Decades of Fun: Computers Built to Last - This Week In Retro 62

is a 50 year old computer retro or vintage all this and more on this weekend retro high resolution color graphics this land of high technology the revolution in technology that made the information age possible those kids are not afraid of computers hooray ferrari a cfax emulator using live data feeds tomb raider advance decades of fun computers built to last all these stories and more on this week in retro up-to-date news for out-of-date tech so chris before we get started uh i just want to say well done on our first episode i thought you did really well and that certainly reflected in the comments that we had on the show we had a lot of positive comments left last week on uh first of all positive comments towards john to thank him for thank him for his service i feel like i should salute him thank you john and um also a big welcome to you and lots of positive thoughts on your performance and i i think this is your first podcast that you've been involved in is that right chris yeah that's right yeah i'm very grateful for those comments as well they do help yeah so you're a natural and um uh long may it continue i'm looking forward to making lots more shows with you um other things to talk about just before we get into this week's stories are first of all a quick plug because my the proof has arrived for the colouring book of retro computers this is a book that i made last year i've been working on and it's what funded the cave here and uh if you're on audio only i'm just holding it up it's sort of an a4 sized coloring book filled with over 30 pages of awesome uh illustrations by stu cambridge of sensible software fame of all our favorite retro computers ready to be colored in i've approved the proof it's going to the factory now so if you back the kickstarter you will get that very very soon if you didn't it'll be in the rmc shop soon and really pleased to deliver another kickstarter we talk about kickstarters a lot on the show and they come and they go and um you're only you're only as good as your last kickstarter chris i firmly believe so it's nice to to be able to deliver uh another one we are admittedly about a month late on delivering it because of um certain things that happened covered wise um it was impossible to avoid certain delays and things but we're there now when we're going to get into people's hands so very pleased with that and the other thing i wanted to talk about was an interesting question that came up as a comment over on my channel from commenter tempest fury what a great name um and despite the angry name it was a constructive comment it wasn't a straight-up trolling comment otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it and it was left on my unboxings video and they said about the unboxings they said those aren't retro donations they are vintage and he qualifies this by saying retro is something that looks acts plays in a style that is older not sure why most get that wrong playing an atari isn't retro gaming while playing a brand new 8-bit game is retro gaming so chris my question is have we been getting it wrong should we be talking about this week in vintage gaming and not retro is language important here oh uh well neil i hate to say it but he raises a fair point um and this is actually what i brought up myself in another retro gaming community they basically do video responses to each other so somebody will raise a question and then other people give their ideas on that that question and um that one of the questions was what is retro and indeed it's in the style of so my examples here just looking around um i've got a spectrum 48k here an original that's not retro because it's the original it's not in the style of it's the original whereas this atari flashback 9 which may get me some hate but that is retro because it's not the original but it is in the style of apart from those horrendously round buttons at the top um another couple of examples i've got an original box copy of driller again for the spectrum that is not retro because it's the original whereas this which is by a company in russia called zoysia travel through time northern lights that is for the zx spectrum even though it's made in the modern day so i would consider that as retro because obviously it's game in the style of the previous period but it's only just a good period often a tangent that's a nice looking box is that it's like a big box spectrum game it's nice yes so so they do and look i'm just a customer i'm not here to plug for them um but they've they've got a nice selections quite fairly small selection but growing of games and they actually make their games available for free um to download so you can download and play any of their games and they're really high quality um if you do if you do that's a driving game okay um you've got screenshots on the back you might not be able to pick them up on my webcam and that's actually a window through to the manual so the manual you're actually looking at the back of the manual at that point really nicely packaged they include a poster they include a cd soundtrack for if you want to play that in the background and they actually we didn't really have these in on the spectrum back in the day but they do cut scenes in their games so they really do put a lot of effort on so yeah so yeah but that is enough retro not vintage in your opinion i i would say that yeah so getting back to the art the question um neil i'd argue even vintage i don't know is vintage pushing it because maybe the word classic and i guess this applies to anything like furniture and cards and clothes and toys you'd think for vintage someone before now would have drawn a line in the sand and said for example i don't know anything over 100 years is vintage um i've got a grandfather clock actually in the other room that's from the 1800s i'd happily call that vintage that vintage or would you call that antique well maybe you're right maybe you are right maybe it's antique because you know i really can't put that grandfather clock in the same category as my a1200 or any of the machines behind me it just doesn't seem right so yeah i i don't know um i simply can't compare the two is that your understanding though neil that there's no line in the sand to define the word vintage well um i've got the dictionary definition here to fall back on to try and uh try and give us some some definition so it's from cambridge online dictionary this one vintage produced in the past and typical of the period in which it was made eg a vintage comic book retro similar to styles fashions etc from the past um and both both have old suggested as a synonym so um yeah i mean the way you've described it is the way it is in the dictionary retro similar in style vintage produced in the past so hmm it would appear that we're talking about vintage computers and vintage computer games and when we talk about modern remakes it would be correct to call them retro however does that mean we should make a concerted effort to double check and to be careful of our use of the word retro and if you'd asked me let's say 10 years ago if you'd asked me about that i would have been really pedantic about it and i probably would have said yes we should um but in those 10 years i've i've moved about and i've tried badly but i've tried hard to learn a second language and on occasion i found myself dependent on using that second language to be understood very badly and simply being understood became more important to me than any other aspect of language when you're put in that situation spelling grammar all important but none of them came close to just being understood you know i want to buy that baguette please so i didn't go hungry i didn't care if the grammar was wrong so um i think that retro is understood and we do have an international audience by the way not everyone has english as their first language not everyone who is into retro gaming and computing or vintage gaming and computing has english as their first language and i think it is universally understood what we mean when we say the word retro um yeah yeah don't forget now we've also got retro gamer magazine which reviews and explores vintage games so well what i mean is it talks about the originals under the title of retro um so have they got it wrong neil yeah yeah yeah it's an interesting point i think and it's something we could discuss for an entire show so thank you to tempest fury for making that con comment i think you're entirely correct but i also think that language changes and evolves according to popular use and i think that's what we might see happen with retro if we haven't already seen that happen is the the word retro will just encompass vintage until we get to the point where we're having this conversation of is it retro or vintage or is it antique that day will come uh but you know i i think i don't i don't know where we draw the line as to where something becomes antique or not um yeah we'll have that conversation again in 50 years time um however you know it's a democracy here this week in retro so i think we should have a vote on it um i'm in favor of continuing to use the word retro for vintage purposes what do you think well yeah as i said knew i've raised this exact same point myself so do i do i vote for vint no i'm gonna go with a retro as well it just works retro it is retro it is but if you don't like that every time we say retro hear the word vintage or take a shot whatever works for you it could be a new game so retro is the committee has decided add it to the minutes let's begin the age-old question of controllers comes up again this week chris what's the perfect stick for your particular method of retro gaming in the past you might have gone with something like an 8-bit do pad oh eight bit dough eight bit two eight bit dough i can't remember how you say that properly one of the two again i'm understood let's not have that conversation again you may have an adapter to let you use original hardware perhaps you went with a great big x arcade control panel on your desk or integrated as part of your arcade cabinet there are all kinds of ways of approaching it and finding your perfect controller for retro gaming i of course only game with a monster joystick that that's not entirely true they don't sponsor this particular show but um you know i in honesty in all honesty i've got my monster joysticks i've got a whole range of pads and sticks depending on what system i'm using but sometimes quite often in fact i'll fall back to a trusty playstation 3 joypad i have to say it's usb you know works on a lot of devices um and it it just feels right you know the ergonomics of joypads has evolved to that point where you use that and it sits in your hand right you go back and use uh or you don't go back you use a modern usb recreation of the nes joypad for example and it just doesn't sit right in your hands you'll have cramp before a few minutes or at least i do so i don't mind mixing and matching according to what fits my hands best um chris how about you are you a purist have you tried lots of options have you got a joystick of choice what do you like to use yeah well i certainly have joysticks of choice but i am a cheapskate meal and we've got it we've got a house full of xbox 360 controllers so that's what i'll tend to plug into the pc for either modern or retro gaming i do have a thrustmaster hottest flight stick for the ps4 that also works on the pc for flight sims some more modern stuff like sims and elite dangerous but to be honest neil um going back to a conversation from last week that's sitting to one side waiting for me to pair it up with a vr headset but that's a whole other cop topic we've already covered um i've also got one of those you almost just mentioned it then one of those dirt cheap snes style controllers which works fine for me just for emulation um for my original hardware i'd love a zip stick again because it's the only joystick i never broke back in the day but until i can afford one um it's i've got a cheater one two five and a couple of quick stop quick shot two clones horses for courses nil really depends on what i'm playing why what is there a new option there is a new option i like that you mentioned the zip stick there because um god this is how deep i am into the hobby i think i spent seven pounds this week on ebay on the zipstick box just the box there was no joystick it was just a piece of cardboard this is my future neil i know and then it arrived and i rebuilt it so it was a nice cube i put my zipstick in it and then i shrink wrapped it and then i put it on the shelf and looked at it i mean i think i've got problems chris but it made me so happy to reunite that stick with that box still make me happy neil playing with that zip stick you've just imprisoned in a box now i get the joy of opening it as if it's new i can i can go here and wrap it again and repeat um and you mentioned your hot ass stick um dare i ask is it is it the a10 style stick because i know they're like the best part of 500 pounds for that oh no way again cheapskate it's it's the cheap one um just just called a hot s4 and i waited for it to be on special on on sale oh okay 70 so about 30 35 pounds okay okay so um yes you are you are correcting asking if there's a new option there is a new competitor that's entered the market and it's not to be ignored because it's a well-known brand in the arena uh if you've not heard of them hori or a japanese company founded back in 1969 they're in the same school of arcade controls as sanwa and simetsu and all those other japanese companies and they were the first i believe the first to make third-party accessories um officially licensed ones for the likes of nintendo and sony and companies like that so it's a company with a huge amount of experience in this area now hurry have shared online their idea for a new joystick aimed squarely at the retro market and instead of just dumping on us and saying here's the stick buy it they're um they're showing some images and inviting feedback to try and really get this right first time which i think is very wise and much appreciated by the community i'm sure so hopefully duncan can pop some of those images on the screen while we're talking about it for those who are listening on audio we'll describe them or i will so there are three images the first of which is proposed is just this wide arcade stick you'd put this on your desk it's got a nice what looks like a nice sturdy base on it that was always the problem back in the day wasn't it when you bought say a quick joy or something they had quite a small base and they had suction cups and if they didn't work you could be flapping all over the place this is nice and wide nice arcade style stick it's got eight arcade style buttons a joystick on the left hand side to the left of the joystick is a trackball and then to the left and above that is a spinner along the top you've got some smaller buttons which you could perhaps set for insert coin start quit all of those things you'd probably map them in your emulator according to what you need so there's um six of them so you hopefully shouldn't need to grab a keyboard um and yeah it looks i guess like a classic fighting stick with a spinner and a trackball added the second picture is it breaks the design out into individual design devices so you've got a joystick on its own with buttons you've got a trackball you've got a spinner or smaller in design and i guess they must all individually plug in i don't know if they would daisy chain to one another or if they'd go all individually go into the machine i don't know but that's how they're presented and then the third image is the idea of a modular device so you can slot together your perfect combination be it two joysticks that slot next to each other two track balls you might want a joystick in the middle and eight buttons either side you might want a joystick buttons and a trackball you could just slot it all together in this transformer style design exactly how you want it so chris three designs what do you make of them is there a need for this device and if so would you go for it do you remember when homer simpson helped design a carniel and put everything he ever wanted into one single design do you recall how that ended it ended very badly it did indeed um so this does make me feel a little like that however that modular idea um and that that design i guess makes that workable because at least then you can pick and choose um for the most part i mean i don't see a steering wheel in the option so it's nothing outlandish like that or um a trackball i mean what's that for other than missile command and marble madness what else am i going to use the trackball for um and trackballs i'm sorry neil they do remind me of school and an art program we had on the bbc micro and very little other memories outside of that um so to be honest i guess it brings it back to for me um i if i was just buying another retro joystick i would be just wanting one or two joysticks six fire buttons for each that's street fighter 2 sorted that's mortal kombat sorted am i missing something what would you choose well um if you just step back from the games themselves a trackball can be useful if you consider it to be a mouse instead of a trap you know if you want to navigate around your operating system or whatever um so it's kind of useful in that respect there are games that use it but i agree there's not a huge number of um high quality games that you'd want to use a trackball but those that do use it uh marble madness um 720 games like that you know they feel right with the trackball they just they they feel all wrong if you try and play them with play the arcade version with the joystick i know there are home ports that overcome that um but in terms of choice i'm quite torn here because i can see a use for all three designs a simple stick with three buttons plus the small menu buttons would be perfect for say emulating the pc engine or a master system or you know one of those 8-bit consoles um but then um on mame or in the mister i might want to jump from marble madness to with a track ball to arkanoid with a spinner i might want two joysticks for robotron or smash tv it's difficult so i i want all of them chris i want all of them i would say i would say the all in one design has the trackball far too close to the joystick and would you play marble madness you at least i i really slapped the yeah i really slapped the ball chris when i'm playing melbourne madness and and i worry that my hand would smell oh god this gets worse i worry that my hand would hit the joystick when i'm slapping the ball so um i don't really like that layout um uh yeah so um when it comes to the modular style um quality would be key i'm i'm sure the buttons and the joysticks themselves are top-notch coming from who's making it but i and i would need that to be a good weighted base i wouldn't want it to creak because obviously you're slotting a lot of things there's a lot of joins are all those plasticky joints gonna creak and you know rattle true nobody nobody wants that if they spent good money on a joystick and then on the individual designs well they risk just being just another joystick in a market that's full of fight sticks and joysticks right now so i'm not sure how well that would stand out from the crowd on its own the individual trackball and an individual spinner i think that would probably do well if they kept it simple and just bought that out for those who want that um it's a bit like the amiga mini you know the a500 mini we were talking about a lot of people would just love that usb tank mouse um a lot of people would just love a trackball i think uh but i'm not gonna sit on the fence um and i'm at risk of doing that right now so um i'm gonna go with the all-in-one design with everything on it but with the readers with a redesigned layout so that that trackball's not too close uh and if you want two player then i would say you buy two of them instead of trying to fight over one long or maybe it won't be long enough it depends how you've built it if you've got the modular layout you might be sat too close together you might end up having to put spacer modules in the middle to make room for two players um i think that gets a bit messy if it's not well thought out enough and it's so much better if you've got a joystick each so that's what i'm going to go with the all-in-one design one joystick each for two players yeah fair enough i think for me given that there are other joysticks available i'd probably concentrate on the point of difference you know concentrate on that nice robust but affordable like you said the trackball and maybe the paddle maybe a combo of those two for the niche gamers and and those niche games that actually make use of those um because that's probably that probably is a bit of a gap in the market i think but i'd leave the button bashers to those already on the market unless they're going to do it better now we might take on it yeah and the only the other thing that i'm surprised at is they haven't put buttons on the sides often when you're making an all-in-one um controller you have the side buttons for the pinball games so they might want to add something like that to them anyway thank you to user our underscore retro hacking for sharing the story on our subreddit we'll be watching this one develop with interest do you recall reading c facts on your tv neil or even oracle it's evil twin i do i do recall reading c facts oracle or teletext as it was later called i'm going to be honest this is the third time we've tried to record this segment of the show because i've called chris john twice completely accidentally yeah it's stuck the name john just i need i need to get out of my head it's chris so yes chris i was a daily user of it and i apologize once again for repeatedly calling me john that's all good had to happen right so we're talking about a c packs in oracle so you did use it neil that's great i did use the chris do you think though neil neil that you could recall a page number all these years later yeah well the obvious one that i think everyone will remember was 8a8 which was across all the channels and that would bring up subtitles now i wasn't that well traveled back then so i don't know if other countries they must have had a similar um system to to cater for the for the death and aaa would drop out of teletext it would give you your program that you were watching and it would put subtitles along the bottom and um uh i i didn't need to use that much but you asked me if i remembered a number and and that's the number i remember but other than that it was mostly channel four where i would do my was it teletext on channel four i think it was teletext on four and um i would check it oracle was renaming anyway yeah it was a long time ago it was a long time ago but it was usually in the morning i would check i think channel 4 the page numbers were in the 400s and the two that i went to the most were bamboozle which was an interactive quiz um it's like mid-400s 450s i think it was and the second or third television we had in the house we were lucky enough to have fast text so you had uh the different colored buttons instead of having to type the numbers in you could press the different colored buttons couldn't you to go to the pages or in the case of bamboozle you would press the reveal button so there would be a joke and the punch line would be hidden and you press reveal to make the the punch line appear um yeah i remember that and then of course digitizer a lot of people who listen to this in the uk will remember digitizer which was the video game pages um that was on a higher number can't remember what number but it's higher than 450 i think it was such a long time ago but yeah it was a big part of my daily life it really was and then it was gone nice nice to meet another teletexter um you can find out for sure if your memory of numbers is is correct o'neill um reddit user it's all pipes shared this amazing online cfax emulator simulator recreation whatever you want to call it i'm not actually sure how this thing works but it works and all from within your browser um at nathan media services dot co dot uk slash teletext um hyphen viewer obviously we'll put that link in the in the show notes um but basically yeah for those that might not be familiar with what teletex was maybe because of the country you're from or maybe just never bothered to press that button on your tv remote it was basically a way of um receiving pages of just plain text or at least ascii there was sometimes some ascii art based information and it was actually broadcast along with the normal tv channel data to your television so you didn't need a computer or anything like that you just needed a compatible television set um and it also depended on which channel you were watching as to what data you would receive so they could actually you know double up on the number of pages by bbc one had one set of pages bbc2 there might be some repetition but it could also have a completely different set of pages very very clever technology um teletech service so to answer the question you raised um earlier neil in terms of other countries from a quick bit of research i did it was available in australia as and that oztext broadcast via channel seven uh from 1982 to 2009 um the american uptake seems a little bit more complicate uh complicated a little bit more muddy um this is only going from what wikipedia tells me in all honesty but um they ended up trialling c facts and also a french system called annie antiope if i'm probably pronouncing that terribly wrong you've tried to learn french haven't you know so you can that's a long time ago yes um but they ended up coming out with their own standard known as nabts which is catchy which stands for north american broadcast teletex specification but again from my research it sounds like it was a bit short-lived but anyway you can re-now you can now relive the glory days of using this passive information service from your browser um to be honest now when i saw this story posted i wasn't too sure about it but as soon as i clicked on the link i was actually surprised at the nostalgia hit it gave me and i was even more surprised at how muscle memory kicked in which is why i asked you if you remembered any page numbers on the website basically when you go there you'll see a main screen which is the cfax feed and you also have a virtual tv remote to one sides and you can use that to click the number buttons to select your page numbers but also the function buttons that puts you into um teletext mode and then out of that so you can change channels then back into teletext mode you can overlay teletext with the tv feed and it's just test patterns for their tv feed it's actually really well done um but the page numbers i instantly remembered so i navigated away from the main page to one of the numbers that it gave me on the screen i think it was news was the first one i went to and then without even thinking i typed in 100 to go back to the main menu now this is you know 25 30 years ago i would have last done that i seriously you know didn't do this much out of my teenage years and yet it was there 500 instinctively i typed that for the entertainment section um the difference with this one is it's actually a live feed so it's not just simulating teletext from back in the day and we'll unpack this a little bit later but it's actually modern news being fed into the cfax format which is trippy yeah um it also does page skipping so you always see the page numbers ticking over trying to find the page that you've you've asked for and back in the day the page that you really wanted to see would often not work for whatever reason it would just keep ticking over and you see it say for example if i typed in 555 for games you'd see it searching through the page numbers and then it would just skip five five five times yeah and it was always the one you're most wanting to look at um so yeah i think there's a really really cool little simulator an emulator you can play uh bamboozled on it neil i found that on channel 2 under page 150 um and also on channel 4 under page 390. so there might looks like there's a little bit of duplication there um you can read digitizer neil i found that on channel 2 page 470 uh reviewing modern games so there's mentions of call of duty and stuff like that in there and in fact i was reading digitizer today neil and it seems uh you can even write to them at digitizer2000 gmail.com uh that's digitizer with an s by the way and there was a comment on there and i quote keep in mind these are modern day posts neil and somebody had written into them and said is alien breed special edition 92 still at the top of the amiga charts which i found hilarious uh and they've they've also said also is alien breed 3d review coming anytime soon or something words to that effect and they ended it off with st sucks now look no coming from me let's not start that war again had an ongoing joke about the amiga and they were always taking fun at the amiga so yeah yeah the legacy lives on and funny enough their response to that letter is exactly along those lines and jumping into the fact that the st had midi ports straight away so they're carrying on that it's it's really nice to see they're having a bit of fun with this have you tried it neil any thoughts i did i i have tried it yeah and it did like you it took me by surprise because i was expecting to find an archive of old pages just like there is on another great website which is archive.teletextarchaeologist.org and what they do on that site is they extract teletext data from vhs recordings and then they archive them it's like a kind of witchcraft you know you put a vhs tape in press play it might be a an old episode of neighbors or something and you're watching harold bishop and mrs mangle and bounce of the dog but actually what they're able to do is extract those teletext pages from whatever part of the uh the video stream whatever however they do it i really don't know but they managed to extract the data from it which um it just seems magical just as teletex did back back in the day because in the uk of course it was all transmitted over the air as an analog signal into our aerials i don't know if perhaps in the us you mentioned their services i don't know if they came down cable or in australia but that's how it worked um over here so all of these years later it still seems like a kind of magic the way the teletext works and um but no that's on that website on the teletext archaeologist but on this one that you've mentioned it's all the up-to-date news and headlines so i was really surprised when i went to 101 for the news and i saw today's news headlines uh it must be pulling this info from i i don't know feeds from from current websites uh to keep it up to date and there's just this weird moment when my brain saw the old and the new colliding as if the service had never stopped you know you you even have to wait for the numbers to tick around like you said so it was nice um and i might even use it i i found the sports section really interesting for whatever reason um you know my favorite sports going off to pay-per-view and things like that i don't follow sport as much as i did when i was a kid when i was using teletext i used to go and watch the foot check the football results and things like that on teletext this this might be the way to get me back into regular sports watching i'll go use this teletextile service to check the results maybe no that vhs archive sounds amazing neil um and i'm gonna have to do some thinking now that look it's such a finite chance that something would have been recorded by the sound of the way that archives put together um but basically i don't know if you remember back in the day some of the pages that were aimed at teenagers with too much time on their hands they were almost like a bulletin board and people left comments and then other people would respond to those comments and you did that by because obviously there was no two-way interaction with the service itself you had to wring a number and you left the message and if they deemed it worthy they would publish that message and i got a comment published which felt amazing and what i did this is my one chance neil to say something meaningful to the world or ask a meaningful question so this is this is what i had published on on teletext george is a hippo bungal is a bear but does anybody know what zippy is so that may be completely lost on some of our international followers um we certainly don't have time to unpack that now so just look up zippy rainbow children's tv and then you'll know what we're talking about if you're not familiar with that um to do that in your own time i don't think the question has ever been answered i don't think it had and you know what there was so many responses to that question that i posted some people said a snake um the best response was a puppet and i thought genius yes you're right yes zippy is a puppet um but yes neil i mean before the internet 2.0 facebook twitter and the rest of that i was interacting with the world asking the important questions i feel um but it's such a slim chance that my comment has been part of an archive from a vhs tape i really doubt it's out there but it would be amazing if it has [Music] ah let's see when would it have been it would have been summer holidays probably 1991 because i remember one of the girls that i that told me she read my comment on the television it would have been the summer when brian adams was at number one so i'm on it neil i'm on that side and i'm gonna find it yeah but yeah i mean exactly the the site we're talking about now um it's live data and i had that same trippy that initial trippy feeling when i read read the news of that new colliding with the old um and just to read that modern live news feed in the old teletech style service was was quite amazing it's certainly interesting to be reading modern headlines and news in a distraction free format i'll give it that perhaps we should add this feature back into modern tvs and speaking of that do check out the link in the show notes as the creator of this alistair cree aka zx guesser even includes instructions on how to use a raspberry pi to use your tv to do exactly that our next story was submitted by croc carmen on this on the subreddit and it's dubbed the impossible port by modern vintage gamer on his video on the topic that port being the original tomb raider running on the humble game boy advance doesn't matter if you're not a fan of tomb raider doesn't matter if you're not a fan of the the game boy advance in particular anyone can look at this thing and marvel at the technical achievement i think it's a wonderful thing to behold and to be clear this is the 3d version of tomb raider that we saw on the pc and the playstation back in the day until now any tomb raider games on the gba have been 2d affairs now the secret source to all of this is a project called open lara which is an open source recreation of the tomb raider engine and with significant efforts by developer teamer gaggiev aka exproger he's got it to work on the gba open lara is also adapted for the 3do the switch windows linux android devices the xbox or all kinds of systems on which you can run this open source engine but seeing it on the tiny screen of the gba running on the limited power that's available to it from its arm cpu this is not a device that was ever designed with 3d gaming in mind in the past we've seen the gba described as having hardware performance on a par with the super nintendo this should be nowhere near playstation territory and 3d gaming territory but here we are with this project um yeah try try doing this on a super nintendo chris yeah i had a quick look at um mvg's footage neil and i'll be honest my knowledge of the gba is limited my boys had them but i never had one never played with theirs but you put it nicely into context with the snez comparison um what i do know is tomb raider in the early days of my pc ownership was a franchise i didn't even bother with until well into the pentium era um can it play doom for me turned into can it play tomb raider and neither my amstrad 386 dx or my ibm ps1486 sx were up to the task they were demanding games so this is a real feat the footage i've seen looks totally playable on a gba nil yeah it does i mean we've got to be honest the frame rate is impressive but not silky smooth um it's it's at a speed that's completely playable and in the context of the year i mean when did the gba come out was it 2000 2001 something like that might have even been late 90s i'd need to check that but we would have it would have blown your mind if you'd seen this come out then it would have been absolutely mind-blowing and it's a testament i think to the quality of the current developers are out there not just working on this project but other projects for old devices they're revisiting their own gaming routes to see what they can squeeze out of the systems with their modern day knowledge and no doubt with modern development tools available to them that they don't require specialist hardware that you have to you know sign an nda way to get from nintendo or anything like that there's all these you've got emulators to test them on you've got modern tools and um they've just done a great job and this is a real reflection of modern retro vintage developers showing us the capabilities of our favorite systems in a way that we've never seen before now tomb raider itself was an eye-opening game in my own personal game in history because it's one of the very first games that i tried with the 3dfx patch so i remember just flicking between the two executables for the game and marveling at the difference between the 3dfx one and the software rendered one it was like i had suddenly jumped 10 years into the future just by running this executable and seeing that hardware acceleration there and then it was just absolutely mind-blowing um you mentioned that you uh you went through a period of can it run tomb raider chris did you get there was it a game that you spent a lot of time of when you did eventually get a pc that you could run it with well yeah yeah i did um look i played it on i played tomb raider first of all probably on my nephew's original playstation um but as already mentioned i didn't touch the franchise until much later just because of the pcs i had i actually won a copy of tomb raider 3 for pc after writing a letter to letter i wrote letter of the month for pc zone and it was one of the random gifts you're like a published game critic that's right yeah um that was actually a letter about duke nukem 3d a map i'd made but anyway yeah so one of the random they sent me this box of random stuff mouse mats a really cheap gamepad and all that kind of stuff but in there was a copy of tomb raider 3 it was probably the best part of the bundle um and i know tome raider 3 obviously came quite a bit later but like you as one of those titles to push me into buying a dedicated 3d card um there was a section i recall where it was a room and there was water down below and there was these blocks that you had to jump across jump from one block to the other but they were translucent and that section was not only ugly but it was pretty much unplayable on what was then my pentium 200 mmx so you know for the time it wasn't a bad machine but it was a standard you know one megabyte 2d graphics card um and yeah that just chugged so like you neil it was it was night and day when i eventually got my banshee card which is what i got which is 3dfx as well and my goodness lara never looked so good neil and things like the transparent surfaces and the water um just became draw dropping so more so for me than the increase in resolution which was also um you know now available to me so yeah it was a game to upgrade your system for interesting that you mentioned the banshee uh i think that was the second voodoo card that i had so i had a 3dfx1 um back then you know the 3dfx design was farmed out and and lots of hardware developers could could license and make these these cards so you would go into a shop and on the shelf you know there would just be some bizarrely named 3d accelerator card you know super phantom 400 and that was that was my first 3dfx card and then the second one was a it was a banshee and i think it was um a creative labs branded one it's like that's the one i had yeah came with incoming as a packing game that's right it wasn't the 3d blaster was it i think that was a device yes it was i was i thought it was the 3d plaster i'm pretty sure it was a 3d blaster but it was the only it was the first one to be standalone whereas the video one and two you needed to plug it into your 2d card do you remember that's right so yeah banshee was a voodoo too with a 2d card i think looking back on it i think the specs have been cut a little bit compared to having two dedicated cards and some people say that's not the way to do it if you want to enjoy it in the modern day i loved it i loved it i didn't know yes at the time um sam's a great card and from then on out it was 2d and 3d in every card that i got moving forward yeah yeah good memories anyway um getting back to this port you really do need to check out modern vintage gamers video on this and many there are many other you there's such a buzz of excitement about this there are lots of youtube videos covering this so go and check it out um maybe also go and look at some of the other tomb raider games on the gba to just see what publishers who were charging good money for this considered to be a first part you know a top-of-the-line game that you should go down to the shop and buy a 2d tomb raider game and then look at this thing and you can make your mind up it's just really incredible causing a lot of excitement and rightly so what's the longest you've owned and used a single computer meal and i don't mean that you've kept it while you've got others and you've bought another a newer model i mean the longest you've actually actively used a computer system without buying an updated one um now that would probably have to be the amiga 500 because as soon as you get into pcs there's no strict baseline for your game requirements so on the amiga the atari st cpc spectrum's even yes there were upgrade options for all of them but it was understood that there was a baseline spec and 99 of the titles were catered for that so it would reach the biggest audience possible but when i moved to a pc everything just became this moving target for for better or for worse it became a moving target my first was a 486sx when i got it i was the king of the world i was playing tfx i could run anything i wanted day of the tentacle wing commander mega race i was having so much fun with it uh and then over time i started seeing this thing on game boxes called a dx266 and more ram was needed and then a cd-rom was needed and then cdx 3d accelerators as we just talked about when needed and so on and so on so from the moment i got pc it was a machine forever changing and um you know that then presented another struggle as a gamer which is do you want to be on the cutting edge by constantly upgrading your pc and enjoying the productivity and all the other things that you can do on a pc or do you want to just never have to think about that and get a console and you'll know that everything will run until the next model comes out it might even run backwardsly you know compatible on the next model but you'll be cutting edge at first it will get older it will still run everything and even at the end of its lifetime and what if we're talking about let's say the xbox 360 or the playstation 3 era its lifetime is eight or nine years i'm not sure that we'll see console cycles that long ever again but it was a huge amount of time and and that machine was relevant and current for that entire cycle and you never had to think about upgrading it um your return on your investment for that initial outlay for an xbox 360 or playstation 3 even if you bought it as a launch system you got your money's worth out of that thing you know nine years out of a system you're doing well if you get that right i think all the pc gamers have just left the chat you know because i say this as an avid pc gamer i did the same thing though knew i eventually ended up jumping to consoles for that very same reason well 50 years is the target neil or at least 30 years at the very least this is according to an article by carl svensson on datagerb.se see the show notes because i may have pronounced that wrong which was posted to the subreddit by paul aka humskey and in this article carl references the work of plume.net and the concept of a fictional computer built to last for 50 years the principle being that by making it modular and robust you could make a machine to last that long and the original work basically uses typewriters as an example of that but the recent 2022 article by carl postulates that perhaps this already exists in the form of his commodore amiga a 1200. you can perhaps see why i jumped on this one neil um he's quite detailed in his article about what has been done to keep his a1200 running things like recapping but he details the fact that that was done as preventative maintenance not out of necessity and he's also had to replace some mechanical elements like of course the floppy drive and the hard drive either with working ones or non mechanical options sure but all that said as he points out the machine for the most part has already lasted 30 years so part of his logic is that the a 1200 was already modular and as we've seen in recent times neil still remains quite upgradeable thoughts neil is the amiga 1200 or any amiga for that matter the 50 year old computer and if not what would you put in its place keeping in mind modular upgrades are acceptable well um yeah it's upgradable yes modular i don't know there's plenty on it that isn't socketed so by modular do you mean desoldering a surface mount chip and putting it back on or not um yes you can upgrade it there are upgrades available but i'd argue that a big box machine offers that a lot more for example a pc if you wanted to stick with the amigas the four amiga 4000 um of that generation or even go all the way back to the apple ii with its eight or so expansion slots that it had in there so whether or not a computer can be classed as a 50 year old computer out of the gates um i don't know that that comes down to what you want to do with it i guess and you gave you mentioned a typewriter there okay that's fine that's made for a specific purpose whereas a computer is is a multi-purpose device so it gets a bit more complicated do you remember that story some years ago about the u.s um nuke the missile system uh still running on eight-inch floppies that was running on and yeah it was running on an ibm series one machine from the 1970s and i think they were scheduled to update and replace them around 2018 i don't know whether or not that has happened i'm not privy to the uh inner workings at the pentagon but um they were scheduled to do it and um you know that was knocking on to getting close to 50 years and we've not had armageddon yet so i'd add classic as a success but again it's it's a system that was being used for one or two purposes rather than a multi-function or multi-purpose machine that we'd expect on our home machines if we're looking at home computers if you wanted to treat it like a typewriter and just write a book without distraction sure you could do that on an apple too you could do it with a nice soothing green screen you could do it on that chapter amiga 1200 but i'm not sure that that proves that it's a 50-year microcomputer certainly wasn't designed to be a 50-year microcomputer it's more it's fit for that purpose that specific purpose and with some maintenance sure you you can keep it going um i don't know i don't know chris i love seeing for example 50 year old classic cars cruising up and down on a sunny day i love to see them but i wouldn't describe them as being a car that you'd buy with the intention of driving for 50 years no yeah that's that's a really fair comment um for me as much as i love the to say the amiga and maybe i would be saying it if the 90s have played out differently i think i'd have to go with a pc um if anything you know even fits this gap uh if we had to pick something from the past or retro um i'd happily say an early pentium era pc so we can at least play tomb raider um you've got a good solid cpu uh you've got upgradable graphics and you've got upgradeable storage and i think most importantly the internet is already a thing at that point rather than being shoehorned onto a device that it really wasn't really wasn't ready for it um surprisingly neil the last pc i purchased which was a cheap acer desktop actually lasted me about six or seven years and when i say lasted it was still working fine the day i sold it complete with the original box keeping in mind i'm not pushed into upgrading all the time by modern games as much as i used to be i could have kept that for another six years at least i think i just have to be offered a bargain on the pc that i'm using right now i think i'm slowing down finally neil is what it is i don't feel the need to upgrade all the time like we did when we jumped on those 3d fx cards um if it works i'm keeping it are you still driven to constantly upgrade neil um yeah yeah uh just thinking of stories like that i i just remembered i have an aunt in her 70s who still uses a windows 98 pc from from the late 90s uh it's completely offline she won't go on the internet with it she has another computer for that but she still uses it to do a home accounts and spreadsheets and things like that so that's a good example of a machine that's knocking on for a few decades now um but yeah what drives me these days to upgrade is no longer the the video games it's video rendering so extra calls ram gpu power it can save me a huge amount of time in productivity so yeah and i always have a secondary machine now and um i think at the moment i've got a tertiary machine as well into which all of my old parts filter down into they're demoted so the oldest of those machines is probably coming up on 10 years old now and it's still perfectly usable for daily tasks but there's a big gulf between a machine 10 years old and a machine from the mid-90s for example you know if you go back to the mid 90s you've got a pc that is probably hasn't got enough ram is constantly paging out memory thrashing the hard disk taking minutes to to boot up minutes to open a program probably strong struggles if you try to run multiple programs there are of course exceptions if you've got it completely pimped out with ram and everything but that's my memory of that period go back a little bit more and you might be in a windows environment where you have to actually disable the windows background to free up more memory so that there's less paging going on that's but if you go back to a machine that's 10 years old windows 7 will run perfectly fine on it windows 10 will probably run perfectly fine on it it will boot up quickly you can put an ssd in there and you know the boot times are quick the loading times are quick you you've got multi-core cpus you've got hyper threading it's a very i you know 30 years it sounds like a silly thing to say but 30 years is vastly different to 10 years in this sex it really i mean it's more like 100 years and will that 10 year old machine of mine be capable of those tasks in 40 years time if it's still working and when we're all i don't know i will be piloting our armchair drones in augmented reality through the metaverse in 40 years time you know that's that's what will be you can hold me to that um and uh and i may well say can i still write a novel that i've always been right meaning to write could i still write that book on my windows 7 machine if i wanted yes i absolutely could i could load up you know microsoft word i could even do that on microsoft word 95 and i could still write that book but would i call it a machine designed to last 50 years no i wouldn't it's just a machine that still happens to work like a classic car still happens to be able to drive because someone's looked after it and haven't left it in a garage where a hole in the roof is dripping on it um so yeah and would i put put the put my trust in in that 40 year old or 50 year old machine to navigate and drive my driverless armchair drone powered by a ryzen processor and a windows 7 pc to drive me to the nursing home no i absolutely would not trust it to do that chris neil no faith just recap it and she'll be right mate i think i think while it's fun to try and pick an everlasting pc from the past perhaps to a point it's actually the modern offerings that could potentially like we've just discussed make that a reality but then why would we do that if that slows progress um anyway check out the article by carl via the links in the show notes our community question of the week is all about your favorite video game shop of old well the gory details was it dark and menacing was it cool and fresh was there a dodgy piracy operation going on in the back room does it still exist these are the questions that we asked you chris why don't you kick us off with your own memories before we get to our community answers oh neil i tell you what any forum to talk about my independent local computer game shop in royal tub bridge wells in kent which was called megabytes they started off at the top of town in an area called st john's road and they became my regular stop-off on the way home from school because it was right on route and that was during the period where i was just i had the spectrum plus three at that point in time so i'd go and i can see it now i can see i know where the building is the building still exists but it's a stereo shop now and i can walk it in my mind and i can see all the 8-bit games down the left-hand side section which is where the door was that you walked in the counters at the end with the nice smiley guy whose name i think was john but that may be a blurred memory but anyway the owner of the place and so that was the 8-bit section and then he went over to the right hand side of the store and that was more where the amigas and the st's and all of that kind of stuff were pretty much most of the time the amiga there was one in the window playing the juggler demo that's where i first saw that and then there was always another one you could test them all you could trial games before you buy them uh before you buy them before you bought them um and most of the time the staff were there playing test drive or they were playing carrier command so that was the first place i saw those two games as well um and then bizarrely i also saw them and it was after i bought an amiga i also that's the first place i saw an amstrad cpc 464 and i think they were playing barbarian on that um so yeah i can see that store straight away they then closed that to move to a smaller premises down in the historic end of town on the high street um and but still it was just part of my life neil to go down to that shop so that was a small pokey little shop walk in test benches down the right hand side after you'd walked in main counter for actually purchasing stuff down the left amiga games were right in the back corner that's the place where i saw a cd tv and played psycho killer played you know made random selections at various points in the uh full motion video um but um yeah i can just see it i can even now as i'm talking about it i can see the whole place i can see the owner of the place um maybe i need to take this if anybody from tunbridge wells or kent or that area that remembers the store if you happen to know the owner and if he's still around can you please apologize to him on my behalf for the time i didn't buy armageddon by psygnosis um he's probably wondering why because they put it aside for me i bought it from volunteers at the top end of town i do apologize i'm sorry but anyways i'm still waiting for you it's still there that's stuck in my memory after all these years but yeah fantastic fantastic shot what about yourself neil well i'm also interested to know if anyone can remember this particular shop um i'll talk about a couple um the first one would be very typical of anyone in the uk which would be dixon's on the high street so that was a big chain and the reason i'd go there is because they would have the machines on display running so you could actually see them whereas a lot of the independent video game stores i went to only had one perhaps machine running because they were usually cramped into very very small stores with floor-to-ceiling games um so i'd go to dixon's to see things running but i wouldn't ever buy they're very rarely sold games actually um sometimes i had good things in the bargain bins there but um i would go to the independent stores so one i went to was in weymouth down in dorset on the seafront in amongst all of the seaside arcades so we could play some arcades go into this little um cramped video game store called double drive computers and um they specialized in you know they had the console games but they had floor to ceiling big box pc and amiga games which is what i was really interested in and um i bought so many games from there but it's also the place i bought oh i remember buying a four megabyte ram upgrade for my 486 from there and i think it cost me a little over a hundred pounds back then all four meg and and this was a reasonably priced shop they weren't you know they didn't rip people off um so yeah i used to buy a lot of games from there and and quite questionably well amazingly they're still running this chain but they've rebranded and renamed themselves and no longer called double drive computers they're called double d computers which kind of double density i'm sure well just double d just makes you think that it's turned into a bra shop or something i'm trying to excuse it it's it's it stands for double density i don't think that i don't think there's any excuse they should have thought this through before they renamed a video game to double d but all it sells now i'm sure it sounds a bit more but i have no need to go in there anymore because it's mostly um ink cartridges printer cartridges toner consumables because how do you compete with the online world you know they've obviously carved out their niche and that's how they've they've found a way of surviving where so many haven't and that's what they do now and the other one i just mentioned quickly and i want to know if anyone out there can remember this paul endorse it in the old market there was this guy who would buy and sell games um so it was basically a used video game shop and it was just like an aladdin's cave of every generation of gaming system every game he had neo geos he had eight bit titles he had bang up to date titles and you would take the games you didn't want you trade them you'd get a little bit of a discount on the game that you really wanted but did anyone else go there in the in that marketplace in poole i'd love to know one day he just disappeared um and i hope i hope that he disappeared and he got all of that stuff online because he had such a wonderful stock and that's the place where i bought most of my ultima games that i used to collect um and i would buy them for less than three pounds each wow and and now they're worth a huge amount but unfortunately i don't have them anymore but you know those were the kind of bargains that you could find there so let's get to our community answers you've heard our answers um now i see that duncan has left a very long answer and i don't think it would be fair to read out producer duncan's answer on the show even though we've given ours um so go and have a read of duncan's memories there the next one the next most popular at the time of recording is richard shears he says while we did have a local corner shop selling mastertronic games so mastertronic was a budget um range by budget publisher here in the uk uh it was great for quick pocket money purchases my favorite place to go was the legendary john menzies oh yeah i went to john menzies yeah i remember john menses he said this involved a bus ride into a larger town nearby therefore it was more of a planned excursion also one field with chances filled with chance as there would be a good chance that the title i've coveted because of the magazine review would not be in stock thankfully however they were very naive and unaware of the ability to back up games oh god where's this going also with a large staff rotation they wouldn't recognize repeat returners so i now hereby confess that perhaps i returned a lot more cough games than i kept i must now bow my head in shame for i surely must have helped with the downfall of the once great empire known as john menzies rich i have to have a go at rich down there cause it's because of people like him that i had trouble returning a game to w.h smith once because they assumed that's what i was doing the game wouldn't load on my system it was a genuine return and they thought i was just pirating it and returning it to the shop sorry carry on here we go pajaco 6502 when i was younger i literally fed my gaming habit wherever i could i bought games in news agents shops and even a petrol station but my main hall was a saturday market stall on canvie island where i grew up every week armed with my two to three pound pocket money i'd rifle through all the full price games i couldn't normally afford but most of the time the good old mastertronic or codemasters budget rangers came to the rescue yes they did see that's what you should do when you don't have enough money for a full price game buy a budget game don't resort to crime that's exactly right those bargain bids were always great and code masters was just found the games weren't necessarily always great but they were good enough to spend your pocket money on they just hit that level yeah and finally reading glasses man says neil's comment about chemists took me all the way back to colin's chemist near where i was raised i could be wrong but in my flashback was a panel full of mastertronic and firebird cassettes for my commodore 16 and 64. i love that place and looking back i'm amazed he spared any space for computer games since this chemist was so small there wasn't a huge amount of room to move after that my main store to visit was a computer shop in town which had all those horizontally lined panels okay so the slat walls i think he means i love that for all the computers on show seeing the games running and dreaming about owning any of the more powerful machines amigas and atari st's seemed so exotic and so out of reach until my parents were able to get me an amiga talk about aspirational products yeah beautiful there you go um yeah even in evening chemists where there was little room you would find just a revolving display with cassettes hung on them it's true isn't it yeah on the on the hanging yeah the hanging style superdrug or boots or anywhere like that yeah yeah the smell yeah the chemists with video games again neil i can see the layout of boots in my hometown tummy trails and also the the town next door tumbridge two completely separate places but i knew i can see in my mind's eye where the electron games were when they still stocked them where the spectrum games were and all of that it's crazy the memories that stick um yeah there's a bit of a do do check out the the subreddit guys because there is a bit of a conversation about why we're chemists from from international um listeners why were chemists selling computer games in the uk um the main one was boots and they became kind of not quite a department store but they almost went that way didn't they neil yeah yeah they did your um your photography they developed your photos they sold video games as well as everything else and it's the power of these memories i mean i can see i i can hear the way you're describing things so vividly and the submissions we've had to the subreddit have probably been the most detailed answers to any question we've ever asked and it's because they're such powerful memories and that's what drove me to create this recreated 90s 80s video game shop here in the cave because i just wanted to step back in time and step back in there again and you see that when people walk in there just just how important it is and what it means to them and so we wrap up today's show with our community question of the week for next week dive into our subreddit ready dot com forward slash r forward slash this week in retro where you will find the latest show pinned at the top as well as our community question of the week which is what was your favorite joystick what did you get on with and also what was your least favorite joystick was there a stick that you absolutely hated was there one that you loved but it was just so fragile that it broke every time you played your favorite game on it so you couldn't use it daley thompson's decathlon will no doubt come up on this question and i will answer it straight away the comics navigator that was the indestructible stick for me let us know the answer over on our subreddit and submit your news stories to appear in next week's show thank you for listening and take care bye this week in retro was presented by neil thomas from rmc the cave and chris winter from double o5 and gema it was produced by me duncan styles the podcast version of the show is available through your favorite podcaster including apple podcast and spotify and the video version is available on this week in retro youtube channel join our community subreddit at r this week in retro to suggest and vote on the stories we cover on the show if you watch this week in retro on youtube please give us a like and subscribe to help us reach new viewers if you enjoy our show and would like to support it then please check out the link to our patreon page in the show notes or description thank you for listening and we'll see you next time for more up-to-date news for out-of-date tech

Channel: This Week in Retro

Views: 5,532

Keywords: This Week in Retro Podcast, Retro Gaming Podcast, Retro Computing Podcast, Retrogaming Podcast, This Week in Retro, TWIR, RMC, tomb raider advance, ceefax, 005 agima

Id: -QG7R4Un-Ww

Length: 68min 8sec (4088 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 29 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/fantomplankton]

Carl’s A1200 in the article about 50 years old machines is very very pretty. Made me smile. 😊

[u/jeremysretrobar]

Here in the US we didn’t have anything like the CeeFax system you talked about. Admittedly I did not have cable until the early 90’s so maybe certain cable providers did or maybe it was something cable had in the 80’s. Definitely not something that came over the air. Not sure if bigger cities had something like it, but not here in St. Louis. I didn’t even know something like that was possible until I watched this episode.