You say "obsessed" as if it is a bad thing.
8bitdo seems to put out a new product about once a week. They are a retro-focused company and like to design their products around nostalgic design cues. Nintendo is a favorite even for things other than game controllers. 8bitdo has sold things other than gamepads for several years now, and for a keyboard and mouse it is time for me to take a representative sample for a spin. Do these devices…
When IBM released the Personal Computer back in 1981, it gave the buyer two choices for the video output. The buyer could buy a monochrome card and a special high resolution green screen monitor to go with it, or a color card and connect it to a color monitor. The buyer could even run both cards in the same system. If someone was on a tight budget, they could use a monochrome monitor with a color…
Over in China there is an expatriate who goes by the handle of Taki Udon. This American began his public video gaming presence modding Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance systems. Over time he partnered with a local company, Retro Remake, to produce modding products and affordable add-ons for the MiSTer FPGA system. Now he has released a consolized MiSTer called the SuperStation One.…
While the Apple IIgs could connect to a composite display, Apple released a high-quality color RGB monitor specifically designed for the IIgs. This monitor was called the Apple Color RGB Monitor, A2M6014. It was the only color monitor Apple ever released which could accept full analog RGB video signals at the standard 240p/480i resolution (using a 15.7KHz horizontal line frequency). I have…
The laws and customs pertaining succession to the throne in the Kingdom of England were, in normal times, simple. The eldest legitimate surviving son of the monarch automatically succeeded his father on the throne after his father's death. If the monarch did not have surviving sons or grandsons but had surviving brothers, then the eldest of those would rule. The formal name for this succession…
The original Commodore 64 had a pretty long run for a computing platform, released in 1982 and discontinued in 1994. Its fortunes mirrored that of the company which developed it as Commodore achieved its greatest success with the C64 and never quite managed to achieve a similar level of market dominance thereafter. Now there is a new Commodore 64, the Commodore C64 Ultimate, which promises to be…
Neverwinter Nights was released by SSI and America Online in March, 1991 and discontinued on July 19, 1997. This game was an adaptation of SSI's Gold Box engine to support online multiplayer. The Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 1st Edition ruleset were used as a basis for the engine. It is notable as the first graphical massively multiplayer online role playing game. The engine on which it was built…
Wizardry is the first role playing game to make a substantial, widespread impact on video gaming. First released for the Apple II in 1981, it spawned many, many ports, sequels and spinoffs. Its origins tend to be obscured by later releases and re-releases, so in this blog article I will discuss what made the features of Wizardry as it was first released to the public so interesting. Read more »…
When Dungeons and Dragons was released in 1974, the presentation was very hobbyist-oriented. The box containing the three little brown books was serviceable enough but the woodgrain pattern and the less than professional artwork on the cover or inside the booklets, combined with the near-inscrutability of the early rules and limited distribution undoubtedly limited its appeal. Further products…
The United States Postal Service offers a shipping option called Media Mail. Media Mail is a popular way to ship certain types of goods through the mail because it is cheap and offers a tracking number. It is not the fasted form of shipping but many buyers are prepared to wait an extra day or two or three for their package to be delivered. Media Mail allows printed material, books, periodicals,…
The 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon was a phenomenon which brought the TMNT from an important independent comic book to a much wider audience. The first season of five episodes was produced and aired in December of that year. It was produced by Murakami/Wolf/Swenson and ran for 10 seasons, ending in 1996. The series ran for 193 episodes, and in most of them they opened with a very catchy…
Courtesy of Wikipedia, Photo by Muband Three times Nintendo released a product where you could write new games to existing media. The first was the Famicom Disk System, where users could bring in their disks to Disk Writer kiosks in stores and have new games rewritten to the floppy disks. This system began in 1986 and was modestly successful, newly written games were cheaper than buying either new…
eBay can suck to use. I have bought a bunch of comic books recently from many sellers. On August 13 I bought many books and all but one shipped within days. Then on August 26-31 I bought a fair number more and again all shipped within days. About two weeks and receiving no shipping notifications about the one August 13 book, I initiated a request to cancel the order through the eBay system. The…
For decades, if you wished to have two computers communicate over any length of distance, you often only had one option, a analog telephone-based modem. The modem allowed for communication over telephone lines, utilizing a technology that was over a century old by the time it became accessible in the 1980s. Over time speeds became faster from 300 baud to 1200, 2400, 4800, 9600, 14.4K, 28.8K, 33.6K…
Last year the company known as ModRetro released an FPGA-based Game Boy and Game Boy Color handheld console. Those consoles were advertised as limited editions and sold out on the ModRetro website. I bought and reviewed one and had an overall favorable opinion of the device. Now eight months have passed and ModRetro is releasing not only a new batch of consoles but also accessories for all…
Number 100: Gradius II - Number 1: Dragon Quest III To commemorate the Famicom's 20th anniversary, Famitsu released a special DVD celebrating the console and its games. The main feature on the disc is a top 100 countdown, listing the most popular Famicom games. The list is a fascinating look into the tastes of the Famicom's original audience and the only one of its kind. Let's break it down today.…
To those people familiar with the MS-DOS command prompt, have you ever wondered how similar tasks are accomplished with non-PC compatible systems? Well, I am one of those people and I have wondered, so I have written this blog article to compare common disk operations with the DOS for the IBM PC, the Apple II and the Commodore 64 (and VIC-20) to compare how these tasks might or might not be…
The Criterion Collection is a well-known boutique distributor of aesthetically-interesting films on physical media. The company releases films that have had some significant artistic or cultural merit and has released well-over 1,000 films on disc. Its releases span the world's cinema, it has distributed films from every civilized continent on the planet. Japanese films are no exception and of…
In the calendar year of 1986 Tandy introduced two all-in-one computers, the Tandy 1000 EX and the Tandy Color Computer 3. Both were competitively priced at $799.00 and $219.95, respectively. At first the budget-conscious consumer may have chosen the CoCo 3 over the EX. By the next year the price of the EX had dropped by $100 while the Tandy 1000 HX took its prior price. At the same time the CoCo 3…
The 1977 Trinity, Courtesy of Wikipedia, Image by Timothy Colegrove Consider that you have been transported back in time to the heady and hot summer of 1977. You are wanting one of these new "personal computers" that you see advertised in Popular Mechanics and Byte Magazine. Maybe you've seen an ad from Radio Shack. Perhaps you saw a flyer from that pocket calculator company called Commodore. Or…
Courtesy of Wikipedia Tandy Corporation's first home computer was the TRS-80, released in 1977. The TRS-80 was fairly affordably priced for its time but limited to monochrome text and extremely blocky semigraphics. 1979 saw the release of the TRS-80 Model II, a business machine with an 8" floppy disk drive incompatible with the previous computer or the budget of a middle-class family. With color…
As regular readers of this blog should no doubt be aware of by now, I have had a resurgent interest in comic books. There is nothing quite like holding and reading stapled pieces of folded paper together that tell a story with pictures and word balloons. Recently I have discussed both the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Cerebus the Aardvark . Now let's compare a pair of recent authorized…
Since I have gone through the early years of TMNT I thought I would touch upon some highlights of one of the comics which inspired TMNT, Cerebus the Aardvark. Cerebus was created by one David Victor Sim with issue #1 premiering in December, 1977. The book ended with issue #300 in March, 2004. The comic was self-published and Dave Sim set up his own company, Aardvark-Vanaheim, to publish the comic.…
The Classic or non-Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game had a remarkably long life. Arguably first introduced with the Basic Set in July, 1977, products were made for the Classic game line until 1996. Unlike other editions of the game, the Classic game did not remain almost immutable and unchanged throughout its lifetime. In this blog article we will consider how the game evolved over time. Read…
Crowdfunding is a very useful tool to help a creative, whether that creative is a single artist, a pair of complementary inventors or a small group of designers, obtain access to the money needed to produce something and bring it to people willing to buy it. Some campaigns become very successful, some just barely meet their funding goals and some fail to get funded. Today we are looking what can…