Slashdot Mirror
Vintage Videogame Commercials
Ant writes "Bezoar has a collection of old video game commercials ranging from Atari 2600 to SNES. These WMV files (1-2 MB each) can be downloaded for nostalgia flashbacks or if you are curious (you young kids!)."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
You should also check out X-Entertainment's media section which features a bunch of 80's ads also (some are video games). Amatuerish site content at best, but some damn fine memories.
-- I have fans? Wow.
In almost every format (quicktime, divx, wmv, real, mpg), so have all your players and codecs loaded. I doubt the person running this site is doing the archiving himself, and is just hosting whatever people send him, hence the hodegpodge of formats.
It's a great collection, but could really use a good sorting. (Presently, everything's arranged by the date it was posted.) If ever a site could benefit from a search feature, this one is it.
Here's a catchy radio commercial. Well, catchy in a mid-80s sort of way...
Check out the price and RAM comparison in the TV commercial.
And lots more here.
If they were ripped from VHS, they don't have 720x480 resolution to begin with. VHS really can't give you much better than 320x240x60, or 320x480x30 (with a 2:1 pixel size) if you de-interlace. 2-hour mode isn't so bad, but back when tapes cost $5-$10 each, nobody really wanted to use anything but 6-hour mode, myself included. With SVHS, you could probably get 640x480/720x480, but it wasn't around then. And I'm sure that few of these are readily available on U-Matic.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
You're using 'lines of resolution' incorrectly. All (and I do mean *all*) interlaced NTSC devices have 525 scanlines, *period*, of which 486 are visible (and thus 480 scanlines is 'close enough'). The 'lines of resolution' is basically the number of vertical lines that you can fit inside of a perfect square at the height of the frame (this is done to make 'lines of resolution' comparable across different aspect ratios), which means that 'lines of resolution' actually refers to horizontal detail. VHS has 480 visible scanlines just like Digital Betacam, and every one of those scanlines will have it's own detail. Due to the way NTSC is transmitted on a line-by-line basis, it is pretty much impossible to lose vertical detail unless the format used specifically threw away a field (as some earlier home video formats did). Remember that - you ALWAYS have 525 total scanlines, on ANY NTSC-native format.
Thus, at 240 scanlines, you've immediately lost one half of the fields. So as long as the video was 480 lines high, I'd be happy, even if it was only 320 pixels wide. Stored as MPEG-2 (or any other format that retains aspect ratio metadata), most decent players should stretch a 320x480 video to the proper aspect (either 640 or 720 pixels wide, depending on the device).
FC Closer
Yeah, but all NTSC formats only have 240 visible lines per field. You don't deinterlace to get 480 lines at 29.97fps, you just take the 480 line interlaced video that the capture hardware gives you. In fact, most deinterlacing algorithms used prior to encoding are pure crap, and only serve to remove either temporal or spatial resolution, depending on the algorithm.
So, 320x480 (or 352x480 preferably) would be sufficient. I just stated 720x480 because I'm used to capturing at 720x480 through an NTSC-DV converter box (since DV is always 720x480, that's what I'm limited to).
FC Closer