Friday, April 16, 2010

Vintage Gaming Party @ Penguicon

I am planning to have a hotel room party at Penguicon this year, bringing my old game consoles out of storage.  (Actually two parties, one on Friday and one on Saturday, if all goes well.) 

I started by testing out a Coleco "Telstar" Pong and the Atari 2600 yesterday.  You can see my team of playtesters trying out some "big-screen" Pong action here:



Here is just a taste of the excitement in store... :)  Next I'll be pulling out the Intellivision, Vectrex, and whatever else I can dig up.  If anyone has some smallish TV's (preferable analog!) they want to loan for the weekend, I could probably use them.

Perhaps I'll throw in some Apple II games, or some other system emulators. Moria/Angband?  Text Adventures?  Trek?  Am I crazy enough to bring in a full-sized arcade game?  The possibilities are endless, but the hotel room is not, unfortunately.  If only I had a TARDIS...

Saturday, April 03, 2010

The Mathematics of Calendar Reform


The Gregorian Calendar is inconsistent, and there is only so much we can do about it. The earth takes about 365.24 days to go around the sun. The number of days in the year are nicely controlled with leap years and leap seconds, to make this work out.

We have a tradition of the 7-day week. We have a tradition of months which are 28 or 30 or 31 days long. But worst of all, each year starts on a different day of the week, forcing us all to have new calendars each year.

So, can we do better? Sure we can. Let's look at the numbers:

First, every number can be expressed as a series of primes multiplied together, called a "prime factorization".

365 = 5*73

Yuck. Well, if we want 5 seasons of 73 days each, we are all set. I don't think so :)

364 = 2*2*7*13

This has potential. We could have 7 day weeks, 4 weeks in a month, and 13 months. Plus one day every year which is outside the "days of the week". A kind of yearly holiday for the 365th day. And on leap years, we need one more day like this. Then, every year would have the same pattern. Indeed, these kinds of 13-month systems have been proposed, and even used occasionally. The most recent version is probably this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

I admit they are probably the most elegant, but I think the world will not readily switch to 13-month calendars.

So, we have two other choices. Give up months altogether, and go with 7*13 = 91 day quarters. This has also been proposed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Season_Calendar

The other choice is to stick with three months in a quarter, with one month getting 31 days and the other 2 getting 30 days. I tend to think this is the most reasonable course of action. Here is a calendar system that works this way:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Calendar

Now, so others have proposed that, instead of having a day or two each year outside of the week, we should stick with 7-day weeks all year, but change the number of weeks per year to keep the calendar with the right "average days per year". These so-called "leap-week" calendars are interesting, but I think they would tend to drift a little too far from the astronomical events for my tastes. The first day of each season would drift around by a few days each year.

Anyways, for more info on this subject, look up "Calendar Reform"

Two good sources are wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform
and this one:
http://personal.ecu.edu/mccartyr/calendar-reform.html

I'm in favor of The World Calendar, how about you?

Fun with FPGAs - recreating the Atari TIA, Part 1

I have been playing with recreating the Atari TIA chip as used in the original 2600 in an FPGA.  I know this has been done a few times alrea...