Very cool, but is anything as cool as that Space Wars Computer Space cabinet in the same scene?

I’m not Brazilian or French, so my main memory is walking past the boxes on the store’s video games aisle. The graph paper pattern on the labels was cool.

IMHO no version of Tetris will ever top the OG green-n-gray Game Boy version, which was also over the top Russian kitschy. The music still loves rent free in my head, and the patterns in lieu of colors define the blocks for me.

Wasn’t gaming basically aynonymous with gambling at that time though?

Yes, in large part, and certainly to the way that the introduction to a book of that era would have been presented to the censors; there would often be a wink and a nod, though: “what a horrible thing to be doing! Now, so you can be completely sure how not to get caught up up in it, here are the complete rules to every game we can think of.” This book is almost entirely consumed with games that were most often used for gambling, though stakes can be set at any level and played for fun at any time.

I think gaming as a recreation without gambling didnt really come about until the 1940s - 1950s, right? Commonly, of course.

I’m sure there’s an element of truth in that certain direct modern lineages of trends in non-gambling gaming are sort of post-WW2 phenomena, but overall I don’t think that’s fair. Even just in the narrow sense, Monopoly was released in 1935, and other American board games date back much farther, which at east one scholar referring to the 1880s to the 1920s as a “Golden Age” for board games in the US. Also, certain games, like chess, have always had cultural associations beyond gambling. Children’s board games have also been common forever. Additionally, TTRPGs and Wargames trace back not to gambling, but to military planning and education.

EDIT: Also of important note, in 1638 the Puritans in the US state of Massachusetts (colonial at the time) enacted a law that made gambling illegal. It outlawed ownership of everything gaming related from dice to cards, and citizens were not allowed to even play in their own home.

True enough, but there’s an important context that they banned all forms of “idleness,” and gaming got wrapped up in that.

It’s uneven but never worse than “okay” IMHO. It gets clowned on occasionally because its three best episodes are a Covid zoom episode and two standalone stories that depart from the main cast and plot almost entirely, but overall it’s still a fun riff on some of the same themes as Silicon Valley, if a bit slight.

Assuming it wasn’t literally the last thing added to the game, the TTP was less than zero.

Also, the color palettes available to CGA and EGA games were… something.

Sort of tells you everything you need to know about the target market that all the images on the game listings are box art and the physical carts (unless you scroll way down). Anybody who cares more about gameplay will just emulate the things with some sort of nice controller or handheld. This is for collectors (god bless 'em).

You’re thinking of the 5200, which had the keypad and analog sticks that didn’t auto-center.

The 7800 controllers were roughly the same form factor, but were digital and only had two buttons, but given the weird history and struggling Atari, many games didn’t even use the second. I think the last models shipped in Europe may have even had a gamepad like the one this new thing comes with.

EDIT: Here it is. I guess the d-Pads were standard in Europe.

The basic concept seems to be floating out there, and I’ve bought many empty RP2040 boards from AE without issue, but if you’re determined to do this, maybe disconnect from any networks, back up your PC, and start with an expendable cartridge. :-)

I don’t THINK a Pi Pico clone could send enough voltage back up into a board to fry a cart, but it’s your risk. 98% chance everything is fine, but you’re spending money on what should have a 100% chance of being fine.

Or, accept the almost-inevitable and just grab ROMs of your carts. If you really want to experiment, maybe build the dumper itself as a DIY project. Buying someone else’s device to create files somebody already ripped twenty years ago doesn’t quite pull the right nostalgia or hobbyist levers for me, but we have to go where our nerdery takes us, and from that perspective, I understand.

Do you find you are able to emulate much that can make use of the analog sticks? The RG Arc-S and -D have similar internals and a nice screen, but they seem to have been consigned to the discount pile for lack of analog sticks (and maybe being late to the game for RK3566 models). As a Genesis kid, I always liked the Sega controllers of that era.

Thanks! That class of device is probably where I’m leaning, having now poked around some other sites as well. Honestly, those issues are about what I’d expect from this pricepoint/feature combination, but they don’t seem like dealbreakers and sounds like it’s a usable SBC in a gaming friendly package, which is about what I’m after.

That was one of the posts that piqued my interest. Also think the Anbernic ones look decent.