Captain Foothand strikes again.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever used the Sega Mega Mouse or the Sega Activator? What did you think about them?

“Refresh Your Memory. And Keep Your Cool.”

I recently ran across this ad for the ICD FA-ST Atari ST hard drive system in a 1988 issue of STart magazine that my wife’s uncle gave me. He was quite an ST fan himself back in the day, and I was the lucky recipient of his ST collection last year.

According to an ICD catalog I have, the 20 megabyte model of this HD system (the FA20ST, seen here) retailed for US $699.95 in 1988 ($1,294.60 in 2010 dollars). The highest end model( FA52ST), which included two 50 megabyte drives, sold for $1649.95 (or $3,051.68 in 2010 dollars).

Those steep prices (common for all hard disks at the time), along with the small market size of Atari 16-bit owners in the US, made drives such as these quite rare. I’ve never seen one in the wild.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Do you own hard drive systems for any of your vintage, non-IBM PC compatible computers? Tell us about them.

I don’t remember this from the films.

Despite the fact that I scanned this ad from a magazine that I religiously pored over some 10 years ago, I have no memory of Star Wars Demolition (PSX and Dreamcast) whatsoever. It appears to be a vehicular combat game (ala Twisted Metal) with a Star Wars license slapped onto it. When I came across this ad earlier today, my first reaction was: “Man, that’s bizarre.” And it is.

Has anyone out there played it?

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite vehicular/car combat game of all time?

It’s the Datalife Holiday Pack!

It’s Christmas morning, 1983. You eagerly run downstairs to the fireplace and notice a stocking stuffed to the brim with goodies. You dump it out and find ten boxes of Datalife 5.25″ floppy diskettes.

Choose your own Adventure:

a) You are happy because disks are expensive for a kid and you use a personal computer.

b) You’d rather have candy.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What did you get for Christmas this year? Any gadgets, games, or computer stuff?

Who will win the battle of the Zappers?

Discussion Topic of the Week: Name any item you received as a present for Christmas in 1987. Don’t remember? Guess!

How your Apple II sees itself.
(click above to see full ad)

This early Apple II video digitizer (the DS-65 Digiselector) took a regular video input and…well, digitized it. The result was a 256×256 pixel greyscale still image that you could manipulate on your Apple II. In an age before consumer digital cameras, this was quite a novel feat of technical wizardry.

It sold for $349.95 in 1979, which is equivalent to $1,054.24 in 2010 dollars. That’s actually not too bad.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever owned a video capture card? Tell us about it.

“Your Game Boy is about to become a man.”

While I’ve been a fan of Duke Nukem since his initial shareware debut in 1991, I’ve never played this 2D platformer for the Game Boy Color. It arrived relatively fresh on the heels of the mega-success that was Duke Nukem 3D in 1996, along with a handful of other spin-off titles for various game consoles.

The true sequel to Duke Nukem 3D, Duke Nukem Forever, is supposedly coming soon (after 14 years in development hell), and I look forward to playing that when it arrives.

By the way — if you like Duke Nukem, you may enjoy reading this interview of 3D Realms founder and president Scott Miller that I did last year.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Which is the better game: Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, or Quake? (Not just technologically speaking, but based on the overall experience.)

“…thus we are very skinny.”

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite first-person RPG of all time?

“And you say this is some sort of football simulator?”

Discussion Topic of the Week: Does your family play video or computer games around the holidays as part of a tradition? Please discuss.

“This product is not intended for the unlawful copying of copywrited material.”

Rewritable CD-RW discs seemed like a good idea when CD-Rs (which could only be written once) still cost $10 a piece. But as the price of CD-Rs fell to pennies per disc over the course of about five years, the CD-RW format’s popularity quickly faded.

Discussion Topic of the Week: When did you burn your first CD-R or CD-RW? How did you feel when you did it? What did you write to the disc?