Atari Flashback 2 - The Only Flashback Worth Anything

While browsing in one of my local thrift stores, I encountered an item I had been wanting for a long time, the Atari Flashback 2.  This mini-console with its built in games had interested me ever since it first game out.  Even though I already had a light-sixer 2600 and a Harmony Cartridge, I still wanted one of these.  The box was marked at $24.99, but the seal seemed to be still intact, so the purchase was a no-brainer for me.  In this blog post, let me describe the system, its capabilities and talk about its included games and its legacy.  This review may be 12 years too late, but I could not let this opportunity pass without comment.

Shenzhen Solitaire - A Review of 2017's New Commercial DOS Game

I have a confession to make.  Until last month, I have never backed a kickstarter project.  I have talked about kickstarter projects on at least one prior occasion on this blog, but I was speaking from afar.  The usual excuses apply, the good reward tiers cost too much, the project carried considerable risk or the product offered just was not sufficiently personally compelling to persuade me to part with my hard-earned money.  Last month came a game which seemed like a good choice for a kickstarter project, Shenzhen Solitaire.  This is a new PC-compatible DOS game for the year 2017.  The price was only $10, the game had already been written and was going to be delivered on a floppy disk, so I was sold.  (Really living on the edge here in terms of crowdfunding risk here :) It was delivered to me yesterday, so let's review the game.

Basic Fun for Retro Gamers - The Stealth Invasion of the Mini-Arcades

In the late 1970s, the handheld electronic game was born with Mattel Auto Race.  More games like Football, Baseball, Basketball and Soccer followed and they were successful. These games ran on a microcontroller and used red LEDs to represent objects.  Companies like Nintendo followed up with the Game & Watch series, which could display much more detailed objects using monochromatic, fixed-pattern LCD displays.  Coleco provided innovation in its mini-arcade games using Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) technology, allowing for color displays that could be viewed in the dark. Milton Bradley introduced the first handheld system with programmable cartridges in 1979 with the Microvision.

The Microvision had the advantage of having individually addressable pixels instead of fixed patterns, but at 16x16 pixels the types of games it could play was extremely limited.  The Game and Watch series and later, cheaper handhelds like the Tiger Electronics' games survived long after Milton Bradley and Coleco got out of the gaming market.  1989's Game Boy, with its 160x144 resolution screen, programmable microprocessor, PPU and APU and 16KB of RAM made the fixed-screen LCD games obsolete.  When the Atari Lynx introduced color and backlighting later that year, not even the color VFD units could compete.  But we are not here to talk about the programmable consoles today, today we are going to take a look at more modern, fixed LCD games released by a company called The Bridge Direct under its Basic Fun brand label.

Turbo EverDrive 2.x and the PC Engine - The Affordable NEC Experience

 Over two years ago, a friend of mine kindly let me borrow a Turbo Duo and a Turbo EverDrive.  I wrote about the experience here : http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/04/turbo-duo-issues-and-solutions.html  I had to give it back (and the Framemeister which came with it), not without a good deal of sadness.  I vowed that I would find a way to play NEC Turbo games again on real hardware/  Now, I have acquired an affordable, upgradeable solution.  Let me talk about it and about plans for future upgrades.

Rise From Your Grave : The Game Boy Interface

The Game Boy Player (GBP) is a genuine Game Boy Advance (GBA) console that attaches to a Nintendo GameCube (NGC),  It allows you to play Game Boy (DMG/MGB), Game Boy Color (GBC/CGB) and GBA games.  The device fit on one of the expansion ports on the underside of the NGC and could be screwed into it for a permanent attachment.  It was a very popular purchase, essentially the Super Game Boy 1/2 (SGB) two generations later.  Unfortunately, the GBP does not boot or do anything without the Official Boot Disc (OBD) that came with the system.  While the GBP is frequently sold with a NGC, the disc was often lost.  Burning a replacement disc involves finding an image, modding the NGC with a modchip to bypass its copy protection.  Relatively few people have the skill or the inclination to do that.  However, there is an alternative solution these days, and it is a magnificent one.  In this blog entry, I am going to describe my experiences with the Game Boy Interface (GBI) software.

The 1541 Ultimate II+ Flash Cart - Running Carts and Disks Images on the C64

My friend Cloudshatze generously ordered me an 1541 Ultimate II+ Flash Cart (U2+).  The 1541 Ultimate flash cart series has been around for quite a few years, but the U2+ is the latest iteration of the device.  It was released in December, 2016.  In this blog entry I will give information about it and my experiences with it.

Unusual Film Formats on Blu-ray

Blu-ray disc may not have been as successful as DVDs, but its capabilities have allowed it to embrace and do some justice to unusual film formats.  Let's discuss some of them.  For screenshots, I will refer the reader to the Blu-ray.com article with the appropriate links (when available), which has excellent, multiple full-HD screenshots for most of the films I will be discussing here.  All Blu-ray covers are taken from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk with one exception noted below.

EverDrive GBA X5 - The Ultimate GBA Flashcart

In July of 2016, Krikzz finally released his long anticipated EverDrive flash cart for the Game Boy Advance.  He called it the EverDrive GBA X5 and sells it for $99.99 on his site and through his authorized vendors.  I bought mine on his annual Black Friday sale for 20% off, so it ended up costing me $87.00, shipping to the USA (from Ukraine) included.


The "X5" in the name represents a new branding of his product lines.  His new products will be released with an X3, X5 and X7 designation.  Each designation indicates the feature support of the flash cart relative to a desired feature set for flash carts.  The designation is not tied to the products released for any particular console.  For example, the Mega EverDrive X7 has save state support whereas the X5 and X3 do not.  Furthermore, the MegaEverDrive X7 and X5 support saving games without resetting the console whereas the X3 requires pressing reset to save or you lose your save games.  Krikzz has not officially used the X designation for his products except those released for the GBA and Sega Genesis.  There is no such thing as a GBA X7 or X3 and Krikzz has no current plans to make any other GBA flash carts.

Boulder Dash on the Atari 2600 - Beginning or Continuing a Long Journey

BD2600 - Title Screen

In late 2011, a new homebrew cartridge was announced for the Atari 2600.  This would be a port of Boulder Dash, the classic computer game originally developed on the Atari 800 home computer by Pieter Liepa and Chris Gray.  Their game was bought by First Star Software, which published it for the Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, Apple II and IBM PC & PCjr. computers in 1984 as well as for the Colecovision.   FSS also published the sequel, Boulder Dash II : Rockford's Revenge and Boulder Dash Construction Kit.  FSS's other well-known game series is the Spy vs. Spy games.

Boulder Dash was very popular, with the game being ported officially or unofficially to many different platforms.  The Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, Epoch Super Cassette Vision, Game Boy, MSX, NES, PC-8801 and ZX Spectrum all received officially licensed ports. Except for a period from around 1991 to 2001, there has rarely been a year gone by without a release or re-release of Boulder Dash in some officially licensed form.  Today it can be purchased on mobile platforms.

Famicom Homebrew : So Close, Yet So Far

NES homebrew has been around for a very, very long time.  Chris Covell's Solar Wars, which is the first complete NES game developed independently, came out in October, 1999.  This was a mere four years after the NES was officially discontinued in 1995.  In those days, the Nesticle was the emulator of choice for playing NES games, but was very inaccurate at emulating the hardware.  Nonetheless, Solar Wars established an important precedent by working on real Nintendo hardware.

Unfortunately, if you wanted to play Solar Wars back in 1999, you had to modify an existing NES cartridge. Fortunately it uses a common PCB, but not everyone had access to an EPROM programmer and soldering and desoldering tools.  The next step was the release of the first homebrew cartridge the Garage Cart, was released by Joey Parsell (Memblers) in 2005.  It cost $42.00 and included Solar Wars and two other small games.  While it still used a donor board, it was significant in that you could purchase one and play it on your real NES without any programming or soldering hassles.  

Metro ED500 DataVac - A Verse Review

The Metro ED500 DataVac 500-Watt 120 volt 0.75-HP Electric Blower Duster :

It will blow quite strong,
It will blow rather long,
Enjoy someday the money you will save,
No cans burying you into an early grave,
With nifty attachments to spare,
Away will fly the dust and hair,
Computers and gadgets clean up swell,
But it heats up like hell, and "burnt rubber" fairly conveys its smell.

Nuby Game Light - Best Contemporary Light Source for the Game Boy

The Nuby Light alongside the Game Boy

The Game Boy was better than its competitors in many ways, more compact, longer battery life, better sound (against Game Gear), more buttons (against Game Gear), higher resolution (against Lynx), lower price, first to market, superior pack-in game.  Otherwise, the screen was its achilles heel : poor contrast, four color monochrome, difficulty in displaying fast moving objects and non back-lit.

Today we have mods that can fix most of the Game Boy's screen problems.  Backlight kits can be installed and the contrast issues can be dramatically improved with a bivert mod.  However, these innovations were not available during the monochrome Game Boy's official lifespan (1989-2003).  You had to put up with the screen, and the best you could do was either buy a light peripheral or play your games on the non-portable Super Game Boy.

Manos : The Versions of Fate

Manos : The Hands of Fate is one of the most extraordinary bad movies ever made.  It has had a surprisingly long history for a film that, by all accounts, should have been relegated to an El Paso urban legend.  In this blog entry, I will identify the most well-known versions of the film and their releases to date.

Versions of the Film

1.  Original Theatrical Release

Originally Released : November 15, 1966 at the Capri Theater in El Paso, Texas.

The versions that are available are at least two generations from the source material.  The film was shot on 16mm color reversal stock, giving a positive (natural) image.  From there, a blow up 35mm internegative was created with the soundtrack added, and from it 16mm and 35mm positive release prints were created from the internegative.

Manos was shot without any sound and used the full area of the 16mm film frame.  Full frame 16mm or 35mm has an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, but the academy ratio is 1.37:1, mainly to account for the optical soundtrack on the side and the thicker borders between frames.  The resulting camera image had to be cropped to fit within the smaller confines of the academy ratio when the soundtrack was added so it could be played in theaters.  The film was edited in four to six hours, which is a very short period of time and allowed mistakes to remain in the picture.

Voices were dubbed in later in a studio by Hal Warren, John Reynolds, Tom Neyman and William Bryan Jennings and one unknown female voice actor.  There are eight distinct female speaking roles (Margaret, Debbie, the first three of the Masters Wives, the two women at the end, the makeout woman) compared to six male speaking roles (Michael, Torgo, the Master, the two Deputy Sheriffs and the makeout man).

2.  Mystery Science Theater 3000 Version

Originally Broadcast : January 30, 1993

The film was apparently taken from a box of tapes of public domain films and projected on the screen while Joel and the Bots would sit in front and riff on the movie.  The quality of the film itself is poor and not helped by the fact that it is being projected from videotape.  Of the film, 51:13 appears to be used.  The rest of the time is used by the Hired Part 2 short, the host segments and the transitions, commercial breaks and mST3K credits.

The riffers here are Joel Hodgson (as Joel Robinson), Trace Beaulieu (as Crow T. Robot) and Kevin Murphy (as Tom Servo).  Also appearing in the episode are Trace Beaulieu (as Dr. Clayton Forrester), Frank Conniff (as TV's Frank), Jim Mallon (as Gypsy) and Mike Nelson (as Torgo).

3.  Rifftrax Live! Version

Originally Performed Live : August 16, 2012

The film is taken from Ben Solovey's 16mm print of the original theatrical release, but the color has been restored independently of Solovey.  Unlike the MST3K version, the entirety of the film appears to be used for this riff.  The riffers here are Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy (returning to the scene of the cinematic crime) and Bill Corbett.  The live event was recorded for posterity.

4.  Restored Workprint Version

Released on DVD and Blu-ray : October 13, 2015

This was based off the materials found in 2011 and painstakingly restored by Ben Solovey

This version combines the 16mm positive camera footage with the optical soundtrack from Solovey's print of the 16mm theatrical release version and a few film clips of the driving sequences which were not included in the workprint film.  Quality-wise it will not get any better than this because there are no dupes being used.

It is missing the infamous visible clapboard error when the makeout couple are shown for the second time because those frames were not included in the workprint materials in Solovey's possession.  There are a few dissolves (the fade out and fade in combinations) in the theatrical release that could not be recreated for the workprint because of a lack of suitable film material on each side of the dissolve.  Approximately 14 seconds may have been left out of this version compared to the original theatrical release.

Optical Disc Releases of the Film

Mystery Science Theater 3000 Manos: Hands of Fate

Released : November 20, 2001
Distributor : Rhino Home Video
Format : DVD (earlier released on VHS)
Version : Mystery Science Theater 3000 Version
Extras : MST3K Outtakes

This was one of the first MST3K episodes released on DVD, and in these days Rhino released each episode separately.  This release is Out of Print, and has been superseded (except possibly for the hour long outtakes from the making of this episode).

Manos: The Hands of Fate

Released : October 7, 2003
Distributor : Alpha Video
Format : DVD
Version : Original Theatrical Release 1:08:39
Extras : None (Alpha Video Catalog and Chapter stops do not count)

This DVD starts with a shot of the family in the car.  The MST3K version starts a few seconds earlier, but the original theatrical release starts a few seconds still.  This release is still in print and representative of the so-called "public domain" releases of the film.  Strictly for people on a severely limited budget.

The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection - The Essentials

Released : August 31, 2004
Distributor : Rhino Home Video
Format : DVD
Version : Mystery Science Theater 3000 Version
Extras : Released in a two disc set with the MST3K Episode Santa Claus Conquers the Martians

This disc has no extras and is out of print.  Unfortunately, the MST3K episode of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is not to be found elsewhere in print on disc.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: Manos The Hands of Fate Special Edition

Released : September 13, 2011
Distributor : Shout! Factory
Format : DVD
Version : Mystery Science Theater 3000 Version and Original Theatrical Release
Extras : Interviews with Joel Hodgson, Frank Conniff, Mary Jo Pehl and Trace Beaulieu, MST3K Short Hired! Part One, Mystery Science Theater Hour wraps, "Jam Handy and You" featurette, "Hotel Torgo" documentary

This release comes with two discs and is in print and includes the very informative Hotel Torgo documentary. The documentary features Bernie Rosenblum, who was a crew member on the film and also the male half of the makeout couple.  The uncut Original Theatrical Release can be found on the second disc.  For the show, the extras and the price, its a very good deal.

I have started to become an Amazon affiliate, so I will be able to earn a tiny bit if a purchase is made through a link.  Here is the link : Mystery Science Theater 3000: Manos The Hands Of Fate

Rifftrax Live! Manos The Hands of Fate

Released : July 12, 2014
Distributor : Legend Films
Format : DVD (streaming and SD or HD digital download available)
Version : Rifftrax Live! Version

Extras : Outtakes from film riffed by Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, DVD only, Extra riffs of shorts "Welcome Back Norman" and At Your Fingertips: Cylinders"

This is a release of the recording of the live rifftrax session described above.  The outtakes were taken from the Harold P. Warren Family Trust, which is owned and operated by his son, Joe Warren.  I haven't watched the whole of the riffing, but the rifftrax guys do care about the quality of the films they riff if the film is included.  The riffing for Welcome Back Norman is pretty good.  RiffTrax: MANOS The Hands of Fate

Manos: The Hands of Fate


























Released : October 13, 2015
Distributor : Synapse Films
Format : DVD or Blu-ray (separate releases)
Version : Restored Workprint Version 1:09:27 and Original Theatrical Release (a.k.a. Grindhouse Edition, Blu-ray only), 1:09:41
Extras : Audio Commentary, Hands: The Fate of Manos Featurette, Restoring the Hands of Fate Feaurette, FELT: The Puppet Hands of Fate Featurette

There is not too much to say about this disc that has not been said above.  The picture quality on the Workprint version is amazing, and the sound quality is also very good.  The featurettes are well-worth the time.

Manos: The Hands of Fate [Blu-ray]

Manos: The Hands of Fate

Recommendations

If you want the best copy of the unadulterated film around, go for the Synapse releases.  Alpha Video's DVD has been totally superseded by Synapse's DVD.  The Synapse Blu-ray is superior, so you should obtain if you have a way to watch or rip Blu-rays.

As far as the riffed version go, if you are a Joel fan, you should get the MST3K Special Edition, while Mike fans should seek out the Rifftrax' DVD.  Alternatively, you can find the MST3K episode on YouTube for free (annotated) and the Rifftrax' version on Hulu.  The older MST3K releases likely command high prices because they are out of print.

Retro City Rampage 486 - A Review of a "New" MS-DOS Game

I knew about Retro City Rampage back when its developer, Brian Provinciano, was calling it Grand Theftendo and trying to port it to the NES.  However, he decided to continue development on the PC and eventually released it on Steam and several consoles.  In its released form, it may have had the feel of an NES or MS-DOS game, but under its hood it was all modern.  Thus it did not really grab my attention and games with no physical release do not either.  In fact, the only Steam games I have ever purchased were the Special Editions of Monkey Island 1 & 2 and I value them today only for their ability to build the Monkey Island 1 & 2 Ultimate Talkie Editions.

When it was announced that not only would RCR receive a true port to the MS-DOS platform as Retro City Rampage 486 but also come in a boxed version, my interest was piqued.  Having a physical release of a game with no need to run a Steam installer and no concern that upgrading to the latest Windows will break the game interested me a great deal.  I was suitably impressed that the game came on a floppy disk.  I had never purchased a physical retro "homebrew" style game before, but the price was $29.99 and it came with a Steam key for the extras, so I eventually decided to take the plunge.  The total came to $34.99 with shipping.

MS-DOS as a gaming platform began with the introduction of the IBM PC back in August of 1981.  The first developed PC game was Donkey.bas, which came on the PC-DOS 1.0 diskette.  It relied on IBM Personal Computer BASIC to run, but it came on a disk, so it required DOS as well.  While during the first few years of PC gaming many games did not need MS-DOS to run, eventually the convenience of using MS-DOS for disk access and the necessity of using it for hard drive access made it ubiquitous by the end of the 1980s.  Until Windows 95 became firmly established as the successor to MS-DOS as a PC gaming platform in 1996-1997, everybody used MS-DOS when they played games on their PC.

It is hard to tell what was the last commercial game released that ran on MS-DOS and came in a box. I am tempted to say Tyrian 2000 from 1999.  However, Tyrian 2000 is an updated release of the original Tyrian, released in 1995.  Perhaps WWII GI is a better example of a DOS game that was first released in stores in 1999 but received a critical drubbing at the time for using the out-of-date Build engine. The last DOS game to be released on floppy disk of any consequence was probably Hexen in 1995 .  It was clear that DOS was Dead by the end of the last century.

While hardly attracting the same attention as consoles, there has been some homebrew style activity for MS-DOS in the 21st Century.  SuperFighterTeam released translated versions of the Taiwanese games Sango Fighter (2009) and Sango Fighter 2 (2013) as free downloads that ran in DOSBox.  Jason Knight released Paku Paku, a Pac-Man clone which ran on a 8088 CPU with CGA using a tweaked 80 column text mode, in 2011.  A guy named mangis is working on a nice-looking CGA tweaked 80 column text game called MagicDuck and has been releasing working alpha builds for quite a while now.  Companies still released shovelware compilations of older DOS games in the early 2000s.  You could order floppy disks of many of Apogee's classics from their website.

Back to RCR 486 and non-free games.  When I received my copy of RCR yesterday, the first thing I did I put it on my shelf and fired up Steam!  Actually, that is what a collector or a reseller might do, but I wanted to do something more with my purchase than simply display it.  The box is a standard size for a NES cartridge, 5"x7"x1".  The Vblank Entertainment logo looks like it came from an Xbox 360 game, the title font looks like it came from a NES game, but the System Requirements label is something that would not look out of place on a Sierra game.  I sliced open the shrinkwrap, opened the top flap and looked at the contents :

I received the fully-boxed Retail Box version, which is limited to 1,000 numbered units.  I ordered my floppy disk with the boring "business beige" color because that is authentic to DOS games and see-through floppy disks are not.  Apparently they are running out of stock of that color.  The glasses have two red lenses rather than the red/blue lenses of regular 3-D glasses.  If you just want a floppy disk and a Steam code, you can get it for $14.99 plus shipping.  In fact, the price for the remaining collector's editions went up $10.00 since I ordered, and judging by my number, they will sell out.

The manual does not need to spend much time on the instructions, which are also located in the game.  The red/blue printing was occasionally used back in the DOS days for document-based copy protection.  More often it was used for hint guides.  In the manual, the cheat keys are hidden by the red/blue printing as is some other artwork, which is pretty cool.

Nor was the cloth map truly necessary as the game has an in-game map.  The material of the cloth map feels like the material found in those smartphone wipes and is about as thick.  The map is rather lacking in contrast, so it will probably stay in the box.  Packaging is nice, but if the game in it is bad, then the whole purpose behind the release is meaningless.

After examining the contents, I did what anyone else would have done back in the day.  I took the 1.44MB disk to my 486 and installed it on my computer.  The installation process went off without a hitch.  The game comes with a proper installation program, which decompresses the game and copies it to your hard drive. Because the game takes 3.7MB of free hard drive space, it cannot be run off a floppy disk.  The install took less than 5 minutes on my 486DX2/66.   The install program is aptly named INSTALL.EXE, the game directory is RCR and the executable is RCR.EXE.  After I installed the program, I made a disk image in case the physical floppy becomes corrupt.

According to the developer, the minimum specification for the game is a 386 with a 387 math coprocessor, but the game was meant for a 486.  It recommends a Pentium for maximum performance.  It also requires 4MB of RAM, DOS 3.3 or better and a VGA card.  It supports keyboard and a joystick or game pad.  I highly recommend using a Gravis Gamepad.  The game will let you map four gamepad buttons and calibrate the joystick or gamepad.  While there are a few more functions than buttons on a PC gamepad or joystick, the main ones map nicely to the most commonly used functions.

The game gives you four frame rate options, 15fps (3 frame skip), 20fps (2 frame skip), 30fps (1 frame skip) and 60fps (0 frame skip).  Real VGA monitors run at 70Hz and none of those options evenly divide into 70, but I did not notice a lot of ugly screen tearing.  For the main game you may want to use the higher fps option, but for the challenges the lower fps options give a faster paced game.

The other fun option in the settings is the ability to change the color scheme.  You can have CGA (both major palettes) or EGA-style graphics.  There is an MDA mode, but it displays more shades of color than real MDA.  You can have graphic schemes that take from the NES, C64, Atari 2600, ZX Spectrum, Genesis, Game Boy, and even the Virtual Boy.

One criticism of the DOS game is that its sound is limited to the PC Speaker.  The original PC release has chiptune music and you can change tunes when you drive the cars.  Unfortunately, the only music in this game appears to be when you are on the title screen.  While the instructions for RCR 486 indicate you can change music in the vehicles using the Tab or Page Up and Page Down keys, they do nothing.

The developer set himself a challenge to fit the game onto one floppy disk.  He had to cut down the game features to do it.  Considering 3.7MB was compressed down to 1.44MB, every byte was precious.  Plus he wanted to target the PC Speaker as a programming challenge.  I would not be displeased if he later released a patch to add music and features, but I will take the game as it is now.

RCR is based on Grand Theft Auto, namely the first two games which had a top down view.  The essential goal outside of story mode is to kill civilians and police.  There are many weapons you can use to wreak havoc and you can carjack any car and run pedestrians over.  There are challenges like the one that gives you a bazooka and requires you to cause as much damage as possible or the one that gives you a certain amount of time to run over 50 people.  Some of the vehicles have special features, you can turn the sirens on the cop cars, shoot a bazooka when you are in a tank and one the vehicles has a pair of machine guns, taken from a certain hard-as-nails NES game made by Konami.

RCR tries to parody pretty much every iconic video game of the 80s and 90s.  Super Mario Bros. 1 & 2, Mega Man 2 and other games are targeted.  The plot of the main game involves the main character who gets lost in time (via a TARDIS) and has to turn to a Doc Brown-type of scientist (from Back to the Future) to obtain the pieces to construct a machine to get him back to his own time.  The main character is a henchman for a psychotic Joker-like character who loves to kill off henchmen who aren't up to snuff.  Other icons of the time like Rambo and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles make appearances.

RCR has something like an open world, or as open as a game of its design can be.  You can enter shops to upgrade your weapons, buy health items and reduce your evil reputation so the police do not attack you every second.  You play through missions and each stage is comprised of multiple missions.  You have three save slots to save your progress in the main game.  Like seemingly all modern games there are achievements and unlockables.

Lazy Game Reviews made a fair criticism that the game tries to parody everything and resemble GTA so closely that it fails to have its own identity.  One or the other could be said about many independent and homebrew games.  Even though it is not a classic in its DOS form it still brought a smile to my face on occasion and the gameplay is easy to pick up and play.  The story mode adds some meat on what would otherwise have been a somewhat shallow offering.  However, I will take it because the developer took the time to bring the essence of his game to a large number of older machines.

A final criticism is that this game is not particularly representative of a retail game that runs well on a 486 but recommends a Pentium.  No game released earlier than 1995 would put something like that on its system requirements sticker.  In 1995, shareware was also dying and this game would hardly be seen as competitive compared with Descent or DOOM II or even Jazz Jackrabbit.  People of 1995 would have been puzzled why a game that looked like it should be on the NES should require system power orders of magnitude greater than the gray box.  However, the developer did not intend this port to be a completely accurate retro game with a presentation from 1990-1991 and system requirements from 1994-1995.  It was to him a fun programming exercise that was sufficiently successful for a limited edition release.

There is no software in this box that I could not have acquired from Steam for $20 less.  $5 extra gets you a floppy disk with an installer and a label, and the extra $15 (now $25) on top of that gets you the other physical feelies.  The developer cannot be making much off this, especially considering all the additional headaches and time it takes to put together a 1,000 copies of a physical software product.  If you just want to try it out, grab it from the Steam.  If you want the total experience of placing an order, waiting for it to ship, opening the box and enjoying the physical items inside, then act fast!  LGR would probably say something like "Mmm, feelies..."

Analogue Nt - The NES as a Luxury Retro Console

Nintendo made over sixty million NES and Famicoms systems from 1983-2003.  It is not a rare system and a base system is not particularly expensive on the second hand market.  It was one of the most popular video game consoles of all time.  However, today getting a NES to run on modern LCD TVs and not looking like crap can be a bit of a challenge.  Any of the popular NES or Famicom models, the original Famicom HVC-001, the front loader NES-001, the top loader NES-101 and the Famicom AV HVC-101 output composite video at best and RF at worst.  LCDs usually make this signal look horrible and some newer TVs do not like the 240p signal output by these consoles at all and will refuse to display them.

Now suppose you took the two core custom chips inside every NTSC NES and Famicom, the 2A03 CPU and 2C02 PPU and had the resources to make a totally redesigned system.  Then suppose you wanted to make this redesigned system a luxury item which the press and deep pocket gamers would fall in love over.  Well, a company called Analogue Interactive did just that.  It made an enclosure for its redesign fashioned out of a single solid block of high-grade 6061 aluminum.  It took CPU and PPU chips from a batch of Famicoms in cosmetically objectionable condition and put them in sockets inside a new PCB that it designed.  The result is a redesigned NES called the Analogue Nt that costs $499.00 to purchase.  

Analogue Interactive has had success designing wooden enclosures for consolized Neo Geo MVS arcade PCBs.  These wooden enclosures, with matching enclosures for the joysticks, are beautifully designed, scream quality and come with price tags to match.  Of course, Neo Geo fans are known for deep pockets who will pay thousands of dollars for rare Neo Geo AES home console game versions and can afford an uncompromising attitude toward quality.  While prices for NES-related items have gone up and up over the years, they are not at the average level of Neo Geo-related items.  The NES had many more games, both games and systems cost far less and had a very wide appeal to gamers in Japan, the United States and Canada and to a lesser extent in Europe, Australia, Brazil, Russia and Southeast Asia.  Analogue Interactive has seen this as a market to tap into with its high-end design philosophy.

The Analogue Nt is designed to handle both NES and Famicom systems.  It has a 72-pin connector cartridge connector for NES Game Paks and a 60-pin connector for Famicom Cassettes (no one uses the "official" names for the media anymore, so from hereon out I will use the word "cartridges" like everybody else).  The four controller ports on the front eliminate the need for a separate 4-player adapter for either NES or Famicom games.  The controller pins are gold plated to resist corrosion.  It supports the Famicom Disk System with an FDS RAM adapter and disk drive.  

As you can see from the front of the unit, the Analogue Nt is very minimalist in design except where absolutely necessary.  No unnecessary ridges, no asymmetry, no buttons or switches.  No more vents than absolutely necessary.  The basic silver color looks as if it was designed by or for Apple Inc.  The little dot above the stylized A is for an LED button, something not found on a Famicom or top loader NES.  If you want to be more adventurous, for $49.00 extra you can get the console in red, blue and black.  Pre-order backers could specify white plastic controller ports instead of the Nintendo black.  

The Analogue Nt has more features and in some ways more powerful hardware than any official Nintendo product every boasted.  It has the equivalent of a NESRGB board built into every system.  That gives S-Video and RGB video output and this console also adds Component Video for us Yankees.  The regular 2C02 composite video is also available.  Cables beyond the basic composite/S-Video cable that the base system comes with cost an additional $29.00 each Analogue Interactive offers JP-21 RGB, SCART RGB, BNC RGB and Component Cables for sale.  For an extra $79.00, you can in addition have kevtris' HDMI Mod installed.  

On the back of the unit, you can see a number of ports.  From left to right, we have a Famicom Expansion Port and a microphone jack.  The microphone input mimics the functionality of the microphone on the original Famicom's 2nd controller.  So you should be able to kill Pols Voice without any effort on the original version of The Legend of Zelda on the Analogue Nt.  

After the microphone port are a pair of RCA audio outputs.  The RCA audio out is shielded and amplified for headphones.  The Analogue Nt supports the original mono audio from the NES or the split channels "stereo" audio mod.  The left switch is to select between the 4-player NES adapter, the default of 2-player input and the 4-player Famicom adapter.

The right switch functions with the up and down buttons next to it.  With the switch in the Mic position, you can set the output volume of the Microphone.  With the switch in the Aux position, you can set the output volume of the Expansion Audio from the a cartridge.  With the switch in the Mix position, you can set the monophonic/stereophonic setting

Next comes the power jack.  Finally there is an HDMI port (if you selected the HDMI Adapter Upgrade option) and a VGA-style HD-15 video output port for all analogue video output.    The red button is the power button and is taken from an NES controller.  A quick push acts as a soft reset, holding it down turns the power off.  

The Analogue Nt supports the NES PowerPak and Everdrive N8.  Its power supply supports all worldwide power standards and there are versions for the US and Japan, the UK, Europe and Australia.  It provides additional power for 3rd party devices.

The HDMI Adapter Upgrade offers an awful lot more.  It uses kevtris' (Kevin Horton's) design and has virtually all the features from the HDMI Mod he has been demonstrating for the past year. Here is an unlisted video Analogue Interactive put out showing off the features for its implementation : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXsZ3LvdfCs

For those who prefer their information in text as opposed to video, a listing of the menu and submenus can give you a good idea of its features

Analogue Nt [Main] Menu

• Resolution
• 640x480 [60Hz/50Hz]
• 1280x720 [60Hz/50Hz]
• 1920x1080 [60Hz/50Hz]
• Video Options
• Horizontal Stretch
• Width [Slider]
• Scaling
• None
• HQ2X
• HQ3X
• HQ4X
• Scale2X
• Scale3X
• XRay
• Scanlines
• Off
• NES
• 2X
• 3X
• 4X
• 5X
• Interpolation
• On
• Depth [Slider]
• Palette
• FCEUX'S
• Beware's
• Playchoice 10
• Black and White
• Cropping
• Top Edge [Slider]
• Right Edge [Slider]
• Bottom Edge [Slider]
• Left Edge [Slider]
• Horizontal Position
• Position [Slider]
• Despeckle
• Sound Options
• Enables
• VRC6
• VRC7
• FDS
• MMC5
• N163
• Sunsoft 5B
• VCR6 Swap
• Volumes
• APU [Slider]
• N163 [Slider]
• VRC6 [Slider]
• MMC5 [Slider]
• 5B [Slider]
• FDS [Slider]
• VRC7A [Slider]
• VRC7B [Slider]
• Panning
• NES Sqr 1 [Slider]
• NES Sqr 2 [Slider]
• NES Tri [Slider]
• NES Noise [Slider]
• NES DPCM [Slider]
• Namco 163 [Slider]
• VRC6 Sq 1 [Slider]
• VRC6 Sq 2 [Slider]
• VRC6 Saw [Slider]
• MMC5 Sq1 [Slider]
• MMC5 Sq2 [Slider]
• MMC5 PCM [Slider]
• Sunsft 5B [Slider]
• FDS [Slider]
• VCR7 A [Slider]
• VRC7 B [Slider]
• Viewer [visual representation by sliders]
• NES Pulse Wave 1 [Shows duty cycle, frequency and volume]
• NES Pulse Wave 2 [Shows duty cycle, frequency and volume]
• NES Triangle Wave [Shows frequency]
• NES Noise [Shows short and long noise periods, frequency and volume]
• NES Delta/PCM [Shows sample address, sample length, whether sample is looped, frequency]
• FDS Wavetable Main Channel [Frequency and volume]
• FDS Modulator [Frequency]
• MMC5 Pulse Wave 1 [Frequency and volume]
• MMC5 Pulse Wave 2 [Frequency and volume]
• VRC6 Pulse Wave 1 [Frequency and volume]
• VRC6 Pulse Wave 2 [Frequency and volume]
• VRC6 Sawtooth Wave [Frequency and accumuator rate]
• Sunsoft 5B Square Wave 1 [Frequency and volume]
• Sunsoft 5B Square Wave 2 [Frequency and volume]
• Sunsoft 5B Square Wave 3 [Frequency and volume]
• Settings
• Menu Hotkey [can select any combination]
• A
• B
• Select
• Strart
• Up
• Down
• Left
• Right
• Overclock Hotkey [can select any combination]
• A
• B
• Select
• Strart
• Up
• Down
• Left
• Right
• Underclock Hotkey [can select any combination]
• A
• B
• Select
• Strart
• Up
• Down
• Left
• Right
• Short Reset Hotkey [can select any combination]
• A
• B
• Select
• Strart
• Up
• Down
• Left
• Right
• Long Reset Hotkey [can select any combination]
• A
• B
• Select
• Strart
• Up
• Down
• Left
• Right
• Controller for Hotkeys
• Controller 1
• Controller 2
• DVI Mode
• DVI Mode
• EDID Disable
• Disable EDID
• Audio Clock
• CPU Clock
• PPU Clock
• Save and Update
• Save Settings
• Update Firmware [via flash cart like PowerPak or Everdrive]
• About

[Status]

Rez(olution) [Current]

Palette [Selected]

Elapsed [Time]

[Controls, changes with every screen]

Start - Reset Timer

A - Enter     Select - Back

While the NESRGB captures the pixel colors from the graphics more-or-less digitally and then recreates the frame, the HDMI NES has to do much more.  Not only can it output pure digital video, it can also output pure digital audio as well.  Because the audio comes out of the CPU in a strictly analog fashion, the HDMI NES has to emulate not only the internal Audio Processing Unit but also all the expansion audio chips.  It also has to monitor the controller input memory locations/registers to virtually eliminate input lag.  The NESRGB board is only connected to the PPU, but the HDMI board is connected to both the CPU and PPU.  The result is digital audio output at 16-bit/48kHz.

A NESRGB modded console connected to a Framemeister typically adds 1 frame of delay/lag to the input compared to a NES output to a CRT via composite video.  The Framemeister can convert analog audio to digital audio, which has to be converted back to analog for the speakers, so it is more noisy.  An HDMI modded NES like the Analogue Nt typically adds a few scanlines worth of delay, which is imperceptible by human beings.  This is in addition to any processing done by a non-CRT TV.  The NES's frame rate is an effective 60.098 frames per second, but the HDMI mod slows this down to a pure 60fps to avoid compatibility issues with picky HDTVs.  The slowdown of .0016% is unnoticeable to human beings.  If you want to get a better idea of how the HDMI mod works and its development, watch the videos on kevtris' channel : https://www.youtube.com/user/kevtris

Aethestically, the brushed silver aluminum finish may not make the best contrast against the dark gray matte finish of NES cartridges or the colorful plastic shells of Famicom cartridges.  Nintendo manufactured millions and millions of cartridges as cheaply as possible.  The gold Zelda cartridges and gold and silver Camerica cartridges may look most appropriate to the Analogue Nt, at least from a distance. The NES itself was made of plastic and rather boxy, it tried not to look out of place next to the VHS players and cassette decks of the mid-80s.  The Famicom, with its red and white scheme looked like a toy.  Those large NES joystick ports with visible pins are as far from modern interconnections like USB ports as you can get.  The plastic, rectangular NES and Famicom controllers with thick cables are somewhat removed from its descendants.  Today's video game storage media are optical disks and SD-like memory cards, not large bulky cartridges that stick out of a system.  The Analogue Nt may still look a little odd next to the 4K HDTV, the Blu-ray player, the Wii U, Xbox One  or Playstation 4 or the home receiver system.

The Analogue Nt was first announced in March, 2014 with an intended shipping date of summer, 2014.  However, summer turned to winter, winter to spring and spring to summer of 2015 before users have begun to receive their units.  Hard information about the device has been extremely limited, although excuses and apologies for the delay were not in short supply.  You can read a summary of it here : http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1076624  This has been seen by some as rather concerning from a company known primarily for its woodworking skills, not its electrical engineering design.  You had to pre-order the console and your account was charged immediately for the full price.  With the delays some have accused Analogue Interactive of running an unannounced Kickstarter-like campaign to raise interest-free financing.  Considering that the aluminum used for the enclosure and the high quality PCB assembly are large parts of the manufacturing cost, this charge has some merit.  To Analogue Interactive's credit, they offered full refunds to pre-order customers dissatisfied with the wait.  I can imagine some felt unhappy with their money tied up for over a year, but from what I have read, by-and-large most customers have stayed loyal. Analogue Interactive has made regular updates to its pre-order customers.

The superficial mainstream media also deserves some criticism.  A media organization finds a story about an interesting new product to be released and its competitors parrot it and that is often the last you hear about it from these sources.  Often you if do a search for the product, you will see little beyond the articles all originating around the same date.  Information about failed and long-delayed products is frequently harder to find.  You would think that if a media entity felt that this device was so sufficiently newsworthy to devote a substantial article, there would be reviews all over the place by now since it started shipping some weeks ago  There are none.

Analogue Interactive has released the occasional photo to keep up interest in the console and attention from the media.  However, if a photo is worth 1,000 words, a frame of video from the Analogue Nt is worth about 60,000 words.  It took well over a year from the initial taking of preorders to get video.  Last month IGN received a unit with an HDMI mod but at a particularly inauspicious time.  Their reporter received a unit on the first day of E3, and was only able to do a video unboxing.  No games were played on the unit.  I doubt that he had NES cartridges lying around in his hotel room in Los Angeles (but he certainly had a very nice looking pool table in his suite).  Moreover, there was so much other current generation news to cover at E3 and the week following it that there would be no time to make videos about the Analogue Nt.  You can watch the video here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDo0hUHM82s

Since the IGN video, Analogue Interactive released a pair of unlisted Youtube videos to its pre-order customers.  The first showed off the HDMI Mod, and I have given the link above.  The functionality of the HDMI Adapter Upgrade had been a questioned feature because the older photos of the Analogue Nt only showed an analog video out port.  It was presumed that the HDMI Adapter Upgrade would act like a mini-Framemeister.  However, the video shows that the now-internal Adapter is licensed directly from kevtris' design, implicitly confirmed by the man himself.  (My skepticism of the release of the product was mostly eliminated at that point.)  Analogue Interactive has also released a second unlisted Youtube video showing gameplay footage from Mega Man 2 without the HDMI Mod menu, it can be viewed here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN6qtbWRC5Y.  Analogue Interactive is to be commended for doing the HDMI Adapter right by going with the Master of 8-bit Nintendo Hardware's (kevtris') design.    

Another individual attached to the website USgamer has received an Analogue Nt and did an unboxing video a few days ago.  His unit did not come with an HDMI Adapter Upgrade, so the hole where the HDMI port is supposed to sit is empty.  Unfortunately his video is no longer available.  According to the Analogue Nt user guide, you can send your HDMI-less console back for an upgrade at any time.  That user had a Framemeister, but the Framemeister is a jack-of-all trades while the HDMI Upgrade is designed specifically for the NES and its unique video output.

No one else has done an unboxing video, which suggests that people are still waiting.  Those who ordered the HDMI Adapter Upgrade may still be waiting because as of this date kevtris has not reported that he is done squashing bugs with his design.  If those bugs are hardware in nature, then Analogue Interactive may not have a final board to ship to customers.  Recalls are expensive for large companies and and a small company may get killed either from the cost of a recall or the bad publicity if they do not initiate a recall after a major bug is discovered.  

One other point of criticism about the Analogue Nt is the warranty period offered by the company.  They only offer a 90-day warranty on all their products.  By comparison, the big three, Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony offer a one-year warranty on newly purchased consoles.  Considering that the core of the Analogue Nt is using used chips with unknowable prior use or abuse (did a prior Famicom owner try to get to new minus worlds in Super Mario Bros. by switching in and out a Tennis cartridge while the console was on?), the short warranty period is not particularly inspiring of confidence.  Not to mention that the Analogue Nt costs more than any of the current consoles, providing an industry standard one-year warranty would show appropriate confidence in their product and keep faith with customers.  

While unboxing and video capture footage videos are great, a full and real review from an unbiased and knowledgeable source is beyond due.  There are so many questions with using this device that have not been answered and cannot be answered without a reliable review of the whole Analogue Nt experience.  Even the User Guide, found here : http://www.analogueinteractive.com/pages/resources, can only answer so many questions.

For example, do the controller or cartridge connectors exhibit a Grip of Death?  Can you select palettes without the HDMI Upgrade Adapter?  Are there any issues with the FDS RAM adapter sitting flush on the slightly curved surface of the Analogue Nt?  What about more exotic devices like the Bandai Datach Joint ROM System?  Cartridge games like Zelda require the user to hold reset as they turn the power off to avoid RAM corruption, so how does the Analogue Nt deal with that?  Is there really a NESRGB board and an HDMI board inside the fully-upgraded Analogue Nt (seems kind of redundant)?  Is the Famicom Expansion Port sufficiently recessed for peripherals?  What is the experience like using the audio mixer buttons (the User Guide is a bit vague)?  Can you get expansion audio from the 72-pin cartridge slot using the pin 51 method?

There are some things an Analogue Nt will not do.  It will not play troublesome NES PAL exclusive games like Elite, Aladdin and Asterix properly and other PAL releases will run too fast.  That would require replacing the CPU and PPU with the PAL versions and changing the clock crystal.  The Analogue Nt can be opened with a slotted screwdriver, but doing so will void your warranty and there is a sticker on the bottom that acts like an anti-tampering seal.  It may not work with cartridges that require a lockout chip in the system like the Nintendo World Championships 1990 or Nintendo Campus Challenge (1991) cartridges.  Considering how rare those cartridges are (26 total confirmed to exist), their owners can find other ways to play them.  I do not recall kevtris getting the Zapper to work on his HDMI Mod, so it and other devices that rely on the refresh rate and scanline phosphor decay characteristics of a 15kHz CRT (R.O.B., Famicom 3D System) will not work on any LCD TV.  It must passthrough sampled ADPCM speech synthesis from cartridges in the Moero Pro Yakyuu series, no one has ever attempted to emulate that.  

Too often, one sees mainstream press coverage of the NES, whether it be a retrospective or a review of a new homebrew game.  While they may show a genuine front loader, they always actually show gameplay using a hardware or software clone.  There is no hardware clone made in recent decades that can accurately reproduce all the NES's quirks, and many get the basics wrong as with the reversed duty cycles for the pulse wave channels.  The Retron 5 is a popular choice these days because it can accept cartridges from the most popular system and display them via an HDMI output, but it is running on Android and using emulators of variable quality to run games.  Putting the game in the system is only necessary for the Retron 5 to dump the ROM to emulate it.  The bankswitching hardware inside the cartridge must also emulated or the game will not work.  The Retron 5 may also not run games it does not recognize if they use new or unknown bankswitching techniques.  Running on emulators means putting up with inaccuracies and lag.  Using the Retron 5 is something of a morally questionable choice considering that some of the emulators the company used, including the one used for the NES (FCEUmm) violate the terms of the emulators licenses.  More information can be found here : http://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-license-violations/ and it is truly reprehensible to violate the rights of individual programmers who do not have the resources to protect their rights. 

If the Analogue Nt is successful, despite its high price tag, we could see a revitalization of the closest way in which the NES and Famicom were intended to look, sound and play in modern times.  In fact, it looks to produce a better experience than Nintendo's own current limited offerings on the Wii U Virtual Console.  One hopes to have more information online about the console in the upcoming weeks, so hopefully some of the questions above can be answered.  If you have the money to spend and did not get in on the first batch another batch is apparently available for preorder, but don't expect to see it anytime soon (remember those TV commercials with allow 6-8 weeks for delivery, welcome to the modern version of that).

Blinking Light Win - A Quality Solution to your NES Front Loader Woes

Who likes it when their NES constantly blinks on and off?  Anyone want to relive this particular memory from their childhood?  Didn't think so.  The front loader NES's achilles heel must be the cartridge connector.  In this blog entry, I will first discuss the problem and then a potential quality solution, the Blinking Light Win.

The Problem

The reason why the front loading NES blinks on and off is because the lockout chip is causing the system to continually reset itself.  The lockout chip can control the reset line and will activate it repeatedly it unless it is in constant communication with an identical chip inside a cartridge. In order for the cartridge's lockout chip to communicate properly with the system's lockout chip, it needs a good connection from the pin connector.  Too often, the NES pin connector cannot provide it.

The lockout chip has 4 pins dedicated to it.  Even if the lockout chip has a proper connection, the pins that connect to the CPU and PPU bus may not.  The NES 72-pin connector has 56 other pins that may also be in use by a cartridge at any particular time.  If the connector or the cartridge pins are corroded or dirty, reliable contact between the console and cartridge will not be made, leading to solid color screens on powerup, in-game crashes and glitchy graphics.  Again, the NES's pin connector too often does not have solid contact with the corresponding cartridge pins.

So, what is the problem?  The problem is the way the cartridge pins are supposed to make contact with the console connector pins.  Inserting any type of PCB contacts into a slot is OK so long as the PCB is supported, whether horizontally or vertically.  If Nintendo had designed the cartridge slot so that all you needed to do was to simply insert the cartridge into the slot, I seriously doubt the front loader would acquired such a reputation for unreliability.  However, Nintendo went one step further and decided it would be a good idea to require the user to have to push the cartridge down until a latch caught the spring-loaded tray for both sides of the contacts to make a connection.

This is the point where unnecessary wear occurs on the console connector.  A cartridge connector's pins get pushed back normally when a cartridge is inserted, this is built into the design.  But for a NES, the bottom row of cartridge pins get pushed twice, one when you insert the cartridge, a second time when you push the cartridge down.  This has the unfortunately effect of putting way more extra strain on the pins then they should have.  The consoles pins can be bent to the extent they are unable to make contact with the cartridge pins or in extreme cases knocked completely out of alignment.  A crude visual representation of the manner in which the console connector makes contact with the cartridge pins is here :

Nintendo's brilliant design was intended to mimic the function of VHS players of the time. In the mid-80s, when VHS players were gaining their way into households at a fast rate, they typically used tray loading mechanisms similar to compact cassettes, just oriented vertically instead of horizontally.  In an old-style VHS player, when you hit the open button, a trap would pop up in the top and you would place your video tape into it and push it down until it closed.  As is well-known, Nintendo wanted to distance itself from the previous home video game systems that had given themselves a poor reputation for quality and value.  So Nintendo designed its NES into a boxy two-toned gray shape to fit in with VHS players, cassette decks, TVs and home stereo systems of the time.  It even came with separate composite A/V outputs, something never seen before in a video game system.  The NES stood for the Nintendo Entertainment System, the games were officially called "Game Paks", not "Cartridges" and these Game Paks were long and thin and loaded like VHS tapes.

At first, a console would play fine.  After a while, however, the blinking light and/or solid color screen would appear.  At this point, players would typically blow into their cartridges and consoles.  This worked OK in the short term to clear dust and improve conductivity with saliva deposits, but over time the corrosive nature of saliva would do damage to both connectors.  Nintendo's cartridges did not have gold plated contacts, which are more resistant to corrosion.  Another thing players would do is to insert a second cartridge into the console above the first, pushing down the game even further and perhaps improving the contact.

Earlier Solutions

Nintendo became aware of the problem and offered certain solutions.  It released a cleaning kit containing a cartridge with an edge covered in cloth and cleaning wands for cartridges.  Nintendo instructed the user to use water and wait for an hour after cleaning for drying off.  Howard Phillips of Nintendo of America later explained that it did not instruct users to use isoprophyl alcohol, a superior cleaning agent, because they were worried that kids would set themselves on fire!  Nintendo also set up service centers that could replace the pin connector, although there was a fee that could be incurred if the console was out of warranty.  Finally, in 1993, Nintendo released a new design of the NES at a budget price, the Top Loader.  The top loader's connector was much more reliable, but the console looked radically different from the front loader, did not have composite A/V outputs, its video output looked washed out and the video had noticeable jailbars by comparison.

One other unofficial but popular solution was to use a Galoob Game Genie.  The Game Genie was a cheat device that fit in between the console and the cartridge.  Because it added an extra two inches to cartridge, it could not be pushed down and aesthetically looks unpleasing because the cartridge sticks out of the NES. The Game Genie's PCB is substantially thicker than a NES game cartridge's, allowing it to make contact with both sets of pins inside the console connector without needing to be pushed down.  Unfortunately, this made it very, very difficult to use a Game Genie with a Top Loader, and Galoob released a now-rare adapter for top loader owners.  Even if you used no codes, the Game Genie is incompatible with games that manipulate the V-RAM mirroring on the cartridge in unusual ways like Castlevania 3 and Gauntlet and the other usual suspects that fail to work in cheap NES clones.

After the NES was retired, third party companies came in with unlicensed replacement console pin connectors.  The NES was built so the console connector was easily replaceable.  However, these connectors developed a reputation for having a grip of death on the cartridges, making it very difficult to remove the cartridge from the system.  They also had a reputation of wearing out very quickly and becoming worse than the original they were intended to replace.  At least with a genuine Nintendo cartridge connector, the cartridges were always easy to insert and remove.

The Blinking Light Win

In December of 2014, a company called ArcadeWorks launched a kickstarter campaign to build a reliable replacement NES connector.  They called this product the Blinking Light Win (BLW) and the kickstarter campaign was very successful.  They sought to raise $15,000 and actually raised $44,080.  Instead of trying to clone Nintendo's part, they designed a connector where the cartridge would simply plug in and play without having to push down.  They also designed a replacement plastic tray piece to replace the original spring/latch mechanism.  This replacement piece keeps the cartridge in place, its pin connector from shifting and people from breaking the pin connector by preventing them from pushing down.  The creators of the BLW intended to make a quality product where they pins would not wear out over time.

In late June of 2014, backers finally began receiving their kits.  One of the reasons for the delay is because ArcadeWorks added a lockout chip clone to every BLW connector (kickstarter stretch goal), ensuring that the lockout chip in the console would make a reliable connection with something it could recognize.  Also, unlike the official Nintendo chips, this lockout chip clone (NTSC/PAL-A/PAL-B/Asia) is region selectable by power cycling the system.  The default setting is NTSC.  There is no need to snip pin 4 on a front loader NES with BLW.  This makes it usable with consoles from any region, but it won't make games designed for PAL timings like Elite or Aladdin work in an NTSC console.

In the kit comes the cartridge connector, the replacement tray, a pair of stickers and an instruction sheet.  The only tool you need to install it is a standard #2 Phillips head screwdriver.  The screwdriver cannot be too short, otherwise you won't be able to reach the screws in the recessed holes on the bottom half of the NES case.  In the past, some people have done intensive mods like removing a Game Genie connector from a Game Genie and soldering it to the edge connector of the NES PCB, but the BLW was designed to make the mod as easy as possible.  No wires, no soldering here, no complexity here.  All you have to do is to unscrew the case, unscrew and remove the RF shield and original tray loading mechanism, pull off the original connector, push on the BLW connector, align the replacement tray and screw it in, screw back in the RF shield and the top half of the cover.  This kit is ingenuous.  Note that the replacement tray does not have a metal bar across the top, unlike those seen in the preview pictures like these :

One of the two stickers the kit comes with says "KEEP CALM AND DON'T PUSH DOWN" and the other one has a BLW graphical logo.  Not only are they a nice touch and reportedly of high quality, but they also remind people, if placed on the system, that the system has been modded and they should not push down.  This is important because considering the millions of NES front loaders made, there is no reason to assume that any particular NES would have one of these installed unless you knew what to look for.  The longer KEEP CALM AND DON'T PUSH DOWN fits very nicely on the lip of the front loader in front of the tray mechanism.  The font is Nintendo appropriate.

Most of the reviews I have seen online have remarked on the good build quality of the product.  However, most have also noted that the cartridges are much more difficult to remove than a true Nintendo connector.  ArcadeWorks indicated in its Kickstarter that's product would not have a death grip.  More recent revisions of the BLW should have a slightly less tight connector.  On the installation instructions paper that comes with the kit, the company explained that it made a compromise between the ease of removal and getting a good connection between the connector and the cartridge every time.

It is important to remember that this kit has to work with cartridges have have been around for twenty to thirty years already and have been used and abused.  It also has to work with unlicensed cartridges which did not use facilities up to Nintendo's manufacturing standards.  One reviewer commented that the grip strength of the BLW is similar to the cartridge connector in the NES top loader.  However, the top loader has the advantage of allowing the user a lot more room on the cartridge to grab it when they want to remove it.

While the kickstarter campaign ended in January, the BLW is also available from the ArcadeWorks website for $29.99 : https://www.arcadeworks.net/blw  Some kickstarter backers have complained that people have been obtaining these kits from the site earlier than they have received them.  This device will be in high demand because it does what it claims to do, is reasonably priced, easy to install and the reviews have been very positive.  ArcadeWorks states that current orders will be shipping at the end of July due to high demand.  I suspect that used video game stores and ebay resellers are probably buying these in large quantities so they can sell the piles of front loaders they have lying around.

Regarding the lockout chip, this is a useful feature when you are using unlicensed cartridges.  While Tengen cloned Nintendo's lockout chip, other companies like Camerica, AVE and Color Dreams used discrete circuitry to defeat the lockout chip by stunning it with negative voltages.  Nintendo got wise to these efforts and released its last front loader PCB revision, NES-CPU-11, with extra resistors and diodes to nullify these efforts.  If you have one of these PCBs, you may find that unlicensed cartridges will not work on it unless you disable the lockout chip or installing a BLW.

The BLW's board design is rather simple.  Except for the built-in Lockout chip, it is merely a pin extender.  The lockout chip stands in between the cartridge and the console's lockout chips, preventing communication between the cartridge and console's chips.  In the very first units shipped, the lockout chip was soldered to the pins on a separate PCB.  On the current units, it is surface mounted to the BLW's PCB.  The PCB sends the lockout chip's reset line to the cartridge, allowing for proper operation of the NES World Championships 1990 and the Super Mario Bros./Tetris/Nintendo World Cup cartridges.

Not all may be perfect, however.  krikzz, creator of the EverDrive N8, has criticized the "ridiculously thin wires at power supply lines" of the BLW.  While the traces are slightly thicker than the regular signal lines, he has raised concerns that the thinness of the traces may lead to instability when using an EverDrive because it is a much more complex device than a regular cartridge.  He suggests soldering thick wires to pins 1, 36 and 72 to solve any instability issues.

Conclusion

So why do I not have one yet?  The chief reason why is because my front loader's original pin connector works very well.  I mainly use it with an NES PowerPak these days, which I have owned since 2007.  I no longer blow into cartridges and use 99% isoprophyl alcohol to clean my cartridges.  99% is available at electronics stores, but 91% can be found in drug stores.  Even if you own a BLW, you need to keep your cartridges clean.  Keep scrubbing them with alcohol and Q-tips until you no longer see black on the Q-tip. Make sure to use both wet and dry applications of a Q-tip.  Alcohol evaporates much more quickly than water, so you can try your cartridges instantly.  Cartridge contacts in very poor condition may require electric contact cleaner or pink erasers.  Ultimately, the BLW is a very good product, is still readily available from ArcadeWorks and should be the new standard for NES replacement pin connectors.

Sound Card Replicas - Attack of the Hardware Clones

Since 2005, vintage computing PC hardware, especially the hardware focused on games has increasingly risen in price.  Not too long ago, you could buy an Adlib card for $30.  Now they can go for five times that. Some of these cards are sufficiently simple that single hobbyists can design a PCB and create a board that works like the original, and in some cases even better than the original.  Here are the efforts to reproduce distinctive sound cards from various vintage computer sources.

Ad Lib Music Synthesizer Card Clone :

There was nothing proprietary about the Ad Lib MSC card, the OPL2 YM-3812 sound chip and its YM3014 DAC were readily available from Yamaha.  The rest of the board was populated with standard logic chips, a pre-amplifier and an amplifier.  Ad Lib Inc. scratched off the part number of the Yamaha chips, but once their identity was known, anyone with some spare time and a multimeter could design a clone PCB.  Several clones were made back-in-the-day, but they are now as hard to find as a genuine Ad Lib Inc. made card. In 2012, VCF forum contributor Sergey Malinov did just that, he designed a smaller 8-bit ISA card and it works just like the original.  It also sounds like the original because he used the original amplifier circuit.  It even has a volume dial.  The 1987 revision of the real Adlib card used a 1/4" phono jack, but the later 1990 Adlib revision and this board use a 3/8" mini-jack.  You can find all the information you need, and a link to the board design, here :

http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?33100-ISA-OPL2-Card

Another individual has also cloned the Ad Lib card, but this individual sought not just to recreate the functionality but to recreate the board itself, including the Ad Lib logo.  True Ad Lib cards are valuable, but this design has the potential to defraud a collector given how close it is :

http://tubetime.us/

Roland MIF-IPC-A Clones :

A Roland Midi Processing Unit (MPU) 401 was originally contained in a small metal box.  It was designed to connect with any 8-bit or better home computer which could provide the addressing and data lines and IRQ it required.  Roland sold interface cards for various computers, including the Apple II, Commodore 64 (cartridge) and IBM PC.  All the electronics necessary for the interface was contained in the external box including a microcontroller, ROM and RAM, a bus interface chip and DIN connectors for MIDI cables. Replicating the MPU-401 circuitry would be no mean feat.  The interface cards consisted only of a few standard logic chips to route the necessary signals from the computer.

The MPU-401 boxes are often found without an interface card, and without an interface card they are useless.  Roland originally offered the MIF-IPC interface card for IBM PCs and XTs.  The original MIF-IPC card proved unreliable in AT and faster machines, so Roland issued the cost-reduced MIF-IPC-A, which works in any PC.  It consists of four standard logic chips and a DB-25 connector on an 8-bit ISA card.  Two cards were made, one from a U.S./German source (Bryce) and another from a Dutch source (n1mr0d), have been made.  The details are here :

http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=38048

http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?57231-Cloning-an-MIF-ISA-Card

I am not sure whether the U.S./German clone is currently available, but it allows you to easily change the IRQ and the I/O address lines.  The Dutch clone is currently available on ebay and allows for easier changing of the I/O port.

James Pearce from VCF and lo-tech.co.uk has designed a clone card called the MIF-IPC-B.  This card can be built cheaply as it uses only through-hole parts.  It adds useful features to the MIF-IPC-A design, namely selectable IRQ and I/O port selections.  It is also compatible in an IBM PC/XT's Slot 8.  It fixes the design flaw on the MIF-IPC-A card that leaves unused gates on the 74LS04 floating.  It even replicates the logic differences between the MIF-IPC/IF-MIDI and the MIF-IPC-A cards, although I have never read or experienced anything to suggest that the MIF-IPC-A is unreliable in an IBM PC or XT.  Still, the  :

https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/product/mif-ipc-b-pcb/

Music Quest PC MIDI Card Clone :

There has been an even more promising development on the MPU-401 clone front.  Recently (as of September, 2015) VOGONS user Keropi made a full clone of the Music Quest PC MIDI 100% compatible MPU-401 card.  This card contains all the essential intelligent MIDI capabilities of the Roland MPU-401, but does not require a breakout box.  In other words, unlike the MIF-IPC-A clones, you do not need to supply anything to connect it to your MT-32 or other MIDI module.  All circuitry is on the card, only an DE-9 to MIDI adapter is required for MIDI In and MIDI Out.  The adapter is included with the card.  The clone is fully compatible with games requiring intelligent (normal) MPU-401 capabilities.  Details here :

http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=43875&hilit=mpu+401+clone

Innovation SSI-2001 Clone :

I have already discussed this remarkable board elsewhere.  I own one and can heartily recommend it, assuming batches are still being made : http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2014/01/sid-and-dos-unlikely-but-true-bedfellows.html

You can probably get a card with an 8580 SID, but if you want a 6581 you will have to provide it yourself. Information on how to obtain a card can be found here :

http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=27045

Creative Game Blaster Clone Prototype :

All the clones that have been made available for purchase or replication have been discussed above.  For my next discussions, I will identify cards which have had working prototypes made.  The principal difficulty in implementing a Game Blaster clone is that for a long time, the CT-1302 chip on the real board acted like a black box.  Now that we know what it does and that all it really does is implement a simple autodetection scheme, the scheme has been replicated with standard logic chips.  A work in progress Russian clone has come up with some very impressive results so far :

http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?47363-Creative-Music-System-(CMS)-Game-Blaster-compatible-replica

True Game Blaster cards sell for $200-$300 these days, but are desirable especially for the nine or so games that require a true Game Blaster card.

I should also mention here for completeness sake the successful efforts to replicate the PAL of the Sound Blaster 2.0 to allow for Game Blaster functionality.  The details can be found here : http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2012/10/all-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about.html

Gravis Ultrasound Plug-N-Play (GUS PnP) Clone Discussion :

This is a very ambitious project because the main AMD/Interwave chip is a surface mount chip with many pins and small spacing between them.  While the Interwave chip does not require RAM to function, its GUS emulation does not work without at least 512KB of RAM.  The more advanced features of the Interwave chip can utilize up to 16MB of RAM.  The real GUS PnP only supported 8MB of RAM, but that was more than sufficient for GUS Classic compatibility.

http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=42431

As of this writing, the prototype is still in the paper stage, so I do not deem it a real prototype until someone gets a real custom board working.  The Interwave-based GUS PnP can play virtually all classic GUS-supporting games, although you may need a utility or special driver for some.  This card should be able to offer the same level of compatibility.  On the other hand, the advanced GUS PNP features went unsupported in DOS and the card was treated somewhat generically by Windows 95 outside Gravis' applications.  GUS cards of any sort have always been pricey and hard to find, so this board should be welcomed by many gamers and fans of old-skool demos that used the GUS.

Tandy 1000 3-Voice Sound Card Discussion :

The idea behind this board is to implement a Tandy 3-voice sound chip at I/O C0-C7 for 8-bit XT systems and and probably 1E0-1E7 for 16-bit AT systems.  Unfortunately, AT systems have a 2nd DMA controller at C0-C7, so the chip may not work there.

http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=42521

Games must write directly to the I/O ports to make sound come out of this chip.  Some games will refuse to play Tandy music or sound effects unless they detect a Tandy through its BIOS signature or its unique graphics adapter.  This card will not work with every game, but it will work with many, many classics that do not care about the BIOS signature or the graphics.  James Pearce has committed to making a prototype, but none has yet been completed.  Unfortunately, the DAC added in the Tandy 1000 TL and SL and later computers used a Tandy-proprietary PSSJ chip, so without a source for those this board will be stuck with a TI SN76489 (the extra feature of the TI SN 76496 is not required).  The NCR 7496 clone is preferable for Tandy 1000s but is virtually impossible to source.

Covox Sound Master Clone Discussion :

This is the discussion I support the most because it is the only one of these projects for which I do not own the original card or a reasonable substitute.  Like the Innovation SSI-2001, there are only two original cards known to still exist.  Cloning this card is more difficult than the Innovation for two reasons.  First, the main sound chip is more difficult to source.  Second, this card has a PAL chip on it that needs to be decoded.  Decoding PAL chips has been done before, but it requires a lot of work and a fair amount of deduction.

http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=40512