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Valuestar in the Valuesky: The PC-9821 V13
You might have heard of the PC Engine. But did you know? NEC didn’t just make engines for PCs, they made PCs themselves too. And now I have one! Let’s take a look, figure out what it’s deal is, and try to do something on it. A gift to the blog, courtesy of the Doors and Dungeons Podcast! Let’s… clean keyboards and debug sound card issues?
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Review! The Sears Tele-Games Pinball Breakaway
Sears, Roebuck & Co. A name that will surely echo throughout American business forever; of course, such a storied department store chain would dip its toe into the video game market, and we all know of Sears Tele-Games, their rebranded Atari line. But now Atari, despite their new Video Computer System, has released a new standalone console, and Sears has dutifully followed. Why is Atari having regrets?
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Neo Geo Genesis: The Alpha 68000
The Neo Geo: we’ve talked about it a lot on this site. And it’s an interesting system, so why not? Its sprite-based graphics system proved flexible enough to allow it to last up until 2003, at which point all of its 2D competition had moved on. But instead of looking at the end, let’s look at the beginning: the arcade systems that led up to it.
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A Lot of Effort to be Thrown Away: Sega's Dottori-kun!
You might have heard the term “discrete logic” before. What does that mean, and how can you use discrete logic to make an image? And if that wasn’t enough, imagine making a video game; a physical object, a small self-contained computer, just to throw it away. These are the themes of today’s blog post!
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The Great Composite Comparison!
You’ve read my post explaining composite video, and now you want to watch some video encoded in it, or play a game. The best option is a CRT television, but those are heavy and you want to use a flat-screen monitor or television instead. So, how best to upscale this video? Let’s take a tough challenge, and see what we can do.
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Composite Video: Why it was good then, and why you might even use it today!
I’ve been talking about video a lot lately; but that was all arcade or some other RGB upscaling. But let’s face it: if you grew up in North America, your arcade may have used RGB monitors, but you almost certainly didn’t have that at home. If you were like me, your video games came over a single yellow wire. (plus audio) But today, you probably want more wires. Why? And what was going down that wire?
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Review! The GBS Control Firmware
The GBS-8200 series of upscalers is, to put it bluntly, mediocre at best. Their main advantage has been their low price, and ability to accept a wide range of signals. This has given them some respect among arcade operators, but their picture quality won’t impress enthusiasts. But never count out the enthusiast community: because with a cheap microcontroller, this has been given new life.
