Retro Gaming Technologies Released Before Their Time 120
Barence writes "Motion-sensing golf game controllers that appeared 20 years before the Nintendo Wii and the 1980s handheld console that operated on solar power are just two of the gems unearthed in this article about retro gaming secrets. Davey Winder has delved into his extensive personal collection of retro hardware to unveil the first handheld console to play '3D games' from 1983, 'the most realistic "gun" game controller ever produced' from way back in 1972, and the device that offered multiplayer computerized Scrabble almost 30 years before the iPad."
Analog joysticks (Score:2)
On the Atari 5200/SuperSystem (really A400 computers without keyboards). In an era when everything was digital (like Pac-man and Dig Dug) having analog sucked.
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So how did you play Pac-Man, which is basically impossible to play with analog sticks (you miss turns)?
Commodore did later develop an analog mouse for use with GEOS 64 and 128 and Amiga. And you're right it was nice for flight sims and such but the D-stick or D-pad was best for arcade games
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What difference would analog make? As long as the stick is in the position before the corner is reach, you can't miss the turn.
((x > 0.75) 0.75) 1) | ((y 0.25) 1)
That would be the analog equivalent of an Atari or Commodore digital joystick bitfield (invert for Atari). Tweak the thresholds to adjust the response speed.
Of course, the Apple ][ had an analog joystick/paddles before any of those machines.
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Cripes. Blasted HTML did me in. That's what I get for not previewing.
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Oh later, another good game was Stunt Island. Remember how you could make your own movies? How cool woul
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>>>What difference would analog make?
Try playing PacMan on your PS2 or Gamecube using the analog stick, and after missing a few turns or running directly into ghosts, then you'll understand. It's fucked up. You need a digital stick.
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No tactile feedback that you're really inside the sensor range for a direction, and longer travel.
Not to forget that in Pac-Man, you travel in one direction until you travel in another. Standing still in corridors (usually next to a power pill or waiting a second for a fruit to appear) is accomplished by changing directions back and forth with precision. If the analogue stick kicks in for a direction when the stick has moved only partway to that position, you lose that pr
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Actually the Arcade Pac-Man will stop when you center the stick. It's the various ports to consoles/computers that removed that functionality.
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What are talking about? Even the original Puck-Man didn't work that way. Whatever bootleg you played at the corner pizzeria has grossly mislead you.
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Listen, I've played Pac-Man and countless other action games using those very joysticks [old-computers.com] as well as this one [atarimagazines.com] written about in this article [atarimagazines.com]. It's not impossible or even difficult. It's simply not ideal. Even with analog sticks, there is plenty of time to hit the corners properly, which is what I was questioning. I doubt there is more than 1/10 second difference between direction changes for analog vs. digital.
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I remember seeing an episode of Mr. Wizard where he took apart an Atari Joystick and had the girl play the game by manually touching the contacts on the circ
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>>>video game system, right?
The 1977 Atari could talk, although it took programmers a few years to learn how to do it. First there was Pitfall 2 with music and then speech came soon after.
The 1982 C64 could talk out of the box (the SID chip could imitate a CD-style PCM recording).
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Heck, the TRS-80 didn't even have sound output designed into it so people wrote out to the cassette tape storage device to get sound for games, and IT managed to do passable voice synthesis.
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The irony is, maybe a few years after that analog joysticks came back into vogue as PCs decided to be better and offer analog joysticks. Even these days the sticks are all analog, before they're quantized and sent over USB. And in this modern era, we have both digital and analog sticks in our gamepads, with one console preferring digital control first
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The 5200 joystick wouldn't have been so bad if it would have just auto-centered! No, wait, it still would have been terrible...
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The 5200 sticks suffered from a plastic contact sheet that self-destructed just sitting in the box (oxidation). Repairing 5200 sticks remains a mini-industry in itself.
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On the Atari 5200/SuperSystem (really A400 computers without keyboards). In an era when everything was digital (like Pac-man and Dig Dug) having analog sucked.
Ironically, the original Atari 400/800- as well as the original Atari VCS (2600)- already supported analogue paddles, two per joystick port. (*) Given that the 5200 was basically a badly modified 800, I suspect that its analogue joystick interface hardware implementation used the existing twin-paddle input internally.
I never had them, as by the time I got my Atari 8-bit in the mid-80s, they seemed to be out of fashion, but AFAIK they were two-dimensional (i.e. left/right only) analogue controllers. I don'
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Ummm, there's no Leo Laporte connection here, unless you think it's a "connection" that he's old enough to have potentially tried and reviewed most of these.
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I don't know that I've ever seen or heard his productions (lucky me?), but I saw a photo of him and he even looks like a goofy tool.
Like the saying goes ... (Score:2)
Worst Console: (Score:2)
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Are you my old neighbor that used to haul his Atari or Coleco over to my apartment to show me all the cool games? Did you ever get a color TV over 12"?
I'm old enough, too. I have a big lawn, and I've owned a Gran Torino and watched the movie. Oh, and that little strip between the sidewalk and the street? I don't care what the city says, that's mine, too.
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>>>Man it sucks you can't get add-ons like that anymore.
PS3 does better than that. It plays all the PS1 and PS2 plus PS3 games. And no expensive addons - it's just builtin, or as a software download. Coleco's Atari addon wasn't really that great anyway, since it cost almost as much as the full Atari console.
Re:Worst Console: (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, no. The PS3 fails because it was only the early model PS3's that had that ability. Furthermore, it wasn't really clear which models of PS3 had the compatibility or didn't have it. So, what ended up happening was that people like me who bought the PS3 later in it's life found out the hard way that it wouldn't play their old PS2 games. Thanks Sony for confusing your customers.
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Amen to that. The PS3 back-compatibility story is a fiasco from start to finish.
I'm one of the lucky ones. I imported a first-gen 60 gig machine from the US, so I get the full hardware-based back compatibility. If you got the 20 gig with the software back-compatibility then you're a bit stuffed, as while the 360's software back-compatibility base has been expanded a few times over the years, I don't think Sony ever implemented (m)any of the planned expansions for the software on the PS3. And if you missed t
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PS3 does better than that. It plays all the PS1 and PS2 plus PS3 games.
This may apply to your PS3 (and mine... 60GB), but plenty of folks can't play PS2 games on their PS3.
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yea if you consider re buying ps1 games that you already own backwards compatible
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If you already own them, put the disc in. All PS3's can play PS1 discs, that's entirely software compatibility that all PS3's have.
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PS3 does better than that. It plays all the PS1 and PS2 plus PS3 games.
But does it run Linux? Any other OS or software? Oh it *used* to, but they decided after initial adopters paid $700 for those features and more, to disable that very feature. No thanks. I will stick with platforms that are not built by and controlled by asshats. Of course, that also rules out 360.
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>>>But does it run Linux?
Who cares? A couple geeks maybe but not 99.9% of the other PS3 owners.
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welllll
the coleco vision was awesome, and that was the console, the ADAM was a badly rushed piss poor engineered PC based around the CV's hardware (why not TMS video z80 etc, arcade games in a set top box)
if ADAM didnt require the fragile printer, and erase your storage media, catch fire and fall apart it would have been a decent contender in the early "everyone has one" pc days riding the coat tails of a already moderately successful console with a library of high quality 3rd party (sega nintendo etc) arca
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It's like everyone in Seattle has to own an iPad, otherwise they aren't hip. wtf.
It's like everyone in Seattle has to own an iPod, otherwise they aren't hip. wtf.
It's like everyone in Seattle has to own an iPhone, otherwise they aren't hip. wtf.
It's like everyone on Slashdot has to dis iOwners, otherwise they lose cred. wtf.
It's like ACs on Slashdot...oh wait, you're just here to flame.
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Its as if a million gold-plated turds cried out, and were suddenly silent.
Scrabble boards indeed, what kind of a metaphor is THAT ?
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Does it mention... (Score:2)
The Sega Activator?
It did everything Kinect does, worked about as reliably, was 20 years earlier and didn't cost $200.
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it simulated 12 buttons(4 directions and 6 buttons) and was horrible for regular purpose gaming.
the activator was shit.
The Kinect actually is pretty innovative.
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The Sega Activator?
It did everything Kinect does,
So it could track four players simultaneously and determine the position of occluded limbs? You're a troll, and not a good one. Go back to digg, son.
Title of story is fucked up (Score:3, Insightful)
The title given to this slashdot story is weird on a couple of levels. Firstly, these devices weren't released "before their time," they were released at precisely their time. Moreover, "retro" refers to exactly the opposite of something that is ahead of its time, it refers to something that is a throwback to an earlier time.
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Your expectation that /. stories should have meaningful titles is retro. :)
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Man were in fact released "before their time", namely they were released with technology that wasn't really mature enough to actually work correctly(such as the power glove which essentially uses the same motion tracking technology as the wii but said technology simply wasn't ready until recently)
But they weren't ahead of their time in any way. They were exactly of their time. Your example is untrue - the power glove does not use the "same motion technology as the Wii," it uses a much earlier incarnation.
Wii Fit (Score:3, Informative)
Cool stuff, but he left out the Amiga Joyboard [google.com].
LED panels lit from external light? (Score:2, Flamebait)
LED panels lit from external light? LCD, maybe. LED panels are light-emitting, not light-transmitting (although most indeed will do both, they don't control light passing through them, only add to it.)
It's the brightness wars (Score:2)
If you think last year's LEDs are too dim, you should see LEDs from the 1980s. They were so dark - (how dark were they?) - they were so dark, you had to shine a laser on 'em to see if they were on!
Don't ask me what they made the lasers out of.
But will it blend? (Score:1)
Me likey
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Why would anyone argue about your Grandmother ?
Oh, you meant grammAr ???
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Arcade Vector Graphics (Score:2)
The 1980s arcade games with vector graphics (not raster/bitmap) displays were ahead of their time. Now that we have Flash and SVG that can specify graphics in vector format, we could use display HW that can render with vectors instead of pixels, for even smoother and better looking displays.
The old tech really offered only black and white, but now 30-40 years later we might have figured out how to offer full color. Perhaps even fuller color than with pixels, since pixels are really not fully colored, but a
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>The 1980s arcade games with vector graphics (not raster/bitmap) displays were ahead of their time. Now that we have Flash and SVG that can specify graphics in vector format,
>we could use display HW that can render with vectors instead of pixels, for even smoother and better looking displays.
It's still extremely hard to get a convincing "Tempest", "Lander" or "Asteroids" on a PC display. There is some real subtlety to the vector system.
I played Lunar Lander a lot, but I always kind of had a grudge be
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Vector graphics displays are essentially unworkable and that is why they were abandoned.
Amongst their many drawbacks is a true killer: they require a CRT tube, complete with an electron beam that can be deflected in arbitrary directions. They are utterly incompatible with any other modern display technology such as LCD displays for example (if you want to use vector graphics on an LCD you have to rasterize your vectors first - which neatly defeats the whole idea).
Then there is a of course the problem with
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The reason vector displays use a CRT is because the drawing point is controlled by deflecting it in X and Y axes with a continuous analog voltage on each axis against the charged beam, which strikes the CRT plate phosphor coat and glows at that moving point. That effect can be produced by moving rocking a mirror in X and Y axes, onto which a laser is directed. In the 1980s a laser and mirror apparatus with quick and precise positioning were low brightness, electrically inefficient, and physically large. Now
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You Sir are confused. DLP technology is a raster display technology, where a grid of mirrors etched onto a semi-conductor chip and controlled electronically represents the entire pixel grid. Also, the advances in the size of the LCD displays rendered even it obsolete for TV use. Most stores no longer carry projection TVs of any kind.
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No, BiggestIgnoramus, I'm not confused. A 2D DLP grid is not a raster - it's a grid. It's pixels, but not raster. You're confused.
But that's totally irrelevant to what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a DLP TV's projection chamber being suitable for a laser vector display. Which, as I said several times, is something I think could be further developed, which makes whether or not DLPs are increasingly or decreasingly popular now irrelevant. But indeed DLPs are still made and sold. You're confused.
What ki
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While technically true, the DLPs are used pretty much exclusively to display input signal meant for a traditional CRT tube, which hasn't changed for decades due to mostly technological inertia. Thus they are classified as "raster" display systems because they accept input formatted and optimized for a raster display. The same is applicable to LCD monitors and TVs which are also technically "grid" displays, yet their r
3D Monster Maze Myth (Score:3, Interesting)
From the article:
> The first game to simulate 3D was 3D Monster Maze for the Sinclair ZX81...
That's the second time recently I've seen that myth trotted out. It's not true. Although a good game, it was actually a copy of a similar game for the Commodore PET that I played at least a year before the ZX81 even came out.
I know this for sure as I used to play the PET version at school (they got a 3016 in March 1980), and then when I got my own ZX81 (which came out Spring 1981), I was thrilled to be able to play a version of the same game at home when it was released a few months after that.
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By the way, that's not to say that it might not have been on other platforms (e.g. Apple II, TRS-80) as well as, or even before, the Commodore PET, I just know that I played it on the PET first, before the ZX81 even came out.
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"The first game to simulate 3D was 3D Monster Maze for the Sinclair ZX81..."
That's the second time recently I've seen that myth trotted out. It's not true. Although a good game, it was actually a copy of a similar game for the Commodore PET that I played at least a year before the ZX81 even came out.
Uh-huh. And on more powerful workstation/minicomputer platforms, such games go back further. "Maze War", which also is sometimes claimed to be the first online multiplayer game, ran on the PDS-1 (a minicomput
Blip! (Score:1)
I had a Blip, a larger similar mechanical pong, and a Mattel Football, all around the same time. I loved these games - they were my favorite games until I got my first computer (TRS-80 the following year.)
CDTV was a great machine! (Score:1)
I've got one of those... (Score:2)
I have that exact golf club LCD game, the full set of 7 different Tomytronic 3D games (as well as the clone fom Tandy), a few Atary Lynx's, that game&watch Mario game plus a pile more, Blip and Barcode Battler.
He who dies with the most games must've had the most fun in life - at least that's how I see it
great example (Score:1)
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is that a self portriat? (Score:1, Flamebait)
DON"T CLICK THAT LINK!!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Thanks for saving me money on food for the next few days till that image fades from my mind.
Where the hell is my bottle of eye/brain bleach. The one labeled "Everclear"
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That was self inflicted, you know. It's not "any link on Slashdot". You really should have just paid attention to the urlshortenertrap. It's kind of like the guys who fall for the police bait car [goo.gl] even after the old lady walks by and says it's a police trap.
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That was self inflicted, you know.
Yeah, I know. Most of the time the links are safe, I've Dl'd some really cool stuff and read some very informative or interesting articles over the years. Hence the automatic click on the link. Just one of the dangers of the web that I have to live with. Better than the alternatives that folks like Conroy would have us endure.
At least now I know what the goatse image looks like.
Still can't find the Everclear, I may have to improvise and use some JD instead.
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2 litres, stat.
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Good point, but I think my use of the word "usually" covers that.
To clarify my point a bit, I'm not actually saying that "doing it more successfully" is what defines who the innovator is. I'm saying that figuring out how to do it well enough to be a success requires additional advances and refinements of a concept which are themselves innovations.
Just because some company tried a mobile gaming platform with two screens over a decade before the DS doesn't meant much. "Hey let's put two screens in it!" isn'
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I'd say that 2 screens ISN'T innovative, and probably wasn't even for the first company that did it. It's a good idea, yes. And the DS is an excellent console in an awful lot of ways. But is adding an extra screen actually an innovation, or just a logical extension of existing technology?
Innovation usually implies doing something non-obvious, or doing something which may have been obvious but was very very tricky. Outputting to multiple displays has been possible for pretty much as long as there have been d
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Watch out. By using your argument, that the second or third comer to the party that actually "does it more successfully" is the innovator, you are coming very close to saying that Apple innovates. Just thought you'd like to know. You don't want to fall into any self set traps now, would you?
Fixed it for you.
Apple is not an innovator. They are a marketing and design company, dedicated to the prettying up of existing technology. Did apple create the MP3 player? No. (Saehan's MPMan, 1998) The first smatphone? No. Simon; it was designed by IBM in 1992, released to the general market in 1993. It had no buttons, it was touchscreen only. First PC? No. It was the IBM 5100, (1975). Did they have the first GUI OS? No. Xerox PARC, 1973). Apple didn't ever invent anything, nor are they
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By the current definition, This [calottery.com] is a gallery of 'innovators'.
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But I wasn't saying that success == innovation. I'm saying that doing something later than something similar doesn't mean that there's no innovation.
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These claims might have more merit if the earlier invention had actually caught on.
Claiming that motion control is innovative because Nintendo was successful at it is a misuse of the word innovation. If there is some aspect of the motion control that is actually innovative, then that should be what is discussed. Claiming that the larger idea is innovative because of some small detail is just incorrect.
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That's not quite what I was trying to say, although I can see how you interpreted it that way.
What I meant was, if the first time that innovation was tested in the marketplace, and it had caught on, and there'd been a steady progression of development in the technology, then it'd be clearly non-innovative for Nintendo to come up with the DS. But if an idea gets floated 20+ years ago, and leads to nothing, and then a similar idea is tried again, the fact that the idea was used 20+ years ago doesn't automati
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Also, with respect to the motion control, I do think that Nintendo innovated. Sure, there was a golf game that used accelerometers. I'm certain that accelerometers predate the development of the golf game.
If the golf game can be said to be innovative, because it used accelerometers for input in a game, can we not say that the Wii is innovative for creating a generalized input solution for motion?
Isn't integrating the IR cameras on the Wii sensor bar, and using it to precisely control the aimpoint of the w
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Getting it right may be an innovation, but is not a prerequisite for innovation.
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Do you know what it means to be, "before your time"?
It means that the technology or social conditions needed for your idea to be successful didn't exist at the time.
However, to the GP's point, it also means that either you didn't scale your idea to the existing technology, or you didn't invent the technology needed, or you didn't time its release correctly, or you didn't do the social engineering necessary to make it a hit. All of those are things you could do, and which various inventors at various times HAVE done to be successful.
When people say "you were
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Why'd you put console in quotes? The Genesis absolutely was a console, and you had to have one to use Sega Channel, just like you have to have a 360 to use Live.
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Gameline for the Atari 2600 predates it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameLine [wikipedia.org]
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"retro
(rtr)
adj.
1. Retroactive: retro pay.
2. Involving, relating to, or reminiscent of things past; retrospective: "As is often the case in retro fashion, historical accuracy is somewhat beside the point" (New York Times).
n. pl. retros
A fashion, decor, design, or style reminiscent of things past."
Old gaming technologies != "Retro gaming technologies".
Gaming with old technologies == gaming involving things past == retro(2) gaming.
Therefore technologies used in gaming with old technologies are,
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True... Blip may not have been the best game out there, but it was definitely a mechanical marvel... I give it that. Demon Driver was another neat mechanical one from Tomy back then.