On the verisimilitude of bleeps and bloops
So today I dragged out a few of the old Odyssey x00/x000 dedicated consoles from the early 70s. For those not in the know, these were relatively-low-price-point machines which usually played a Pong-like game and maybe one or two other variations on that theme dressed up as hockey or soccer, released between the original Magnavox Odyssey (1972, the first home video game) and the Odyssey2 (1978, still my favorite). Magnavox, in trying desperately the make the things seem futuristic to you, the consumer, called these games by names such as “Odyssey 100” and “Odyssey 4000” (really, if you think about it, they almost made the Odyssey2 sound like a step back in retrospect). I’m singling out three of these intermediate Odyssey consoles as historically important in PDF Level 2, and therefore I needed video…so therefore I needed to hook them up.
Not so fast, though! Just hooking them up and recording their video wasn’t enough. Each of these machines generated its own internal sound – bleeps and bloops came from a little piezo speaker inside the plastic casing. Not only did I record the video straight to a DVD-R (through my infamous RF-to-digital rig, which was responsible for a heap of the first DVD), I also shut off everything else in the room – even the ceiling fan – and did sound recordings of each machine. I discovered that the Odyssey 100 and 500 had an identical bleep-and-bloop generator (that’s a highly technical term there), so I captured “the perfect beep” from one recording and manually synced it up with the video. The Odyssey 4000 produces a variety of bleeps and bloops, so it’ll be a slightly more complicated process, but the point of all this is that I want the resulting video on the DVD to present the true experience – both sound and picture – of what you’d see and hear while playing these games.
This is important because the Odyssey x00/x000 consoles – with only a couple of models excepted – all have analog components, and therefore can’t be emulated, strictly speaking: there’s no chip to emulate, just a rat’s nest of discrete logic wiring. This point was made to me very thoroughly when I plugged in the Odyssey 500: the analog circuit that generates the vertical lines that form the boundaries of the screen (and the center “net” line for the tennis/pong game) has gone way screwy on me. The vertical lines have groovy waves going through them, which also distort everything else on the screen – any video I gathered would’ve been useless. Fortunately, the early Odyssey x00 consoles had a knob that could be used to literally yank the center line off the screen completely. So that’s what I did – without that line on the screen to warp everything, the game appeared perfectly normal. I’ll reproduce the missing center line with the Avid’s graphics tools and it’ll look like it’s supposed to. That experience reminded me of why it’s really important to get this stuff right – because these machines won’t always be working. Compared to the video games you play on your Xbox 360 or Wii today, of course, these old Pong variants are cave drawings. But you know how excited real archaeologists get about cave drawings, don’t you? It’s history. In its own way, so is this.
I’m hoping to have the 1970s done by the first of the year, but I keep finding so much neat stuff to add – old Odyssey consoles, Studio II and Astrocade and Channel F games, commercials for stuff like Blip and Merlin – that it’s dangerously tempting to just make this one “Phosphor Dot Fossils: The ’70s.”… Read more
Now that I’ve conquered the world, I think it’s time to tuck the disk away again and get back to a life where I’m occasionally able to be productive. Or at least look like it. Maybe it’s for the best that Dune 2000 online play isn’t supported anymore…
So I had a little bit of frustration worked up tonight and decided that I’d take care of it the only way that seemed reasonable: it was time to blow shit up, and it was time to blow shit up 
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Reports are rolling in that OVGE was a big success this year – that’s a relief. I have to give a big, Discs-Of-Tron-environmental-cabinet-sized heap of thanks to Flack for flogging the PDF DVD at his table. He so didn’t have to do that what with hawking his own wares – namely his new book – but it was much appreciated, and I also appreciate everyone who bought one. Having seen some of the first photos posted and seen some TV news footage on the one Tulsa station carried by our local cable system, I’ve started to get bummed out – sleepless bummed out – about missing the show this year. This is the first OVGE I’ve missed since it started in 2003, and as with several other retro video game conventions I enjoy, it seems to have fallen into an every-other-year pattern now that the hobby has fallen out of the public eye a bit (the golden years were really from 1999 through whatever year it was that they had those little all-in-one Ms. Pac-Man joysticks you could get at Wal-Mart – 2004/05 I think – once those and others like them reached the saturation point, I think everyone was ready to let the ’80s die again). With icbrkr joining the Gamer Dad Squad soon, I don’t even know where this leaves the usual small-scale get-togethers that we have (not that I’ve had a great attendance record with those either). I’ve been trying to just routinely get out more during the week with Evan, but even then it’s not quite the same as getting out with the grownups – as long as you’re hauling your kid around, your primary function is still obviously dad or mom (or in my case, Mr. Mom, which I’ve noticed with some people automatically places you off to one side in a whole different social bubble from other parents, as if there’s something wrong with a guy who’s staying home with the baby while the kid’s mom is out working). I’m kinda yearning for the time out with the grown-ups, and my dentist’s appointment last week, and hanging out with my in-laws, just doesn’t count. And yet when I am off on my own, what do I talk about? My son. I don’t know how much of this isolation is naturally occurring due to the factors in play, or how much of it I might be unconsciously/subconsciously doing to myself, but…yeah, I’m kinda missing the company of like minds. And there is was for the taking in Tulsa today, and I had to miss it.
One last note: I’m apparently never completely out of the gaming scene, because I just discovered that an upcoming repro release of the finished-but-never-released Odyssey2/Videopac game Martian Threat will utilize some artwork I cobbled together just for fun a few years ago. It will debut next month at Eurocon and will get a general (but limited – 100 or so) release afterward, with both PAL and NTSC copies available. The “frame” seen around the artwork here will probably be different, since it will almost certainly be reworked into a more traditional Videopac-style package, but that’s a good thing – there’s a lot of fine detail that would’ve been knocked out by that frame, including the work I did to make the “cockpit” look slimy, organic and alien.
Othello is home from the vet, and as I type this he’s enthusiastically chowing down on some Fancy Feast – of which I have quite a bit that I never intended to feed anyone after the Great Wet Cat Food Scare of a year or two ago. All these cans o’ Fancy Feast came as little samplers packed in with cat litter. Right now, they seem to be hitting the spot just fine, which is exactly what we need; due to the same aforementioned Cat Food Scare, we switched off to a regionally-produced brand of dry food – i.e. something that didn’t come from the same mills as 90% of the commercial brands – which Othello now shows no interest in. He now happily chows down on canned food while the other two are locked away temporarily, which drives the kitty kids nuts. Especially when I put his food away and he happily struts back into the baby’s room to lay down on my bed, smelling like canned cat food…which the other two can’t find. Good to be king, eh? But it’s even better that he’s eating. Now let’s see you pack on some pounds, skinny boy.