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."

Comments

Re:Leo Laporte

[WED Fan]

Yeah, and he puts his byline on his writing, too. Yeah, what a tool.

DON"T CLICK THAT LINK!!!!

[PinkyGigglebrain]

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"

Re:Analog joysticks

[WED Fan]

I hate to do it...wait, no I don't...we used to build our own joysticks and wheel controllers, a few pots and pulleys. I think it was Byte magazine that ran an article that showed how to build a light pen for the Sinclair ZX81. Analog was nice.

Re:Worst Console:

[WED Fan]

Are you my old neighbor that used to haul his Atari or Coleco over to my apartment to show me all the cool games? Did you ever get a color TV over 12"?

I'm old enough, too. I have a big lawn, and I've owned a Gran Torino and watched the movie. Oh, and that little strip between the sidewalk and the street? I don't care what the city says, that's mine, too.

Title of story is fucked up

[dangitman]

The title given to this slashdot story is weird on a couple of levels. Firstly, these devices weren't released "before their time," they were released at precisely their time. Moreover, "retro" refers to exactly the opposite of something that is ahead of its time, it refers to something that is a throwback to an earlier time.

Re:Title of story is fucked up

[antifoidulus]

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)

Wii Fit

[lmnfrs]

Cool stuff, but he left out the Amiga Joyboard.

Re:Worst Console:

[RESPAWN]

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.

Re:Worst Console:

[mister_playboy]

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.

Re:Analog joysticks

[veganboyjosh]

We got our first 2600 in about 1987. My parents got it used. I was young enough to still think it pretty cool at the time. Whoever we bought it from had hacked two buttons onto one of the joysticks, for use in video pinball. One button was the same as "left joystick", while the other was the same as "right joystick." The joystick functioned as normal.
I remember seeing an episode of Mr. Wizard where he took apart an Atari Joystick and had the girl play the game by manually touching the contacts on the circuit board, instead of using the joystick. I was able to figure out what the previous owner had done from memory of that episode.
Even at that age, it didn't take long for me to realize that I could do something with the hacked buttons that I couldn't do with the joystick alone. Namely, "move" to the right and the left at the same time. I don't remember the result in any other game but pacman. I'd play agains my sister, and midway throuy turn, i'd hit bottht once. Pacman would turn all of a sudden into one of the walls, and go through it, all the way across the screen, until he froze, all the power pellets dissappeared, and I moved on to the next round.
My sister would cry "cheater!" but I'd just shrug my shoulders and say "i dunno. the game just messed up."

Re:Analog joysticks

[Inner_Child]

The 5200 joystick wouldn't have been so bad if it would have just auto-centered! No, wait, it still would have been terrible...

3D Monster Maze Myth

[Ambient Sheep]

From the article:

> 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.

I know this for sure as I used to play the PET version at school (they got a 3016 in March 1980), and then when I got my own ZX81 (which came out Spring 1981), I was thrilled to be able to play a version of the same game at home when it was released a few months after that.

Re:3D Monster Maze Myth

[julesh]

"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.

Re:Analog joysticks

[jesset77]

I'm sad they didn't mention the TI-99/4a speech synthesizer. I mean every computer in early 80's movies and television could talk (Kit, WOPR, Hawking) but try getting that tech into your personal video game system, right? Even today Microsoft Sam on a quad core 3.3Ghz machine with 4gb of RAM hasn't really gained a lot of ground past Parsec's onboard computer 29 years ago on a single core 300khz machine with 16kb of (usable) RAM. Yeah speech synth was a hardware add-on, might have had it's own processor and ram but they sure as hell weren't any denser than what the chassis had.

Re:Meh.

[ksemlerK]

Watch out. By using your argument, that the second or third comer to the party that actually "does it more successfully" is the innovator, you are coming very close to saying that Apple innovates. Just thought you'd like to know. You don't want to fall into any self set traps now, would you?

Fixed it for you.

Apple is not an innovator. They are a marketing and design company, dedicated to the prettying up of existing technology. Did apple create the MP3 player? No. (Saehan's MPMan, 1998) The first smatphone? No. Simon; it was designed by IBM in 1992, released to the general market in 1993. It had no buttons, it was touchscreen only. First PC? No. It was the IBM 5100, (1975). Did they have the first GUI OS? No. Xerox PARC, 1973). Apple didn't ever invent anything, nor are they innovative. They just take existing technology and wrap it up in a fancy package so the public thinks they are a new-tech company.

Re:Arcade Vector Graphics

[IgnoramusMaximus]

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.

Re:Analog joysticks

[CrazyJim1]

Speaking from experience of 286 years, sometimes the analog would not calibrate right. And even when you calibrated, if you didn't push the stick the full degree to its range of motion, it would not know you moved there. Red Baron was a great game to play though with analog. Speaking of Red Baron, why haven't they came out with a modern version of it for Internet play? That could be a great game.

Oh later, another good game was Stunt Island. Remember how you could make your own movies? How cool would it be if Disney made Stunt Island 2? Then you make your own maps, share them with others to play. Then they can rate and play them? Also, sometimes the movies are funny. If there was an automatic feature to post them to youtube, that could be cool to share your movies. And in game, there could be a rating system to see which ones are the funniest by user vote.