Game Boy pocket, 1996.

Not much to share here today: I've got some larger and more interesting posts in progress, but they're more like work and take time. This called for a quick turnaround, so here's a quick and dirty ad post for the first time in yonks. Here we are, back at the Game Boy we last saw about a month ago on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. This is the later "Pocket" version of the handheld console. The ad is courtesy of Vintage Computing & Games, which looked at it a bit over a year ago.

Game Boy pocket

Now in six tasty colours

It's not unknown for Nintendo to dwell perhaps overly on the aesthetic variations on their basic and simple hardware. Henry Ford boasted of the Model T "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black." but Nintendo has always been happy to reward its loyalists with the ability to coordinate their devices with their overall decor. Admittedly, offerings from rivals Sony, Microsoft and even Sega have often looked like they would only really be fully appropriate as part of the on-board entertainment systems on one of Disaster Area's sundiving stunt ships.

"That," he said, "that ... is really bad for the eyes ..." Ford looked. He too stood astonished. It was a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing about it. "It's so ... black!" said Ford Prefect, "you can hardly make out its shape ... light just seems to fall into it!" Zaphod said nothing. He had simply fallen in love. The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it. "Your eyes just slide off it ..." said Ford in wonder. It was an emotional moment. He bit his lip.

And so forth -- don't get me starting Hitchhiker's Guide quotes: I won't stop. (But in deference to the recently-passed Towel Day, I may as well pass along the link for the new, 30th-anniversary implementation of the HHGTTG text adventure game, now in HTML5!)

But back to the matter at hand, I guess what they're getting at with this ad is that Game Boy pockets are cool and fun in a similar way to the cool fun of drinking Slurpees from the local 7-11, which are likely to stain your tongue some heinous neon tint after freezing your brain. It's a dense little unexplicated reference: anyone who needs to know will appreciate it subconsciously.

The evocation of the 1980 D&D monster the Gibbering Mouther by this "wall of tongues" effect is probably unintentional.

Anyhow, my Game Boy-related excuse for making this post here today is because this morning at shift change a co-worker invited me to tarry a moment; having previously overheard me talking up my fabulous video game party, which wasn't really her cup of tea, she revealed that she still had her childhood Game Boy (because anything not explicitly thrown out is retained) and would be happy to give it a good home under my custody. With the video game party behind me, I'd pretty much forgotten the exchange, but apparently she hadn't -- I was delighted this morning to be endowed with a working GB and its two killer apps, Super Mario Land and Tetris -- arguably the best video game ever made, shortly to be celebrating the 30th anniversary of its creation in the USSR... maybe I will learn the rest of its theme music in honor of the occasion.

I previously owned a defunct Game Boy but got to enjoy a fine selection of its carts harnessing the power of the Super Game Boy adaptor, which duplicates the hardware contents of a Game Boy in cartridge form, parasitically hijacking the Super Nintendo's joystick input and video/sound output. So I'm looking forward to playing Game Boy Tetris with the adaptor, on a big screen, in colour, with block-rocking beats.

Thanks, Anne-Marie! I'll try to take a better selfie next time. She claimed it had just been sitting in a drawer for 20 years, which is sadly very likely, but I was thrilled to flip the switch and observe the power light going on. Typically in such cases the batteries would eventually corrode and explode, leaking battery acid everywhere, rendering the insides of the machine messy if not outright destroyed -- seemingly the fate of my Game Gear (though I have a lead suggesting that cleaning with vinegar can reverse some of the alkaline "battery acid"'s effects. Happily not so in this case!

Video game ANSI art: Reset Survivor's DECAR.ANS

Here it is, the ne plus ultra epic masterwork I reserved from the previous post on Blocktronics' 1980 artpack. After this, all other scriveners of video game ANSI art may as well go home. So just what is it we have got, here, anyway? There's plenty!

"Winners Don't Use Drugs" -- the first time I remember ever seeing this PSA appended to an arcade game's attract mode was, hilariously, Narc (1988, WMS... though oddly the Wikipedia link suggests the campaign began the following year, in '89.) Do you suppose William S. Sessions might have fried my ass with a rocket bomb after I told him "I give up!"?

Next up is obviously Ms. Pac-Man (who else rocks go-go boots quite like that?), though I must confess I can't locate the source of that particular presentation of her. And the "READY!" is also authentic Pac-Man! Then we see some Ms. Pac-Man game sprites, seamlessly segue-ing into Galaga ships -- seemingly a non sequitur, but they're both Namco games, the former from 1982 and the latter from 1981. So our trip through time here isn't necessarily in chronological sequence, but we haven't seen any tremendous leaps yet.

Next up looks like Atari's 1980 Missile Command, though again I've never seen those specific instructions before. Next a return back to Namco and 1982 with Dig-Dug, with a Pooka being blown up (inflated, that is) taking over the foreground. Those don't look like Fygars in the background, but I'm not sure what else they might be, unless there's some game mash-up going on in this particular sequence. (We will be seeing a great deal more of it.)

We're maintaining a 1980 holding pattern with a classic title from still another company, this time Stern and their game Berzerk, complete with quotes from its early and expensive sampled speech synthesis. Then we see another classic from another historical also-ran, the unmistakable Q-Bert from Gottlieb (1982), but instead of the typical enemies Coily and Slick on his Escherian pyramid, here we have a "Sidestepper" crab from Mario Bros. (1983, Nintendo) and what appears to be the titular frog from Frogger (Konami, 1981).

I don't recognize the rainbow that the pyramid dissolves into, but the face behind it is that of Donkey Kong (Nintendo, 1981) and it is into his scaffolding platform level that the rainbow resolves, with a new champion having reached the top to best Mario -- the ostrich-riding knight from Williams' 1982 game Joust. Something else is fishy two levels below that knight, with what appears to be a happy ambulatory bean jumping around -- a character or power-up I feel I ought to be able to place but can't quite lay my finger on. (Is it one of the early arcades' numerous eggplants?) Below the legume is a chef, apparently the protagonist of Data East's 1982 BurgerTime.

Donkey Kong's scaffolding eventually resolves, dumping a final barrel into the playfield of Atari's Centipede (1981), which is populated not with insects but the Grunt and Hulk robots of Williams' 1982 Robotron: 2084. Rounding the bend, that scene resolves into a background of the keys-on-chains of Nintendo's 1982 Donkey Kong Junior with a skeletal Dirk the Daring from one of Dragon's Lair's (1983) countless death sequences.

That's about it. A price of 67 cents with the message "push to reset" is unclear to me, a final mystery (well no, that would be the filename "DECAR"), reminiscent of a redemption mechanical game, but it may just be a reference to the artist's handle, resetsurvivor. And there we are. With the exception of the anti-drug message, all games depicted in this work date to a period of just a few years -- a "golden age" of the arcades -- from 1980 to 1983.

(Final contextual clarification: large rectangular "glitch"es you may have observed scattered throughout the piece are just ANSI shading blocks writ large 8)

ETA, clarification from the artist:

"thanks for the awesome dissection of the DECAR (decade arcade) piece, Rowan! The Ms Pacman is actually an original. A combination of the Japanese and American versions of MsP. I liked both designs and decided to mash em together.

The 'defend cities' pops up before the wave and volley of missiles in missile command.

The things in the dig dug tunnels are the humans from defender.

The rainbow is indeed from tron. It's the MCP ... I think? I forgot already. That pattern in the 'rainbow' is a simulation of fighting the mcp in tron. when you threw the disc it would take away a little block .

That 'bean' is the hot dog from Burgertime.

Also the 'push to reset' is just a play on my name combined with the 'push to reject' instructions on coin slots." (and 67 cents = 6lock7ronics)

And now you know the rest of the story!

Video game ANSI part 3 - Blocktronics 1980

I enjoyed good success with my previous two posts on this subject -- the obvious good fit between video game characters (and often outright sprite art) and the textmode graphics format of ANSI art. In my adolescence I was plunged into the weird world of textmode computer art, not for any retro reason -- that was just the way dialup BBSes distinguished themselves. The technology has moved on to heights unimagined, but similarly to how I cannot shake memories of the great old games I played back then, neither can I forget the satisfyingly minimalist aesthetic of ANSI art.
The ANSI art scene is long since defunct, but disparate onetime practitioners of the arcane art have found themselves swept together once again for sporadic releases of works made for old time's sake. Specifically, the group "Blocktronics" has just released an artpack of works themed "1980", and when considering the '80s, many of the artists thought about old video games -- and rendered out some textmode visual impressions of them. For your convenience, I have skimmed the pack of its game-related works and present them to you, here. (There are many other impressive works in the artpack, including a conversion of a Patrick Nagel piece, a tribute to the Moore/Gibbons Watchmen and a Max Headroom portrait, so if the look of these appeals to you, please don't hesitate to go check out the rest of it!)

Always, you must begin at the beginning: the FILE_ID.DIZ would instruct BBS file areas what the contents of the archive were, and here they are represented by a Pac-Man ghost.

At the bottom of the infofile, filled with nonsense typical of the '80s, there is a bright portrait of Capcom's MegaMan reclining by Enzo.

The Konami code will be well-drilled-in to anyone who ever owned one of the company's carts on their Nintendo Entertainment System, and here it is celebrated with one of their hardest games, its logo reproduced with great fidelity (using the advanced XBIN textmode format) by Fever.

Because even new video games owe a big debt to their predecessors, we have a long specimen of what might have once been termed a "scrolly", giving you a peek at the overall tapestry 25 lines at a time, this one themed after That Game Company's Journey, proudly painted by Reset Survivor.

Reset Survivor provided one more video-game-related piece for the artpack, but I have decided to reserve it for a post all its own -- truly it is just that epic. Cheers and fear not -- someday I will get back to video game ads scanned from comic books. Someday.

Yard Sale roundup, April 2014 edition PLUS celebrating 25k views!

Congratulations, readers! (Or, far more likely, Google Image-searchers who never see any of this text content! Google, do your bloggers a favour and endow them with special powers to force their image-scummers to read their posts!) We just surpassed a total of 25 thousand hits to the blog! This has been a good month here, also its most-viewed month ever despite deviating from the script (hello, video game comic book ads? That's what the URL said, at least!) and serving up some atypical content on niche topics (the demo of my vintage computer, the TINK!TONK! book, the two obituaries, that Lotus 1-2-3 VHS tape, and of course "realia" ... and somewhere along the line we actually did accidentally air a couple of video game ads, hitherto unseen here since mid-February. Essentially, this blog has no theme anymore beyond "Stuff I feel like writing about".) Some specific posts saw some mild promo on FaceBook and Google+, which led to big traffic spikes to those specific posts. Will I ever see regular commentors again? Does this blog have subscribers? Maybe it will somehow find its community. (Occasionally I despair of the time and effort needed to enrich these ads with transcriptions, context and analysis and wonder if I might be doing myself a favour if I turned it into a Tumblr imageblog. It hasn't quite happened yet!)

Anyhow, today was Port Coquitlam's city wide garage sale. As you may recall from past posts, my partner comes from a line of inveterate deal-seekers, spending more weekends than not logging visits to garage sales, yard sales, estate sales, flea markets and thrift stores. I didn't even really collect games (at least, not physical media 8) before meeting her and having to come up with some category of goods of interest to me to seek out on these expeditions. It's been chilling to see the onward march of time throttling what I'm likely to find secondhand -- I remember finding NES carts cheap and in great abundance, while now they are the sole province of collectors who hit up ebay to maximise the return on their investment. My family hit these sales during the golden age of PS2 / Xbox / Gamecube game turnover, and now in town when we find games at sales at all, they are more typically of the following generation -- PS3, Xbox 360, Wii -- none of whose machines I own or can easily emulate (and whose games, consequently, I fail to collect, for that way madness lies.) Anyhow, we are now quite distant from the opening sentence of this paragraph, but if you will hold my hand and nostalgically visit back to it, you can note that I invoked it for two reasons: the first advantage of a city-wide garage sale is a sheer density of sites -- you don't have to look for sales, you can just drive down a single street and stop when you find one that you like: they come geographically pre-optimised, and I think we hit up some 15 of them this morning... the second item of note is that Port Coquitlam is of that species of municipality considered a suburb, and hence its propensity for being hoovered clean by hungry urban dealers and hipsters is lesser. Thus, I ended up with a pretty good haul for my kingly $20 budget:

Starting at 1 o' clock, we've got two cheapie Nintendo DS games: Petz Dogz Pack and Monster High - Ghoul Spirit; then there is the PlayStation 1 game of Jurassic Park - the Lost World (which I was delighted to see reviewed at MobyGames under the hilarious headline "The worst game in history!" ... GameSpot's blurb is summarized as "The Lost World video game is an action-packed 3D platform game that has a perfect blend of frustration and frustration.") with its special lenticular case for cover art animation; there it is, the PS2 release of the most reviled game in the Fallout franchise (but how does it measure up to Fountain of Dreams?), Brotherhood of Steel; a big Game Gear haul of Mortal Kombat, Desert Speedtrap, Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and Shinobi (whose GG incarnation is a wholly autonomous game independent of its arcade and Master System predecessor); and a little trove of Game Boy Advance cartridges, including The Incredibles, The Polar Express, underdocumented Polly Pocket and Cabbage Patch Kids games, and the GBA port of Super Mario 3, which is what made my eyes light up at the baggie and pull my wallet out. Also you'll note there is a pink GBA unit itself -- basically thrown in for free under my budgetary terms -- which I can report is working! I don't need it to play the carts, which fit in my DS, so I would likely try to pass it along... but my toddler took an immediate liking to it, so we'll see if she doesn't end up inheriting it. (Over her mother's dead body, I imagine.) Then also a handful of games I already own but was unable to confirm redundant as my phone inconveniently died as soon as we arrived at the sales -- the desirable Metal Gear Solid for PS1 and MGS 3 for the PS2. (Also the Strawberry Shortcake GBA cart, which is embarrassing enough to own once let alone twice.) Alas, fuel for next year's family garage sale. I found other materials I could have bought -- one sale had a dozen PlayStation 2 joysticks but puzzlingly no games, and another one had several desirable games (FF7, Kingdom Hearts) I'm sure I could have picked up for a song and flipped for profit, were I so inclined -- but down that path (join in with me if you've heard this one before) madness lies. I am not a speculator in retro video game futures. (I just feel bad when I imagine the games going unsold at the end of the day and just being thrown out. But as the Ikea ad says, they don't feel bad: they are inanimate objects, they don't have feelings, am I crazy?)

And then there's the Xbox joystick. Why? Setting up my machine after the move, I found I couldn't get a strong enough signal from any of my existing joysticks to set the date and time on the machine after plugging it back in. This raises a worrying question regarding the health of the unit (and if so, the ultimate fate of my hundreds of Xbox games.) I figure either the joysticks are worn out or the joystick port is, and hopefully a "new" used joystick in good shape can help me get to the bottom of the conundrum.

Why do I care if my Xbox is working? Because I'm having another retro video game party! This time we've unhitched it from my birthday and are getting down to business in May. Retro Video Game Party III: The Legend of Joystickia (pretty terrible name, isn't it?) unfolds Saturday May 10th, from 2 to 11 pm. If you can figure out how to reach me and inquire, you are welcome to attend and play some of my hundreds of old games! I'll probably hit this point another couple of times before the date.

Then again, maybe not! Things might be slow around here for the rest of the month... I've entered several of these contests in the past and have never been able to actually deliver a working finished product by deadline, but I have full intentions of submitting a complete and working game to the ShuffleComp IF competition and I need to come up with more time in order to bring my little prototype to fruition, hence something has to go. (Let's not get too drastic, however!) Time spent designing incomplete games for past competitions still takes time and you get nothing out the other end (except, arguably, practice) and I am sufficiently confident in this one's fit of subject and concept that I want to bring it to the finish line. So if it gets quiet here, don't worry too much. Cheers and play on!

Game Boy's 25th anniversary

And in other missed-opportunity news, this past Monday the Nintendo Game Boy celebrated the 25th anniversary of its first release. I can apocryphally report that it was the top-selling handheld gaming unit of all time, largely due to its running battery-life laps around its competition the Lynx (from Atari, but originally Epyx!) and Sega's Game Gear. Also it was the single video gaming machine that was continually in production and on store shelves for the longest period of time (from 1989 to 2003, 5 or 8, depending on who you ask and what you mean by "Game Boy" -- the original pea-soup unit, or the whole line that ran through Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance) -- a record that will likely stand, given Moore's law. Different markets saw different advertising campaigns for it; here are three entries from a single campaign that stood out to me in my excavations:

Game Boy.  More fun than a ferret down your trousers.

Game Boy. More fun than a hole in the head.

Game Boy. More fun than a clip on the ear.

It seems clear that they're using the same model in all three shots here, though they get a radical hair restyling in the second ad. Am I just perverted to be questioning what, given its relative position, the ferret is up to in the boy's pants? These are '90s ads, self-evidently, as demonstrated amply by edgy non sequiturs. A hole in the head isn't fun. (A putting green on the head doesn't even make it much more playful.) And then "a clip on the ear" is a Britishism for being smacked upside the head, which is quite clearly also not fun -- though this expropriation of office supplies for the purposes of literally misinterpreting the phrase also appears to be no fun, despite whatever his whimsically unshod feet might suggest to the contrary.

The house is lit by an eerie blue ambience, and the floor appears to be, for no apparent reason beyond obligatory middle-finger surreality, made of astroturf. In conclusion, these ridiculous ads (and the Game Boy has some humdingers in that category) really help to establish the brand, but if you don't already believe the product to be something that you need or want, I'm not convinced that they're going to sell you on the lifestyle depicted in the ads. The model? I'm sure his mom told him to stop making that face or it'd stay like that, and he didn't listen.

RIP The Ultimate Warrior

James Brian Hellwig
June 16, 1959 – April 8, 2014

I used the first of these ads as a punchline earlier (note: when your topic is Fabio, no punchline is needed), but now circumstances sadly dictate that I celebrate the professional wrestler touted in these ads (who just a couple of weeks earlier, I heard described as enjoying the same decorating scheme as a little girl's bicycle) in memorial. I'm a couple of weeks late, but that's par for the course in this low-blog-activity slump. The world of video games is a weird kind of convergence nexus, so you end up finding significance in obituaries from all sorts of circles: math, AI, computing science, literature, music, film, and sports. And, well, professional wrestling. Here's the first of two ads I have featuring the slab of beefcake prominently, this one for 1991's WWF Superstars for the Game Boy:

THE ULTIMATE GAME BOY GAME.

INCREDIBLE WRESTLING ACTION!
Take on your favorite WWF Superstars with the piledriver, suplex, headbutt, clothesline, dropkick and more!

TV INTERVIEWS
Anybody want to take on these 24" Pythons?

OUT-OF-THE-RING MAYHEM!
Watch out for a powerslam!

TURNBUCKLE TURMOIL!
Unleash a devastating flying leap on your opponent!

Step into the ring with Ultimate Warrior, Hulk Hogan, Mr. Prefect, Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase and Macho King Randy Savage!

Everything looks pretty straightforward here, but wait -- was "Macho Man" Randy Savage secretly royalty or did the sport's twisting plotlines briefly upgrade him to a king when I wasn't paying attention? (Oh wait... yes, it did. Thank you, Wikipedia, for keeping tabs on all the notable bits we didn't keep up with.) The curious stuff to me is in the very bottom, where Hulk Hogan, who plays a minimal role in this ad, gets a full array of trademarks asserted as being the property of the Marvel Comics Group, including Hulkamania and Hulkster. Maybe he was licensed to Marvel for a comics deal in this time period? (Nope: truth is stranger than fiction -- Hulk's stage name was seen as derivative of Marvel's The Incredible Hulk, and amazingly for much of his career in the ring -- barring the "Hollywood Hogan" years -- he simply licensed use of "Hulk" and derivatives from Marvel.)

Now, here's one from 1990's WWF WrestleMania Challenge for the NES:

WWF
WRESTLEMANIA
CHALLENGE

ONLY THE
STRONGEST SURVIVE...

* HEAD-TO-HEAD SINGLES AND TAG TEAM ACTION.
*MAYHEM BOTH IN AND OUTSIDE THE RING.
* THE 3-ON-3 SURVIVOR SERIES.
* THE ATOMIC DROP, THE WARRIOR WALLOP, THE HULKSTER SPLASH, AND MORE.

IT'S SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST ON YOUR NES!

[SCREENSHOT]
Double-teaming may lead to victory -- or disqualification.
[SCREENSHOT]
Choose from 8 WWF Superstars or enter the ring as "yourself".
[SCREENSHOT]
Unleash a Flying Atomic Drop -- outside the ring.

I gather at this point in the sport, Hulk and the Warrior had a rivalry going on, and the out-of-ring side of the sport was gaining prominence. I have a vivid imagination, but I can't turn off my speculation regarding what the special move "the Hulkster Splash" might consist of -- maybe explaining that yellow stuff splattering the ad's backdrop? I don't know if I would risk double-teaming an opponent if a potential consequence would be disqualification on a coin-toss. I like the quotation marks when they say "or enter the ring as 'yourself'." Legal department stuff. Finally -- maybe the out-of-the-ring business really was worth stressing twice, but was the presence of the Atomic Drop really such a selling point?

So many questions that will never be answered. In conclusion... in nipply memoriam:

"Lotus 1-2-3 Release 4: Learn the EASY Way INSTRUCTIONAL COURSE", 1994.

So, after the recent "realia" post, you must be wondering -- just what was the latest acquisition in his collection? Well, here it is. It's not a game, and it's not an advertisement for a game, but it is so embodying of the early '90s that it would probably burn you to touch it. Now you know what my secret weakness is. A Lotus 1-2-3 orientation course on VHS tape? Hang on while I grab a bottle of Orbitz and open up my Trapper Keeper...

Learn everything you need to know to get started with Lotus 1-2-3
In less than an hour!
FEATURING
Bob DesLauriers
AMERICA'S TOP COMPUTER TRAINER
56 Minutes of High-Quality Instruction
ETN - Educational Television Network

Bob may have been hot stuff in the '80s, but lemme tell you, after '95, his output really trailed off... did the switch in technologies render his expertise irrelevant (Hello, where are all the registrations for my CP/M WordStar workshop?) or did he just make his mint and move to a Thai beach?

As ridiculous as this product seems on the surface, overall Bob must have been a kind of genius -- this is basically the invention of ehow in 1994. But being ahead of one's time is not always profitable...

If you find Software User Manuals too intimidating, then this course is exactly what you need. Try it, and master Lotus 1-2-3 today!
INDEX
01 SOFTWARE DEMONSTRATION
02 HARDWARE COMPONENTS: THE KEYBOARD, MOUSE AND FLOPPY DISKS
03 LESSON 1: CREATE, REVISE, & PRINT A WORKSHEET
04 LESSON 2: DEVELOP SKILLS, GRAPHICS
Consider the BENEFITS of ETN VIDEO COURSES
Motivated Instructors
Course Objectives
Practice Basic Commands
Use Help To Expand Skills
Learn Terminology
WordPerfect SIX Instructional Video
Colorful Graphics
Drive A:
Drive B:
Hardware Overviews
Step-By-Step Approach
Document 1
Save (Untitled)?
Document has been modified.
Save As... Yes No Cancel
Clear Computer Screens

Can someone who needs to be briefed on the use of a keyboard really be trusted to operate a VCR? I like how Lesson 1 seems to cover all the basics, with Lesson 2 reserved for "develop skills". It's kind of like the underwear gnomes' plan for financial success:

STEP 1: CREATE A WORKSHEET
STEP 2: DEVELOP SKILLS
STEP 3: ??
STEP 4: PROFIT!!!

I see they boast "motivated instructors" but yet the only face and name I see on the package is that of Mr. Bob DeLauriers. Are there other anonymous trainers or does he just wear sock puppets and use funny voices?

The Colorful Graphics curiously demonstrate a screen from what must be a different member of the product line, a similarly retro WordPerfect tutorial. (Why promote this product when you can promote the entire line?) What I want to know is, next slide, in the Hardware Overviews section -- who is responsible for that bass-ackwards floppy disk drive arrangement? I've seen various configurations of 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 drives, but never in this particular exotic arrangement, with the 3.5 drive A and the 5.25 one B? For the first half of the '90s, we used the A: practically exclusively for booting from 5.25 floppies. Ah well. In retrospect, it all seems quite arbitrary -- that said, the arbitrary convention still results in this setup looking positively backwards.

I love the textmode character art menu in the final, "Clear Computer Screens" slide: it really was all you needed to get the job done even for a GUI. I gather that in some applications circles this menu style is the final major motivation for interest in boxological textmode support.

Obviously I need to get this thing converted and up on YouTube and let me tell you, it'll set the retro applications scene on fire! I recall that Gaming After 40 actually contacted the author of an old computing video for the rights to re-print authorized copies of it for collectors to enjoy. Let's not get crazy, here. YouTube will clearly suffice. Admittedly the conversion is somewhat low-priority, but we'll see if I manage to make it happen.

(The real question is: who is more foolish, the fool who expects to get money stocking this on their store shelf in 2014 or the fool who actually spent money on it to impress hypothetical blog visitors?)