Vintage computing and retrogaming news small enough to eat.

Recent News

• Microsoft Releases Source Code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows
  A great move by Microsoft and the CHM

  “On Tuesday, we dusted off the source code for early versions of MS-DOS and Word for Windows. With the help of the Computer History Museum, we are making this code available to the public for the first time.

• Yoshi’s New Island Out Now on 3DS
  A Nintendo 3DS sequel to the Super NES classic with all-new stages.

  “New island. New adventure. Same awesome Yoshi. The little Mario Bros. are in big trouble. Help Yoshi save the day — with help from cool power-ups, giant Eggdozers, and crazy transformations.

• New Ultima Online Shard Freeshard Open
  by the name of “An Corp”

  “A brand new freeshard for Ultima Online has opened up and it is amazing. T2A era, full-loot, open-world PVP, revamped loot tables, exciting new expansions like the Township/Kingship system, and Order/Chaos/Balance battles.

Cool Links

• Play Zork on an Altair 8800 Clone via Telnet
  and watch the panel lights blink in realtime

  “Logon using your favorite telnet client to: altair.micronick.com on port 23. You can SAVE and RESTORE your Zork game. I suggest using terminal type vt100 or ANSI.

• Magpi: The Micro Arduino Gaming Platform Interface
  A retro portable game console built from scratch

  “Here’s a retro hand-held gaming console I built with my son. It uses an Arduino micro-controller, a small LCD screen, push-buttons, a 3D printed case and home-grown “PC” board. It’s really pretty easy to solder and put together. My son & I wrote two games and a drawing program for it.

• Classic Game Room Reviews the Sega Dreamcast Dreameye Camera
  A neat peripheral many people have forgotten

  “TV phone, video mail and photo mail with your Sega Dreamcast and the Dreameye camera! Hook this up to your Dreamcast and connect to the Japanese Internet in 2000 for some great times!! Records 25 second clips of video from a terrible webcam, but it’s great for laughs.

Submit News

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Today, PC World published my latest slideshow, The Top 1000 Video Games of All Time.

The in-depth piece — split into 1000 separate slides, each with its own paragraph of text — took over two years to create.

You may be asking yourself how one person could create such an epic work. Well, I got a little help from custom algorithms I programmed partially in Haskell — and partially in Minecraft’s redstone circuitry using Boolean algebra.

But I didn’t just rely on computer wizardry. Much self-deliberation went into choosing the order of the items on the list. I argued with myself for hours while sitting on the bench at a local park, on the bus, and in the North Regional Branch of the Wake County Public Library. After being arrested 13 times (twice in the nude), I decided to perform future deliberations in the privacy of my own bathroom. I feel that it made the results more pure.

Here’s a sneak peek at the bottom 11:

1000. Halo (Xbox)
999. Silpheed (IBM PC)
998. Sewermania (TI-99/4A)
997. Quadrapong (Arcade)
996. Section Z (NES)
995. Pooyan (Arcade)
994. New Super Mario Bros. (DS)
993. Popeye: Beach Volleyball (Game Gear)
992. Lloyd the Squirrel (???)
991. Snafu (Aquarius)
990. Descent (PC)

And here’s a selection from somewhere near the middle:

555. Superman (2600)
554. Bioshock Infinite (PC)
553. Slipnosis (iOS)
552. Star Trek: Phaser Strike (Microvision)
551. Farmville (Flash)
550. Deadly Towers (NES)

As for the top 10, you may be in for a surprise. My Haskell program determined with scientific precision that the 10 greatest video games of all time are, in fact, different versions of Ms. Pac-Man:

10. Ms. Pac-Man (Apple iPod)
9. Ms. Pac-Man (Atari 2600)
8. Ms. Pac-Man (TI-99/4A)
7. Ms. Pac-Man (ColecoVision)
6. Ms. Pac-Man (Atari 5200)
5. Ms. Pac-Man (Atari 800)
4. Ms. Pac-Man (IBM PC)
3. Ms. Pac-Man (Intellivision)
2. Ms. Pac-Man (Arcade)
1. Ms. Pac-Man (Atari 7800)

Oddly, my redstone program placed Super Mario Bros. 3 in the top 10 seven times — that’s how good it is. But I can’t do the same game on the same platform in multiple spots, so I compromised. To see the full, final list, you’ll have to check out the slideshow yourself. I hope you enjoy it.

And remember: unlike most of my previous ranked lists, I used computer algorithms to ensure its accuracy, so don’t get mad if you disagree with the list. You’re completely wrong.

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Discussion Topic: What are your top 1000 video games of all time?

“Whispering is for gutless weasels.”

In the early-mid 1990s, Sega experimented with a few electronics items that veered away from mainstream console gaming. Case in point, the IR 7000 PDA, seen here (and don’t forget the Sega Pico).

I’ve never owned an IR 7000, but I have to admit that I wanted one badly back in the day. The thought of sending secret wireless messages to other kids in class (I was 13 at the time this came out) excited me.

Discussion Topic of the Week: In your opinion, what was Sega’s weirdest product?

“Children everywhere will be crushed and digitized by the trophy of power.”

There’s a certain ultra-rare golden NES cartridge out there that originated at Nintendo World Championships 1990. Here’s an advertisement for the event itself on the back of a vintage Nintendo Power magazine from 1990.

Kinda makes you want to go back in time and attend, doesn’t it? Call 1-900-HOT-4NWC to find out more!

Discussion Topic of the Week: Video game competitions: interesting or boring? Debate.

Plays the 200 variations of Tetris that Pajitnov rejected.

I must admit that I wanted this “Pro 200 Super Electronic Handheld Gaming System” upon seeing it in 1998 — even through I knew it was almost certainly a piece of junk. Not to play it, per se, but to collect it and to admire its gloriously gimmicky nature.

If history is any guide, I’m guessing that the Protech Pro 200 didn’t actually ship with 256 (or even 200) built in games. Rather, it likely contained 250 variations on a handful of distinct games — like most “1000-in-1” cheap off-brand multicarts from back in the day.

16 years since its release, I have still never played the Pro 200, so I can’t say if it had any play value. I did find this commercial on YouTube though.

Has anybody out there played one of these?

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s the cheapest, crappiest piece of video game hardware you’ve ever bought (think peripherals too)?

The princess has lost her floatation powers…and Yoshi loves bongs.

My mom saves everything. Case in point, I ran across a mountain of mid-1990s coupon flyers — the kind that arrive stacked in an envelope through the mail — at her house this afternoon while I was looking for some old papers. This particular 30-cents-off coupon for Kraft’s Super Mario Bros. Macaroni and Cheese from 1994 caught my eye. It measures 4.5″ x 7.5″ (for those of you at home keeping notes).

I’ve never eaten Super Mario Bros. mac and cheese, but I bet it was every bit as delicious as the regular noodle variety. And besides — there was an adventure in every bowl.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever eaten any food products based on licensed video game characters?

Just in time for Sochi. Sorry for the page fold.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite winter sport(s) video game? This is mine.

“Stickybear,” in retrospect, is a kinda disgusting name.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite educational video/computer game of all time?

Virtual Boy: The #1 video game console on Mars.

When the Virtual Boy first launched in 1995, I rented the console (yep, the whole console) and a few games from my local Blockbuster store. Prior to that time, I don’t remember Blockbuster offering any other systems for rent; I think it was a joint effort with Nintendo to get the novel machine into people’s hands to try it out. (Later, I also rented a Nintendo 64 and a PlayStation from Blockbuster. But I digress.)

In fact, here are some early digital photos of that Virtual Boy rental, courtesy of my Snappy Video Snapshot. The first, dated 8/29/95, shows one of my cats sleeping in the plastic hard case the Virtual Boy arrived in when rented from Blockbuster. The second shows the Virtual Boy sitting alone on a stool in my room, and the third (dated 8/30/1995) shows my friend playing the Virtual Boy.

The Virtual Boy was an interesting experience — not exactly mind-blowing, but neat. Its display was all red, all the time, but with stereoscopic 3D. I remember that it seemed expensive (MSRP of $179.99, which is $275.26 today when adjusted for inflation), and I remember thinking that if it only cost less, it could be successful.

But as we now know, the Virtual Boy failed to take off. Nintendo killed it the same year it launched in Japan, and the company pulled the plug in the US the following year. At that time I bought a Virtual Boy new in the box on clearance at Toys’R’Us for $30. I still have it; in fact it’s sitting next to me as I write this. Wario Land ranks among my favorite games for the system, and I always wished that this odd 3D console had lived long enough to receive a proper Super Mario Bros. title.

Why did the Virtual Boy fail? I wrote about some of the reasons in this 2009 article on Game Console Design Mistakes for Technologizer. I also briefly analyzed the Virtual Boy for my History of Stereoscopic 3D Gaming slideshow for PC World in 2011.

In some ways, it’s a shame that the system died so early, but in absolute business terms, its early demise made perfect sense. The Virtual Boy was an odd machine without broad appeal — one of Nintendo’s rare flops — but it makes for a heck of a video game collector’s item today as a result.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever played the Virtual Boy? What’s your favorite game for the system?

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See Also: Virtual Boy Vortex (RSOTW, 2012)
See Also: The History of Stereoscopic 3D Gaming (PC World, 2011)

“Don’t cross the line unless you’re serious.”

In all my two decades of video game collecting adventures, I’ve never personally owned a Neo-Geo console. (I have owned a Neo-Geo Pocket Color, but that’s different.) It’s probably because I started collecting with inexpensive systems, games and accessories, and the Neo-Geo line was always scarce and expensive. Also, I was never particularly drawn to the Neo-Geo’s brand of action-heavy arcade games.

So part of me wants to rectify the lack of Neo-Geo in my life, even if only for completion’s sake. But then again, I’ve played the games on emulators for over a decade now, and I’ve been satisfied with that. What do you guys think?

Discussion Topic of the Week: What was your first CD-based video game system?