As I mentioned on another thread, I'm in a mild burnout stage where home computing is concerned. Work demands are fairly high and that's consuming enough mindshare as to not make it worth it to further engage at home.

Another factor is my real computing love is UNIX machines, X window system, etc... damn fun and powerful stuff. Right now, personal use potential is high and that's cool. Work potential is low.

A couple years back, I authored a game for the old Atari 2600. As a kid, I always wanted to program on that thing and having an Atari home computer was the next best thing. Fast forward to today and we've got excellent emulators, assemblers and a nice body of documented code to learn from.

It's pure fun, but I have a problem with relevancy.

Parallax has made just about the perfect hobby microcontroller type chip. It's more than a micro, as it has onboard graphics, counters, etc... It's also a multi-processor with 8 full on CPU's, each with their associated goodies, running together in one package.

It's got that retro feel and the onboard graphics range from clearly retro territory to practical graphics that would see serious use today, in embedded and custom applications.

Fun stuff, if you like working near the hardware. Some games have been written. I've got my own in process (port of the excellent Star Raiders) as I'm building the graphics related stuff necessary to make it happen.

http://propeller.wikispaces.com

This is a perfect mix of electronics potential (easy as hell to hook all sorts of stuff to this thing), and down to the metal computing. (no OS to get in the way, assembly and high level programming functions on board.)

Relevance is high because it's a new design, to be in production for quite some time. V2 of the thing will feature speeds well out of the retro range. Getting back into some electronics is just fun, like it always is.

Anyone else here do any retro computing / gaming?

I find the latest and greatest somewhat mundane right now. Collaborative, or competetive online games are just a blast still, but stand alone 3D shooters of all kinds are just shooters of all kinds.

Older gaming has an appeal that continues to keep calling. And it's really exploding these days! One can get emulators for just about anything, ROMS are not hard to find either.

I still play StarCraft online and you can find that BS'ing Darktemper there if your not careful! LOL

Edit Add:
StarCraft II is due out in 2008 I believe and the new graphics are superb!
http://www.starcraft2.com/

I don't even dare.

(seriously, that's just too good of a game)

I don't play games on my computers. It's work work work for me. No time for that foolish folly.

So posting on PDX radio is part of your work Chris??

Speaking of emulators, got one that'll run CP/M on a PC?

There's a GREAT Air Traffic Controller game that I'd like to resume playing but it only runs on CP/M . . .

Get to know virtual machine software. The best right now is VMWare. If you can find a distribution, you can load it onto a VM, just like you would a PC.