Saturday, October 17, 2026

Bowling Tomy Pocket Game



@john2001plus

0 seconds ago

It is like a bowling slot machine.

How Small Can a Video Game Actually Be?

 

 @john2001plus 
3 minutes ago (edited) 
This video describes my early game programming days, starting with very primitive 8-bit computers.

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

Massive 1966 Sega Periscope Arcade game. Firing Torpedo's is fun!


Never saw this one.  I would have loved it.

I remember playing a standup periscope game in the late 1960s, and I loved it.  I would have been around 9 years old.

It was the first arcade game I played, and it was in a long-gone pizza shop near the river in Madison, Indiana.  

I would take a bigger interest in arcade games in the 1970s.  First was a really lousy racing game (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09D8tek091s) in a "dime store" in downtown Columbus, Indiana.  Then I found a mechanical shooting game I liked at a department store.  Then my sister and I became hooked on a mechanical baseball game that was in one of those really small corner grocery stores.

Apparently, arcade games have a long history.

Columbus got its first mall around 1973, and an arcade opened a year later, which changed my life forever.  The arcade started with mechanical games.  The first video game was Pong, which I didn't find very interesting.

Friday, October 9, 2026

The 20 Greatest ColecoVision Games of All-Time

ColecoVision | The 25 greatest games


Turbo is a questionable #1 choice. Compared to other driving games, it has a fixed perspective. I'd rather being playing Pole Position, which gives a better 3D effect. I am such a Donkey Kong fan, it would have been one of my top choices. The Q-Bert game shown appears to be Q-Bert Qubes.


Donkey Kong (Coleco Handheld)

This would have been fun to play.

Sunday, October 4, 2026

Konami Code on an Arcade1Up Ms. Pac-Man?


@john2001plus
3 minutes ago (edited)
Ms. Pac-Man started as a third-party hack of the original Pac-Man called Crazy Otto. As a result, the original Pac-Man maze exists inside the original Ms. Pac-Man, but there is no apparent way to play it.

In the early 1980s, I started a game of Ms. Pac-Man and somehow got the Pac-Man maze for the first screen. This bug was likely very rare because I have never heard of anyone else seeing it. Maybe the glitch was unique to the machine I was playing. In very rare cases, a RAM bit will get flipped or misread, resulting in a bug.

(Chat GPT found a story of one other person encountering the same bug of getting the Pac-Man maze on Ms. Pac-Man.)

The Anniversary Arcade version of Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga had a secret code to play the original Pac-Man game.  There was even a bug where you could play the attract mode of Galaga for a while.

I would really like it if I could play Pac-Man on my Ms. Pac-Man Arcade1up.

This Vectrex does things I never thought possible

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING TO VIDEO GAMES?!


@john2001plus
1 minute ago
In the 1990s, game consoles were distinct entities from PCs.  Now game consoles are close enough to PCs that it makes more sense to buy a PC.  To be viable, the consoles have to offer some kind of value, like the XBox Series X did for $500, which was considerably cheaper than the equivalent gaming PC.  The low price was achieved through custom hardware and mass production.

Bowling Tomy Pocket Game

@john2001plus 0 seconds ago It is like a bowling slot machine.