Archive for May, 2014

[ Retro Scan of the Week ] Super Mario Kart Photo

Monday, May 26th, 2014

Benj's Super Mario Kart Photo Screenshot - circa 1992

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.

[ From a personal photo by Benj Edwards, circa 1992]

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

[ Retro Scan of the Week ] The Commodore 64

Monday, May 19th, 2014

Commodore 64 Advertisement It’s the Commodore 64. ‘Nuff said.

I’ve covered the Commodore 64 quite a bit over the years, including taking one apart for PC World back in 2008 and spending a week working with one in honor of its 30th anniversary in 2012.

But I don’t think I’ve ever posted a plain ‘ole ad for the Commodore 64 itself. Until now, that is. Here’s a colorful one that graced the back of many computer magazine issues back in 1983.

[ From Personal Computing – November 1983, back cover]

Discussion Topic of the Week: When did you first get a Commodore 64? Tell us the story.

[ Newsbits ] May 15, 2014

Wednesday, May 14th, 2014

VC&G Newsbits Newspaper Logo

VC&G Newsbits Logo

Vintage computing and retrogaming news small enough to eat.

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.

Submit News

If you want me to include something on a future Newsbits column, send me an email with “[Newsbits]” in the subject line.

[ Retro Scan of the Week ] Mad: Computer Virus Edition

Monday, May 12th, 2014

Mad Super Special Summer 1991 Computer Virus Edition CoverHis missing tooth is a hanging chad

I found this in my old collection of Mad magazines. In 1991, computer viruses were relatively novel — although I did lose all of my early BBS data to a malicious virus just one year later (see the story in that link).

[ From Mad Super Special – Summer 1991, cover]

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever had a computer virus that wiped some or all of your data?

[ Retro Scan of the Week ] Eye of the Beholder

Monday, May 5th, 2014

Eye of the Beholder magazine advertisement 1991How 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.

[ From Video Games & Computer Entertainment – January 1991, p.175]

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

[ Newsbits ] May 1, 2014

Thursday, May 1st, 2014

VC&G Newsbits Newspaper Logo

VC&G Newsbits Logo

Vintage computing and retrogaming news small enough to eat.

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

Submit News

If you want me to include something on a future Newsbits column, send me an email with “[Newsbits]” in the subject line.