The Tower of Retro-Babble: Universal (aka Aruze)

 

The thingie in the logo
is the archaeopteryx, the extinct
missing link between dinosaur and bird.
This brand name went extinct pretty
quickly too, with the company reverting
back to its original name, Universal. 

Universal is one of those obscure game companies that hangs out in the dimly lit corner of the minds of old-school gamers. So let’s throw a little light on the subject! The company’s two most popular games, Ladybug and the first Mr. Do!, were the creations of Kazutoshi Ueda, a journeyman programmer who went on to develop games for the Turbografx-16, Super NES, and Playstation. Universal went through a turn of the century rebranding, becoming Aruze and attempting a hostile takeover of the more popular, but financially ailing SNK. After that blew up in Aruze’s beaky prehistoric face, SNK was resurrected as SNK-Playmore by SNK’s founder Eikichi Kawasaki, and Aruze went back to the name Universal, receding back into the pachinko industry.

Universal’s contributions to the early arcade scene were limited, but hugely influential all the same. Mr. Do! was the Coke to Dig Dug’s Pepsi, and Cosmic Avenger and Space Panic were both brought to the ColecoVision in the arcade port goldrush of the early 1980s. Universal’s games were a little meatier than the average arcade title, with more urgent gameplay and lots of opportunities for bonus points. Many of their games were build on familiar foundations, but they felt like more honest attempts to give players an expert version of the games they’d already mastered. (As opposed to Exciting New Pac-Man Plus.)

Dorodon
Played: Just in MAME, sorry!

If Ladybug asked, “What if Pac-Man had revolving doors?,” Dorodon responded with “What if those revolving doors caused grievous bodily harm?” Dorodon was designed by Falcon, a small player in the arcade industry that gained notoriety with Crazy Kong. (That was the creepily “off” clone of Donkey Kong using Crazy Climber hardware, which I reviewed in a previous installment of this feature.) 

Dorodon uses Ladybug hardware, but unlike Crazy Kong, this is an entirely new game. Well, mostly an entirely new game. The similarities to Ladybug are obvious from the moment you start, but Dorodon is a more frantic and chaotic experience. The blob-like hero must swing all the gates on the playfield to turn them white, but ogres pour out of the center of the screen, hoping to catch him. His defenses include a question mark, which turns all attacking ogres into ice cream cones; a swirl, which swings all white gates, clobbering all ogres standing nearby; and fire, which snuffs out any ogre stupid enough to step on it. (And you too, so be careful!)

After grabbing a question
mark, the ogres turn into
ice cream cones. Sure,
why not.

The gameplay isn’t as immediately intuitive as Ladybug’s or Pac-Man’s, and the ogres will quickly overwhelm you if you don’t swat them down as they appear. While that’s possible in the first stage, subsequent stages get a lot harder, with faster ogres and gates that revert back to yellow or red if you swing them while they’re the target color. The play mechanics are kind of a mess, and nothing really “takes.” I’ve never seen a Dorodon machine outside of the occasional episode of Starcade, and when you actually play it, it’s not hard to figure out why.

Ladybug
Played at: The Malt Shop, in Mount Pleasant MI 
(probably in the basement, where all the good old coin-ops were) 

Ladybug is Universal’s first shot at a Pac-Man clone, and it’s a pretty good eat ‘em up considering its early vintage. It’s a little “sticky” in the way it controls... instead of smoothly gliding thorugh each turn like the man of Pac, your bug crawls along in single pixel increments, making quick ninety degree turns through intersections annoyingly imprecise.

However, the gameplay of Ladybug is deeper than the game that inspired it. Scattered throughout the maze are revolving gates... push through one and it turns. Although you can move through the gates, the enemy bugs can’t, which means that careful shifting of gates can keep you out of their claws and even lead them into fatal skulls. Along with the expected bonus prize in the center of the screen, players can collect color-shifting letters. “EXTRA” in yellow awards an extra life, “SPECIAL” in red offers an extra credit, and the blue multipliers double, triple, and even quintuple the value of everything else, if your timing is just right.

Buggin' out, bugga bugga
buggin' out.

Unlike Pac-Man where you can regularly turn the tables on the roving monsters, Ladybug puts you exclusively on defense. The vegetable prize freezes the enemy bugs briefly, but beyond that, quick thinking and gate spinning are your only hope for survival. It’s a more punishing game than Pac-Man, but also more rewarding thanks to the high point potential offered by the letter tiles and multipliers. The EXTRA bonus in particular would become a mainstay in future Universal titles, starting with...

Mr. Do!
Played at: A gas station (Speedway?) on the edge of Coldwater, MI 

Like Ladybug, Mr. Do! provides a more challenging alternative to one of Namco’s arcade hits. While Dig Dug is relatively placid, with the hero plodding along through the dirt to the tune of friendly banjos, Mr. Do! is more lively. Unlike the Pookas and Fygars who sleepily bounce along in their burrows, the monsters in Mr. Do! immediately make a mad dash for the player the moment they emerge from the center of the screen. I guess I’d better get moving, like, right now.

They want the D.

Fortunately, Mr. Do! is armed with the power ball, which violently ricochets through the tunnels until it strikes a target or returns to the crafty clown. He can also push apples into vertical shafts, crushing anything at the bottom, but unlike Dig Dug’s more passive monsters, the creatures in Mr. Do! are often too wily to be flattened by giant fruit. Also, they don’t float through the dirt as ghosts... they chew through it as ravenous beasts, opening up the maze and quickly closing the distance between themselves and the player.

Ladybug was a deeper game than Pac-Man, and so it goes with Mr. Do! Every ten thousand points, a humanoid Scrabble tile appears at the top of the screen, going against the flow of enemy traffic. Hitting this “Letterman” earns you letters that eventually spell EXTRA, for an extra life. Lettermen also appear when you eat a fruit target in the center of the screen... along with three gooey monsters that devour falling apples. (So much for that tactic.) Stages can be completed by killing all onscreen creatures or collecting all onscreen cherries, and you get a point bonus if you grab eight cherries in a row. It’s extremely technique-dense for a game released in 1982, is the takeaway here. You might even call Mr. Do! the Dark Souls of Dig Dug, but really... just don’t.

Mr. Do's Castle
Played at: A Wal-Mart in central Illinois

Ms. Pac-Man was a lot like Pac-Man. Galaga was a lot like Galaxian. The sequel to Mr. Do! is... nothing like Mr. Do! This may have come as a shock and an annoyance to fans of the original, but Mr. Do’s Castle is a great game in its own right, when taken on its own terms.

This time the clown is playing exterminator in a castle infested with... unicorns? (Am I reading this right?) These aren’t the fun, cuddly, My Little Pony kind of unicorns, however! Imagine red, vaguely equine gremlins... they’re still kind of cuddly, but deadly to the touch. Like those gremlins from the movie, they have a habit of multiplying and getting more hostile if left unattended, so squish ‘em quick with your trusty unicorn-bashing hammer! A direct hit will do the job in the first two stages, but past that you’ll have to crush them with the blocks that make up the floors. Choose your targets carefully! Any block you drop leaves a gap that could leave you stuck until the unicorns fill it. (They poop blocks. It’s a video game thing; best not think too deeply about it.)

I mean, they're kinda like
unicorns? But they walk
like people, and poop
like wombats. (Look it up.)

Unlike the first Mr. Do!, Mr. Do!’s Castle is a platformer, a bit like Donkey Kong but a whole lot more like Lode Runner and Universal’s earlier Space Panic. As an arcade game from 1981, Space Panic felt rough and unpolished, but Mr. Do!’s Castle illustrates the difference two years of design experience and improved technology can make. It plays cleanly, with the jester scurrying across the playfield, dropping blocks, kicking over ladders, and generally making a nuisance of himself. It looks better than the first game, with a sense of depth to the castle interior. The soundtrack is bouncy and energetic, a perfect fit for the frantic action.

Mr. Do’s Castle exudes confidence in its design. It knows exactly what it wants to be, and does it better than either Lode Runner (too finicky for arcade play, although there have been arcade versions...) or Space Panic (which runs about as smoothly as a UNIVAC mining Bitcoin). It’s definitely not the Mr. Do players wanted, but it’s a detour that’s well worth taking.

Mr. Do's Wild Ride
Played at: A laundromat in Tekonsha MI

This is where the Mr. Do! series hits its first snag. Mr. Do’s Wild Ride borrows even more heavily from Donkey Kong than the previous game, but the amusement park setting ultimately proves its undoing. Like Donkey Kong, it’s a race to the top of the stage, but instead of girders and barrels, Mr. Do! is on the tracks of an active rollercoaster. Mr. Do! will quickly become Mr. Done if he’s clipped by a rollercoaster car or one of the other rides at the theme park, forcing the player to frequently shimmy up ladders to dodge the oncoming traffic.

Where do I even start with this one? First, the premise is idiotic. Bubble-blowing dinosaurs, hungry yellow spheres, and time-travelling space ships I can buy as charmingly odd video game concepts. Running up an amusement park ride while cars are racing on it just seems senselessly suicidal. There’s really no better way to do whatever you’re trying to accomplish here? Can’t you just, you know, buy a ticket? Better to ride the rollercoaster than to get smeared all over the front of it.

You don't have a jump button, because
jumping on a rollercoaster track would
be... too... dangerous? Look, it's just
easier to call this game stupid.

Beyond the stupid concept, Mr. Do!’s Wild Ride is just obnoxious to play. There’s a lot of overly lateral gameplay where the ladders don’t get any you closer to the goal and the only upward movement you’ll get is from the track loops on either end of the screen. Holding down a button triples Do!’s speed, but you’ll still need to spend a lot of time loiterng on ladders to keep from getting bounced around the screen by oncoming rollercoasters. Way to take the fun out of the fun park, Universal.

Kids, just say no to playing on rollercoaster tracks! It’s dangerous, and even worse, it leads to games like Mr. Do’s Wild Ride. 

Do! Run Run
Played at: An arcade inside an IGA grocery store 

Finishing up the series, at least in the 1980s, is Do! Run Run. Out of all the sequels, this is the closest in spirit to the original Mr. Do!. This dot munching maze game is seen from an elevated overhead view. Some platforms are higher than others, so when you throw that power ball, take care that it doesn’t fly over the heads of the clams and snakes chasing after you!

Colorful tubes replace the apples from the first game. Tip one over by either pushing it from above or knocking out the supports below, and the tube rolls downward, crushing any monsters in its path. The Lettermen from Mr. Do! and Castle return, and Mr. Do! can boost the value of dots by drawing a box around them, turning them into lemons and pineapples. Seems like a lot of unnecessary busywork, but it’s there if you want to wring more points out of the game.

Hee, hee! Someone's getting squished
by this gaudy looking drum!

Do! Run Run wasn’t built with the same confidence as the original or Castle... some of the new play mechanics in particular feel contrived. Qix called, it wants its territory marking back! Still, Do! Run Run has the feel of an impromptu band reunion on the roof of the Universal office. It’s a little unpolished, but the heart is still there, and you’re just happy to see one more performance from the old gang. Rock on with your bad self, Mr. Do!.

Ex-Box

 

Welp, that's it for the Xbox brand. Turn off the lights when you leave, will you?

Long story short, former Xbox head Phil Spencer and his imminently forgettable second-in-command Sarah Bond have both left the company... Spencer by choice, and Bond after being nudged out by incoming Xbox CEO Asha "Please don't squeeze the" Sharma. Sharma was the former head of Microsoft's AI division, suggesting that 1) She doesn't really give a damn about gaming and 2) She doesn't need to give a damn about gaming; she's the cleaner. Sharma is there to put an end to the Xbox brand, and determine the fate of the numerous third parties Microsoft bought when they thought they could force their way into the industry by purchasing half of it.

Look, we all saw this coming. Anyone old enough to have owned a Dreamcast for the fraction of a second that Sega supported it could see this coming the minute Microsoft informed the world that through the power (?) of cloud gaming, everything is an Xbox. 

It sounds like the logic of a petulant third grader... "Well, MY game system sold the most, because I say everything's an Xbox! So there!" As this figure shows, this attempt to divide and conquer through brand expansion rarely works. The 3DO had multiple manufacturers, but the price of the machine made it a non-starter no matter what company logo was on the front. The N-Gage was a dud right out of the starting gate, and efforts to turn it into a hardware standard for cell phones fizzled out just as quickly. Like the 3DO, the Nuon was made by multiple manufacturers... but around the time it launched, there was already a game system with DVD capabilities and much stronger gaming capabilities. A Sony, even, not some third-rate hardware from Goldstar.

Whenever console manufacturers try to awkwardly expand their brand by, say, making a joystick with the N64 logo that doesn't actually work with the Nintendo 64, or licensing games to a competitor's lousy handheld, it's a sign of weakness. It's a big neon sign flashing "XBOX IS ABOUT TO DIE!," and it's readily apparent that Microsoft is no longer dropping in quarters to keep this brand clinging to life. 

Trust me, I've been into video games for nearly all my life, and I've lived for over half a century. The patterns and behaviors of a game company going down in flames are easy to recognize... lord knows I've seen it enough. When a company tells you "We're behind right now, but we're coming back stronger than ever!," it's an effort to stop the bleeding and keep the customer base placated until the company's finished digging the grave and nailing together the coffin. Sega was telling Dreamcast fans they planned to support the system days before announcing it was pulling out of the console business.

Maybe it's the chin, but this dude looked 
like Sega's answer to Master Higgins.
(Or would that be Wonder Boy?)

Speaking of Sega! Hideki Sato, creator of all of Sega's flagship game consoles, passed away at the age of 75. I loved the Sega Genesis the moment I got one from a Toys 'R Us store in 1991, and I've grown to appreciate what the Master System can do in the years since. Sato took the creaky TMS9918 graphics chip and turbo-charged it, resulting in the most powerful purely 8-bit game system you could buy in the 1980s. Mr. Sato, I salute-o you. Your contributions to gaming will surely revive Zanoni be remembered forever. Hell, the way things are shaping up, people will keep making games for these five machines for an eternity.

It's no contest. (Also, Eye Brawls development journal)

For me, I mean. My latest game, Eye Brawls, was barred from the 2026 SMS Power contest, because it was submitted to SMS Power a day before it started. Or some horseshit. Funny how I'm always slightly too early to join these contests, as if the rules were enforced to specifically bar me from participation. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. 

"But feel free to join the contest next year!" Feel free to pick off the little granules of turd clinging to my butthole hair with your teeth. Putz.

...but anyway. Eye Brawls is out, it's available on Itch.IO, and it sure would be grand if someone gave the goddamned thing some love, because I sure poured a lot into it.

Digitrex Techstar's logo, which looks more
painful to step on than most video game logos.

"And what IS Eye Brawls?," you ask. Well, imaginary reader, it's like this. There was a video game way back in the 1980s, from a little-known Miami game developer called Digitrex Techstar. Its founder, and the man who made all its games, was Luis Sanchez, which gives you a pretty good idea of how small his operation really was. Games from Digitrex Techstar include Gorkans, Lizard Wizard, and the company's headliner, Eyes.

Eyes is best described as Pac-Man, with shooting. That's it, that's the game. As a tiny, confusingly drawn eyeball (I went for years thinking that flattened hat was a cluster of muscle around the eye, as if it had been ripped from someone's socket), you've got to blast a bunch of spastically pulsing objects while keeping one step ahead of the game's unnamed enemies. Some move faster than others, but they're all singularly focused on finding you, then zapping you with an optic blast. Similarly, the twisty maze of Pac-Man has been flattened out to a series of horizontal and vertical bars, resulting in a lot of long corridors and tense shoot outs with the roaming eyes. 

Get an eye-full of this! Heh, that's
the best I can do for a joke at the
moment. 

It's a dumber game than Pac-Man for sure. Enemy behavior never gets more complicated than "AFTER HIM!!!" in Eyes, while in Pac-Man, the monsters were sneaky, cornering you in the warp tunnel and making rare, unexpected 180 degree turns (not constant backtracking, like in Baby Pac-Man. A-hem, Dave Nutting and Associates) to play with your head. However, it's also a more intense and immediate game, with death literally coming at you from all sides. 

A classic? Maybe not, but a sleeper hit for sure. It's better than many Pac-Man clones, including Midway's own Exasperating Exciting New Pac-Man Plus, and it made big waves in Michigan, where Roogie Elliot achieved some small measure of fame by getting over 23 million points in one game. I met him briefly in Lake Odessa, or more accurately, stood next to him as he tried to revive his magic touch on an Eyes arcade cabinet. (Years of being behind the wheel of a long-haul truck left him a little rusty.)

Fast-forward to two years ago. Oscar Toledo Gutierrez, a Mexican IT expert better known to the world as Nanochess, released a BASIC compiler for the ColecoVision, and after getting familiar with the software, I went right to work on Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons, along with a ColecoVision port of Eyes. WESEB got finished, but the newly minted Eye Brawls got put on the shelf for a while.

The Eye Brawls cast, featuring one-eyed puns
for the four wandering eyes. Pops and Pete
are sluggish and have lousy reflexes, but Sandy
and especially Samson are more dangerous.

Fast-forward again to just about now. After frustration with the enemy logic in Pyrebirds, I stepped back from that cliff and attempted something less demanding. I went back to Eye Brawls, adding collision detection, sound, and an improved engine for the onscreen whatzits, now called whirligigs. There's a lot of optical puns, as you can see... the previously unnamed hero is now 20/20, and the four evil eyes are now named after Cyclopean celebrities like Peter Falk, Sandy Duncan, and Sammy Davis Jr. It's silly, bordering on crass, but it felt like it fit.

It took about two weeks of work to convert the Eye Brawls alpha into a full-fledged game, thanks to the power of CVBasic and me having no social life. There were frustrations, to be sure! Enemies absolutely insisted on cutting through the horizontal bars near the center of the screen, and it threatened my already thinning hairline and fractured sanity, held together with duct tape and hope. The solution was to force the eyes to move away from them with a command that superceded all the other ones. That was easily, without a shadow of a doubt, the toughest part of this project.

A tear swings from 20/20's eye-self when he's
hit with an optic blast, one of the additions
Eye Brawls makes to the arcade game. The
other ones you'll have to find for yourself!

In the end, I'd say the Eye Brawls project was a success, and a fitting tribute to a game that didn't get the kudos it deserved. (Boy, can I relate.) Because it's so easy to port a game to other formats with CVBasic, Eye Brawls is available for not only the ColecoVision, but the MSX and the SG-1000 as well. The SG-1000 port I'm regretting in light of recent events, but hey, I'll know better next time.

 

2025 Dies Screaming

Good lord, what a dogshit year. At least the video games were pretty good! Let's take a look at some of the stuff I played in 2025, or as I prefer to call it, Anno Diablo:

FINAL FIGHT MD

The Sega Genesis conversion of Final Fight, a project started in Brazil three years ago, is quite close to finished, hovering at 92% completion in its most recent build. Was a Genesis conversion of Final Fight strictly necessary in 2025, where you'll find pixel perfect emulations of the game everywhere else? Not really, but Final Fight MD isn't as much for the players as it is for its designer Mauro Xavier, who wanted to flex his programming muscles by bringing this big, big arcade hit to a humble home console, with as little compromise as possible.

I'm happy to say that this seemingly impossible task was a success. Final Fight MD ranks up there with Strider, Forgotten Worlds, and Chiki Chiki Boys as one of the best Capcom arcade ports you'll find on the Sega Genesis. You want all three heroes from the arcade game? You've got 'em, plus Maki from Final Fight 2 in a special "Mega" mode with additional content. You want all the stages? They're here, including the flame-filled foundry that left players a little crispy around the edges. You want achievements? Well, Xavier wanted them, so you're getting them... and you'll need to get a whole lot of them to unlock everything the game has to offer.

There are frequently points in Final Fight MD when the Genesis is pushed past its limits, crushed under the weight of six huge onscreen enemies and up to three (!!) players. You will definitely notice slowdown and flicker, but it's easy to forgive when the little Mega Drive that could is pushed to the point where it just barely can. Three-quarters of the time, the game mimics its arcade ancestor flawlessly, to the point where you won't even notice the difference on a handheld device.

Yes, you've probably played Final Fight a million times on a million formats, but it's worth playing it again on the Genesis, if only to marvel at Brazil's mastery of this ancient hardware.

EARTHION

Speaking of unexpectedly recent and awesome Sega Genesis games, Yuzo Koshiro hit us with a doozy in Earthion. It's a side-scrolling shoot 'em up with lofty aspirations, looking as though it was meant for the more powerful Neo-Geo with stunning intermissions and gigantic bosses.

Earthion's more than just a pretty face, though. The weapon system is one of the best I've seen in a shmup, with "adaptation pods" that force the player to make difficult decisions early in the game to benefit from additional weapon slots later. Weapons range from the dull but effective (V-Fire) to the slow but devastating (Prism Laser) to the tricky to use but deeply satisfying (Apex, a bomb which lets out a bass-heavy explosion as it scorches the earth below. War crimes have never been so much fun!).

The gameplay feels like the missing link between Yumekobo's Pulstar and Blazing Star, with the quarter-munching accessibility of the latter. You're given a generous health bar that refills over time, and even if you're blasted out of the sky, your next ship appears inches from the smoking remains of the last one. The game kind of has to be gentle with the player, because the sky is often thick with bullets, and collisions aren't always fair. This is especially true in the miserable bio-organic stage, full of claustrophobic tunnels, moaning worms, and a poorly telegraphed ambush from a gruesome monster that chases you through the start of the level. And you were doing so well up to this point, Mr. Koshiro...

Even with that unbelievably crappy stage, Earthion is one of the best and certainly the most eye-catching shooter on the Sega Genesis. After Mighty Number Nine, I look at the hype surrounding crowdsourced video games with a jaundiced eye, but this is every bit as good as the screenshots and the blurry video previews suggested it would be. (Aside from that crappy, crappy bio-organic stage. Did I mention it sucked a whole lot? It's a point worth belaboring.)

ATARI VCS
(not the old one, the more recent one)

This has got to be the most confusing video game branding since Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3. The Atari VCS is not a remake of the Atari 2600, nor is it an Atari 400 or 800 as the two available models suggest. Rather, the VCS is a low-spec x86 computer running its own proprietary operating system... Atari's half-assed answer to the Xbox Series and PS5, basically.

When used as its creators intended, the VCS is nothing special. There's a bundle of classic Atari games built into the unit, but if you want more software, you'll have to buy it from Atari's digital storefront. The selection of games is both underwhelming and overpriced, with the only big (or any) budget title being an awkward re-imagining of Food Fight as a Splatoon-like online action game. The rest of the titles are a jumble of unremarkable indie games, along with a handful of Atari 2600 and 7800 homebrews.

The average gamer would starve to death before finding much nourishment in the Atari VCS e-shop. However, you don't have to use the VCS in an official capacity... it's better to crack it open, add an M.2 drive, and turn it into a handy emulation station. It's not easy to do this, but once you have, you'll find the VCS absolutely creams single board computers like the Raspberry Pi in overall performance. You might even be able to use the VCS as an ersatz Steam Machine, although you'll want to stick with old-school titles like Freedom Planet and Peggle 2, as opposed to hardware-heavy juggernauts like Doom Eternal.

In short, the VCS is a pretty bad system if used as directed, but a pretty good plaything for nerds with some IT experience and a lot of free time. Those individuals will be able to mold the VCS into anything they want it to be... as long as they don't expect this eighty dollar toy to perform at the level of a supercomputer. If you're smart enough to hack this, you're also smart enough to recognize its limitations. 

Have You Played A Turkey Today?

This just in! It's already December, somehow. It's not going to be one of my better Decembers... in fact, it could be the last December for an aging loved one, whose health has been on the decline over the last couple of months. She seemed all but invincible as early as last year, lifting huge bags of pet food and cat litter into the back of her car during grocery trips unless I was there to intervene... and even then, it took some convincing to get her to let me lift the bags for her! 

But now she's confused, and scared, and subject to wild mood swings. It's like her memories are playing back from a hard drive with corrupt sectors, shifting from one scratched ceramic plate to the next in order to stave off a system shutdown. During a family Thanksgiving party, she cried about her daughter's death from cancer in the early 1980s, as if it happened yesterday. The family can't even trust her beyond the wheel of a car anymore, and it's got me worried for the future. It could just be the side effects of an infection, but I'm not optimistic. I mean, as a general rule I'm not optimistic, but especially not about this situation.

As a result, it's been hard to concentrate on my creative pursuits, including this blog. I do feel it's a good time to look back at the last month of gaming news. The first, admittedly anecdotal report? I bought an Atari 7800+ and an Atari VCS on sale from Woot and Atari, respectively. While the Atari VCS (effectively a laptop computer minus the screen, squeezed into a vaguely console-like shell) has yet to arrive... or even ship after four days... the Atari 7800+ has stunk up the house for a couple weeks now. 

As you may have already gathered, I'm not impressed with this machine in the least. It's not a real Atari 7800, using a system on a chip running an emulator, connected to a cartridge slot. What this means is that you're introduced to significant access time as the contents of the inserted cartridge are dumped and transferred to system RAM. Access time! On a cartridge! An ATARI 7800 cartridge! They're rarely more than 128K in size! You could put a dozen of 'em on a floppy disc!

One of the best things about old game systems like the Atari 7800 was their immediacy... you pop in a cartridge and press the power button, and you're already at the title screen, one squeeze of the joystick button away from the action. The Atari 7800+ somehow merges the worst of modern and old-school gaming... you're getting Atari 7800 quality games, at the interminable speeds of a new game console, with its penchant for corporate logos that swallow the screen and lengthy loading that burns through your precious free time. 

Does that sound like a winning combination for anyone else? Because Atari games that start at glacial Neo-Geo CD speeds is a total non-starter for me. I'd rather go the mini console route, where you're given instant access to a library of highlights in that console's library. Hack the thing and you can squeeze a good chunk of the library onto the system. It's what I've done with the Genesis Mini and Super NES Classic, two consoles which I've grown to love as much as the consoles that inspired them.

The Atari 7800+ in all its, ahem, glory.
Note the controller, with its buttons
set five blocks apart from each other. I
wasn't big on the ProLine joysticks either,
but good lord, this isn't much of an improvement.
(image from WallpaperAccess)

The Atari 7800+, on the other hand, rarely finds its way out of its box. It's comically hard to update*, comes with a cheap feeling wireless controller with buttons that seem to have restraining orders against each other, doesn't include any games beyond the okay-ish Crystal Castles follow-up Bentley's Crystal Quest, and will never play anything beyond titles for the Atari 2600 and the Atari 7800, nobody's favorite in the console wars of the late 1980s. The Atari 7800+ kind of blows, is the takeaway here. There's a million ways to play Atari games, instantly. Why the hell would you wait twenty-five seconds to do it? 

I hope the coming Atari VCS is better. It would just about have to be. 

* even for a seasoned IT expert! Good lord, I worked at a computer store during the malware epidemic of 2003, and updating this hardware was tougher than fumigating Bonzi Buddy from the Dell Granny Gertrude bought from Circuit City in 1998!

Aged Like Fine Milk: The Ten Most Future-PRONE Game Formats

Some game consoles have smart hardware designs that keep them relevant years and even decades past their expiration dates. The Atari 2600's life spanned three decades. The Neo-Geo only died because its manufacturer SNK did, some thirteen years after its introduction in 1990. Heck, they may still be selling Master Systems in Brazil, forty years later! Their longevity alone makes these machines legendary.

Like Squidward, these game systems
are not E.

Not every game console has that kind of endurance... in fact, an unlucky handful were obsolete on launch, held back from greatness by limited resources, bewildering architecture, and plain old-fashioned short-sighted design. They're not necessarily bad systems, but they're a whole lot harder to love than the machines in my last article...

MAGNAVOX ODYSSEY2

Back in 1981, most game-loving families had an Atari 2600. A lucky few had the Mattel Intellivision, while the less fortunate- myself included- had to slum with the Magnavox Odyssey2.

In the first console war, the Odyssey2 wasn’t a major player like Stalin or Churchill, but more akin to Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes. At first glance, it looks like a genuine threat, with a membrane keyboard and neon-lined science-fiction box art. However, from its first stumbling step, the Odyssey2 demonstrates that it’s far from the Dutch uber-console Phillips would have you believe.

Every game system in the early 1980s had compromises in its design to keep it at a consumer-friendly price point. The 2600 had no video RAM, and the Intellivision had a sluggish clock speed... these were severe handicaps, but smart developers could work around them to deliver fun and distinct gaming experiences.

Pop-Aye-Aye-Aye!

Phillips’ compromise for the Odyssey2 was cutting the available RAM down to 64 bytes, while including a built-in character set with all the objects one would need to make a video game. That was fine in 1978, when the machine was first designed, but as the gaming industry evolved and video games developed as an artistic medium, the Odyssey2 couldn’t keep up. Ports of arcade hits like Frogger, Q*Bert, and Popeye were eventually released for the system, but they were more like abstractions, drained of visual identity and even basic play mechanics. 

Against all logic, the Odyssey2 has fans in the 21^st century, including a few programmers who’ve made their own games. Writing a video game for this machine must be like painting a detailed landscape on a grain of rice, but at least the Odyssey2 is still providing gamers with a challenge...

EMERSON ARCADIA 2001 

Shitty box art rounds out
the thoroughly shitty
Arcadia experience.

Powered by a Signetics 2650 processor (in the same way a potato might power an alarm clock), this early game console designed by Hong Kong’s Universal Appliances Limited was released in a whole lot of countries, under a whole lot of names. Here in America, we either called it the “Emerson Arcadia 2001,” or “the only game console my parents could afford.”

The problem with the Arcadia is that it was designed to compete with the Atari 2600... with budget Hong Kong parts... in 1982, on the cusp of the arrival of the ColecoVision. The Arcadia couldn’t compete with the massive library of titles on the Atari 2600, and certainly couldn’t go toe to toe with the next wave of game consoles, with their boosted specs. The ColecoVision promised an arcade-quality gaming experience, and sometimes hit that mark. With eight acrid colors and screechy sound, the Arcadia had no chance of reaching that target, let alone the bullseye. What else would you expect from a game system designed by Universal Appliances Limited? Maybe they should have stuck with toasters... 

ATARI JAGUAR

Oh, you want me to do the math? Here’s an equation for you! One leftover Atari ST, plus a handful of new chips that work about as well together as The Three Stooges, plus an obnoxious marketing campaign, equals one of the least popular game systems of all time, selling a miserable 250,000 units. The 3DO sold three million units, and that was at three times the price!

Cybermorph gets the lion's share of ridicule
from gamers, but for my money, it's Trevor
McFur that deserves all the contempt. It's
a game that thinks it's Star Fox on the Super
NES, but is actually more like Star Fox on
the Atari 2600.
(image from retrogamesreview.co.uk)

Atari pushed the notion that the Jaguar was 64-bit, which wasn’t really true... putting two 32-bit processors together in the same console doesn’t add up to 64 bits. However, you don’t have to be an IT expert to know that Jaguar games fall well short of expectations for a next generation console. Many of the Jaguar’s titles were holdovers from the Genesis and Super NES, a little shinier than before but not dramatically improved. It could handle 3D better than Sega and Nintendo’s 16-bit consoles, but was soundly thrashed as a polygon pusher by both its rival, the 3DO, and the 32-bit consoles that would arrive years later.

In spite of, well, everything, the Atari Jaguar has a small but dedicated fanbase, and homebrew software does exist for the system. It couldn’t have been easy to code with the Jaguar’s convoluted architecture, and it can’t be easy to run with so few physical units and a dearth of worthwhile Jaguar emulators, but it’s there.

NEC SUPERGRAFX 

From an American perspective, the entire Turbografx-16 brand was a fizzle, but Hudson’s almost 16-bit console was a hit in Japan, coming at just the right time to tempt players away from the Famicom. Nintendo’s first console was released much earlier in Japan than the United States, and players in the East had more time to get disillusioned with the Famicom’s limitations. The PC Engine was originally conceived as a sequel to the Famicom, with a similar processor but access to larger sprites and richer colors. Nintendo didn’t want the machine, but the players did, and the new and improved PC Engine sold millions of units. (The number is contested, but long-running Japanese magazine Famitsu seems to think it was five million.)

Hudson and manufacturer NEC picked the perfect time to release the PC Engine, at the peak of Japan’s Famicom fatigue. (You may recall that this tactic also worked pretty well for Sega, which released the Genesis at the peak of America’s own Nintendo burnout.) However, with the powerful Super Nintendo on the horizon, what would Hudson and NEC do for an encore? 

The choppy aerial combat game
Battle Ace illustrates how unprepared
the SuperGrafx was for the Mode 7
effects of the Super NES.
(image from StrategyWiki)

The unfortunate answer is the SuperGrafx, which took the momentum NEC built up with the PC Engine and slammed on the brakes. What did Japanese gamers get for their three hundred dollars? A PC Engine with double the RAM... and that’s it. While this opened the door to parallax scrolling and more sprites, as illustrated in its killer app Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, the measly five and a half games of the SuperGrafx library didn’t provide much of a value proposition for players. Even the Sega CD, widely considered a failure, introduced significant improvements to the core Genesis hardware, and had... let me crunch the numbers on this... thirty-four times the games.

The SuperGrafx was an evolutionary dead end for NEC, the definition of “too little, too late,” and its negligible performance enhancements would be left out of NEC’s later consoles. The company’s final misstep in the console wars, the anime-heavy, gameplay-light PC-fx, would face similar issues... it was much too expensive for what it offered players, and was instantly eclipsed by later 32-bit consoles.

GAME DOT COM

“Oh, come on! You can’t put a Tiger handheld in a list like this!”

Oh yes I can! Especially when the Game dot Com was specifically designed to challenge the Game Boy with its own library of cartridges. Tiger made a lot of tall promises about the system’s abilities to the gaming press of the time... it’s got digitized voice! It’s got big names like Sonic the Hedgehog and Duke Nukem! It’s got online capabilities! It’s got a touchscreen!

The Game Dot Com got a slimline model,
the Pocket Pro. It's a game system no pro
would ever put in their pockets.
(image from eBay)

What it’s really got is plenty of disappointment. Technically, you can play Duke Nukem on a game dot com... but don’t expect it to be much like the shareware hit on home computers. Same deal with other high-profile game dot com titles like Sonic Jam and Fighter’s Megamix. They exist, but with a blurry monochrome display and a processor so primitive it should have come with a wind-up key, you won’t be enjoying them much. As for the online features, wi-fi wasn’t a thing back in those days, so you’ll have to be plugged into a phone line to use them. So you can use your game dot com to surf the internet, but only twenty feet from your home computer, which does it better, and in color. Okay...?

The game dot com was soundly spanked by the black and white Game Boy, and didn’t stand a chance in hell when more powerful handhelds like the Wonderswan Crystal and Neo-Geo Pocket Color arrived. By the time the Game Boy Advance joined the fray, the game dot com was a distant, bitter memory. As they say, “and nothing of value was lost.”

PANASONIC 3DO

The 3DO was a victim of bad timing... too early to start a new console generation, but too dated in design to compete with the next generation consoles released two years later. With a bleeding-edge RISC processor, a dual-speed CD-ROM drive, and 3D visuals beyond the grasp of the Genesis and even the Super NES, the 3DO was pretty amazing. In 1993. If you could afford it. (At seven hundred dollars, you couldn’t.)

Immercenary for the 3DO. Hey, 3D gaming
had to start somewhere.
(image from MyAbandonware.com)

Two years later, the 3DO dropped in price. You know what else dropped? The Playstation and Saturn, two consoles from Japan which had two years to mature, improve, and streamline. Suddenly the 3DO, which was a hard sell at seven hundred dollars, was a hard sell with two cheaper, more powerful consoles bracketing it on store shelves. The token support the 3DO received from Capcom, Taito, and SNK quickly shifted to the Saturn and Playstation, and the system was finished. A sequel system, the M2, was planned but cancelled, with units being repurposed as video kiosks in car dealerships. (Hey, it beats the Atari Jaguar’s master mold being used to make dental equipment.)

As an orphaned game console, the 3DO doesn’t get much love from homebrew developers. It’s a little too slow to run emulators and a little too obscure for arcade ports, although there was a valiant attempt by a fan to port Mortal Kombat II to the system. It’s a bit cramped and the AI doesn’t perfectly match the arcade game’s, but it’s still better than any other digitized fighter on this system.

SEGA SATURN

Let me preface this by saying that I love the Sega Saturn. With its famously responsive six button controllers and a buttload of old-school arcade titles, it’s like Sega made a game console just for me. And Del the Funky Homosapien. And a handful of Japanese hipsters.

Shining Force III, one of the final releases
for the Saturn in the United States. If
you're underwhelmed by this, you should see
one of the Saturn's bad games.
(image from MobyGames)

The problem is that millions more did not want this system. As a 2D powerhouse that struggled mightily with first and third person action games, it stood in defiance of what gaming had become in the late 1990s. Rumor has it that support for polygons was added to the Saturn hardware at the last minute, and you can feel it in the way many of its 3D games look and play. Almost without exception, the Playstation versions of a major release, be it Resident Evil or Tomb Raider or Doom, look better than their Saturn counterparts, with more detail and better special effects. 3D is just not the Saturn’s forte, which was unfortunate for Sega, as it was what players wanted in 1998.

It should also be noted that the CPU that handles the 2D games in the Saturn and the CPU that handles the 3D games don’t play well together, resulting in headaches for both game designers in the 1990s, and emulator authors now. Ymir has made great strides in Sega Saturn emulation, but it’s taken twenty five years to get to that point. If you’re expecting a Saturn mini built with budget parts, you might have to wait another twenty five years.

ACTION MAX

Move over, "blast processing!" Worlds
of Wonder has given us the most
meaningless marketing catchphrase in
video game history!
(image from Parry Game Preserve)

When Nintendo first launched the Nintendo Entertainment System in America, they partnered with Worlds of Wonder, a toy company responsible for the runaway success of Teddy Ruxpin in the mid 1980s. When the popularity of the NES snowballed, Nintendo broke its ties with Worlds of Wonder... and WOW retaliated by releasing its own game system. If you want to call it that.

The reality is that the Action Max was about as much of a “video game system” as the animatronic bear they sold years earlier. The console includes a light gun, a siren light, and connections for your VCR. The “games” are video tapes; corny movies with targets on the screen. Firing at the targets lights up the siren and adds to a counter on the console, which goes all the way up to 99!

Even in the distant year of 1987, the Action Max looked like a low-tech, cobbled together relic. There were only five late night cable movies- er, games- and the best Worlds of Wonder could do to promote it was product placement in the woeful spy comedy Leonard Part VI. (There were not five previous Leonards. Be eternally grateful for this.) The Action Max couldn’t catch a break. As a VCR toy disguised as a video game system, it didn’t deserve one.

MATTEL HYPERSCAN

Slightly better than the Action Max (but just barely...) is the Mattel Hyperscan, the toy company’s not-so-triumphant return to the video game market in 2006. The Hyperscan, which looked like the unholy love child of a Sega Dreamcast and a George Foreman Grill, used trading cards to boost the stats of your character. When the trading cards actually scanned properly, which wasn’t often. Also, the library was comprised of throwaway licensed games, roughly on par with what you might find on a Jakks-Pacific Plug ‘n Play unit. Five titles are available for your playing, uh, pleasure, including a stiff rendered X-Men fighting game and an action title starring shape-shifting boy hero Ben 10.

With its patented design, the HyperScam
drains the fun directly out of your fingertips!
(image from Kinguin.net)

Forget future-proof, the Hyperscan wasn’t even present-proof. It was released in 2006, when the Xbox 360 was already on store shelves and the Wii and PS3 weren’t far behind, yet would have been put to shame by consoles released ten years earlier. The Hyperscan processor is a system on a chip which runs at 100MHz. There’s 16 megabytes of RAM, a fraction of what you’d find in 1998’s Sega Dreamcast. It’s got no I/O beyond a couple of proprietary joystick ports, the CD-ROM, and a hardwired A/V cable. It runs five games, none good. The Hyperscan probably could be hacked, given enough time and a hacker with absolutely nothing better to do. However, considering its wimpy, obscure hardware, it’s not so much of a question of “how?” as “why?”

NINTENDO 64

Nintendo 64 games have a distinct look, as you
can see from this snapshot of Turok: 
Dinosaur Hunter. His greatest enemy?
Nearsightedness!
(image from MobyGames)

The Nintendo 64 feels weirdly out of step with Nintendo’s previous consoles, using hardware originally crafted for Silicon Graphics’ CGI workstations. You’d think this would give the system an advantage over its competitors in rendering 3D visuals, and indeed, the Nintendo 64’s best moments were presented in three dimensions. However, Nintendo 64 graphics weren’t necessarily better than those on the Playstation; just different. Instead of wobbly but sharp polygons, N64 games had blurred edges, smeary textures, and low frame rates, with thick curtains of fog to mask the short draw distances. This brings a hazy, dream-like quality to Nintendo 64 games. That ethereal vibe fit epics like Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time perfectly well, but in a lesser game like Superman 64, it just felt cheap. Apparently Superman now has super-cataracts.

The look and feel of Nintendo 64 games is subject to personal taste, but almost nobody was down with Nintendo’s decision to use cartridge-based media. While this meant instant loading for games and Tonka-tough media that could withstand a child’s wrath, it also significantly curtailed the scope of the N64’s games, and left third party publishers with high aspirations scrambling to Sony and its Playstation. Nintendo lost the support of Squaresoft for years because the company’s big ideas just wouldn’t fit on a cartridge. Other publishers continued to support Nintendo, but reluctantly... their N64 games often felt feeble next to their Playstation counterparts, due to the limitations of the cartridge format and general indifference.

After attempting to fill the void of a CD-ROM drive with the 64DD, an oversized floppy drive, Nintendo stopped trying to plug holes in the Nintendo 64 and abandoned the sinking ship, replacing it with the PowerPC-based GameCube in 2001. Time has not been kind to the Nintendo 64 in the years since... its complicated architecture makes it a bitch to emulate. And forget about homebrew games! Even the professionals at Treasure lamented the stubborn N64 hardware in an interview with Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata. If even they can’t get a handle on this machine, the average coder doesn’t stand a chance.

Future Shockproof

What’s the best game console ever made? It’s an impossible question to answer definitively... personal preference and other factors means that nearly everyone you ask will have a different response, and no one answer will be more or less valid than the others. (Except the guy in the back who said the game dot com. Stop screwing around and take this seriously!)

Instead, let’s look at something that’s easier to objectively measure. Which of history’s game consoles and handhelds were best prepared to outlive their natural lifespans with smartly designed hardware that stands the test of time? Here now are my choices for the ten most future-proofed game systems, in no particular order. 

NEO-GEO

It may have been entirely too expensive for the average gamer, with a six hundred dollar price tag and two hundred dollar games, but the Neo-Geo was a lean, mean, (too much) fighting machine in arcades, with a lower price than competing arcade cabinets and the option to swap out cartridges for when players inevitably lost interest in launch titles like Ninja Combat and Cyber-Lip.

Designed by Alpha Denshi as a pumped up version of its earlier arcade hardware, the Neo-Geo had more than enough muscle to impress arcade goers when it was first launched in 1990. With its massive sprites, flashy scaling and rotation, and cartridges that tipped the scales at up to 330 megabits, the Neo-Geo remained a dominant force in arcades for thirteen years. It eventually succumbed to the decline of the arcade market and SNK’s own flagging fortunes in 2003, being discontinued that year.

Dramatic cut scenes like this one from Fatal
Fury 3 were the Neo-Geo's specialty. You
know what they say about big sprites with
big feet!

It may officially be dead, but like a bloodsucking Leslie Nielsen, the Neo-Geo is dead and loving it. Its once gigantic cartridge sizes are trivial in this gilded age of gigabytes and terabytes, and the system’s familiar 68000 and Z80 architecture has led to Neo-Geo emulators for dozens of formats. This one-time giant of the arcade scene can now be played on your smartphone, or even that twenty dollar handheld you bought from AliExpress. Couple that with the Neo-Geo’s extremely user-friendly interface and its dazzling, in-your-face visuals, and you’ve got a hardware standard that’s loved the whole world over, and for good reason. (Hell, the Saudis loved the Neo-Geo so much, they bought the company.)

ATARI 2600

With 128 bytes of RAM, absolutely no video RAM, and tone-deaf one channel sound, the Atari 2600 doesn’t seem like much in 2025. It wasn’t even all that impressive next to its archrival, the Intellivision, released a couple of years later. However, some of the programmers from Atari, and later Activision, found a way to grow flowers in that rocky soil. If you can stay one step ahead of the beam that draws Atari 2600 graphics line by line, you can layer the machine’s 128 colors, and get attractive if somewhat primitive results. All these years later, Atari 2600 graphics remain among the most iconic of any game system, looking like the video game equivalent of cave paintings. When you see those bars of color sandwiched together to create Pitfall Harry, or a flying saucer, or the frantic turkey from Eggomania, you know exactly which system you’re playing.

Solaris is the pinnacle of Atari 2600 game
design. Games just don't get any better 
than this on this hamstrung hardware.

Nothing comes easily to the Atari 2600 programmer, but a good coder can pull some dazzling magic tricks out of this dusty old hat. Just look at Doug Neubauer’s Atari 2600 magnum opus Solaris, or the shockingly competent port of mid 1980s beat ‘em up Kung Fu Master, or the dozen arcade ports by Champ Games. Sure, the latter titles use ARM chips to do some of the heavy lifting for the ancient 6507 processor, which feels like strapping a jet engine to a Yugo. However, one could argue that this expandability is one of the Atari 2600’s strengths. If you don’t have enough storage and RAM for your games, add to it with a Supercharger (somehow foreward compatible with CD players and smartphones! Talk about future-proof!). Not getting enough mileage out of that crappy one channel sound processor? Throw another sound chip into the cartridge, like David Crane did with Pitfall 2! 

Look, the core technology is from 1977, and it cost fifty dollars in 1987. These days, the chips needed to boost the 2600’s capabilities might cost you three dollars plus shipping from Mouser. The Atari 2600 doesn’t strictly need that boost in performance to make an effective game, but with technology that primitive and prices that low, you can afford to splurge.

SEGA GENESIS

The Sega Genesis and the Super NES have a contentious relationship, sparking the bitter console wars of the 1990s. Truth is, both of these machines are excellent, but they take different approaches in their design. The Super NES is the show pony, loaded with all the bells and whistles afforded by early 1990s gaming technology. It’s got scaling and rotation, once only a feature in costly arcade games! It’s got a sound chip from Sony with startlingly realistic instruments and crisp digitized voice! It can display 256 colors! Like, all at the same time! 

(If you weren’t alive at the time, this was a big deal in 1991.)

Genesis does! Still!
(image from the Earthion web site)

Meanwhile, the Sega Genesis was the workhorse. It felt a little behind the industry curve with only 64 available onscreen colors and crusty FM sound that was a little digital-sounding in the best hands, and downright horrifying in the hands of whoever made Chakan: The Forever Man. However, with an industry leading clock speed of 7.58Mhz and a 16-bit 68000 processor (a favorite of arcade manufacturers), the Sega Genesis could do things it wasn’t really designed to do, like polygons (either slowly, like in Hard Drivin’, or with a co-processor, like in Virtua Racing), full-motion video (Sonic 3D Blast, Red Zone), and proto-boomer shooters (Zero Tolerance and a ballsy if flawed Brazilian adaptation of Duke Nukem 3D).

The Sega Genesis keeps on tugging at the plow to this day, thanks to SGDK and an enthusiastic base of dedicated coders. Dream arcade ports like Final Fight, R-Type, and Sunset Riders are in development, and don’t suffer from the limited cartridge sizes that had hobbled past Genesis arcade conversions. Most recently, Yuzo Koshiro’s Earthion, a Neo-Geo quality shooter that somehow found itself on the Genesis, proves that there’s still work left in this old horse. 

SUPER NINTENDO

Once upon a time, Nintendo was at the forefront of video game technology, rather than lagging a generation or two behind. Its long-awaited sequel to the Nintendo Entertainment System was dramatically improved in nearly every area, and even leapfrogged contemporary consoles like the Sega Genesis and Turbografx-16 with a warm, friendly color palette and features once limited to costly arcade cabinets and home computers. One headliner was Mode 7, which let programmers smoothly resize and rotate onscreen objects. Nearly every Super NES game used this in some capacity, and its racing and flying games were almost uniformly smoother and more pleasant to the eyes than their Sega Genesis counterparts. Barring extra hardware on the cartridge or a Sega CD attachment or divine intervention, the Sega Genesis was never, ever going to handle a game like Pilotwings.

Colors on the Super NES often have a radiant
glow, as seen in this screenshot from
Sony and Ukiyotei's Sky Blazer.

Even with its advanced special effects and a Sony-designed sound processor with stunningly realistic sampled instruments, the Super NES was not entirely superior to the Sega Genesis. At half the clock speed, slowdown was a common occurance on the machine. This has been addressed in recent times with FastROM and SA-1 hacks, but there’s still a nagging lack of homebrew software and comprehensive design utilities for the Super NES, suggesting the machine’s 65c816 processor isn’t as developer friendly as the Sega Genesis. Only one other device used it, after all... the Apple IIgs, the 16-bit fork of the Apple II line of computers. (For the record, that processor worked out much better for Nintendo than it did for Apple.) 

SEGA MASTER SYSTEM

The Texas Instruments TMS9918 was a dominant force in early consumer technology. It’s a very basic video chip, with sixteen preset colors and tiny, single colored sprites. It’s just good enough for an early 1980s game console or computer, but more importantly, it was cheap, which is why so many game consoles and computers from the early 1980s used it. You can find a TMS9918 in the MSX computer line, the ColecoVision, its Japanese cousin the Sega SG-1000, Texas Instruments’ own TI 99/4A... I could go on, but it’s a big list. If you know how to program games for any one of these machines, you know how to program games for all of them. 

Ubiquitous as it was, the TMS9918 had numerous shortcomings that wouldn’t stand up to the demands of late 1980s gaming. It had no hardware scrolling, an essential ingredient in action/adventure games. Its color output was limited to the point of distress, and the sprites were feeble and flickery, no match for the recently released Famicom (our own NES).

It's hard to overstate how impressive
Phantasy Star is when compared to the
average NES RPG. These dungeons fill the
screen, and the walls move smoothly
with every step.

Sega asked its hardware engineer Hideki Sato to design the gaming-focused sequel to the TMS9918, and he hit it out of the park with the video chip inside the Sega Master System. The SG-1000 couldn’t scroll backgrounds, while the Master System could scroll individual sections of the screen at different speeds, letting a clever programmer create parallax effects. The SG-1000 can’t handle more than two colors in an eight pixel line, an aggravating limitation to pixel artists. The Master System has no limitations in the use of its sixteen background colors and sixteen sprite colors. Feel free to use any color, anywhere you please, without risk of color clash. 

The improved graphics chip pays dividends in Master System games like Rampage, which is light years ahead of its NES counterpart visually, and R-Type, an ambitious conversion of the cutting edge arcade shooter that Nintendo didn’t dare attempt on the NES. The Master System was so ahead of the curve technologically that the hardware would be recycled in the handheld Game Gear five years later, and continued to receive support into the 21^st century thanks to Brazil’s TecToy and dozens of hobbyist programmers.

Take it from someone who’s actually made a game for this hardware... it’s pretty keen. Hideki Sato finished what Texas Instruments started when he designed the Master System video chip, and where visuals are concerned, it’s as good as 8-bit gaming gets. 

GAMECUBE AND KIN

It’s the game system so nice, Nintendo released it thrice! For sheer staying power, even the Master System (recycled into the portable Game Gear) can’t match the GameCube and its two successors, all using the same core PowerPC hardware. Originally appearing in late 1990s Macintosh computers, the PowerPC is the heart of the GameCube, and its successor the Wii, and ITS successor the Wii U.

Standout GameCube release Mario Kart:
Double Dash still looks sharp some twenty
years later.
(image from The Next Level)

Nintendo must have figured, “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” And indeed, the GameCube and its progeny is capable hardware... perhaps not powerful enough to carry Nintendo through three consecutive console generations, but it comes admirably close. The Cube is a more capable machine than the Playstation 2 (discounting the smaller discs that resulted in irksome content cuts), and the hardware was familiar territory for programmers, unlike the highly proprietary and slightly quirky Playstation 2.

The GameCube hardware hit its lofty peak with the Nintendo Wii, a game console with much of the same hardware, but a faster clock speed, an emphasis on motion controls, and surprisingly handy online features. (I used the News and Weather channels regularly in 2007.) It was well behind the Xbox 360 and PS3 in raw horsepower, and couldn’t even output a high definition video signal, but its audience of casual and lapsed gamers didn’t care. These days, the Wii is easily hacked, is a fairly capable emulation station, and makes a great stand-in for the GameCube, since it effectively is one.

The Wii U was a fridge too far for the GameCube family of systems, a TV and social network focused boondoggle with an oversized touchscreen/gamepad hybrid, and performance barely on the level of the Xbox 360. However, as a multi-core machine, it is the most powerful system in the GameCube lineage, and hackers swear that it’s fantastic for emulation. Personally, I think the Wii is the sweet spot for this hardware... it’s embarrassingly cheap, has an avalanche of homebrew software, and gives you progressive scan in your GameCube games without forcing you to buy a three hundred dollar cable first. What’s not to like? 

(Aside from the waggle. That's something that hasn't aged well.)

SONY PLAYSTATION

The Playstation stomped Sega’s Saturn flat in America, and it’s not hard to understand why. It’s incredibly powerful hardware for late 1994, when polygons were reserved for CAD programs and costly VR simulations. Hey, now you can get triangles pushed in your face in the comfort of your own home for three hundred dollars! You paid a tenth of that just to play Dactyl Nightmare with a friend at the state fair, and that kind of sucked!

It’s not just that the Playstation was powerful. It’s also supremely user-friendly, to the point where a software package called Net Yaroze let amateur game designers create their own Playstation titles. It was such a comprehensive package that one of the games designed with Net Yaroze was eventually released in stores as Devil Dice (aka Xi). 

It’s important to stress that indie games on a video game console was unheard of in the mid 1990s. You just didn’t make an NES game or a Sega Genesis game... the resources and the knowledge weren’t available to ordinary people. You might as well have asked for a unicorn made of rainbows and cotton candy.

Early indie darling Devil Dice. I don't totally
understand how this game works, but
damned if I don't keep trying.
(image from John God Games)

However, you could make a Playstation game. Not just because Sony encouraged development for its premiere console, but because designing games from the programmer-friendly Playstation hardware won’t tie your brain in knots the way designing a game for the Sega Saturn or Nintendo 64 would. Lots of official games that were in development on the Saturn (or sequels to games already released for the system) were cancelled because of the immense effort it would have taken to make the ports. Why bother when the Playstation version will take half the development time and sell ten times the copies? 

All the good stuff seemed to come to the Playstation in the late 1990s, and it wasn’t just because it was powerful, or popular. Its future-focused, user-friendly hardware attracted developers; the Saturn, which was neither of these things, repelled them. The Saturn’s obstinate hardware, best described as dueling CPUs, didn’t lead to its doom outright, but it couldn’t have helped.

CLASSIC XBOX 

The Xbox brand isn’t doing so hot now, but it started off on the right foot with the original Xbox. With a built-in hard drive and the specs of a mid-grade home computer, the Xbox smoked the competition in overall performance. Even its lesser games like Kakuto Chojin at least looked amazing, while killer apps like Dead or Alive 3 played as good as they looked. Years later, with the benefit of the Xbox Series’ upscaling, this magnificent versus fighter somehow looks even better than it did a quarter of a century ago, when it was first released.

Dead or Alive creator Tomonobu Itagaki recently
died, but he gained video game immortality
with Dead or Alive 3, one of the high points
of the fighting game genre.

Fast forward to 2025. The original Xbox still has a faithful fan base, thanks to the relative ease of hacking the machine and its dated but still capable specs. With a larger hard drive, the OG Xbox becomes an all-purpose emulation station, with enough room left over for dozens of official games. Especially dedicated Xbox fans have taken the machine past its limits with overclocking and extra RAM, but it’s not necessary... the new hard drive is all you’ll need to keep yourself entertained for an extra, extra, Xbox long time. 

(Just be sure to snip the clock capacitor out of yours, if it has one.)

GAME BOY ADVANCE 

GAME BOY evolved into GAME BOY ADVANCE! It’s super effective!

I’m probably doing that wrong. Anyway, the Game Boy Advance is the final step in the evolution of the Game Boy line of handheld systems, backward compatible with the previous models, but with a 32-bit processor and state of the art graphics that turns this boy into a Game Man.

German developer Shin'En knew how to put
the "advance" in Game Boy Advance with
showy shooters like Iridion II, shown here. 

I respect you, Game Man! And I love that the Game Ma- er, Game Boy Advance is so much more powerful than its ancestors. Remember the high color output, the clear digitized voice, and the fancy Mode 7 effects on the Super NES? Now you’ve got all that in a handheld. By the way, there’s a 32-bit ARM processor under the hood, so now you can also have polygons and full-motion video and Super FX games without a Super FX chip. Holy crap, yes! Gimme gimme gimme! 

Thanks to its robust feature set and a well documented ARM processor, the Game Boy Advance is as much fun to program for as it is to play. It provided more than enough power for a complete conversion of the arcade oldie GORF, including all five stages, several minutes of digitized speech, and even a bonus mode where the player could unlock images by completing challenges. The Game Boy Advance could do it all without breaking a sweat, in contrast with the original Game Boy from 1989, where everything seemed frustratingly out of reach. Now you’re playing with power... pocket power!

SONY PSP 

Many portable game systems were released to challenge Nintendo’s dominance in the handheld market. Nearly all of them were quickly eclipsed by the Game Boy and its successors, but Sony’s PSP is the first handheld to present a serious threat to Nintendo’s stranglehold on the portable gaming market. With a MIPS processor similar to those in Sony’s home consoles, the PSP was designed to take handheld gaming to a new plateau, vastly superior to the already powerful Game Boy Advance and the recently released Nintendo DS. Americans were put off by the high retail price, but the PSP was a smash hit with in its native Japan. Living space is at a premium in this cluster of islands, and Japanese players yearned for a game system with the best possible performance at the smallest possible size. 

The best PSP games approach a PS2 level
of visual fidelity, and look even better with
upscaling on emulators. Shown here:
Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny.

Hundreds upon hundreds of video games (and even a substantial library of movies) were released for the PSP over its lifespan. Eventually, the system would be hacked with an exploit, and the hundreds of official games would be joined by hundreds more homebrew games, emulators, and utilities. When Sony boastfully claimed that the PSP “only does everything” in advertisements, they weren’t far off base.

The only thing that held the system back was its sluggish UMD drive, and even that was addressed in later years, when the size of the PSP’s Memory Stick Pro was raised from 32 megabytes to 16 gigabytes and higher. When you can store your entire PSP library on a stick the size of a postage stamp and cut your load times in half as a bonus, the optical drive becomes a vestigial organ. You may have needed it once, but not anymore!

The PSP is remarkably future-proof, not just because of its solid state storage, but because the machine’s considerable power means that it can run every other console’s games through the magic of emulation. It only does everything... including some things Sony would prefer you didn’t do.