I Reached for the Nuon for “PONG Week” Over at /r/RetroBattlestations

The project / competition fun continues over at /r/RetroBattlestations. We’ve now had BASIC Week, Spooky Week, Logo Week, and most recently PONG Week at the retro computing subreddit, and each one has been a blast.

PONG Week challenged participants to pull out their favorite retro game console and record a photo or video of it playing PONG or a PONG variant, such as Breakout. (No emulators allowed.) Now, I have a good number of retro consoles setup and ready to go, but across the lot of them, I don’t have many PONG-like games. Happily, perhaps my most interesting retro console, a Nuon (a Samsung DVD-N501 with Nuon chipset), has a homebrew game scene and downloading and burning titles to DVD is a snap. So, I dug around and found Breakout, programmed by Stephen Anderson. It fit the bill, and here’s the video.

Now, homebrew Breakout for the Nuon is certainly not the most inspired take on PONG that I’ve ever seen. As this is, sadly, the case, I recorded a few minutes of Nuon VLM-2 (Jeff Minter’s integrated Virtual Light Machine) magic running against an ELO audio CD after the Breakout demo. You gotta love those visuals.

Next stop: Holiday Music Week…