Recent News

• Seattle Retro Gaming Expo 2014
  Saturday, June 28, 2014 at 10:00 AM – Sunday, June 29, 2014 at 5:00 PM (PDT) in Seattle, WA

  “The Seattle Retro Gaming Expo is an organization dedicated to creating a network of gamers in the Seattle area, and providing outlets for us to express our passion for all facets of the geek culture in general, and classic videogames in particular.

• Richard Garriott Holds Contest to Resurrect his Teletype-era RPG; Ends May 15
  Hit the link for a BASIC source printout — and a smidgen of self-aggrandizement

  “D&D #1 represents one of the earliest known computer role playing games. Originally created and refined between the years 1975-1977, this game is one of the few true founding efforts of the entire computer gaming genre. Interestingly the ascii based tile graphics are a clear forerunner of what followed in Ultima and many other computer role playing games, and thus remains relevant to the genres history.

• Nintendo Game Boy Turns 25 (The Onion)

  “Lets just call it what it really was: a Tetris delivery system.

• Almost Every PlayStation Classic and PSP Game Now Downloadable on PS Vita
  They perfectly emulate the two minutes of introductory logo screens too

  “In a rather sudden turn of events, almost every PlayStation Classic and PSP game on Sony’s SEN marketplace is now downloadable on the PS Vita including those that previously weren’t available on Sony’s portable console.

• Super Mario Bros. 3 Released on Wii U and 3DS Virtual Console
  Sixth time is the charm.

  “Jump, swim, and fly through one of the most beloved Super Mario Bros. games of all time on the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U systems!

• NES Remix 2 Launches For Wii U April 25
  With Super Luigi Bros., Nintendo makes an unconscious nod to ROM hackers

  “NES Remix 2 also features two exciting new modes. Super Luigi Bros. stars our nervous hero, Luigi, and dares players to beat each level of the original Super Mario Bros. backward! The other new mode has you trying for high scores in three rapid-fire levels from different NES games, using a scoring system inspired by the 1990 Nintendo World Championships.

• Retro Platformer Cave Story Coming to 3DS in Europe on May 1
  Loved it on the Wii

  “It’s happening! Cave Story comes to Europe on the Nintendo 3DS eShop May 1st, 2014!

Cool Links

• The History of Technology, as Told in Wacky British Pathe Newsreels
  These ancient computer videos should keep you busy for a while

  “In an inventive, generous act, British Pathe has uploaded its entire collection of 85,000 pieces of footage from vintage newsreels to YouTube. I pulled up some choice bits relating to computers — especially how they got used to automate practically everything in the 1960s.

• If Sega Made Easter Eggs
  Clever Eggman art
• See Pac-Man Rendered in Physical 3D Space
  Demo for the “voLumen” rotating 3D display. Check out 1:34 for Pac-Man in the video and 2:34 for a shout-out to Super Mario Bros.
• Sex Sells — Even on the Moon
  Either the best or most sexist arcade video game flier ever made, circa 1981. Remarkable for what it says about the arcade vending audience at the time (probably not safe for work)
• Street Fighter II: What Did Critics Say in 1992?
  Neat review roundup from Defunct Games

  “Not only was it the biggest arcade game around, but it forced every other publisher to come up with their own fighting game. Could this Super NES game possibly live up to the hype? To find the answer to this question, we decided to look through the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly, GamePro, N-Force, Super Play and other magazines of the era.

Submit News

If you want me to include something on a future Newsbits column, send me an email with “[Newsbits]” in the subject line.

Recent News

• The New Age: Leaving Behind Everything, Or Nothing At All
  A piece about digital legacies from NPR

  “Perhaps in your attic or basement there is a box of papers — letters, photographs, cards, maybe even journals — inherited from a grandparent or other relative who’s passed on. But what if that box isn’t a box at all? What if it’s an ancient laptop? And if we are starting to leave behind an increasingly digital inheritance, will it die as soon as the hard drive does?

• Nintendo Embraces NES History in its Twitter Marketing
  I like this trend

  “Its time for #SpringCleaning! Did you find any forgotten gems while organizing your Nintendo gaming collection?

• This 1981 Computer Magazine Cover Explains Why Were So Bad at Tech Predictions
  This piece from Harry McCracken at TIME gives a hat tip to the greatest magazine illustrator of all time

  “If you were passionate about personal computers between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, the odds were high that you were a reader of Byte magazine. And if you read Byte, you were surely a fan of Robert Tinney, the artist whose cover paintings were one of the magazine’s signature features for years.

• Solid Snake Pixel Art Graffiti
  Whoever did this is free to vandalize my office wall

  “Solid snake graff piece. I like the dude in the box. Nice touch…

• Make Your Very Own “Game Boy Macro”
  Got a broken DS lying around? Chop off the top and you’ll have a new system.

  “i personally first saw it on kotaku made by Maarten, from the Bureau voor Gamers. so i decided i would make a couple of my own because i had some brokens DS’s laying around. decided to go with Macro, since its like a GB micro but huge.

• Five Unemulated Computer Experiences
  Jason Scott makes a point about emulation nitpickers

  “While I and many others work to turn the experience of emulation into one as smooth and ubiquitous as possible, inevitably the corners and back alleys of discussions about this process present people claiming that there are unemulated aspects and therefore the entire project is doomed. I thought I would stoke that sad little fire by giving you five examples of entirely unemulated but perfectly valid vintage computer experiences.

Cool Links

• The Lost Ancestors of ASCII Art
  Awesome piece I missed from January — by Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic

  “The history of ASCII art goes deeper, and much of it is told only in Geocities blog postings, abandoned websites, Google Books, and scattered PDFs across the web This post traces a fascinating and mostly lost strand of that history: The way thousands and thousands of people made typewriter art, from amateurs to avant gardists.

• PabloDraw: A Modern ANSI Art Editor
  We don’t need no steenkin’ TheDraw. (link via @blakespot)

  “PabloDraw is an Ansi/Ascii text and RIPscrip vector graphic art editor/viewer with multi-user capabilities.

• An Early English-Language Image Diplay from a Computer, 1957
  Dynamic text display on a CRT in 1957? Not bad.

  “The screen of the picture tube shown will present as many as 10,000 characters per second. Each character is formed by an array of bright spots, a selection from a rectangular array of a total of 35 spots, five wide and seven deep. For a capital letter T, for example, the selection is five spots across the top and six more spots down through the middle…

• Pinterest Gallery of Ugly Computers
  One of Blake Patterson’s amazing Pinterest boards

Submit News

If you want me to include something on a future Newsbits column, send me an email with “[Newsbits]” in the subject line.

There are too many good links this week. I honestly don’t know what happened. Maybe I’m getting better at this.

Recent News

• Vintage Computer Festival Southeast 2.0
  The AHCS does it again

  “The Atlanta Historical Computer Society and the Computer Museum of America are pleased to announce the second annual Vintage Computer Festival Southeast. We have selected the dates of the 3rd and 4th of May to make it easy for people to attend both VCF East and VCF Southeast this year.

• Nintendo Launches Game Boy Advance on Wii U Virtual Console
  Another painfully slow trickle of games from Nintendo, but the emulation is very well done.

  “From April 3 through April 24, select Game Boy Advance titles will launch in the Nintendo eShop on Wii U each week. In addition to off-TV play, these games feature Restore Points that save progress during game play, and Miiverse functionality.

• Microsoft Ends Support for Windows XP
  Spoiler: It’s not really dead

  “Windows XP, Microsoft Corp.’s beloved seventh major operating system and arguably the company’s most successful, was left to perish on Tuesday at its creators’ hands. It was 12 years, seven months old.

• Fifty Years of IBM System/360
  The most successful computer platform that the least number of people know about

  “50 years ago today, IBM unveiled the System/360 mainframe, a groundbreaking computer that allowed new levels of compatibility between systems and helped NASA send astronauts to the Moon.

• Gmail 10th Anniversary
  A great piece by Harry McCracken I missed last week

  “If you wanted to pick a single date to mark the beginning of the modern era of the web, you could do a lot worse than choosing Thursday, April 1, 2004, the day Gmail launched.

• Raspberri Pi Announces New “Compute Module”
  A new variety of this vertsatile, hackable machine

  “The compute module contains the guts of a Raspberry Pi (the BCM2835 processor and 512Mbyte of RAM) as well as a 4Gbyte eMMC Flash device (which is the equivalent of the SD card in the Pi). This is all integrated on to a small 67.6x30mm board which fits into a standard DDR2 SODIMM connector (the same type of connector as used for laptop memory*).

Cool Links

• Story of the Windows XP Bliss Desktop Image
  Hachman hits it out of the park with this research piece

  “It’s not too far-fetched to believe that a billion people have viewed the “Bliss” image that defines the desktop view of Windows XP, the seminal OS that Microsoft is retiring Tuesday. But you’d barely notice the real-world “Bliss” scene if you stepped out of your car and gazed at it today.

• A Custom Portable N64 Console
  Kotaku drools all over a Bacman forum post

  “We’ve seen portable retro consoles before, but this N64 mod is beautiful. It uses a 3.5” screen, internal memory and Rumble Pak, an Expansion Pak, a GameCube analog stick and 4 hour battery life.

• Kevin Mitnick Befriends a Former Foe on Facebook
  …an old hacking target of decades past

  “You gotta love the old friends you meet on Facebook.

• Looking at the Web with Internet Explorer 6, One Last Time
  Lee Hutchinson explores the modern web with IE 6 in all its splintered glory

  “Windows XP wasn’t the only thing to be shuffled into unsupported purgatory yesterday. Also included in the group of applications to be dumped down the memory hole is the browser that everyone loves to hate: Internet Explorer 6.

• 1988 Inside Edition Story on Nintendo
  Retroist digs up a vintage scare piece

  “In 1988 parents were still baffled by the spell that video games had cast over their children. This segment from Inside Edition tries to get to to the bottom of it all.

Echo Box

A place for products, creative works, and upcoming projects seeking support. No endorsement from VC&G is implied.

• Project: MEGAFOOT
  An indie sci-fi action film seeking funding on IndieGoGo. One of the rewards ($150 level) is a limited edition Megafoot NES cartridge.

Submit News

If you want me to include something on a future Newsbits column, send me an email with “[Newsbits]” in the subject line.

Vintage computing and retrogaming news small enough to eat.

Recent News

• Microsoft Releases Source Code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows
  A great move by Microsoft and the CHM

  “On Tuesday, we dusted off the source code for early versions of MS-DOS and Word for Windows. With the help of the Computer History Museum, we are making this code available to the public for the first time.

• Yoshi’s New Island Out Now on 3DS
  A Nintendo 3DS sequel to the Super NES classic with all-new stages.

  “New island. New adventure. Same awesome Yoshi. The little Mario Bros. are in big trouble. Help Yoshi save the day — with help from cool power-ups, giant Eggdozers, and crazy transformations.

• New Ultima Online Shard Freeshard Open
  by the name of “An Corp”

  “A brand new freeshard for Ultima Online has opened up and it is amazing. T2A era, full-loot, open-world PVP, revamped loot tables, exciting new expansions like the Township/Kingship system, and Order/Chaos/Balance battles.

Cool Links

• Play Zork on an Altair 8800 Clone via Telnet
  and watch the panel lights blink in realtime

  “Logon using your favorite telnet client to: altair.micronick.com on port 23. You can SAVE and RESTORE your Zork game. I suggest using terminal type vt100 or ANSI.

• Magpi: The Micro Arduino Gaming Platform Interface
  A retro portable game console built from scratch

  “Here’s a retro hand-held gaming console I built with my son. It uses an Arduino micro-controller, a small LCD screen, push-buttons, a 3D printed case and home-grown “PC” board. It’s really pretty easy to solder and put together. My son & I wrote two games and a drawing program for it.

• Classic Game Room Reviews the Sega Dreamcast Dreameye Camera
  A neat peripheral many people have forgotten

  “TV phone, video mail and photo mail with your Sega Dreamcast and the Dreameye camera! Hook this up to your Dreamcast and connect to the Japanese Internet in 2000 for some great times!! Records 25 second clips of video from a terrible webcam, but it’s great for laughs.

Submit News

If you want me to include something on a future Newsbits column, send me an email with “[Newsbits]” in the subject line. My email filter will route it directly into my brain.

Hi, Benj here. People send me stuff all the time hoping I’ll post something about it on VC&G, but each item alone rarely warrants its own post. There is a solution: a regular compressed news and links column. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for, well, almost 9 years now.

So I finally got around to it. (Just in time for blogs to become thoroughly obsolete, natch.) Newsbits could become a weekly thing, or I’ll just post them as news collects. I’ll feel it out as I go along.

News & Links

• Vintage Computer Festival East 9.1
  April 4-6, 2014, InfoAge Science Center, Wall, New Jersey

  “Vintage Computer Festival East is a hands-on, family-friendly celebration of computer history. Activities include a book sale, classes, consignment sale, exhibit hall, food, lectures, museum tours, prizes, vendors, workshops, and more. (Why “9.1”? We skipped 9.0 in 2013 due to damage from Hurricane Sandy.)

• Second Edition of “Atari, Inc.” Possible
  Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel are working on a second, revised edition of the epic Atari history book they released in 2012. More info as it comes along.
• Surfing Modern Web With Ancient Browsers
  Awesome technique renders pages as image-mapped GIFs.

  “Webrender.py came to life. It’s a cgi-bin application that resides on a machine in the middle. It renders a gif image and spits it out to the browser together with a simple web page, containing a URL and search input boxes plus the gif and image map.

• The Temple Operating System
  The demo video for this Judeo-Christian-inspired homemade operating system will blow your mind. (via Antoni Sawicki)

  “TempleOS is an x86_64, multi-tasking, multi-cored, public domain, open source, ring-0-only, single-address-map (identity mapped), non-networked, PC operating system for recreational programming. I capped the lines of code at 100,000, so it will never be an ugly monstrosity. Currently, it is 81,489. Since God’s temple must be perfect and we have 1,000 years in mind, I do not promise that anything is future-proof.

Echo Box

Here are some products, creative works, and upcoming projects seeking support. No endorsement from VC&G is implied.

• Nova Phase
  A downloadable comic book with NES-style pixel art graphics.
• donkulous DONKEYS (iTunes Link)
  “We’ve just released a new free iOS game, donkulous DONKEYS. It’s an unapologetically hard but insanely addictive retro arcade game, inspired by Bill Gates’ first one-and-only DOS game.
• Armiga Project on Indiegogo
  “Wouldn’t it be great to be able to use all those aging Amiga disks again? Maybe the original Amiga is a bit big and video quality not so good… A smaller version, with modern connections would be awesome, isn’t it? That’s what we’ve done: take modern technology and make it work with good old floppies.

Submit News

If you want me to include something on a future Newsbits column, send me an email with “[Newsbits]” in the subject line. My email filter will route it directly into my brain.

Just in time for Sochi. Sorry for the page fold.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite winter sport(s) video game? This is mine.

“Shhh! Don’t tell dad, but I got him a box of blank paper for Christmas.”

Discussion Topic of the Week: When was the last time you printed something, and what was it?

It’s that time of year again: the Yuletide. In celebration, I thought I’d search through the VC&G archives for Christmas material and collect it all in one place. (I also did this the last few years, but I have updated the list of links with new material for 2013.)

Below you will find a list of everything Yule-flavored from this site and my offsite freelance work. There are a couple slideshow gems in there that you don’t want to miss, so check those out if you haven’t already.

I have a soft spot for Christmas, having been raised with the tradition, so this list is for me as much as it is for everyone else. After going through these things again, it’s amazing to see how much Christmas stuff I’ve posted over the years. I hope you enjoy it.

[ Continue reading The VC&G Christmas Collection (2013 Edition) » ]

One of the best reasons to own a Jaguar circa 1994

Twenty years ago this week, id Software launched one of the most important and influential PC games of all time: Doom. It started as a modest shareware download but grew to change the entire video game industry. To explain how, here’s 2009 Benj writing about the title for a PC World slideshow:

Id’s archetypical first-person shooter triggered a sea change in the PC game industry, which had formerly been dominated by slow, plodding strategy turn fests, brainy simulations, and stilted PC action titles of yore.

In contrast, Doom was the first of a new generation of fast-paced, smooth action titles that utilized new visual techniques to push PC hardware to its limits. With Doom, PC gamers could experience fluid gameplay, graphics, and sound that easily topped what was found on home game consoles of the day — an uncommon achievement at that point.

Moreover, it introduced exciting new network multiplayer options that are widely imitated to this day, coining the term “deathmatch” in the process.

From its lowly roots as a MS-DOS shareware title, Doom spread like a weed to other platforms, including game consoles, which now count first-person shooters as one of their best-selling genres.

“Doom defined the 3D shooter genre and made multiplayer gaming mainstream,” says Tim Sweeney (founder of Epic Games and creator of the Unreal Engine), “And it did them with such incredible polish, artistry, and foresight that it created an industry.”

Considering that Doom launched in 1993 via shareware channels, I’m not aware of when or in what publication the first advertisement for Doom appeared. (I believe GT Interactive became distributor for the full, boxed PC version of Doom much later, but I could be mistaken.)

So instead, I found this nifty November 1994 scan for the Atari Jaguar version of Doom. I received this version of the game for Christmas in 1994, and it was an amazing gift.

Pushing the PC Limits, Jaguar Relief

Most people don’t remember how much horsepower Doom required in a PC at the time — at least 4 MB of RAM, a mid-range 486 CPU, and a sound card to run passably well. So I had trouble running the game on any PC up to that point.

In 1993, we had one 486 in the household with exactly 4 MB of RAM (to contrast, my personal PC sported a 16 MHz 386 and 2MB RAM), and I had to make a special 5.25″ boot disk that loaded fewer resident DOS drivers, etc. so I could run Doom on that 486 at all. If I recall correctly, I didn’t have enough spare RAM to load the SoundBlaster drivers at boot, so the experience was limited. My friend had to run Doom on his mom’s 486 the same way. Even then, the game didn’t run at full frame rate. Doom pushed the limits.

So coming from that environment, it was an amazing convenience to just plug a Doom cartridge into the Jaguar and play, full-speed, full-screen, with glorious sound and no hiccups. My brother and I played a lot of Doom on that console well into 1996 — until I got a more powerful PC that could run Doom with ease.

Until the PlayStation port of Doom came out (late 1995), the Jaguar port was widely considered the best port of the game (in terms of screen window size, lighting effects, monster interaction, sound, controls, and frame rate) available on consoles. Its biggest drawback was lack of a soundtrack during gameplay. I think that’s because John Carmack used the Jag’s DSP co-processor to handle graphics routines instead of music, which was unconventional on that platform.

But I digress. What a great game. I still play Doom regularly via modern source ports on the PC — most recently on my new 1080p big screen TV set. Add on Xbox 360 controller support via ZDoom, and you’ve got Doom heaven. It’s a game that never seems to get old for me, even 20 years on. That’s the mark of a true classic in my book.

Discussion Topic of the Week: How did you feel when you first played Doom? What are your memories of the occasion?

Hello, and welcome to VC&G’s 2013 Thanksgiving Spectacular. I’m your host for this evening, Burt Edwards.

Thanksgiving is a great excuse to spend time with family around a four-player game of Gauntlet IV for the Sega Genesis. Or perhaps a Super Bomberman tournament. Or eight-player networked Atari Jaguar Battlesphere? Did I mention a 16-player Mario Kart Double Dash LAN battle?

One of each, please.

But before you stuff yourself with turkey and get lost in multiplayer fragfests, feel free to enjoy the following Thanksgiving-themed posts I have culled from the annals of VC&G history.

• [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Gather ‘Round the Videotex (2013)
• [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Family Computing (2011)
• [ Retro Scan of the Week ] An Apple //c Thanksgiving (2010)
• A 1980s Home Computer Family Celebration (2009)
• [ Retro Scan of the Week ] The NES Action Set Family (2009)
• Guest Editor Introduction: ULAF EDIT THE GHOST THIS WEEKS (2007)
• What Computer Nerds Should Be Thankful For (2006)

That is all for now. Let the thankfulness begin!