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First Is the Worst: Nintendo's Color TV Game 6 and 15
- gjsman-1000 3y agoNintendo: The world’s most ambitious playing card company; that actually still makes playing cards. https://www.amazon.com/Nintendo-Mario-playing-cards-red/dp/B01683O7BA/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?crid=8V7WR7EJ1B0A&keywords=nintendo+hanafuda+cards&qid=1701016632&sprefix=nintendo+hana%2Caps%2C199&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.com/Nintendo-Mario-playing-cards-red/dp/B...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mock-possum 3y ago> Includes instruction manual (English language not guaranteed). Sorry but how is that possible - do they know what they’re selling, or not?
- rax0m 3y agoToggle dark mode at the bottom of the page
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- reassembled 3y agoWould be nice to have it at the top. :/
- mananaysiempre 3y agoEven the URL is perfect :)
- quickthrower2 3y agofirstname.{one of the gazillion new tlds} is a good one to get, and usually gettable, although some of them charge like $1000/y because it is a nice domain.
- mananaysiempre 3y agoNot what I meant—look at the path :)
- quickthrower2 3y agoYou are either admiring the .html extension or the monthless date?
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago> A potentiometer has a maximum and minimum value. They can’t spin indefinitely by the very nature of how they’re constructed, and each position of the pot maps to a point on screen. Some can spin freely if they have their stops removed. Tektronix did this for their late 70's vintage scopes like the 2465. The discontinuity from the wiper crossing the gap was mostly hidden with firmware.
- bsder 3y agoI'm pretty sure I've used that 2465, and I don't remember any of those pots not having a stop.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoThe cursor knobs are full turn. The service manual goes into some depth explaining how they work. If you play around you can find the gap where the cursors become non-responsive but in typical usage you skip over it and don't notice because the firmware is tracking the velocity and keeps them moving when the wiper is disconnected.
- tomn 3y agoI have a bench power supply which takes this further by having two stop-less potentiometers on the same shaft with a 180-degree offset to cover the gap. It works quite well!
- nicole_express 3y agoWhen I wrote that I assumed it was a physical possibility but I didn't realize people actually did that. It would actually probably work pretty well for a Pong system, since the discontinuity would be when the paddle was off-screen. But I don't know if any system actually did that.
- xacky 3y agoNintendo tends to have a "good-bad" cycle similar to Windows. The good phases help save the whole gaming industry.
- weberer 3y agoThe "bad" cycle is only bad sales-wise. The Gamecube and Wii U were great systems.
- ajmurmann 3y agoAnd we don't talk about the VirtualBoy
- gjsman-1000 3y agoWe talk about wanting companies to do more experimental things, then simultaneously diss the failed attempts. The VirtualBoy was an insane idea that was a whole human generation ahead of its time. That’s rare and credit to Nintendo for trying.
- Keyframe 3y agoMy mind exploded when I found out there was no 'screen' in it at all. Very clever for the time.
- Dwedit 3y agoSo let's play alternate history. Say that Blue LEDs had been developed at this time, and Nintendo could have used Red, Green, and Blue LEDs to make a full color screen rather than just a red screen. And all the warnings about headaches and such were all overblown things to try to make legal compliance happy, but they had the effect of scaring away customers who did not understand that they were for legal compliance rather than actual warnings. So how would an RGB Virtual Boy have turned out? Imagine a cross between the Game Boy Color and the 3DS.
- 3y ago
- sillywalk 3y agoI'm reminded of the Degenatron. https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Degenatron https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Degenatron
- vasvae3 3y ago[flagged]
- jhbadger 3y agoThat was more a parody of the Atari 2600 (1977). While it had very blocky graphics, the sorts of games it could play (crude versions of arcade games of the time) seems more like what this is parodying rather than Pong-like games.
- duskwuff 3y agoTo take that full circle, though: the hardware capabilities of the 2600 were designed as a generalization of earlier "hard-wired" consoles. Support for graphical features like a "ball" and "player" paddles was built into the TIA chip, and it was by creatively manipulating these features that later games like Pitfall were able to produce (relatively) sophisticated graphics.
- sillywalk 3y agoI just had to look up the specs for an Atari 2600 (which I played as a kid back in the 80s. I feel. old) 128 Bytes of RAM. Makes a microbit: look roomy.
- nyanpasu64 3y ago> Consoles with built-in RF cables, like the Color TV Game 6, often have scars like this, and it seems particularly common on the Nintendo consoles. This is because the RF cable contains plasticizers to make it more flexible; the problem is, people often wrap cables around the console for convenient storage. This is fine for the short term, but if they’ve been in the closet for almost fifty years, well, you get burns like this or even worse. Be careful how you store these! Yum endocrine disruptors... I find that when I apply office or duct tape to plastic erasers or PVC cable sleeves, the plastic and glue will "diffuse" into each other, producing a disgusting goop that sticks to fingers and is a pain to clean off. I also know that rubber feet and "soft touch" surfaces can turn into goop over time, but I don't know what process is happening there. I hear that the plasticizers leaching out of plastic into air (or decomposing) is why old electronics' plastic cases and parts become weak and brittle over decades.
- akx 3y agoYegh, old (occasionally not even 5 years old) soft-touch plastic turning sticky goopy. I cleaned that up off an old handheld vacuum with rough salt and water, of course turning it non-soft-touch in the process, but better than sticky goopy...
- hakfoo 3y agoAnother place you see this is turntables. People boxed it up and tossed the cord on top, then piled a bunch of stuff on it for 25 years, and there are the terrible dents. Since the dustcover is usually plastic, it takes the damage. This was a huge eye-opener moment for me; I figured it was some other common damage mechanism-- cigarette burns or leaving something hot on top of the unit.
- pbj1968 3y agoHey Nicole, shoe horning my PC Engine project onto your last hacker news thread was actually successful at getting the attention I needed! And now I’m sitting on PCE joystick pcbs nobody wants. :)
- pests 3y agoInteresting tidbit about wrapping devices with cords. I never thought chemicals in the cords could do damage to the plastics in the housing.
- aidenn0 3y ago> Ping Pong is probably the most unique pong-a-like on this console, but more unique from a conceptual standing than an actual fun game mode. Essentially you have a side view, but your paddles move as usual; you can, however, get the ball to arc over the net. It’s a bit confusing perspective-wise, really, but I’ve not seen any other Pong game like it. Hard to tell from just a still image, but it sounds like Tennis for Two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_for_Two https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_for_Two