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...

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 ...