Author Archives: DustyConsoles
Classic PC Game Woes
Ah, Icewind Dale. You bring memories of R. A. Salvatore’s books and his famous Drow, Drizzt. So when I bought a box of old PC games and found the discs to Icewind Dale mixed in with those of Baldur’s Gate and other RPGs I could not cram them in my disc drive fast enough.
Having no knowledge of the game other than a recognition of its title I wasn’t sure what to expect. Its a massive game for its era, my 90’s gaming rig with only an 8 gig HD balked at it. However when it was all said and done the game ran perfectly.
Immediately I was struck by a half forgotten memory….. This seemed familiar! The music, the cross-hairs indicating where your characters should walk, and the artwork for the town of Easthaven.
So after ambling around town I decide to leave it only to meet some kid saying goblins stole his fish. Yeah! I’m ready to butcher me some goblins!
I died. Almost instantly.
Even running like a pansy back to town hoping someone would jump in and help me didn’t work and I just succeeded in filling my back with goblin arrows.
So, I load up a save file. Create two new characters to follow me along and head back to show those goblins what’s what.
We all died. Again.
OK, so despite having some half memory of this game from 13 years ago I clearly have no idea what I’m doing. My RPG experience up to now has pretty much consisted of only Pokemon and Elder Scrolls. So I cheated a bit and read about a low level quest you were supposed to start on and worked from there. Fetch quests, kill bugs in the basement, etc… and was just about to complete the final quest in town when “doonk”
“An Assertion Failed”
Aaand, I’m back to the desktop. Restart game, apply patch, try again, same results. Crap.
I installed the game on my current computer (thankfully it seemed to work). Apply patch. Re-do the quests. Last quest. Same results. Double crap.
So where does one go from here? I guess you could try installing it on various PCs to see if one of them would let you through it. There’s a stack of them in the corner I haven’t tried yet. Googling didn’t yield any results other than a downloadable patch that did nothing. I could just try not doing the mission and seeing if I could squeak by the goblins with less experience, but what if the glitch occurs at a crucial point in the game? On a mission you can’t skip over?
So now I know the plight of vintage PC gamers. When you run into an error or bug but the game is so old that Googling returns few results, if any, to your problem.
TurboGrafx-16
What a bizarre name for a console. In my mind it was always pronounced obnoxiously: “Turbo GREEAAEF-AX”. In a vocal chord scraping scream. To be fair though, the Japanese name for the console didn’t make much more sense: PC Engine. But at least that one you could abbreviate easily and just call it the PCE. I wanted to cover this console only briefly since it didn’t sell well here and I haven’t found one yet. Thus I can’t really make many comments on it other than looking at the specs.
The TG-16 was touted as the first 16 bit home console. This is “technically” true but only in the same way that the Atari Jaguar was actually 64bit. They played with numbers during its release. The TG-16 featured 16 bit graphics processors but relied on a CPU that was only 8 bit. Since it included a 16 bit processor, albeit not the CPU, they billed it as 16 bit. However the Genesis and, later on, the SNES and Neo Geo would use true 16 bit CPUs.
But enough of that techno babble, what does it all mean? Basically the TG-16 was having to process twice the number of instructions to achieve the same effect as the other consoles. As such it was superior to the 8 bit consoles yet inferior to the 16 bit ones. It was caught in between a generation of gaming. In Japan it had more than a year to gain footing before the Genesis (known as the Mega Drive there) was released, however here in the US it was released about the same time as the Genesis. As such the TG-16 never really gained any traction here and some other problems like poor marketing and lack of 3rd party games kept the TG-16 lagging behind its competition in America.
The other pioneering feature that the TG-16 had was the first home console with a CD drive. While popular in Japan this add-on was expensive (its initial price of $399 being double that of the console itself) and furthermore didn’t come with a game. It did however provide a carrying case…whoopee.
Another problem that you might have noticed by just looking at the console is the singular controller port. A multi-tap adapter was required for two players. The only other console, to my knowledge, that did this was the 3DO. But on that at least the controllers daisy-chained together so all you had to to was buy a second controller and not an adapter plus a second controller.
Now it may seem that I’m bashing the console. I’m not really trying to but there were problem areas and without a broad US release I haven’t even managed to get a hold of one to see how it plays. All I can look at is what is on paper and it doesn’t look good. However the TG-16 is reputed to have some great ports of arcade shooters, often coming closer to the authentic experience than its rival consoles could. But arcade ports alone aren’t reason enough to pay auction price for one since arcade games are ported to newer consoles all the time and with a more faithful transfer.
Overall the TurboGrafx-16 was a pioneer in many respects. Early release date and the first CD add on. However it seems to me to be a case of too much, too soon. It’s early release made it more powerful than the 8 bit consoles but the true 16 bit consoles were just around the corner and it couldn’t keep up. One could argue that the Sega Dreamcast fell into the same trap and we’ll see if the new WiiU can avoid the same fate.
Image credits to Evan-Amos
Atari 7800
The 3rd Generation of game consoles was very slim in options compared to the generation before. Only 3 consoles in America were released in this generation. The final console to round out this generation is Atari’s 7800, an attempt to correct the problems that plagued the 5200 and try to help Atari stay competitive against its Japanese foes. I don’t have a 7800 as I prefer to scrounge for one instead of buying one on eBay or other such sites. Still, if you wanted to buy one from there they aren’t too expensive. About $40 to $60 with games and controllers seems to be the norm.
The 7800 was due to be released in 1984 but when Atari was sold after the video game crash it was put on hold and not released until 1986 when Nintendo proved that game consoles could still sell. Retailing for $140 it was much less than its competition.
The 7800 was fully backwards compatible with 2600 games but not 5200 ones. This is what largely kept the console going as fewer than 100 games were released for the 7800. It should be noted that one could still buy a brand new 2600 and games for it at this time. It is thought that the lack of games developed for it was due to Nintendo’s policy (later to be found illegal) of restricting developers from making games for systems other than Nintendo. There was a loophole however that allowed developers to create arcade ports for the 7800 however.
Hardware wise the 7800 was more or less on par with the others. The biggest flaw with it was the sound board was roughly the same as the 2600 so only simple beeps and tones could be made which as you can imagine was very disappointing compared to the NES and Master System. An add on card within game carts themselves was a work around to this problem but very few took advantage of it. One such chip, known as a POKEY chip, can be seen below. In theory though the 7800 could produce higher resolutions than both the NES and Master System.
In the end the 7800 was simply forgotten. Forgotten by Atari and left sitting for 2 years before release. Forgotten by consumers who were attracted to the larger game libraries of Nintendo and Sega. Forgotten by those who saw that the 2600jr was significantly cheaper and had more games. But we collectors of old junk shall not forget! Unfortunately Atari’s later consoles did not fare much better. It seems that they peaked with the 2600 and it was all downhill from there.
Image credits: Evan-Amos and RodCastler
Sega Master System
Two days after the NES was released in America the Sega Master System was released. Though in Japan the NES had been out for over 2 years already. The Master System is technically superior to the NES but due to some weird design choices and the mistake of allowing Tonka to market the console it eventually fell into obscurity. Mine is a little beat up as you can see the lettering is coming off. However I only paid $5 for it after the man running the estate sale pulled it out of a pile of junk in his basement; a testament to the durability of this system. I wish he still had the controllers though as they run about double the cost of an NES controller. Thankfully Genesis controllers will work just fine in it.
The system itself is a high tech looking (at least for the 80’s) block of angular plastic. It seems that in order to be “cool” in the 80’s your product had to be red and black. Also note the diagram on top that is reminiscent of a wiring schematic. I’ve seen something similar on JVC and a few other brands of home audio receivers of the same era. On those a light would glow behind whatever input you were using (tape, cd, etc…) however on the master system the only light is behind the “Power On” triangle. Basically the diagram makes no sense and is useless, but it looks cool!
Above and below the diagram are two design choices that made the Master System unusual. First off, the pause button is on the console instead of the controller. Great placement for that don’t you think? By the time you stand up to reach the console you’re dead.
Below the diagram is the Card Input. The Master System can accept both cartridge and Sega Card games. The card games were cheaper to make but offered less storage space and thus were intended for “budget” games that would cost less. Ironically though the cartridges can now be had for less than the cards. The cartridges were known as “Mega Cartridges” to differ them from the cards. The name is a reference to their storage space of 1 megabit.
Another unique feature is that the Master System itself had a game built into it. Mine has the motorcycle racing game Hang On but depending on your model of Master System the game would be different. There was even an 8-bit Sonic the Hedgehog released on carts and programmed into some of the later Master Systems.
Master System controllers are quite nice from what I remember. Unfortunately I used to have two but in my ignorance I traded them in for Genesis controllers not knowing that they were worth quite a bit more. The image above is courtesy of Evan-Amos. The buttons had a nice positive feel to them with more travel than the NES buttons. Some would argue that this makes for a slower “response time” however I prefer to know if I’ve pressed the button or not. Besides, it’s not like you’re trying to get top spot on Xbox Live or something. The d-pad is OK; seen worse, seen better. It’s one piece so you can rock your thumb around on it easy enough. Some controllers had a screw in thumb stick which seems completely pointless to me as it is too short to be of use.
The carts are not the best designed either. It seems they were more worried about matching the aesthetics of the console when a cart was plugged in than what the game was about. The box was the only thing with artwork on it and the carts simply had the name. Now, I know that when they were new you could just look at the box but surely even back then there were used carts for sale that were missing the box? So pretend you know nothing about games, you walk into a store and see the cart for Out Run. Is it a track and field game? A racing game? Or something even weirder that only has a little bit to do with the title?
All of these factors could have been overcome if the console was marketed properly. Unfortunately it was not. Sega contracted Tonka (yes, the toy dump truck people) to market the Master System here in America. Unfortunately being a toy company Tonka had no idea how to properly sell the system. Combine that with Nintendo preventing 3rd party game developers from creating games for systems other than Nintendo (a practice that was later ruled illegal) and we have the final nail in the Master System’s coffin.
Which is a shame too as there is nothing fatally wrong with the Master System. Most of the games were of high quality, the graphics were better than the NES, and it was a standard top loading console without the reliability problems inherent with the NES.
Dusty Consoles 