Sunday, January 29, 2023
CGA and "Intended", "Incidental" and "Just Plain Wrong" Graphics
Friday, January 13, 2023
The X-Station Optical Drive Emulator : The Key to the Sony PlayStation's Library
The Sony PlayStation (PSX)'s impact on console gaming cannot be understated. It was extremely successful, defining its generation of consoles. It was the first truly successful gaming console to rely on optical discs. It popularized removable memory card storage, which permitted progress or configuration data to be saved for virtually every game. The controller design also saw improvements in the form of dual shoulder buttons for each side and later the dual shock analog sticks. The movement to CDs allowed more games to be published, the US PlayStation library alone amounts to approximately 1,500 distinct games. Exploring the vastness of the PlayStation library on an original PlayStation has now been made relatively easy thanks to the rise of Optical Drive Emulators (ODEs). In today's blog post I am going to talk about the X-Station ODE, a modification which opens your PSX to the vastness of PSX gaming.
Thursday, December 29, 2022
Accelerating your Tandy 1000s
The Tandy 1000s have unique graphics hardware and sound hardware that was supported for a long time. The number of Tandy 1000s was so large that many games from prestige publishers released after 1984 would have support for Tandy 16-color graphics and/or Tandy 3-voice sound. While there were other graphics solutions which provided 16-color full screen graphics at a resolution of 320x200 pixels, only the Tandy 1000 series had any significant support in games. Additionally, the Adlib and other expansion sound cards did not get PC gaming support until September of 1988. During the lifespan of the Tandy 1000s, the system speeds were generally keeping pace with games, but by the end of the 1980s the 1000 line was not getting any faster, but games and applications were becoming increasingly demanding. In this article let's talk about the benefits and drawbacks of installing CPU accelerators in your Tandy 1000s.
Tuesday, December 27, 2022
Drive your Neo Geo Pocket Color to its Limits - The NeoPocket GameDrive
The Neo Geo Pocket Color may not have been a success against the Game Boy Color, but it did put up a fight against Nintendo's mighty handheld system. It had several innovative features for the time, a battery backed clock, a micro-switched 8-way thumbstick and hardware that was not held back by the need to maintain backwards compatibility with a large existing monochrome library. Unfortunately the NGPC only had 90 games released across all regions, so the library is a bit thin. Moreover it can be very expensive to buy many of the best games, some NGPC carts get real pricey. Enter the subject of today's blog post, the NeoPocket GameDrive Flash Cart.
Friday, December 2, 2022
So Many Floppies! - Late DOS/Early Windows Era Installations
Saturday, November 19, 2022
Re-Modding a Game Boy
One day, while browsing through a local collectibles store, I came across some Game Boys. I saw that two of these Game Boys were unusual and decided to bring one home to play with. With this Game Boy I was able to fill a small but nagging hole in my handheld console collection. So in today's blog post, I will discuss an unusual Game Boy to find in the wild and what I did to fix and improve it.
Sunday, September 25, 2022
Atari 400 - An Atari 2600 on Steroids and More
The Atari 400 and Atari 800 were released by Atari in late 1979 as a follow up to the successful Atari Video Computer System (VCS). Unlike the VCS, the 400 and 800 came with keyboards as well as more powerful hardware and more RAM. Having recently acquired an Atari 400, let me talk about some of the issues I have encountered with it.
Sunday, September 11, 2022
Apple II Sound Cards & Gaming - A Niche Precursor to PC-Compatible Sound Cards
The Apple II was distinctive when it was released because it was the first microcomputer and the only one of the "1977 Trinity" of consumer-friendly computers (TRS-80 and Commodore PET being the other two) to come with any kind of audio capabilities built in. Those capabilities were primitive, a speaker that could be clicked in software by the CPU. Other computers followed with sound chips built in like the Atari 400 and 800, the TI 99/4 & 4A, the Commodore VIC-20 and 64 and so on. But the Apple II was more flexible than any of its 8-bit competitors in having expansion slots to allow for less expensive and less bulky expansion options. Eventually games began to look at some of those expansion capabilities, and in this article we will talk about how they explored them in terms of sound.