Guru Meditation Trivia Contest Answers

A week ago or so, I mentioned a trivia contest I was running on the Touch Arcade forums, with correct answers winning Guru Meditation redemption codes or a signed copy of Racing the Beam. I’ve given away all the codes and the book, so now it’s time to share the correct answers.

(1) The Fairchild Channel F, an interchangeable cartridge home videogame console that predated the Atari VCS by a year. It was commercially unsuccessful and fell somewhat into the obscurity of arcane videogame history.

A few years back, someone finally dumped all the ROMs for the Channel F, and an easter egg was found in Videocart #20, Video Wizball. The easter egg displays the programmers names, just as in Adventure. Read more details here.

(2) The “Guru Meditation” Amiga error message is legendary, at least for those who remember it. As such it’s been reused in a number of contexts beyond the Amiga. Most recently, a newspaper used “Guru Meditation” to accompany errors on its website. What is the name of the newspaper?

The one I was thinking of was the Globe & Mail (here’s the evidence). But further research shows that the Varnish HTTP accelerator uses this error message internally, so it shows up on a number of newspaper sites that deploy that software, including Norway’s Aftenposten.

(3) Along with many silicon valley innovators of the 1970s, Steve Jobs was something of a hippie. There is an indirect relationship between Jobs’s technohippiedom and the name of the company he co-founded. What is it?

Many people noted that Jobs worked in the apple orchards in northern California, but the connection to hippiedom comes from Steve’s vegetarianism. By the time he returned from India, his commitment to vegetarianism was so extreme that he reportedly ate only fruits and called himself a “fruitatarian.” His favorite was apples, which he considered to be the perfect food.

(4) The Atari VCS is capable of displaying two sprites at a time, each in a single color. Early programmers accomplished multi-color characters by changing the sprite color registers between television scanlines. However, each line of a sprite could only appear in one color. In the documentation for Guru Meditation for iPhone, I explain that all of the iPhone-specific screens could be rendered on the Atari. But the thumbs in the how-to screen have two colors on a single line. The same effect can be seen on the Atari hardware, in the joystick on the game’s input selection screen. How does one accomplish this effect on the Atari?

This one was tough, but the answer is simple: Atari VCS sprites allow for one color at a time, which usually means one color per line of TV display. Areas not rendered appear transparent. This means that you can line up two sprites, one showing through the other in a different color, to achieve the appearance of a multicolored, single object.

(5) The Amiga personal computer boasted many influential innovations in graphics and sound, and it was used in a variety of multimedia contexts. But what was the original purpose the machine was intended to serve?

Many respondents noted that the Amiga was originally conceived as a videogaming system, and eventually I realized that the question was ambiguous enough that such a response could be considered correct, so I did give away a code for the first such answer.

But more accurately, after the Amiga designers gave up on the idea of a single-purpose machine, they set out to make a general purpose computer capable of performing advanced graphics and sound operations beyond videogames. Their original usage conception for the machine was in doing real-time cartoon authoring.