I love the effort Nathan Baggs puts in to making this happen. When I’m out thrifting, I tend to gravitate toward the old technology sections of the store. I’ve managed to build up a fairly decent collection of ’90s/’00s game CDs, half of which won’t run on modern systems. The intellectual exercise alone is worth the challenge.
This makes me wish I still had my dot-matrix print outs of all of the BASIC programs I wrote in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At least I can relive some of that feeling using this BASIC interpreter, Vintage Basic, and running the programs here.
In another 100 years we’ll look back at the dearth of cultural information available for the period from ca. 1995 until whatever period comes after ours – it truly will be a dark age since so much is digital.
The linked blog post here goes back two decades earlier, to the start of digital gaming. Same issues apply to that scenario.
Internet Artifacts: you may touch the artifacts
Atari Age hosts two sets of copies of the schematics for the Atari VCS TIA (Television Interface Adapter), the custom chip that was used in the VCS/2600 for graphics and sound. One set has sheets at 2048 x 1396 resolution, the other is in a whopping 14400 x 9820 format.
Might be neat to simulate the TIA and other VCS hardware in Minecraft and run a ROM entirely in that world. Why not? Something similar was done w/ the Commandore 32!
Another interesting link – a recent rundown of the TIA hardware.
Neat background info on everything Galaga, from the programming to the cabinet design: https://web.archive.org/web/20150803002342/http://shmuplations.com/galaga
…from a single screenshot more than 20 years after it disappeared due to unfortunate circumstances.
Interesting thread here at AtariAge discussing the current effort and a contemporaneous description of the game by the original developer, Paul Oswood, here.
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I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to the original screenshot of course:
…developer of – among other things – the Intellivision Exec OS and Star Fire, the first arcade game to use a sit-down cockpit, and more notably, allow a user to enter their initials after achieving a high score: https://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_david_rolfe.html
Suh-weet: https://www.pcjs.org/machines/arcade/invaders/
Also, the Github repo for PCjs.
Amazing the obscurity of some of these titles and the resultant sales prices: https://www.racketboy.com/retro/rarest-and-most-valuable-atari-2600-games