Hello, everyone. I'm debuting a new regular video series entitled, "Armchair Arcade TV". The first one, with the surprising name of "Episode 1" is on little known Centuri arcade game, Route 16 (Route-16), from 1981, with feature coverage of its first home translation for the Emerson Arcadia-2001 and its family of systems. Other games and systems are also featured. This is my first time on Adobe Premiere and on a new computer system, so the usual issues cropped up in the creation of this, but naturally these will improve in all ways over time, including the host segments. In the mean-time, enjoy the first episode. The full transcript follows the video.

EDGE Magazine has posted a neat article called The Making of Asteroids. The article features quotations from Ed Logg. There are also design sketches and other materials you won't want to miss if you're a fan of the game.

I had recently blogged about and posted photos of the current state of my home arcade machine and the surrounding area. I've been going through my network backup drive and came across some interesting photos from when I first got the machine in February of 2006 that I never did anything with. When it was shipped, several wires inside got knocked loose and I was planning on documenting the restoration and the internals in great detail. That never happened, but I did take a few photos in anticipation of that. These are those photos (this is back when we were living in our previous house). I'm not going to describe each photo like I did in the previous blog entry, but they should still be interesting nonetheless for those wanted to know just a bit more about what's going on inside of the thing. When I power the coin slot in the future, I'll take updated photos, but these should suffice for now. Click here for the album of 38 photos or here for the slide show. Enjoy.

I've been on vacation from work with the wife and kids at home since last Friday (until the 30th), so I've actually had time to do some videogame, computer and related things I've been meaning to do for a very long time. As I mentioned in another thread my wife had a cookie party on Saturday, so I took some time away from all the ladies with my dad by retiring to the basement and getting his help with finishing upgrading/repairing the modified Hero Jr robot and PAL-based Exidy Sorcerer, as well as repairing a spare Nintendo DS Lite in an aftermarket case and Microsoft Xbox 360 wireless controller.

Pac-ManPac-Man fever! That's what I have now that I've started work on the Pac-Man chapter in the book I'm currently writing with Bill Loguidice, the acclaimed collector and game historian. :) As usual, I started off by reading the wikipedia entry on the game, which this time was actually extremely detailed and helpful. One interesting thing about the wikipedia article is that it claims that the game designer, Toru Iwatani, was not inspired by a pizza as the old story goes. The article cites a book called Programmers at Work: Interviews, which I unfortunately do not own. If anyone does have this book or has thoughts on this matter, please let me know!

This looks a bit old, but this person apparently successfully ported the real Space Invaders arcade game to a TRS-80 Model 4/4P with hi-res board (the board being the x-factor here and something few of us with TRS-80 collections have (I don't)).

Pretty extraordinary stuff and as the author says, probably the first of its kind ever attempted. As we know, someone did something similar on the far more capable (though no less impressive of a technical achievement) TRS-80 Color Computer 3 with arcade Donkey Kong.

Keep in mind that the Model 4 came out in 1983, based off of a platform first released in 1977, and the Color Computer 3 came out in 1987, based off of a platform first released in 1980!

Thanks to the work of some gentlemen here, I was able to compile my own version of games that work best with a 4-way limit joystick under MAME. All-time personal favorites Pooyan (really a 2-way) and Satan's Hollow are of course on there...

Here's the list of 208 matches, with each game hopefully only listed once (anything missing or corrections? Let me know!):