Day: August 9, 2006

Categories
Gaming

Et tu, Studio II?

I’m coming down the home stretch on this year’s Phosphor Dot Fossils video for OVGE, which will be close to 3 hours long (and will be available on DVD at the table this year), and this morning I hooked up my Fairchild Channel F and RCA Studio II consoles, both of which I acquired last year, to grab some of the last footage before I start editing. (I’m also going to grab some Vectrex stuff today, though that requires hooking up another camera for obvious reasons.)
The thing about the Channel F, when you hook it up, is that you quickly realize why, despite it being the first cartridge based video game system, it quickly fell to the Atari VCS. It has some unique controllers, but that’s about all it has going for it; the sound still comes from a speaker in the console itself (whose volume is permanently set at “too loud for something that just sits there and beeps”), and the games…well…they’re interesting academically. Which means that once I get the one-minute-or-so of footage that I need, that machine gets unplugged and put away again.
Beep boop, the Studio II is dead!The Studio II, sadly, is an even worse story. It’s got a completely byzantine hookup – the machine gets its power from the RF adapter, which is where the AC adapter plugs in as well – and after all that, I find…that my Studio II doesn’t work.
Now, this is my own damned fault. I reeled in a massive haul of old games and consoles on eBay last year, and just due to time, I had never plugged this puppy in before. I’ve got a ton of games for it, but no working console to play them on. (By all accounts, I’m not missing much – the thing may be powered by the same processor that drove the Pioneer and Voyager probes, but you’d think this one had been a lot closer to Jupiter’s hard radiation than the spacecraft’s chips had.) Like the song says, all I get is video ga-ga. … Read more

Categories
Gaming

I remember the arcade.

Anyone who knows me – or who has been to my place and seen my retina-wrecking low-light game room – knows that I have a fondness for the arcade of old. And when I say that, I don’t mean the places wrapped in bubble gum colors, but the places that were painted black, with mirrored ceilings and support columns, that just seemed to eat any form of light that didn’t emanate from a game’s screen or its backlit marquee. Yeah. Those were the good days.
Of course, I talk about these places like I’m remembering romantic teenage hangouts, and that simply isn’t the case. I’m remembering single-digit-age and pre-teen hangouts, places that my mom or my brother would take me. Sometimes they’d leave me there and go shopping. Other times they’d stay – even my mom, who could so kick your ass on Ms. Pac-Man. She was cool like that.
I thought I’d sit down and try to squeeze out of my synapses every available memory of the four arcades I frequented in my youth. … Read more