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at the same time, pretty much all manufacturers have abandoned S-Video and SCART.

SCART never took off in my country, but I can still get S-Video inputs on most TVs. My Vizio VX32L has one on the left side. As I understand it, TV makers cut out SCART to make room for VGA to hook up netbooks and other non-HDMI PCs.

Since I have some classic game consoles that really could use something less shitty than composite

I take it you're referring to the Super NES and Nintendo 64. The NES directly generated its signal in the composite domain due to its hue-value palette arrangement. The PS2 and PS3 can play almost all PS1 games through a component cable, though some TVs can't take a 240p component signal like the one the PS2 makes when playing PS1 games.

Why just get the Excitebike theme stuck in your head when you could be playing it? Print out a few copies of the sheet music and get half a marching band together.

there are other ways of getting a feel for what making NES games was like...

http://bobrost.com/nes/

If you're using this equipment to play emulator games, chances are that you downloaded them off the internet and they're illegal. Shame on you! Why not get some good homebrew games or, better yet, make your own games?

You'd better call it something else to avoid copyright infringement.

yes, like Sack of flour, Heart of Gold

These are some of the first new NES games developed in years

Hardly some of the first...There have been tons of homebrew NES demos and full games developed within the past few years. Well-polished games like Chris Covell's Solar Wars and Kent Hansen's Bombsweeper are polished games that put Bob Rost's own self-proclaimed 'NES game of the century', Sack of Flour, to shame - if not on code complexity and dev team size, on well-polished game design and playability. Not to mention the promising Megaman: Vengeance homebrew game being (slowly) developed by the folks at Dragon Eye Studios. The rom hacking community has produced plenty of other high quality rom hacks that do amazing things with the NES.

Either way, I think it's a cool project. I first discovered the student class webpage a month or two ago, and I'm glad that the class ended successfully.

I got my undergrad from UCF in Digital Media, just down the street from FullSail - heard some questionable things as well about the place. They do have kickin' facilities, though.

I'm a grad student now at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. The program has people going into many industries, but the majority are into video games. We have graduates at Rockstar, EA, Maxis, Angel Studios, and a number of other companies. One guy was back from his co-op at Maxis and had to excuse himself from a party because Will Wright had called him on his cell. We took a trip to EA (among other companies like Pixar, Disney, etc) last month, where the Vice President and CTO each gave presentations to our group of 30 or so.

Unlike many vocational programs, we don't actually have any courses on video game programming directly, though we do offer official courses in Maya, Building Virtual Worlds, and Game Design. The game design course mainly focuses on board, dice, and card games.

Retro gaming is a popular side hobby, with one student teaching a course in Game Development for the 8-bit NES and the X-Arcade company at residence in our building. (We've got two MAME Arcade setups in the hall)

It's not uncommon to see students parked in front of the gaming setups we have on each floor (with all the major consoles) doing "research", only to go back and discuss what they learned for a few hours with their project team.

The program is pretty demanding and tough to get in, but it's a fun place. Gaming is not an easy industry, there's a lot of late hours, especially in "crunch" mode before a game ships, but it's pretty rewarding.