gingerbeardman

One question I had is... do they have permission to make this? Who owns the Vectrex trademark and ip, etc? No mention of it on the Kickstarter worries me.

@Crabbitsteve this is a magnitude cheaper, smaller, and probanly more reliable. I appreciate the original, but I just don't have the space or time to be bothered with old temperamental electronics. I'm happy to accept the modern substitute.

A friend who has a Vectrex saw this at an expo and says it's good.

@missingno_fgc check the latest videos of it running. I was concerned but not any more.

I missed the early birds, but got pre-order in. Going to be hell to wait for almost a year.

I want aware of the EA thing or the 87% blimey

Yeah back in the day I found the controls and criteria for that Driver tutorial very unforgiving.

This looks great. Hopefully it plays well.

Urgh. So disappointing.

I didn't back the Kickstarter book because at the time something felt off to me about the way it was written, hard to put my finger on what exactly, but it just didn't seem like the text itself was something I would enjoy reading. Anyway, I'm relieved about that now.

Obsolete Sony is run by somebody called Eddie, here's a video podcast interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xmtt_NUSto

Edit: Just did a search of my Twitter, after seeing that I'm blocked by Obsolete Sony, and found that back in December 2024 there were reports that an article by them about the Sony 43" CRT had the hallmarks of being wtitten by ai. I asked them to confirm/deny, but they never replied. https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/1871478067656613973

Edit 2: I also asked them about the source for the photos in the book. Also no reply. Maybe publisher @S4ndm4n can answer that one? https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/1859573999249805462

RetroArch can already do this, for years now. It translate either in place or as closed caption style.

Another vote for 640x480 (or multiple of) here too, it's the most sensible resolution for the majority of these old games

Who are PLAION REPLAI?

Word is it's not as good as the original. Too short and too easy. Can any shmup fans deny/confirm?

Chip Shot: Super Pro Golf...is an amazing game. Better than it has any right to be.

It influenced my way of making games a lot, from its procedurally generated holes, to drawing everything with circles/shapes. A really brilliant piece of programming.

I used both of those techniques in YOYOZO my "Best Games of 2023" and "Game of the Year" accolade winner, my Atari-award-winning game HERD NERD, and many more. Good ideas last forever.

But can I use it to mod my original Xbox? iykyk

@FR4M3 I know what they are. A licence violation would have been worth mentioning in the news report.

So they forked it and added some stuff of their own? Standard open source practice.

If they used ai to do it does that taint the work that was done on the emulator before they did that? What if Nintendo used ai in the new Super Mario Galaxy would that taint it? It's an interesting philosophical question. I don't have a good answer.

I see look and feel, but I see zero gameplay.

This is such crazy—and lazy—use of totally the wrong tool for the job. Really disappointing, and I'm glad people are taking them to talk on it. Have Taito responded?

@slider1983 yes indeed. fun to implement, and fun to play the game with

@slider1983 I used the crank as an analog input steering wheel in one game

1300 games and only one game listed as a GOTY alongside Mario & Zelda: my game YOYOZO
https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/11/21/yoyozo-how-i-made-a-playdate-game-in-39kb/

Love to see this "optimized N64-style analog range to perfectly match the original console’s output "

Nintendo can't even get that right for NSO.

I simply had to Google the sex position.

@sdelfin of course it's theoretically possible, but has it been achieved and how is such a feat proven with FPGA or emulation?

Still got my boxed collection of Pokémon Mini in all colours. 😎

Serious question: are there any 100% accurate FPGA cores? And if so, how was it proven? Is it even possible to prove it?

@RobertPayne556 I don't really understand what you're saying, sorry

Hurrah! Great to see this resolved.

It's disappointing, and perhaps unsurprising that Sega would do this once the seller was making money from things they thought were worthless.

Looks cool! Hopeful for a wider release.

Seems pretty cool.

I'm guessing the colours look a little less garish on a real GBC?

So the Formula 3 game that was mentioned, turned into nothing or is it REVS?

Typo x2: Grammond

I asked on twitter and it's AMOLED at 600x800 and they promise you can't see pixels. https://twitter.com/VectrexOn/status/1958423078020510050

The article states that the white edition is limited to 200 units, founders edition limited to 200 units, which hopefully means a load of regular price units for the latecomers (most people).

Great stuff. More like this please

@DemonKow the Macintosh eventually got PC Exchange with System 7 in 1992, allowing it to read PC floppies and map file extensions of certain common file types to their Macintosh equivalent type/creator code. There were also apps that could convert certain file formats to Macintosh equivalents. But these were limited luxuries!

His solution is very clever. He created his own encoding system.

Text encoding was a nightmare before Unicode became popular in the early 2000s. Especially Japanese, which in 1992 could be any of the following encodings: JIS, Shift-JIS, EUC, ISO, or MacJapanese. And that's before we try to figure out how to transfer it to people in a different country using different languages and computer systems. With no internet you couldn't just Google it or ask Siri/Alexa/etc.

One of my ongoing personal projects (buying and archiving hundreds of Japanese Macintosh Magazine CD-ROMs and making their file listings searchable) involves converting period encoding to Unicode. It's a minefield, but was fun to figure out: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2022/03/31/working-with-classic-macintosh-text-encodings-in-the-age-of-unicode/

...next week? Did they suddenly realise it's GAMESCOM but still need a week to get their act together?

Typo: Simpon's

@Damo I think it's a useful service you're providing with this coverage. It's good to understand both sides to form a rounded opinion of many shades not just black and white. And it is surprising that even in the niche retro games scene there is a lot of ai related news. It must be tricky to keep journalism and personal opinion separate and I thank you for that.

That's great to have confirmed.

From now on I'm going to comment on every ai article, apologies if/when I gets annoying @damo

@HammyHavoc I refuse to give LRG a penny

They could set up a donation link. The game looks and sounds great, but is not something I would ever play myself. Though as an indie game developer that has had my share of difficult game releases, I would donate to these guys because I enjoyed their development updates so much.

Is it just me or does anybody else see Walter from The Big Lebowski when they see photos of Christian with his 80s glasses and goatee?

Can't wait to dive into this when I decide which version to buy.

@Damo nothing personal at all in my mild objection. It's the quantity of ai coverage (for and against) that I find tiresome, across Time Extension and elsewhere. I'd feel the same if I was seeing the same quantity of any one thing, even something I have more time for. Though I still haven't set up my RSS to filter out ai, so it's evidently not that high on my list of annoyances.

I need to set up an ai filter on my time extension rss feed.

Hop the paywall https://archive.is/www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/arts/video-games-artificial-intelligence.html

This all gives me bad vibes. I'm relieved to not be Commodore fan.

@Jamesarson you could just plug in a single everdrive cartridge containing all your legally owned games. The point is that this is running real hardware, even closer than FPGA.

@MSaturn really interesting to read about how you're using it! Sounds genuinely useful. Well done.

I find this kind of soapbox article full of opinions, rather than facts, a bit tiresome. Almost as much as the relentless ai talk.

Great interview. Was it conducted back and forth by email? I'm intrigued how these things come together.