Bleah. All weekend and no post to show for it. I could throw in a some edu-humor but I think you five readers would rather me put something substantial. Unfortunately it is too late in the evening for that. Besides, I really don’t have anything to post- Friday was uninteresting and I didn’t go to church since I had the weekend off from kid’s ministry and needed the break. Should I start adding posts for one of the other passions I hold- retrogaming? I wanted to start a sister brother blog, but I have a hard enough time writing for this blog. Here are a few sites to whet an appetite for retrogaming:
The first site is everything MAME for arcade emulation. The second is pretty much just a news site for all types of emulator releases: computer, arcade, and console. There really is no good site these days for computer and console emulation. For emulators you need game files to play, be it ROM images, disks, or CD images, but I don’t think I should be telling you where to find these given their legality. The third link is all about remakes of older games, usually for Windows but sometimes for other systems. This would be the easiest one to get started with, but as remakes they are usually reimaginings (thanks Sci-fi Channel for the term!) rather than exact copies, so if it’s the original you want you will need to go with emulation.
Once in a while I feel like playing atari games that I played as a kid, but I never have time for any hobbies I used to enjoy like video games or lego. Hobbies now = kids. Maybe when I “retire” ie, kids are grown, then I will probably just sit and waste away with video games!
Only temporarily, until they all want you to perform your grandmotherly duties. Still quite a ways away though.
I just want an old Centipede or Q-bert arcade game. I’ve tried playing both on various home setups, but they weren’t as much fun as the actual arcade machines. Something about that big track ball for Centipede. And Q-bert always seemed to have the best joystick. I have “pong” somewhere too. I never got into the Amiga computers, never had the money to get one. I build my own Heath-Kit machine, part by part.
Yes, the old gaming systems games never were like the old games. I remember Atari’s version of Pac-Man…. horrible.
Q*Bert actually used a standard 4-way joystick mounted 45 degrees off standard, so the “diagonals” were really just up, down, left, and right. It’s hard capturing that feel with modern 8-way joysticks/control pads. In fact, some arcade enthusiasts actually have a setup that includes both 8-direction and 4-direction controllers. Still doesn’t do much for Q*Bert though since they are still mounted standard, but it does help immensely for games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong which were built with the 4-way controllers in mind.
As for the trackball, you can buy trackball controllers, or controllers with these arcade trackballs. I will post about these in the near future.
And Jamiahsh, that Pac-Man version, along with E.T., was part of the reason for the video game crash in the mid-eighties. Nintendo of course would revive it a couple years later with the NES. I don’t think a good Pac-Man home remake came out until the 16-bit era (Genesis, SNES). NES did have a pretty good version, but it still wasn’t the same.