Sound Bytes: The Case of the Mysterious Midway Track

Sorry I've been flying under the radar for the last few days, folks. While I was gone, I discovered something pretty cool that I'd like to share with the fine readers of this blog. Remember Midway Arcade's Greatest Hits? This collection of early arcade hits like Defender, Joust, and my abusive love interest Sinistar was released for every game console you can imagine... yes, even that one. However, the Sega Saturn version was my favorite of the bunch, vying with Japanese megahits like Dracula X, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, and Grandia for the title of the most entertaining title on this unappreciated system.

Unappreciated because of this guy, naturally.

However, the Saturn port of Arcade's Greatest Hits has a special surprise for players adventurous enough to pop the disc into their computers. There's a lengthy music track exclusive to this version of the game; a bizarre progressive rock epic that calls to mind the work of Tangerine Dream and Mike "Tubular Bells" Oldfield. I can't share the whole thing with you, but you'll find an excerpt from the track here.

On a whim, I decided to ask the game's creators (formerly of Digital Eclipse, currently with a new company called Code Mystics) about this mysterious track. This was their response:

The Code Mystics rep then provided a link to the band's Grooveshark page, featuring selections from Weird Blinking Lights' latest album, Traditional Synthetic Cuisine. The quality of these tracks is subject to debate- you're not going to get a lot of mileage out of them if you're not a fan of space rock- but at least this sheds some light on this eighteen year old mystery.

With that mystery solved, let's discuss more recent gaming news. Evidently Nintendo has changed its 2014 financial projections from a rosy one billion dollar profit to a thorny three hundred million dollar loss. It's important to point out (since nobody else will) that Microsoft has lost three billion dollars on the Xbox in the last decade, and that Sony hemorrhaged nearly that much in a single year. Nevertheless, the loss has got CEO Satoru Iwata sweating bullets and considering other income sources for this former industry leader.

What else U got?
(image courtesy of Animalcrossing.wikia.com)

Personally, I didn't think the Wii U was a fantastic idea. Its technology badly lags behind its competitors, just as the Wii had in 2006. Unlike the Wii, however, it doesn't have any compelling technology to offset that handicap; just an expensive boondoggle of a controller that adds more to the system's cost than its entertainment value. Having said all that, I also think it would be unwise for Nintendo to abandon the machine halfway through its lifespan. Sega had a nasty habit of turning its consoles into doorstops through the 1990s, and it took a wrecking ball to the company's reputation. After the Dreamcast was taken off store shelves, Sega vowed never to make a console again... a wise decision, as nobody with an ounce of common sense would consider buying one from the frustratingly fickle company.

My advice to Nintendo is to take its lumps in this console cycle, put more of its marketing and development muscle behind the 3DS, and when 2017 finally arrives, start fresh with an entirely new system... something more in line with its competitors. Withered technology is no longer working for Nintendo... these days, the strategy is making their products seem as stale as the name would suggest.

Speaking of stale, it may also be time to hand the aging and creatively tapped Shigeru Miyamoto his walking papers*... but that is a story for another time.

* Hey, put down the torches and pitchforks! You did play Paper Mario: Sticker Star, right?!

Bolded for Emphasis: The Bravely Default Demo

Playing Bravely Default reminds me of a scene from Futurama. I think it went something like this:

Fry: I just saw something incredibly cool! A big, floating ball that lit up with every color of the rainbow, plus some new ones that were so beautiful I fell to my knees and cried.

Amy Wong: Was it out in front of Discount Shoe Outlet?

Fry: Yeah.

Amy Wong: They have a college kid wear that to attract customers.

Fry: Well, I don't care if it was some dork in a costume! For one brief moment, I felt the heartbeat of creation, and it was one with my own.

Amy Wong: Big deal!

Bender: We all feel like that, all the time. You don't hear us gassing on about it!

Yeah, you saw this one coming.
(Image courtesy of LetsTalkAbout.co.uk)

If only games this good were that common! I do not exaggerate when I say that I haven't been this enthusiastic about a video game since Mass Effect 2, Darkstalkers, or even the original Gunstar Heroes. Bravely Default looks incredible on the 3DS, sounds even better, and offers some of the most addictive combat you'll find in a turn-based RPG... and that's just the demo!

The steampunk town featured in the
Bravely Default demo.
(Image courtesy of FinalFantasy-fxn.net)

The attention to detail in Bravely Default is amazing, from the massive windmills and clocks looming over you in the city to the trail of footprints you leave behind as you journey through the desert. Wispy clouds lazily float past, casting shadows on the ground, and day turns to night, bringing more ferocious monsters with it. (What a horrible night to have a curse!) Your heroes even engage in a little cosplay, putting on different costumes depending on the jobs you select for them. The "performer" job class turns pasty white sidekick Ringabel into an Elvis impersonator... if that's not a first for an RPG, I can scarcely imagine the game that beat Bravely Default to it!

Speaking of music, Bravely Default has some of the best you'll find in a role-playing game, no small feat when you consider the epic tracks Square-Enix has served up in the past. The combat theme, Bell of Battle (or is it Conflict's Chime...?) is a rousing, urgent score that gets you pumped and primed for carving up cat wizards and giant scorpions. You'll be hearing it a lot over the course of the game, but there's a pretty good chance you'll download the track and listen to it even after you've put your 3DS to sleep for the night.

The two greatest words in the English
language! De-fault, de-fault!
(image courtesy of FinalFantasy-fxn.net)

Oh yes, about the combat! Fights are turn-based, closely resembling the battles from the early Final Fantasy games, but the developers have taken steps to ensure they don't slow to a crawl... like, uh, the later Final Fantasy games. Along with the usual combat options like attack, item, and magic, you've got two new choices, Brave and Default. Brave lets you take up to four turns at once, giving you a chance to put the hammer down on monsters or heal multiple party members. Default is the more conservative option, letting you save a turn for later while boosting your defense.

Personally, I've never found a practical use for Default, aside from unessential skills that require multiple turns to activate. However, Brave is extremely handy for tearing through lesser foes, or bringing down the strong ones before they get a chance to retaliate. Plus, your allotment of turns (called BP) are restored with each new fight, so hey, go nuts!

There's an even BIGGER dragon than D'gon?!
Help, mommy!
(image courtesy of N-Handhelds.com)

The only issue I have with the Bravely Default demo, aside from the fact that I'll only be able to play it thirty times, is that it's punishingly difficult. On my first try, I was advised by a non-player character that the path to the west of the city was full of easily dispatched chumps, along with a cave stockpiled with handy items. I quickly discovered that those chumps weren't so easily dispatched, and all I found in the cave was death, delivered swiftly by a massive fire-belching anklyosaur called a D'gon.

You're not going to survive long if you don't make frequent use of the town inn (mercifully, a budget-priced inn that cures all status ailments, including death) and prepare your heroes for future encounters. That not only means grinding for levels and buying better gear, but switching jobs to give your characters new abilities. As with many RPGs, patience is a virtue in Bravely Default... if you charge headlong into uncharted territory, humiliating defeats and hopeless battles of attrition will be your reward.

Even with its brutal (but not insurmountable) difficulty, the Bravely Default demo makes a strong case for purchasing the full game, which will be released next month for around forty dollars. It's much too early to tell if Bravely Default will be the best game of 2014, but if what I've seen from the demo is any indication, it'll give the competition one hell of a run for its money.

Regarding the controversy over the characters'
redesigned outfits: do you really want to see
these Precious Moments figurines in
skimpy clothing? (Please say "no.")
(Image courtesy of USGamer.net)

Can You Dig It? Heiankyo Alien... and Friends!

Image courtesy of
Forbiddensiren.ucoz.ru

Before we begin, I'd like to introduce you to the glorious print ad for the GameBoy version of Heiankyo Alien, published by Eastern media giant Meldac. Back in the 1990s, when video game advertising was an embarrassing cavalcade of poor taste and focus-tested rebellion, Meldac's ad was a refreshing break from the status quo. So wonderfully bizarre! So uniquely Japanese! So different from the butts, nuts, guts, and smut other game companies were using in their own ads! It must have been marketing suicide for Heiankyo Alien, but you've nevertheless got to admire Meldac for its stubborn refusal to pander to a pubescent American audience.

"Knock it off, dillweed! Hey Butthead,
gimme some help over here!"
(image courtesy of Arcade Flyers)

So, what kind of game would inspire woodblock prints of half-digested samurai? That would be Heiankyo Alien, which stars a feudal lawman defending ancient Kyoto from aliens by burying the hungry invaders with a shovel. (Hey, it's not any less dumb than the ending of Signs...) This game was originally designed outside the video game industry, at the Theoretical Science division of the prestigious University of Tokyo. After it was brought to arcades by electronics manufacturer Onkyo, Heiankyo Alien was quickly embraced by the Japanese, inspiring dozens of home ports and knock-offs. Here now are a few of the more memorable ones...

SUPER ALIEN
COMMODORE
VIC-20

Forgive the huge, off-center border. For
reasons that still remain a mystery, VIC-20
games force the user to adjust its position
with the function keys. It really was a
good game system, honest!

Be it ever so underpowered, there's no place like your first computer. Commodore's VIC-20 was mine, and it still has a place in my heart despite barely being more powerful than the breadbox it so strongly resembles. The little computer that couldn't struck a chord with the Japanese as well, with HAL Laboratories publishing its first handful of games on the system. One of these games, a Galaxian clone called Star Battle, was designed by Satoru Iwata, the current president of Nintendo.

The VIC-20's popularity in Japan meant that a conversion of Heiankyo Alien was inevitable, and this one is a dead ringer for the arcade game, aside from a different color scheme and the system's extra-chunky font. Unfortunately, since the VIC only supports single button joysticks, you'll have to hold down the trigger and press up to dig holes, or down to fill them. Alternately, you could tap A and D on the keyboard, but who uses a keyboard to play video games in this day and age? (Shut up, first-person shooter fans.)

BOOBY KIDS
NIHON BUSSAN
NES

The game doesn't get really hard
until the Sleestaks arrive...

This game is way too similar to the later TurboGrafx-16 title Cratermaze to be a coincidence, and indeed, there are family ties. The original game, Kid no Hore Hore Daisakusen (Hole Hole Kid's Big Scheme), was released in arcades back in 1987, and is extremely similar to Cratermaze, albeit with different level designs and a lot more enemies. Booby Kids is one of those console-friendly rewrites that were aggravatingly common on the NES... it's got the same characters but an entirely new setting and lengthier stages.

This time, the titular Booby Kid (I'm sorry... I'm really, really sorry. Please stop hitting me!) has to scoop up oranges in a prehistoric setting while dodging hungry dinosaurs and club-wielding cavemen. The stages are more open than they were in the game's arcade and TurboGrafx-16 cousins, but that just makes it harder to bury your foes... and if you stumble into a monster, you'll have to start your fruit harvesting from the beginning. Did I mention that the levels are kind of long...?

HEIANKYO ALIEN 
MELDAC
GAMEBOY

"Oh God, it's even more painful
than it looks!"

This game could have been a disaster of epic proportions and I still would have loved it thanks to Meldac's unapologetically Japanese ad campaign. The company let its freak flag fly at a time when Japanese culture hadn't yet been embraced by an American audience, and I have to appreciate that audacity. Plus, just try to tell me that a samurai beating an alien to death while being devoured by it isn't outrageously awesome. You can't, and if you did, you would be a dirty, dirty liar.

Anyway, Heiankyo Alien on the GameBoy offers two styles of play. The first is your usual vanilla Heiankyo experience... you guide a skirt-wearing stick figure through a simple maze, digging holes to trap the abstractly drawn aliens hoping to sink their teeth into you. However, the real fun's in the New mode, which takes the graphics and sound out of the 1970s and beyond what you'd expect from a GameBoy launch title. Distinctly Japanese details litter the landscape and the feudal music lends an air of authenticity to the action. The gameplay's not much changed from the original, but it's easier to appreciate when it looks and sounds this nice.

CRATERMAZE 
NEC
TURBOGRAFX-16

"Here I come to save the day!
Uh, somewhere else."

The origin of this game is a little confusing, so bear with me. Originally designed as merchandise for Japan's cartoon cat robot Doraemon, Cratermaze was also based on a Japanese arcade release... and was turned back into that game when it was released here in the United States. The fact that this cute and colorful game was brought to America in any form is a little surprising, but NEC had a bad habit of releasing games that had no hope of finding an audience outside Japan. The TurboGrafx-16's pack-in was Keith Courage in Alpha Zones, based on a cartoon that never aired in the West. 'Nuff said.

But back to Cratermaze. It's an overhead view maze game that's a few generations removed from Heiankyo Alien... instead of flat rectangles separating the pathways, there are brightly colored buildings and stone walls, and instead of relying solely on digging to defend yourself, you've got a wide variety of weapons at your disposal, including a yo-yo, bombs, and a freeze beam. In fact, the odds are stacked a little too heavily in your favor, so you'll want to pick the higher of the two difficulty settings to give yourself an honest challenge.

NICHIBUTSU ARCADE CLASSICS 2: HEIANKYO ALIEN
NIHON BUSSAN
SUPER NES

It's Nichibutsu's turn up to bat with the Heiankyo Alien franchise, and as usual, the company bunts for first base. In all fairness, Nihon Bussan's first Arcade Classics release was impressive, a collection of their two best arcade games (and Frisky Tom) with special enhanced modes. However, the sequel was schlepped off to an outside developer named Syscom, which had no idea how to bring the game to the Super NES.

Heiankyo Alien and Bomberman: Two
great tastes that taste great together!
Like peanut butter and barbecue sauce!

There are three modes here. The first is, naturally, a straight port of the arcade game, and it's about as good as other home ports if you don't mind slightly sticky control and misplaced digitized sound. The second is an odd hybrid of Heiankyo Alien and Bomberman, with wooden blocks scattered throughout each stage. Smashing the blocks could result in anything from a faster shovel to more aliens to a deadly rain of logs, which is a pretty good reason to avoid them entirely. 

Finally, there's the versus mode, which takes the "new type" mode, splits the screen down the middle, and puts a player on each half. Burying monsters sends them to the other side of the playfield to harass the opponent. This new wrinkle to the gameplay would be brilliant in a fiercely competitive, Twinkle Star Sprites kind of way... if you had any room to dodge the hungry beasties. Maybe "three strikes" would have been a better baseball metaphor for this game...

Okay, okay, I'm goin', already!

(Special thanks to Wikipedia for providing valuable information for this article, as always.)

I picked the wrong time to start sniffing glue- er, collecting 16-bit games

Hey, dudes and dudettes! I'd like to apologize for my extended absence... shortly after my last post, I was socked with pancreatitus, a nasty, occasionally fatal disease that wrecks havoc with your lower digestive system. The symptoms of the disease had been there for years, but doctors had dismissed it as acid reflux or gastritus. Luckily, once the pain had reached its apex, I was taken to a better hospital, and they gave me a proper diagnosis. Two months of convalescence, another two months of rehabilitation, and countless pills later, I'm nearly back to normal, albeit with a pancreatic drain hanging from my gut. And, uh, $100,000 in medical bills. America... the best health care ungodly amounts of money can buy! (What, me bitter?)

Anyway, now that I've mostly recovered and my appetite for gaming has returned, it seems like the right time to start blogging again. My comeback was inspired by some of the big names in the business; guys like the anonymous editor of VGJunk and The Gay Gamer's impossibly cordial Bryan Ochalla. Beyond that, I need to sharpen up my writing skills, because lord knows I wasn't getting that practice when I was in the hospital for all those months.

So, let me get those of you who are just joining caught up. Last August, I'd gotten a Sega Genesis in the mail, along with a stack of games... most good, a few less so, and one OH GOD THE HUMANITY. After encasing Heavy Nova in concrete and burying it in a radioactive waste dump where it belongs, I set out to strengthen my rather anemic library of Genesis games. That... has not gone so well. The thrift stores in the Mount Pleasant area, which used to be a rich source of 16-bit software, have all been cleaned out in the five years since I lived there, leaving me with this...

Image courtesy of Justgovintage.com

...and dozens of cartridges just like it. You'll note the unusual shape and the yellow tab along the side... that's your warning that the game in question is by Electronic Arts, and is likely one of the company's throwaway sports titles. These games aren't bad, exactly, but they're not nearly as exciting as the system's finer moments. Moreover, from a collector's standpoint, they're damned near worthless, engineered to be antiquated the moment a new game in the series is released. You can't even use the cartridges as shells for reproductions, homebrew games, or flash cartridges, because they clash with standard Genesis carts and the yellow tabs get in the way of any modifications you'd want to make.

In short, I don't want these. NOBODY wants these, which is why they're in abundant supply in nearly every pawn shop, thrift shop, and consignment shop you visit. They'd be easy enough to ignore if there were something, anything else to buy, but it's all vanished, apparently looted by "Sumguys" and speculators. The story's the same everywhere you go, and the grass is no greener on the Super Nintendo side of the fence. It's hugely aggravating, especially when you consider that all the good stuff was there just five years ago. In 2009, you could find everything from Target Earth to Alisia Dragoon in the wild. This year, I found a lonely copy of Midway Arcade's Greatest Hits hidden in the detritus of EA's sports games, and I felt damned grateful for the opportunity. Maybe things are different elsewhere, but from what I've heard from other collectors, I kind of doubt it.

Genesis: The Unboxening

Welcome back, readers! (Both of you.) I have tidings of great gaming cheer to report. A few days ago, a member of the Talking Time forum was looking to trim down his collection, and offered his Genesis and a handful of games for the price of shipping. Being a fan of the system since... well, forever, I jumped on the chance to claim it for myself. Sure, I already own a Genny, but I could always use more games and accessories, and that stuff has gotten seriously hard to find at pawn shops and yard sales. Yesterday, I scoured a local town during an annual summer festival- peak garage sale conditions- and turned up a single Sega Genesis item, a lonely copy of Pac-Man 2. That's what I call slim pickens.

So you can understand why I'd be grateful to have a shot at a big Genesis score, regardless of how that opportunity presented itself. I sent the seller the eight dollars he requested, and just two days later, it arrived on my doorstep, as if it had been delivered by Sonic himself. Let's take a peek inside, shall we?

That's a promising start! Many of the games in the package included the box and instructions. The great thing about Genesis collecting is that the games are complete as often as not, thanks to the sturdy plastic cases they were shipped in for most of the system's life. Unfortunately, later titles like the ill-considered port of The Art of Fighting came in the same flimsy cardboard boxes that Super NES games always had, a move Sega defended as "environmentally friendly" but I'd personally describe as "a huge load of bullshit." The plastic cases might find their way to a landfill, but if my twenty-five years of collecting have taught me anything, the cardboard boxes are destined for one.

Also included in the package were two three button controllers, standard equipment for the Genesis in its early years. These joypads seem perfectly ordinary at first glance, but one of them holds a pleasant surprise. While the one on the left has the usual thumb-wrecking hard plastic D-pad with barely any throw, the one on the right is rubberized and rocks on a central pivot. It's the same design Sega used in its brilliant six button Arcade Pad as well as the Saturn's stock controller, and I had no idea that it ever found its way to the old three button controllers. I originally planned to hack both of these joypads for other projects, but now I'm having second thoughts...

Here's the system itself, a standard model two Genesis. I prefer the design of the original, with its wide frame, circle-rimmed cartridge port, and the promise of "high-definition graphics" on the front, but at least this one doesn't take up much space and plays nice with the later model of the Sega CD. Both models are a quantum leap ahead of the third model, which could nearly fit in a man's pocket but sacrifices all but the most basic functionality to squeeze into that tiny package. (You know, kind of like that Canadian Wii released a few months ago.)

Let's look at the games. Oh god, not this one! I mentioned Heavy Nova in a previous update, but never gave it the thrashing it so richly deserves, so let's open that overdue can of whoopass. What first appears to be a thrilling action game with a strong anime influence quickly devolves into a boring slog spread across two play styles... a sluggish, frustrating platformer and a versus fighter that adds the -anical to mech and puts the "ass" in molasses. After your fifth slow-motion smackdown at the hands of a "Heavy Doll" (really, Micronet? Really?), you'll want to set the cartridge under your opponent's ten ton heel. Problem is, it might take a few years for the mech to step on it.

And here now is an elusive species, the Sega Genesis RPG. Once thought to exist only in myths and rumors, this beast made a rare appearance at the bottom of this box. Enjoy this sight, for it could be a once in a lifetime experience.

Er, seriously. This is Sword of Vermillion, one of the few role-playing games released for the Genesis in its early years. I've spent a grand total of five minutes playing this, and the unflattering reviews on GameFAQs aren't convincing me to give it more of my time.

Championship Pool, endorsed by the Billiard Congress of America! Unlike our current congress, they try to sink the black one last. Anyway, this seems to be an okay adaptation of the sport, although having to switch screens to adjust your power (instead of the timing-dependent power meter in Side Pocket) takes some adjustment.

When the guy who sent me the Genesis listed "Genesis 6-Pak" as one of the games in the package, I assumed he meant the assortment of light gun games packaged with the Menacer, Sega's quickly forgotten bazooka peripheral. To my great surprise and relief, the 6-Pak actually contains six Genesis launch titles, ranging from the ho-hum Columns to classics like Revenge of Shinobi and the first Sonic the Hedgehog. The original Streets of Rage is also squeezed in there, but it shows its age next to its sequel, with limited move sets, shrimpy characters, and a smart bomb that's nowhere near as cool or useful as the special attacks in Streets of Rage 2. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time with SOR in my teen years, and it's nice to have it back in my collection.

The package included two RF adapters. Problem is, the Amiga 1080 I use with my older game systems isn't compatible with RF. Frankly, neither am I... I was eager to leave that stone-aged standard behind the moment I bought a television set with more than one port on the back. With this in mind, I snipped the RF box from one of the cables and soldered on a couple of composite wires I'd salvaged from a Commodore DTV unit. Twenty minutes of snipping and soldering later, the Genesis was producing an image of acceptable, if not sterling, quality. The Genesis can output in dazzling, razor-sharp RGB, but the parts I'll need to make that cable are a little pricey, so that mod will have to wait.

This was a damn fine haul, especially when you consider the price. The original owner charged me a lot less for shipping than it actually cost, so the Genesis, several accessories, and a buttload of games effectively cost me negative eight dollars. Best of all, I've got a spare system, in case the old one goes belly up or I decide to mod this one. So yeah, I'm pretty happy with the way this panned out. You might even say giddy!

Here Comes Franklin!

First things first... check out the new design for the blog! It's no longer got that Tommy Vercetti Hawaiian shirt look that the old one did. It's probably a little bluer than necessary, but that's nothing a new background image won't cure! I'll plug one in later this week.

So, I was out yard sailing with me madre, and happened across this beast...

I found this mysterious computer at a garage sale a couple of months earlier, but left it behind, thinking it was just another IBM PC clone. Some online research later that evening revealed that it was an entirely different animal, worthy of closer inspection. Luckily, I would get a second crack at the machine when it turned up at a later sale. I wanted the computer and the previous owners wanted it gone, so after two dollars exchanged hands, we both got what we wanted.

So, what exactly did I get? It's the Franklin Ace 2200, the last in the company's line of Apple II clones. Back in the 1980s, when IBM PCs were obscenely expensive and largely relegated to the business sector, it was Apple's hardware that was relentlessly copied by hardware manufacturers. Franklin Computer Corporation led the charge with the Ace series of desktop computers, which one-upped Apple's official systems with higher performance, smaller footprints, and lower prices. The system shown above is roughly half the size of a common PC tower, with built in disc drives and a detachable keyboard you can rest on your lap. These were all luxuries conspicuously absent from the Apple IIe, a tan behemoth that gobbled up half your desktop and looked only marginally more modern than the wood-carved original Steve Wozniak pieced together in his garage.

Okay, that's a slight exaggeration.
(image courtesy of Engadget)

Naturally, Apple wasn't happy about this, and was determined to force Franklin off its turf. Franklin scored an early victory against the company when a district judge ruled that Apple could only copyright code written on paper, not discs or microchips. However, anyone familiar with our civil justice system knows that a company is allowed as many re-rolls as it can afford to emerge victorious in a legal battle. Apple took its grievances to an appeals court, which reversed the decision and doomed Franklin to a long, miserable life of making pocket translators.

However, Franklin must had enough time between the two court cases to thoroughly saturate the market with Ace computers. I've seen three of these in the wild so far, including two 2000 series machines and a 1000 my mother had brought home from a yard sale some years earlier. I don't doubt for a second that there are many more out there... after all, if you were shopping for a computer and had the chance to buy the same hardware as a major brand, but for less money, why wouldn't you?

While we're on the subject of pinching pennies, I guess I could have saved myself two dollars and downloaded an emulator instead. However, I can also use this Ace to retrieve some of the games I wrote in Apple BASIC over twenty years ago. Sure, they were hilariously crude, but the nostalgia would make it oh-so worth it.

(Special thanks to Wikipedia, Oldcomputers.net, and Old-Computers.com for their assistance in writing this article.)

Coleco Gemini: The Second Encounter

You remember this guy, right? Short, black, and ill-tempered, like Gary Coleman after Diff'rent Strokes was cancelled?

Well, after some encouragement from the fine folks at AtariAge,I decided to dig it out from the shed and take it apart, along with the mysterious project box attached to it. It turns out that the box, which I hoped would let me connect the Gemini to a television, offered nothing but an alternate power source, along with plenty of regret for those foolish enough to plug it into their big screen LCD television sets. Iesposta from the AtariAge forums offered this warning:

"Don't use that project box. If that 110V power soldered to the yellow transformer lead touches the Coax Connector and that is connected to a TV, well, it would be very bad, unless by 50/50 chance it was plugged into the house ground. 

If 110V did get into the TV or the RF of the Gemini, it would probably be powdered toast, man."

When I get a word of caution with a Ren and Stimpy reference in it, you'd better believe I listen! So I chucked the awful thing in the shed and turned my attention to the Gemini itself. Thankfully, the wires inside the machine leading to the project box weren't permanently attached... they slipped out of the system almost immediately after I opened it. That was a welcome surprise!

That was the easy part. However, hacking a system with little available documentation is considerably trickier. Sure, A/V mods for the standard Atari 2600 are all over the internet, but there's something you've got to understand about the Coleco Gemini. For all Coleco's efforts, the machine is not the same as a genuine Atari 2600, and if anyone tells you otherwise...

I quickly learned this lesson when I connected Ben Heckendorn's classic 2600 composite mod to the system in the usual way. Instead of a picture, I got a rolling green screen full of gibberish... a clear indication that the Gemini was not the twin of the Atari 2600 that Coleco had made it out to be.

That meant that I had to do a little detective work to discover the functions of the pins on Coleco's TIA knock-off, shown here:

Before I proceed, here's the 411 on the TIA. The Television Interface Adapter is the muscle of the Atari 2600, handling its video, audio, and input/output functions. Anything you see on the screen or hear from the speakers of your television set can be traced back to this little beauty. A real Atari 2600 uses a 10444 for its TIA chip; the Gemini has an off-the-shelf counterpart called the 73192. And that's where the headaches start...

The 73192 is wired differently than the 10444, with several key pins swapped. I was able to find half of them by tracing them back to the 6507, a budget-priced version of the 8-bit processor that all the cool game systems were wearing back in the 1980s.*

And some robots a thousand years later, apparently!
(courtesy of Morbotron)

* The guys with Z-80s were all in the chess club, raising a pair of taped-up glasses with one hand while pulling down their wedgied underwear with the other.
The other pins had to be sniffed out with sneakier methods. For instance, the paddle inputs were tracked down by connecting a multimeter to the pins and looking for changes in voltage as I cranked on the dial of the Coleco Gemini controller. 

That wasn't the brass ring, though... I was after the video pins. I only managed to find those through a process of trial and error. Solder a wire here, get a dim monochrome image, solder another wire here with a resistor on the end, get a few more details, etc. Here's how it looked when I finally found the sweet spots on the underside of the board. You'll pardon the annotations!

After wiring up the prototype, I replaced it with something tidier and more permanent, as shown here:

The mod works as shown, but there's still room for improvement. Colorful titles like Pitfall! look great, but games set against a black background, like childhood favorite Crystal Castles and my own Solar Plexus, aren't as sharp as they ought to be. Crystal Castles in particular becomes an annoying challenge of hunting for barely visible gems, an issue I didn't have with the Light Sixer mod I'd done the week before.

You'll pardon the scanline. I chased
the beam, but it got away from me...

There are gems here somewhere! I, uh, think.

So hey, mission accomplished! Sort of. By the way, here's the pinout for the Coleco Gemini's TIA, since it seems to be such a closely guarded secret. The pins listed in red are guesstimates, but since I've got my system running composite video, I'd say they were pretty close to the mark.

All right, all right. I've been hitting the mod talk pretty hard lately, so I'll give it a rest and review some of the games I've been playing on my Atari systems in the next installment. Until then, folks!

EDIT: Hi, it's me from five years later! I just wanted to let you know that the pinout I cobbled together with multimeter readings wasn't entirely correct. This one from Console5 is the real deal, so if you plan to do this mod, use that as a guide instead. Apologies for the inconvenience.