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Don’t be afraid of Windows 8 Desktop
This (Windows 8 has problems, but it doesn’t deserve the dreaded Vista comparison)says that Windows 8 is only good for touch…
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The Run Cycle – Running Sick After Christmas
The Literal Run Cycle – Running Sick After Christmas The Day After Christmas Run is never an easy one. This year it was…
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The Literal Run Cycle #1
Jeff Fulton (8bitjeff) This is a blog that usually deals with game design / programming, retro-gaming and other nostalgia. It…
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Friday was a Tough Day for a Deadline, but HTML5 Canvas 2nd Edition Is Nearly Complete
By Jeff Fulton (8bitjeff) Tough Day for a Deadline, but HTML5 Canvas 2nd Edition Is Nearly Complete There will be no…
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Back on the re-hab trail…literally.
By Jeff D. Fulton Back on the re-hab trail…literally. From June through July of 2012 I was cooking through a training…
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A young Chris Crawford teaches the Magic of Atari 8-bit computer graphics (3 videos)
By Jeff Fulton (8bitjeff) Way back when Atari was trying to capture home computer market share from the Apples and Commodores…
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Atari 400/800 8bit computer games released by Atari in 1981
By Jeff Fulton (8bitjeff) Atari 400/800 8bit computer games released by Atari in 1981. Atari was still not on board with…
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Retro Atari 8-Bit Computer Gaming – Commando for the XE Game System
By Jeff Fulton (8bitjeff) Retro Atari 8-Bit Computer Gaming – Commando for the XE Game System Commando for the Atari XE…
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Atari 400/800 8-bit Games From 1980
[iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/h2dM3wjEqF0″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe] Most of these games were hold over releases from the 8-bit computer launch in 1979.…
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Retro Atari Lynx Gaming: Zarlor Mercenary
By 8bitjeff (Jeff D. Fulton) One of the first games we had for the Atari Lynx was Zarlor Mercenary. I remember purchasing it at the…
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Video: Atari 8-bit Computer Games From 1979
[iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/cwbwM-J31Pk” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe] When Atari released the 400 and 800 computers in 1979, they were afraid they…
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We are looking for Paid Technical Reviewers for the 2nd Edition of The HTML5 Canvas book on O’Reilly
By Jeff D. Fulton (8bitjeff) We are looking for Paid Technical Reviewers for the 2nd Edition of The HTML5 Canvas book…
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Today only, O’Reilly media is offering 50% off on all e-books
Our Book Publisher, O’Reilly Media is selling all e-books at 50% off today only. They have a lot of great stuff,…
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Retro Atari 8-bit Computer Gaming – Arkanoid
By Jeff D. Fulton – 8bitjeff What a pleasant surprise. Arkanoid for the Atari 8-bit computers is a very well made…
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Retro Atari ST Gaming – Tempest
By Jeff D. Fulton (8bitjeff) Atari UK released a lot of arcade conversions for the ST line of computers in the…
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What Was I thinking? The Existential Cognitive Dissonance Of Updating Old Code
My new blog on Gamasutra: What Was I thinking? The Existential Cognitive Dissonance Of Updating Old Code “Updating old code, especially code…
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Xbox 360 Internet Explorer Plays HTML5 Games…But Not Flash
This morning I work up early to download the new Xbox Live update that includes Internet Explorer. My goal was to…
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Brick Basher Progressive (HTML5 DEMO)
An HTML5 update to Brick Basher to create a progressive version of the game like the one found on in Super…
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Full Versions Of Professor Palindrome! And Professor Zombie! Now Available In The Amazon Android Store
Last week we implemented the the new Amazon in-app payment system into the Android and Kindle versions of Professor Palindrome! and…
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Professor Zombie! Released For iOS, Kindle Fire, Android – Plus Professor Palindrome! now On Kindle Fire!
For Immediate Release : 9/25/2012 Producto Studios Releases Professor Zombie! For iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire Redondo Beach, CA: Today Producto Studios…
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What Is A Game Box Worth?
I have a new blog over at Gamasutra named “What Is a Game Box Worth“: “… when I finally went “indie”,…
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Announcing Professor Zombie! For Android Devices! (Plus a new Free Version of Professor Palindrome!)
Today we launched Professor Zombie!, a reworking of Professor Palindrome! with new puzzles and a mock-horror theme. In this version of…
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A Completely Anecdotal Account Of Why The Wii U Might Not Matter To The Next Generation
Another Gamasutra blog went up today : A Completely Anecdotal Account Of Why The Wii U Might Not Matter To The…
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Tongva Chief : Game Design Diary #1 : Gamasutra Blog
8bitsteve Here. I was invited earlier this year to create an expert blog on Gamasutra. So far, I’ve mostly posted “greatest…
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Christmas Bytes Film Kick Starter Campaign
Christmas Bytes Kick Starter Campaign. Steve and I are involved in a Kick Starter Campaign to get a movie developed. It…
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O’Reilly Back-to-School Special Includes Our HTML5 Canvas Book
September 4-11, our HTML5 Canvas Book is part of O’Reilly Back to School Promotion:Back-to-School Special: Save up to 50% on Books,…
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Freelance Flash Games Interview with Steve and I on the Future of Flash and HTML5
Freelance Flash Games Interview with Steve and I on the Future of Flash and HTML5 Read It Here…
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One Of The Masters “Speaks” On Game Design : Dan(i) Bunten (Berry)’s Archived Web Site
It’s no secret that we here at 8bitrocket.com have a few very distinct heroes, and Dan(i) Bunten (Berry) is one of…
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Vectrex Regeneration Closes The Loop On My Retro Game Needs
One a summer day, just like this one, nearly 30 years to the day, I bought a GCE Vectrex with money…
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Bob Cringely Says His Web Site Is Not Viable Any Longer, He Needs To Evolve : We Understand Bob!
Over at Cingely.com, Bob Cringely has finally has explained why he is “quitting”. Basically, a web writer trying to create a…
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Professor Palindrome! Now For Android Devices
Professor Palindrome! in now available for Android devices. the Android version cost $.99 and has no ads. You can get it…
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Professor Palindromes! First Dollar Earned As an Indie Studio Partnered With Producto Studios
We put this on our bulletin board. It represents the first dollar we earned from our first game as an indie…
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box2dweb for the HTML5 Canvas: Converting MTS Units To Pixels To Apply To The Canvas
I’m starting to love box2dweb. I’ve been working on a revisions for the new edition of our O’Reilly book on the…
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Professor Palindromes! Press Release
Here is the new press release for out newest iOS game, Professor Palindromes Game: Professor Palindrome! Description: Unscramble the palindromes! Palindromes…
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Professor Palindromes, Our First iOS Game Is Now Available
Our first iOS game is now live in the iTunes store. “Professor Palindromes” is a free game for word nerds. The…
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See You At DevCon5, New York, Next Week!
I will be speaking about the HTML5 Canvas at 3 sessions of DevCon5 in New York next Monday, July 23rd. If…
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Pong Returns : Postmortem For The Atari Pong Indie Developer Challenge
Atari announced the finalists for their Pong Developer Challenge on June 26th, and we were not included on this. Thus,…
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Flash CS6 + Our Book On Flash + iOS = Surprisingly Good Performance. I Feel Vindicated
A couple years ago, Jeff and I published The Essential Guide To Flash Games through Friends Of Ed. At nearly…
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In His Latest Column, Bob Cringley Finally Tackles The Current State Of I.T.
Bob Cringley has finally done it. He has finally written a column that tries to tackle the current sad state of…
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Sim City Social : Social Game Perfection, Cynical Game Design
Yesterday I sat down to try Sim City Social. I, honestly, wanted to see how EA had translated one of…
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HTML5 Canvas On The 4th Of July : Atari 2600 Inspired Fireworks Demo And (Short) Tutorial
For the 4th of July, here is an Atari 2600 inspired fireworks demo in HTML5. Click the mouse button to…
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HTML5 Canvas : Animating Gradients To Create A Retro Atari Style Color Cycle
We just finished our semi-final run into the Atari Pong Developer Contest last week, but I’m still feeling a little “retro”.…
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Producto Studios Video for GE.
Over at Producto Studios, we are doing far more than just making it into the semi-finals of the Pong Developer Challenge.…
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Thing’s We’ve Learned The Hard Way #7: Development Contests
Things We’ve Learned The Hard Way #7: Development Contests
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*New Book Celebrates Atari For It’s 40th Anniversary*
(Atari Book Press Release) Authors tell the fun and inspirational stories behind the iconic founding brand of the video game industry.…
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I Wish I Had Made That! Dragon Fantasy From Muteki Corp
Dragon Fantasy This is a new column named “I Wish I Had Made That!” where we explore games that are so…
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Pong Developer Challenge : Reality Bites
I’ve searched for the past few days to find comments on the Atari Pong Developer Challenge, and most everything I’ve read…
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Atari Pong Developer Challenge : 15 Semi-Finalist Videos Posted, Ours Included
Atari has posted the finalist videos for the Pong Developer Challenge, ours included. Only 15 of 20 videos made the…
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Canvas-A-Go-Go: Lessons Learned From Teaching HTML5 Canvas at One Of Top Tech Companies On Earth
This week I spent a couple days on-site at “a very large technology company in the Silicon Valley”, working for a…
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Atari Pong Developer Challenge : Crossing The Finish Line, Dreams Intact
A couple days ago was the deadline to have our demo and video submission for the Atari Pong Developer challenge .…
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Be Excellent To Each Other
This is a story only a few people know. But it has been a year now and I think I am…
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Memorial Day Tribute To The Uncle I Never Knew : PFC John Fulton Jr. KIA 10/24/44
When I was little my dad told me a single story about World War II. He told no stories about his…
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Having a awesome publisher has its little perks.
So, today, out of the blue, I receive two (one for Steve and one for me) packages in the mail. Inside…
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Atari Pong Developer Challenge Inspiration: Pong In The Wild At The Redondo Beach Fun Factory
Today I took my daughter to the last remaining arcade from my youth, the Redondo Beach Fun Factory. I wanted to…
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Atari Announces Intriguing “Circus Atari” App for iOS
Atari announced that tomorrow, a free iOS app named Circus Atari” will be available in the App Store. The original Circus Atari…
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Atari Pong Developer Challenge Diary: What The Radio Shack “TV Scoreboard” Taught Me About Game Design.
One day, back in 1978 my dad came home with this: [iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/6quqAff5fO8″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe] A Radio Shack, TV…
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Not Flash! : The Angsty Zeitgeist Of HTML5 Technology Burnout
More than two years ago we started taking a close look at the HTML5. To us, the HTML5 features like <canvas>,…
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Atari Pong Developer Challenge Inspiration Video #1
Here is a video we created to help inspire our team while we work on our entry for the semi-final round…
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Cracked.com Chose One Of Our Images For “Video Game Plot Twists That Would Have Blown Your Mind”
By Steve Fulton A few weeks ago I wrote an article about my efforts as complete “non-artist” to create funny, classic…
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The Day “Retro” Became Cool or R.I.P. MCA
By Steve Fulton In 1994, about a week after I moved out of my parents house and into an apartment with…
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Flash Professional CS6 Includes Sprite Sheet Generator
Wow. It seems like just a few years ago, we here at 8bitrocket.com were the only ones talking about using sprite…
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Randomness: The Best Cartoon ever Made: Feed The Kitty (now on youtube.com)
[iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/VTorphrBlPY” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe] This doesn’t look like it was posted by a legit source, so enjoy it while…
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Why I think Side-By-Side Gaming On Mobile Devices Would Benefit Young Children
By Jeff Fulton The modern-school playground, sans technology, not-that-different from-1977 and what game developers can learn from it. My mornings are…
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New Issue Of Distro Shouts-Out My Articles On Atari For Gamasutra
I downloaded the new issue of Distro, the Engadget tablet magazine today because it had an article on Atari, and what…
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A Nerd Is Born: Star Wars In-Person At Toys ‘R Us September 1977 (updated)
I’m been a consumer of nerd-laden toys and video games for most of my life. There is not a January that…
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The incredible story of Atari 2600 Star Castle
By Jeff Fulton Star Castle was one of thee very first arcade games that Steve and I (along with Eric Barth)…
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O’Reilly Celebrates FSF’s Day Against DRM by Selling Our DRM-Free HTML5 Canvas E-Book for 50% 0ff
By Jeff Fulton O’Reilly Celebrates FSF’s Day Against DRM by Selling Our HTML5 Canvas E-Book for 50% 0ff: Use code: DRMFREE http://oreil.ly/Against-DRM …
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Hit Testing For Accessibility May Be Added To The W3C HTML5 Canvas Specification. What Does It Mean For Game Developers?
By Steve Fulton While searching for the updated W3C HTML 2d Context (Canvas) API Specification today I ran into some some…
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Semifinals, Here We Come! Producto Studios Makes It Into The Next Round Of The Atari Pong Developer Challenge!
By Steve Fulton Atari announced the semifinalists for their Pong Developer Challenge today, and Producto/8bitrocket Studios made the cut! Now…
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The DevCon5 HTML5 Conference April 2012 Trek Diary
By Jeff Fulton Steve and I were asked to speak at DevCon5 again this last week. We did two sessions on…
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Four HTML5 Canvas Game Demos Running Full Screen On An iPad 2 (video)
By Jeff Fulton [iframe width=”480″ height=”360″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/2hNU9uBU37I” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen][/iframe] Four HTML5 Canvas games with touch controls running from our web site…
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Atari Pong Developer Challenge Semi Finalist Announcement Postponed A Week
According to Pocket Gamer, Atari is overwhelmed with entries (87 in all) so they are delaying the announcement of the semi-finalists…
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Death, Disappointment And Pong Dreams : The Atari Pong Developer Challenge Is Getting Into My Head
Tomorrow, Atari announces the semi-finalists in their Pong Developer Challenge. I had planned to create a demo for the contest,…
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See You At DevCon5, Santa Clara!
Jeff and I are very excited to be speaking again at DevCon5 Santa Clara, next week. We will be speaking…
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Don’t Miss Lost Cast: HTML5 Game Development Podcast
I just found out about this today: Lost Cast: HTML5 Game Development Podcast from the guys over at Lost Decade Games.…
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Amazing Atari Research Images From 1982 That Predicted The Future
By Steve Fulton In 1982, during the halcyon days of the original Atari, Bob Stein worked with pioneering computer scientist Alan…
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Atari Pong Developer Challenge: Challenge Met! How About you?
I worked all weekend on our submission for the Atari Pong Developer Challenge, and just submitted it a few minutes ago…
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Atari Poetry: Snack Time Is Over
Snack Time Is Over “Hey, that’s cool! ColecoVision looks radical!” Alex said. I held the magazine with both hands, scanning every…
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Web/Mobile/Mobile Web Game Development Survey : Hype vs. Reality : Help Us Sort It Out
By Steve Fulton [iframe src=”https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/embeddedform?formkey=dHE0VkNLd1NZV0F4OUxINWhWbGhna1E6MQ” width=”665″ height=”2000″ frameborder=”0″ marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″]Loading…[/iframe]
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8bitrocket.com Podcast : Jack Tramiel And Atari
by Jeff Fulton Finally, a new podcast! Today we tackle Jack Tramiel and The Atari ST. Listen Here.
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R.I.P. : Commodore Legend Jack Tramiel
According to Forbes, Jack Tramiel has died at the age of 83. Most Atari fans know Jack as the founder…
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8bitrocket.com April 2012 HTML5 Game Development Poll Results Infographic (updated)
By Jeff Fulton Our HTML5 Game Development Poll Results are in! With had a huge response, so thank you very…
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Ace’s (The Super Villain) InterWeb Mash-up Special Edition #2
ASV Interwebs, Go! (I’m already starting to see why you stopped doing this every week) Abobo – http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/587787 – A gargantuan…
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The best of 8bitrocket Track Back Spam
We get A LOT of “Trackback Spam” that comes in the form of emails to our admin account. These are supposed…
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Atari Pong Development Challenge Diary #3: On The Shoulders Of Giants
By Steve Fulton We spent the last day of our short trip to Yosemite visiting the Mariposa Grove, an expansive area…
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Adobe Working With CreateJS (Grant Skinner) To Let Flash CS6.0 Export To HTML5 Canvas
By Steve Fulton We found out about Grant Skinner’s CreateJS project a few weeks ago, and were instantly excited to start…
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Atari Pong Developement Challenge Diary #2: Inspiration In Yosemite Valley
I’m still on my little trip with my family, trying to recharge my batteries after a year of turmoil, and hoping…
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Atari Pong Developement Challenge Diary #1: A Trip To Sierra Online Ground Zero
I’ve been planning my entry for Atari’s Pong Development Challenge for past few weeks, the but I’ve hit a brick wall…
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Adobe To Charge Developers Per Centimeter Of ActionScript Code
Coming on the heels of Adobe’s Premium Features for Flash (developers will be required to pay Adobe 9% of revenue above…
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Google 8-bit Quest Maps For April Fools Are So Awesome I Want Them To Stay Forever
Google’s April Fools “joke” this year is an 8-bit looking map style for Google Maps. Not only does it look…
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Ace’s (The Super Villain) InterWeb Mash-up Special Edition
I have been meaning to start these up again and cover the world of games, retro, etc, but time has not…
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Flash Premium Features: Adobe Wants Some “Zynga Money”, But Probably Not Yours
By Steve Fulton Adobe announced yesterday a set of “Premium Features” for Flash. These are features that, when used for web…
