GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

At long last, I debuted my custom turbo Vectrex controller at the Houston Arcade Expo on October 19 & 20.  This will be a milestone for Vectrex fans and collectors, as it brings about more ergonomic controls and a rate-adjustable Turbo (auto-fire) mode that can toggle per button. Vectrex Controller Prototype, as seen in Houston last month Why, you ask? I acquired a Vectrex in late 2015 from a very generous individual who had several to spare.  However, it did not come with a controller, so it laid dormant until I got around to building the giant 100x NES controller .  As the guts of a cheap knock-off NES controller from Amazon went into my behemoth NES controller, I used its shell and buttons to enclose a crude perf-board controller, and cut up a cheap Sega Genesis extension cable from Amazon in order to make all the connections from my hand-soldered board into the Vectrex.  It is well-documented on how to fashion a Sega Genesis controller into a Ve...

In my retrocomputing adventures, I have sought things not purely based on style alone, but based on combinations of processor, wide 3rd-party adoption and support, and "interesting" factor.  Having picked up at least one system from each common type of processor (8088, x86, Zilog Z80, 6502, 68xx, 68xxx) and the schemes popular in the USA (IBM & compatibles, Apple, Commodore, Amiga, Atari, Tandy), I thought it was time to try for something from overseas.  Plenty of computers were made for the UK market, such as the Amstrad, Acorn, and BBC Micro, and Japan had many interesting varieties of computers offered by NEC alone, not to mention their other manufacturers such as Sharp and Fujitsu. However, really not much is known (in English) about computers from behind the Iron Curtain. A Brief History of Why This Is a Thing One thing that is for sure: in the 1970s, the Soviet Union, in an effort to keep up with rapidly-evolving Western technology, decided to put an end to ...

The opportunity Google gave me to attend Google I/O, their annual conference, two weeks ago required me to travel to the Bay Area in California in order to attend in person.  Also known as Silicon Valley, it is an area steeped in computer history, featuring (of course) the Computer History Museum, not to mention large offices or global headquarters for many current and long-gone tech behemoths, plus all the tiny startups making millions off various Internet and mobile technologies.  As someone who has been using computers their entire life (well over 25 years now), I am enthusiastic about the way forward but do not want to forget about the winding, bumpy way that has gotten us to this point. As I seek to bolster my collection of retro-tech, it is fascinating to pontificate on what all these devices would have cost brand new.  There's no way my family could have afforded but one or two these things back in the day, but as technology marches on and leaves so much of itsel...

Recently, I dug up an old email where I was musing on the big marquee on an old television game show called The Magnificent Marble Machine .  It was a very fancy prop at the time, as most television shows of the era relied on art cards with big, bold letters that would be flipped, slid, or otherwise revealed by stagehands upon the emcee's verbal cue.    k Slide it, Earl! ( Match Game ) - Survey Says?! ( Family Feud ) - Sources: YouTube, Game Show Utopia This is about as fancy as it got for electronic graphics on game show props in the 1970s ( Tic Tac Dough ).  However, they never upgraded this board during the 1980s... Source: Dailymotion And a couple shots of the Magnificent Marble Machine game board in action.  Looks like a plain ol' marquee, but really an astonishing feat of engineering given normally chintzy television props, especially for its era... Source: Gameshows Wikia Cashing In On a Fad Now, the Magnificent Marble Machine w...

(Addendum: Follow along my thought process below with this extra pedagogical material:  https://www.slideshare.net/StephenWylie3/process-of-arcade-rom-hacking  ) An interesting work project, right? I was invited to take my Giant NES Controller to a recruiting event for work taking place at a local brewery.  But you can't just have an NES controller without anything to play, right?  Thus, I pitched a couple ideas on custom games to go along with the giant controller since I didn't want participants playing anything standard either.  The thing they agreed to was to feature the Tapper arcade game, by Bally/Midway in 1983, but modified to show the brewery's logo instead of being Budweiser-branded like it was originally. My handiwork, about 80% done, and with a tiny glitch.  Can you spot the remaining issues? Now you might be thinking Tapper wasn't ever ported to NES, and that's correct.  However, with the help of the MAME arcade emulator and a ...