3 favored children and 1 redheaded stepson in the UCL semis. 
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To call Real & Bayern “Children” in the Champions League is almost arrogant.
Both teams have won more Champions League titles than any British team could have ever dreamed of.
I always find it funny when ESPN FC talks about the “Farmers League” when talking about other leagues outside the Premier League and possibly La Liga.
Despite this, these English teams win relatively little in the UCL and UEFA Cup in relation to the financial investment they undoubtedly make.
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Just to be absolutely clear, all of the below is just in good fun.
?? Does the “redheaded stepchild” thing not make sense in Germany?
It’s not funny if you have to explain it, but “redheaded stepchild” refers to a bastard, the one who doesn’t enjoy the “birthright.” 
Bayern: 6
Liverpool: 6
Liverpool aren’t British?
Real Madrid are a different story. They are indeed far from any other club in the competition, from any country. And now they’re favorites to win it again.
I find it irritating, but it’s just the way sports are covered these days, at least in the U.S. If you can believe it, ESPN’s coverage of college athletics in the U.S. is even more biased (favoring the SEC, as ESPN runs the “SEC Network” over here). And Peacock/NBC/USA are just as bad, maybe worse.
Depends on how you look at it. The English have had more different winners (6) and more different runners-up (7) than anyone. No other country has more than 3 different winners (Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands).
Everybody knows money doesn’t equal trophies. If it did, Newcastle would rule the Premier League, Saudi Arabia would have as many World Cups as Brazil, and Bayern wouldn’t have just lost the Bundesliga to a club with less than 1/10th of their payroll. 
On an only-slightly-more-serious note, what I think is more determinative than money is the domestic title race. More often than not, the eventual UCL champion is not involved in a tight race domestically. That will certainly be the case this year – the domestic races have been over for awhile for all of the semifinalists, for better (PSG, Madrid) or worse (Bayern, Dortmund).
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Speaking of losing, we’ve now launched the last Delta rocket. 1960-2024, a good run.
There aren’t that many Atlas launches left either. I think fewer than 20.
@torq and other retro-gamers, did you guys notice the EoL announcement for a number of Z80 variants (Z84C10 MPUs in particular)? That’s the end of the drop-in DIPs and easy breadboards. Not sure if anybody does things like a DIY Galaga, but if so, time for last orders.
All good things come to an end. 
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It seems like I’m one of those redhead “bastards”, but I’m actually a fan of Bayern München and have been a member of the club since the 70s, registered by my father and loyal ever since.
The question is: Who is these redhead in these final four? Paris?? 
PS.: Liverpool, Bayern, Inter Milan and Real are, to me at least, the top 4 Clubs in Europe, which I also regularly try to follow live on TV.
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Don’t worry, nobody’s perfect
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I hadn’t.
It’s been a while since I’ve built anything that used actual, physical, vintage-design, processors. At least for gaming. Most of that I’ve done on FPGAs, as it simplifies so much and can easily be repurposed.
It’s a shame, though … and amazing how long-lived, and useful, those near 50-year old CPU designs were and are.
That said, I have boxes of the things - and salvaging them from other, obsolete, gear will mean they’ll be around, in practical terms, for a good while yet.
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My parents got me the Atari 400, and a book on BASIC, as a christmas present circa 1984. We were dirt poor, I have no doubt that they had to scrimp and save for months to buy this for me (pretty sure in retrospect that they couldn’t afford the more popular Apple II or Commodor 64). But their 9 year old boy was smart, precocious, and starved for stimulation, so they gave me what is to this day the best and most meaningful gift I’ve ever been given. Pretty much everything in my life after that point turned on that one decision. 
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The Atari 400 was easily as good as the C64, except for the keyboard. And had much better software. Ataris OS was way better than TOS and the Antic graphics chip was SOTA.
You could even plug in the assembly language cart and really program like a big boy in 6502 code. Apple ran a demo one year and was exposed when the Apple II was secretly running an Atari 400 to play Ultima
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I remember first getting that …
So much easier, and more productive, than manually looking up opcodes and sticking values in DATA statements to POKE into RAM (via BASIC) and then write from memory a file, or using a tool like CASSIVER (a static/live, non-macro, symbol-less assembler/dissassembler/monitor).
However … it was such a transformational way to do things … I almost immediately started saving for MAC/65.
…
Amazing that, today, I can still use those tools, on actual hardware or emulators. And that things have developed to the point where I can also use a far more powerful tool chain on a Mac or PC (ATASM, MADS, XASM or CA65 - part of CC65) and push code, wirelessly, to a real 400/800/XL/XE machine (via a special cartridge or over FujiNet or a disk drive emulator), and execute it directly.
Those of you that dabbled, will no doubt remember this sort of thing (though this is via CA65, so some of the macros and includes may not be familiar):
.include "atari.inc"
.CODE
.proc Main
lda #0
lp: adc #1
sta 53272 ;physical color register (instantly changes output)
sta WSYNC ;wait for horizontal retrace
jmp lp
END:
.endproc
.SEGMENT "EXEHDR"
.word $FFFF
.word Main
.word Main::END - 1
.segment "AUTOSTRT"
.word RUNAD
.word RUNAD+1
.word Main
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Well, it was 4, nearly 5, years earlier … though I was also 9 (about to turn 10) at the time, and it was much the same for me.
And it was an 800 (a combined “all my savings” plus Christmas + Birthday gift … fortunately my birthday is a week after Christmas …) … mostly for the keyboard (since you could do your own solder-in 48K upgrade on the 400 … and since I’d built my Nascom 1 myself … that would have been easy … the keyboard was MUCH trickier).
It wasn’t my first computer (that honor belongs to a Nascom 1, which was a kit) … but it was the one that had the most impact on my life …
I got my first, paid, coding job on it (15 GBP to convert a game, for a book … so a type-in listing … to the Atari computers). I was 11 at that point. Things sort of snowballed from there.
…
Most of my friends had ZX81s or ZX Spectrums, a Vic-20 or two, and then Commodore 64s. I played lots of games on those, but didn’t own them myself until a bit later. And then it wasn’t because I wanted to “play” on them; they were just useful to have for some of my coding exploits.
ALL of my computer-gaming time was on the Atari 8-bit stuff, and 90% or so of my coding time (ALL of my for-me/for-fun coding).
Many fun memories … and a lot of games that I was only able to get through having made some friends in the US …
Fun times … and still the bulk of where I spend my “retro-computing” time …
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From another perspective, but still with a healthy (especially recently) Atari-bias …
I’ve been watching this YouTube channel.
This is something I almost-literally never do.
In general, I find YouTube to be vacuous and annoying, with a tendency to take 20x as long to glean any useful information as it would just to read two paragraphs of text.
But, for whatever reason, be it consistent production quality, material I find interesting, and a take, on most things, that’s quite close to my own, this one has been enjoyable.
Worth checking out if you’re a fan of retro-games, early handhelds, Atari, and other related stuff.
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Remember all the friends you could make talking to early developers. APX. APX Pascal, ValFORTH. LOGO. I recall a Modula 2. I had the VisiCalc cart. I tended to play at games more than play them.
Now you had mentioned copy protection and how that eventually devolved as more and more cracked games were released as binaries. If I’d paid for a product, I always wanted to have the binary.
And I certainly (now that any statute of limitations has clearly expired and I’ve gotten rid of all my Ataris and drives and software) accessed a number of binaries of games I did not own. The group of the day was called N.A.P.O., and when they cracked a game they put a little screen on it - brought to you by the National Atari Pirates Organization.
What really killed off pirating, I think was the subscription model and the multi-player games that you had to pay to buy upgrades to be competitive on a server.
And even though the Atari had great graphics for the time, text adventures are/were a lot of fun. I spent far too much time figuring out what buttons to push at ZORK’s dam.
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Faster devices and better tech always killed off the old games and systems.
There was Colossal Cave and there was Rogue, then Zork and its text parser, then the Sierra On-Line graphic adventures with text, then Sierra games with better pictures and point-and-click, then the Ocarina of Time, and perhaps the technical adventure peak of Grim Fandango (1998), and the commercial end of adventure games in 2000.
The first Tomb Raider game came out in 1996…with 3D shake and jiggle and a plot in the cutscenes.
The funny thing is that the marketing materials and ads were always about the same quality.
New games compete with the back catalog today, much like new music competes with the old stuff. Who needs piracy with so many leftovers and no-cost products? (I know young males will pirate to achieve and learn. It’s what they do.)
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Yes, played Colossal cave. All 3 Zorks. Never finished Bureaucracy. Started a lot of Infocom games. As @Torq and I remember, Eastern Front 1941. Of course we played Última. Castle Wolfenstein. Sierra, Electronic Arts, Infocom, Activision. Not to mention Leisure Suit Larry.
Oh wait, I just did.
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(General response …)
Gaming, for me, took a marked downturn starting around the end of 1983 … by 1985 I had mostly lost interest (though I was still happy to work on writing/porting such things).
But, it would be entirely accurate to say you could pick any of a number of 1983 (and earlier) era games (including Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Galaxian, Galaga, Asteroids, Missile Command, Dragon’s Lair etc.) and I’d have more hours on any one of them than ALL the subsequent FPS games I’ve played combined.
There are, maybe, 20 games, since 1985 that I could honestly say I thought were great. I’d rather play the old text-based “Star Trek” game (upon which Star Raiders was based), than almost any of the more modern stuff.
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The 1993 to 1997 period was amazing to experience for (narrowly defined) First-Person Shooters. Doom I was the first game realistic enough to make people jump out of their seats. By the time Quake II came out in 1997, 3D hardware acceleration was pretty good and the gameplay, controls, and multiplayer system were well defined. I bought new video cards every year just to keep up, even though I didn’t like playing the games much. The video cards worked for driving games and I did play those.
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I’m even older! I got my TRS-80 and a basic book in 1978 when I was 12, it was that year’s big gift combined for Christmas and Birthday. I remember hooking it up to the family TV and learning how to code. Like you, it paved a future no one in my family ever could have conceived of and here I am all these years later a CIO. It’s amazing how much influence a single gift can have on a kid’s life.
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My issues weren’t technical … there have been lots of incredibly impressive technical achievements and progress. They just haven’t lead to, for me, that many great games.
Lots of “superficially impressive” and/or “fun-for-once-for-a-very-short-period-but-don’t-get-all-the-hype” stuff … sure … but not much I’d consider “great”, nor, really, even “want to play again”.
Which may well just be the curmudgeon in me …
Doom … yes, that is one of the “great” ones. The original Half-Life, as well. Thief was interesting, but not great (I suspect that would have worked much better if done, for the first time, today). Half-Life 2 - incredibly atmospheric, but less fun than whisking eggs. Quake, the entire series in fact, left me absolutely cold.
Halo was okay … mostly for being hassle free for 4-player LAN play (or online, with a little helper utility on the PC), but I enjoyed the campaign mode more than multiplayer.
I do like the driving games, but that pretty much meant Gran Turismo 3, 7 and Forza (original and 3), and the Project Gotham series. Everything else was either “simulators” or I was actually just racing real cars on real circuits.
But so many of the post 83/85 games that people go absolutely ga-ga for just leave me entirely cold. Zelda, Metroid, Mario Kart (after the first one) … I couldn’t give a shit. Even Mario I only care about Donkey Kong & Jr. (he was “Jumpman” then), and very rare fits of SMB 1-3 and SMW.
I was never into the Sierra Online stuff, though I had friends that were. Maybe it was just too primitive, story wise, compared to the Infocom games (and I’m pretty sure “Leisure Suit Larry” was basically the same game as ‘The Soft-Porn Adventure’ from years earlier, but with “graphics”).
CoD … loved 2 (on Xbox 360 no less), hated 3, enjoyed 4, haven’t bothered since.
Clancy’s first Xbox game, Ghost Recon, was fun enough.
Crisis can fuck off.
I was never a Tomb Raider fan.
I did enjoy the first Uncharted, but not enough to play the 2nd through Nth.
99.9999% of the stuff on phones and tablets I find to be absolute shite (I’d rather play “Sword and Poker” than any of the spasmodically-hyperactive 3D stuff that’s come since), and things like Minecraft, all the various MOBAs, and Battle-Royale style stuff … no interest. Tried them, was bored silly in minutes. I get the appeal, just don’t share it.
But … to even things up a bit … some other’s that did meet the “great” standard, for me, would include Another World, Gears of War, Populous, Oblivion, Star Craft, Tetris, Viva Piñata, and a few others. And even those aren’t on the same plane, fun-wise, as Archon or M.U.L.E. (for me.
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