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New York City artist Rosemarie Fiore has many experimental projects, such as using an amusement park ride as a giant spirograph. Using a long exposure photography technique she has captured movement patterns in several arcade games:
These photographs are long exposures taken while playing video war games of the 80's created by Atari, Centuri and Taito. The photographs were shot from video game screens while I played the games. By recording each second of an entire game on one frame of film, I captured complex patterns not normally seen by the eye.
The patterns are quite striking. It reminds me of the kind of "ordered chaos" you find in fractal patterns.
Back when I was first learning procedural programming with C, I remember "gotos are evil! Never use them!" being drilled into my head over and over. I would shrug it off, telling myself that I can easily keep track of where I'm going and what the logic is doing. I really wasn't writing anything complex at the time, and the goto statement in C came in handy for several sticky situations. As my programming grew more and more complex and the need for long debug sessions grew, I started to understand my instructor's reservations about the goto. Stepping through pages and pages of code line-by-line to find the crippling bug was made more and more difficult as each goto blasted the code pointer to far-off places, jumping around like a game of hopscotch, with no easy way to find my way back.
Ben Fry, who has spent many years at MIT combining computer science, statistics, graphic design and data visualization, has traced the operation of several classic Atari games in an exhibit titled Distellamap, including Adventure, pictured to the right. Each game's code has been presented as Atari 2600 assembly code, with arcs drawn between the two points of a goto statement. Pac-Man and Q-Bert are apparently more complex than the other three games analyzed.
Like any other game console, Atari 2600 cartridges contained executable code also commingled with data. This lists the code as columns of assembly language. Most of it is math or conditional statements (if x is true, go to y), so each time there's "go to" a curve is drawn from that point to its destination.
Looking at all the logic traces from just these simple games should easily demonstrate why gotos and other such logic jumps are a pain in the neck to debug and should be avoided wherever possible!
Source: SEGA Visions October/November 1990.
Who says GameCube controllers are ugly?
Check out the rest of the photo set and gain a new appreciation for its hardware design.
SNK's attempt at the portable market was a powerful little package that did enjoy some success, but in the end it could not compete with the unstoppable Nintendo juggernaut. But it sure is a beautiful little package, with an amazing battery life.
Add some new life to your desktop!
Many long-time Macintosh gamers remember the day when Bungie sold itself to Microsoft, bringing Halo to the XBox. To some, it felt like betrayal. A slap in the face from one of the greatest Mac game developers. They stayed with the platform through the darkest of times, when Apple was expected to go bankrupt and close up shop any day now. Through this sea of uncertainty, Bungie produced two amazing lines of games: the Marathon trilogy and the first two Myth RTS games.
Bungie always peppered their titles with a great sense of humor, such as the SPNKR-X18 SSM Launcher and the TOZT-7 Backpack Napalm Unit weapons in Marathon. Even Marathon's manual contains the following warning, just opposite the Table of Contents:
Warning:
This manual contains sarcastic language that some readers might find condescending.
This drawing of B.O.B., with his trademark catch-phrase, comes from Marathon's manual, released in 1994.
Artwork ©1994 Bungie Software Corporation.
Click for a larger 300dpi .png version (983x1075).
During the Wii system launch, much talk was made about the Japanese manual's unique warning illustrations. Japanese warning illustrations are usually more entertaining than their Western counterparts, as demonstrated in this gallery of illustrations from x68k game sleeves and warning pages. Remember, don't use your game floppy disks as origami paper!
