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Composite Mod on the CoCo 2: The UVD Board
Since at least March of 2019, the Tandy Color Computer 2 has sat there, teasing me. It has a Motorola 6847, the tragically disappointing graphics chip, paired with the terrifyingly powerful Motorola 6809 CPU (running at… substantially less than a megahertz, but we all have our flaws). Truly a machine that should provoke more interest from me than it does… except for the fact that it only has RF output. Let’s finally fix that.
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Too Good to be First-Party: Coleco's Tabletop Donkey Kong Junior
What was home video gaming like in the early 1980’s? You might consider picturing things like the Atari 2600 or the Intellivision, and those were certainly a big part of it. But another big part were the category I’ll call segmented-display games; portable systems like the Game & Watch, but also more stationary “portable arcade” machines. And in the United States, no name in home mini-arcades was bigger than that of the Connecticut Leather Company, or if you’re a friend, Coleco.
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Cartridge Chaos: The Official Nintendo Region Converter and More!
This post is a combination of looks at several oddities among my pile of NES and Famicom cartridges. Why, for example, do I have a copy of Gyromite when I don’t have a R.O.B.? Did I miss something interesting in my MMC blog post? And while it is the Japanese release of Kid Niki: Radical Ninja, is my Kaiketsu Yanchamaru being a little too radical? Who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong? Some of these questions will be answered!
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The CV-1000 returns, but at what cost?
One thing that always amazes me about the arcade industry is the ingenuity of the, shall we say, post-market. Certainly there are simple things like the 60-in-1 or the King of Fighters ‘97 pirate board that are little more than interfaces between MAME and a JAMMA edge, but more interesting things include the Teddy Boy Blues complete recreation of Sega’s System 1 hardware. But what about the CAVE CV1000? Could that be recreated?
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The Fuuki FG-3 and Asura Buster: The late 90's say Hello
One thing I’ve talked about a few times on this blog is that over the course of the 1990’s, 2D arcade hardware became something you could take for granted; in fact, today you can run pretty much any 2D game you want on an incredibly cheap Raspberry Pi. Some of the later boards we’ve looked at include the lower-end Namco ND-1, the IGS PGM2, and the high-end Cave CV-1000, which used a blitter and framebuffer approach. Let’s look at a monster of sprites and tilemaps from a more modest company at the end of the 2D era: the 1998-2001 Fuuki FG-3.
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The Master System Girl: A Console with Cooties?
Remember Julius Caesar and the Casio Loopy? Today we’re taking another look at a console designed for a market: this time, Brazilian girls. But I suspect that this one will be a lot more up-front appealing to the readers of this blog (there is actually a big push for the Loopy right now, thanks to the Puppy Love Story translation), because this console can play ALF. Casio Loopy can’t say that. (Homebrew authors, please don’t bother to prove me wrong, that sounds like a massive waste of your time)
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A Unique, High-Tech (Family) Computer
There’s a concept that many people have tried, with varying effects: the “educational computer”, a device that a parent can buy for their children to learn the basics of the computer, which everyone will need to know in the future, and can also play games, so the children will actually want to use it. These have ranged from plasticky VTech toys with little more than an electronic organizer, to the Wonder Computer of the 1980’s, the Commodore VIC-20, which was a full computer. This is a prime market fit for an aging 8-bit platform, so of course, the Famicom has been wedged into it too… but not by Nintendo.
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