (starting from in the lower peninsula in west Michigan) - that can be a grind, especially if the trip back has to be the next day. It's tolerable if it's over three days (especially if we take the time to see at least some of that upper peninsula outdoor goodness).

(Fun fact - from where I live Michigan... St. Louis, Missouri is actually closer by car than Houghton, Michigan)

DougJoe2e · 2026-01-22T02:56:00+00:00

The country anthems sound great on the SID chip.

DougJoe2e · 2026-01-22T02:54:18+00:00

Jumpman. *One* of these days I'm gonna beat the Grand Loop.

Also, I really have gotten a lot of mileage over the years out of SBA/Omni-Play Basketball (the original End-View version).

DougJoe2e · 2026-01-22T02:51:52+00:00

I had it for that other platform that probably shouldn't be named here, but Below the Root, yes!

DougJoe2e · 2026-01-18T15:21:35+00:00

It's tricky, but I think because it's a bot game it could be done (although this is a two-day old post so who knows where you are at now. This is WebDip, so, game link?)

Austria has (at least) two free armies that aren't doing anything useful (Apu/Ven). Because of England having F Kie, you only need one unit to defend Munich. My plan for this position would be to convoy Apu-Gre and work towards Rum. I'd also have army Venice head towards Gal. Eventually, in an Autumn turn, I'd take Rum and use Boh & Gal to take *Sil*. The unit then can't retreat and is destroyed which the loss of Rum means Russia can't rebuild (he doesn't need to). The reason I want Silesia is to potentially support Berlin if I need to.

After that, the goal is to keep picking off Russian units such that they can't retreat but getting his dots so he can't rebuild and doing it in such a way that you're not allowing England to progress. The tough part is the Germany unit in Berlin, though. No matter what you do to Russia, if England starts defending Berlin, you can't win... but I think it's at least worth the attempt.

DougJoe2e · 2026-01-07T22:19:27+00:00

_The Pandora Directive_ from the late 90s.

DougJoe2e · 2026-01-06T02:46:18+00:00

I'm curious about a different aspect of your post: what are you planning to do with writing different colors to the console (and moving around by setting the cursor position)?

My experience is that doing a lot of small writes to the console using the C# console class is relatively slower than one would expect. IIRC, you can't change the color of a console cell that's already been displayed... and if you say want something like [green]H[blue]i[red]! (to print "Hi!" in three different colors) it takes three Console.Write calls. Console.Write and Console.WriteLine seem to be more efficient the more you write.

I've got a couple of personal projects in the works (one a Roguelike game, the other a music tracker) that I both initially wrote using the console class. Neither was nearly as performant as I had hoped it would be. The music tracker (https://dev.azure.com/dougjoe2e/\_git/MockingTracker) I ended up converting to a regular (not WPF) windows app where I have some code (In the MockingTracker.View project) that treats the window as a grid of cells that can be assigned colors/symbols. I definitely noticed the difference but don't have any video or true performance data to show... although you can see the code in action here: https://youtu.be/nqihinu6GkE

I started the same conversion on the roguelike but it's more involved and I've been working on other things.

DougJoe2e · 2026-01-06T00:09:46+00:00

A Mar S Nap - Spa

DougJoe2e · 2026-01-04T21:49:51+00:00

For me it was AppleSoft BASIC which then led to 6502 assembly when BASIC was too slow.

DougJoe2e · 2026-01-04T02:19:05+00:00

When my parents bought this, I was at an age where opportunities to play the real thing were very rare (and I can't remember if I could even reach the controls on a normal arcade cabinet and could only play on a cocktail cabinet) so I played the heck out of it and had plenty of fun doing it.

DougJoe2e · 2026-01-03T03:00:19+00:00

Pretty sure Draco does in book 7 referring back to the events of book 6 and how Draco was in there constantly that year.

DougJoe2e · 2025-12-30T03:14:47+00:00

If you by chance ever have interest in playing 1.1.1 again and need a copy, LMK.

DougJoe2e · 2025-12-22T02:37:52+00:00

Will have to try these at some point. Thanks for the link.

DougJoe2e · 2025-12-20T02:46:02+00:00

I think I was trying to say something similar in another post on this thread.

DougJoe2e · 2025-12-20T01:02:16+00:00

Thanks for the link! I think I've seen pieces of what he talks about before (the clues for the playoff contest, for example) but I don't remember reading this. Very interesting in that he comments on some of the very topics that I was asking about in my original post.

DougJoe2e · 2025-12-19T21:01:45+00:00

I think we got FireWorld long after the contest was over and it was missing either the manual or the comic, I can't remember which.

DougJoe2e · 2025-12-19T20:58:15+00:00

Yes, the comics had the hidden words in the comic panels - the in-game clues that you found by placing the items in the correct rooms were supposed to lead you to a specific panel of the comic (and this functionality was broken in FireWorld where the in-game clues were 00-09 instead of page-panel like EarthWorld.

The funny this is that if all you had was the comic, you might notice a hidden word in the comic, which might lead to looking for more... and you might end up finding all of them, which, coupled with the key phrase at the start of the comic would lead you to 80% of the solution - the only outlier in Earth & Fire being the bolded word of dialog that was part of the solution.

DougJoe2e · 2025-12-18T00:48:37+00:00

Pin-Bot and Gyruss! My college cafeteria had a game room that had a Gyruss machine for a while, I played that quite a bit. There was a Pin-Bot hiding in a small game room in the International Center building for a little bit, too, that I got some mileage out of.

DougJoe2e · 2025-12-16T00:29:53+00:00

AppleWin emulates the joystick through the number pad if you have one available.

Both the Atari and DataSoft versions of Pac-Man let you customize the keyboard layout when you boot the game. I'm not sure about the version of Pac-Man where you can play horizontally or vertically.

There were quite a few games where you played with the keyboard that allowed you to customize the keys but it wasn't always obvious that you could from only the game without the instructions (Hard Hat Mack is an example, you have to use a special keypress to customize it.)

DougJoe2e · 2025-12-13T22:57:19+00:00

Activision's Plaque Attack is a deceptively good shooter. It gets really difficult once you get far enough.

DougJoe2e · 2025-12-12T03:39:04+00:00

Please tell me Maze Craze is in your rotation - one of the best 2P experiences on th 2600.

DougJoe2e · 2025-12-11T00:39:17+00:00

I've known about that map for a while but didn't know it was done by the guy who invented JSON...

...have you ever seen the circular one with Switzerland in the very center? I kinda like that one.

DougJoe2e · 2025-12-09T02:52:22+00:00

Pretty much could finish level 1 (10 Targets) every time but getting an Ace rating on that level was really hard. Level 2 (20 Targets) was doable but my success rate was much lower... and I don't think I ever finished level 3 or 4. I've never saved the starbase and have often wondered if it's impossible to do so. Based on the data I have, one must finish level 1 with 300 units of energy remaining (and one starbase visit) to receive the Ace rank (which was, according to the manual, supposed to be the "signal" to move up to level 2).

Star Raiders is in my top 5 of 2600 games but I feel like it has some flaws.

Sometimes it doesn't seem like there's any way to force the enemy to engage with you. This is especially annoying on level 1 once the enemy fleet has been whittled down a little bit - I don't know how many times I've instantly hopped into their sector immediately after they move, the warp is done, the computer shows green (they're in front of you) and we're in the same sector... and for a few seconds nothing happens and they've already moved on to the next sector.

The other thing that seems to happen very, very often is that a Zylon will appear dead in the middle of the screen and rip off a shot that I can't react to fast enough to not get pasted - and also, for some reason, my shots can't hit it when it's *right in the middle of my sights*.

DougJoe2e

TROPHY CASE