Lag Testing on a Budget

Keeping input and display latency to a minimum is very important when playing any kind of vintage video game which relies to some extent on reflexes.  There are some methods which can test display lag of any display, like the Time Sleuth or the Leo Bodnar Display Lag Testers.  Other methods may require running the same software on two consoles at the same time or connecting one console to two displays via splitters and adapters.  Testing controller latency often requires wiring up an LED or shooting video of a screen and button pressing at a very high frame rate.  These methods tend to be expensive, but what if we consider an approach that is likely to be inexpensive and perhaps cost you nothing?

Is there a Doctor in the Game Console? - The Venus Turbo Doctor 6M

Taiwan may or may not have been the birthplace of commercial video game piracy, but it certainly has a strong claim to have been its nursery.  When video games skyrocketed in popularity in Southeastern Asia with the Famicom, it seemed as through the entire island of Taiwan wanted to cash in on the efforts of the Japanese.  Taiwan was the first source of unlicensed Famicom clones and pirate cartridges.  But cartridges were expensive to make, even for Taiwan fabs and the larger games were not very profitable to clone.  Then Nintendo handed the pirates a gift, the Famicom Disk System.  But as it turned out this was a gift that kept on giving.  While copying FDS games was child's play for the organized pirates, they saw in the FDS an opportunity to pirate to go beyond games originally released on disk. They created "RAM cartridges", hardware devices that worked with the Famicom and the Disk System to permit cartridge games put on disk to work.  In this blog entry, I will describe my personal experiences with one such device, the Venus Turbo Game Doctor 6M.

Nintendo, Sega and the World Outside Japan and North America - Accommodating Non-English Speakers

Early on, most video games did not need to be translated because the amount of text used in these games was very limited.  Some games, like RPGs, were an exception but by and large most games from the pre-crash era used English when they needed to convey information in the written form.  Even games made by Japanese companies, unless the game was for a Japanese game like Go, Mahjong or Shogi, English was the norm for the simple text messages.  

When console games were large enough to hold a significant amount of text and able totell a story, then for the games that were developed in Japan most or all of the game would tend to use Japanese text.  When these games were released in North America the Japanese text would be translated into English, generally with some simplification for 8-bit and 16-bit console titles.  But when tongues other than English had to be accommodated, things got interesting.