Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 219: Classic console hardware design, Pt. 1

Episode Date: May 13, 2019

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, and Flip Grip design engineer Mike Choi talk about the most beautiful and memorable game console designs through the years. Even though podcasts, uh, aren't exactly a visual medium.

This week in Retronauts, everyone needs to get a grip on this console hardware. Hi, everyone. Welcome to this latest episode of Retronauts. And this week, we are going to talk about my original topic title has been voted off the island. We are not talking about hardware porn. We are talking about our affection for ogling video game hardware. It's hardware porn. And joining us this week, making his retronauts debut is none other than... Mike Choi.

Hello, Mecha Choi. Mecha Choi. Make a Choi. Introduce yourself. Why are you here? I am here because I love video game hardware. Jeremy, I just recently worked together on the flip grip, and I'm the engineer and designer and designer behind it. And, yeah, I'm just here to talk about all these beautiful consoles and how much I love touching them and feeling them. Oh, boy. I was going to say, look, but don't touch boys.

So as you listen to this episode, we're going to ask you to close your eyes and place your hand in this bowl. what is this? Is it eyeballs? No, it's actually... Spaghetti. No, it's mouse ball. Oh, mouse trackball. Mouse balls? That would have been soaked in, I don't know. Anyway, yes. So we're going to talk about game hardware. Also, talking about it with us this week.

Hey, it's Bob Mackey. Oh, that guy again. Yeah, I'm back. All right. So, yeah, I guess this is a little bit of a weird idea for an episode. I mean, I think it's an interesting idea and a fun idea. It was Mike's suggestion. But it is going to, we are going to be talking about, the physical appearance and like tactile aspect of

classic video game hardware and we're going to be doing it entirely through an audio medium. So that's a little weird. So we'll see how this goes but I've prepared notes and I don't know why I am holding this up for everyone because you can't see it because it's audio. Grab the smoothest

piece of plastic in your house and just pet it gently while you listen to us. But not every piece of hardware on here is smooth. A lot of it has like a matte texture and we're going to be talking about that. We're going to be talking about the appearance of these systems, the design, the aesthetics, the evolution of, you know, like within a family and iteration and that sort of thing. But also when possible, talk about the tactile aspects and, you know, the plastics used and little things like that, which are

very subtle but are very, very important to the overall feel. Like, you know, you look at a third-party controller and it looks the same as a Sony-made controller or Nintendo controller, but it doesn't feel as good, and why is that? It's because of the materials and because of the engineering. And Mike being an engineer who works with materials is someone who can talk about that and maybe explain why, I don't know, the original SG-1000 control pad was so bad. Yeah, part of my background is in plastics manufacturing, and so most recently with the flip grip, I was just showing Bob and Jeremy before this podcast, all the engineering drawings for the flip group and specifying how the plastic should feel. There's like very specific

You know, nomenclature for how plastic should be and, you know, how you had to make it look a certain way. And so I'm excited to start talking about that. And, of course, just the overall aesthetic of all these different systems is really interesting to see how they evolve. So what is some of the nomenclature? Like, what are some terms used to describe plastic? Or do you want to wait until we get to some of these systems? Yeah, just really quickly there, as you can imagine, with something like plastic, it's kind of difficult to describe. You think of matte or shiny, but there's actually a.

organization called the Society of Injection Moulders or something like that. And they have a... Is it like the stone masons? Yeah, something like that. So they have this big old swatch that you can buy, and it's all these different classifications, like SPIA1. SPIA1 is really shiny, by the way. And then they have SPI D3.

That's very matte. And, you know, so you'll see a lot of logos made out of something really shiny when everything else is mad. That's how the flip grip is. And you'll see a lot of Nintendo stuff. If you look at the Nintendo Doc for the Switch, it's all matte with the logos being real shiny. And so when you're making a product, you'll specify all those different things, and it can really affect how the product feels and how it looks in different lighting and stuff like that.

So the terms aren't things like lustrous. It's more like technical designations, codes, and things like that. Right. Because you're having these things manufactured, you need to have like a common vocabulary between, you know, the U.S. and China, whoever it is that's making it, that you can say, okay, we're going to make it with this texture. This specific surface is going to be this texture. And so you'll see on the outside, if you've ever taken apart of GameConcy, you'll see the outside is a specific texture and very, very well paid attention.

When you open up the inside, it looks really ugly. Crappy, yeah. That's because it's not a cosmetic face, and so they'll designate that. Right. So it's kind of like this society swatch thing is kind of like pantone swatches. Exactly. It's exactly like that. Like you go to the hardware store and you have all these. different swatches of paint and everything is sort of uniform.

Right. And to get even kind of a little bit more into the inside baseball of it, there's different ways that they'll apply. So there'll be two matte textures that look really similar. But then one of them is made by electrifying the surface or by painting on some sort of chemical that it'll dissolve the surface or even just shooting sand, little beads of sand at the surface. And so there's all these different specifications for how these different systems and different surfaces feel.

I didn't know my plastic. was tortured before release. Oh, yeah. Yeah, most plastics actually violate the Geneva Convention. Oh, boy. It's terrible. So, yeah, that's actually really interesting. Do you personally have a favorite kind of plastic

or, like, one you aspire to use in a project someday? Hmm. I really, really like PCABS, which is polycarbonate and adenoine butinine styrene. It's a really long scientific name, but ABS is what Legos are made out of, and polycarbonate is what, like, clear plastic. glass made out of, and you can actually mix them together to get different properties. It's really cool. If you want to be stiffer, you add more polycarbon.

If you want to be looser, you make it more like ABS. It's a really, really fun material to work with. Okay. Yeah. And you can get it in all sorts of colors, which is the best part. And, you know, the manufacturing and formulation of plastics has evolved over, you know, the past 50, 60 years. And, you know, the plastics that they used in things in the 60s, 70s, 80s are very different and the kinds of plastics they use now.

And I guess maybe with game consoles, you don't notice quite so much because they're not meant to be, like, handled a lot. I mean, I guess handholds are. But, you know, with things like action figures, the very brittle plastics they used for old GI Joe's or Star Wars figures, they don't use those anymore. Everything is softer, so, like, you know, characters don't lose their thumbs and things like that.

Right. So, yeah, there's a lot of science that goes into materials. And I don't know how much of that we're going to get in. into in this episode. But, you know, like every aspect of a game console is considered, and it's not just the innards, the technology and the chips and things like that, but also the materials on the outside and the presentation it gives. And, you know, people have a very specific impression of something like the Nintendo

GameCube because of the very specific design choices they made with the manufacturing. And that system gives you a very different impression than something like the PlayStation for. So the design and plastics are all part of that. And we'll talk about that to some degree. Although, just for the sake of keeping things sane and reasonable, we are not going past 1999 with any of these systems because there's plenty of systems to talk about it. We're just talking about Japanese systems this time, actually. Mainly just because there's so many old game consoles. If we didn't set some boundaries, then it would be an impossible sprawl. Well, everything from Japan is good and also better than anything else.

That's absolutely correct. That's my sincere stance. No, there were some pretty nicely designed American and European consoles back in the day, but it's just I think there's a clearer lineage in Japanese consoles because the American manufacturers didn't really stick around. Microsoft is the only one that's weathered, what, three generations now? So that's a record for an American company. All right. So I have organized this, um,

this list, this rundown, alphabetically by company. Oh, I don't even realize that. I did. And then chronologically within each company. And that way we're going to take it a fair approach. So I know, Mike, you really wanted to talk about Nintendo systems. And we'll get to that. But I don't want to give other companies short shrift because there are some really cool systems

and some really interesting things to talk about with some other manufacturers. So I want to be sure we touch on those. And if we don't make it all the way through this list, well, gosh darn, we'll just have to come back and talk about other systems someday. But we'll see how we go. Yeah, some of my favorites from this list were ones that I had never even heard of before. And so doing research for this show, I was like really, really blown away by some of these that I'd never even seen for. They're really, really cool. I'm excited to talk about those.

All right. Well, we will get to those. Bob, did you have any favorites on here? Um, I actually, there's a lot on here, but I'm trying to see, the one we talked about last night, is that on here? It's a 60 page of Google document. Yeah. What did we talk about last year? I mean, my favorite, there was a whole lot of sake involved.

I don't remember. Yeah, that's true. I mean, in terms of just something to hold in your hands, I think my favorite is the original DSI. I don't know if that's on there. It is not. That's 2009. That's 10 years. Oh, that's right.

We're going up to 89. Can I talk about that for a second? 99. Sure. I mean, it's, I've had every iteration of. game boy game boy color uh game boy advance uh ds i've had i had like four dss and um the ds i is like one of the most solidly built uh things to hold it just feels so good to hold you could throw it through a window and just retrieve it you could kill a man and uh without leaving any scratches

on it and i like the 3d s the modern 3ds is fine but my 3dxel like if i hold it and sort of twist my hands i can hear creak and like protest but the ds i just is the most solid thing to hold in your hands. It just feels so good. Yeah, it is one of my favorites, for sure. The matte texture on it. Yeah. So beautiful.

Yeah, for some reason with 3DS, Nintendo is like, glossy. Glossy's great. Everyone loves to see their fingerprints. I don't get that. The DSI, yeah, it had a nice matte texture, like a very coarse finish. So it felt really firm in your hands. Like you didn't worry about your finger slipping on it. And originally it shipped in this sort of like very peaceful,

blue color. It was not a very kind of like GameCube. It was not like a macho, cool color. Yeah, there's black, but there was also blue, but not like black and blue as a bruise. It was more like the Bondi blue that that Apple used on its old IMAX. It was very similar to that. And I don't know, for me that was perfect

because I played, I imported Dragon Quest 9 from Japan and was playing on that, and it's like the same blue as slimes. Yeah, that's good. Everything's perfect here. Yeah, I mean, that system was a weird evolutionary dead. I mean, that system was a weird evolutionary dead. for the DS and it also

added region locking to the system which sucked but it was just it was such a satisfying thing to have in your hands even though it was not very ergonomic it just felt so solidly made yeah my favorite part of the DSI is the LEDs their choice of the colors on the LEDs when you have the wireless

because it was the first time they had wireless and then they had the charging and they had the I think it was the powers I forget what the other third LED was but it was so beautiful with all those on and the system in your hand Oh, it's one of my favorites. You know what I really miss?

And for LED design is the way Apple did their LEDs like 15 years ago, where it was like a white LED. And when you put it to sleep, it would pulse. And it mimicked the rhythm of someone breathing while they're asleep. Totally. I don't know why they stopped doing that because it was so great. It was just like maybe it was too creepy for some people. Like Dreamcast is thinking.

Macintosh is breathing. Now what? When do they start killing? Well, with the DSI, they also moved the power button because I remember. remember on the original DS and DS light, the power button was a thing you could easily hit that it was on the side of the console. Like you would slide it up. It was a slider.

Yeah, terrible idea. And it was like opposite the volume slider. Yeah, yeah, not a great idea. But the power button was just sort of like the starter select button and just a button that is out of the way. You wouldn't accidentally hit it. I do prefer the DSI Excel because of the huge screens, like playing, especially like super NES ports,

like Shear and the Wanderer. It's just like having the... this beautiful, portable Super Nintendo in your hands. And I really loved the screens on that thing just because they were so huge and impractical for 2D graphics. But my goodness. But, yeah, I admit the actual physical, the tangibility of the DSI Excel was not as good as the DSI.

Yeah, I do feel that is the best-built Nintendo handheld period. I mean, it's got weird features that no one really used, but in terms of just the design in the physicality, it's number one for me. Yeah, and the DSI Excel is really interesting because it felt like immediately they were marketing it towards a different audience with the color choices, that like wine red, that was really classy. That's like one of my favorite color guys.

Yeah, it's so beautiful. Yeah, and it's crazy. They shipped it in this huge box. Like when we first got it and opened it up at one up, it was like having a video game laptop. It was such a huge system, and it shipped in this gigantic box where it was just like, I'm, like,

I think my roommate had a Vio that was smaller than the TSIXL. Yeah. All right. But anyway, we'll get to DSI someday. But not this, this time. We're going to jump into Bandai, which alphabetically is the first company to have any kind of staying power in the console space.

Although we didn't really get much in the way of Bondi consoles over here, and one might argue that we didn't miss out on much. But the first system they created was Pladia, which I screwed up in my notes. It was a 1994 system, not a 2004 system, and only came out in Japan. Now, this is a really strange little system.

It's very much part of that CD-ROM boom of gaming, and the whole thing is kind of built around a CD interface. But for some reason, they went really playful with it, and the top of the shell is a very deep sort of, I don't know, like afternoon sky blue. And then the bottom is sort of a leaf green. And it has a sort of a sort of, sort of slot where you place the control pad, which is more like a remote control, and it's

a wireless infrared remote. So there's an IR port on the front of it. I admit I've never actually used this myself. So I can't speak to the physical aspect of it. You know, it reminds me of like on the airplane seats when that controller comes out of the armrest. Yes. That's what that reminds me of. I'm sure the wireless is not very good, but it's sort of ahead of its time to have wireless out of the box when that would be a feature in five to seven years for most other consoles. Unfortunately, this was infrared, so that's bad. Nothing can get in front of that beam

or you're screwed. And also if you turn on lights in your living room, then you're in trouble. Yeah, one thing that I'm really curious about, because I've never handled one of these either, is like how is that controller held in place? Is it, there doesn't look like there's an apparent clicking mechanism. There's like a little tiny bump in there, if you look, on the left side. And I

think it probably isn't like super secure, but it keeps it from just like casually falling out. So it's like a tiny little notch. Kind of like what you used for the secure mechanism in the flip group, actually. Bringing it back. That's right. Bringing it in a full circle.

Yeah, I don't have any real experience with the system, so I can't speak to its quality. But it didn't really have games. It was more like the CDI where it had a few game applications, but it was mostly meant as a multimedia device. Was that where that Mega Man full motion video game came from? No, that was actually a PlayStation and Saturn game. A Mega Man, Rockman, the Adventure. Yeah. Super Adventure Rockman, that's what it was.

Yeah, that was on more mainstream platforms. But this was like educational software and anime and that kind of stuff. And I don't think it did that well. It certainly didn't come to the U.S. The main reason I wanted to put it on this list is because as a fun piece of trivia, when we were trying to come up with a name for OneUp.com, we looked at just this list of available domain names that had play or game in them, and one of them was Pladia.

And I was like, I can't believe pladia.com is available when that was the name of a console. And we need to buy that so we can, you know, lock down the Pladia fan base. And I came up with a mascot character, Pladia Platypus, that would have been the website's mascot. But they went with OneUp.com and say, can you believe it? And now look where they are now. I know. Out of business. And everyone who worked for them is now shamed.

Everyone who worked for them is pretty much moved on to better things. One interesting thing about the Plady that I saw on a YouTube video. that I was watching is that there was some other arcade cabinet that Bandai released that they just, if you open it up, it's just a plaudia just bolted to the inside. So they're going to show you about the industrial design of this console

is hidden inside of another arcade cabinet. It's like nesting dolls. Bandai's second system that they created was a collaboration with Apple called the Atmark or the Atworld, depending on which region you were in. And this was a terrible system. It was also a multimedia

system, but the idea was basically to create a console that was like a miniaturized Power Mac. Well, you know, if you want to make up miniaturized computer system into a console, that's not a bad idea, but maybe don't go with the one that's known for not having any good games. There are a few interesting little footnotes with the Pippin. Messiah Matsura, the guy who created Parapa Therapa, had a game on there, which Chris Kohler could probably tell you all about. I cannot. We talked about that on the Parap episode from four years ago.

So you can check that out. We went through his game history. And then also Bungee published their first console game on here, which was an adaptation of the first two marathon games. It was called Super Marathon. And from what I understand, it never actually shipped a retail. And, like, it's apparently super rare. If you can find a boxed copy of it, it's, like, crazy expensive. Could you only order it from Bandai or Bandai?

Or like through a catalog? I think you could only order the games, like Mac catalogs sold Pippin games for like a very short window of time until they were like, whoa, that's a bad idea. But the physical design of this thing is it's basically a consoleized pizza box style Mac from that era. If you look at the Power Mac, 6,100, 7100, or an LC model from that era, it's very similar. Apple had a, they had what they called the snow white design language, which was kind of their guideline for hardware physical design in the 80s and into the 90s. And this is very much along those lines. It's very sort of clean lines with just a little bit of curvature to it and a little bit of, you know, a little bit of flare. But the real telltale signs is on the back of the console, it's got just this grid of dot.

Like, that's very much in keeping with what the PowerMax looked like around the time that this shipped. So, yeah, that controller looks, it looks good, but it looks really uncomfortable to hold. It looks like the controller Sony was going to create for the PlayStation 3 until everyone was like, that battering is stupid. The silver battering. Yep, yeah. So this is the white battering. Is it a trackball in the middle? It's not a trackball.

It's like a, it's kind of a D-pad, but it's, it's kind of a D-pad, but, it's, you know, 360 degrees. Is it clicky? I don't know. I've never actually used it. I've never seen this or touched one. But anyway, this was a huge failure. It only sold like 40,000 units and is best forgotten.

The most successful system that Bondi ever shipped was the Wonder Swan, which was designed by Gunpei Yokoy. We've had a full episode on the Wonder Swan, so we don't need to belabor the point. But the hardware design of it, I think, really gets to the spirit of what Yo Koi was trying to do with the system. Have you guys ever actually used a Wonderswan? No. In fact, when we did that episode, I don't know when that was, but I was trying to find...

It's been like three years. It's been a while. I was trying to find videos of Wonderswan games on YouTube just to see what they look like, and your videos were the only ones. There are some out there. I'm sure in the passing years, there have been more, but I was surprised by, like, the total lack of Wonderswan video online, but, yeah. Yeah, Wonderswan was designed to be an inexpensive competitor to Game Boy.

It was designed to basically beat Game Boy at its own game in terms of pricing. So it was like very low-powered. But it was more powerful than Game Boy. It was like a 16-bit system. But it was black and white, passive Matrix LCD. It was meant to sell for like $40 or $50. But it's a very, an odd little system. It's actually wider than it looks here in this photo.

But it has this sort of ambidextrous design, not quite ambidextrous, but it's rotatable. Like before flip grip, there was the. The Wonder Swan, and this was actually the best system to play vertical shooters on because it has like two sets of D-pads, so you can play it horizontally or vertically. But the plastics are very lightweight. It's meant to, it's not meant to feel cheap exactly, but you can definitely tell that they did not put anything to waste in this. Right.

It's very, very lightweight. The system is very slim and kind of awkward because there's a battery compartment on the back that actually bulges out. And that's something we'll see in a few other handhold systems. Yeah, I thought that was interesting that the battery is, is this the one where the battery is inside of the battery cover? So if you lose that battery cover, you can't put the battery in the system? I don't think so.

You know, I've never actually really paid attention. I just, like, stick the battery in and go. But one interesting thing is that the system does not have a traditional headphone jack. Nintendo would steal this idea for the Game Boy Advance SP, and everyone hated it. But you have to have like an adapter that plugs into this multi-purpose slot. A dongle. Yep.

Yeah, I loved all the different colors that you can find for the WonderSwan. That was really, really cool. Different colors of the chassis and different colors of the buttons. Like they did the, there's like a Digimon special edition one that was a clear orange, which I know you like, Jeremy. Right. Well, what I had back in the day was a classic WonderSwan, like original black and white, that was sort of a translucent green.

And it kind of like was the shape and size and cream. curvature of a bar of Irish spring soap. And if you cut it open, it would start foaming. Exactly. There's like a leprechaun. It was like, oh, yeah, I feel fresh and clean as a whistle. I've never held one, but it only takes one, uh, double A battery, which is great because I remember, I forget which

Game Boy iteration had this, but it had like the the battery baby bump where it was like, it's pregnant with batteries. Yeah, there's a couple. Yeah, and it was always, that kind of ruined the aesthetic, you know. Well, this does have kind of a bulge where the battery compartment is. But it's not too bad. Yeah, it's only one, one little battery. Um, but it's

interesting because the plastics on this, like the physical design of it didn't really change that much through the iterations, but there was this Wonder Swan, then the Wonder Swan color that added a color screen, obviously, and then the Swan Crystal, which added just a better quality screen. It didn't really do much else beyond that. But the plastics change with each one. Like the original Wonder Swan's plastics are very sort of a, like a dull matte texture, and I think they wanted to focus mostly on the clear plastics because that was, you know, the 90s. Everyone did that. By the time you get to the Wonder Swan's, crystal, it's like very sort of hard plastic, very slick, and like, you know, I don't know

how you describe hardness of plastic, but it's not like the original Wonder Swan is soft. It just has, I don't know, like a different feel in the hands. It doesn't have that slick, hard, glossy plastic feel that the Swan Crystal does. Yeah. How does that work exactly? I mean, I haven't held one of them. I was looking at a bunch of different wonder swans, and obviously there's tons of different colors. I wonder if you're thinking of kind of like the coating that they can sometimes put a coating on top of the plastic

or just by texturing it and makes it feel very different. Was the geometry different between the swan and the crystal? Very slightly. I think the crystal might be a little larger, but they're very similar. They have that kind of weird bulge at the bottom. Yeah, I like that. I really like that. And I love that it's flippable.

Like, that's if you can imagine a time before the flip grip. I mean, this is so cool that you can rotate on its side. I like that all the buttons are the same. Dev's had a little trouble finding good uses for that. They would just, like, randomly in the middle of an action game, put in a stage where you had to rotate the system. And it didn't make the game any better. The Mega Man game for the system is the one that really sticks out of my memory.

Rockman and Forte Challenger from the future. It was like a really bad Mega Man game developed by Bondi, not by Capcom. Was it a gun pay game also rotated? Yes, you played that whole thing rotated, which made sense. But the Mega Man game, you'd mostly played in horizontal mode, but then occasionally you'd come into an area, and it was just like, oh, you have to turn the screen sideways now. And it was bad and stupid.

So that's, you know, like sometimes you put a feature there, and instead of people making good use of it, they're just like, I guess we've got to do something with it. It was the blowing into the mic of its era. Yes, exactly. When did Gunpei Yokoy design the Wonder Swan? Was that after he had left Nintendo? It was after he left Nintendo and started his own company, Koto, I think.

And obviously, before he passed away. So there was like a one-year window in there. And I don't know if he saw the design of it all the way through because it launched like two years after he died, a year and a half. But it was definitely like his vision for it. You can see Oyokoi all over this system. Yeah, it's really, really cool. They also had that Final Fantasy limited edition one, right?

That was really beautiful. They had a few different Final Fantasy ones. Final Fantasy one, two. two, maybe a four, there might have been a romancing saga, or just a, sorry, just saga, um, Wunders Swan. I can't remember it. There's a lot of limited editions. It was mostly a lot of anime games, though. You know, Bondi, like, had all these licenses. So they were like, let's make Avongelian games and black and white for little kids. Because Ava, you know, that's what the kids love. Yeah. The eight-year-olds.

All right, so moving on to, uh, are we still streaming, by the way. Oh, okay. This is, this is, this is only temporary, so it will disappear in 24 hours. That's fine. I mean, okay. People can enjoy us. Six people are watching now. Sweet.

Four people. Hello, four people. I, you think a, okay, whatever. I didn't tweet it. I just started on my Instagram, so I actually don't know how to tweet it out yet. So next time I'll figure that out. All right. So moving on to NEC, which is best known for the turbographics.

The turbographics started in Japan as the PC engine in 1987 and was very much a, very much in line with the aesthetic of Japanese consoles at the time. It's a very, very tiny system. The controller is the same size as the American Turbographic 16 controller, but the console itself is about one-third the size. Have you guys ever used an original PC engine? No, I had a turbographics, and I know they made it way bulkier for America. Yeah, I love how small.

I was looking at some size comparisons online. It's so cool how small it is. Yeah, I don't know exactly what the thinking was with the PC. engine, but it is so tiny. I mean, it ran on the who cards, which are like credit card size chips with no cartridge on the outside, and there's a slot on there, and the system is not actually that much bigger. It's like, you know, the top of it, it's like two cards put together side by side, and then it's like an inch thick. It's really tiny, and very, very compact. It's white plastic with bright red, a logo on it, a little bit of gray and black. Yeah, I love the

green power switch. Did they do the thing with the power switch where it holds the card in? It looks like it does. Yeah, if you see the little notch there. Yeah. Yeah, Nintendo did that with Game Boy, and there's a few other systems that did that. Right. Yeah, I think they have like a hard barrier there to keep you from pulling an active card out. I really love little pops of color like that. That's like my favorite thing of all these consoles when you see it. It's like a big white console with a little thing of green or a little thing of red. Yeah, I don't know about the green necessarily. It's kind of an odd choice. I don't recall the turbographics having that safeguard for the card when you put it in.

And I'm looking at one now. Yeah, it looks like it does. Oh, it does. Okay, wow. I guess I just have a fuzzy memory of that system. But it is actually like it looks like it just two PC engines stuck together. Pretty much. It's a rectangle instead of a square.

And it's, I bet that's just all empty space just to make it look like a beefy American. Well, the turbogravics is strange because it is like two PC engines put side by side. And then on top of that, there's this dock thing. It goes on the back. Yeah, that's right. That doesn't actually do anything. It's just like, it's just to take up extra space. Like, literally it just exists to make it bigger.

It's really bizarre. And then to use the turbo CD, you take off that connector thing and it exposes ports. Do you know why they did that? Like, with that to convey more value? This was, you know, this was at the same time that Atari came out with the links and did focus testing and people were like, the links is so small. So they made it humongous, like too big to be portable, really, and it's mostly empty air, and it's stupid. And I feel like this came from the same school of design. Maybe they focused tested it with the same group.

Maybe it was the same bad children who were like, I want a big game console, not something that's compact and doesn't take up much space. The links is like a back-to-the-future hoverboard when you're holding it. It's so big. It's gigantic. Yeah, the turbographic is really strange because, yeah, you have that superfluous thing on the back. and then the PC engine or the turbo CD, like, it's bulky and awkward. Like there's this whole cradle thing that the turbographics has to sit on, and then the turbo CD sits on top of that, so it overlaps the system.

It's very strange. That's pretty in elegant. That they would do the thing where they added all this space, it would remind them of, like, you know, with cheap knockoff electronics, how sometimes manufacturers will put just like billets of metal on the inside, inside to make it feel like it has more value. I guess that's kind of what they were going for with the turbographics. The other is an interesting thing about

the PC engine is, as you scroll down and look at all of the different iterations that it went through, it's like morphing into all these things. It looks so painful. I feel so bad for the cute little PC engine in the beginning one. Right. Well, I mean, the first thing, the CD-ROM 2, I think, kind of makes sense because you basically

put it on a tray side-by-side with a CD-ROM extension. It's like a bento box of video game hardware. Yeah, and then there's an interface unit is what it's called that plugs into the back and creates the connections and I think it shares a single power adapter

which is something Sega really should have done so yeah it's a I love the way that this whole thing looks when you put it together it must make you feel like you're some kind of like engineer or some kind of like fighter pilot or something like that. Yeah the design of the CD-ROM 2 is really like it's very late 80s

I can't think of any other way to describe it it's just like white and then the The CD-ROM portion is sort of a raised semi, like very flat hemisphere. Yeah. And part of it is just glossy black with stuff printed on it. It says very, you know, like, I am very high tech. Yeah. And they redesigned the PC engine to be the core graphics two, which was basically the same thing but in gray.

And then they redesigned the whole setup. So there was a smaller CD-ROM unit instead of sitting side by side. with the original PC engine model. The, what is it, the CD-ROM, I can't remember what it's called, a super CD-ROM. Like, it's, it kind of docks. It's like, it's like, it's like.

Don't make it sexual. No, no. I'm thinking like, you know, like a James Bond escape vehicle or something. It's like you're, you know, the CD-ROM and the core docked together. If it gets blown up, then the core unit escapes. and that's how your games get away. But I don't know, I really like the design of this. It's a sort of medium gray plastic with bright orange text on it,

but I don't know, like it has this kind of very distinct design, and I love the way the core unit plugs into the front. I don't know how practical that is, but would you ever need to detach them? Probably not, but it just seems very compact and very elegant compared to pretty much any other CD-ROM add-on that I can think of. like CD-ROM add-ons were always very cumbersome and awkward and this one actually feels kind of nice

it's kind of sensible the PC engines I can talk about most are the duo systems because I've actually had those and those are great those are all-in-one units that had the CD-ROM and the PC engine you know the cards all together and the first one was a dark gray it's got those color pops you like it's got a little

lavender power button I love that. I love that. That's the eject button. And then the power button is the same green as on the original PC engine. But this, yeah, this thing is very, very, it's very sleek. It's very low, and it has, it's kind of like just a rectangle, but then the CD tray rises up from the top,

and it's sort of sloped at a very natural curvature to it. It's very low, slung, very sleek. It seems aerodynamic, I guess. Yeah, one of my favorite parts about the duo is that line that travels up from the power button to the eject button, that, like, squiggly line. I think that that is so cool. It reminds me a tiny bit of the PS4 without the harsh edges. Right, yeah. But then it has that, like, crenellation on the sides that you would see on the super NES.

And I don't know, like, does that actually have a purpose, or is it just aesthetic? I think it's just aesthetic. I mean, the, yeah, that's totally aesthetic. I mean, it kind of looks like a, the reason why things usually look like that are, like, heat sinks, which are trying to increase their surface area to make it so a distance. Right, but I don't think you really need that. Not plastics, no. But it is really cool looking.

Is this the duo the one that had the capacitors that would explode and then, like, leak all over the motherboard and break them? Probably. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of systems that when people kind of refurbish them, they replace the capacitors. Right. Game Gear is one of them and I think, yeah, I think the duo is one of them and the duo R also, which I've got on here. And that's pretty much the same thing

but it's slightly redesigned in white and it's just a beautiful system if you see it in person. I have one of these and unfortunately it doesn't work because I had it modded by someone who did a really crappy job of it. Oh, no. But it loses the crenellation on the sides and kind of replaces that

or like moves the crenellation up to the back of the CD tray. So there's like this ridge on the back Just kind of like It's almost like you know Klingon forehead brow or something Just a little bit up there at the top But it kind of keeps the same overall feel

As the original duo But it's a little more curved And a little, even like a little more aerodynamic It's like you know A 1980s sports car versus the duo's 1970s sports car Yeah it looks like a little car Yeah for sure

Yeah it's I really liked the all-in-one design that they came up with for that. Yeah, it's beautiful. So much better than, yeah, the turbographics. Oof. So the plastics on these, I don't know if you want to talk about that. Have you had a chance to go hands-on with these? I don't think I've ever actually held a turbographics.

Just from looking at it and hearing what we were talking about earlier about the fact that a lot of it is just air, right? It's just like empty air. I'm sure it doesn't feel super great. hand? No, it's, you know, these, well, the turbographics, I don't know, but the, like, the duos, they have a good weighty feel to them. I think they use, like, good, solid plastic, and even though they have a very aerodynamic

look, it's not, like, super slick plastic, it's got just a little bit of tooth to it. It's very subtle, very fine, but I really like the feel of these. Yeah, I think a lot of... They just have lots of nice little details on them. Yeah, I think a lot of that feeling of the plastics, like you were talking about earlier, Bob, is, like, how they support the plastics from the inside. If it creaks a lot, it's not really well supported because either there's a bunch of stuff happening on the inside or they just didn't engineer it with enough support structure. And so I think that can definitely contribute to that as well.

With handhelds, they probably want to reduce weights as much as possible. So taking out some of that support plastic brings the weight down like a gram or two, which probably doesn't make that big a difference in the long run. Yeah, and also to make it small, you have to core out a lot of the plastic to fit the electronics. Right. I'm trying to remember, I had a turbographics, and it lived for 18 months before it just stopped working. But I forget why you took that back cover off. Was it to hook up your AV cables and stuff? And I remember it didn't come off and on very elegantly.

It was just like it felt odd. I think you took that off to put the CD-ROM unit off. That's all it was for? Just the... You know, I can't speak to this as an expert because I did not own... I mean, I should know, but I don't... I didn't play very much of it. But the controller sucks.

We're going to be able to be. And so, I'm going to be. Thank you. So speaking of, you know, So speaking of, you know, handheld's trying to be as compact and lightweight as possible, that wasn't really the case in the old days. They were just like, just, you know, put some video games on the go,

and if it's the size of a giant brick, that's cool. And you really see that in NEC's Turbo Express, which is a really great little handheld. It is actually a PC engine that is a handheld system, and it has a very distinct look to it versus all the other system. It's got the orientation of the Game Boy, but it's got black plastics that are very sort of like a silky kind of, of semi-gloss, satin, I guess, satiny, yeah.

I totally see that. But it's all black. It's like black buttons, black d-pads. But then the little green power switch again. Right. Yeah, it looks like a piece of industrial equipment. Which is interesting because I read that it was used in Enemy of the State as like a, just a prop. Because I guess it looked like a piece of, like, equipment or some kind of, like, secret agent device.

And now it looks like a vertical pit boy, like, from Fallout. Like, you could strap your... Express to your wrist and see how irradiated you are. Yeah, I was about say it looks like a Geiger counter. But this was a fully featured PC engine or TurboGraphics. In fact, there's actually one game that is more fully featured on Turbo Express than it is on TurboGraphics. And I didn't know about this until Alexander Bearer, who is the guy who created the BitBoy. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it basically allows you to save Game Boy camera images to an SD card and then print them off.

or like put them on your computer. He's actually this, you know, just really into handheld technology, obviously. And the game Falcon, which is a flight sim game, he wrote to me this really lengthy email a few months ago talking about how excited he was that I was talking about link cable and stuff like that, because, you know, you could put two PC engine expresses or turbo expresses together head to head to play competitive games. but if you

plugged two systems together playing Falcon instead of being just like a normal head-to-head game you each had your own cockpit perspective which it wasn't obviously possible on the console so instead of just being like a split screen

or something it was you know you had your whole full view of this aerial combat sim so it's like the best way to play the game Falcon for Turbo Express or TurboGraphics is on TurboExpress That's really interesting One other interesting insight about this console

is that it has that threaded insert on the side of it for the TV tuner, which I thought was really interesting. I mean, I don't know how many people got the TV tuner for this thing, but that they had to put that threaded insert inside of the plastic for every single Turbo Express is really interesting. That they felt that's added cost for every single unit that they made, and they have to put that into the plastic. Yeah, but that was a big selling point,

was being able to watch television on the go. Game Gear also had one of those. It was like, wow, you can watch television in your car, And I remember, I forget if it was for the Game Gear TV Tuna or the Turbo Express one, but whenever it was advertised like in a magazine or catalog, it always had a picture of a football player, like a live-action football player. I don't know why they chose football. They landed on football for their...

Because that's what Americans like. Yeah. You'll watch this. But I like that that's there even when you're not using the TV Tuna. I see this giant piece of threaded metal on the side of your console. So the Turbo Express is cool, but the true king of retro handhelds, Without question, is the PC Engine LT, which is the LT stands for laptop. It is the laptop-style PC engine handheld.

It has a built-in TV tuner. It has an external display port so you can plug it into a TV. You can plug it into a CD-ROM unit. Like this is a crazy piece of equipment. It is like this massive flip open. It's like a GBA SP. years before that existed. How big is this thing?

It's huge. I mean, the screen is the same size as on the Turbo Express. So, you know, that's like Game Gear-sized screen. So imagine, you know, that. And it's pretty thick. I mean, you can see the card in here on this photo. Like, it's half the card. So that's, you know, half a credit card exposed right there.

So it's like three credit card side by side. It's bigger than a PC engine, actually. I don't think, this seems very awkward to, I don't think. you're intended to hold it up? It seems like very odd. I don't know where you're supposed to put this thing when you play it. Well, you can play it on the go. Yeah. But then you can also plug it into a TV and it has an external controller port to it. Yeah. So it's basically like a portable game system. It's switch before there was a switch. I mean, this thing was now you're talking my language. Yeah. Like this thing was really, really ambitious. It didn't

sell that well, I think. It was only in Japan. And if you buy one, if you want to buy one now, it's hundreds and hundreds of dollars, maybe $1,000 at this point. Like, six or seven years ago, it's like $500. So I can imagine that it's gotten way more expensive at this point. But it is like, I mean, I would have been all over one of these as a kid. I like that's an amazing piece of. Yeah, I like the hue card is like facing you while you're playing. Is that how that works?

So you know what game are playing. That is really cool. Bonk is like, dude, you got an LT? That's awesome. And the buttons are really low on. Like, if you look at this thing, like it's a GBSP, the buttons are really low on that. And so are you feeling all that weight of the screen

and the electronics kind of like torquing down on you while you're holding this thing in your hands? Yeah, you would think the buttons would be higher up. But you can see the power button, the secure function that it has to hold in cards in this photo because it's actually powered on. But man, yeah, I always wanted one of these. It's so, so impressive.

The Cadillac. But I don't have one of those. Instead, what I do have is a C. Super Graphics, which is not portable. It looks like a G.I. Joe command center. It's a really weird system. It's like, where they go when you're not playing with them. So the base, the center

of the machine is the size of a PC engine, but taller. But then it has these like exterior ribs. It's like an HR Geiger thing. Like I look at this and I'm like, oh, that's like an HR Geiger image or, you know, painting, but they took out the erotic part and replaced it with video games. It looks like it should

be glued to the background of the satellite of love and spray painted. Yeah, the super graphics is really weird. It's got this like this thing in the back where you can plug stuff into it and it's a very powerful system. It's like a PC

engine with full CD-ROM support and capabilities, you know, like you can plug it into a CD-ROM and it can play special games that are much too powerful for the PC engine but there were only five of them. So it's this like really expensive system that can only play five games

that a normal PC engine can't or like a duo. So it's a really strange system, but the design of it is wild. And we're going to post a blog to a company this episode. So if you're listening and being like this is useless to me, go to richor-nots.com and look up this episode's

accompanying blog post, because we'll have all these photos. You know, they're pretty much all Evan Amos photos from Wikipedia, so open source images, but they're all kind of like an isometric, not isometric, but you know, semi-overhead view that shows off the hardware. But yeah,

the weird thing is it has these ribs on the side, and there's what looks like buttons. Right. But these buttons don't function. Yeah. They're just like circles of plastic. They have no action to them. They have no purpose.

It's a weird system. I don't know why they designed it like this. I mean, I imagine it was like, hey, we have to add a bunch of stuff to this, make it look like it does all these different things. It does look like an action figure, like, station. And one thing that I'm wondering about is, like, those four torque screws on the top, those hex screws on the top. Like, I wonder if those are actual, so they're just molded in the, there's a secret for you.

There's an industrial drying trick. if you want to make your thing look more legit than it is mold some screws into it. Well, I mean, the whole thing looks like it's supposed to be some sort of, you know, industrial device. It looks like they were trying to say, you know, this is, you know, heavy machinery right here. And it's not. It's a PC engine that's a little more powerful than usual. But by the time this came out, you know, like the Genesis and Super NES were out. So I don't know what they were thinking.

I love it, though. It's so weird. I imagine that when these came out, a lot of people had, like, really aching fingers. They're trying to, like, open up these different ports. It's like, this must open. I don't think anyone bought these. Like, they only made five games for it.

Why did you buy this? And then the final NEC system is the PCFX, which also kind of looks like an Apple Tower from the mid-80s. Like, I used a quadra at my college that was basically this exact same thing, except this was much smaller. So the PCFX is designed to look like a PC. They called, you know, all their systems,

PC, in Japan, but this was really meant to be, like, modular, upgradable. There's a CD-ROM on the top, and it looks like a flat, you know, computer tower, but the top of it actually opens up as a disk tray. I love the way that this one looks. This one looks so cool to me. And the way that the CD tray opens at the top is, I think, really, really neat. And my favorite part of this whole system is the logo is so cool.

It's like a little tornado. It kind of looks like the next logo. It reminds me of the next logo for some reason. It's such a beautiful logo. Unfortunately, there weren't really that many games for this. It was mostly used for, like, anime applications. And because there was no CD protection on it, mostly the library for PCFX is Smut.

So this is the real hardware porn right here. No one would know you're watching Smut. Would they look how classy it looks? I know, right? Oh, you've got yourself a little computer. I bet you're using that for your database. and you're keeping your recipes for grandma. Yeah, I was a little bit sad when I saw it.

I was like, whoa, this is so cool. And then I was like, oh, all the games for it are... Yeah, nothing. Yeah. All right, so that is NEC, and next alphabetically is Nintendo, and we're going to talk about it after this break. Great. All right, Mike, it's the moment you've been waiting for.

It's time for Nintendo hardware. Yeah. And we're going to start with the best. Their pre-NES dedicated console. Yeah. No, these are actually bad. Yeah. Let's start in the business making Pong clones and similar systems, and these were actually

designed and manufactured by Sharp, and they are very much of their time. Like, they just have that kind of crummy look to them. The plastics are not that great. They look like kitchen appliances. Yeah. Like, there's something about 70s plastic that, like, you see old devices like this or old toys made from, like, mid-70s to early 80s, usually with kind of like a white plastic and a beige plastic and you're just like, ugh, it didn't age well at all.

I feel like it's going to crumble in your hands, sorry? Yeah, I wonder if they had not yet figured out how to, like, make plastic colorful because everything is like beige. No, they had, they had colorful plastic back then. I think it was just, you know, kind of the color styles at the time. Right. Lots of beige and other earth tones. Avocado, harvest gold, rust orange.

We watched all of those 70s commercials for a recent episode, and they are all very beige living rooms. I think, you know, that was just supposed to be, it was in vogue, I guess. So they went beige. But Nintendo redesigned some of its systems with a young artist named Shigero Miyamoto. and he put together their first internally designed console hardware for the Block Kuzushi, their breakout clone, and it's just on a different level altogether. I mean, I'm sure everyone has seen this by now,

but it's an orange all-in-one unit. It has just like a reset button and some selector switches and a control rotary knob on it. And it's just so beautifully designed. I love it so much. I like all of the icons that show you what each game is. is very, it's very, very, the visual communication is very good. Yes.

Yeah. But I mean, just on top of that, the actual hardware design, it's kind of lodgins, lozenge shaped and then extruded, which the word lozange is not very attractive. But in this case, it's very sort of, it kind of reminds me of like a Camaro or something from this area. Totally. Not quite a sports car, not quite a muscle car. It's sort of straddling that line.

Like very no nonsense. clean lines, but also just a little bit of curvature and, yeah, some personality to it. There's a lot of actually ovals that kind of are repeated as motifs throughout this. It's just a very thoughtful design, and it looks nice, and it's bright orange. Yeah, I love that. I really like that motif, like the pill-shaped motif around the buttons, around that black instructional part, and then the whole three-dimensional extruded pill shape, and the color is so amazing. I imagine that the beige

is meant to like blend into the rest of the house, but this thing will definitely stand out. Actually, the orange and black kind of make it look like the General Lee from Duke's of Hazard, and that's unfortunate, but imagine the General Lee with the racist flag replaced by cool

little video game icon. So there you go. That's what you've got here. But this was, of course, several years before Duke of Hazard. So who's ripping off who, I ask you? So moving on to things that people have probably actually seen at some point in their life. Are you guys, have you ever played Game and Watch systems? Yes.

Yep. All right. Game and watch was obviously like a super important moment in video game hardware design. They started out as these like basically simple little credit card size pocket calculator things with very simple buttons. But after a while they invented the D-pad and like the quality really started. I mean the, yeah, like they're. They're just, you can really see design evolution at work with these things. Yeah.

If you compare Ball to Donkey Kong, ball is just this very flat, simple thing, silver, rim by red, with a screen kind of erased on the top, two buttons. I think the interesting thing about Ball, and I could be wrong about this, but that actual front plate is actually not plastic. It's made out of sheet metal that they stamp into that shape, and they kind of put those indentations in it, which is really interesting, because that's like the main piece that you're going to be handling. Yeah, I think it was meant to be, you know, carried in your pocket.

So they probably wanted it to be more durable than plastics could be at that point. Yeah. You know, plastics of this era were they tended to be pretty brittle and pretty easily broken. So I think they, you know, like plastics are a lot more flexible now and can withstand more damage. But I think just for the logistics of having a. a handheld system they wanted it to be metal, so it would be more durable. Yeah, I also just recently

remembered that they reissued the Game and Watch Ball on Club Nintendo. And I thought it would be really interesting to compare one of the reissues with one of the original ones and see how maybe their manufacturing techniques changed over time. But I don't have either. Right. That's difficult.

They're like 40 bucks on eBay. Yeah, but the, you know, the D-Pad was a great invention and And it showed up throughout several of their systems. That wasn't the only interface they used. If you look at the Super Mario Brothers game and watch, which was like 1989, it was one of the last game and watches. It just uses left and right buttons. It doesn't have a D-PAD on it.

So, you know, even though you kind of associate Super Mario Brothers with the NES and with, you know, the D-Pad, that wasn't the best use or best application for that particular game and watch. So that's kind of interesting. But you had a chance to try out the Donkey Kong 3 game and watch yourself, didn't you, Mike? Yes. Can you talk about that? Because that's one of the most interesting systems, but it's also really expensive. It's like a two-person game and watch with them like detachable controllers, semi-detachable. To research for this episode, I went to a game store in San Jose called Games World,

which I saw was like one of the only retro game shops in the Bay Area. And I went and I don't know what I was expecting. I was expecting like this immaculate collection of old video games, but I went in and it was just this Asian dude with like a pile of a bunch of video games in this store with some in these glass cases. And I stayed there for about an hour, just kind of walking around and looking at it. It was a very small, it was like the size of this room, which isn't very large. And the longer I stayed, the more stuff he would bring out that was really old.

And he unlocked this one case and reached all the way back inside and pulled out the micro versus Donkey Kong hockey system. And I was, like, freaking out, because I had never seen one before. And he mentioned that it was very hard. He didn't speak very much English, but he mentioned it was very hard to open up. But he would open it up for me. And he took out these two little controllers that, for me, was a real trip because it's, you can, you know, and looking at all these old gaming watch systems, you totally see the design language coming through in the DS, in the DS days,

and also even with the Nintendo Switch, like this whole idea of the two controllers coming out. And so you can play two-player on the go. that's, like, totally what the switch is doing. So it's really cool to see it manifested in these older systems. Yeah, so you said, you know, the controllers come out. Can you talk about that a little bit? Because I've, like I said, I've never used one of these before, but it looks like it is a almost like a small pill case,

like a purse or something. Yeah, it's like a little makeup. It's like a little mirror, like the way a little makeup mirror case would hinge open. And then it opens up, and then, you know, it looks like two circles next to each other. You open it up, and there's two circular controllers next to each And then there's these little cables that spool up, and you just, I mean, they're just, like, kind of wrapped up on the inside, and you pull them out, and you can play a two-player game of Donkey Kong, and it's really, really, it is so cool to look at. I mean, and just the visual design of it all.

I love how each of the game and watches has, like, its own color. I think the one that the microversus that I was looking at was actually blue. Yeah, that was the hockey. This is, the one in the photo is Donkey Kong 3. Oh, okay, yeah. And so the hockey was also just like this, except it was blue. Right. Yeah, it's just, it's so beautiful.

I love the, I love the color pops. I like that. It's actually a very tasteful use of that, like, beige. Maybe I'm fanboying at this point, but it's like a very tasteful use of that beige against the green. Beige isn't necessarily bad. It's just like, you know, the sharp system that Nintendo made. It's just like a solid, single piece of molded beige plastic,

kind of a sort of slick plastic. And I just, you know, as a kid, I saw this kind of plastic used so much like in the early 80s or leftovers from the 70s and it was just always like they get dirty and you know you look at these recesses and these corners and crap just gets in there and it just looks cheap and filthy

in almost no time whatsoever and the plastic doesn't age well itself so it's good that they got away from that there's nothing wrong with the color beige in and of itself like it can be used tastefully And in an interesting way, it's just this is, you know, the Donkey Kong 3 game and watch is a more interesting use than a solid chunk of cheap-looking beige plastic. Yeah, and the dual screen game and watch is like so trippy to look at. Like I try and think about like what was going through their minds.

They're like, let's put two screens on a hinge and they're going to be separated by this giant bezel rather than making this like one larger screen. I think it's really, really interesting. Well, you know, it was meant to be portable. So they didn't want it to be like a giant screen. They wanted it to be something that you could put into your pocket like a pocket calculator. So it was really meant around that particular language. I mean, obviously with the microversus system that changed, like they clearly weren't going for just like a pocket-sized calculator anymore.

But whenever possible, I think, you know, even all the way through like the Zelda and Super Mario Brothers game and watches at the very late 80s, They really kind of shot for that, slip it in your pocket, and forget about it, kind of design and size. So the Donkey Kong Hockey and Donkey Kong 3 models, the controllers fit inside of the system? Okay, so I guess they are still pretty portable then. Yeah. It's just more work than folding a thing shut to put it away. Well, I mean, to get those in there, you know, they're kind of thick.

Yeah. The system's kind of thick. So it's not like, you know, a pocket calculator or, you know, the traditional game Watch. It's chunky. It's got to be, you know, thick enough to hold two controllers plus the game mechanism on top. And kids wore tiny shorts back then. You're not getting that. You're not getting that

in that back pocket. Yep. I've seen Gamera. I'm wearing shorts right now. They're appropriately sized, though. Yeah. I think it's so cool to see, like, these very practical industrial design elements going all the way back to the game and watch, and you can see just like how they're very, it's very clear

how they're used in the, in modern Nintendo console. Yeah. Like there was a tabletop done in the Colico mini arcade style. That's not that interesting. But, you know, all of this kind of paved the way for Nintendo's move into the console space with the family computer. And the family computer is so different from the NES,

even though they're technically the same inside. And I'm assuming you guys have actually gone hands-on with a Famicom at some point. Oh, yeah. Have you ever used one of the original Famicombs with the square buttons? I didn't know about that until very recently. No, no. Yeah, so the original Famicom, you know, it had the built-in controllers, like they were hardwired to the system. And in the first iteration, the A and B buttons were square.

And they weren't just square. They were like silicon plastic instead of being hard plastic. So they had this tendency to stick at which point your console was kind of useless because you had these hardwired controllers with buttons that didn't work anymore. So whoops, so much for playing video games. So that was one of the reasons they recalled the system. There was also like some sort of math glitch, like an integer glitch or something, that rarely showed up in the hardware.

Math is the worst, man. Gosh, I hate that stuff. I hate math. I'm right there with you, Barbie. So, yeah, the system itself, though, was very toy-like, if you look at it. They did redesign the buttons to be round and hard. So they kept the soft silicon plastic for the select and start buttons.

You know, same in Japan as it was on the American NES. But the system, like the Famicom system, is this kind of like bright white plastic. It actually sort of reminds me a little bit of the sharp system that I was insulting. But it was white plastic instead of beige, although it turns beige over time. Right. It's a feature. And then there was like a bright sort of burgundy red with gold control. and lots of red accents.

It's very bold. It's like, I don't know. Like, I look at this and I think of some of the transformers that were like white and red from around this time. Just like, wow, there it is. Red and white. Right in your face. I love the burgundy on this system.

Like, that isn't one of my favorite colors. And I think it's because looking at the Famicom growing up, being like, wow, that is so cool. It's so much more interesting than the gray of the NES. And is it true that the red? I've heard that the red was based off the scarf of Yamauchi. Is that a myth?

Or like his, maybe, or his wife's scarf or something? I don't know. It looks very much, I mean, it's like the almost like the Japanese flag a bit, like the color choices. Yeah, totally. It's like if we had a red, white, and blue system. I'm not even making a joke.

That's true. I have not about that. It's a very nationalistic. Well, part of that's the photograph. Like, when you see it in person, the red is deeper. Yeah, it's not the bright red of the rising sun. but I feel like the Famicom didn't really come into its own

until they came out with the disc system attachment, which is the same red as the controllers, and it's a big box that the Famicom sits on top of, and then there's an adapter that plugs into the cartridge slot on top of the Famicom, and it just becomes like this very interesting stacked unit, and it's very appealing. Yeah, I love the way that it all looks when it's all fully assembled,

and I love the little yellow eject button is so cool looking against the black. I was looking at eBay for disk systems and I saw something that was listed for $20. It looked just like a disc system and it was like this little disc system shoebox that you can put your Famicom Mini on top of, and I really wanted to buy one.

Obviously, they're not. The actual disk system is much more special. Yeah, I think you keep your controllers in that. Right. No, I guess you don't because the controllers are hardwired into the mini. So I don't know. Yeah.

It's for something. Yeah. I think it's so cool, though. I mean, I think that with the release of the mini and the classic, the NAS classic, like it's interesting to look back on what these systems look. Because when you look at them in that miniature form factor, you see in a completely different way. Yeah, I admit there's a really sick, stupid part of me

that is tempted to import one of those Famicom Jump minis. Oh, yeah. But the least, the lowest price I've seen on that is like $180,000. Which, no. Are the Famicom minis, do they still have the two small controllers? Yes. I mean, it's a perfect miniaturization of the actual Famicom. The controllers are to scale as well.

Yes, the controllers are to scale, and they are hardwired. So you're stuck with them. So I would say the NES classic is a lot better because you have actual NES-sized controllers that plug in and can be removed and you're not stuck with them. But I'm not a big fan of the plug. plastics they used for the Famicom, they're, they age very badly. Like, I've never seen a Famicom that is as white as this in the image. Like, I've seen some very well taken care of Famicombs, but they just turn yellow.

Yeah, that is so interesting. I don't really know much about that. I think it's just, like, as exposure to oxygen, the ABS just degrades. Wasn't it that special fire retardants plastic that turned yellow? Maybe. I've heard different theories and rumors, but I've never seen, like, a firm definitive. I thought there was just an article, just like, your S-NES, part of it turns yellow because that was the part that was made of the fire retardant plastic or something like that. And that, with exposure to air over time, it does turn yellow.

Right. Yeah, whenever you go to Swatmeets and you see some of the cartridges, like half of the cartridges, like, how does that work? Yeah, not everyone smoke that much. I don't see that much with super NES cartridges, but super Famicom cartridges. Yeah. Almost always, like, one part of the shell is a different shade of yellow than our shirt. shade of gray than the other. Well, I wonder if they knew that when they were making it, that it was going to do that.

Because, I don't know. It's interesting because they also have that gold color on the controller, which looks closer to how it actually ends up. Yeah, for a long time, I thought that Famicoms were just red and gold. Like, that's what they were supposed to be. Yeah. But then I think I realized they weren't when Nintendo released the Famicom Anniversary Game Boy Advance SP that was made, yeah, it was like very, very,

bright, like, optical white with red, and I was like, that's not what a Famicom is supposed to look like. I've seen them. They're gold. And I was told, no, actually, that's what a Famicom is supposed to look like. Yeah, seeing one that white is alarming. Yeah, it's like, did a time traveler give us this? Do we know this man?

Can he buy Apple stock for us? Is there any way to, like, basically prevent that from happening if you get one, like, put in, like, an airtight chamber? Not unless you, like, 3D print a new shell for it, I guess. Yeah, you put it in like a glass shell like David DeCutney's hand in Zoolander. I don't know. Yeah, I don't think you can undo the process of the yellowing. And if you're just going to take it apart in this crazy, but like, bleach it or something,

you might as well just find a new life. Yeah, supposedly the bleaching process. There are some bleaching system. Bleaching process is available, but they use chemicals that will turn the plastic brittle. So your system can look beautiful and also shatter if you drop something on it. So poetic. Yeah, these game consoles are really meant to remind us of our mortality. Yeah.

The passing of time. I mean, have we gotten to the point where people are 3D printing these and you can just have a pristine looking, like fake Famicom in your home? Probably. That'd be fun just to have on a shelf just because you can never get one that looks that clean. Even if it doesn't function, you could just have it as a decoration, you know. Yeah. can get reproduction shells, because the interesting thing about all these plastics is, like, there is a piece of steel somewhere in the world that is meant, is the negative

of this part, and you could shoot plastic. Well, there was at some point. Right. You can say if they actually kept those around. Yeah, I forget what video game system it was, but someone, some medical device company took the mold. That's the Jaguar CD. Right.

Yeah, and they turned it into just, like, one of their medical devices. Yep, a dental tool, like a dental camera tool. Yeah, which much was saved them, like... $20,000, something like that. Yeah, and there was the Calico Camelian. I think that's what it was supposed to be. The retro magazine system that was based on crap. I forgot now.

I think it was like the Jaguar mold. Yeah. Actually, I think it was the same mold. I think it was the Jaguar CD mold. I think he bought the molds and was going to turn that into a system, but that never happened. Oh, that thing, yeah. Yeah. So anyway, the best Famicom system is kind of like with NEC.

it's the duo version. It's the sharp twin Famicom. Made out of bubble gum. You just sink your teeth right into that. The plastic, the orange plastics, okay, so they came in three colors. There was black. There was red, and there was a very uncommon orange.

It looks more, I mean, this is all up to your own perception, but it looks like salmon to me, like a salmon color. In person, it's more orange. It's a very bright sort of like hazard, you know, orange. Like, don't shoot me even though it's to your season. Yeah, is that? that the yellowing process that it looks salmon like that? I think it's just a bad photo. It's hard to find good reference photos of some of these

things. But I've seen these in shops in Japan, and it's not quite so pale. Like, I don't want to, you know, put this on rice and eat it raw. But the twin family com is great because it is a, you know, it's a family computer, so it has the cartridge slot, but it also has the disc system slot for you to, you know, play both at the same time. And it carries over some of the design cues of the disk system and everything, but with its own totally distinct aesthetic, yes. It's like, it's very large and it has a more elegant, kind of graceful curve to it. It has a great lever on the front.

The controllers fit into the back, and they have much longer cables than the standard Famicom. They're still hardwired in, though. They, if I'm not mistaken, yes, they are, but they're much longer, so you don't have to sit like two feet away from your TV. What are the buttons in the front for? I'm trying to remember. One of them is reset. One of them is power. And then the yellow lever is to eject the disk system.

Right. I think the red button is to eject the cartridge. Yeah, the red, yeah. And then right in front of the cartridge slot, there's a switch, and that determines whether you're playing cartridge or disc games. Oh, that's really cool. So it has a bunch of very functional buttons on it. I love the color.

All of which are kind of, yeah, sort of subtly. built into the system. Yeah, the orange one is so beautiful. And in this picture that you have here, it looks like someone really pressed the reset button really hard. Way too hard, yeah. Yeah, and just like smash it to the inside. Yeah, I think the plastics on this were more fragile than the Famicom. I had a twin Famicom for a while and eventually decided to divest myself of it because it is a Famicom disk system in there, which means at some point it's going to break down and it's going to be very hard to repair. So I said, you know, as much as it's a I love this thing.

It's irresponsible for me to keep it. Isn't it basically just a rubber band? Like a rubber band? It's a special kind of rubber band, yeah. Like, people can fix it, but it's getting harder and harder to get it repaired. And, you know, they're just going to give up at some point. But the story behind the Sharp twin Famicom is interesting because this is not a system manufactured by Nintendo. Sharp actually owned the trademark on family computer.

And this is something I just recently read about. And I'd wondered about it for a long time, but they actually had a, like a home computer in the 70s called the family computer. So when Nintendo created the family computer, the Famicom, they had to, you know, get Sharp's okay to use the trademark. And Sharp had a good relationship with Nintendo. You know, they made their early systems. And they made the processor, I want to say, the RICO processor inside the NES,

the Famicom, I think was manufactured by Sharp. So they were good buddies. So Sharp was like, okay, but we want the rights to, you know, manufacture our own versions of the Famicom. So they made the Famicom, the Twin Famicom, and they also made something called the Famicom Titler, which was like a broadcast quality system that could record stuff and put overlays on it.

And it had, like, it's actually until, you know, stuff like the analog NT came out, it was actually the best video quality for Famicom because it had an RGB out capabilities. So when people say, oh, well, you know, there was no such thing an RGB NES back of the day. That's not true. There actually was.

So if you want to, like, see NES games in their true ultimate glory, the very expensive sharp Famicom titler was the way to do it. Wow, that is really interesting. I could not find any images of the titler. I don't think it's a very attractive system. It's not meant to be, like, a consumer-level console. It's, like, pro-grade gear, I think, for magazines and stuff. That sounds about right, yeah.

I was wondering who would use this, but you're right. No one was streaming in 1985. What's up, everyone? Check up my Famicom, Tyler. One thing that I really love about the Twin Famicom is like the font choice on that top there where it says Twin Famicom and then the big one, like the big fat one and two on the controllers. I think is so cool. All right, so we are actually kind of running out of time. We're not even going to make it Sega on this.

We're not actually going to make it all the Nintendo. That sounds like us. That does sound. How convenient, Jeremy, putting ass at the end. It's conspiracy by the alphabet. Next time we'll do it from the end of the alphabet. Next time we'll do it from the end of the alphabet. I'm kidding, of course.

No, you're not. No, it's good. You're soft. You're bracing me up for the inevitable. We're going to hear it. Yep. It's not intentional. It's totally alphabetical.

I'm so sorry. We're going to start with A, advance, comma, game boy. So the NES design, I mean, I can't imagine anyone listening to this podcast has never seen or used in NES. It is angular. and neutral-colored, where the Famicom was curvy and silly and whimsical. Boy, if you want to talk about crud collectors, that little, all those ridges on the top. Oh, yeah. Especially when you spill a soda on it, a little cheese grater.

I've been talking a lot. Oh, yeah. Tell me why you love the NES. I don't. Right on. I dislike it. What do you hate about it? I mean, I love the platform, but, I mean, they were just, like, built to die.

Because after a certain amount of time, what's, what's? the story behind the insides where like the content, like something would come loose and the contacts would not meet in the correct way. The pins get bent. Yeah, I mean, everyone's NES eventually stop working or everyone had their own trick. For us, it was instead of pushing the, and this is probably

a terrible idea, but it actually got the games to work. Instead of inserting the cartridge and then pushing down, you push down as you insert, and like you're sort of like giving it more force. It's hard to explain with words, but it always made the games work and I'm sure it just ripped it up even more

inside. But that and like the horrible squeaky creek you'd get as your system would age, like when you would push up cartridge down. Yeah. But that's all inside stuff. What about the outside? Oh, I mean, I guess I didn't think of it much in the 80s, but it is just like

I have nostalgia for how it looks, and I have a lot of love for just seeing it in living rooms and stuff like that. But now that I'm a mega Japanophile weave, and I see how cool the Famicom looks and just how how like, you know, the non-VCR-style loading has always become the default after this.

I just feel like, boy, we got the short end of the stick with this one. Yeah. Thank you for saying it for me. You think the Famicom looks cool? I do. I do. In a very playful, whimsical way. It's, um, the NES is very much like, like we all know the story.

We told it a million times. It's like a game system in disguise. Right. I've always felt like the Famicom looks like a tonka truck or something. It's like, it's like a toy, and it doesn't it doesn't work for me. I like the twin FAMicom, but the original, I'm just kind of like,

unless you have the disc system on it, to me it looks really cheap and kind of... I don't know. I just like how silly it looks. But I think the Super Famicom is beautiful and elegant and just... Again, again, we got the short end of the stick, but in a way that didn't, like, make the hardware worse.

Right, yeah. I like the FAMMI com as well. Yeah. I think that, for me, like, it was... The taste was made when they released the Game Boy Micro Famicom edition, and that was just so beautiful. And I was like, where did this come from? I was like, oh, well, it came from this

Famicom. And so I have definitely a special place in my heart for that. And the red. I'm a big fan of the revised Famicom model, the Model 2, which actually did come to the U.S. with a slight revision. I feel like it very successfully

combines design cues of both the Famicom and the NES. Like it's small and compatible. and sort of very self-contained but at the same time it has like the sort of some hard lines and some angles that are reminiscent of the NES

without being that boxy. The only problem with the American version of the redesign NES is that the cartridges are still super long, so it's a very awkward looking setup to. Yeah, they had to add this hump to it. Yeah, that's right. The Japanese version does not,

it's just like flat on top whether you put the cartridge in and because the cartridges are cassette-sized, it's fine, but because American cartridges are VHS tape cassettes sized. They needed that hump. Like for more supports. It wasn't just like

wobbling around. Otherwise it would have bent the connectors on that too. So there's like a little baby bump in that one too. Yep. I love, I always thought, I was wondered how they picked the purple for the Super Famicom. I thought that that was a really interesting choice away from the red, blue, yellow,

green for the Super Famicom. You mean Super NES? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for the Super Yeah, the purple buttons and all the purple kind of like the lavender and then like the indigo. Yeah, that's a real mystery. Like even at the time I was like, this is weird. Like, why are these, why is this purple? Yeah. Whenever I see the super Famicom kind of like design aesthetics show up, though, like with the new 3DS,

how they had the same kind of red, blue, green, yellow buttons that always, that always gets me. I love that so much. I actually like replaced the buttons on my superiors. switch from the just regular black buttons to be modded, red, blue, green, and yellow, because I like that so much. Yeah, you know, the buttons on the Super Famicom, the Japanese Super Famicom are separate from each other visually with the four colors. Yeah.

But they're all convex. Whereas the American Super NES has two purple buttons, two lavender buttons, but the lavender buttons are concave. so they have a tactile difference to, you know, the A and B buttons. So just by feeling them, like when you're, you know, in the heat of action, there's a physical difference between those buttons. And I really, that's such a great idea. And I don't know why no one else has carried that concept through. I've never seen another system that carries that idea.

Yeah, I could be so good. I could be wrong, but I don't think Nintendo ever use convex buttons again for anything. And I would actually prefer, if you're not going to have the differentiation between concave and convex on the face of the controller, I'd rather them all have the concave. I think it's more comfortable. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I have to assume that it was maybe more likely to cause blisters or something

because the edges, like the lips are raised. I guess it's not that sharp, but I guess it's still a problem that could be raised. But yeah, I do miss that differentiation. And especially when the Wii came out and the class of controller lost that completely. And I was like, oh, you missed it. You missed a chance to bring this back. Speaking of which, they actually released another club Nintendo thing

was like a super Famicom controller with the classic controller end. And I was looking at that on eBay yesterday, and I was like, oh, that actually would work with the Super Famicom Mini. Yeah, how much are those selling for these days? Those are like, I saw a two-pack for like $70 and then a single pack for like $40. And so you can buy them. I blew it. I had the chance to buy them for like $20.

I should have. Yeah. Stupid me. Everything gets more expensive. So we are all, I mean, I guess Jeremy does not care as much over the Famicom as we do. but what I really dislike about these old designs that we had in the past is that whenever there is like a 3DS version of that design, like the 3DS with, I believe there's a 3DS with N.S stylings on it, right? I know there was a DS with NES style like decals or whatever on it. In any case, it's always that actually even ages worse when you turn a newer system into that.

Right. That's Super Nintendo 2DS XL or whatever. Is that what it's called? It's a new 3DSXL. It's hideous. It's so ugly. I hate it so much. Yeah, with the purple buttons.

And I think the thing that I really dislike about that is the way that they did the treatment on the cover. It's just like a static picture of basically the stylized console itself. Yeah, those homages work better when they're a reference as opposed to just like, here's the thing you like. It's like a funny Futurama joke versus a family guy joke. One is thoughtful and makes sense within the context of the new thing, whereas the other is just like, look, it's that again. I mean, both the Super Famicom and Super Nintendo 3DSxels, they're both designed to look like the console when you unfold it. Yeah. But that, like, the Super Famicom still looks elegant and presentable, and the Super Nintendo just looks even worse now.

I totally agree with that. I totally agree with that. Yeah, it's like the only console where you look at it and you're like, how many clowns are going to? going to come out of that. And we're not even talking about, like, packaging today. And that'd be, that would actually be a good episode. I might do that in the future. But I also love the super Famicom packaging. It just has the

like, look, laser etched, like just drawing of the system with the four colors on it. And the 3DS XL Super Famicom replicates that, but with a 3DS. I love how elegant and just understated and simplified the super Famicom boxes. Look it up everybody. Yeah, you're taking the words right out of my mouth. I love it.

I love it, too. It's so good. Actually, the buttons, the buttons, the buttons on the new 3D or on the new 3DSXL Super Family Commendition, they're like slightly brighter than the buttons that are on the regular new Nintendo 3DS and I've been wanting to like buy one of those but they're like $300, $400 on eBay. It's like too much.

All right, so our guests for the next episode are here already. We only made it like halfway through all the notes I repaired. I can't believe, I really thought this was going to be an episode we were like struggling to fill out an hour and a half, But no, no, we're going to have to get Mike back here sometime to talk about Sega systems and also the rest of Nintendo's systems. Well, 9 of the second episode ready to go. Yeah, I mean, that'll be the easiest notes I've ever made.

But we barely got on the Nintendo stuff. We didn't touch Sega at all and Sony. So we'll start from the end of the alphabet next time and work our way back toward the Famicom. How does that sound? Oh, I'm excited. Okay. Oh, and yeah, the NeoGeo Pocket. Yeah, there's so much great stuff we didn't get to talk about.

A PS1. Man. All right. Well, anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this, like, you know, video game console descriptions for the blind. It's kind of a weird, like I said, idea for a podcast. Yeah, but please do check out Retronauts.com and check out the photos that we have to accompany this episode. Or if you can't see what we're like. If you don't want to go to a blog or whatever, you just Google Imits for all these as we talk about them.

That's another way to do it. Or just go out and buy all the systems yourself. You've got infinite money, right? There is that technology where you can literally embed images in an MP3, but I don't think anyone does that. I don't think our service supports that. Yeah, actually, our service wouldn't support that either. But I've never seen anyone actually use that except for one podcast in my life. So I'm sorry that we don't know how to do that and can't do that, but...

We'll sell the film strip of this at our website. There's a Viewmaster slideshow. Yeah, you can also go to, like, Wikimedia archives and find, like, really nice high-quality images. Yeah, a lot of these are taken from there. Evan Amos is the guy who does the creative. of Commons photography, and he does great work. So definitely go check that out and be sure to send him a thank you to say thank you for preserving images of all these systems for future generations. Anyway, this has been Retronauts as usual, and why don't you guys tell us about yourselves?

Mike, where can we find you on the Internet? And what do you do? I am Mike Choi. I'm Mecca Choi on the Internet. I am a mechanical engineer. Most recently worked on the flip group with Jeremy. and you can find me at Twitter.com slash Macachoy.

If you Google the FlipGrib, you can go and pre-order one now. Shameless plug. Hey, we get money from that. Yeah. No plug is too shameless if we're profiting. Yeah. And, yeah, I post on Twitter,

sometimes on YouTube, so check it out. Cool. I'm Bob Mackey, and I have one word for you, plastics. Sorry, I wanted to get that graduate reference in. No one thought of it but me. I'm sorry. That's crazy.

Yes, I'm sorry, everybody. You got too retro even for us. Yeah, it's true. 1968 is too old, Retronauts. But you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. I also have lots of other podcasts

via the Talking Simpsons network. The first one is Talking Simpsons, a chronological exploration of the Simpsons. The second one is What a Cartoon where we look at a different cartoon from different series every week. And if you go to our Patreon at patreon. Atcom slash Talking Simpsons

and give it the $5 level, you get both those podcasts a week at a time edit free. And also all of our exclusive series like Talking Critic, Talking Futurama, all of our interviews, tons of bonus stuff. If you sign up today,

you'll get like 100 bonus podcasts you've never heard before. So that's Patreon. slash Talking Simpsons. That's how I do most of my living. Wow. And I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as Gamesbite and at Retronauts.com,

which is also where you'll find this podcast as well as on iTunes. And another assorted pod catchers. Is that what the kids are calling them? Catchers. My goodness. You kids in your linguistics. Anyway, Retronaut is, of course, ad-supported, but also crowd-supported. So if you would like, you can subscribe to Retronauts.

Kind of like Talking Simpsons. They got the idea from us. But it's okay because they are us. Still for myself. Yeah. So, yeah, three bucks a month. You can download episodes a week early and a higher bit rate quality with no advertisements.

And get other cool stuff, too, like T-shirts and books and, I don't know, go check it out. Retronuts on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Retronuts. Anyway, that's it for this episode. We'll come back around and talk about other game system designs at some point. Sorry about the Sega stuff. in the mind.

You know,