Retronauts - 653: The Bronze Age of Arcade Games

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

Kevin Bunch, Benj Edwards, and Nate Lockhart enter the era of TTL circuits and early microprocessors as they celebrate the world of 1970s arcade games. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts For a very limited time, upgrade your wardrobe instantly and save 25% off during the @PublicRec Holiday Sale at www.publicrec.com/RETRO

This episode of Retronaut is brought to you by Public Rec. This week on Retronauts, pool hall thrills. Hello, and welcome to Retronauts. This should be episode 653, if I'm counting correctly. And I am your host, Kevin Bunch. And today, we're going back to not the primordial days of coin-operated video games, per se, but definitely the era when you had the first trilobites crawling around or swimming around. What did trilobites do again?

I don't remember. I don't know. Exist in fossils? Yeah. Underwater? Crawling around under water, for sure. So we're discussing what is generally dubbed sort of the Bronze Age of Video Games, which spanned in 1970s, led into the Golden Age, which really, you know, skipped a generation there

that most people seem to really be more familiar with, the Golden Age of Arcades, when you had the big hits like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and Mr. Doe. Sure. But the Bronze Age is really fascinating. It has a lot of really cool concepts and games that are just really forgotten or overlooked nowadays. And I'm really excited to talk about them. And I brought you two folks to chat about them too. Wonderful.

So who do we have to my south? Well, I can't really. Oh, oh, to your global. To my south. Global South. Yes. South of D.C. South of D.C.

Oh, yeah. Wait, wait, I don't even know where you live, Kevin. You're in D.C.? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, sorry. My geography is a little hazy. Anyway, I'm Benj Edwards.

I am, I don't know what I am anymore. Right now, I'm an AI reporter for Ars Technica. I used to be a tech historian. I guess I still am in a way. And that's me. You never truly get out of it. Yeah. And who do we have up in New York State?

Hi. I'm Nate Lockhart. I'm, uh, I guess, I guess we, we call ourselves citizen archivists, is that right, in the gaming Alexandria space, but, uh, I do a little podcast called, uh, the memory machine, which kind of talks about pop culture throughout, you know, all sorts of areas going all the way back to like the 1850s to like 10 years ago with like flash cartoons or something. But, uh, one of my passions that, that, uh, I'm really involved in, which we're going to talk about a lot in a minute is the, is this early era of video games,

mainly the pre-CPU type that are very, that are all TTL transistor, transistor logic based. And, yeah, I've buy up schematics and try to scan them in for people so that, you know, people can do recreations on things like FPGAs. And I've also been enamored with this one. particular book. I don't know if you want me to go into that now, but maybe we can talk about it when we get there. But I've got a project having to do with that. So I guess that's me, right? Yeah. I was going to say, you have spent a lot of time in the past couple of years building your own transistor transistor logic games. Yeah. Yes, yes, I have. Trying to repair a

couple arcade ones, too. Mm-hmm. That's impressive. They're tricky beasts. They really are, especially when the schematics have errors in them. Wow. And I referred to it before to other people as I sort of like brute forced my way through electronics training by taking on these projects. Like you just, you know, you just sort of start on it. You'd be like, well, I want to do this. And I'm going to figure it out come hell or high water.

And I guess I did to some extent. It's the best way. It really is. It really is. I mean, I was really interested in electronics for a long time, you know, and I wanted to learn more about it, and I would just read books, and then it just never stuck. And I think one day I just set to hell with it. And I, like, bought, like, a small kit and started going to town. So, yeah, there you go.

And then you got the TTL game bug, which is helpful for this podcast. Yes, I did. Yeah, we're going to be leaning on you quite a bit. I have the feeling. Oh, Lordy. All right. So what makes these games interesting to you folks? You know, I don't think any of us were necessarily conscious enough to be playing a lot of these games in the arcades during their heyday.

Certainly, I did not exist yet, so. Yeah, I was born in 81, so all this happened before I was born. You know, my dad was an electronics engineer. So I grew up around electronics engineers. They were his friends. They were his employees when he started a company later. And he taught me about Boaz, Steve Wozniak, when I was a kid, because I got an Apple 2 plus. Apple 2 plus was my first computer, depending on what you call a computer.

I had an Atari 400 before that. That was like a game console. But anyway, so I've always been fascinated by the electronics of the 70s. It was an era where my dad was very active doing radio stuff. and he was always fixing old toys and things. And so I feel like, you know, when I first started writing about tech and video game history, I was trying to find some corner of the universe that hadn't been really studied very well yet. So I ended up really focusing on the origins of video games in the very beginning.

And so, you know, I interviewed people like Ralph Bayer, Nolan Bushnell, and Alan Alcorn and those kind of people. tried to figure out how it started. And this is, there's such an interesting gap here because, like, through my work, you know a lot about, people know a lot about, like, say, Ralph Bayer's stuff in the 60s or the very beginning of Atari, Nolan Bushnell. And then there's sort of a gap. And then you get to, like, the Atari 2,600 and stuff, and people focus on the home machines. And then they get to, like, 80, 82, like the golden age of arcades.

like we're talking about, like Kevin mentioned earlier. And so there's sort of this gap in history where there's a, it's a dark, sort of a dark age, a lost age of arcade history in the early 70s with these TTL games. It's really fascinating. And they, you know, we can't play them on emulators because they're not software in that sense, but they have to be simulated or reproduced. And Nate knows all about that. So I feel like, you know, I've only done limited work in this.

If you count computer space, my big article on computer space in 2011 for Technologizer, that's something that's similar, but that was the very beginning. And also, I did a slideshow for, I don't know if you remember Glyxel. Glyxel was the site run by Rolling Stone. Oh, man. I've read like a slideshow of early lost Atari games, and I think they're all TTR, black and white TTL games in 2017. And that's like totally offline now.

I need to republish it. I think it's lost. What is what is that even like a portmanteau of? Like, what is that supposed to mean? Blue and pixels. I don't know. Is that it? Was Jiminy Glick there?

Is that involved somewhere? God, I don't know. Papa was a rolling stone on Sunday. Wherever he laid his hat was his home. And when he died, only the left of a long. What about you, what about you, Nate? Yeah, I was nowhere near these games when they were in their heyday. I wasn't born until 87.

for me, this is this is just sort of like a pure fascination. You know, I've always been kind of interested in video game history and looking backwards. And I think I was first fascinated by them just by looking

at Van Bernam's book, Van Bernam's book, Supercade back in the day. And she has some, she had some very limited, but there were still some very tantalizing like flyers, you know, for these games that I couldn't play, that were like hardly any screenshots of them, like things like Atari asked, like the, um, space chase, right? Space race. Space race.

That's interesting. Yeah. You know, and just sort of looking at it from afar or computer space for that matter. Um, I remember playing a computer space, a two-player computer space at, um, Philly Classic 3, which would have been like 2002, I think. Going way back. Yeah. A fellow named Cassidy Nolan had a two-player computer space machine. And that was the coolest thing in the world. And I loved it.

My dad and I played it a lot. It was a really fun time. But I really got, the thing that really sucked me in was when I was 10 years old, I lived in a little town called La Grange, Georgia for about four years. and before and after that, I grew up in Rochester, New York. But they had this book there that was just absolutely fascinating to me. And it was called How to Design and Build Your Own Custom TV Games. And I was always fascinated by the idea of, you know, video game creation.

It's something I always wanted to do. I messed around in like basic, right, for a little bit. You know, I looked at like C++ code for a minute and got super confused. but this was something else entirely. And I saw, like, this book has, you know, diagrams of control panels and, like, little, like, crude illustrations about what the games are supposed to look like. And these things in them that I don't know what they are. They're these weird diagrams. And I take it to my dad.

And I said, Dad, can we do this? You know, can we take a look at these games, see what they are? And he was like, oh, oh, oh, no. It's like, these are schematics and absolutely not. But it was something that just stayed in the back of my brain for decades, honestly, until really the pandemic hit. And I had a lot of time. And I remembered that book. In fact, I had gotten my own copy by that point.

And I had dabbled a little bit with electronics here and there. Like, I think I built like a little LM-386 amplifier, you know, little things. things like that. And, um, and I built a, uh, a joystick converter for a TI 99, uh, because they use this weird diode switching system. But, uh, I opened that book up during the pandemic and I looked at it and it was like, oh my God, I get, I get this now. I understand this. I know what this is doing. I could do this. Surely. Um, and that's what sent me off this dark dangerous path I've gone on and now I've built a few of these things and I think it's just absolutely fascinating what you can do at that level and I could talk more about it when we get

to like how these things actually work but I just think it's magical you know these things that just don't have any code but they're all working through these extremely well-timed five-volt pulses all working in symphony with each other. And it's super cool. You have the forbidden knowledge now. Yeah. I can call it that. There are very few, very few people alive who know how these things work. So you may be like, we need to guard your life. You know, it's funny you say that because it's one of those things where like, you know, you think like, oh, well, if I can do it, it can't possibly be that special. Like, if I could do it, then surely anybody could do this, right?

They would have to be interested in it. Yeah, that is the stumbling block. Yeah. All right. But hey, maybe someone will hear our conversation and also think, oh, this sounds rad. I want to mess around with T.T.L. You know, there is one other guy who is in our Gaming Alexandria Discord, and he is actually not too far away from where my in-laws live.

So next time I go out that way, out to northwest Indiana. I'm going to, we're going to hang out. We're going to have a good time. There you go. You'll have two-thirds of the world's TTL arcade game knowledge in one place. Can you get together with Ed Fry's? Yes. At least.

The triumvirate will be complete. At least two-thirds of them under the age of 50, put it that way. Most of the other guys are kind of getting up there. But, yeah, if somebody hears this and wants to join in our madness, please. For the love of God. Yeah. You know, I need somebody to talk to about this stuff who wasn't my very patient wife, who's very supportive, you know. But, you know, there comes a time when she just says, like, I cannot remember what I had for breakfast.

But I know about these cascading counters that you've been working on. Like, anyway. And as for me, so obviously I was born 83. well after the heyday for these games, like I said earlier. But around 92 or so, I remember finding a book at the library. I've mentioned it before, but it was Craig Kuby's Winner's Book of Video Games. And he has a chapter in there where he just sort of talks about some of the older games from before the golden age, because his book came out in like 82, that you can still find an arcade. So he's talking about a lot of 70s games.

He talks about, like, computer space and Pong and space wars and a few others off the top of my head. I can't remember. But I remember finding that really intriguing. And then a few years after that, I remember going to Cedar Point in Ohio. I think it was like a school trip or something. And they had a little arcade in there at the time, I guess a big arcade, really. And it clearly hadn't been updated in years because it was full of machines from the 70s, both. video games and some of the

electromechanical machines which I spent a good chunk of time in there and quarters. Nice. Yeah, so that's where I got to first play Space Invaders and Atari's Tank or... Key Games. Key Games tank, yes. Yeah. Very technically not the same

company, but really... No. We all know. And, yeah, a handful of others. And I thought they were really cool. And that's also when I first realized, like, Oh, these early Atari 2,600 games, these are just home ports of these 1970s games that I can actually play. Yes. So that sort of put me down a rabbit hole, and I've gotten to play a few more over the years. I gotten to play Pong in computer space at, like, gaming events, and a couple of these have FPGA recreations, so I can play them on the mister.

I think a couple have been redone in emulation on MAME, but yeah, there's only a handful of these 70s games I've really gotten to play with, but I've seen like footage, I've talked to people who played them or have written about them and they're really, really cool

and it's very interesting to see how they sort of worked around the extreme limits of what they had to work with at the time, both before and after, like, microprocessors just started getting introduced into the mix. Mm-hmm.

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After you purchase, they'll ask where you heard about them, so please support our show and tell them that retronauts sent you. Give yourself or someone you love the gift of comfort this holiday. upgrade your wardrobe instantly and save 25% off during the public rec holiday sale at publicwreck.com slash R-E-T-R-O. So, yeah, I think that's a good segue into talking a bit more about what makes these games so unique, both on a hardware level and even just, like, in terms of the cabinet design. Hmm. Oh, yes, a beautiful, like, 70s, mid-century modern.

that, like, chrome trim, walnut wood grain everywhere. Oh, my God, it's beautiful. It's a thing of beauty. I incorporate it into all my work. But, yeah, and they're all, you're right. They're all, like, different shapes. You know, computer space is like a fiberglass cabinet, right? And that was done a few times.

It's very rounded. Yeah. Yeah. in an attempt to make it, like, futuristic, right? Nolan told me, I think Nolan Bushnell sculpted that shape out of clay and gave it to Ted Dabney, who hired a guy who did fiberglass hot tubs and swimming pools or whatever. Nice. And they had that fabricated from the, and there's a hole in the back so you could put the circuitry in it,

you know, in the TV and everything, and then they put a woodboard, I think over the back of it. So it's fascinating. I was just thinking maybe we could mention, like, Like, just the origin of this, it goes back to the origin of arcade video games, basically, with computer space. And the technological origin is basically, you know, in the 60s, first of all, Ralph Bayer and his engineers at Sanders had discovered, you know, how to create signals on the screen and manipulate them. But they actually cheated. A lot of people don't know about this, but they used these Heath Kit signal generators that made spot. on the screen, spot generators.

And so Ralph hacked up these spot generators and made it so you could control the spots. He never invented the circuitry to actually, you know, do this by itself. They just sort of borrowed it. And I'm sure that the other guys. Bill Ruch and what's the other guy? Bill Harrison. Bill Harrison. I think Bill Harrison was his chief deputy on building these consoles.

So he probably had to implement his own version of that. But, you know, at first Ralph was sort of like doing a hack. And so when it came to Nolan, Bushnell, and Ted Dabney in the late 60s, early 70s, around 70-ish, they, they, he had played, Nolan had played Space War, the mainframe arcade game created in 1962, 61, 62 era at MIT. And so he wanted to put a coin slot on it and turn it into an arcade game because he had worked at a midway and knew about electromechanical arcade game. which predated this stuff. And they were not very reliable. They broke down a lot frequently. And he was in charge of a midway that had a bunch of these old games that would break down all the time.

And when he saw this game on the mainframe, he's like, man, this would be a great arcade game. So he thought about, you know, they thought about using a computer called the Data General Nova, which was the cheapest computer at the time, but it wasn't powerful enough. and it's still too expensive. It's a cheap and scare quotes. Yeah. Keep as in, I can't remember what was like 10 grand. 10 grand or, okay, it was, I just look, it's $4,000, which was $24,600 in 2011.

I don't know what that is. I'm looking at my inflation. I'm looking at my article from technologizing. So at some point, you know, they put this idea aside, but months went by and then Bushnell asked Dabney. This is what Ted Dabney told me. me a direct quote. He said, Nolan came to me one time and he said, on a TV set, when you turn the vertical hold on the TV, the picture will go up. And if you turn it the other way, it goes down.

Why does it do that? I explained it to him. It was the difference between the sink and the picture timing. He said, could we do that with some control? I said, yeah, we probably can. And we'd have to do it digitally because analog would not be linear. And so that was sort of his epiphany. he was like, hey, we could control that, you know, use the vertical hole and horizontal hole and stuff and make the signals around. And then, so Ted created this spot generator circuitry himself and handed it over to Nolan, who developed the game logic. You know, some people believe he didn't develop the game logic.

I personally do believe that he did, you know, 90% of it or something. And that's what became computer space. So this might segue well into Nate, if you could describe. that vertical and horizontal hold control and sinking and stuff like that, like how these games built up. Yeah. So analog televisions worked at

we'll just keep it to the black and white to make it simpler at about 60 cycles per second, right? 60 hertz. If you're doing interlaced video, you know, that's 30 hertz per frame and

per interlaced frame. And the composite video signal, which is what was broadcast out to televisions at that time, is made up of these little pulses. And, you know, a TV will look to that and sync to that. And so, for instance, you have like the vertical sync pulse, which goes low, is about, I think, 27 microseconds. Is that right? Microseconds. Sounds right.

Like 27 microseconds. Then you have a horizontal sync pulse, which is like 4.7. And, you know, you can mix these signals together and it creates a raster image. And you can vary the signal going up or down. You know, if you do one volt peak to peak, that would be, you know, all the way up to one volt is white. and at about 0.7-ish is black. And anything lower than that would be seen by the television circuitry as a sync signal. So knowing that, I mean, you know, one of the first things you do and you do stuff with electronics is you play with something called like a 555 timer,

which is this really bog simple, a little chip that you can use to make like blinking lights or a little delay timer, you know, something kind of like that. but you can manipulate those signals and kind of play with them. For instance, what I believe, like what, for instance, what the Odyssey does and what those early Rothbear experiments do is they simply take the full field of video. They time out what that is. And then they use like a timer, not a 555 timer because they just use transistors and diodes, DTL logic, if you will. and, you know, can squeeze that or stretch it to be what they need. And taking those two things, when you have the horizontal and the vertical, you can mix those together with some simple logic and you've got a little spot that you can move around.

I hope that's not too technical. But, yeah, and so what you can do, too, and what a lot of these games did, I'm not certain on computer space, haven't looked at the schematic too much on that one. but what they will often do is they'll set up some logic to do like the little timing pulses for the horizontal and vertical sink and then they'll figure out

what is the how much time they have to create video lines and have like a series of cascading you know 16 or 4-bit counters to count the lines on a TV screen. They do it over and over and over and over and over again

and you have these different frequencies that you can pull off of from these counters and mix them and match them and all that to make shapes and and you know do all sorts of crazy stuff with them whatever you know you want to do and um yeah it's a pretty genius way to do video games because uh it's a hell of a lot cheaper than a Nova computer which I think they wanted to like network right they wanted to have like four or five machines hooked up to the same computer was that the The one, what they told me was, his idea was to do two off of one machine, just two terminals, basically. But it was, wasn't powerful enough to play two at the same time.

And so it was too expensive for just one game or something like that. And they just dropped the idea. Yeah. I was say the, the Galaxy game that got, I guess, field tested or however you want to call it, quote unquote, released at Stanford. I think it was Stanford. Yeah, that used PDP 11 and, you know, that financially made as much sense for them to make two units total. And I think I'm all that the computer history museum now, at least one of them is. Yeah.

I mean, if you look at like, you know, I mean, this is like going off of like 1977, 1978 sale numbers when things were considerably cheaper, but the price really wasn't that different. You know, you can look at, like, old Radio Shack catalogs, and you can see, you know, how much these things cost, these little, you know, generic logic chips. And, you know, like a 7400, which is a, it's NAND gates, you know, and gates that are inverted at the output. And they were like a dollar for like five of them, you know. And so that's nothing, especially compared to that. And the fact that you can just kind of hack into a black and white television and inject the composite signal directly into it, you don't have to futz with monitors, you know. I'd say the computer space and Pong and some of the other early games just straight up used retail consumer black and white TVs and they just popped them in there and wired them up, which was probably the most male, I guess the actual shell of the machine, probably more expensive. but I feel like internally, the monitor is probably just buy a long shot the most expensive part of it.

Yeah, it could have been or close to it. And I bet, too, that they probably could find monitors that they got a good deal on. Yeah. I would have to assume. I mean, that's sort of what happened with Radio Shack, right, with their TRS-80 Model 1. Like, theirs were just sort of repurposed RCA. Yeah. I think what happened probably with the arcade, early arcade games was just,

Just, you know, when Nolan and Ted basically invented this new product category of the retail arcade, you know, video game, there were no monitors. There were security monitors that probably cost $10,000 a piece or something ridiculous, you know, and then there's television sets. And so there was no in between yet. But once there was a market for it, in terms of arcade people needing this, I'm sure some purpose built. monitors were created and sold to these companies, but I don't know who did that. And that's another little lost chapter of history. I know Wells Gardner was big into it in the early 80s and late 70s, but I don't remember off the top of my head who was the company that, like, first got into it.

But I remember it was fairly early, like 74, 75. Yeah, I seem to think maybe some Japanese company may have done it first. Might have been. I don't know. I don't know. So maybe we should just describe Galaxy game just for a minute, which is that, you know, in 71, before computer space came out in, I'd say November of 71, something like that. In the summer, I think it was the summer of 71, a couple of guys, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tucker, or is it Hugh Tucker and Bill Pitts? Those two guys, names interchanged.

they created this game that Kevin mentioned that used a PDP 11 dash slash 20 I think it was and it was the first version I think it was it was a version of Space War basically first of all the game from MIT that we mentioned earlier and it had a vector display and they put a coin slot on it

and they put in the Treseter Student Union and Stanford and they charged I don't know like 10 cents a game or something like that and it was popular there at the union, but because of, you know, the cost involved, obviously they couldn't deploy these computers everywhere, so it never went any farther. They made a second version later that was like two games on one machine or multiple games. And it did beat, you know, computer space to market as the first coin-operated video game, you know, technically. But it wasn't a commercial product that

they sold as a product to others, you know, to make money. And so the first commercial arcade video game was computer space in November 1971. So, there we go. Set the stage. If you want to play Galaxy game, I mean, you just play Space War and pretend you're putting coins in. There you go. We've spent a long time

Building it up, maybe we should talk about the games. Yeah, the games themselves. Anyone's still listening, I don't know. Some of these are really cool. And I think what makes them really interesting is just, like, the hardware design is really fascinating. Beyond what we've talked about internally, we talked a little bit about computer space, but you know, this was the era when electromechanical games were still king, at least early on. And they take a lot of cues from those, both in terms of where they'd be deployed or even, you know, where they could deploy these,

where electromechanical machines could not actually fit. So you'd see them in like pool halls and bars and taverns and bowling alleys, etc. But also they took some of those electromechanical visual. cue. So one that I really like pointing out is it's a Ramtex baseball. Yeah. Which is one of the first coin-op games or

video games really to have representations of like little people which it does in TTL logic. I think it might use a... It uses a couple proms. Okay. I was going to ask is that one diode-based

or did they actually have like a ROM for the graphical if they didn't start doing that? They have a have a little ROM. I think it holds about like 128 bytes. Like it's not much. But it's plenty for like a little stick figure. Yeah. But what makes it fascinating is that if you look

at the machine in a picture, probably you're not going to actually see the machine. But because it's, it has that, you know, overhead view that a lot of baseball games did at the time. So they mounted the monitor in such a way and built the cabinet in such a way. And it looks like you're having a bird's eye view down

at a baseball stadium. So, like there's stadium seating, uh, surrounding the monitor. And that is like such a cool design. Uh, it did not work out very well for the machine because the early ones were holding the monitor up with like material that could not support the weight and they would just sort of collapse. Yes. But they look so cool up until that collapse. Yeah. There were a couple others that did that too. Like Chicago coin, I think, had a couple. Like TV goalie is one that does that where they kind of have

like, yeah, that bird's eye view looking in it like, I think like a soccer game is like the, the conceit. Of course, it's just like a pong.

Yeah. Style game. But the conceit is soccer and you get to look down in on it like you're looking down on a, like you're looking down into a stadium. It's pretty cool. Or,

or Super Flipper. You mentioned Chicago Coy. They put out this game called Super Flipper. Yeah. Which was a video pinball machine. and they designed the cabinet to look like a pinball machine with like you have the backglass and then you have the little playfield

and that's your like video screen and you use the buttons on the side of the cabinet to like work your flippers. What year was that? Do you know? 75. Okay, so Atari beat them because there was a game called pin-pong in 1974 that I think was probably the first video pinball game.

I think it is. And it's super cool as well. I would love to see that in person. It's a wild-looking cabinet. Do you count Exidy's TV pinball, though? Or is that like... When did that come out? That was 74, late 73.

But that was more like a paddle. It is. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I remember that. But the idea was to like ape pinball. The cool thing about Super Flipper is that it still uses electromechanical sounds.

So it still uses, like, the bells of, like, an electromechanical pinball game. That's cool. Yeah, and it has, like, a back glass that lights up, you know? Yeah, I wouldn't even know how to begin to emulate that, but it looks so cool if you, like, look up a video with these things. You can find video of a good chunk of, like, 70s games, if you know what you're looking for. Sure. By the way, this reminds me, this is a weird story. But there was a guy who used to work at my dad's company named Dave.

I can't remember his last name right now. But he worked for Midway or something. I can't remember now. And it was in the 70s. And when the 4004 chip came out, you know, in 72, he created one of the first microprocessor-controlled. I don't know if it was a pinball game. There's like a bowling. I think it's Bally, Bally Alley.

He worked on Bally Alley, and I thought that was really cool. It's an electromechanical bowling game. It's not a video game, but it was one of the first to have a microprocessor in it, like really, really early. Like a shuffle alley kind of thing? I think you, yeah, have like literally probably have a ball and you roll it down or a shuffle puck or something. I can't remember now, but it's, I mean, I'd love to see that. So that was my one little. the reason I bring that up is just because of what you mentioned,

the hybrid nature of these early things where people are trying to figure out how to do these arcade games and what elements they should use. And so here I'm talking about sort of the opposite of what you're talking about. You're talking about a video display with some electromagnetic mechanical parts. And this was an electric mechanical machine with a software logic for one of the first times that happened. And so there's this interesting,

hybrid period where these things are kind of mixing together, these different technologies. Absolutely. Yeah, it's a, it's very, like, interesting to me trying to delineate, like, okay, where does electromechanical end and video game begin? Because there are some real edge cases. There's like a skiing game. Yeah. Allied Leisure.

Allied Leisure Ski. And it is technically an electromechanical game. Yes. Made to look like a video game. Yes, made to look like a video game. So, like, it's in a cabinet that looks like a video game. It has a screen, and it's like a projector screen that's, like, rolling through stuff. That actually exists.

But it's designed to look like the hot new thing, a video game, and they put it up in, like, ski lodges. Yeah, you know, there were a bunch of electromechanical games that used projection. You know, I think Atari even licensed one from Namco, like, call F1 or something in the 70s. I can't remember where it. But it was like you sat down in a cabinet and saw the screen, you know, as a film of someone racing. Somehow you could control it a little bit with a wheel.

It was crazy. I'd love to play that. Like, what the hell happened to those? Yeah. That is an amazing lost piece of history right there. You know, like, man, I would pay a million dollars. If I had a million dollars to just go, like, go see those in person. Like, if there was a room full of all the lost arcade games ever made,

mechanical video whatever like that would be so incredible that's my time machine wish that's a good one as far as I'm concerned yeah yeah I know some like of these 70s video games and EM games like they're around like I think the

strong museum has several I think they have pin pong oh no can yeah they don't have it on display right now but they do have it next time I go to Rochester I'll have to to bug them about it. I need to go up there.

I've been invited many times, but I never went just because it's so far. Yeah, I know. It's super far for me. I only go once a month. It's hard. There's also an arcade in Youngstown, not in Youngstown, but near Youngstown, Ohio that has a bunch of electromechanical games.

I've been meaning to take a drive out there. I mean, it's several hours, so it's not an easy drive for me. It's like a retronauts field trip is in order. All location in Youngstown. Well, you start in Rochester, and then you go to Youngstown, and then you go to Michigan for what's up there. Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum. Yeah, there you go. And then we'll go to San Francisco.

The Museum Mechanique, which is at Fisherman's Wharf. I've been there three or four times. I don't know. I've been there once, but I've been to Marvin's a ton of times because I used to live nearby, and it was the only arcade worth going to for a couple of years. years there. My brother used to live in Youngstown. I'm mad that I didn't know about that while he lived there. I think it's a recent development.

And there's a place in the Twin Cities or near the Twin Cities that has a bunch of electromechanical games. I've heard about that. I haven't been there, but I heard it's good. Getting a little afield, but that's fine. Yes, yeah. This is that kind of podcast. Yes.

The Retronauts arcade, ancient arcade. bucket list. Listen, we're just telling people like where they can go to find 70s games because you can't really emulate most of these. You can't download them. I mean, a lot of the schematics are on there and, you know, I guess you could build them off of that if you really wanted

to. I wouldn't recommend it, but you can do it. To find the queen without a king they say she plays guitar and cries and sing. La la la. You ride a white man in the footsteps of door Trying to find a woman who's never, never, never been born

You're standing on the heel in the mountain of dreams Tell it myself it's not as hard, hard, hard as it seems anyone anyone listening this far into this podcast is part of a secret society yeah that's right secret society the TTL worshippers or whatever you know like there is such a niche niche upon a niche like I don't know yeah we should probably talk about the games there this is where Jeremy Parish would smack me around be like we need a strong man in charge Kevin listen we're all a little punchy today it's fine. Someone needs to put a tent on this

circus. It ain't going to be me, but somebody's got to. But I was just going to say like, you know, a lot of these aren't emulated or even simulated or, you know, remade an FPGA. No. And, you know, this was the 70s. They did not have high production runs. Like

Pong is a massive outlier. Most games got like 500. A few hundred. Yeah, 500 or so. Computer space had 2000 and that was considered pretty successful for an arcade game. So, like, yeah, when your highs are pawing and, like, breakout and space invaders,

yeah, everything else looks like a failure, but they were all doing decently for themselves. They're just, you know, 50 years old and were, you know, wailed on at arcades because they were designed for that. Yeah. Doesn't space invaders use an 80-80 processor? I believe it does. That should not be in this podcast. Yeah.

But I was going to say, even if you're not. But I was going to say even, like, CPU-based games, like, even these are hard to come by, and there's quite a few that aren't really dumped, or they're, you know, dumped poorly because they were dumped in the 90s before people really knew what they were looking for. And they do it even, even then, like, they didn't necessarily always use, like, off-the-shelf graphic generators, video chips, you know. They were using, like, a combination of, like, analog parts and the CPU parts. So, like, right. But, yeah, something like PT-109, which is in the running is like one of the first potential CPU-based video games ever made. That, or microprocessor-based video games, that is undumped. I have not encountered anyone with a copy of that machine.

So I don't know if it ever will be dumped. There's something like Spitfire, which was written by, or rather programmed by Michael Glass, who went on to, you know, port it to the Channel F after the company he was working for went under. But that original arcade game, that's never been dumped. It's super rare because they didn't make very many before they went out of business. So it's like stuff like that. Yeah, there's a lot of fly-by-night companies like Merco, Fun games, Elektra. Electra had some really cool games, too.

You sure did. There's footage on YouTube of one called Flying Fortress, and you might consider it one of the first shoot-em-ups, you know, but it goes from right to left instead of the other way around. But, you know, you go down, you, you know, you bomb stuff, but it has these really cool sound effects of explosions and guns going off, you know. But it's all done in transistor, transistor logic, these TTR chips. I really like, there's a few games that used interesting technology to get around. the limitations of the sound capabilities at the time. So, like, there's FONS based on Happy Days. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And because they, you know, couldn't very well emulate the sound of a motorcycle, they just slapped an 8-track in there that had that as, like, the audio. And I know a few places that have Fons machines, like the Strong Museum is a Fons machine. They do not have the tape. So, even though you can technically play it, you're missing, like, a key component of the experience. Right. And then there's a man-eater from another fly-by-night company, Project Support Engineering, which had a tape deck that could play back the screams of divers as they're eaten by sharks. So, like, the game itself does have, like, sound effects, but, you know, they wanted to go all in on their jaws craze.

Yeah. Yeah. There was one of those at the Midwest Gaming Classic this year. It wasn't playable. But, I mean, that was plenty for me just to see it, just to see like, oh, this game does exist. It's not just a photo on the internet. This is so cool, you know? That's the one that's shaped like a shark head, isn't it? Yes. Yes, it is. Which is also amazing. Oh, it's so cool. I mean, I wish it could work, but yeah, it was just amazing just to see it for real. It's smaller than I thought it would be.

It's not a very tall machine. Yeah, sort of like what you were mentioning earlier, this is before standardized arcade cabinet designs. And so there is a wild variety. What's the, yeah, you just said Man Eater was the one with the cassette tape? Yeah. Okay. And there's, what about like, wasn't Tank, Key Games, Tank one of the first games to use ROM chips?

I can't remember what it might be. I mean, I know it used ROM chips. I feel like it was Grand Track 10. That was the first one that I'm aware of. For the track layout, right? Yeah, I think it was for the track. Yeah. Speaking of Grand Track 10, it's one of the few that I've played.

I've never played it. That's awesome. They have one at, or maybe it's, it may be one of the variations like Sprint or Super Sprint or, but I think they have a Grand Track 10 at the Museum. Le Mans. Over at, uh, Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. Francisco. I've played it. I think it's a Grand Track 10, but it's neat. So it's just an overhead. You know, the field is a bunch of dots. Like the track is a bunch of dots. And your car can

turn pretty smoothly with the wheel and the gas pedals make it go. And it's pretty, it's pretty nice thing to play considering how limited it is. Yeah. You know, Indy 500 on the Atari 2,600 came with a driving controller. I don't know if you guys know that game, but it's a lot like that. And it's really neat how smooth and sort of analog the feel of the driving is, you know. Because it's like a rotary encoder. It's a rotary digital encoder, if I remember. Yes. So it's rotary with no stops.

There's no, you know, it just can rotate as much as you want. And yeah, it's a nice experience. It's something just, it's one of those unique little experiences in games that I like, I've always craved that you don't, most people don't know and have never experienced. It's like just, like, what's the coolest, weirdest thing you can do on Atari 2,600? I'd say get an Indy 500 play with the driving controller or play Arkinoid on an NES with the Arkinoid controller or play, like, you know, Star Raiders with the Star Raiders controller. The video, the video, the video, yeah, or you could program basic on it, right? Yeah, that's true. But now this is, we got sidetrack, sorry.

It's okay. Arcade games here. We've driven off the course with Grandtrak. Fire truck. Oh. Yeah. Fire truck's a fun one. It doesn't have two screens or something or there's two people playing?

Well, you have like, um, there's a two-player version, right? Yeah, like someone driving in the front and then someone controlling the back of the engine. Yeah, like a real fire truck. They have one at Gallup and Ghost, uh, in Chicago, but the last time I went there, it was not working, unfortunately, but that's a, that's a really cool game. I think I've seen it at Fun Spot as well up in New Hampshire. That's another one that Strong has. Yeah, it's, it was pretty, I think it was pretty popular for the time, you know, relatively speaking.

But it's pretty cool. I was just thinking of how they had like, you could see a very clear difference in how different countries approached racing games as their developers. So like Atari had these top down games like Grand Track 10 and Sprint and Indy 800. and then in Japan you had like these racing games that were more focused on your vehicle and you were sort of driving along a track that would come down the pipe at you. So you had stuff like, you know, Fons, which became, which was originally what speed race. Something like a wheels. Or no, speed race became wheels in the U.S.

Fons was something else. Yeah. And yeah, they take different approaches to like imitating the sort of speed and momentum of driving. And then there was the one in Germany. Yes. Yes. Nobergring. Is that how you say it?

Dürbergring one. I don't know. Someone who's German will probably get mad at us for mangling the pronunciation. But like, so that's a game that is, that's like not only is it TTR, but it used something like 28 boards. 25. 25 boards. It's a lot of boards. There's a picture of it online.

You can see it's, it's not very good quality, but you can see it. You could see that the cage, you know, with all the TTL cards on it, just filled with chips. Yeah, there's like two or three of these machines still, like, floating around in Europe. I'll probably never see one in person, but it was very interesting because the developer of it was Dr. Rainier Forst, who was very interested in driving simulators and bought video games, like specifically the TTL technology that Pong used would be really good. for that versus, you know, a projector, a oscilloscope arrangement. So he designed this machine and, like, it was a hugely popular when he debuted it. And the problem is that it used so many circuit boards and he was practically a tiny little

operation that he could not fill all of those, which means that someone else did. Yeah. Started off with digital games. one of their people saw the machine while he was in there. Ted Mishon, he went to West Germany to fix a defective shipment of their game air combat. He saw Nubergring. At the same time, Forrest was there, like, giving a demonstration to some kids. So he got to learn how the machine worked, and he went home and made his own version of it.

Cool. But because Micronetics was tiny and didn't have much capacity either, they re-licensed that out to Midway and, I believe, Atari. So that's where you got 280 Zapp and Night Driver. Yeah. And Micronetics' own version, which I forget off the top of my head what it was called, NightRacer. I didn't know about the, I didn't know that the Neubergering connection was that close. That's cool.

Yeah. It's cool. It's like a game that exists by pure luck, like Night Driver and whatnot. And if you ever played any of those games, they are first-person driving games, which big successful genre nowadays, very hardcore fans of it. And they got its start with this TTL era gaming. And with a couple of games that I'm pretty sure are also not emulated because Night Driver was a TTL game. I've always wanted to play the original arcade Nighter. I don't think I have, you know, I've obviously played the, obviously, I've played the

2600 version since I was a kid. I loved that game. It's just, that's so funny how you can be enthralled by a bunch of little dots, like, moving around on the screen, and you feel like you're driving a car. It's wild. In the 80s, we were happy. I've gotten to play Night Driver a couple times. I've been to a couple arcades that have had it working, and it's very cool because

the dots are moving around and you have like the gear shift and the wheel and pedal and all that fun stuff but there's no like image of your car on screen. It's a decal. They have a decal on the cabinet to show where you are like physically located

and if one of the lines on the road gets too close to your decal you like crash and stop and have to restart moving. It's such a cool like arranger. was Night Driver.

I'm looking for the... 76, I think. 76, okay. I have a bunch of Atari Flyers in folders by year, luckily, because I did a slideshow once, and I have, like, every game. Night Driver. Yeah, I see that.

That's cool. It has a decal. So the overlay and decal thing is another one of those hacks, you know, that a lot of early arcade games did, because they had black and white screens, and sometimes they needed a graphical element that was far beyond the resolution of ever being able to display on screen. or something color, you know, so they would use an overlay transparency on the screen.

Or, like, I think I saw one. You mentioned the baseball game that has, like, the stadium. I'm sure that's, like, you know, not on the display itself, but, I mean, not generated in video. No, it's physically there. Yeah. Yeah. And this outlaw, I'm looking at, man, Atari Outlaw, I've never, this is crazy. It's a very weird looking game.

Yeah. has an overlay of like an old west town. Not the 2,600 game, right? No, this is an arcade game. There's so many weird arcade, like Atari games that no one's ever heard of. Yeah. There's one called

Cops and Robbers that I've never what the hell is this? This is like four people play. This is from 76. There's like four joystick looking things and wheel. I don't know what. There's pedals, foot pedals.

Oh, Outlaws Outlaw is a light gun game. Yeah, Outlaw has a light gun, stunt cycle. Yeah, that's a cool one. I've gotten to play that one at Galloping Ghost. That's a fun one. I mean, I could go through, why don't I just read these, like, while I'm looking at them?

Let's go back to 73, just real quick. I mean, we mentioned gotcha in 73, which I think did we, like, it's sort of a chase game, and it had the weird dome, pink dome controllers for a limited time. That game's interesting to me, both because it's one of the first color games. They had a variant of it that they only made like a couple dozen copies of that were cut in color. But also because if I remember right, I think Al Alcorn described it existing because of like a glitch with one of the Pong machines that they were trying to figure out. And he realized like, oh, I can use this to like generate a maze. I could make a game around that.

And I'll bet. That's where you got gotcha. Yeah, that's clever. I could see that. I bet it had to do with the score, like being repeated, like parts of the score being repeated over the screen, because you kind of have to, and I'm not going to get too technical again here, but basically you should create the score by like using one of those things that drive seven segment displays, you know, for numbers. But instead of like wiring it to lights, when you use the decoder, you wire it to like frequencies of the television and, and you get the little outs. but you get the number output. It's a really easy way to do it.

But you have to window it. You have to, otherwise it'll repeat all over the screen. So, yeah, I could totally see that. Oh, that's so cool. I love that. I don't have you ever seen it in action, but it is like a very visually arresting game to see. Yeah.

Because I feel like that's sort of true of a lot of TTL games. In motion, they don't look like a video game. Like, you generally think of a, It's not frames of animation. It's completely smooth, right? Yeah. It's weirdly smooth. And I can understand why they kept using it up until, like, 1980 or so, I think, is when Sega's Monaco GP came out.

Because, like, I've gotten to play that before at a New Jersey arcade. And it's just, like, so cool to watch the track just, like, smoothly shift in size and, like, you're entering a tunnel. and it just all, like, works so well, and it's wild. Man, I want to play that. There's something about the aesthetics of this that's really fascinating, too. Like, I was describing an experience you can't get anywhere else, kind of. This is, like, on a real CRT with the real chips and the real thing is something that will never be perfectly simulated. You can probably do a pretty good job with enough resolution and everything, but it's an experience unto itself.

the phosphor glow let's go back to the like space race I skipped space race I think that was Atari's second game right after Wong that sounds right yeah you know you

there's two players they're going vertically and you're avoiding things they're like avoiding stars or something I don't know I've never played that there's Pong doubles which is doubles

four people two on two and in 74 things start to explode we've got World Cup football, which is European, like, multiplayer pong. Grand Track 10 was 74. It's just one player. Grand Track 20 was 74. It was two players. Pin pong, we already talked about.

Quadra pong, which is a really neat machine. It has four players. They're, you know, person is guarding a sort of hole on the sides of four sides of the screen, kind of. But not the first four-player pong game, because that's a tennis tourney from Allied Leisure. Oh, God. Which I think was just like two-on-two. That game. I just, I fixed one of those not that long ago.

The fun thing about that game is that, well, Paddle Battle was the main one, right, that Allied Leisure did. That was their big pawn clone. Yeah. That I think for a long time, didn't they sell, like, more of that sold than Atari's actual pawn? I believe so, because they had more capacity to, like, produce. 10 minutes than Atari did.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is almost exactly the same game. Like, it's the same chips and everything. But my board, through Gaming Alexandria, I was able to procure about 10 or so TTL boards to see if we can get them working. Currently working on Ramtech baseball, it's slow going. But, you know, we'll get there someday.

And we'll have footage on YouTube, streamed, you know, captured footage. but we'll get there when we come to it anyway so this paddle battle game and I was looking at the schematics for it and I noticed like things didn't like add up but but there was paddle battle battle on the board like emblazoned under the solder mask you know there it is paddle battle and I keep working on it and like something's not right like the edge connector for the you know hookups for like TV and controls and all that um there's too many pins on this and then there are in the schematic.

And come to find out later on, you know, I did some digging and like, oh, they released a four-play version called Tennis Tourney. And that's what this board is. And so then after, you know, we figured that out, it was just, you know, balancing the analog signals, which is a whole other thing, which we can go into when we talk about. Bob's your uncle. Challenges. Well, it depends on the game and the manufacturer.

We could talk about that more when we get into like the. challenges of preservation but there's way more games than we could talk about in one episode i'm just looking at oh yeah i i i probably got to go go soon yeah and and you're just talking about like the atop you know atari's stuff yeah yeah we're talking like i'll just rattle off a couple names we don't even have to talk about like uh quack yeah 74 is a light gun game um that might be worth talking about but uh rebrand is a basketball game, Super Pong. There's something called

Elimination by Key Games that might be a version of Pong, something. That sounds right. I believe it is. It's like Quadra Pong. Spike is a volleyball, key games, volleyball, Formula K's, Key Games, Sprint, Super Sprint or something, or not Super Sprint, but Grand Track 10. And 75 things start getting more interesting. There's something called anti-aircraft by Atari

where two people are shooting It's Air Sea Battle if anyone's played that. Crash and score, which is like a demolition derby. I would love to play that. That's on the Atari 2,600 Indy 500 cartridge. They ported it on there as an extra game. Okay.

They did. There's Highway, which is an overhead driving thing that had a cockpit. I think it may have been Atari's first cockpit video game. There was a cockpit electromechanival that I mentioned the video the F1 or whatever it was called

but a jet fighter that's like one of the combat games basically from the combat cartridge they had a game called Jaws this is about shark jaws sharks and very small prints

sorry yeah shark jaws steeple chase horse racing pursuit which is looks like another plane type game but first person maybe

combat. That's amazing. Yeah. We've got Tank. We mentioned that key games. Going to 76, we've got, of course, breakout, which was, I could talk for a minute about the origins of breakout. Well, we did a breakout episode a while ago. We delved into that a fair bit. But Dave Boas tell you himself about how it got created.

He did not tell me personally, no. I'll just briefly, briefly, briefly mention that I think until I interviewed Waus in 2007 and talked to him about video games, very few people knew that he designed one version of Breakout for the arcade. And I asked Alcorn later, you know, Waz says that, you know, Steve, it was Steve Jobs' project, you know, it was assigned to him. And Nolan Bouchnell told me it was his idea or something to design the game. I don't know if that's true. And he signed it to Steve Jobs. And Steve got his friend Waz to build it, of course. And there's all these famous stories about it.

But so I guess people did know. But people didn't know that Waz thought it was the version that was released. That's what people didn't know. But Al Alcorn said, no. I mean, there's no way we would have released this thing. It had like, weird, like five chips and no one understood how it worked. And, you know, like. If I remember, it didn't have sound effects.

Like the scoring was like analog using a digital count or not an digital counter, but like a counter outside the game. And they're like, yeah, this is not workable. Yeah. I don't know who designed the final version of Breakout, but it has that weird, cool little story. So I'm sure you talked about it in the episode. And I couldn't break Waz's heart and tell him like, no, man, it wasn't your version.

He still swears to this day that it was the version that was released and all this stuff. Bless him. Yeah. fly ball, which is some kind of arcade baseball game by Atari. We mentioned, this Cops and Robbers game is wild. Somebody's got to look into this.

Some four player, like, it's got Tommy guns and Model T people, cops and robbers. Like a maze craze. Facing off shooting each other. It looks kind of like Spy Hunter from overhead, but with four cars. It's wild. And we've mentioned

Knight Driver. That was in 76. Outlaw. We mentioned that. Sprint 2 looks like another version of Grand Track 2, Grand Track 20, sorry, 77, Canyon Bomber, which is a 2,600 game, isn't it? Yeah, I got it ported directly. Yeah. Very faithful. By David Crane, right? Yep.

Yeah. That's a great game. Sprint 4 is 4 players probably, that's not key. It's a, sorry, that's neat. I think Sprint 4 might actually be an MPU-based game, like processor as well. Well, so we're getting into the microprocessors. Sprint 8 is an 8 player game, sort of like Indy 800, which is a wild. Speaking of weird experiences, like, I'd love to play players playing an overhead indie 800 at the same time.

That would be wild. I've seen a video of that on YouTube, and it does look absolutely wild. It's like a whole family playing Indie 800 at some location, and I think Italy. Yeah, and how about Starship 1? probably micropressism based, right? This is sort of like... So Starship on the 2600 is a port of it, but what's interesting is that Starship 1 came out like a month or two

before the 2600 port, so Bob Whitehead must have like just been looking over the shoulder while they were building that game out. It's like, all right, all right, taking notes. Yep, and so we're getting into like this, you know, there's some games called Triple Hunt, Superbug, Superbugs cute. 78 has football, which was a pretty famous game.

It was a trackball, so that's microprocessor-based. That's an MPU. I think Atari at that point had fully gotten out of the T.TL. I mean, not that they didn't incorporate TTR elements. I mean, a lot of arcade games still did until the early 80s. But TTL was much more failure-prone and more expensive to, like, build out. And you couldn't just, like, design a basic hardware. standard and like tweak it as you needed you have to like redesign the hardware from the

crowned up every single game right and it wasn't the main driver of the game at that point like ttl would be used for things like sound uh graphics if they didn't use a dedicated video processor you know things like that Like, yeah, this was an era where, like, Sega got really big into video games. Yeah, like head-on. It's a microprocessor game, but, like, that was a huge hit for Sega. Yeah. Head-on had some kind of port on the 2600.

What was it called? Dodge-um. Dodge-em. Yeah. It was like a clone. It got cloned to, like, everywhere. Because it was such a huge hit, especially in Japan, I know. Exidy had one, Crash.

Yeah, Exidy had Crash. Exity had Death Race, which is, like, one of the first controversial games. Oh, that's full TTL. That's full TTL, and it's super cool to actually, like, sit down and play. Yeah. Death Race, they have one of those in San Francisco at the Muse Mechanique at the dock. The Galloping Ghost has that one, too. Galloping Ghost does have that one.

Yeah, Therese. That's one of the earliest games. games I've played. Yeah. Your friend and mine, Ethan Johnson and I played that when I went to visit him when I visited in Chicago and we spent a day at Gallup and Ghost hitting up all the weird old arcade games we could find. I enjoy that Exidy, like, reworked Death Race into Score, which is probably the first game

with an animated woman, but we don't know for sure because surprise hit is unpreserved. And the only couple, you know, historian. Kate Willard's been, like, trying to track it down. And she's come across, like, three units and none of them work. Oh, wow. So, who knows? Who knows for sure if it's an animated woman? But it's, like, the concept is, like, death race, except you're, like, chasing people around to, you know, score, quote unquote.

Yeah. But it's sort of, like, equal opportunity, horny, I think, is the best way to describe it. Because, like, you're not necessarily chasing women and, and, you know, and. Like the women can chase men. I'm not positive entirely at how it works because it doesn't exist in any sort of playable way. But it sounds interesting. The interesting thing, you're talking about space invaders and how, like, you know, that sort of is where like the line begins to blur a bit as they get to more CPU stuff.

You know, while it did use an 8080, it still had TTF stuff. But Sega did make a full TTR clone of space invaders called. Sankan Yamato. Which is insane that they bothered with this. I can't imagine. I can't imagine. One of the silly little games that I built, the Storm Trooper attack,

is sort of a space invaders-ish sort of thing, but it's just like one row of squares that you got to shoot. But to do like all of that and they have like full alien figures and everything, like that thing's got to be like two boards at least. Yeah, at least. at least. Yeah, they're so much to do these cool games.

Yeah. I want to play them all. I want to play Drop Zone 4 because it's like, oh, yeah. This one was from, was that Electra or was that one? Meadow Games. Yeah.

So the concept there is you're like dropping bombs on targets. But it had like an anti-war Easter egg in there. So if you drop all your bombs and none of them hit a target, you get a free game. Wow. Love it. It's such a, like, cute little idea for your war game to make it, you know, not a war game. And something else, too.

You know, we were mentioning, like, the interesting, like, cabinet designs and, and how they kind of went all over the place. But there was, like, one area where they really, like, stuck to a certain aesthetic. And that is absolutely those cocktail table games, you know, because they want to, like, sell them to be like, oh, this is for the lounge area, you know. And so, like, there's just these simple, handsome wood grain tables, you know, for things like, like Flim Flam from Meadow Games, had that with like a little, little, like, miniature analog joystick. So you can move along both the X. Your paddle could go up and down the X and Y axis. Yeah, so there was like that uniform factor there with, with those cocktail tables. And it's very funny that the way you look at some of the flyers for them and it's like guys in leisure suits and girls with like these giant bell bottoms and done in these beautiful like watercolor paintings of like, of like, yes, we're going to talk about our new Plymouth Roadrunners and play some flim flam.

As you do. You're right. And drink some cognac. Sure. um anyways but uh yeah and there's a lot of interesting pongolones too like digital games had one that's intrigued me for a while called knockout so like instead of you know just trying to get the ball past the other player each player has like a row of breakout style bricks behind them this is of course pre breakout and the book you have to hit the other players bricks to win a point. And see, that's, that's very interesting. And I would love to, to play that.

Really like playing with the, sort of the premises on a lot of these, which is really cool. Yeah, a lot of playing around. I mean, that's kind of like what, like, clean sweep is, right? Like, you know, here's a paddle game. What else can you do with paddles? Collect dots. You talked about that in your breakout episode, but.

Yeah. Strangely, uh, influential clean sweep. Yeah. And like, uh, Exidy's TV pinball, which is sort of like a game that Ramtech developed, but never released called Knockout, but Ramtech and Exidy are kind of the same thing. Uh, but they had a lot of the same personnel. Yeah. I think, uh, I think, uh, what happened is they probably just licensed it or sold it or something. Like, Howell Ivy?

Because like a lot of these companies, like, they were, you know, straight up like, pirate. Clones of games, but there's also some very, like, murky licensing arrangements and sub-licensing. Yes. So, and that crossed over oceans, too. I just watched a video uploaded from, I think, the account's Onion Software on YouTube. Yeah. But it's this Japanese, you know, game historian. And there was a Taito event a couple weeks ago, as of this recording, where they were showing off a bunch of, like, their early 70s video games.

and he was there with Tomohiro Nishkato who helped design Space Invaders and they were going through them all and they had a copy of Ram Tech's Clean Sweep but it was a version that Taito had published because they had licensed it and there was a couple other games from Ram Tech and I think Midway that they were showing off as well.

I need to bookmark this. Tornado Baseball, that was the other one. Midway is like a microprocessor based sequel, if you will, to Ramtex Baseball, which they had licensed for themselves. And released Unchanged as Ballpark. Yes. Yeah. And you can play Tornado Baseball on the Valley Professional Arcade console.

You sure can. I have an Astrocade, but it doesn't work. I just never got it working. So monster, oh, So, monster, This monster, This is My

Kourrii He's So, Oh, Yesb Nassim And Monsar got

So Monsar got to So So So So So, So,

Ben Jad's words had to take off for the rest of this podcast so we are moving along with me and Nate and we will include his where you can find him

at the end of the video we'll include his plugs at the end of the podcast. It's getting very late here. So yeah, I wanted to talk a bit about sort of the preservation status of these games. We've talked about a lot of like

really cool ones and what makes them interesting. Yeah. There's still a lot we haven't touched on but we only have so much time. Right. Got to cut it off somewhere. Oh, my gosh. I mean, you can go on.

And one more thing I want to touch on to before we talk about the preservation challenges is that a lot of these games are still very fun to play. Absolutely. You know, I mean, breakout's still great. Like, it still grabs you. Death race is a blast. Clowns is great. You know, circus, like the little ping-ponging clowns bouncing up to balloons,

which got ported around to everything. That game is. excellent. On the 2,600, I'll play that for an hour until I get a score I'm satisfied with. My personal favorite dog patch from Midway, which is the best way I can describe it is like, what if you played volleyball with guns? It was the inspiration of the recent game Hypergunsport, which is just that. Because I think it was Brandon Sheffield and Frank Sefaldi were playing this Midway arcade game at the California. stream some years ago and

Branden's like, oh, that's cool. I'm going to make that again. It's still influencing people these old video games. But yeah, they are they pose a challenge. I mean, first and foremost simply because these aren't

software. There's no, you're not running any code. A lot of them aren't software period, so. No, nothing. You're talking about circuits that you have to implement into an FPGA, which, you know, that's that's kind of what FPGAs are good at. It's doable.

Or you have to make it work through software using like soft lists, I think they're called. Yeah, I mean, there's ways to do it. I mean, at that point, you're sort of simulating and you're really going for like the feel, like really trying hard to nail the feel. FPGA, though, will more accurately than anything else we have at this point, will get you what the actual circuitry is and does. Yeah, so that's a challenge. But FPGAs can be worked with, especially if you have schematics handy and a good high-quality

picture of the board, you know. And ideally someone who can like playtest it and make sure that it's lined up. Yeah, yeah. Make sure you got it accurate. Right, right, because that can happen. And especially because oftentimes these schematics will have error. in them. And, you know, having the board, a good high quality picture of the board handy can help you look at the trace exactly. So you could say, okay, that's why this isn't working.

Yada, yada, yada. And which can be a little daunting if you're like me and doing this for some reason. And you have Ramtech baseball, you know, and that's two boards, two big, big boards. How big would you say? They're like poster sized, right? Yeah, somewhere around there. It was small poster size, like, whatever you would call that, 18 by 11 and a half, something like that, right? 11 by 17. That's it, 11 by 17. And they each have about 100 chips on them.

So, you know, that's a lot of work. But, yeah, having the schematics and pictures handy is very nice. There are some. I have one. It's from digital games. It is one of their like Pong compilations. They had, some companies did this where you could play like a few variants of Pong on them. And one of the things that they did to combat people copying their games is Atari's was a little bit more clever because they would do like the the, the ROMs, right?

They would give the ROMs the same nomenclature as the 7400 series logic. So it would, like, confuse people trying to rip off their game designs. Less clever, in the case of digital games, is they just scratched off the label of every single chip. So, like, cool, I can't do anything with this. I mean, I do have, I have a cheap eProm burner, but one of the things it can do is it can identify logic chips. So I could de-sodder each and every single one of those chips and put each and every one in there and see what they are. Of course, this doesn't take into account what happens if, you know, it doesn't work and it can't identify it. And then you're just kind of screwed.

And for a lot of these lower run games that we have, the schematics are just not out there, you know? I mean, for Atari, they've been on there since the 90s. Um, not in great quality for some of them. Yeah, the quality is pretty trash, uh, for a lot of them. But that's getting rectified too at this point. It's getting better. But yeah, for some of the smaller run ones, you're just kind of S. Um, and yeah, that's a big problem.

Again, uh, errors in schematics can make things kind of a nightmare. Uh, when I do those TTL builds from that book about building your own at home, every single one of the schematics. Every single one had an error in it. Some of them less egregious than other. Sometimes it was just the pinouts being incorrect, which is, you know, I can work with that. And you can just sort of match up the data sheet of the chip with what's in the schematic. It'd be like, oh, that got mixed up. I see what happened. That's not the big of a deal. The bigger problem is when there's like a mistake in, the actual, like, routing of the logic. And that is so hard to suss out. And luckily, for the book that I'm working on, every single one of these builds has a circuit description. So you can look in and see, like, okay, so when he designed it, this is what he was trying to do.

And so, so when I hear, like, what he's trying to do and what is actually happening on the board is I could wait against each other and I could say, like, okay, there's actually supposed to be an or gate in here that's supposed to go in between these two things instead of and you draw this up the wrong way right right and in some cases like sometimes i wish i could talk to the man who wrote it david el heisman unfortunately he passed away in 2020 so i'll never know uh but i get the feeling that he designed these things that these were all just ideas and he never actually built any of them himself i do believe leave that. You might be one

of a handful of people who ever has. Yeah. I mean, there's one other guy I found. One. And he only built one game. It was one of the simpler ones. But he did do it. What are you up to now? Like three? Three. Three. And I've started

slowly on another one that uses slipping counters, which is you think I would have had it hard enough with the pinball game. You're making a face. So I I think it's not a great time. No, it's hard. I mean, it feels so good when you get it working.

Like, I think the first time when I got the video generator board working, like, I was so excited. I took my son, who I think was four at the time, four or five. And I, like, airplanes spun them around my head because I was so thrilled that, like, I figured it out. But, yeah, and that could be a real headache. And another thing that's a problem, too, with keeping these boards going is that there are different versions of these 7,400 series logic chips. And they each work a little bit differently. You have LS, HC, and HCT. And, I mean, that's just for starters.

And they work a little bit different. I won't get bogged down with details. This is not the kind of podcast this is. So I want to respect to the people who are trudging through this part. But there are other, like, weird ones. Like, so LS was sort of like the first big leap from just played old 7400 and it was a lot more power efficient. But, like, each brand sort of had like their own weird version. Like Fairchild had the F series.

So 74F00. And because these things, the timing is just a little different. So, you know, you're supposed to be using this logic to, I don't know, put together a aircraft figure or a spaceship. And it doesn't look right. It's, it's like wigging out, you know, and it's like spreading across the screen. You're like, why is that? It's like, oh, because I need to use the C variant of this chip. And I substituted an LS chip, which was period appropriate, but not for this specific use case.

And so because of that, that can be a real headache. And, you know, I'll just magnify that for multiple boards for something like in the 800 or Norbert Ring 1 or what have you. I could never. So you have to deal with all that for all these boards. And, you know, there are people who probably love that challenge. I clearly do do do, honestly. You know, it sounds like, you know, I'm complaining here, but I do think it's very interesting. And something I do to kind of keep pushing myself forward.

is, you know, is as long as I learned something new, if I did that or I fixed a single issue, if I could do that in a section in a period of time where I'm working on a board and I have to leave it, if I've learned something or if I've been able to repair one element, then I've chosen to take that as a victory. And when you take that approach, I think it becomes much more enjoyable. And then your mind starts to reel about like, you know, I wonder what else you could do with this? Like, you know, like, what if I made one? Like, what would that be?

You know. Now you're designing like it's 1973. I have this hobby computer sitting next to me as a quick tangent that's somebody designed a couple years ago. Actually, not that long ago, like last year. And it's a fully TTL computer using about 60 logic chips. It has like 640 by 480 VGA output, one color, of course, you know, white, but still, still, it's pretty cool. And, you know, as you get into it, and I'm like, you know, but what if I used TTL logic and some 555 timers to turn the VGA output into composite output? And if I did that, then I could use the weird NTSC color encoding and make color.

So what you're saying is the next Rochester Maker Faire. You're going to have a very strange, like, unique computer. I have been to the Maker Faire a couple times. That would be very 70s, you know, when people were just designing their own computers. Yeah. Yeah. But that's another thing entirely. But it is very interesting.

And then, you know, you can look it up with your oscilloscope and you can kind of see how all the timing works and how the things go, you know, when this pulse goes up, then this one goes down for two cycles. And you can actually hook up your oscilloscope and see it. action. And to me, personally, that's very thrilling. Your mileage may vary. But for me, it's pretty cool. Yeah, I'm living for the weekend. Yeah, but those are just some of the challenges. And there are others, like I said, I'm forgetting his real name. His username is Dillweed, and you can see so of his stuff.

on YouTube. And you can see some of the stuff that he's working on. And it's very cool. So shout out to him. He's like the other guy under the age of 50 who does this stuff. So like this is very like, you know, a lot of emulation of old video games is very much based on like what are people interested in. And it makes sense. Yeah.

Because if you don't care about, I don't know, the Dick Smith wizard, then why would you bother writing an emulator for it? Right. And I think that's a big issue that a lot of these. games have because, you know, a lot of them have these very small production runs. A lot of them were destroyed in, like, the 80s and 90s because there was no real, like, market or aftermarket value for them. You know, God, if I had been collecting arcade machines in the 90s, you could have picked these up for a song, you know.

Yes. I know a friend whose dad used to deal in arcade machines. I think he might still. And he's mentioned that, like, yeah, in the 90s, you couldn't give these. things away. We had like a warehouse full of 70s machines that I wish we still had. They were less than worthless. They absolutely destroyed them. So there's not very many of these around anymore. A lot of them are in private collector hands. And like that's a whole other like scene that yeah, for the most part is not necessarily even online. A lot of these people like

just know each other through old time messaging systems. Right. And if they are online at all, it's through like some sort of quasi-usenet style of thing. Yeah, there's like, there's a Facebook group for Bronze Age Arcades. And I feel like that only has like a small number of the people who are overall there. Yeah, there's a Discord too, but that's like, seriously, it can't be more than 40 members on that Discord. So like, yeah, you have this very like niche number of people who are interested and they don't necessarily have the right skill set to like translate these into something software. or through FPGA. And there are a couple of people doing that.

Like a guy, a guy who goes by the name of Jimmy Stones, who I think you know about. Yeah, he's a, he's a Mr. developer and he's done, he's got several projects that are like TTL based in varying stages of completion, but even he's run into the dilemma of, okay, are these schematics accurate to the machine? Right. Where can I find, like, video? footage of it running or like images of the boards and like so I know he has several that are

near ready to release but he hasn't released them because he's not sure if they're actually accurate yet so he's trying to get that information together I think clean sweep is one of the ones he's working on clean sweep was one of them he sent me a list a while ago it's pretty extensive but does he uh does he have a patreon I don't think so maybe he does that should be if he does that should be plugged. He can be the Jotago or Hotego. I don't know.

He's Spanish. He can be that, but for the 70s. Right, right. But, yeah, like, I know it's just been the most recent years, like past four or so, that, like,

microprocessor-based games that had analog sound technology have really started, like, getting another pass on maim and have started getting that more accurate. Right. Because, again, a lot of these were made in dumps from the 90s that were not, they were not done with the accompanying technical information that you'd want today. Right.

Even on top of that, there are microproscer-based games that aren't dumped because they're super rare and hard to come by now. Like, we mentioned PT109 from Mirko Spitfire from, it was Innovative Coin who did Spitfire. I had to look that up. I had never even heard of them until now. And I... Fly by night. Look up this stuff. Yeah.

And then there's games from like big companies like, you know, SNK is a whole thing now. And they got their start in the 70s with breakout clones. They had like three of them. And I think only one's dumped. And Yosaku, which is a funky game where you're like chopping down trees. And it was pretty much unavailable to play in any form up until what last year? when the cassette vision, the epoch

cassette vision finally unemulated and now you can play their unlicensed clone of Yosaku. Yes. But that was a very popular game and you can't play it. Yeah. And there are, it'll be, this is like one of the

most fascinating ones to me is Sega's heavyweight champ. Oh yeah, that game is so, you can find footage of this because, uh, like news reporting has been digitized and like posted online. I don't know how you'd find it necessarily, but there are stories about

video games, and they have, like, footage of heavyweight champ in there. Yes, from this company called SIGA, as they call it in the news report. And, yeah, I mean, that's the first time, like, any footage of that game has surfaced. It's like a fighting game.

Yeah, right, exactly. And you have these very odd-looking controls. I don't even know how they would work. They look like, I don't know, they just look like these weird handles that, You're supposed to move up and down to, like, shift where your fists are. And the way that they do, like, your fighter getting woozy and falling over is, like, this weird, like, wavy technique thing that they do, which I'm sure is just pulse width modulation. But damn, it looks cool. It's not something you could do, like, digital circuitry, at least not at the time.

No, not well. Not well at all. Yeah. But, like, it works really well here, and it's a very cool game. I've never seen like an actual machine, and I'm not even sure if there are any actual machines of this left. I mean, again, if they are, it's one of those weird old collector hermits, you know, that really only talks to themselves. And these older collectors really tend to keep their cards close to their chests. They don't reveal a whole heck of a lot.

Yeah, there was a, there was some years ago. I was trying to track down someone who had a, an RCA coin arcade, because in 1975, RCA was exploring doing a microprocessor-based arcade machine that had sort of the sort of the same basic concept as the Neo Geo where games would come on cartridges. You just swap them out. With the 1802? 1801. Yeah.

Two-chip implementation before the 1802 came along. And they made six of these cabs and a couple of them still exist because I've talked to some folks I know in like the that are old-time coin arcade machine collectors. And they're like, oh, yeah, someone has that. I don't remember who. But I can see you. I can track that down. They could not.

But it's okay. I don't want to delve into it too deep, but I think I've got a lead on something related to it. Crossed my fingers. So, but yeah. Crossed my fingers for you. But yeah, you can. It is emulated based on the schematics and like what we know about, you know,

It's sister machines like the RCA Studio 2 and et cetera. But it would be cool to be able to check that against the real hardware. Right. And, you know, get more of the games dumped. But all this to say, you know, like you kind of hit the nail on the head earlier when you're talking about building interest. And it's hard to do that because there's not a lot that's out there. But there is one way.

And that is to just, I would go on like K-L-O-V, right, and look up just by you. year, see what company looks interesting that made a bunch of weird games, and go on YouTube. There's not a lot, but what's there is pretty cool to look at and can hopefully, like, wet your whistle for, like, wanting to see more of this, somehow. And I don't know whose door you would knock down to do that. Maybe start with Atari. they've certainly been doing a better job being curators of their

library. Yeah, I made a note in here that there's not a lot of like commercialization of any of these games anymore. No, no. Even ones where the ownership is very straightforward, like, Taito's still around. Midway, like Warner owns

Midway. Atari still exists as a thing. Namco still exists. So like, these are all companies. They're, that could ostensibly reissue these games. And they could probably finance people to do a very good job of it if they saw reason to do so. Oh, gosh.

Just getting two-player computer space out there would be lovely. I would love that. But according to the Video Game History Foundation's game availability study, only 0.89% of games from 1975 to 1979 were currently commercially available. when their report came out. And that was basically through the Atari 50 collection and the Space Invaders Invincible collection. And the rate for 70 to 74 was statistically zero other than Pong.

So we can't rely on the companies to do this. Right. It's real dire. It kind of reminds me a lot of the silent film world, which is kind of one of my other big passions, which I know you share as well. You know, a lot of silent film is just gone. You're not getting it back. Yeah.

I think it's like 80% was the last, was the most recent figure estimate for silent films lost. I mean, I don't think you're in that big of danger when it comes to this. For instance, circuit boards aren't as volatile as nitrate, which is nice. They're not going to burst into flame on you. No, no. They might rust. But so I would say that it's not as urgent as silent film, but I think it's as close as you could get without being that. And I do think that there is some degree of urgency that needs to happen, especially as people, the people who made these machines are not getting younger.

They're getting a lot older. And so those people are, uh, we, we, We're losing that wisdom there about these games and how they worked and how they were presented. And the way they work is just not something that's – I mean, when I learned how they worked, I just sort of brute forced it, you know. I made myself learn. And, you know, the schematics are things you kind of have to find. And some of them are easier than others.

There's only so many copies out there. I mean, for Atari, it's a little bit easier. but for some other ones, like Ramtech baseball, I hunted literally for years to find a copy of the schematic for that. And I finally found it on a random auction house website for 30 bucks. And I scoop them up. And now they're online for everybody. So do your part.

Support your local electronics nerd. Buy old schematics and give them to people to scan. That's my advice to all of you. If you want more than any of these things, if you want more reading about any of these things, obviously you can find YouTube videos. I know one source that I always really liked is that I think Jeremy Parrish himself was one of the people who ripped these history of video games laser discs that came out in Japan and there's one for Taito and one for Namco I don't remember if there's any others but they were the first two Japanese video game companies so unsurprising that'd be early but they have some like direct capture video footage of these 1970s games and that's really cool to see and see it. very good quality, especially because I have never seen a Western

gun machine running, and I don't know if I ever will. But now I can at least see, like, how it plays and how it differs from gunfight, the like U.S. adaptation of that game. But also, you know,

Ed Freeze got mentioned at Fries. I'm not sure how he pronounced his name, but he has a website at frize. dot WordPress.com, where he has several blog posts. about repairing some of these machines. It would be computer space, gotcha, Starship 1, and Grand Track 10.

And that's a very good way to dive into, like, all the issues with troubleshooting these machines and getting them to work again, decades later. Those blog posts are so cool. They're so inspirational to me. They were great. And I feel like I should have tapped him for this at some point. It would have been fun.

Yeah. That well. Yeah, no. And the other good one I wanted to point out is all in color for a quarter, which is, you know, no spaces dot blogspot.com. And this is a blog that historian Keith Smith ran for several, several years. And he's really done a ton of research into the history of 1970s and 80s video games. And he's had quite a few posts on there about these topics. It's like these minor players, fly-by-night companies.

or even the bigger ones like Exidy and Ramtech and Midway. So, like, it's a great resource. He wrote a book that he has not yet gotten published. I don't know where that's at. It's absolutely massive. I have a copy of the manuscript and the doc file takes a good, like, 40 seconds to load on my computer. That's how long it is.

But, like... It's killing me that that book isn't released. But, like, he's interviewed people who, you know, have died because he started doing this back in the 90s before any of these people were passing away. So it's a fantastic resource. I definitely hope he gets it out in some form or another. Absolutely. Yeah, because the blog posts are so tantalizing. I would love a more thorough read into that. It deserves it. Those people deserve their due. Mm-hmm. So I think in the end, like, check out these games. If you can find

them somewhere. You should try playing them. It's an experience you probably won't find really anywhere else. And if you don't have that opportunity, at least you know, check them out. Look them up, look up some videos, look up some flyers, read about them. They're cool.

And I really want more people to understand just like how neat they are in their own unique way. Yes. So I guess we can just call it there since we're almost out of time. So this has been Retronauts. It's a Patreon-supported show. You can support us at patreon.com

slash Retronauts. And at the $3 level, you get each episode one week early and at a higher bit rate. And at the $5 level, you also get access to our Friday bonus episodes, weekly columns by Diamond Fight, as well as the Retronauts Discord server. So that's a pretty great deal. And I highly recommend you follow suit as I have. And I believe Nate has in back it. I'm a member. And Nate, where can we find you on the internet? I can be found on Blue Sky and Mastodon under the Fostodon server at Nathaniel Lockhart,

just all one word, and that's I-E-L Lockhart and H-A-R-T. I do a little podcast called The Memory Machine and talk about old pop culture stuff from there was one we did about the history of screens. from going from the 1800s all the way up to stuff from 10 years ago and everything in between. Don't update it much. I have two young kids. It makes it very hard.

In fact, I think I did like one this year. But I got two recordings scheduled this month, getting back at it, baby. So I have that. There's also the website for it, Memory MachinePod.com, which has show notes to my podcast as well as blog entries for the builds that I have done and some of the work that I've done on 70s arcade games. from the book. And if you want to join me in my craziness, I have put schematics, corrected schematics for the video generation board from the David

L. Heisman book. They're on my GitHub, along with PCB fabrication files. So if you want to send them to the PCB fab of your choice, I use JLC PCB. You can make those. and, you know, descend into madness with me. And, yeah, that's everything. So where can folks find you, Benj? Yeah, you can find me at Benj Edwards on X, which kind of sucks these days, but also at Benj Edwards on Blue Sky or Mastodon.

And I am, you know, writing stuff for Ars Technica all the time, AI thing. So you can find me there or check out Vintagecomputing. old blog, which I occasionally update every once in a while. And, hey, I did a book that's out this year about the Virtual Boy on MIT Press. And you should go check it out. It's called Seeing Red. Very cool. That's pretty rad. You know, it's hard to get a book out through MIT Press. So you should be extremely proud. Yeah, thank you. It's mostly Jose Zagal's doing. He got the contract first and then invited me along for the ride. That's cool. As you can tell I like obscure and weird video game experiences. And that's one of them. The virtual

boy, you know, it's great. I'll say. That's why we wanted you on here, right? Yeah, thanks, man. And as for me, you can find me on the internet as a ubersaurus. Mostly on blue sky nowadays. I'm occasionally checking in on Twitter, but I try not to for my own So I own mental health. Yeah. I also run the Atari Archive YouTube channel and website and Patreon. You can find the YouTube on YouTube.com slash Atari Archive and Patreon.com slash Atari Archive. And the website is Atari Archive.org.

And I also have a book under the same name that's published through limited run games. It's also available on Amazon. And I talk about a fair number of these 1970s. arcade games in the context of their Atari 2,600 ports. So if this subject seems interesting to you, check my stuff out. And I know you've done podcasts, episodes on TTL games as well. So that might be some additional listening if you find the topic irresistible. Yes.

That's right. That's right. And with that, I bid you all a good day. Have a good night. Thank you.