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Retro Homebrew & Console News is a site that has the latest Retro Homebrew News, DCEmu Hosted Coder Releases, Interviews, History and Tutorials, Part of the
DCEmu Homebrew & Gaming Network.
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July 5th, 2014, 01:14 Posted By: wraggster
IPS Peek, the IPS (International Patching System) patch viewer, has been updated to version 0.4.0. This is the most significant update IPS Peek has received since it was originally introduced.
The following notable features have been added (among others):
- File linking (with patched file difference highlighting): open a patch as normal, then click the “Link File” icon in the “Data View” toolbar to link a file. This will enable a special mode, where the patched data is applied to the linked file and highlighted (color-coded) data changes are shown. In this mode, yellow highlights indicate new data applied by a patch record. Red highlights signify when the patch record expands the ROM before writing (if you see red, then something may be wrong with the compatibility of the patch and the file.) Gray highlights represent data that is cut off by the Lunar IPS truncate extension (CHS). Clicking a patch record in the list will jump to and select the corresponding patched data.
- IPS Peek now supports two layouts: vertical or horizontal (available in the “View” menu.)
- IPS Peek can now be used as a basic hex viewer for any file.
See the full changelog included with IPS Peek (CHANGES.txt) for a more detailed list of changes. Look out for more great stuff coming in the future!
http://www.codeisle.com/
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July 5th, 2014, 01:13 Posted By: wraggster
Today we are releasing a complete translation patch for the wacky Japanese RPG, Ninja Rahoi.
The translation was started by aishsha sometime in 2009 and he did most of the translation and hacking. Pennywise did all the final hacks and final draft of the script. We also had the help of several excellent translators who helped with us puns, obscure text and whatever else craziness the game threw at us. Those people are Ryusui, Eien ni Hen and harmony7. Without them, this translation would not be what it is now.
This is also more than a translation. It is also a localization. The game featured a plethora of jokes and puns based on Japanese history and pop culture of the time. Just doing a literal translation would have stripped the game of its humor. So the decision was made to replace all the jokes with Western equivalents while retaining the spirit of the original. This translation is a lot of fun to play just for the text, but also a lot of work went into it. The game does take place in Japan and no attempt has been made to remove that aspect. It is and will always be a wacky Japanese game.
Speaking of the game, it was made by the same folks who did Momotarou Densetsu, which was translated by KingMike a few years ago. Without having the played the game, there are probably similarities between the two. So if you liked that game, you’ll probably like this one.
The game might be a DQ clone, but it is anything but generic. There are plenty of hilarious joke enemies and there is a Ninjutsu system that levels up through use in battle. The game does feature your old school grinding though.
Lastly, the game does not use the traditional SRAM for battery backed saving. Instead it uses an external add-on for the Famicom called the Turbo File. It was made by ASCII, the same company who published this game. So if you’re playing on a flashcart, you won’t be able to save unless you have Famicom and a Turbo File. We did not feel like hacking traditional SRAM into the game, but if someone would like to do that for us, we would graciously accept it. Otherwise, use your favorite emulator.
http://yojimbo.eludevisibility.org/
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June 12th, 2014, 01:39 Posted By: wraggster
 Hang around Hackaday long enough and you’ll hear about MAME, and all the other ways to emulate vintage arcade machines on a computer. The builds are usually fantastic, with real arcade buttons, MDF cabinets, and side graphics with just the right retro flair to make any connoisseur of ancient video games happy. MAME is only emulating old video games, though, and not physical systems like the digital pinball system [ronnied] put up on the Projects site.
[ronnied] was inspired by a real life, full-size White Water pinball machine at his previous job, and decided it was high time for him to acquire – somehow – a pinball machine of his own. He had a spare computer sitting around, an old 16:9 monitor for the main playfield, and was donated a smaller 4:3 monitor for the backglass. With an MDF cabinet, PinMAME, and a little bit of work, [ronnied] had his own machine capable of recreating hundreds of classic machines.
The build didn’t stop at just a few arcade buttons and a screen; [ronnied] added a 3-axis accelerometer for a tilt mechanism, solenoids and a plunger torn from a real pinball machine for a more realistic interface, and a Williams knocker for a very loud bit of haptic feedback. We’ve seen solenoids, buzzers, and knockers in pinball emulators before, and the vibrations and buzzing that comes with these electromechanical add ons make all the difference; without them, it’s pretty much the same as playing a pinball emulator on a computer. With them, it’s pretty easy to convince yourself you’re playing a real machine.
http://hackaday.com/2014/06/10/digit...orce-feedback/
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June 9th, 2014, 23:08 Posted By: wraggster
 Year: October 1985 Manufacturer: Sega Original Cost: ¥15,500
With the Famicom achieving huge profits in the home video game market, Sega was just one of a number of companies eager to try its hand at launching an alternative, and wrestling some of Nintendo’s 90 per cent market share back. The company established an internal division, which was known as Sega Away Team, headed by Hideki Sato, tasked with developing Sega’s home consoles. Sato’s first hardware release was the Sega-1000, released in 1983 to disastrous response. However, lessons learned were used to design the Mark III, the system that would later be renamed the Sega Master System. The hardware featured a Zilog Z-80 processing chip and boasted 128 kilobits (a kilobit is one eighth of the size of a kilobyte) of memory, nearly twice that of the Famicom. Despite being more powerful than its rival, Sega lacked the software to make any impact on Nintendo’s market share in its homeland, and so began looking to the West in the hope of success, where the Famicom, redubbed Nintendo Entertainment System, had only just been released.Sega rebranded the Mark III as the Sega Master System, redesigning its futuristic white plastic casing for a black and red rectangular design, more in keeping with Western fashions of the time.While Nintendo had been steadily pulling away from its arcade business in favour of the home market, Sega emphasized its strong arcade presence. To attract consumers, the company bundled a home version of Yu Suzuki’s Hang On, its most popular arcade game of the time, with the Master System. However, without the handlebars used to control the arcade version, the home version seemed a little plain by comparison.With a tiny marketing department run by just two men, Bruce Lowry and Bob Harris, out of a small room in the back of the company’s coin-op games offices, Sega lacked the advertising clout that was necessary to rival Nintendo’s spread across America. Without a recognizable mascot to set against Mario, the Master System floundered in America and Europe, in the same way that it had in Japan, leaving Sato and his team to return to the console drawing board once more.
http://www.edge-online.com/features/...master-system/
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June 9th, 2014, 22:59 Posted By: wraggster
 Year: January 1990 Manufacturer: NEC Original Cost: $649
By 1986 Japan’s home console market was burgeoning thanks to Nintendo’s Famicom and its evergreen success. PC manufacturing giant NEC Home Electronics, well aware of the continual drop in chip manufacturing costs, commissioned one of its R&D teams to design a console that could incorporate PC technologies into a video game system.Tomio Gotoh, one of NEC’s top semiconductor engineers, was placed in charge of the project. Gotoh, having been responsible for some of the very first DOS machines, was a highly experienced electronic engineer, but he had no understanding of the console market.As a result, Gotoh approached Hudson, a prolific third-party software developer that had been considering the hardware market, having seen at first hand the profits Nintendo was able to skim from third-party developers. The pair struck a deal to develop the hardware in partnership, and the PC Engine was finally conceived.Unlike the companies’ rivals, NEC and Hudson spent a huge amount of time and money developing the casing for the system, hoping to design a console that looked more like a stylish Walkman than a toy. The casing’s dimensions were finally settled on at a slender 135 x 130 x 35 mm, the smallest home console yet released. But it was the system’s internal power that really impressed. A 7.16MHz processor was paired with 64Kb of VRAM and four coprocessors to allow 64 sprites to be displayed on screen at a time. With potential for 256 on-screen colours pulled from a palette of 512, the system’s raw specs dwarfed those of the Famicom and Mark III. In Japan, at least, the machine’s excellent ports of Sega’s arcade titles, OutRun, Afterburner 2 and Thunder Blade, scuppered the Mega Drive’s chances in the region even before it was released.In 1988 the PC Engine was the best-selling piece of hardware in Japan, and the machine continued to be the second best-selling machine until the release of the Super Famciom. In the US the PC Engine, renamed TurboGrafx-16, fared worse, undermined by smart rival advertising by Sega that dubbed NEC’s machine an 8-bit machine and by the poor quality of its pack-in game, Keith Courage in Alpha Zones.
http://www.edge-online.com/features/...are-pc-engine/
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June 9th, 2014, 22:58 Posted By: wraggster
 Year: 1988 Manufacturer: Sega Original Cost: ¥21,000
Sega is nothing. Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi would regret those words – an off-hand remark given to a Japanese journalist – when, four years after its debut, the Sega Mega Drive recorded sales of 7.5 million systems in the US, outselling Nintendo’s Super Nintendo by a factor of 2:1. For Sega’s staff, Yamauchi’s pronouncement acted as a thrown gauntlet. The company’s American CEO, Tom Kalinske, went so far as to pin a copy of the phrase on every door in the Sega offices, a challenge to his staff to prove the venerable businessman wrong.But in 1988, Yamauchi’s bullish diagnosis made reasonable sense. Nintendo’s Famicom swaggered into its fifth year with a rudely dominant 90 per cent of the video game hardware market share and one machine in every three US homes. Sega’s Master System machine, meanwhile, limped behind, having secured fewer than a quarter of a million sales in Europe, showing an equally poor record in America and Japan. Despite its technical superiority over the Famicom, the lack of third-party support, and arrival of the vastly superior PC Engine, ensured Sega’s hardware ventures throughout the 1980s were ill- timed and ill-fated.Believing that Sega’s success might lie in porting its arcade hits to the home, CEO Hayou Nakayama took the decision to try the company’s hand at a new console launch, developing a domestic version of Sega’s successful coin-operated technology, the System 16. Codenamed MK-1601, Sega announced a launch slot of autumn 1988, hoping the system could establish dominance in the next generation of video game hardware as the first ‘16-bit’ system.On 29 October 1988, Sega launched the MK-1601, now renamed the Mega Drive, in Japan for ¥21,000 (£114) alongside four titles, Altered Beast, Super Thunderblade, Space Harrier II (an exclusive sequel to Yu Suzuki’s popular arcade title) and Osomatsu-kun. While the ease with which the system handled the arcade ports caused a small stir in Japan, Nintendo’s dominance prevented Sega from making the financial impact the company wanted. Space Harrier 2, a launch title for the console in Japan. This feature is an extract from Simon Parkin’s book, An Illustrated History of 151 Videogames.
In a shift of focus, Nakayama decided that the system’s fortunes lay in the West and charged the US wing of the company with a Japanese mandate: ‘Haku Mandai,’ or ‘sell one million consoles.’ Copyright issues with the ‘Mega Drive’ name in the US forced a name change, an inconvenience that nevertheless enabled the American team to spell out their aspiration for the machine, nothing short of a rebirth of Sega: Genesis. The team assumed that gamers who had joined the Nintendo camp with the launch of the NES five years earlier would now be looking for more mature content. The marketing team designed a campaign to paint Nintendo as a family and children’s company, and Sega as a more grown-up offering.On 14 August 1989, Sega shipped a limited quantity of console to stores in New York and Los Angeles, priced at $199 (£125). Celebrity-endorsed sports titles Arnold Palmer Tournament Golf and Tommy Lasorda Baseball were twinned with arcade behemoths Golden Axe and Altered Beast to reinforce Sega’s positioning of the console as a more mature machine. The approach worked and within one week industry figures put Sega as owning 65 per cent of the market share, growing to 90 per cent by the Christmas period.However, the Nintendo user base remained greater in the West, and Sega began a campaign, using slogans such as ‘Sega does what Nintendon’t’. In Japan, Sega had all but given up hope of besting Nintendo and now focused all of its energy at beating its rival on foreign soil, now supported by a Mario- beating mascot, Sonic The Hedgehog. While the Mega Drive slid from popularity with the release of a number of ill-advised add-ons, its impact was still significant, moving public perception toward games to send the medium into its cultural adolescence.
http://www.edge-online.com/features/...ga-mega-drive/
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June 9th, 2014, 22:56 Posted By: wraggster
 Year: 1989 Manufacturer: Nintendo Original cost: $89.99
Nintendo’s Game Boy became synonymous with handheld gaming overnight. A system with interchangeable games, it could be played anywhere, combining portability, miniaturization and entertainment – three of the most important attributes of today’s emerging technology – into a single, affordable, power-light device.Not only that, but the Game Boy is arguably the most iconic piece of video game hardware design. Its light grey casing is punctuated by two maroon buttons and a jet black d-pad, while a single bright red power light winks to life on the left of a square, luminous green screen, a miniature window into a world of two-tone possibility.The system’s marriage to Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris is a pairing of hardware and software that is yet to be bettered, establishing the handheld’s place as a near-universally recognizable cultural artefact. Not only that, but this was the system to establish Nintendo’s most successful line of gaming hardware, one that stretches across the years in numerous iterations, leading up to the Nintendo 3DS, a handheld system in whose three-dimensional face the bold likeness of the original Game Boy can still be recognized.And yet, even at launch, the Game Boy’s components were technically obsolete. Its creator, Gunpei Yokoi, the man almost single-handedly responsible for Nintendo’s entry to the video game market (page 16), had been responsible for Nintendo’s range of Game & Watch handhelds, LCD-based machines dedicated to a single game. The Game & Watch games were created to make use of cheap LCD screens, a re- purposing of elderly technology that Yokoi imaginatively described as: ‘Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology.’ Game Boy’s success led to a multitude of new iterations of the hardware.
It was this same philosophy that directed Yokoi and his 45-man team of designers, programmers and engineers to create the Game Boy, a system assembled from inexpensive, near-obsolete components that kept manufacturing costs to a minimum. While Sega and Atari busied themselves working with high-powered handhelds with colour graphics and impressive sound capabilities (the Game Gear and Atari Lynx respectively), Yokoi and his team opted for a monochrome screen and a tinny speaker. As a result, the Game Boy outlasted its rivals by several times over.The biggest benefit to Yokoi’s decision to use outdated technology was lowered manufacturing costs. As a result of the team’s insistence on using cheap components inside the Game Boy shell, the launch price was set at just $89.99 in the US, $100 cheaper than Atari’s rival Lynx, and $60 cheaper than Sega’s Game Gear. Nintendo’s competitors were quick to jump upon the Game Boy’s weaker specifications. Sega aired a number of negative advertising campaigns in the US that mocked the Game Boy’s monochrome display in comparison to Game Gear’s full colour display. But despite the jibes, the Game Boy’s popularity rose. The system’s affordability also elevated Nintendo’s own expectations, with company president Hiroshi Yamauchi predicting sales of 25 million within the first three years of its release. In reality, three years after its launch, the Game Boy had sold 32 million units, far exceeding Yamauchi’s seemingly wild speculation.In contrast to the console side of its business, Nintendo subjected the Game Boy technology to a series of iterations, releasing the Game Boy Pocket, then the Game Boy Color, small upgrades on the original hardware, that allowed the hardware to develop without rendering its back catalogue of over 650 games. Later, the Game Boy Advance arrived, a more powerful piece of hardware and one that itself went through a number of upgrades through the SP models and finally to the beautiful Game Boy Micro. With the arrival of Nintendo’s DS, however, the Game Boy brand took a back seat – though many would love to see it return again.
http://www.edge-online.com/features/...endo-game-boy/
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June 9th, 2014, 22:47 Posted By: wraggster
The folks at NYC Resistor have a thing for circular displays, it seems. Their earlier Hexascroller was a ceiling mounted display with six 30×7 displays – good enough to display the time and a few textual message in six directions. The Octoscroller bumped up the display capability with eight 16×32 RGB LED panels. Now the Megascroller, a 32-sided 512×64 display is hanging in the hackerspace, complete with 360° Mario and Pong.
The Megascroller is one of [Trammell Hudson]‘s projects, constructed out of sixty-four 32×16 RGB LED matrices. That’s an impressive amount of controllable LEDs, that required a lot of processing power: namely, the BeagleBone-powered LEDscape board used in their earlier Octoscroller
As far as applications go, they naturally have Pong, but a more interesting application is the side-scrolling Mario that requires you to move around the display as you play. You can check out a video of that below.
If you’d like to see the Megascroller in person, as well as a whole bunch of other crazy blinking interactive projects, NYC Resistor is holding a an interactive show this weekend, beer provided.
http://hackaday.com/2014/06/05/the-m...-in-the-round/
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June 8th, 2014, 21:25 Posted By: wraggster
Need a bigger backlog of games to work through? Michael Thommason is selling his 11,000-plus game collection, a treasure hoard officially recorded as the largest in the world by Guinness Records, on GameGavel.
So 11,000 is a big number and all, but what do you get with that many zeroes? For starters, you get every game released in the US for the: 3DO, Action Max, AGP X-System, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, Atari Jaguar, Atari Jaguar CD, Atari Lynx, Buzztime, Captain Power, Game Boy Advance e-Reader, Neo-Geo Pocket Color, Nintendo Virtual Boy, NUON, Sega CD, Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, Tapwave Zodiac, Tiger Game.Com, Turbo-Grafx-16 CD and Turbo-Grafx-16 Super CD.
Finally, you can get that copy of Blue Stinger you always dreamed of!
Thommason writes on his GameGavel listing that he is not exiting the hobby, but is selling his collection due to "immediate family and extended family that have needs that need to be addressed." As of this writing, the top bid is $50,000, with nine days left before the auction closes.
http://www.joystiq.com/2014/06/06/la...auction-block/
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June 2nd, 2014, 22:51 Posted By: wraggster
 For James ‘Shamus’ Hammons, Doom and a limbless, white-gloved cartoon mascot were all it took to ignite a longstanding obsession with Atari’s Jaguar. Back in the early ’90s, he felt he couldn’t abandon his Atari ST for IBM PC-style computing simply to play id Software’s genre-defining FPS, but then the news came that Doom would hit his favourite company’s new 64bit console. The real clincher came later, however. “I saw a preview of Rayman,” he recalls, “which at the time was going to be a Jaguar exclusive, and it looked amazing.”Today, Hammons – the lead developer of the Virtual Jaguar emulator – is just one of a growing scene of enthusiasts dedicated to sustaining consoles the world would sooner forget, earning them some respect for the niche they tried and failed to carve out. These emulator developers, amateur historians and digital archaeologists want you to remember Jaguar’s brief run at Nintendo and Sega’s dominance, and Virtual Boy’s daring attempt at 3D gaming almost 20 years too soon. And they’re desperate to preserve something of ambitious systems such as Nuon and Pioneer’s LaserActive, which were never widely known in the first place.
http://www.edge-online.com/features/...-be-forgotten/
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June 2nd, 2014, 22:41 Posted By: wraggster
The bragging rights of owning a vintage arcade machine are awesome, but the practicality of it – restoring what is likely a very abused machine, and the sheer physical space one requires – doesn’t appeal to a lot of people. [Jason] has a much better solution to anyone who wants a vintage arcade machine, but doesn’t want the buyer’s remorse that comes with the phrase, “now where do we put it?” It’s a miniaturized Ms. Pacman, mostly scale in every detail.
The cabinet is constructed out of 1/8″ plywood, decorated with printed out graphics properly scaled down from the full-size machine. Inside is a BeagleBone Black with a 4.3″ touchscreen, USB speakers, and a battery-backed power supply.
The control system is rather interesting. Although [Jason] is using an analog joystick, the resistive touch screen monopolizes the ADC on the BeagleBone. The solution to this problem would be to write a driver, or if you’re [Jason], crack the joystick open and scratch away the resistive contact until you have a digital joystick. A nice solution, considering Ms. Pacman doesn’t use an analog joystick anyway.
http://hackaday.com/2014/06/02/mini-ms-pacman/
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June 1st, 2014, 22:10 Posted By: wraggster
 Year: July 1983 Manufacturer: Nintendo Original Cost: ¥14,800
Dinky, with red and white plastic casing and rounded edges, you’d be forgiven for thinking Nintendo’s defining video game system of the 1980s was a child’s toy. It’s no accident. Having achieved success with the Color TV Game 6 and 15 systems, Nintendo’s CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi wanted to design a more serious home computer disguised as a toy, one to appeal to the entire family: a family computer; or ‘Famicom’.The heart of the machine, based on a Motorola 6502 chip derivative, was nothing unusual. But the system’s controllers derived their shape and input dynamics from Gunpei Yokoi’s Game and Watch LCD games, while the inclusion of a microphone on the second pad showed Nintendo’s broadminded industrial creativity. But Yamauchi’s inventiveness went further than mere product innovation. In May 1983 he addressed a wholesalers’ group, the Shoshin-kai, stating that sellers of the Famicom should not expect to see large profits from system sales. “Forgo profits on the hardware,” he said. “It is just a tool to sell software. This is where we shall make our money.”The Famicom launched on July 15 1983 for just ¥14,800, around half the cost of rival systems. Within two months the system had sold over half a million units. Within six, disaster had struck. A bad chipset was causing a crash in certain games. Yamauchi, with typical flourish, recalled every system sold, skirting a crucial sales window in the Japanese New Year holiday, but protecting Nintendo’s name.Nintendo soon learned that software sold hardware, not vice-versa, and Yamauchi appointed a young Shigeru Miyamoto, designer of Nintendo’s first global arcade hit, Donkey Kong, to head a new game design research group, R&D4. Yamauchi recognized that artists not technicians made the best games and filled R&D4 with similar creative minds. The internal software division established itself as the most successful in Nintendo, launching Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, triumphs buoyed by Gunpei Yokoi’s R&D1 group, which counted Metroid, Kid Icarus and Excitebike among its accomplishments.This feature is an extract from Simon Parkin’s book, An Illustrated History of 151 Videogames.
However, by 1984 Nintendo faced a crisis. The company could not meet the demand with new games. Yamauchi was loath to open the system up to third-party developers, fearing that doing so would dilute the brand with poor games – the Atari effect. In late 1984 he yielded, granting the first three licences to Japanese game makers. The licences were restrictive. Nintendo took an unprecedented ¥2,000 per cartridge, and imposed a minimum order of 10,000 units per game. While many companies were dismayed by the terms, any misgivings were silenced by the size of the potential market. Hudson, one of the first developers to obtain a licence, sold a million copies of its first Famicom title, Roadrunner.While the Famicom’s rise to dominance in Japan had been smooth, the journey to the West was tortuous. Following a redesign to make the system look like a more serious computer, Nintendo renamed the machine the Advanced Video System and demonstrated it at the January 1985 CES show in Las Vegas. The reaction was disastrous: not a single order was placed.Yamauchi ordered another redesign and renamed the machine the Nintendo Entertainment System, while Nintendo of America’s Minoru Arakawa offered retailers a bold promise: the company would deliver machines and set up window displays for free. After 90 days, the retailer would pay for what was sold and return anything else they didn’t want. The offer broke down barriers and rebuilt trust with the games industry.Within three months the NES had sold 50,000 systems. Within a year, a million and within three years, three million. By 1990, Nintendo owned a 90 per cent market share of all video games in the West and, by 1991, the company was earning an average $1.5 million per employee, nudging past Toyota to become the most successful company in Japan. Almost single-handedly, Nintendo’s machine had resuscitated an industry.
http://www.edge-online.com/features/...tendo-famicom/
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June 1st, 2014, 00:04 Posted By: wraggster
 If you're in the market for a filthy yet arguably notable copy of the Atari 2600 debacle known as E.T., you may want to plan a trip to the New Mexico Museum of Space History.
One month ago, Microsoft funded a dig in the Southwestern state in search of a fabled cache of E.T. cartridges reportedly dumped by Atari in the wake of the game's disastrous launch. After boring through 30 feet of human refuse, 1,300 of the cartridges were recovered. 700 of those historical artifacts will now be sold to the public, according to a decision by the Alamogordo City Commission.
"We have been working with the space museum for curation, both for displaying and selling the games; they are now artifacts," Mayor Susie Galea told Polygon. "There are 700 that we can sell."
It's currently unknown what price these unearthed cartridges will fetch, as Galea claims the city is still working to have the 700 pieces appraised. Once that's complete, they'll be handed over to the museum, complete with certificate of authenticity, just in case any enterprising New Mexicans hope to strike it rich by retrieving the more than a half a million E.T. cartridges that remain buried.
http://www.joystiq.com/2014/05/30/re...-t-cartridges/
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May 30th, 2014, 00:24 Posted By: wraggster
 Year: 1972 Manufacturer: Magnavox Original Cost: US $75
The Magnavox Odyssey was the world’s first home video game console. Its Kubrick-esque logo and smooth curved white and black casing, like the dashboard of a newly born space shuttle, was pure science fiction, a far cry from the mythological poem from which it borrowed its name.And yet, what better word with which to launch both an entirely new entertainment medium and a reimagining of what was possible with the television set? An odyssey: a journey into the long unknown, a voyage fraught with danger and peril, wonder and triumph, the very same words that articulate the base appeal of the video game itself. Indeed, the Odyssey’s own journey to life started around such words, although, in this instance, the danger and peril were far from virtual.August 1938. Ralf Baer, a 16-year-old Jew, and his family fled Germany, three weeks before Kristallnacht saw the Nazis turn cold oppression to hot violence and genocide. Upon his safe arrival in New York, Baer studied television and radio technology, before securing a job at the military contractor Loral Electronics. It was here, in 1951, that Baer and some colleagues were asked to build a television set from the ground up. A piece of test equipment used in the building of the technology drew horizontal and vertical lines across the screen, filling them with colours. Baer could move these lines up and down and wondered whether the test should be built into the set, not necessarily as a game, but as something to do when the owner grew tired of the network television shows. The idea was dismissed by the team but Baer never forgot the concept.Fifteen years later and Baer’s career trajectory had taken him to head of instrument design at New Hampshire-based military contractors Sanders Associates. In August 1966, on a New York business trip, the seed of the idea he had in 1951 broke through the topsoil of his consciousness. While waiting at the East Side Bus Terminal after the day’s work, Baer started to formulate the idea for a game-playing device that plugged into a television set. The problem was that Sanders Associates only developed military technology, so Baer used his senior position to start work on the project, which he dubbed ‘Channel LP’, or, ‘Let’s Play’, in secret. Procuring a room on the sixth floor of his office block, Baer set Bill Harrison, a technician at Sanders, to work on the project. A few weeks later, Baer invited Bill Rusch to join as chief engineer, and the three men worked together in secret. Ralf Baer, developer of the Magnavox Odyssey. This feature is an extract from an Illustrated History of 151 Videogames.
Baer took the prototype to Herbert Chapman, corporate director of research and development, who gave the team a $2,000 grant and five months to turn the idea into something marketable. But despite Baer’s small victories, Sanders was unable to find a company with TV expertise with whom to partner, and the project was placed on hold. In late 1969, Baer presented the Brown Box to a host of television manufacturers – General Electric, Magnavox, Motorola, Philco, RCA and Sylvania – in the hope that the similarities in components between the console and television sets would inspire one to jump on board. None did.Soon after, Bill Enders, one of the RCA execs who had been present at the meeting, moved across to Magnavox, and convinced his new employers to take another look at the system. Baer, Harrison and Rusch presented their machine again and this time Magnavox said yes. The TV manufacturer signed a preliminary deal in January 1971, before redesigning the casing and renaming the project Skill-O-Vision before settling upon Odyssey.The Magnavox Odyssey launched in May 1972, bundled with 12 games including Ping-Pong, the tennis game, which would inspire Atari’s Pong. To Baer’s dismay, his original price tag of $19.95 had ballooned to $99.95 but despite the tall cost, 200,000 consoles had been sold through Magnavox dealerships by 1974.
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May 30th, 2014, 00:22 Posted By: wraggster
With its wood panel effect frontage, and black, plastic- rimmed hood leading up to a retro-futuristic panel of orange-rimmed knobs and levers, the Atari 2600 is one of the most iconic machines of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Not only that, but the system provided a crucial step in the evolution of home gaming, taking the focus away from machines dedicated to a single game to a console that could play whatever compatible game was clicked into its cartridge slot.The machine was conceived by members of an engineering think-tank, Cyan Engineering, which Atari purchased in 1973 to specifically research and develop video game systems. Under the codename ‘Stella’, the team worked to create a complete CPU capable of reading whatever code was fed into it, a drastic move away from the custom logic-based hardware that was on the market at the time. However, work was slow and, in August 1976, Fairchild Semiconductor released its own CPU-based system, the Video Entertainment System. Atari was still some way off having a machine ready for mass production.Not only that, but the company did not have sufficient cash-flow to be able to complete the system quickly. Realizing they had to act fast, founder Nolan Bushnell turned to Warner Communications for investment, selling the company to them for $28 million on the understanding that work to finish Stella would be expedited. The next year Stella, initially named the Atari Video Computer System, later changed again to the Atari 2600 after its manufacturing part number CX2600, was released in America for $249. It had cost around $100 million to develop. Initially the reaction to the machine was lacklustre, the pressure of what looked like a grand failure resulting in the departure of Nolan Bushnell from the company in 1978. This feature is an extract from Simon Parkin’s book, An Illustrated History of 151 Videogames.
The following year, however, through a combination of word of mouth and the release of a home version of Space Invaders, the machine gained widespread popularity, selling a million units in that year alone. With its 8-bit, 1.19 MHz speed processor and palette of 16 colours, the Atari 2600 was far from the most powerful console on the market at the time, technically surpassed by both the Bally Astrocade and Mattel’s Intellivision. However, Atari’s talent was in software development, and through a steady trickle of compelling, influential titles, the company began converting those who had previously eyed home gaming with scepticism into gamers. Originally intended by Atari to be a short-term product, marketed for one or two holiday seasons, game sales soon made it clear that home video gaming’s future lay in a software-led business model. Formative hits such as Pitfall!, Defender, Asteroids and Missile Command created a snowball effect in sales, with each success selling more hardware which in turn sold more software, an upward spiral of success that every video game hardware manufacturer since has sought to replicate.Ports of arcade titles sat alongside games based on licensed names such as Star Wars, G.I. Joe and James Bond, with each success story attracting the attention of yet another Hollywood studio or television company wanting to expand their empire into this brave, new frontier. However, by 1982 the system’s software library had reached saturation point, with developers having squeezed the potential from the machine by falling back on uninspired ports, such as Pac-Man, or substandard games, such as E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. With no Nintendo quality control system in place the ratio of good games to broken ones eroded consumer confidence in the machine and its library of games. In a few years, success had shifted Atari from a diminutive, agile, fun-obsessed outfit, to a dry corporation apathetic toward developing a follow-up to their once innovative hardware. In 1984 Warner sold Atari to Commodore Business Machines who immediately closed the game publishing wing. With it, the Atari 2600 died.
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May 30th, 2014, 00:21 Posted By: wraggster
The only vector-based home console with an integrated screen, GCE’s Vectrex remains desirable and iconic today, decades after its debut and subsequent decline. Where most systems of the era offered embryonic games with rudimentary visuals that have aged poorly, Vectrex’s brilliant white vector lines that light up its black screen like laser comets remain irresistibly chic.The system, on the market for just two years, was home to just 30-odd commercially available games. The Vectrex’s rise and fall exactly mirrored that of the wider video game industry, enjoying the boom success of the early 1980s before suffering the obliterating crash of 1984.The original idea for the machine derived from Western Technologies. One of the company’s employees, John Ross, bought a one-inch CRT screen, the type used in aircraft heads-up displays, in a surplus store. He brought it in to work with the idea of using the technology to develop a prototype handheld game. Kenner, best known for its range of Star Wars figurines, saw the potential and partnered with Western to build a prototype using a 5-inch screen, before promptly pulling out of the deal. Weeks later, GCE stepped in, changed the hardware design to accommodate a 9-inch monitor and gave the project the name ‘Mini-Arcade’. This feature is an extract from Simon Parkin’s book, An Illustrated History of 151 Videogames.
By January 1982 the console was nearing completion but GCE had no games. Ed Smith, Western Technologies’ head of engineering, began to recruit students from Georgia Tech College, setting them the challenge to create 12 games by June that year. One staff member recalls visiting the warehouse at the time: “One programmer used to snort whipped cream gas all night while programming. [People would] trip on the cans when coming in for work the next morning. There were cases of them all over the floor. GCE management apparently put up with this…” The technique appeared to work. By April the games Mine Storm, Berzerk, Rip Off and Star Trek were all complete and, following a brainstorming session, the console’s name was changed to Vectrex.Despite the relatively high price point, the system sold well. In March 1983, the board game developer Milton Bradley bought GCE, just before the market crashed in 1984. MB reportedly lost around $31 million on the Vectrex as the bottom fell out of the market while Atari allegedly threatened to withhold their games and systems from any distributor that also carried Vectrex products.In recent years, the machine has enjoyed a resurgence of interest thanks to its unique graphical aesthetics. When it comes to vector-based game consoles, the Vectrex has no rival. If you long for a minimalist vector glow to light your living room, there is nowhere else to go.
http://www.edge-online.com/features/...dware-vectrex/
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