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Retro Gaming Technologies Released Before Their Time
Barence writes "Motion-sensing golf game controllers that appeared 20 years before the Nintendo Wii and the 1980s handheld console that operated on solar power are just two of the gems unearthed in this article about retro gaming secrets. Davey Winder has delved into his extensive personal collection of retro hardware to unveil the first handheld console to play '3D games' from 1983, 'the most realistic "gun" game controller ever produced' from way back in 1972, and the device that offered multiplayer computerized Scrabble almost 30 years before the iPad."
I should know better than clicking on a link in a /. comment.
Thanks for saving me money on food for the next few days till that image fades from my mind.
Where the hell is my bottle of eye/brain bleach. The one labeled "Everclear"
Cool stuff, but he left out the Amiga Joyboard.
Actually, no. The PS3 fails because it was only the early model PS3's that had that ability. Furthermore, it wasn't really clear which models of PS3 had the compatibility or didn't have it. So, what ended up happening was that people like me who bought the PS3 later in it's life found out the hard way that it wouldn't play their old PS2 games. Thanks Sony for confusing your customers.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
PS3 does better than that. It plays all the PS1 and PS2 plus PS3 games.
This may apply to your PS3 (and mine... 60GB), but plenty of folks can't play PS2 games on their PS3.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Man were in fact released "before their time", namely they were released with technology that wasn't really mature enough to actually work correctly(such as the power glove which essentially uses the same motion tracking technology as the wii but said technology simply wasn't ready until recently)
Monstar L
"The first game to simulate 3D was 3D Monster Maze for the Sinclair ZX81..."
That's the second time recently I've seen that myth trotted out. It's not true. Although a good game, it was actually a copy of a similar game for the Commodore PET that I played at least a year before the ZX81 even came out.
Uh-huh. And on more powerful workstation/minicomputer platforms, such games go back further. "Maze War", which also is sometimes claimed to be the first online multiplayer game, ran on the PDS-1 (a minicomputer with vector graphics) in 1974, according to the wikipedia article. Admittedly it didn't see a lot of distribution -- there weren't many PDS-1s outside of MIT, from all I gather -- but it existed. If you want widely-distributed, Battlezone was released about a year before the ZX81, although it may or may not have predated the game you remember.
Some of the other stuff is dubious; for instance I'm pretty sure there was a steering wheel controller available for the Atari 2600, which predates the console described as the first to have one in the article.
Vector graphics displays are essentially unworkable and that is why they were abandoned.
Amongst their many drawbacks is a true killer: they require a CRT tube, complete with an electron beam that can be deflected in arbitrary directions. They are utterly incompatible with any other modern display technology such as LCD displays for example (if you want to use vector graphics on an LCD you have to rasterize your vectors first - which neatly defeats the whole idea).
Then there is a of course the problem with variable brightness, where vector graphics displays lose brightness when new vectors are added, to the point that when enough vectors are drawn the display becomes too dim for viewing. And then there is the deteriorating update frequency (which is behind the brightness problem) which causes increased flicker with an increase of the number of vectors displayed... and on and on and on.
The only last holdout for vector graphics displays is in some large scale party/concert laser shows where a single beam is deflected via galvanometer and mirror setups and where only carefully pre-selected for a given brightness/flicker ratios sets of images are drawn.