RGB Video And Old Game Consoles

The connection between an old game console and a television is kind of like a game of Pictionary being played between the two: The game console is doing its damnedest to describe what it has in mind to the television, and the TV is doing its best to interpret what it's being told. But somewhere along the line, communication breaks down. RF connections are like playing with a drunk person over a particularly crappy cell phone connection. Composite video at least get rid of the phone, but the console is still clearly sloshed. S-video sobers the console up, but hey, the TV still doesn't quite get that the console is trying to draw 'dignity' here. (After all, it didn't go to Gudger College) But there's one last option, and it's akin to the console just screaming the answer to the whole room. That option is called RGB video!

Generally speaking, RGB stands for red, green and blue, the three primary colors of light that, when mixed together at varying intensities, create all of the colors we can perceive. In video signaling, an RGB connection has at least one discrete channel per color.  RGB connections electrically isolate the red, green and blue intensity signals in order to keep them as pristine as possible, which gives them a huge advantage over composite and s-video in terms of image quality. Typically, it also includes one more discrete signal, called sync, which the display uses to figure out which line on the screen it should be updating at a given moment. In old CRT displays, sync is used to aim the electron guns at the correct spot on the screen, while the RGB intensity signals tell it what color and how bright the spot should be. The frequencies at which the the sync signal operates define the resolution of the display; higher frequencies produce higher resolutions. All of the consoles we're working with output a horizontal sync frequency of 15 kHz. That's an important number to remember, as it will come into play later in the discussion.

In an effort to reduce both the bandwidth and the number of physical wires required to carry a video signal to a television, old game consoles smushed their raw RGB data down into composite, s-video, or RF, shaving off a whole lot of image detail in the process. Fortunately, the general suckiness of the resulting video signal wasn't entirely disregarded by the folks who designed these old consoles. Many of them, particularly consoles from the 16-bit era on, actually carry RGB signals right to their external AV connections, making connecting them up to a compatible display a relative snap. The following is a list of all the game consoles I'm aware of which support RGB without any special modifications:

Console	Display Resolution	Notes
Atari Jaguar	240p
Neo Geo AES/CD/CDZ	240p	Audio from AV port is mono only
Nintendo Gamecube	240p, 480i, 480p	PAL units only. NTSC model DOL-001 GCs support component video
Nintendo SNES/ Super Famicom model 1	240p
Sega Dreamcast	240p, 480i	Also supports VGA @ 480p
Sega Genesis/Mega Drive model 1	240p	Audio from AV port is mono only
Sega Genesis/Mega Drive model 2, model 3, CDX & 32x	240p
Sega Master System model 1	240p	AV port pinouts identical to model 1 Genesis
Sega Saturn	240p
Sony PS1	240p, 480i
Sony PS2	240p, 480i, 480p	Supports component video natively

Many more game consoles can be modded to output RGB, but that's beyond the scope of this article. The website retrorgb.com has a great deal of excellent information on the subject, including detailed how-to instructions for nearly every game console.

The Sega Dreamcast supports VGA in addition to RGB, and it's the method I recommend for best results. As VGA is an even higher-quality RGB video standard, the Dreamcast looks spectacular when connected to a VGA-compatible monitor or HDTV. Not all Dreamcast games support VGA, though; the ones that do have 'VGA cord' printed on the back of the jewel case.

Getting RGB to your TV or monitor

Connecting RGB may be as simple as plugging in a cable or as complex as building one, depending on your circumstances and goals. I'll cover a few common situations here:

A female SCART connector

Connect directly to a SCART-capable TV: Many European countries adopted a very nifty standard for connecting video devices together in the late 70s, called SCART. SCART, a French acronym for Radio and Television Receiver Manufacturers' Association, is a standard for a 21-pin plug capable of carrying several different types of analog video signals, including RGB. It also carries stereo audio, simplifying the process of connecting up a game console down to attaching one single cable. SCART has been largely supplanted by HDMI these days, but if you still own a television with a SCART connector, you just need to purchase the appropriate cable for your console. Again, retrorgb.com is a great source for these cables, and they can also be found on eBay. Be advised that PAL consoles may require different AV cables from their NTSC counterparts. When in doubt, contact the seller.

Convert RGB to component: If you live in the US, you're unlikely to own a SCART-capable TV. Instead, you might own a TV with component inputs. Component video connectors started appearing on US televisions in the late 90s, as a means of transmitting better-quality video from a DVD player. In the early days of HD television, component cables were also used to connect HDTVs to HD sources. With their red, green and blue RCA plugs, they look like RGB connections, but in fact, they're not. The green cable actually carries luma (the B&W portion of the image) and sync together, while the red & blue cables carry the difference between red & luma and blue & luma, respectively. The TV uses luma along with the red & blue difference signals to internally calculate what portions of the image should be green. In theory, component connections shouldn't look quite as good as RGB, since some of the signals are multiplexed together. In practice, though, the difference is imperceptible.

In order to use RGB with a component-equipped TV, you need to first convert the signal. SCART comes in handy here too, as RGB SCART-to-component converters are widely available and fairly cheap. The one I own is a model CVS287, purchased off eBay for about $50 shipped. The CVS287 has no audio out jacks, so you'll need to either purchase the SC-890-AV audio breakout box or, if you're handy with a soldering iron, attach audio connections directly to the SCART input plug.

When my CVS287 first showed up, its output was tinted green. A quick Google search revealed that these suckers often ship mis-calibrated, and need to be adjusted by rotating one or more of the little dials inside the unit. If you need to make adjustments, make sure to mark your starting point on each dial before you turn it, so you can go back if the image starts looking worse.

One last gotcha concerning this method: As indicated in the table above, most of these game consoles output a really low display resolution of 240p. An old, standard-def CRT TV equipped with component inputs should handle 240p just fine, but an HDTV may not. Of all the HDTVs I've tried it on, only a 2011-vintage Panasonic plasma TV would accept a 240p signal via its component input. If you're unlucky enough to own an HDTV without 240p support, the next couple of options will be your best bet.

Convert RGB to HDMI: Once again, SCART comes to the rescue: SCART RGB-to-HDMI converters are just as common and just as cheap as SCART-to-component converters. The unit I own came from Amazon, again costing about $50 shipped. There's no model number to be found on it, but the Amazon ID number is B00MUNIVRO. It accepts a SCART RGB input (and only RGB; it doesn't support composite video) and converts it to a digital HDMI signal at one of several selectable output resolutions. Unlike the CVS287, this converter works with audio, too. It can send stereo audio from the SCART port through HDMI to your TV, as well as output it to a headphone-style analog jack, and a digital S/PDIF coax jack. 

The converter I have works great with source resolution from 240p on up, but it does have a couple of annoying problems. First, there's no documentation included at all. It's fairly foolproof to set up & use, but for the button that switches output resolution. It may be labeled "720p/1080p", but it doesn't just toggle between those two resolutions. Pressing it once brings up the converter's on-screen display. Pressing it again in quick succession cycles through several output resolutions, including a few oddballs which may not be supported by your HDTV. If you plug this sucker in & get an error from your television about an invalid signal, try pressing the 720p/1080p button once every couple of seconds until it returns to a supported resolution. 

Its other, bigger problem is that it introduces a brief but noticeable lag to the outputted video. From what I've been able to tell, the lag is about about 2-3 frames long, or roughly 1/30th of a second. That doesn't sound like much, but it can make games that require absolutely perfect timing much more difficult to play. HDTVs themselves introduce a fraction of a second of additional lag, so bear that in mind too. If you go this route, I recommend enabling your TV's 'game' mode to minimize any additional lag.  I only have personal experience with this one make of HDMI converter, but others on the Internet have reported that most HDMI converters like this introduce a similar amount of lag. One notable exception is the Micomsoft XRGB-Mini. It inserts only about 1 frame of lag, but it'll set you back a cool $375, plus shipping from Japan.

NOTE: Japan used a very similar-looking connector, called JP-21. However, it is not directly compatible with SCART! Do not connect a SCART cable to a JP-21 device, such as the XRGB-Mini, without using a converter cable, like this one.

Use a VGA scaler: As I mentioned earlier, VGA is a very high-quality analog video standard, and it's an excellent option if your TV or monitor supports it. To maintain the best image quality possible, it uses five signal lines instead of four; one line each for red, green and blue intensities, plus separate horizontal and vertical sync lines. It also uses higher sync frequencies in order to achieve resolutions greater than 240p or 480i. To use VGA with anything other than the Dreamcast, though, you need a device called a scaler or a scan converter. At the very least, the scaler needs to accept an RGB+S (S in this case stands for composite sync) signal at the lower sync frequency of 15kHz and spit out a RGB+HV signal at sync frequencies high enough to drive a VGA monitor. (31kHz or greater) Additional features include the ability to de-interlace the source signal, (Convert a 480i source to 480p.) overlay fake scan lines, and output multiple resolutions. 

Gonbes GBS8200

The scaler I own, a Gonbes GBS8200 is a pretty bare-bones unit. It doesn't insert scan lines, and the quality of its deinterlacing isn't all that great. It doesn't even have a case, as it's intended to be mounted inside an arcade machine's cabinet. Still, it's dirt-cheap and it supports a wide variety of input sources: It accepts CGA, EGA, (Two very old IBM PC video standards) component and 15kHz RGB+S, and it outputs a de-interlaced VGA signal at a number of different selectable resolutions. Unlike the other solutions I've talked about so far, this one doesn't rely on SCART, so you are going to have to build your own AV cables in order to use it. 

If you choose to go down this route, you'll probably want to look into a scaler that can accept composite video as its sync source. Most of the above game consoles don't have a separate sync line; they use their composite video output as a substitute. Composite video contains sync, but it also contains a lot of other garbage that some scalers don't know how to strip away, leading to scrambled video. If your scaler displays garbage or complains about 'no sync' when it's fed composite video as sync, a device called a Sync Strike, or a similar board with the LM1881 chip can strip out the extraneous noise, leaving a clean, usable sync signal.

Use an RGB monitor: Until now, I've focused on converting our consoles' RGB output into a format that more modern displays can work with. The last option I'm going to discuss is connecting a console to what it was intended to use from the start: A good, old-fashioned 15 kHz RGB monitor. Several early home computers, like the Commodore Amiga, the Atari ST, and the Apple IIGS used 15 kHz RGB monitors, or at least supported them in addition to conventional composite monitors. A handful of early-generation VGA monitors also support 15 kHz. If you happen across any monitor on this list, there's a fairly good chance it'll work with your game console. Avoid any monitor that has a single input labeled 'digital ' or 'TTL'. While technically RGB, these types use a digital signal which is incompatible with any retro game console you're likely to own. Likewise, steer clear of any CGA or EGA monitor unless it specifically has an option for analog RGB.

Commercial 15kHz RGB monitors were also commonly used in closed-circuit setups, in hospitals as endoscope displays, and in television production studios. Commercial monitors usually have the added benefit of looking very good, since an accurate, distortion-free image is a must, whether you're videotaping a soap opera or the inside of someone's colon. Some of the best standard-def CRT displays ever made are members of the Sony PVM and BVM family of professional monitors. These units sold for of thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars new, so even used, they can be a bit pricey. Most arcade monitors, particularly JAMMA-compliant ones, operate at 15 kHz too, but arcade boards usually output a higher voltage to their displays than do home consoles. An arcade monitor connected directly to a home console would probably show a very dim image.

Sony PVM-14M2U (left) & Commodore 1080 (right)

If you find a compatible RGB monitor, you now need a way to connect it up. Commercial monitors typically use individual BNC jacks for each signal line, and several websites, like these guys, sell a cable with a female SCART jack on one end, and individual BNC connections for video on the other, as well as RCA connections for audio. You attach your specific console's AV-to-SCART cable to to it, and then it to the monitor.

The Sony PVM monitor (top) uses separate BNC connectors for R, G, B & sync.
The Commodore monitor (bottom) condenses R, G, B & sync connections into a 9-pin D-sub connector

The consumer-grade RGB monitors that old computers used are a little more complicated to work with. Since each manufacturer used its own pinouts & connector styles, you may need to build your own cable to connect it to your console of choice. In either case, expect your RGB monitor to be much less tolerant of garbage on the sync line, so try to use a clean sync signal with it, either directly from the console or with a Sync Strike.

Note: Not all monitors in Sony's PVM series have RGB inputs, so be sure to do your homework before buying one. Also, you need a monitor with an external sync input. Avoid monitors with only "internal sync", also called "sync-on-green."

Left: A Super NES-to-SCART cable and a SCART-to-BNC cable with on-board Sync Strike chip.
Right: A home-made SCART-to-Commodore cable, also with on-board Sync Strike chip.

RGB Compared

In this first batch of pictures, I'm using a Sony PVM 20m2u monitor. In addition to having an excellent picture for a CRT, it sports composite video and s-video connections in addition to RGB. The SNES supports all three standards as well, so it'll be our source. Apologies for the dark horizontal bar visible in some of these pictures; it's what happens some times when you photograph a CRT.

 First up is composite video:

Colors bleed into each other in several places, including the coin counter, the red turtle shell, and the front of Bullet Bill. In addition, a checkerboard pattern, called dot crawl, is visible in the smiling clouds, the timer, and the score counter. Definitely room for improvement here.

Now let's check out s-video:

S-video represents a pretty significant bump in image quality. The dot crawl is gone and the colors don't bleed together to nearly the same degree as they did with composite video. The image is also slightly brighter, too. However, sharp borders between light and dark colors, such as the clouds' eyes and Bullet Bill's face against the white background smear together to some extent, causing a slight loss of definition. On solid colors, like the blue sky, a slight checkerboard pattern is visible, too. 

OK, so let's see RGB finally:

The jump in image quality isn't quite as dramatic as moving from composite to s-video, but it's still impressive. The colors are much richer and more saturated, each individual pixel is clearly-defined, and there is almost no fringing, smearing or bleeding. The only image flaw I noticed is a slight horizontal bleed from the black border around the 'mario' text onto the blue pixels just to the right. 

Next up is a modern HDTV, a Samsung UN48H6350 48" LCD unit. Like most modern HDTVs, it has no s-video input, so I will only be comparing composite video fed directly from the SNES to the RGB-HDMI converter. In both cases, the TV is in game mode. 

First up is the composite video:

This TV has surprisingly good standard-def image processing. There's no dot crawl, and in most cases, the pixels appear sharp. A notable exception is Mario himself, who is a muddy blob, and the clouds' smiles, which lack definition.

Now for the HDMI converter:

Unsurprisingly, it looks excellent by comparison. The pixels are sharp and the colors are nicely saturated. It is almost indistinguishable from the image you might get from an emulator. Again, the only notable image flaw is the same ever-so-slight horizontal bleed from 'mario.' 

As I mentioned earlier, input lag is an issue with pretty much all HDTVs. (It also happens to be the reason why light gun peripherals, like the Nintendo Zapper, no longer work.) Generally speaking, the more devices in the signal path, the laggier things get, and my experience with the converter vs the TV's own composite connection bears this out. To demonstrate input lag, I split the output from the SNES, sending it to the HDTV and a reference CRT monitor at the same time. In this first video, the HDTV is connected via composite video:

The lag is certainly detectable, but at least with Super Mario World, it didn't cause me too much difficulty. 

This next video shows the HDMI converter:

The lag is much more apparent here, and this time, it did interfere with my ability to effectively time some jumps. I personally would not play a game like SMW using this converter, despite the impressive bump in image quality.

Input lag is hard to pin down. It can vary wildly from manufacturer to manufacturer and even from model to model. It's often not advertised too, since it has generally trended upward as HDTVs have gotten more sophisticated. Fortunately, TV review sites like this one include input lag in their evaluations. I wouldn't recommend buying a new TV just because it has the lowest lag times, but if you plan to use it as a display for any type of game console, old or new, and what you enjoy playing requires the reflexes of a spazzy 8-year-old, it should be a consideration. One of those low-lag HDTVs paired with an XRGB-mini converter might well be the key to retro gaming bliss, in lieu of a CRT display.

Space Harrier for Sega 32X

The Sega 32X has gotten a lot of flak over the years, for being an under-supported kludgy add-on to the Genesis, and a cynical attempt by Sega to squeeze the last few drops of revenue from a dying platform...

Anyway, onto the review: Space Harrier is a "2.5-D," on-rails 3rd person shooter, originally released to arcades way back in 1985. Much like DOOM, it uses scaling 2D sprites on top of a 3D background to simulate a fully 3D environment. Your character, a blond, be-jetpacked fellow, runs, flies, and shoots his way through wave after wave of robots, cycloptic woolly mammoths, Easter Island statues, laser-shooting orbs, rocks & bushes in a colorful landscape called the Fantasy Zone. It's a simple game, even by arcade shooter standards, but it is very intense, and it excels both in presentation and gameplay. It looks and sounds great even by today's standards, but the smooth-scaling, detailed sprites, the generous use of color and digitized voices, and the fast-paced, fluid action must have been mind-blowing to its original audience.

Space Harrier's success in the arcades meant it was soon ported to nearly every contemporary computer and game console. However, the arcade version of Space Harrier utilized a brand new "Super Scaler" arcade board, equipped with dual 16-bit CPUs, a powerful GPU capable of displaying thousands of on-screen colors, and sophisticated sprite scaling/rotation hardware. The home ports running on more humble hardware ran the gamut from skin-peelingly awful to surprisingly playable, given their limitations, but none came close to matching the Super Scaler's capabilities and thus none could do justice to Space Harrier.

Fast-forward to late 1994, when Sega released the 32X add-on, and Space Harrier was among its launch titles. A 10-year-old arcade game may be an odd choice for console launch title, but Space Harrier's fast-paced action really helped show off the 32X's chops. Nostalgic gamers suffering from a decade-long Space Harrier drought finally had their thirst quenched by what turned out to an outstanding port of the arcade. The graphics, sound effects, music, levels and characters are all dead-on perfect, and it even sports the arcade original's disappointingly terse "The End" screen when you beat it. There's just a tiny bit of chug that shows up when too much is happening on-screen at once, and the Genesis' D-pad is a poor substitute for the superb analog flight yoke the arcade machine used.

Unfortunately, I still can't recommend seeking out this version of Space Harrier, unless you already own a working 32X and you're looking for something to play on it. If that's the case, it's cheap and readily available on eBay. However, ports of Space Harrier continue to be released to this day, on hardware that's much easier to live with. For example, the Sega Saturn version is every bit as faithful as the 32X's, but it does support analog controls, using the Knights Into Dreams' 3D controller. Space Harrier has also appeared in various Sega collections for the Dreamcast, PS2, PS3 and Xbox 360. Most recently, Nintendo has released a version of the arcade Space Harrier for the 3DS' virtual console, complete with stereoscopic 3D support. I'd suggest steering clear of the Sega Master System version on the VC, though, unless you're curious enough to pay actual money to find out just how badly Space Harrier sucked on 8-bit hardware.

How The NES Zapper Works

I have professed my undying love for the light gun peripheral elsewhere on this blog. To me, it remains one of the most natural and immersive ways to interact with a video game, despite its decline in popularity. Though nearly every game console from the mid 80s to the mid 90s had one, the NES Zapper is probably the one most gamers are familiar with.

Nintendo's involvement with light gun games actually predates the NES by over a decade. In 1973, Nintendo turned several old Japanese bowling alleys into light gun-based skeet shooting parlors.  A year later, Nintendo introduced its first arcade game, Wild Gunman. The purely electro-mechanical Wild Gunman used a couple of 16mm film projectors to show footage of various Old West bad guys ready to draw and fire on you, the player. Your goal was to wait until their eyes 'flashed', then draw your own pistol & shoot. If you were quick enough, "YOU WON" would be projected on the screen over a shot of the bad guy clutching his chest & crumpling, Sergio Leone-style, to the ground. 

The NES wasn't the first home console to sport a light gun, (that honor belongs to the Odyssey) but it was the first to couple one with complex games, and it has by far the largest library of supported titles. The Zapper is based on the Famicom's light gun, a very convincing-looking black revolver which was itself modeled after the one featured in Wild Gunman. Fearing a potential rise in cases of police-perforated eight-year-olds, Nintendo of America redesigned the Zapper to look more futuristic, and less lethal. The earliest Zappers have a dark gray body, light gray accents, and a red trigger, mimicking the NES' color scheme. Later models have a bright orange body, light gray accents and a black trigger, again in an attempt to make them look even less like real firearms. 

Opening up a Zapper reveals that there's not much to it. A small lens in the barrel focuses light from the TV screen onto a photodiode, a device which generates a small electrical current when exposed to light. An amplifier boosts the current and sends it to the NES console to be processed as input for the game. As simple as it is, the Zapper can't tell if the light it detected came from a TV screen or another source, like a light bulb, so it's up to the NES game to make that determination. The more well-written games use a multi-step process to determine which target on screen has been hit:

Here, we have two Duck Hunt ducks flying around:

When the Zapper's trigger is pulled, the NES blanks the entire screen for one frame of video, or roughly 1/30th of a second. This establishes a baseline that the NES uses to make sure the player's not just aiming the Zapper at a lamp. 

Next, the NES draws a white box around the first duck on the screen for one frame:

The first box is then removed and another one is drawn over the second duck:

Finally, the NES resumes drawing the game's normal graphics. If the Zapper picked up light from one box or the other, the NES registers a hit and the game murders the targeted duck accordingly.

This entire process takes a fraction of a second to complete, and is nearly imperceptible to the human eye. You can watch the whole process unfold in this slow-motion footage from Hogan's Alley:

When the trigger is pulled for the first time, the NES blanks the screen and puts a white box in place of the cop first, the professor second and the bad guy third. The NES registers a hit with the bad guy, so he is removes from play. When the trigger is pulled for the second time, only the cop and the professor are left as valid targets, and the NES replaces just those two characters with white boxes.

It's a simple and effective technique, but it's not fool-proof. The television has to be adjusted so that the image is not too bright or too dark, as either will screw up the baseline or keep the Zapper from picking any light up at all. The targets have to be large enough so their white box can be picked up by the Zapper, and the number of targets on screen are limited to no more than three or four to keep the TV screen from going black too long. The process is also extremely time-sensitive; if there's any significant delay between the time the NES sends the image to the television, and the time that image appears on-screen, the NES won't correctly register hits. This isn't a problem for old-school analog CRT televisions, as they respond pretty much instantaneously. However, digital HDTVs spend a lot of time (relatively speaking) converting the analog signal from the NES into a digital image, and then rendering it on screen, causing a phenomenon known as input lag. In some HDTVs, this lag can be as bad a 1/10th of a second, which is much longer than the 1/30th the NES is expecting to wait. As a result, Zapper games work only spottily with the handful of tube-based HDTVs in existence, and they won't work at all with LCDs, plasmas or projectors. All the more reason to hang on to your old Radiation King, in my opinion.

SolarStriker for Game Boy

I own three copies of SolarStriker. I've actually run across this game in stores, purchased it for dirt-cheap, taken it home & realized I already owned a copy twice. It's not that I have Mel Gibson's Consipracy Theory OCD; it's that this game is so forgettable, it keeps falling out of my brain.

Another Game Boy launch title, SolarStriker is a vertical spaceship shooter with a standard boilerplate of a plot: You and your super-advanced prototype fighter are Earth's last defense against the overwhelming forces of an invading alien race. You fight your way through waves of enemies until you encounter the level's boss. Once you defeat it, you move on to the next level in the game. In standard shmup fashion, you have no control over how fast the screen scrolls, but you can move up and down in addition to left & right, and the screen scrolls slightly left or right to reveal more of the play field than will fit on-screen at once. You have only one weapon in this game (A & B buttons both fire it.) which can be upgraded from a single shot to twin, triple, and ultimately the high-powered Super Shot by shooting space-crates & collecting the 'P's enclosed within. There are no other types of weapons or power-ups at all in SolarStriker

It's an uncomplicated game to be sure, but it's not easy. You start with only three lives and no continues. Scoring 50,000 points earns you a bonus life, but unless you're really good at dodging enemy fire, that won't be enough to sustain you through all six of its levels. Dodging itself is a problem because, while you can move in any direction, you don't do so very quickly, and you can't outrun enemies at all. The SolarStriker is one pokey little spaceship, but then again the play field is so tiny, there are times when you can't avoid getting hit no matter how fast you move. Maddeningly, you can only shoot straight ahead, while most of your enemies can shoot in any direction. You're usually screwed if you let too many enemies get behind you, because there's no way you can take them out. Oh, how I yearned for a Super Zapper or something when this happened! Fortunately, the game is not so cruel as to actually spawn enemies behind you. It's not a thumb-busting button masher either, as you just have to hold A or B down to keep firing. Come to think of it, this may be the first shmup I've played to actually sport that feature.

The graphics in SolarStriker are basic but clean, and nicely high-contrast. It's very playable on the original Game Boy's notoriously smear-happy screen because nothing moves very quickly. I'm glad the developers chose dim, unobtrusive backgrounds, even if black stars on a white background do look a bit odd. (Nintendo corrected this on the Game Boy Color, Advance & Player.) The sound effects never rise above Atari-style beeps & bloops, but the background music isn't bad. If nothing else, SolarStriker demonstrates the Game Boy's potential to produce some very good chiptunes in subsequent games.


It's unfair to be too critical of a launch title like this, as developers almost always have a tight schedule & limited budget to work with. SolarStriker certainly feels like a rush job, but there's a germ of a good game here. If it just had a little more variety in its design, a little more balance in its gameplay, and a little more reason to keep the player coming back for more, it wouldn't be so forgettable today. And I wouldn't own three copies of it.

Nintendo Virtual Boy and Mario's Tennis

Ahh, Virtual Reality. In the mid 90s, it's possibilities seemed boundless: Entirely new computer-generated worlds were waiting to be discovered, explored and sexually assaulted in. Yes, with comically large goggles strapped to our faces, Humanity would soon enter a new golden age of infinite possibilities, and Nintendo would lead us there with the Virtual Boy.

Virtual Boy was the brainchild of Gunpei Yokoi, legendary designer of The Game & Watch series and the original Game Boy, as well as the father of the Metroid and Kid Icarus series. In the mid 90s, most of Nintendo's R&D efforts were tied up in development of the Nintendo 64, but its portable R&D group was relatively idle, since the Game Boy was still selling like crazy. Yokoi came about the idea of developing a 3D virtual reality game system after witnessing a demonstration of a new type of LED-based imaging system created by a company called Reflection Technologies. Yokoi had lofty goals for his new system, like a 3D full-color head-mounted display with full motion tracking capabilities. Cost and technological limitations quickly brought the project down to Earth, and Yokoi ultimately settled on a tabletop system with no head-tracking features and only a red monochrome display for his prototype, which he dubbed the VR-32. Nintendo, eager to put any kind of new hardware on store shelves, rushed the VR-32 prototype to completion, against Yokoi's wishes, and demonstrated it for the first time at the Shoshinkai Trade Show in 1994. It met with a tepid response from the attendees, who balked at its clunky design, monochrome picture and, worst of all, copious health hazards! Much like the 3DS 15 years later, the Virtual Boy came slathered with warnings that its 3D technology could cause headaches, nausea, and even permanent eyesight damage for players under 7 year of age. Nevertheless, Nintendo released the console in Japan in July of 1995 and in the US one month later for an initial retail price of $180. Customer response was just as tepid, and Virtual Boys languished on store shelves for months. Nintendo began dramatically slashing the price to as low as $99, but it seems they couldn't even give the Virtual Boy away. Discouraged by abysmally low sales and with the release of the Nintendo 64 imminent, Nintendo quietly killed the Virtual Boy in may of 1996, less than a year after it debuted. It was so short-lived that it never reached Europe and only 22 games in total were released. Yokoi left Nintendo shortly thereafter, his reputation in tatters despite his insistence that the console needed more time to develop. Nintendo, for its part, now officially had its first epic flop.



The Virtual Boy really is an oddity. It works something like a Viewmaster, in that each eye gets its own display screen, and each screen shows the game's action from a slightly different perspective, creating the illusion of three dimensions. The displays themselves are made up of a single vertical column of high-brightness red LEDs, the light from which is reflected off a mirror that oscillates horizontally about 50 times per second. The result of all this crazy video voodoo is a red monochrome 3D image with an effective resolution of 384x224 per eyeball. The system is battery-powered, but it's not something that can really be played on the go. The player places the Virtual Boy on a desk or table and mashes his face into the viewfinder. A neoprene mask blocks out ambient light, leaving the player able to see nothing but glorious reds and blacks.

The Virtual Boy's controller is ergonomic and comfortable to hold. It sports two D-pads, allowing the player to move about in a 3D space, though in most games, the right pad isn't used. A, B, Select and Start all make a return, as do two trigger buttons on the controller's underside. Curiously, the Virtual Boy houses its batteries in a removable compartment attached to the controller itself. The compartment houses six AA batteries which are good for only about 6-7 hours of play, and make the controller annoyingly heavy. An AC adapter is also available, but its power cable also plugs into the controller, forcing the player to sit near a wall outlet to use it.

Viewing a Virtual Boy is a pretty surreal experience. The image fills up only the center of your field of view; everything in the periphery is pitch black and devoid of any visual queues. This effect couples with the 3D images to create an experience I can best describe as being in a darkened theater, watching a play unfold that's lit entirely by red gels. It can be very striking. However, watching in an audience is still a far cry from delivering an immersive VR experience, and it's here that the Virtual Boy falters. Besides the color limitations, the Virtual Boy has no 3D acceleration, and its 32-bit RISC CPU, though state of the art for its time, isn't up to the task of pushing polygons around by itself. As a result, most Virtual Boy games are 2D sprite-based, with only a few 3D gimmicks thrown in. The handful that do use 3D polygons render them as hollow wireframes, reminiscent of Vectrex games. Of all the games in the Virtual Boy's library, only Red Alarm and Teleroboxer are played from a first-person point of view, generally considered a mainstay of VR technology.

The Virtual Boy's sound is also a big disappointment. Ironically, the first thing I noticed when I fired up my eBay-fresh Virtual Boy was how it sounded no better than the Game Boy, a system six years' its elder. I realize that CD-quality audio tracks probably couldn't be squeezed onto those old cartridges, but the SNES' audio quality puts Virtual Boy's to shame, and the Virtual Boy was touted as having a superior, 16-bit wavetable sound chip. If that's really the case, then the games I've played so far seriously under-utilize it.

Finally, I can happily report that, despite its copious warnings, I did not go blind playing Virtual Boy. I didn't even get a headache or sour stomach. After several marathon play sessions, the worst injury I sustained was a sore neck from craning to look into it. The red-on-black color scheme is distracting at first, but it doesn't take long to get past it, as anyone who's used a monochrome computer screen can attest. Overall, the Virtual Boy has plenty of shortcomings, but it's not the dramatic trainwreck history has made it out to be. It's endearing in its own quirky way, and it does have a few games worth playing. Let's check one out now.


Mario's Tennis

Mario's Tennis was the Virtual Boy's pack-in title, and the very first game in the Mario Tennis series. You play as one of six Mushroom Kingdom's denizens, and Donkey Kong Jr. for some reason, in a singles or doubles match of tennis. Unlike the games that followed, Mario's Tennis really is just that. No special moves are allowed here, although each character has a set of unique strengths and weaknesses. For example, Mario is once again the jack-of-all-trades, while Yoshi is fastest, but plays with a small racquet. Toad and the koopa troopa can both lunge for the ball and, in my experience, were the hardest to score against. In doubles matches, the computer-controlled teammate is competent enough, though sometime it'll ignore balls hit directly at it. It never gets in the way of your own shot, though, which is a plus. The opponents put up a real fight, particularly in the higher difficulties, and they employ a little bit of strategy in their game. They generally aim for the side of the court you're not occupying, and they will lob the ball over your head if you're too close to the net, or hit it short if you're playing too deep. Unfortunately, a two-player mode is conspicuously absent, since Nintendo never released the cable that allowed two Virtual Boys to communicate.

 The controls in the game are pretty basic. The left D-pad moves you around the court, while the A & B buttons cause you to hit groundstrokes or lobs, respectively. How you swing your racquet (forehand, backhand, smash, etc) depends on where your character's body is in relation to the ball. Pressing a direction on the D-pad mid-swing lets you roughly aim the ball, but you can't precisely pick where on the court to send it, and you can't apply topspin or backspin to the ball.


The graphics are pretty good, even if the color scheme makes it looks like you're playing tennis on the surface of a dying sun. Though the characters are all 2D sprites, they move around on a 3D court that looks convincing enough. The 3D effect helps you zero in on the ball easily despite the low camera angle, though the third-person perspective means the character's body sometimes blocks your view of the ball. The sprites are large and detailed, and they have a pleasant, hand-drawn aesthetic. They're all well animated too; lots of frames went into each of their movements, ensuring they don't just look like static drawings sliding around a tennis court. When they're facing toward you, their expressions change to reflect how they did at that last serve. If they've just scored a particularly difficult point, they'll usually react in some way: Mario flashes a peace symbol, Peach curtseys, Toad spazzes out, and so on. The backgrounds are sparse and don't draw attention away from the game. Occasionally, though, a gaggle of boos will float by or a few fireworks will explode in the distance, just to add a little visual flair.

Again, the audio is a disappointment. The characters themselves are completely mute, and the sound effects are typical Game Boy-ish bleeps and bloops. The music is unobtrusive, though the same four background songs played on a loop become tiresome to hear during long tournaments. At least the stereo sound is put to good use; sound effects pan and fade to match the action on screen.

I wonder... Had Nintendo chosen to pack in a game that appealed to a wider audience, would the Virtual Boy been a hit? Excepting perhaps Pong, tennis games haven't had nearly the same cultural impact that games Tetris or Super Mario Bros have. Had a game with more depth or originality been bundled with the Virtual Boy instead, would the future of video gaming really have become goggles on sticks?

Probably not.

The Magnavox Odyssey

A particularly memorable episode of  What's My Line? aired in 1972. In it, the panelists try to suss out what host Larry Blyden and his mystery guest are doing with a television that's out of view. It becomes apparent, as they grasp at straws and ask increasingly irreverent questions, that none of the panelists have any earthly idea what the correct answer is. When Blyden finally reveals that they're playing tennis, the confused looks on the panelists' faces show they still don't follow. And why should they? As far as they knew, television was only for watching. Finally, the other shoe drops: The TV is turned around to show the panelists an image of two white boxes batting a third box across a white line in what could charitably be called a tennis simulation. The mystery guest is identified as Product Manager for Magnavox Inc and the strange, white box on the desk is described as the world's first "electronic beam simulator that's attached to a television", the Magnavox Odyssey.

The Odyssey is the brainchild of Ralph H. Baer, a radio repairman-turned engineer and inventor. In 1966, while working for a defense contractor caller Sanders Associates, Baer began to develop his idea for a consumer-level interactive electronic device which used a television as its display. Working with fellow Sanders engineers Bob Solomon and Bob Tremblay, he created the prototype console and nicknamed it the Brown Box. It was initially capable of drawing two boxes on screen which controlled by the players, with the idea that one player would chase the other in a game of electronic tag. Later in its development, a third "ball" box was added which could move around independently, but still be influenced by the players' actions. After a few more tweaks and added features, the Brown Box prototype was ready for prime time by 1968. Baer patented his idea and shopped his prototype around to several major electronics manufacturers. After a deal with RCA fell through, Magnavox purchased Baer's invention and both Baer and Magnavox engineers spent the next four years developing it into a marketable product.


The production Odyssey was now completely solid state and capable of only black-and-white images, (the Brown Box supported limited color) but otherwise fairly faithful to Baer's prototype. It hit Magnavox dealers' shelves in August 1972. Unfortunately, it met with a tepid consumer response due in part to poor marketing (The commercials left impression that the Odyssey would only work with a Magnavox television.) and an astronomical price tag of over $550 adjusted dollars. Deep discounts and a renewed ad campaign failed to generate much more consumer interest in the Odyssey, and only about 300,000 units were sold before it was discontinued in 1975. Magnavox kept the Odyssey name alive though, applying it to a series of Pong consoles released in the mid 70s and ultimately to a new, completely programmable game console called the Odyssey 2. Though the Odyssey 2 sold many more units than its predecessor, the Great Video Game Crash hit Magnavox hard, and it bowed out of the video game biz altogether in 1983. Ralph Baer went on to develop Milton Bradley's phenomenally popular electronic game, Simon, in 1979. He also spent a great deal of time in court defending his patent from competing game console manufacturers like Atari and Nintendo. He was ultimately successful, and these companies were required to pay royalties for each game console sold, until Baer's patent expired in the early 90s.



So now let's check out the Odyssey. At first glance, it doesn't look all that different from later game consoles, though it's battery-powered and it's completely silent. There's a cartridge slot on the front and a couple of ports in the back that connect to two big, chunky controllers. The controllers themselves are a little more unusual: Horizontal and vertical knobs move the player's block around, Etch-A-Sketch style. A third knob, labeled English, allows you to steer the ball as it moves across the screen, while a reset button typically puts the ball back into play if it leaves the screen. A third port on the console connects to Videogaming's very first hardware add-on, a disturbingly realistic-looking light rifle that actually needs to be cocked each time the trigger is pulled.

It also comes loaded with accessories. In addition to the console, the box contains dice, poker chips, game boards, tokens, score counters, card decks, Monopoly money, and several transparent plastic overlays that fit on the TV screen. There are also six game cartridges included in the box, imaginatively named 1 through 6. The rather thick user manual explains the rules for each game, as well as which cartridges, accessories and overlays are needed to play. In total, 12 games are available out of the box: Table Tennis, Tennis, Football, Hockey, Ski, Submarine, Cat & Mouse, Analogic, Roulette, States, and Simon Says. The light gun accessory adds two more, and a handful of additional games were sold separately. That sounds like a lot, but every single game employs some combination the same basic objects: two player-controlled blocks, a ball, and a vertical wall. This is because the game cartridges contain no program data at all, and the Odyssey has nothing remotely approaching a CPU. Each of the above screen objects is quite literally generated by its own discrete circuit board. When inserted, the game carts simply switch the circuits on and connected them together in such a way to create the desired objects. It's incredibly primitive in design, and yet ingenious in its simplicity. It is a video game console in the most basic sense imagineable.

Of course this means that the Odyssey is dumber than a toaster. It can't keep score or time, enforce a game's rules or even limit where on the screen the players can move. There is of course no AI, so every game requires two people to play. I'll describe a few of the games in detail: In Ski, one player maneuvers his or her dot through a course laid out on the overlay while the other player keeps time and score. It sounds simple enough, but the Etch-A-Sketch controls do add a bit of a challenge. The two tennis games and Hockey are enjoyable, as they play like a sort of proto-Pong. Of course, nothing stops either player from cheating by constantly resetting the ball, noodling with the english knob or running all around the screen. Football is a complicated mess of a game, requiring a game board, several decks of cards, tokens, sticky tape, dice, and about six pages of rules to play. Here,  most of the action takes place on the game board, and the Odyssey is basically used as a down marker. At the other end of the difficulty spectrum, States and Simon Says simply involve one player drawing a card and asking the other to point to a specific US state/body part using the Odyssey. These two games are clearly aimed at a much younger crowd, but I have difficulty imagining that any little kid in the '70s would get much out of steering a white block toward Delaware. My guess is that marathon Odyssey-playing sessions eventually devolved into two people noodling around with a couple of glowing blocks on a TV screen and forgetting the rulebook. Maybe that was entertainment enough in 1972, but judging by the sheer number of closet-fresh Odysseys available on eBay, I'm guessing it wasn't.

So in the end, perhaps the Magnavox Odyssey should be best remembered for what it represented: the birth of a whole new entertainment medium. Edison's earliest films were just glimpses of daily life at the end of the 19th century, but they laid the foundation for a new form of expression and an industry which changed the world overnight. Likewise, the Odyssey demonstrated to the public that there is the potential to do so much more with our televisions than merely watch them. 40 years ago, a panel of celebrities couldn't imagine what life with an interactive electronic device would be like. Today, we can't imagine life without them.