This is really cool. Old school video game developers were really creative with their usage of technology.
Mildly related, in high school back when Power Point was new (yes, dating myself a bit), I used it to create an interactive tour through a historic house in my home town. Users could click on a door to enter a room, click back to move back, and explore the full house. It was a wild maze of click areas to numbered slides and I attribute this project to getting me into programming.
I used to make simple games and animations like that in PowerPoint. Then I discovered geocities and helped make some click and point games with a friend who did all handdrawn artwork that I'd scan in. Then I hit puberty and my brain turned to mush for a bit.
I wish I still had that stuff. It's not I'm any geocities archive I've seen online.
I had a somewhat similar introduction. I played an enormous amount of Cosmic Osmo as a kid. And then one day my oldest brother reached in front of me and booted up Hyper Card.
20+ years ago, I went through a stage of playing lots of strip mahjong games on MAME, mostly because there weren't (or I didn't know) other ways to play actual mahjong on PC (native PC games that claimed to be mahjong typically were solitaires).
Many of those strip mahjong games are interesting in terms of aesthetics and could be potentially very fun, but they are very blatantly rigged. They typically let you win the first match by giving you a highly improbably good hand, and then do the opposite in the second or third. This quite detracts from the fun, and I pity the people who put many actual coins in them.
I liked to play the ones that had at least one or two matches that felt more or less fair (typically the second and third, or so). I vaguely remember Mahjong Erotica Golf (yes, a mahjong game that drives a golf game that in turn drives porn) as being one of the best in terms of giving a fair challenge.
At the bottom right of hardware photo 3 I see VR2 and VR3 populated with things that seem to have screw holes. Are these variable resistors maybe? If so, what for? Tuning something I imagine.
This is really cool. Old school video game developers were really creative with their usage of technology.
Mildly related, in high school back when Power Point was new (yes, dating myself a bit), I used it to create an interactive tour through a historic house in my home town. Users could click on a door to enter a room, click back to move back, and explore the full house. It was a wild maze of click areas to numbered slides and I attribute this project to getting me into programming.
I used to make simple games and animations like that in PowerPoint. Then I discovered geocities and helped make some click and point games with a friend who did all handdrawn artwork that I'd scan in. Then I hit puberty and my brain turned to mush for a bit.
I wish I still had that stuff. It's not I'm any geocities archive I've seen online.
I had a somewhat similar introduction. I played an enormous amount of Cosmic Osmo as a kid. And then one day my oldest brother reached in front of me and booted up Hyper Card.
20+ years ago, I went through a stage of playing lots of strip mahjong games on MAME, mostly because there weren't (or I didn't know) other ways to play actual mahjong on PC (native PC games that claimed to be mahjong typically were solitaires).
Many of those strip mahjong games are interesting in terms of aesthetics and could be potentially very fun, but they are very blatantly rigged. They typically let you win the first match by giving you a highly improbably good hand, and then do the opposite in the second or third. This quite detracts from the fun, and I pity the people who put many actual coins in them.
I liked to play the ones that had at least one or two matches that felt more or less fair (typically the second and third, or so). I vaguely remember Mahjong Erotica Golf (yes, a mahjong game that drives a golf game that in turn drives porn) as being one of the best in terms of giving a fair challenge.
And if you want (at least just an overview) of even more strip Mahjong games https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaZoMFmMgI4
At the bottom right of hardware photo 3 I see VR2 and VR3 populated with things that seem to have screw holes. Are these variable resistors maybe? If so, what for? Tuning something I imagine.