On the Western stretch of Montgomery Avenue, a long, heavy-traffic road cutting neatly through Albuquerque's pleasant Northeast Heights, sits a large apartment complex with a pool and a playground. The units are roomy and quite nice for not costing an arm and a leg. Inside one of these apartments, Adam Trionfo, author, programmer, poet and collector of the classics, has crammed into the corners a large, multi-unit machine that never fails to astound me.
He can often be seen on the playground goofing around with his son Dominic, or jumping around to the music of a punk band at a bar, or out at a coffee house with his laptop, devising an article or some code. But these typical social excursions only serve to fool people into forgetting that this is a devious wizard who harbors an ominous network of electronic units that can do anything.
Want a Vic-20 game to run on a Timex Sinclair? Wondering what a 2600 emulator plays like when run through an Apple IIe and displayed on the GameBoy screen? Thinking of 'porting a hand-held game onto your ColecoVision via an international modem connection? Adam can figure out how to hook everything up to do it. It always impresses me when he gets it in his head to do things like this. The Magic Machine is the answer to all modern problems of standardization. MicroSoft should just call up Adam when they're having a problem. (Sure, they might have to get an Astrocade at some point...)