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Quick Look at the AT&T 6300 PC (1984) with Lots of Photos

Fri, 01/25/2008 - 12:00am — Bill Loguidice
Why a quick look at what first glance resembles a generic IBM PC clone? Well, the reality is, this clone has a few special elements that you might find interesting. With IBM romping in the professional PC market since late 1981, it was only a matter of time before some other big companies would want a piece of the business pie. Enter AT&T, the powerhouse behind UNIX and C, and oh yes, the monopolistic phone company, who started their own rumblings in the industry when it was rumored that they would soon be entering with a stunning new mystery system or two. It turns out that instead of coming out with something truly radical, they merely decided to one-up the original IBM PC, with a faster processor (the 16-bit 8086 at 8Mhz versus 8/16-bit 8088 at 4.7 Mhz), extra proprietary 16-bit expansion slots and a built-in combination monochrome and color graphics adapter (versus one or the other). In reality, this was a rebranded Olivetti M24, a highly compatible IBM PC clone from Italy. The only area where it definitely wasn't compatible was in its ability to use IBM PC memory because of the Olivetti/AT&T's higher processor speed. It even passed the difficult "Microsoft Flight Simulator" test with flying colors, something that not every clone could say. AT&T's system could come with either a monochrome or color monitor and either two 5.25" 360K floppy disk drives or one 5.25" floppy disk drive and a hard drive.

With some of the preliminaries out of the way, let's take a look at the system in hand and some of its features:


RadioShack and the Origins of PC Gaming

Fri, 07/21/2006 - 6:02pm — Matt Barton

Someone calling himself "DeadDrPhibes" has a great post up at The Older Gamers Paradise called The Birth of PC Gaming. The author takes us on a little tour of the earliest days of home PCs and gaming, starting with furniture-sized monstrosities and ending up with the Apple Mac and the Windows PC. He strikes me as a died-in-the-wall TRS-80 man, and spends good time discussing Radio Shack and Texas Instruments' entries in the home computing market (the CoCo, and so on). It's a fun read, even if it seems to be drafted mostly from the author's own experiences and memories. At any rate, it's nice to see a history like this from this perspective, since most "history-lite" like this I've read has focused mostly on the Apple, Commodore, or IBM. Now all I'm waiting for is a great feature on the Atari line of home computers.


Mario Games I've Never Played, Thank the Gods

Mon, 06/26/2006 - 1:54pm — Matt Barton

How well do you know Mario? Did you know about all of Mario's Bastard Children? Read about some truly obscure Mario Bros.-licensed titles of all sorts--is "Super Mario Bros. & Friends: When I Grow Up" on anyone's top ten list? It seems that Nintendo's brief spasm of cross-platform licensing didn't last long, and, judging by the looks of these titles, that's a good thing. When will parents learn? Educational games suck--and so do devices that try to trick you into learning or getting in shape.


Classic PC Games on Your PSP

Sun, 06/18/2006 - 3:56pm — Matt Barton

PSPPSPAlthough PSP owners content to run official commercial titles for their system are safer to avoid homebrew, there's no denying that the emulation scene for the popular portable is extending at a massive rate: Now you can run scads of classic PC games on your PSP, including SCUMM adventure games (which I'd rather play than Doom).


Scorched Parabolas: A History of the Artillery Game

Wed, 06/14/2006 - 3:40pm — Matt Barton
Author: Matt Barton
Editing: Bill Loguidice
Online Layout: Matt Barton
Special Thanks: Bill Loguidice, Erwin Bierhof, Gavin Camp
All screenshots by the author using various emulators.


Trilobyte's "7th Guest" (1993)

Thu, 05/18/2006 - 3:40pm — Matt Barton

7th Guest Book Shot: Here's a shot from the introduction to The 7th Guest. Note the "blurring of genres" here with the storybook--Myst took the exact same approach.7th Guest Book Shot: Here's a shot from the introduction to The 7th Guest. Note the "blurring of genres" here with the storybook--Myst took the exact same approach.The 7th Guest is a graphical adventure game developed by Trilobyte and released in 1993 by Virgin. It was one of the first commercial games to ship only on CD-ROM, and certainly one of the first to really showcase the potential of the new storage medium. Trilobyte loaded the game with hundreds of megabytes worth of fully-rendered 3-D graphics, live-action video clips, and digitized audio, and topped it all off with some pretty clever puzzles and music by The Fat Man. Unfortunately, The 7th Guest is interesting now only from a historical perspective, the wizardry of its graphics and sound long overshadowed by newer PC technology.


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