You don’t have to check your calendar; you know, instinctively, what time of year it is. You get that warm tingling feeling in your gut that grows stronger as the big day approaches — the greatest day of the year. You’re a Halloween freak.

Some video game fans have a tough time figuring out what costume to wear on All Hallows’ Eve, so as per tradition, I figured I’d help them out and provide some detailed suggestions geared towards the gaming enthusiast. Any of the ten costumes listed below is guaranteed to make you popular at the office Halloween party, on the street begging for candy, or anywhere in between.

[ Continue reading VC&G’s Halloween Video Game Costume Ideas (2007) » ]

How many of these games have you played?

If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.

It happens to the best of us.

How many of these puppies do you have sitting around? A fellow on eBay is selling a lot of 36. I’ll have to admit: I have a box of a few dozen myself.

The object in question, of course, is the once-essential manual RF switch, commonly known as a “TV/GAME” switch. Such switches were used to alternate between RF video/audio input from a video game system or home computer and a broadcast (or cable) TV antenna signal. They went the way of the dodo in the mid-1980s — first in Japan with the introduction of Nintendo’s innovative automatic RF switch box (it came packaged with every Famicom produced from 1983-1993), and then in the US around 1985 with the introduction of the NES (which included an automatic switch box with every unit sold). Later, RF switches in general became endangered once nearly all consumer TV sets started shipping with separate A/V jacks for composite video and stereo audio. The choice was natural, as video quality through an RF antenna input is inferior to a composite video connection.

Even among collectors, manual TV/GAME switches are mostly useless these days because most of us try to make at least composite (or better) video connections to our TVs, either via special cables or modifications to the systems themselves. Still, if you want to play classic machines like the Atari VCS without video hacks, you’ll probably need to use one.

Does anybody out there collect these things? We’d love to hear from you.

These two ads appeared in the same magazine. I found it amusing.

If you use this image on your site, please support “Retro Scan of the Week” by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry. Thanks.

[ In Jonathan Signor’s first contribution to VC&G, he describes an incredible find that any collector of vintage games can appreciate. ]

For those of us who strive to remember or rediscover vintage computers and video games, it is rewarding to see how far we have come in such a short amount of time. However, this hobby has one disadvantage: you generally can’t walk into a used game store and find an obscure, twenty year-old title. You must go out of your way (and usually pay a hefty price) to find something interesting.

I keep track of the Computer, Electronics, and Toys “For Sale” listings of my local Craigslist through RSS feeds of each section. A few weeks ago I saw someone was selling a Fairchild Channel F, with 25 games and game carry case. I emailed the seller and we set up a place and time to meet. He advised me that the Channel F wasn’t working at the time, but I still wanted to buy the system and add it to my collection. Since I didn’t know much about the Channel F at the time, I didn’t really pay too much attention to what games were included.

[ Continue reading New Fairchild Channel F Prototypes Discovered » ]

According to the Associated Press, the smiley emoticon, i.e. :-), turns twenty-five years old tomorrow. Scott E. Fahlman created and introduced the symbol on a Carnegie Mellon BBS in a message dated 11:44 AM on September 19, 1982. The online world has been littered with the smiley and its prolific progeny ever since.

Although I have friends that swear off emoticons, I am definitely guilty of ample smiley usage over the last fourteen years. I typically use the concatenated, sans-nose version, :), which is quicker to type. The smiley is an important, albeit understated, tool for easing tensions during heated discussions, or for simply conveying a bit of happiness through a text-based digital medium. Interestingly enough, Fahlman first proposed the smiley as a way to denote jokes in a discussion about online humor. You can read Fahlman’s original message on Carnegie Mellon’s Smiley website.

The Smiley Family

In tribute to the birth of the smiley, I present to you now a thoroughly incomplete list of smileys plucked from the wilds of the Internet. Check out “The Canonical Smiley List” if you’d like to see more.

The Basic Smileys
 
    :-)     The standard smiley
    :-(     Sad smiley
    ;-)     Winking smiley
    :-P     Sticking tongue out
    8-)     Cool smiley wearing shades
    :-o     Shocked smiley
    :-D     Big grin
 
Some Caricatures
 
    =):-)    Uncle Sam
    :-)B     Dolly Parton
    :-.)     Madonna
    :/7)     Cyrano de Bergerac
       )     Cheshire Cat
     o-)     Cyclops
    =:o]     Bill Clinton
    B-|      Batman
    =*0      Felix the Cat
 
Specialized Smileys
 
    /:-)     With a beret
    d:-)     With a baseball hat
    {:-)     Hair parted down the middle
    }:-)     With toupee in an updraft
    (-)      Needs a haircut
    `:-)     One eyebrow raised
    %-\      Hungover
    %*@:-(   So hungover my head hurts...
    X-(      Just died

Feel free to share your own favorite smileys with us. Keep in mind, though, that this blog software intercepts certain smileys and turns them into little yellow graphical faces.

From 1983 – 2002, Stewart Cheifet hosted The Computer Chronicles, a public television show devoted to important topics in the field of personal computing. Now viewers can download or stream 560 episodes of the series on their computers from the Internet Archive, with episodes devoted to everything from the Original Macintosh (1984) to the Y2K bug (2000).

I’ve watched a few episodes myself, and they provide a unique contemporary view into the world of vintage computing when it was still the cutting edge. Many of the episodes are co-hosted by the late Gary Kildall, so you rabid Killdall fans out there will quickly get your fill. Go check it out; I highly recommend it.

In 1989, the TurboGrafx-16 made its American debut with a lackluster pack-in title, Keith Courage in Alpha Zones. Included within the Keith Courage game was an approximately 4.5″ x 4.5″, eight page mini comic book setting the story for the game.

Keith Courage was originally based on a Japanese cartoon called Spirit Hero Wataru, but, in line with conventional thinking of the day, NEC felt that the crazy Japanese story needed to be dumbed down for American audiences. Let’s take a look.

[ Continue reading [ Retro Scan Special Edition ] Keith Courage in Alpha Zones Mini Comic » ]