First Is the Worst: Nintendo's Color TV Game 6 and 15 | Hacker News Reader

First Is the Worst: Nintendo's Color TV Game 6 and 15

nicole.express

170 pointszdw37 comments

> A potentiometer has a maximum and minimum value. They can’t spin indefinitely by the very nature of how they’re constructed, and each position of the pot maps to a point on screen.

Some can spin freely if they have their stops removed. Tektronix did this for their late 70's vintage scopes like the 2465. The discontinuity from the wiper crossing the gap was mostly hidden with firmware.

I'm pretty sure I've used that 2465, and I don't remember any of those pots not having a stop.

The cursor knobs are full turn. The service manual goes into some depth explaining how they work. If you play around you can find the gap where the cursors become non-responsive but in typical usage you skip over it and don't notice because the firmware is tracking the velocity and keeps them moving when the wiper is disconnected.

I have a bench power supply which takes this further by having two stop-less potentiometers on the same shaft with a 180-degree offset to cover the gap. It works quite well!

When I wrote that I assumed it was a physical possibility but I didn't realize people actually did that.

It would actually probably work pretty well for a Pong system, since the discontinuity would be when the paddle was off-screen. But I don't know if any system actually did that.

Interesting tidbit about wrapping devices with cords. I never thought chemicals in the cords could do damage to the plastics in the housing.

I'm reminded of the Degenatron.

https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Degenatron

That was more a parody of the Atari 2600 (1977). While it had very blocky graphics, the sorts of games it could play (crude versions of arcade games of the time) seems more like what this is parodying rather than Pong-like games.

To take that full circle, though: the hardware capabilities of the 2600 were designed as a generalization of earlier "hard-wired" consoles. Support for graphical features like a "ball" and "player" paddles was built into the TIA chip, and it was by creatively manipulating these features that later games like Pitfall were able to produce (relatively) sophisticated graphics.

I just had to look up the specs for an Atari 2600 (which I played as a kid back in the 80s. I feel. old)

128 Bytes of RAM. Makes a microbit: look roomy.

Nintendo: The world’s most ambitious playing card company; that actually still makes playing cards.

https://www.amazon.com/Nintendo-Mario-playing-cards-red/dp/B...

> Includes instruction manual (English language not guaranteed).

Sorry but how is that possible - do they know what they’re selling, or not?

I suppose the cards themselves are the same regardless of the region, but the language of the instruction manual depends on the region, and they are commingling decks from all regions?

It's an imported product by 3rd party

> Consoles with built-in RF cables, like the Color TV Game 6, often have scars like this, and it seems particularly common on the Nintendo consoles. This is because the RF cable contains plasticizers to make it more flexible; the problem is, people often wrap cables around the console for convenient storage. This is fine for the short term, but if they’ve been in the closet for almost fifty years, well, you get burns like this or even worse. Be careful how you store these!

Yum endocrine disruptors... I find that when I apply office or duct tape to plastic erasers or PVC cable sleeves, the plastic and glue will "diffuse" into each other, producing a disgusting goop that sticks to fingers and is a pain to clean off. I also know that rubber feet and "soft touch" surfaces can turn into goop over time, but I don't know what process is happening there.

I hear that the plasticizers leaching out of plastic into air (or decomposing) is why old electronics' plastic cases and parts become weak and brittle over decades.

Yegh, old (occasionally not even 5 years old) soft-touch plastic turning sticky goopy.

I cleaned that up off an old handheld vacuum with rough salt and water, of course turning it non-soft-touch in the process, but better than sticky goopy...

Another place you see this is turntables. People boxed it up and tossed the cord on top, then piled a bunch of stuff on it for 25 years, and there are the terrible dents. Since the dustcover is usually plastic, it takes the damage.

This was a huge eye-opener moment for me; I figured it was some other common damage mechanism-- cigarette burns or leaving something hot on top of the unit.

> Ping Pong is probably the most unique pong-a-like on this console, but more unique from a conceptual standing than an actual fun game mode. Essentially you have a side view, but your paddles move as usual; you can, however, get the ball to arc over the net. It’s a bit confusing perspective-wise, really, but I’ve not seen any other Pong game like it.

Hard to tell from just a still image, but it sounds like Tennis for Two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_for_Two

Hey Nicole, shoe horning my PC Engine project onto your last hacker news thread was actually successful at getting the attention I needed! And now I’m sitting on PCE joystick pcbs nobody wants. :)

Even the URL is perfect :)

firstname.{one of the gazillion new tlds} is a good one to get, and usually gettable, although some of them charge like $1000/y because it is a nice domain.

Not what I meant—look at the path :)

You are either admiring the .html extension or the monthless date?

Toggle dark mode at the bottom of the page

Would be nice to have it at the top. :/

Nintendo tends to have a "good-bad" cycle similar to Windows. The good phases help save the whole gaming industry.

The "bad" cycle is only bad sales-wise. The Gamecube and Wii U were great systems.

And we don't talk about the VirtualBoy

We talk about wanting companies to do more experimental things, then simultaneously diss the failed attempts.

The VirtualBoy was an insane idea that was a whole human generation ahead of its time. That’s rare and credit to Nintendo for trying.

My mind exploded when I found out there was no 'screen' in it at all. Very clever for the time.

So let's play alternate history. Say that Blue LEDs had been developed at this time, and Nintendo could have used Red, Green, and Blue LEDs to make a full color screen rather than just a red screen.

And all the warnings about headaches and such were all overblown things to try to make legal compliance happy, but they had the effect of scaring away customers who did not understand that they were for legal compliance rather than actual warnings.

So how would an RGB Virtual Boy have turned out? Imagine a cross between the Game Boy Color and the 3DS.

The headaches were due to multiple factors:

1. Flicker. A 60hz scanout with no phosphor or LCDs to temporally smear the light out means a very raw image that's pretty hard on the eyes, which might be tolerable if...

2. Ergonomics were OK but they aren't. Needing to keep the thing on a table with your head hunched over peering into it is the opposite of comfortable. You can attach it to your head instead but then...

3. Simulation sickness becomes a problem. Fill peoples vision with a "virtual reality" without motion tracking and you'll start making people hurl.

Interestingly, the best way to play Virtual Boy games is on a Quest VR headset. The controls are a close match, it allows the use of greyscale (and other colours) instead of red and most importantly the VB's output is displayed as a giant screen fixed in space in front of you. I played through all of VB Wario Land that way, it was great fun and very comfortable.

Depends what you mean by great. Technologically the GPU in the Gamecube was pretty cool and it served as a foundation for the Wii, but it's hard to tell if that's because it was just so good or as a cost saving measure, by 2006 things were moving to HD and programmable shaders and the Wii was stuck at SD with (admittedly rather powerful) fixed function hardware. Those PPC cores were showing their age by the time the WiiU rolled around too, a lot of games ran at sub-30 framerates.

The choice of Mini DVDs was baffling. I modded my Gamecube back in the day with a chip and a custom top shell that expanded the physical space to allow the use of full sized DVDRs (they were cheaper). The optical drive mechanism was still only sized for Mini DVDs, but full sized discs worked fine as long as you didn't burn past the edge of where a Mini DVD would end. That mod highlighted that they totally could have allowed for full sized discs without compromising on size of the console, cost, or anything. Just like ignoring DVD movie playback at it's peak, it seemed utterly dumb.

In the market it ran third after Xbox, which was released by a company that had never released a games console before. That's pretty embarrassing for Nintendo.

Also Super Mario Sunshine is just terrible.

Ehh, these "good/bad" charts often have to follow a specific narrative to make sense, like those Windows ones that pick only certain versions among the NT and non-NT systems for it to follow the pattern. Same for Nintendo - what was the "bad" between NES and SNES?

FDS maybe? Didn't make it outside of Japan, but it was enough of it's own platform/ecosystem that it could count if you stretched the definition far enough.

I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that a console is a standalone device. Sure, the FDS had its own games, but it inherently relies on the Famicom to function and is more or less just an upgrade kit for that console.

There was the Twin Famicom, but that was made by Sharp.

Still, it underlines that Nintendo's output isn't all hits and never has been. Their add-ons in particular are usually busts.

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