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.

Monday, September 7, 2026

The $10,000 Trinitron


No matter how good this TV was in 1981, the technology was still limited to 480i. I'm not sure if 480p was even possible at the time. When DVDs were introduced in 1996, they were still 480i.

No matter how high-tech the TV claimed to be, it still had the same fundamental limitations.

The computers that existed in the early 1980s generally output a 240p signal, although a few machines had options for higher resolutions.

In the 1990s, a friend of my mother's was showing off her 33-inch CRT TV. She asked me how much I thought it cost. I correctly guessed $3,000. Soon, however, that expensive TV would become obsolete as HDTV came along. Some of the final CRT televisions could accept an HD signal before flat-screen TVs became common.

In my final years in Utah, I saw someone giving away a 33-inch TV on the curb. I thought maybe I could use it as a video game display. It was so heavy—probably around 150 pounds—that a friend and I nearly killed ourselves trying to lift it together. I eventually had to give it away before I moved.

Shortly after arriving in Indiana, I saw another 33-inch TV sitting on a curb. I convinced the owner to haul it to my house. Again, I wanted to use it as a video game display, but I eventually gave it away. A young couple wanted it for their son's video game system.


3D Escape 1000 Mazes by Entex

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP7s1Oae0MY