Despite what you may think, Newsbits is not dead. It just needs more fiber.

Recent News

• The RetroN 5 Launching June 6th (Today!) in the US
  (Source: Destructoid)

  Hope it works as advertised.

  This thing is a beast, supporting NES, Famicom, SNES, Super Famicom, Genesis, Mega Drive, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and GBA cartridges. All of that, with 720p output via HDMI and original controller support.

• Wii U plugs first DS game into Virtual Console in Japan

  Once upon a time, Nintendo frowned strongly upon emulation. Now its business model depends on it. Oh, how times have changed.

  Puzzle-poser Brain Age is the first DS game to arrive on Wii U Virtual Console, and it’s out now in Japan for free until June 30.

• Unearthed E.T. Atari games will be curated by New Mexico space museum and then sold
  (Source: Polygon)

  A unique situation where one of these games in unopened, mint condition could be worth far less than one crushed and buried in a landfill for 30 years.

  Seven hundred of the 1,300 E.T. and other Atari cartridges recovered from a New Mexico landfill will be appraised, certified and put up for sale, the Alamogordo City Commission decided this week.

• The Verge Publishes Rarely-Seen Photos of Apple’s 1980s Prototype Case Designs
  (Source: The Verge)

  Incredible photos of early 1980s Apple products that never were

  Some of its earliest and most iconic designs, however, didn’t actually come from inside of Apple, but from outside designers at Frog. In particular, credit goes to Frog’s founder, Hartmut Esslinger, who was responsible for the ‘Snow White’ design language.

• Watching kids trying to figure out how to use an old Apple II is totally hilarious
  (Source: Cult of Mac)
  

  This video of children from the ages of 6 to 13 trying to figure out how to work a vintage Apple II … shows just how inexplicable computing was to pretty much everyone before Steve Jobs released the original Mac in 1984.

• Modder Stuffs a Raspberry Pi into a Game Boy Pocket
  (Source: Hackaday)

  This is one of the most amazing mods I’ve ever seen

  After sanding down the bosses on the inside of the case, gluing the battery door shut, and installing a bit of plastic over the cartridge slot, WarriorRocker was able to fit a Raspi inside. The buttons use the same PCB as the stock Game Boy, connected to a Teensy 2.0 board that simulates a USB keyboard.

• Exhibiting .gifs: An Interview with curator Jason Eppink
  (Source: The Signal)

  Wonder if they know about Retro GIF of the Week

  Jason recently curated ‘The Reaction GIF: Moving Image as Gesture,’ which exhibits a set of GIFs he identified in consultation with redditors.

Cool Links

• Where Have You Gone, Peter Norton?
  (Source: Technologizer)

  A look back at the PC utility guru’s career by Harry McCracken at the newly-reborn Technologizer

  Norton’s empire grew to include multiple software products, articles (including a long-running PC Magazine column), and books. He was everywhere that PCs were. And then, in 1990, he sold Peter Norton Computing to Symantec, which made the Norton line of software even more successful.

• Wolfenstein game graphics, 1992 vs 2014
  (Source: Twitter)

  A million more pixels, but the jaw remains the same

• The Most 90s Thing That Could Ever Exist
  (Source: The Atlantic)
  

  The zeitgeist summed perfectly in one technological artifact, which is a VHS tape promoting Windows 95, starring Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry.

• Total Chaos is the Best-Looking Doom II Mod You’ve Ever Seen
  (Source: PCGamer)

  More like a “GZDoom mod,” but still very impressive.

  Total Chaos doesn’t run on the Doom 2 engine from 1993 proper, but a modified version of the original source code that brings in OpenGL, mouse looks and other features like 16x motion blur, high resolution textures, 3D models, and bloom effects.

• The Secret History of Hypertext
  (Source: The Atlantic)
  

  Historians of technology often cite Bush’s essay as the conceptual forerunner of the Web. And hypertext pioneers like Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee have all acknowledged their debt to Bush’s vision. But for all his lasting influence, Bush was not the first person to imagine something like the Web.

• The Woman Behind Apple’s First Icons
  (Source: Priceonomics)

  …and Windows 3.0 to XP’s Solitaire cards! (I did an interview with her about that once, gotta find it.)

  For many, Susan Kare’s icons were a first taste of human-computer interaction: they were approachable, friendly, and simple, much like the designer herself. Today, we recognize the little images — system-failure bomb, paintbrush, mini-stopwatch, dogcow — as old, pixelated friends.

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I took this photo around 1992 or 1993 not long after Super Mario Kart came out. I had rented the game from Blockbuster (See “Secret Cartridge Messages“), and I was amazed to see that the cartridge would save high scores (in this case, track records) between sessions.

That blew my mind a little, because it meant that the scores I saw on the screen came from previous renters of the game — I was playing against previous renters’ track times! So when I set a new record on a particular track, it carried a little extra weight.

(It struck me, even then, that this sharing of scores between players formed a sort of primitive pass-along gaming network, and coming from a BBS background, that excited me.)

In retrospect, I am positive that the track record you see in this photo is nothing record-breaking in the broader competitive Mario Kart universe. But just getting first place — as a 12 year-old, first-time Super Mario Kart player — filled me with enough pride to take a photo of the game screen as viewed from my family’s 1983 TV set.

Remember that this was the era when people used to take photos (with film cameras) of high score screens and physically mail them to Nintendo Power so they could be listed in the magazine. I’m sure that’s where I got the idea to snap the photo.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Did you ever take photos of your video game high score screens?

Since I missed last week’s column, I decided to fold some of those links into this week’s edition. So there may be a few older newsbits, but at least they’re still interesting.

Recent News

• 2300 Console Games Now Playable on Internet Archive

  ‘Ole pal Jason Scott writes about the sudden influx of games playable on the Internet Archive website

  For the last couple of weeks I’ve been working with a range of volunteers on a massive expansion of what we call the Console Living Room at the Internet Archive. Previously weighing in at about 800 game cartridges from seven console systems, the new collection is roughly 2300 cartridges and a total of 21 different consoles.

• George R. R. Martin Writes Using WordStar 4.0 in MS-DOS

  I’m not surprised. To avoid distractions, I sometimes write using Word 6.0 for DOS on a Compaq Aero 4/25 laptop.

  The ‘Game of Thrones’ author confessed to late-night talk-show host Conan O’Brien that he prefers to write his popular books on a DOS word processor instead of the latest laptop.

  ‘I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lower case letter and it becomes a capital letter. I don’t want a capital. If I wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work the shift key.’

• Nintendo Forces Takedown of GBA Emulator for iOS

  From the not-very-surprising department

  In order to play titles like Super Mario and Zelda on your iPhone, then, you have to look at unofficial alternatives. GBA4iOS was one of the most popular — but after its creators received a DMCA notice from Nintendo this week, it is no more.

• Analogue Interactive’s $499 NES Clone Up for Pre-Order

  TinyCartridge reports on this fancy console with a healthy grain of salt mixed in. (Memories of Generation NEX still make me shudder.)

  Analogue has opened pre-orders for its Nt, the Famicom/NES device with RGB output, four controller ports, and purported ‘unparallelled'” compatibility with American and Japanese games and accessories.

• New Book About How Sega Nearly Won the Console Wars

  Chris Kohler provides an overview of Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo and the Battle That Defined a Generation.

  If a few small things had changed, might we be gaming on a Sega PlayStation right now? That’s the picture Blake Harris paints in his new book Console Wars. It is a narrative history of the brief time period in the lifespan of the videogame publisher Sega when it was on top of the world.

• Midway Planned HD Remakes of Mortal Kombat Games

  I would have really loved to see this

  With the [ Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection], Midway’s initial plan was to release HD remakes of the original games with new actors, and even though that’s not what happened in the end, these images with Liu Kang, Sonya, Shao Kahn and the others show that the remakes would have been quite faithful to the original

Cool Links

• The Last Survivors of Meridian 59

  A rare examination of obscure Internet game culture from a mainstream publication (The New Yorker)

  Today, almost eighteen years after Meridian 59’s launch, Barloque’s streets are quiet and vacant, its cobblestones buffed and rounded by little more than a digital breeze. They are rarely visited by more than twenty people in the world at any one time.

• The Great Works of Software

  Paul Ford muses about a software canon

  Is it possible to propose a software canon? To enumerate great works of software that are deeply influential—that changed the nature of the code that followed?

• How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch

  Woz himself writes for Gizmodo, re: BASIC 50th anniversary

  The problem was that I had no knowledge of BASIC, just a bare memory that it had line numbers from that 3-day high-school experience. So I picked up a BASIC manual late one night at HP and started reading it and making notes about the commands of this language. Mind that I had never taken a course in compiler (or interpreter) writing in my life.

• How Sega is Rejuvinating its Classic Games in 3D

  I’m not sure if “rejuvenating” is the right word here, but I welcome Sega dipping into the past

  Few games have had as much attention lavished upon them as the Sega 3D Classics series. The first wave of titles was released between November and December of last year, in pairs over four successive weeks.

• Super Mario Bros. Level Belt (Etsy)

  Incredible artistry — an entire Super Mario Bros. level crafted into a leather belt

  The images are of a belt that I crafted for my brother, who is a big Super Mario fan, and depicts the last level of Super Mario brothers where Mario finally rescues the princess.

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How does he see… WITHOUT EYES. More like eye of the not-beholder, am I right?

Eye of the Beholder (1991) took the formula of Dungeon Master formula and ran with it, resulting in one of the best the first-person real-time RPGs of the pre-3D era. It’s definitely one of the best early VGA games for the IBM PC as well.

As far as games of this category go, I’m quite partial to Lands of Lore myself.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite first-person RPG game of the 1990s?

Recent News

• See Atari’s Buried Treasure: E.T. Among 30 Retro Games Unearthed In The Desert
  I never thought I’d live to see the day

  “The legend was true, but that’s not all. Atari buried a lot of stuff back in 1983–and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

• Andy Warhol’s Amiga Computer Art Found 30 Years Later
  Always felt Amiga + Warhol was one of the more bizarre partnerships in computer history

  “The Andy Warhol Museum has recovered a set of images, doodles, and photos created by the seminal pop artist on a Commodore Amiga home computer. The artworks, made by Warhol as part of a collaboration with Commodore Amiga, had been stranded on Amiga floppy disks for almost twenty years after the artist saved them in the mid-1980s.

• ICHEG Preserves Atari Coin-Op Divisions Collection
  It gives me great mental relief to know someone is doing this so well and so thoroughly

  “ICHEG has acquired a massive collection of materials chronicling the history of Atari’s pioneering video arcade and pinball machine divisions from 1972 to 1999. The collection represents the largest and most comprehensive assemblage of archival records and other documentary items related to Atari’s coin-operated games anywhere in the world.

• Bob Hoskins, Actor Who Played Mario, Dead at 71
  Now both live-action Marios are gone

  “Bob Hoskins, the pugnacious British actor known for playing gangsters, tough guys and working-class gentlemen in such films as ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit,’ ‘The Long Good Friday’ and ‘Mermaids,’ has died, publicist Clair Dobbs said Wednesday.

• Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal
  Harry McCracken’s epic study of BASIC on its 50th

  “Once upon a time, knowing how to use a computer was virtually synonymous with knowing how to program one. And the thing that made it possible was a programming language called BASIC.

• A Short History of BASIC, as Told in Animated GIFs
  An animated supplement to McCracken’s BASIC story above

  “I used a neat program called Camtasia and some post-processing in Photoshop to create animated GIFs capturing what I saw as I loaded some significant BASIC programs, listed the code and then ran it.

• Sony Quietly Removes Ability to Download PSP/PS One Games Unlocked a Few Days Ago on PS Vita
  An update to last week’s Vita story

  “A few days ago we reported about Sony suddenly unlocking a large amount of PSP games and PlayStation Classics for download and play on the PS Vita. Unfortunately its time to mourn, as that ability was quietly removed this morning. None of those games is available for download anymore.

• Atari Landfill Tweet from Scott Weinberg

  “My generation buried those E.T. Atari cartridges for a reason. You’re awakening something not even Lovecraft could imagine.

Cool Links

• Jim and Charlie Gerrie’s Basic Game Programs and Other Software for the TRS-80 MC-10
  The underrated MC-10 gets some programming love
• “Drunk Hunt” NES Cartridge Flask

  “We wanted our product to look and feel exactly like the game cartridges we grew up with, and then BAM SUPRISE! it holds your favorite real-life health potion. Amiright? Amiright?

• A Game Boy That Looks Like It Could Survive Ten Thousand Years
  Kotaku’s Plunkett examines a neat Game Boy mod

  “Vadu Amka’s ‘Brick’ work turns an old Game Boy into a brick wall from the Zelda series.

• L.E.D. Zeppelin Photo
  Amusing promotional tweet from Atmel

  “And for their next hit, L.E.D. Zeppelin presents ‘DI’Yer Maker!’

• BBEdit on System 6 on a Galaxy Note 3
  Twitter user @bergmayer hooked up an original Mac mouse and keyboard too

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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.

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Game Boy: The Final Frontier

Fans of early Mac games will no doubt remember Crystal Quest, which (I believe) was the first Mac game to use color graphics just after the Mac II came out in 1987.

Crystal Quest on the Mac played like a space-based Robotron: 2084 controlled with the mouse, albeit with a loose trackball feel because your ship kept moving in the direction you nudged the mouse until you corrected its course. So I’m not sure how it played in this obscure Game Boy port from 1991. Perhaps I’ll fire up an emulator right now and find out.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Can you think of any other game that started on the Macintosh then received a port to a Nintendo console?

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.

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Like a Game Boy outside your pocket on a leash.

Ah, the Super Game Boy. What an enchanting peripheral it was. (I wrote about my feelings for it in eighth-ever RSOTW entry back in 2006.)

In case you missed it, the Super Game Boy was a special cartridge that let you play Game Boy games on the Super NES using a TV set and a SNES controller.

Around the time the Super Game Boy came out in Japan (1994 I believe), the always-amusing Hori released a special controller that partially simulated the look and the feel of the original Game Boy unit itself — right down to the speaker grille in the lower right corner. The resulting product, the SGB Commander, never saw the light of day in the US, but that didn’t stop me from importing one about a half decade ago when they were on sale at NCSX for a very reasonable price.

As far as controllers go, the build is sturdy and responsive. It works as well as any decently-made controller with the Super Game Boy, although I’m not sure it was entirely necessary. For that reason it remains a very neat oddity in the history of game controllers.

By the way, here’s what the back of the box looks like.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite game to play with the Super Game Boy?

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.

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