Atari
Paleotronic’s 12 Years of Retro-Christmas Year Two: 1981
Our second instalment of our 12 Years of Retro-Christmas includes the ZX81, TI99/4A. BBC Micro and more… Click on each image for the full-sized copy or download the PDF Version
Video Games
Atari
Paleotronic’s 12 Years of Retro-Christmas Year One: 1980
Over the next 23 days we’re going on a journey through 12 years of Christmas tech-gifts past. Our first year is 1980, when first generation consoles and home computers began to gain serious traction. Click [more…]
Education
Pong: or, how I learned to love getting paddled
In the 1960s, television was something that was a passive occupation, you turn it on an it entertained you. The possibility that you might be able to create or manage what you saw on the [more…]
Computers
Emulating the Tube: Completing the Retro Experience
For some nostalgics it’s not merely enough to emulate the console or computer – they want to emulate the CRT they used it on too! The nature of cathode-ray tube displays distinctly affected how images [more…]
Atari
Shootout of the Video Game Systems: The Age of the Light Gun
The first mechanical light-gun games appeared in the arcades and midways of the 1930s. Following the invention of the light-sensing vacuum tube, companies such as Seeburg produced games that had the tube hidden inside targets, [more…]
Computers
The Noise Channel: Hearing and Cheering the AY-3-8910
THE ARCADE games of the 1970s used dedicated circuits for sound – even the sound chip in the Atari 2600 only had a set of pre-defined sound effects and an oddly-tuned tone generator. Realising that [more…]
History
The Bard’s Inn: The First Graphical Role-Playing Games
RPGs, no, it’s probably not what your thinking of – rocket propelled grenades. Although those kind of RPG’s sure are cool and a very useful weapon in today’s current gaming environment. What RPG stands for [more…]
Atari
No Software Required: How Atari Made Its First Video Games Without A Computer
In the early 1970s, computers were expensive! Like, really expensive, man! So if you were a young Nolan Bushnell entranced by Spacewar and you wanted to bring it to the masses, how could you do [more…]
Features
From the Computer Lab to the Arcade: The Journey of Space War
Paul Monopoli takes a look back at the very first video game, and its influence on what would become one of the world’s most popular pasttimes. In 1961 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was to [more…]
Computers
Open Mailbox: An Introduction to the World of Text Adventures and Interactive Fiction
WELCOME TO ADVENTURE!! WOULD YOU LIKE INSTRUCTIONS? Y SOMEWHERE NEARBY IS A COLOSSAL CAVE, WHERE OTHERS HAVE FOUND FORTUNES IN TREASURE AND GOLD, THOUGH IT IS RUMOURED THAT SOME WHO ENTER ARE NEVER SEEN AGAIN. [more…]