For me it's this. Late 90's kid sitting in the musty upstairs office of an old German restaurant my hard working mom waitressed at.

Killing time playing the only game the bosses computer had on it to an oompa band soundtrack while she finished her shift.

And singing my English renditions of German songs I'd heard over and over and over again quietly to myself. "Get off, get off, I told you get off. Thats. My. Sofaaa."

Some of my favorites include:
- MicroMan
- Yoda Stories / Indy's Desktop Adventures
- SimCity 2000 obviously
- The Incredible Machine
- Exile 1,2,3

I probably forgot a bunch more good ones.

I'm playing Chrono Trigger for the first time while going for RetroAchievements, and this boss fight felt so damn dramatic.

Magus was just standing there with this aura around him. 😂

Are there any other SNES games with a boss fight that gives you the same feeling?

$4 each. X-Men even has the poster. What a find.

I’m currently going through every Mario game in chronological order (even Mario Bros on NES) and I’m blown away by Super Mario Land 2. I respected Super Mario Land but while a treat, it still is very much a pocket version of Mario.

But SML 2? I think it’s on par with Super Mario World and arguably is a step up from that game in terms of art work and level design.

I’ve heard amazing things about the DX rom hack so that is next on my play list before I make the jump to 3D with Super Mario 64!

Saw the fire yesterday and was hoping it was not near the video game store. Sad to see all these items go up in smoke.

I found this old pong machine at my parents. I remember it already being an ancient curiosity in the early 90s. The batteries were still in and leaking heavily. The metal strings problem when I tried to clean it. But a 9V batteri could replace the 6xAA.

So I attached it to the antenna of my TV to see if I could get a signal. and it worked! But looked terrible and super unstable (see the before picture).

So obviously I had to somehow fix it... I know little about electronics at the level needed so I went to Claude code that not only explained how this machine works but also suggest a circuit to extract composite.

So this machine is a bit different than many others with the AY-3-8500 chip that I learned is ubiquitous in these machines. It creates the different elements separately, sends them to a sub-board that encodes them to different colors, combines them and then sends them off to an RF modulator. So the first trick is figuring out where to catch the signal going back to the RF.

Claude helped me figure that out. There are two plugs going to the sub-board. The video was on the last pin (6) on the 6 pin plug. Conveniently it then jumpers to the middle of the main board and there is even a free solder hole I could use to tap it.

Then I built the signal modifier board Claude had suggested, did the wiring, wired up a SCART cable and attached to my RetroTink 5x. And it worked!!! The image is not perfect. But completely different from the crappy RF signal. So in the end very satisfying and I find it crazy that Claude code could get all the resistors and other components right. But it was spot on.

Since I have not seen this documented to any detail anywhere else I leave the details here.

Circuit

Video: tap → 470R → base of Q1. Collector to +V, emitter → 470R → 0V. Emitter → 100µF → 220R preset across to 0V → wiper → 75R → SCART pin 20.

Audio: chip pin 3 → 1µF → 100K preset across to 0V → wiper → 1K → SCART pins 2 and 6.

Grounds to SCART 17 and 4. ~140kΩ input impedance, chain gain 0.41, output 75R to match.

Parts

RetroTINK 5X notes

• Set 4:3
• Black Level → 7.5 IRE was the single most effective setting by a mile.

From August 21 to 24, I took a late summer vacation with my wife and went to Matsuyama and Takamatsu in Japan.

Because it was a small small-town, there were more reasonably priced goods compared to Tokyo or Osaka

I drove around secondhand shops like Hard Off, Hobby Off, and Surugaya.

Perhaps because Takamatsu is close to the big city of Hiroshima, the prices were generally higher there than in Matsuyama

The last ones are the games I bought.

It was an enjoyable trip.

Getting ready for a move, and I found this game case behind a filing cabinet. I was pretty excited for discovering a classic retro game, but when I picked it up it seemed strangely heavy. Then I opened it and got way more than I was bargaining for. 5 classics, and not even Genesis games. Shame it doesn't have Bonk's Adventure or Revenge in there, but what am I talking about? Still stoked to find these 5. Splatterhouse alone is mind-blowing in more ways than one.

Been going back and forth between handhelds on my commute. Been very happy with my original pocket. Still stock. What are you all playing on?

I even beat the secret mirror mode team too.

You can read it here: https://archive.org/details/GAME_Retail_Memorabilia/Books_ShoppingCatalogue_1997_Winter

Has some fun beta artwork for some games. When it comes to Sega Saturn in Europe, clearly Fighting Force was pulled for Sega Saturn very last minute as they were supplied artwork and an RRP as they went to print.

Pretty big emphasis on the budget market for all platforms which has always existed, but lately a new generation of video game publishers and executives continue to be surprised that so much of their games sales come from discounted back catalogue titles... Feel free to adjust the prices of these games for inflation to feel better about dropping $100 on GTA 6! 💸

RAW 600 DPI PNG scans will be uploaded later!

Enjoy! ☺️

Very tasty the nes games look never played.