Keatah

It was funner in the old days, where mom or gramma would take us to Toys'R'Us. The excitement was in discovering new games, right there on the spot and then debating which ones to bring home. There were of course times we went and they didn't have anything new. That was fun - because we'd start saying, "Look!! No more new games for Atari!! Now we need Intellivision!!" And on and on. Accumulating systems and games at breakneck speed.

Sure, if the hardware and software support it.

Yes. All of the above. Is Atari VCS gaming an option for some entertainment?

B/W games are more sought after, and that means collectors will spend more effort restoring them. There is nothing "special" in a mame'd cabinet. A full-size mame cab is essentially a wannabe. A bartop is an entirely different story.

Definitely not 2010 nor Silent Running.. I doubt it's life force, but I will go through it to be sure.

It's pretty much that way for smartphones. Smartphones control you and you can't escape.

Love the authenticity and no hack jobbery!

?? Not sure what to make of this??

I once had the phone company call and investigate the pay phone I had set up in my bedroom. Or at least they thought it was a payphone when it was a box. Other things were excessively loud vibrations from my dad's drum amps hooked to the Apple II. And one of the local HAM operators started snooping around with an SWR meter or something when I hooked the Apple to a TV antenna amplifier's input and the output to the antenna. It was my intent to broadcast the video out signal through the entire house and hopefully to my buddy's house. It worked better than I thought and it reached across my whole side of the street!

I don't think it really matters. They'll be dumped and backed up on the internet.

Back in the day it was hardware specs that drove my purchase decisions. Sizes of drives and memory, processor speeds, # of onscreen colors and resolution. Stuff like that. Then it laboriously and slowly transitioned to present, what stoftware was available for a given platform was now the factor. And the PC happens to be my platoforom of choice. I enjoy the complexity of the software and the ability to organize and manage things as I see fit. I may never buy a switch for myself personally. But that doesn't mean I won't give them as gifts and prizes - there's nothing glaringly wrong the system that I can see other than we're 6-7 months away from being able ourchase one. Realistically. Without waiting in line overnite.

Did any classic computer activity scare you or get you in trouble? The only scary things I did was rigging up AC-line powered relays and such for my early 'lectric & science experiments. Nothing ever blew up that wasn't supposed to. That and the war dialing. I kept wondering what the fone company or fbi thought of dialing a thousand numbers each night. That, too, didn't result in anything seriously bad other than a $500 phone bill.

400 or 800.

In another thread I was saying that only 2 or maybe 3 top-flight VCS games come out every year. This would be one of them.

I think that "uncanny valley" phenomenon is at issue here.

That's a key point. Because I creamed my corduroys reading about the UltraVision - an AIO console with tv and radio and the ability to play cartridges. Imagine a bartop with some depth for a real CRT and control panel. Then I imagined getting super hi-power circuits and cramming it all into my Apple II console and drilling several holes in the side to accept VCS and Intellivision carts. I was nervous and didn't really want to cut up my new Apple II. So that never materialized. But I did plug in a VCS Game Program Cartridge into one of the 8 expansion slots. Try it! It actually fits and makes a connection. I never powered it up that way however. Now the wheels were spinning. I got a Sony 5" color TV, a car radio, SW radio, a cassette player, a Coleco TelStar and another VCS. And me and my buddies I built one of these things. It could play all VCS games, get all the TV stations, play cassettes, and do AM/FM/SW/WB. Made the housing out of plywood, and simply mounted everything in there. All I had to do was keep track of what wires went where and I would be o.k. I even had an upgrade-to-VCR planned for the future. About the only thing it did well, aside from all the stuff making interference with itself, was overheat. While I had a "System Saver" for the Apple II, the idea never occurred to me to put a fan in there. And not too long after those musings, I imagined (ridiculously of course) of having a James Bond secret agent briefcase that could play any videogame ever made. I spoke of modular software and how each computer and console would have its own memory carved out of a master array. Say I wanted an Atari VCS - I'd rotate the selector knob to "VCS" and press a button. Now it behaved like a VCS! Like magic. And it was similar with cartridges. I'd rotate a set of knobs to dial in the game I wanted. Not wholly unlike a fictional-but-plausible multi-system kiosk. But much smaller. I got some of the RadioShack project kits and actually started wiring it all up. I got as far as using the relay as an A/B switch box this allowing two consoles to be connected at one time to one tv. And then I started to see problems faster then I could solve them. I even discussed it with my dad's and neighbor's buddies at McDonald's over lunch one day. I asked them how I could build such a machine. Some of them were IBM engineers I think and they laughed at me like I was a retard. They cracked jokes about power and complexity and other engineering terms I didn't comprehend at the time. I told them to screw off and never associated myself with that bunch much anymore. I got on my (then new) ten-speed, dragging and moping around, and rode home. I even managed to crash into a parked car. I turned around, pissed that it got in my way, and kicked a dent in the fender. That'll teach it I thought.. So. Here we are today. A childhood dream and desire come true. Have all my videogames in a suitcase or small box. A perfect AIO. I don't know if I could find nostalgia in a small gumstick SOC computer, but anything the size of a NUC is a good catalyst.

I bet if you tried it a couple of times you'd get it going. It looks like a simple repackaging, as are all most R-Pi emulation projects.

Defender, like Pac-Man, was way to hard for a kid like me. But I did like all the clones and spinoffs of those games. And of course, the home systems' ports tended to be simpler and easier. So I liked those more than the originals.

That kiosk looks like it could be [converted into] a widescreen arcade cab!

The video is a big fail for several reasons. And is little more than clickbait. For this to have been anywhere near a valid demonstration, the kids would have to have had their choice of games to pick from. I remember I did. Must have had at least 8 the first 6 months. And all their variations. The early VCS catalog! Part of the fun of early videogaming was self-directed explorations. I remember on the Apple II there were times we played Bandits, or Star Blazer. Other times we rigged up our own "word processor" via a series of PRINT statements. And other times it got super technical like learning DOS commands and trying to fill up a disk. On the VCS we'd do Combat championships or Breakout eliminations. Other times we'd just sit mesmerized by the graphics in Superman in only a way a kid could. Then fall asleep to Miniature Golf after hours of all that other stuff. So you see, it wasn't any one single game. But all of it combined to make a self-directed gaming evening full of Atari ambiance and atmosphere. That's fun! You also have to remember all that the kids in this video are already spoiled by smartphones and tablets. Poisoned by skinner box apps and "Game Programs" that appear out of thin air. To be totally realistic you'd need a batch of kids that hadn't seen electronics and videogames before, just like us back in the day.

When I got my first RF-style videogame I had to go over the instructions to find out how to hook it up and what the rules were. And same thing with the Apple II which had excellent documentation. I believe it was because of that excellent documentation I still have an interest in the platform. And other early classic platforms. But if it would have been thrown in front of me blindly I would have lost interest.

That's it! Mike Kennedy was mentioned. The kiss of death has arrived and the Switch will be a failure.

They did! Rest assured. A shot like so can easily take 2 days, more when you consider the false coloring added in. This isn't a 1-week start to finish toothpaste commercial.

Yup. Happens in airplanes too. Pilots are always caught asking "what's the plane doing now" because they don't understand how it works.