Early Video Game Content Advisories - Who Needs Ratings Systems?

Prior to the formation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board in 1994 there was no comprehensive content ratings systems for computer and video games in the U.S.  However, that did not mean that video games never provided warnings to potential purchasers and their parents or spouses.  Here let us explore the attempts to advise the public of adult-oriented content prior to and outside the eventual dominance of the ESRB.

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.

SNES "Port"pouri

Space Invaders and the Super Game Boy

Super Game Boy Mode

Arcade Mode

Space Invaders was released for the Game Boy in 1994.  It indicated that it supported the Super Game Boy.  It did so in a unique way, when you selected the Arcade Mode, it launched a slightly cut-down version of the SNES Space Invaders port which had been previously only been released in Japan.  The only thing missing from the game as run transferred from the Super Game Boy and the game that was released on cartridge in Japan in 1994 and the U.S. in 1997 is the VS mode.

Official Variations of the Nintendo 8-bit NES/Famicom Console Hardware

Nintendo tried to get its 8-bit system into homes across the world.  It was most successful in Japan, the United States and Canada.  But it also distributed its hardware in many other countries, usually with the assistance of a local distributor.  Some of these systems are rather rare, but have been documented to exist.  In this blog post let I will attempt to identify every officially licensed variation of the 8-bit hardware Nintendo ever released.

The Ownership of and Issues with the ColecoVision Trademark

Courtesy of Wikipedia

A few blog entries ago, I described the current state of the ColecoVision.  http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2017/03/old-coleco-or-new-coleco-nostalgia-or.html  In that blog entry, I identified Coleco Holdings, LLC, a subsidiary of Dormitus Brands and previously River West Brands as the claimant of the trademark to the ColecoVision name.  Given certain recent interactions between Coleco Holdings and certain ColecoVision homebrew developers, I believe it is worth exploring Coleco Holdings' trademark claims in some detail.

First, let me begin by summarizing the recent news which has caused interest in this topic, then go on to describe how a trademark is registered and finally the law and facts surrounding the ColecoVision trademark.

NES and Famicom Controller Compatibility Issues and AV Famicom Microphone Mod

Prior to the NES, most controllers had a joystick and one or two buttons.  The Atari joystick was wired in parallel, where one wire corresponded to one button, and pressing a direction or a button completed a circuit with the common (ground wire).  The program would read these button presses in parallel, where reading from a single memory location would give the state of each of the five buttons at one time.

Nintendo's controllers were to come with a D-pad and four buttons.  These were originally hard-wired in the Famicom but would have required at least nine wires if wired by the traditional parallel standard.  Moreover, if they wanted to use other kinds of peripherals, they may have found that difficult.  To cut down on wires, Nintendo decided to use a serial method for reading buttons.  This also allowed for more varied expansion, as will be discussed below.

Guard to HD Nirvana : HDMI Licensing

The HDMI connector and cables are ubiquitous today for all high definition digital video devices.  The DVI port is essentially deprecated, DisplayPort has not really caught on at all outside PC Monitors and Thunderbolt is seldom used outside of Apple products.  All consumer HDTVs can be counted on having at least one or two HDMI inputs, and some even have an HDMI output for passing audio through to an audio receiver.

The HDMI connector is a consumer's dream, it just plugs in.  The connector is keyed and robust, you are unlikely to break any pins on an insertion.  The fit is snug enough that you don't need to fiddle with screws and cables can be hotswapped.  The connector and cable are thin enough to be mounted horizontally or vertically.  The cable carries audio and video, so it is as simple as you can get to hook up AV equipment.  Cables are cheap if you know where to shop, Monoprice built much of its business model on affordable HDMI cables.  Frequently, the HDMI connector is the only way to obtain HD input to your TV or monitor (apart from the digital TV/cable tuner using the coaxial screw, but the High Definition picture produced by this method usually leaves much to be desired).  HDMI is great but it is not free.  Let's take a look at the costs associated with HDMI and how some individuals and smaller, hobbyist and enthusiast-oriented retrogaming entities try to get around paying those costs.

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.

HDMI Solutions for the NES - Mid 2017 Edition

If you want to play NES or Famicom games on a modern TV or monitor with a digital HDMI input, there are many options available.  In fact, there are far more options for the NES than any other console which did not natively have an HDMI connection.  In this blog article I will give a brief overview of the features and drawbacks of each method.  Going by cost and roughly analogous quotations from The Legend of Zelda, let's begin :

20th Century PC Game Remakes, Remasters, Sequels and Successors

The home computer has produced many, many classic and groundbreaking games.  Some games have been sufficiently successful to spawn a series, others have just been held to be a pinnacle in their own right without sequels.  Eventually, interest in many games and series that were once popular tends to wane and commercially many of these series were seen to have no future.  Occasionally, however, a long dormant game or series can be reactivated with a new sequel.  Since 2010, there have been quite a few new games released for the PC that are late sequels, remasters or spiritual successors of older classic PC games.  It is still somewhat rare for PC games to get remade, but those that do should be identified.  However, it is especially impressive for a game to be revived after ten years or more without a commercial release (budget re-releases don't count), so I am going to focus on those games.

In this blog article, I will try to identify games that were released during the twentieth century I will not be covering late ports or fan mods, otherwise the blog article may include too many games to manage.  Several games have been successfully ported to mobile devices, but tracking down ports is too much to manage with my ten-year rule.  I just don't have the time to track down every re-release of Dragon's Lair, Defender of the Crown or The Oregon Trail, games that always seem to be ported or rehashed.

Reducing Disks on Later PC Game Releases - What is Lost

PC games were often re-released.  Even though they may be older, a budget-friendly price can attract a surprising number of buyers.  To keep the costs down, often games are released in smaller boxes, sometimes paper manuals turned into electronic manuals.  It is not unknown for a game to be released on fewer discs/disks than it was released on originally, without being put onto a higher capacity storage medium.  In this blog entry, I will discuss several famous examples where this occurred and what the effect of the disk/disc reduction was.

The Evolution of King's Quest (I AGI)

The original King's Quest had a long history of releases for the IBM PC and compatible platforms. The game was originally developed for the enhanced graphics and sound of the IBM PCjr.  The PCjr. was hyped to the max and many media publications were predicting that IBM's consumer-focused machine would quickly dominate the home market when it was announced in November of 1983.  Sierra Online was facing a troubling future and made good on a deal to publish an ambitious and revolutionary game for IBM's machine.

IBM bankrolled much of King's Quest's development, but the game would not be available at launch.
However, by the time King's Quest was released in May of 1984, the market had shown that it was not about to become IBM's playground.  The PCjr. was overpriced cost twice as much as the Commodore 64 with a disk drive and did not offer much to the consumer that the C64 could not.  The Apple IIe and //c computers were also strong competitors at the same price, offering a huge library of software.  The PCjr struggled with compatibility with several popular IBM PC programs and included a keyboard that was laughable for trying to get real work done with it.

The Realistic Portavision - Portable Television in the 1980s

About a week or two ago on this blog, I may have foreshadowed that I had acquired a new electronic item worth talking about.  Portable televisions have always been of interest to me.  Since TVs became mainstream in the 1950s, marketers have always tried to find ways to make TVs smaller and able to be used in more and more places across the globe.  My little acquisition represents the peak of its technology for its time, so let's look at it in greater detail.

The system in question is called the Realistic Portavision.  Its most notable feature is that it is a fully portable color CRT TV.  A sticker on the back of the unit stated it was manufactured in November of 1985.  During the 1980s, portable TVs were not particularly rare.  Many kitchens and campers featured one.  But these TVs were typically black and white TVs.  Black and white TVs were much cheaper to manufacture, required fewer components to make them work and consumed less energy. Black and white TVs in portable sizes were quite common by the mid-1970s and were manufactured throughout the 1980s.

The Amazing Technology in the Nintendo Game Boy

Truly nothing like the Game Boy had ever been seen before by the general public when it was released in 1989.  Handheld gaming prior to that was confined to simple, single hand-held games like the Coleco mini-Arcades, the Nintendo Game and Watch series and the ubiquitous Tiger Electronics Hand-helds.  These were simple games that were driven by pre-programmed microcontroller chips and drove an LCD display that was only capable of displaying a series of fixed patterns.  Although the patterns could have a high level of detail, the limitations of the display severely limited the complexity and longevity of these games.

The Game Boy's best-known predecessor, the Milton Bradley Microsivion, used a 16x16 display.  The Microvision was not very successful and its games were put on pre-programmed microcontrollers that plugged into the main unit.  These microcontrollers operated at a very low speed of 100KHz, and provided only 64 bytes of RAM and 1-2KB of ROM for a game.  The low resolution of the display also placed severe limitations on the games that could be made for this system.  The Epoch Game Pocket Computer was released in Japan in 1984 and used a 75x64 resolution display, but it was not very successful and only had five games released for it.

Giving the Studios the Bird : Fan Reconstructions of their Preferred Versions of Classic Films

In the past several years, there has been an increasing proliferation of the fan re-edit and the fan reconstruction of classic films.  One of the chief reasons for this was the Star Wars Special Editions.  But fan reconstructions have gone far beyond a Galaxy Far, Far Away.  Read on to discover another community increasingly devoted to reconstruction.  But before we get there, let us set the stage during the long winter of our discontent :

The Story Behind the Star Wars Special Editions and Despecialized Editions

Back in 1997, fourteen years after Return of the Jedi, George Lucas decided to reedit the original trilogy to reflect how he believed the films should be presented and enjoyed given the advances in technology between 1977, 1980, 1983 and 1997.  At first, these Special Editions (SEs) were met with some interest and were released on VHS and Laserdisc.  Given that the untouched versions (now known as George's Original Untouched Trilogy or GOUT) of these films were also available at that time on VHS and Laserdisc and the Internet was just becoming a part of everyday life, complaints were fairly muted at the time.

Your Meme for Today - Portable Console Gaming Over Time

2017 :

Courtesy of Nintendo

2002 :

Courtesy of neogaf forum

1987 :

Old Coleco or New Coleco : Nostalgia or Nothing

ColecoVision Video Game System (courtesy of wikipedia)

The Connecticut Leather Company, popularly known by its moniker Coleco, certainly had an interesting role in the history of video games.  It started by making dedicated game consoles in the Pong-era which were marketed as the Telstar series.  They also made a line of well-received hand-held conversions of arcade games, the mini-Arcades.  Finally, they turned their hands to marketing a game console, the ColecoVision, and a home computer, the Adam.  But when the video game crash wiped out all the consoles of the 2nd generation of video games, they were left to selling Cabbage Patch Kids dolls and other toys to survive for a time.  The costly failures of their video game ventures brought them to liquidation by the end of the 1980s.

In 2005, the Coleco brand was reintroduced to the general public by West River Holdings (WRH), a company that revitalizes older trademarks.  Companies like WRH look for trademarks which have been dormant for some time but had been previously been associated by the public with a successful product or service.  These trademarks could simply discontinued by the user of the mark or abandoned when the owner went out of business.  WRH typically forms an LLC to manage and promote each trademark it acquires.  In Coleco's case, it was Coleco Holdings, LLC.  In 2016, WRH and its brands were purchased by Dormitus Brands, another trademark holding company.

For the remainder of this article, where it is necessary to distinguish the two, I will refer to the original Coleco, the company that was sold in the late 1980s as the "old Coleco".  The WRH incarnation will be referred to as the "new Coleco".  Let's discuss the legacy of the old Coleco vs. the new Coleco.

Practical Issues with a Tandy 1400 LT Laptop Comptuer

Recently I acquired a Tandy 1400 LT Laptop computer, so as tradition seems to demand, I will talk about my impressions of the machine, tips on how to use it and mistakes to avoid.  The Tandy 1400 LT is Tandy's first IBM PC compatible laptop.  As the 1400 LT is so very much a mostly-improved clone of the IBM PC Convertible, it makes sense to compare the two products.

In April of 1986, IBM released the first PC compatible that could conceivably be called a laptop, the IBM PC Convertible Model 5140.  In 1988, Tandy released its own version of the PC laptop, the Tandy 1400 LT.  The Tandy machine had many notable improvements over the IBM machine :

First World Problems : Finding a Good Movie Theater Screen

Here is a problem : You live in an area where there are a almost a dozen movie theaters showing first run films within a 25-mile radius of your house but you are almost an hour away away from a major city.  You want to see a large budget, action and spectacle heavy film.  This means you want to see it on a big screen with a powerful sound system.  The same screen may not be necessary for an intimate drama or a raunchy comedy, but when it comes to action, bigger is usually better.

The biggest films, especially action/adventure films, tend to be shown on more than one screen, at least on opening weekend.  Today, many of the big films are converted to 3-D, even though most were not shot with 3-D in mind.  In the theaters around me, there will be separate screens devoted to the 2-D version and the 3-D version.  A couple of theaters near me have a giant screen.  Showcase Cinemas and AMC refers to their giant screen as IMAX (licensing the trademark) and Regal Cinemas calls their screen RPX.  These will always show the 3-D version of the film.  In the upcoming years, there may be a battle between the two chains and their competing 4D technologies, (Showcase uses MX4D, Regal uses 4DX) but that is the subject of another blog entry.

I saw Kong : Skull Island on the local-ish Showcase Cinema's IMAX screen.  Some commentators have derisively called these screens "LIEMAX" because they are smaller than a true IMAX screen.  While there are dedicated IMAX theaters in my state with the enormous screen, they are much further away than the local IMAX.

The local IMAX gives a very good presentation compared to non-IMAX sized-screens.  I saw Star Wars Rogue One in the 2-D version at the Regal Cinemas theater and was very disappointed with the size of the screen.  Not only was it small, it was noticeably offset from the center of the room.  I have a suspicion that these shoebox theaters may only be using 2K projectors, the industry standard is to use 4K projectors.  The movie deserved better.

The problem is these cinema chains only show the 3-D version of the films.  If you want to see a 2-D version of the film, you are often left with small screens and small theaters that just don't do the action on-screen justice in this day and age.  While the 3-D conversion of Kong was without major flaws, the glasses I had to wear were uncomfortable and tended to fog up around the bridge of the nose.   You simply cannot take off the glasses and expect to enjoy what is on the screen, it will appear blurry thanks to the dual projection of the 3-D images.

I find that 3-D does not particularly add much to a film that was not shot with 3-D in mind.  On the other hand, when the film was shot with 3-D in mind and projected on a huge screen, as was the case with Gravity, the experience is incredible.  Moreover, a 3-D conversion does not reflect the director's intent unless the director supervised the process. There are also 4D conversions of films that add moving seats and other tactile sensory perceptions, but that kind of gimmickry only reflects the studio's intent, not the director's.

While I am on the subject, Showcase Cinemas has a dizzying array of theater options.  Depending on the theater, you could have choices of a 2-D screen, a 3-D screen, a Lux Level option for each ( with food service), an IMAX 3-D screen, an MX4D screen (motion seats and sensory effects) or an XPLUS screen (featuring Dolby Atmos sound).  There are also a few SuperLux theaters that seem more focused on comfort and food than a pure or traditional moviegoing experience.  Offering a comprehensive experience with a restaurant, bar, comfy seating and in-movie service does seem to be the trend in upscale movie theaters.

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.