Greetings from Armchair Arcade!

[mbarton]

Hi, all. I'm Matt Barton, one of the editors of Armchair Arcade. I came across this website after reading Michael's book on Collectible Microcomputers. I'm really more into "vintage gaming" on computers more than the computers themselves, though I come from a background in Commodore computers (started with the Vic-20, then the C-64, then C-128, Amiga 1000, Amiga 3000), and then finally jumped ship for the PC in the mid 90s. I think my interest in collecting computers came when I first opened my Amiga 1000 and noticed the names of the team carved into the underside of the cover. What a machine!!

Anyway, I don't know how many of you here are also interested in gaming, but I want to personally invite anyone who is to check out our newest issue (we're up to 4, now). There are articles here in game audio, the history of artillery games (which mentions such classic systems as the PET), a fairly comprehensive (though not even close to approaching Michael's book) interactive matrix of 75 game capable systems, and much more. We are strictly a non-profit, non-commercial website!

If you'd like to check us out, the website is http://armchairarcade.com

Thanks!

Matt

[Erik]

Welcome to the VC Forum, Matt, and thanks for the link into your Armchair Arcade!

Enjoy!

Erik

[Terry Yager]

Heh! I remember all the chips in the Amiga have names too, like "Fat Agnus". I opened up my Toshiba tablet PC the other day and was surprized to find that one of it's chips is named Agnes, too. I wonder if they're related?

--T

[mbarton]

Well, I don't know too much about the naming conventions of the Amiga other than they're supposedly named after the engineers' girlfriends. There's a Paula chip, a Denise chip, an Agnus (the enhanced chip is the "Fatter" Agnus, no love there, I guess) and others. It *would* be quite interesting to figure out once and for all why these chips received the names they did!!

"Amiga" also means "girlfriend" in Spanish (but more as in 'female friend' rather than significant other.)

[carlsson]

Agnes is a female name, but Agnus is a male name in my world. While it may be possible that one of the engineers had a boyfriend, I would think it was an alteration of another name. By the way, we should not forget the previous dedicated Commodore chips - VIC, SID, TED to mention the most known ones.

[Terry Yager]

Yeah, the one in my Toshiba is definitely the feminine gender, not Agnus llike the Amiga chip.

--T

[mbarton]

Well, the Amiga wasn't designed by the same guys that created the Commodore 64, so you can' treally compare the naming conventions. However, some of the Amiga's chips are obviously male, like the Gary.
http://www.amiga-seal.freeserve.co.uk/aos/HISTORY.HTM
http://www.l8r.net/technical/t-achips.shtml

The first article mentioned there just says they were named after girls' names...I just wonder if it were done at random.

[carlsson]

Yep, I know the different origins - maybe even more interesting in that case if Commodore engineers on purpose chose acronyms which read out like men's names while the Amiga group code-named their chips with girls' names.. :lol:

[mbarton]

Now I'm wondering about the weirdest names for chips (either console or computer.) I always though the Atari's sound chip, the "Pokey," had a funny and perhaps ironic character. I'm sure glad people take the time to name custom chips rather than just assigning them alpha numeric codes.

[Terry Yager]

Ha! I never knew that about the "Pokey" chip. One of my computers is named Pokey, too.

--T

[mbarton]

Here's a quiz for you: Do you know what SF show featured a portable supercomputer named "Orac?"

[Terry Yager]

Portable supercomputer...isn't that an oxymoron?

--T

[mbarton]

Aw, come on. I'll give you a hint: It was a British SF series.

[Terry Yager]

Aw, come on. I'll give you a hint: It was a British SF series.

Ok, wild guess: HHGTTG?

--T

[mbarton]

Blake's 7!

[carlsson]

I think Apple's PowerBooks from the mid-90s (or if it was the first series of iBook) were advertised to have the same computational power as a Cray 1, but sold without a leather sofa. I wonder what the bus/load capacity of a Cray is and whether the PowerBook matched that figure too.

Thus, if Cray is a super computer (is it??), you could say that any portable computer today also is a super computer by early 1980's standards.

[mbarton]

I wonder what a modern "supercomputer" is like? 500 million gigahertz?

[carlsson]

Oh, it is very easy to answer that question. Visit http://www.top500.org/ and read the current list. These days it is not about computational power from one node, but rather a cluster of skillfully connected nodes. I don't know if clock frequency ever was an important measure even in the Cray days (and before).

As you can see, the Earth Simulator with 5,120 NEC nodes (special CPU, each operating at 500 MHz) is still by far the most powerful one. However, it seems an Itanium2 cluster is closing in, using one thousand nodes fewer. It must be rewarding for Intel to be represented so high up.

[mbarton]

Wow, thanks Carlsson!

Interesting how the #1 computer is in Japan. Is there a "computer race" going on similar to the "arms race" during the Cold War?

[carlsson]

I think computers are too expensive to build and run only to show your power (what power - economical wealth?). Also, I don't know how e.g. the Itanium2 cluster would scale and be useable if if was three or four times as big.

I think the race is more about developing new technologies and ways to use things rather than constructing the biggest ever of something existing - almost like finding the world's largest integer number or prime number (which has a vaguely meaningful use in some cryptology).

[NathanAllan]

I went and signed up for the arcmchair arcade forums, it´s a pretty neat site. I´m an old Sega fan myself. My wife´s son has a Genesis 2-3 and we take turns playing it. I wish there was some kind o fhardware hack that would let me kinda network it to my pc, heh heh. I´m sure there is a schematic out there but I can´t find it.

Great site though!! I posted a review for Dungeon Crawl. It´s gotten lots of looks but so far no replies since the last five minutes ago since I checked.

Nathan