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.

Thirty years ago today, Sony released the first commercially available Compact Disc player, the CDP-101. It launched alongside 50 CDs in Japan, marking the commercial birth of the widely popular digital audio medium.

Over at TechHive (a new site run by the folks behind PC World), I’ve written an in-depth piece that details the history and impact of the CD as a medium for both audio and computer data. I hope you enjoy it.

Guns don’t kill people. My grimy hands do.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever fired a gun in real life? Do any video games successfully replicate that experience?

A stunningly realistic RCA Studio II gameplay session.

Here’s the box cover of TV Arcade III: Tennis/Squash for the for the RCA Studio II (1977), the world’s second ROM cartridge-based video game console.

The early console, which featured only two numeric keypads for control, was such a dog that I named it the “worst video game console of all time” in a 2009 PC World slideshow. Three years later, I stand by that assessment.

You may be asking yourself why RCA prefaced the game title with “TV Arcade III.” Well, silly, that’s because it was part of a sequence of “TV Arcade” games for the RCA Studio II that started with “I” and ended with “IV.” That’s exactly, I might add, how the ancient Romans would have labeled their video games.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever played an RCA Studio II? What did you think?

“You won’t find a bluer word processor package anywhere…”

Discussion Topic of the Week: What was the first word processor software you ever used?

Quite frankly, Mario is stunned — just stunned — by that potted plant.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Tell us about your most novel experience with Mario Paint. Did you make any music or animations?

Every once and a while, I receive emails from people looking for a certain game, electronic toy, or computer from their distant past. I then pass it on to intrepid VC&G readers to crack the case.

The Clues

Richard writes:

My father’s birthday is fast approaching, and I want to find him one of his classic games from the Commodore 64. Unfortunately, the name has been lost in time and his fuzzy memory, though the details of it remain. He often remarks about the amazing depth given to characters in the game.

The plot was a mystery of some sort, set in various Bulletin Board Systems. Some clues would be several messages back in the board, and various NPCs would post messages to the board at key points in the story. When connecting to a board, it would slide in from right to left, and then wobble slightly as it stabilized. Apparently the game itself was very well built, apparently having rather good word recognition, allowing for normal-ish conversations.

Beyond that, I know very little about the game. Hopefully the you can help me out, I’d really like to see this game for myself, and I’m sure it would bring him a great deal of joy. Hopefully what I have will be enough.

Thanks for any help,
Richard

The Search Begins

It’s up to you to find the object of Richard’s fuzzy memory. Post any thoughts or suggestions in the comments section below. Richard will be monitoring the comments, so if you need to clarify something with him, ask away. Good luck!

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Have a memory of a computer, video game, computer software, or electronic toy you need help identifying? Send me an email describing your memories in detail. Hopefully, the collective genius of the VC&G readership can help solve your mystery.