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Making Every Ball Count with a Pachinko Data Counter and... React?
So, you decided that after reading my post on hanemono, you had to get a modern pachinko machine for yourself. And now, after spending some time finding the sweet spot on the shooter and the perfect timing for the waving arms, you realize something: there’s no score. Even Pachi-Com has that! Well, the score in a gambling game is in your wallet (and will inevitably be negative). But if you’re playing for fun? What can be done then? And can you work Javascript into it?
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Timing Matters on the Neo Geo
The other day I did a long drive for a business trip, which meant a lot of listening to music. And that’s when I wondered something about a CD I’ve had for some time. Let’s look at some Neo Geo music. And maybe learn something I didn’t know about the AES before.
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SG-1000 Smörgåsbord! Cartridges and RGB
Did you think I could leave well enough alone with the SG-1000 II? Of course not. There were some follow-up questions raised by the last blog post, so I’d like to take a look. Also, we’ll build a cartridge to allow for some more in-depth testing. And some more thoughts about a way forward for RGB, too.
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A Review of the RGB Blaster: No Mod, No Problem
It seems like I’m covering krikzz’s products a bunch now, with the Turbo EverDrive Pro and now this. But it’s not my fault he keeps making interesting things! Here, we see something particularly interesting: the RGB Blaster, an affordable device that promises Famicom users RGB video directly from the cartridge slot. How is this possible? How does it work? And I’ll say in advance, this one surprised me: things I expected to work didn’t, and things I didn’t expect to work did.
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Loading screens? On my Super Nintendo? It's more likely than you think!
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was, in many ways, the most advanced game console of its era, featuring 128kiB of work RAM, tilemap scaling and rotation, a massive color palette of 15-bit colors, translucency, flexible graphics modes, DMA, HDMA, and many other acronyms. But SNES gamers also know that it had an Achilles’ heel: speed. The pokey S-CPU wasn’t always the fastest kid on the block, and with SlowROM, it can be even slower than that. Let’s take a look at one particular game that runs slowly, Fatal Fury, and see if we can speed it up a tad.
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All Power to the HuCard Slot: The Turbo Everdrive Pro
The NEC PC Engine is an amazing console with an excellent library. It’s also a bit of a mess, with many different models, different capabilities, and different graphical specs; all of which are in fairly high demand. So I’m all for the release of tools that make the system more comprehensible and make its library more accessible: krikzz’s Turbo EverDrive Pro promises to do just that. How does it hold up to the weirdest stuff in my PC Engine collection?
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Sega 3-D Glasses: How did they work?
Most people have two eyes, allowing for a stereoscopic view of reality.[citation needed]. Nevertheless, video games are generally designed to run on monitors with a single screen, viewed from a distance, so three-dimensional effects have to be done with perspective and other techniques. But of course, many ways have been made to give a true stereoscopic view; from the 3DTV fad of the early 2010s, to the Nintendo 3DS’ glasses-free parallax barrier. But how did systems in the primitive days of 8-bit consoles do it? Let’s ask Sega!
