I didn’t find this one in the creek.

And now, I present to you…a box. I know it’s not that old, but I’ve been hanging on to this scan since I finally threw out the packaging for my TrackMan Marble FX a few years ago (I scanned it first). I believe I bought this trackball around 1998. I had another Logitech trackball before it, but I was fed up with cleaning the rollers every few weeks. The neat thing about the TrackMan Marble series is that it used an optical scanning mechanism that tracked the movement of dots printed on the marbled red ball. I used the FX for years until it finally crapped out — some components inside of it irreparably broke, although I still have the parts. There’s more to my TrackMan Marble story, though, albeit with a different model.

Trackball Creek

When I moved to a new house a few years ago, I walked out one day to explore a twisty, shallow creek in the woods behind my house. The stream lies in a flood plain that gathers nearly all the water runoff in the area when it rains, so it regularly overflows its banks.

Some ways up the creek, I found a makeshift junkyard of soiled, broken goods both tossed and washed in from every direction. There, among the discarded bicycle spokes, power drills, soggy basketballs and broken mirrors, I spotted a curious looking ball protruding from the mud. I pulled it out and realized that it was a red trackball for a Logitech TrackMan Marble.

Months later, I found the unit itself, and it looked like this. I took it apart to see if I could salvage anything of interest, but, of course, sitting half a decade in a muddy, wet environment isn’t conducive to the proper operation of electronics. Beneath the dirt — caked and wedged between every crack imaginable — I found nothing but a corroded mess.

For a few weeks, the unit served as a strange fence ornament in my back yard until my wife complained about it, then I threw it out. In the end, I walked away with a nifty red trackball, half-bleached orange from years in the sun, that I still have in my collection. It serves as a token from an almost embarrassingly pitiful lesson in technological humility — how something once new, shiny, high-tech, and amazing can be quickly rendered worthless and derelict by an apathetic hand a coat of mud.

Discussion topic of the week: It’s one of the great debates: trackball or mouse? You tell me!

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Better than sliced cheese.

Discussion topic of the week: What’s the best Apple II or IBM PC compatible joystick you’ve ever used? It was always hard to find a really good one for platforms with analog joystick inputs.

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From a more innocent time, when “laptop” was two words separated by a hyphen.

Discussion topic of the week: What was the first portable computer you ever used?

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Get thee to a nunnery

Ten years ago this Friday, Nintendo released what many consider to be the greatest Zelda title of all time, if not one of the greatest video games ever created. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time went on sale in Japan on November 21, 1998 after a long period of eager anticipation on the part of Zelda fans, who hadn’t seen a home console Zelda title since 1991’s A Link to the Past on the Super NES. Nintendo hyped up the release of their new game by offering a limited edition gold-colored cartridge (seen here) to those who pre-ordered Ocarina in the US.

Sadly, I missed out on the gold carts, but I did manage to snag a copy (a very gray copy) for Christmas 1998. Honestly, since playing through Ocarina of Time almost a decade ago, that personal experience — in terms of its joy, its depth, and its enchanting, enveloping nature — has yet to be surpassed by any other title. Now that’s a good video game.

Discussion topic of the week: Tell us why you think the Ocarina of Time is great. How, if at all, has the game been influential to the video game industry?

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I actually have a TRS-80 Model 12, although I don’t have a hard drive for it. I bought it at a flea market back in 2000-2001 for $20. It had been used for corporate accounting, payroll, spreadsheets, etc. for some years, and it came with a bunch of 8-inch disks and a huge dot-matrix printer. Sadly, the 8-inch drives on my unit both failed some years ago, although not before I got a chance to load up BASIC and tinker around with a spreadsheet. I haven’t gotten around to fixing them yet, but I’ll probably give it a shot some day.

Discussion topic of the week: Here’s a good one: How many of you readers out there have used systems with 8-inch floppy disks? If you have, tell us about the computer and your 8-inch floppy stories.

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Sega created some pretty edgy advertising in the mid-1990s, so it came as no surprise when they used a risqué visual metaphor to introduce their new 32X add-on for the Genesis. Sadly, the only fruit this unholy union bore was Sega’s eventual failure in the hardware market.

Discussion topic of the week: It’s a tough call: are there any decent games for the 32x?

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Since Friday is Halloween, I’ve pulled out this scary, 25 year-old ad from Interface Age. The Devil doesn’t look too happy with Qantex’s latest offering — the joke being that Qantex’s new model is compatible with Diablo printers. If any of you attend a costume party this Halloween, feel free to dress as the Qantex Devil. Be sure to take pictures.

Discussion topic of the week: Remember dot-matrix, impact, and daisy-wheel printers? How about thermal, bubble-jet, ink-jet, and laser? Tell us about your earliest printer experiences, good and bad.

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Discussion topic of the week: What’s the worst video game controller you’ve ever used?

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When I was compiling my list of the ten worst PC keyboards of all time last year, I considered many rare and obscure computers, like this Interact Model One. If I had included the Interact, it probably would have been high on the list. Among the original chiclet keyboard’s eccentricities is the fact that the number row starts with 2, counts up to 9, then 0, then finally reaches the number 1 (sort of like a really old typewriter whose lowercase “L” was used for “1,” but lacked a “1” key altogether.).

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“Wait till you see what these girls can do with their hands.”

I just got home from a road trip a few hours ago and I’m absolutely exhausted, so I’ll let you guys provide the humorous commentary for this one. I recall this title (Fantastic Night Dreams: Cotton) getting a hefty premium in the used game shops back in the late-1990s — it was one of the seemingly prized, relatively rare, and unabashedly Japanese CD games always locked behind a glass case. I drooled, but those discs remained just out of reach…so I stocked up on $2 NES cartridges instead.

Discussion topic of the week: What’s your favorite TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine / Turbo Duo game? This should be a good one. The more obscure, the better.

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