Nothing says fun like a nice hot bowl of chunky butter cubes.

With the Wii U launching next weekend, it’s worth taking a look back the Power Pad, one of Nintendo’s first experiments in motion-based game control.

In this case, the controller (which decidedly lacked a second screen) took the form of a large vinyl mat with enormous soft buttons that one would lay upon the floor and beat with one’s fists stomp with one’s feet to simulate running in an on-screen video game.

It didn’t work too well, but I personally had a blast playing World Class Track Meet tournaments with the Power Pad at the neighbor’s house up the street. I recall playing in improvised teams of two, where one player from each team would stand and run on two of the forward facing buttons, and another player on each team would sit behind them on the floor and pound the rear buttons simultaneously in an attempt to make their character run faster.

This was apparently possible (I’m working from memory here — I haven’t used a Power Pad in a long time) because each column of buttons is linked together electronically in the Power Pad, so that a push on any one button in any one column is like a push on any other button in that column. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. I can’t test it because the Power Pad I happen to have doesn’t work.

By the way, I apologize for the uncharacteristically poor quality of the source material here. This came from a particular issue of Nintendo Power that I must have read hundreds of times, literally, so the creases are a natural byproduct of my youthful Nintendo-fueled enthusiasm.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Tell us your Power Pad memories. Have you ever used one?

This IS your daddy’s SSD.

Back in January, I traced the evolution of the Solid State Drive from its 1978 origins to the present in a PC World slideshow. From that experience, I learned that SSDs, as a product class, were far older than most people realize.

Case in point: Seen here is an advertisement for a 1985-era SSD called the SemiDisk. The company behind this early SSD, SemiDisk Systems, sold a wide range of “disk emulators” (as they were called back then) for platforms like S-100 bus systems, the TRS-80 Model 2, and the IBM PC. All of them used solid-state RAM chips to achieve read and write speeds far beyond those of rotating platter drives at the time.

The 2 megabyte SemiDisk for the IBM PC retailed for $1,795 in 1985. That’s about $3,860 today when adjusted for inflation. Amusingly, at that vintage price rate — about $1,930 per megabyte — a 256 GB SemiDisk SSD would cost over $494 million today. Yep, that’s a 494 followed by six zeroes.

Of course, you can buy a 256GB flash-based SSD right now for under $180. Not bad.

Discussion Topic of the Week: When did you buy your first solid state PC drive? How big was it?

Back in 2007, I intended to write an article about the 10th anniversary of Nick Newhard, the designer and lead programmer of Blood, and arranged for an interview.

For whatever reason, my interview with Newhard didn’t take place until April 2008 via email. (That’s probably why I shelved the project.) Since it’s almost Halloween — and it’s the 15th anniversary of Blood this year — I thought I’d share this little gem from my archives. It should be a treat for any Blood fans that might be out there.

I’m presenting this interview a little more sparsely laid-out than I usually do just for the sake of expediency. Some day I will write more about Blood, but until then, I hope this nugget of history will tide you over.

Get Blood

By the way, you can buy Blood on GOG.com these days for $5.99 (price at present). It runs great in DOSBox on a fast machine — make sure you crank up the in-game display resolution for greatest effect. The game is amazing in 1440×900 VESA mode on a widescreen monitor.

I heartily endorse the thorough and frequent playing of Blood, as it is one of the greatest PC games of all time — in my opinion, at least.

[ Continue reading VC&G Anthology Interview: Nick Newhard on Monolith’s Blood (2008) » ]

That purple monster skipped out mid-treatment and he’s angry!

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s the scariest video or computer game you’ve ever played?

As a small administrative note, I’d like to mention that the scanner I’ve used for our Retro Scan of the Week column since its inception in 2006 crapped out on October 15th, 2012.

It up and died. The scanning head got stuck a few times, then the scans started returning blank white images. It’s the digital equivalent to coughing up blood.

I’ve used the scanner, an Epson Perfection 2480 Photo, to scan thousands upon thousands of images, so it’s amazing it has lasted this long. It would be amusing to see how many miles the scanning mechanism has traveled since I first received the scanner as a gift from my dad in 2004 or 2005.

I might be able to fix the unit, but I thought of a better solution. My father happened to have the exact same scanner model, which he hasn’t used in many years. I picked it up on Sunday, dropped it in place of the old scanner, and it’s like nothing has changed. So Retro Scan of the Week is saved.

Of course, new flatbed scanners cost about $50 these days, so it may be time for an upgrade. I’ll think about it, but for now, the Epson Perfection 2480 Photo rides again!

Two hours later, firefighters found Fluffy melted into the plastic.
(click image to see the full two-page spread)

There was a fire.

And a cat.

The computer melted.

A Beautiful Computer.

Oh, the curt, pretentious voice projected by Apple advertising in the 1980s. It almost revels in talking down to you. Just about every Apple print ad of the era uses a similar subliminal script. It goes a little something like this:

This is Apple.

We are amazing.

Really.

Don’t get me wrong — I like Apple as much as the next guy, but man, wipe that smirk off your face.

Apple has come a long way since that time, from floundering near death to basking as the most valuable corporation in the world. The firm, like its co-founder Steve Jobs, suffered some hard knocks, and Apple’s post-1997 advertising reflected that by gaining a little humility. Just a little.

In general, I like Apple advertising these days (except for that recent “Genius” campaign). The 1984-era smirk is long gone, although a hint of strategically placed pretension remains.

But hey — that’s the way people like their Apple, and it shows: a record number of consumers keep buying their products.

More Melted Tech

Back in early 2011, I created a slideshow called “A Gallery of Melted Technology” for PCMag.com that features this ad and photos of similar melted gadgets. If you have the same morbid curiosity I do about melted technology, I think you’ll enjoy that as well.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever lost or damaged a gadget in a fire? Tell us about it.

Oh to travel by rolling over your face with your spherical body.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite ball-themed video game? Any balls apply.

“My whole torso is numb, and it feels great!”

The Sanyo MBC-1100 (1982) was a Z80-A-based business machine that ran CP/M as its operating system. It was one of many, many Z80 business machines from that era designed to run CP/M.

Japanese computer manufacturers were just breaking into the U.S. computer market at the time, so the Sanyo MBC-1100 would have likely been a curiosity in an American office setting.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever used a Japanese-designed vintage computer? Tell us about it.

Ten years ago today, I opened an experimental music website called Request-A-Song.com. On the site, my brother Jeremy and I solicited song titles (just titles, not lyrics), which site visitors would submit via a web form. We’d pick the ones we found most inspiring and write songs based on them, then publish them on the site in MP3 format. The project lasted until December 2005.

As you might expect, a lot of very interesting and unusual songs came out of the process. You can tell just by reading the titles of our most popular songs — names like “Butter Ghost,” “Violent House Panda,” “Poke ‘Em In The Neck,” and “I Flipped My Biscuit” — that we preferred ideas on the bizarre end of the spectrum.

In honor of our 10th anniversary, I’ve uploaded all 134 of our songs to The Internet Archive with the hope that it will preserve our effort for posterity.

You can still download those songs from the original Request-A-Song.com website (which also provides information on who requested what and when, lyrics, and dates of release), but it’s actually easier to explore our catalog with the IA’s handy online streaming MP3 app.

(If you want to know which songs to listen to first, here is a list of our 25 most popular songs.)

Over the next month, I plan on uploading more RAS information to the Internet Archive, including news archives, press clippings, song metadata, images, and more.

[ Continue reading Experimental Music Site Request-A-Song.com Turns 10 » ]

Dino Wars cast a long shadow in the world of manual covers.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Off the top of your head, name the first video game you can think of that involves dinosaurs.