I just ran across an interesting piece put up by Fosfor Gadgets. The article [Archive] provides a side-by-side screenshot comparison of games from various genres – one from today and one from somewhere around 20 years ago. It’s amazing how technology has advanced.
But with the incomparably superior visuals of today’s games, has the gameplay become “more fun?” I don’t think so. Not overall. Perhaps this is why I so enjoy playing with the old hardware. The old games.
What do you think?
I build database driven web applications for a living. Lots of server-side code – usually PHP or ColdFusion tying to Oracle or MySQL. A good bit of this work also involves interface design. I try to be as innovative as possible in this work, and because of that, I am intrigued by the AJAX development methodology. I use it in a few applications right now, including my first Mac OS X Dashboard Widget.
Seeking to further my AJAX abilities, I talked my employer into sending me to a recent AJAX Seminar in New York City. It was a long day, well spent. Among the many notable speakers, one stood out for me: Bill Scott, AJAX Evangelist and member of Yahoo’s User Experience Design team. His take on sound design and his enthusiasm for these new technologies spoke to me. And I must confess, part of the reason I took particular note of the man was the fact that he is clearly “a Mac guy” – and not just a casual Mac guy. Bill Scott wrote the Macintosh port of Spectrum Holobyte’s submarine simulation, GATO, in the mid 80s.
I e-mailed Bill, asking a bit about the development of Macintosh GATO. He quickly responded and explained that the Macintosh version was coded in C and was based on the original IBM PC verison of the game, which was written in MS BASIC. The development specification was the PC GATO manual. He pointed me to a far more detailed history of the development of the game that he posted as a comment tied to a story posted on Folklore.org, entitled “3rd Party Developers and Macintosh Development“.
See the extended entry of this article for an excerpt from Bill’s commentary on the Folklore.org story.
Revolution Advanced has posted an excellent look at game console controllers over the years, “from the days of Atari to [Nintendo] Revolution.” It’s a great piece that may prove educational for the uninitiated. The only major lack in the article is the curious absence of the Mattel Intellivision controller.
My favorite console controller of all is probably the Playstation / PS2 Dual Shock. But for FPS games, nothing beats the good ole’ keyboard and mouse.
For a most bizarre but quite kickass retro computing music video experience, check out Wintergreen’s “When I Wake Up” music video, directed by Keith Schofield. The video, if not the song itself, tells the sad tale of the ill-fated video game “E.T.” for the Atari 2600. A great video, really – and you’ve gotta love the Pixies t-shirt on that one guy.
Have a look at KeithSchofield.com to see other videos by the director.
Who outdid the Amiga and Atari ST in the mid 1980’s when it came to gaming performance on a desktop home PC? Sharp did, that’s who.
I spent a few quarters on Galaga in an arcade at Disney World last weekend, enjoying simplistic shoot-’em-up action. It seems to have set me in the mood for that type of game, and that may be why an article in issue 12 of Retro Gamer magazine caught my eye, today. Flipping through the magazine, I got drawn into an article that I had passed over months ago, entitled “Arcade Heaven.” The piece takes a look at gaming on the elusive Sharp X68000 (more about it at Wikipedia) series of computer, a not so well-known machine sold only in Japan.
Debuting in 1987, the original X68000 was a striking black, dual-tower design based on the 10MHz Motorola 68000 CPU. It was one of the first machines to feature soft-power and, even more unique, it sported soft-ejecting 5.25″ floppy drives! It featured hardware sprites and scrolling more advanced than that offered by the Amiga or Atari ST – all in thousands of colors on-screen. As such, the machine saw a great deal of “perfect” arcade conversions in its 332 commercial title life.
As Retro Gamer puts it:
The magazine’s cover disc contains a version of two top X68000 emulators for Windows: WinX68 and EX68. I installed both and, after some quick Googling, found some ROMs to play with and spent several hours this afternoon engaged in some top-shelf gaming on my P3 700 box running Win 98SE that serves as my primary emulation station.
I heartily recommend you do the same.
Related links:
Lately I’ve seen a number of assembled Apple I replicas on eBay. These are not original Apple I‘s but are assembled from look-alike kits (the board does physically resemble the original Apple I). They are going for a pretty penny as well. These links will soon wither and die, but I thought I’d share while they can still be seen:
These kits seem to differ from that described in Tom Owad’s Apple I Replica Creation.
Wow.
I just did a Goole Images search on the term “blakespot,” which is the name of my homepage as well as my nick on many sites on the ‘net. What I saw returned by the most savvy of search engines is a veritable feast for the eyes of (mainly retro) computer hardware and other interesting bits of visual wonder. Photos I’d forgotten I even had online. My first homepage went online in 1994, now eleven years ago, and this visual stroll down memory lanes makes that pretty easy to believe.
A Yahoo images search on the same term returns a shorter, but interesting group of images as well.
I thought I’d share.
My regular readers will recall that I setup my most interesting system of all, a C-One system—”the reconfigurable computer,” earlier this year. The C-One is often billed as “a super Commodore 64,” but it’s really far more. Various system “cores,” hardware descriptions written in Verilog, can be uploaded into the two FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) at the heart of this 65C816-based machine, allowing it to “become” the hardware described by the cores. Virtually any computer with a 16-bit (or smaller) bus can be described by the C-One. Currently available cores include the Commodore 64, Vic 20 and Amstrad 464 and 6128, with many other cores planned, including the Apple IIgs. Jeri Ellsworth designed the C-One as well as the C64 DTV, which has drawn significant press on its own.
Well, as it turns out, Jeri is not the only one with a hunger for bringing back old Commodores by way of the magical FPGA. I was browsing the forum topics over at Amiga.org when one in particular jumped out at me, started earlier this month: Amiga in an FPGA : Minimig. Assuming the post was going to be so much starry-eyed daydreaming, I began to read and was amazed and excited to discover that this was indeed nothing of the sort. It’s real. Dennis van Weeren has built an FPGA-based Amiga.
Dennis’ goal is to create a fully functional PAL OCS Amiga 500 with a few added bells and whistles. The hardware involved is a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA board featuring a 400K gate FPGA, 1MB SRAM, PS/2 interface, power regulators as well as three daughterboards: a processor board featuring a Motorola 68000, a small clock circuitry board, and an interface board with an MCC flashcard interface, joystick interface, and videodac and audiodac connectors. Currently the Amiga’s custom chips: OCS Agnus, Paula, and OCS Denise, as well as both CIAs, are running in the FPGA (60% of which is currently utilized).
The Minimig is still a work in progress, but as can be seen from Dennis’ uploaded photos, the machine is close to fully functional, running at full speed and able to load many games without issue. The best way to get a feel for the current state of the project is by way of the aforelinked forum thread in which Dennis himself posts frequent updates.
It’s unclear where this project will go from here. Will the Minimig become a perfect facsimilie of the Amiga 500? Will Dennis be the only one fortunate enough to call it his own? How big a market is there for this unit, if mass-produced? I can say with certainty that he would have at least one customer if the Minimig were brought to market….
A while back I made the sad report that Retro Gamer magazine’s future looked bleak given the financial crash of publishing house Live Publishing. More recently came the bright and happy news that Retro Gamer would be saved by Imagine Publishing who would be bringing issue 19 in December.
Well, friends, issue 19 arrived late last week and, I must say, in its new incarnation it’s at least every bit as good as it was before, refreshed with a new layout. It is not clear if the bundled CD will be available in this new run (the complimentary copy I received as a subscriber of the old Retro Gamer did not come with a cover CD). Either way, I will be subscribing immediately.
UPDATE: Subscribe now from RetroGamer.net.
With much lamentation I recently wrote of the apparent demise of the most excellent Retro Gamer magazine. It seemed this paean of 80’s and early 90’s home computer and console gaming was to be no more, as its publisher, Live Publishing, went into administration.
It seems, thankfully, that this is not to be!
I received a letter, as a subscriber of Retro Gamer, from Imagine Publishing that says the following: