The Analogue Nt Mini - First Impressions

Last Thursday my Analogue Nt Mini finally arrived.  I had discussed this FPGA-based console from afar when it was first released early in the year, but had no opportunity to review one first-hand at the time.  I ordered my Nt Mini during the second run of pre-orders.  Analogue planned to ship the second batch in September, but late shipping from the factory and a surprise customs inspection later, it ended up shipping the Nt Mini in late October.  Having paid full price for an Nt Mini, $449, plus $37 in shipping, I intend to do a complete and thorough review of all the device's capabilities.  Let me start by giving my first impressions of this high end recreation of the Nintendo Entertainment System.

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.

The Analogue Super Nt - The Day After Preview

If 2016 was the Year of the HDMI NES, with the release or pre-order availability of high quality NES HDMI devices such as the NES Classic Mini, Analogue Nt Mini and the RetroUSB AVS, then 2017 is the Year of the HDMI SNES, with the release of the SNES Classic Mini and now pre-order availability of the Analogue Super Nt.  The Super Nt was announced yesterday and I would like to gather all the available information about it here after 24 hours have passed to allow for information from multiple sources to be made available online.

NES Clones Reversed Duty Cycles - Why you should Reject them

Clones of the Famicom have been around since the mid-1980s, but clones of the Nintendo Entertainment System were very rare until Nintendo's patents expired in 2005.  Since then, clones have become quite common, all advertising such features as improved cartridge insertion mechanisms, lower cost (compared to the official NES top loader), x-in-1s with Genesis or SNES hardware and more recently built-in HDMI support.  However, the hardware in many of these clone consoles is fatally flawed and will not give a genuine experience.  The flaw comes in the reproduction of the NES's audio in the form of reversed duty cycles.  In this blog post, I will explain why this is an issue, how to detect it and why you should not buy second-rate clone consoles.

The Rise of Interlacing in Video Game Consoles

Until the Genesis and the SNES, all video game consoles used 240p resolutions.  However, in the quest to gain greater graphical detail without severely impacting performance, game programmers began to use interlaced video modes in the fourth and fifth generation of video game consoles.  Then in the sixth generation, interlacing was the norm and progressive scan was the option.  By the seventh generation, HD gaming was the norm and interlaced graphics usage was more or less here to stay.  Let's explore the issues surrounding interlaced video game graphics here.

From Adventure to Zelda - Influences and Common Themes

When Atari released Adventure in 1980, most players had never seen anything like it before.  Seven years later when Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda, again it seemed that most players had never seen anything like it before.  But when you start to compare the two games, there are many common design elements in both.  In this blog entry, we will take a look at them.

Flawed, Risky and Dangerous Devices for your Retro Consoles and PCs

Most of us appreciate it when enterprising entrepeneurs go out of their way to make new products for us to enjoy on our vintage consoles.  However, they don't always get it right.  Some products can be positively dangerous to your consoles, others are not obviously dangerous but have the potential to decrease your console's lifespan.  In this blog entry I will discuss modern products that are fundamentally flawed, risky to use or just plain dangerous.

He's making list, checking it twice,
Gonna find out whose naughty and nice...

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.