Chris Covell

Yes, if you get a certain score and end the game, you get a Karaoke option on the title screen, where it plays the in-game music along with lyrics. I once "convinced" a Japanese friend to sing it in tune for me...

I remember reading Doonesbury as a kid and puzzling why the President was always depicted as "invisible" in the strip...

Konami OAM shuffling IIRC uses prime number offsets to keep the cascade look and reduce "flashing" that would occur every 2/3/... frames if nonprime numbers were used. It is dumb though that they didn't set aside some higher-priority sprite slots for objs that should always be in the foreground.

Yes, many problems with this map, and no printed publisher here to complain to.

YouTube video by Sound Design Music 虹のかけ橋 RAINBOW / 宗次郎 Sojiro【ハーモニー】

I picked up a cassette at HardOff, 1988's Harmony by Sojiro, a (new age?) ocarina musician. The song Rainbow is pretty fantastic, sounding like something you'd hear mid-game in a Super Famicom RPG in 1993-94 with the hints that your adolescence was coming to an end...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kICY...

I used mail-order importer maybe 1994 or so, and it cost $100-130 still new (limited memory of the price at that time).

Octomom

An "Irene" telephone from Japan with some unusual buttons beyond the 12-key keypad

What other device features buttons like "no!" and "I like chopin"?

A Yamaha CC-101 stereo component system from the early 1980s all in metallic finish with blue accents

Ugly? Or beautiful?

Hi, I don't know if anyone has ever considered that sort of hack, since the GG has a built-in SMS compatibility mode anyway. As with all GG->SMS hacks, the main problem is with scrolling and level & tile-drawing routines that need new constraints... and I don't think that can be automated much.

Yes, I actually have a nice 19" NEC Multisync FE90. Still no support for 15Khz modes, so I have to use an XRGB2. The NEC FE90 can support 50Hz VGA, so PAL consoles on the MiSTer work great on it.

15Khz RGB looks clear, but this monitor refuses to sync to it!

DOOM can be made nice and bright on this! That was nice!

The obligatory screenshot of the Amiga Workbench, but this was upscaled to VGA specs...

MX17S 3/3: In back it has VGA, DA-15 and BNC posts. I had hopes that it accepted 15Khz Amiga/console frequencies like a magic unicorn, but sadly no. When a 31Khz 60Hz VGA signal is detected, the LCD shows res & freq. But 50Hz VGA, or 15Khz anything kicks up an error, and the buttons go unresponsive.

The back of the monitor showing some connections, maybe a Mac computer DA-15? and BNC with split or combined sync

Convenient brightness and contrast controls, and the LCD readout

Quite deep and very heavy monitor

MX17S 2/3: The monitor is from 1993! and is still sharp and bright. It is from an era when analogue geometry controls were being replaced by digital ones, but before OSDs became common. So it has its own backlit LCD screen showing its status. Some analogue controls are found behind knobs or pots.

MAG Innovision MX17S CRT Monitor

The digital control panel of the MAG monitor. It has 8 presets for different frequencies (but how different can they really be?)

MAG MX17S product label on underside. From 1993. MAG was a Taiwanese company.

MX17S 1/3: Some info about the MAG MX17S CRT monitor I came across this week, since there is scant information about it online. I stopped by a HardOff near my old place and they were selling this. I took my MiSTer FPGA system back to the HardOff to test it, and whether it supported 15Khz RGB, etc.

Well, we're dealing in grades of ugly already...
(I meant drawers like these)

First, get some wardrobes or closet space to put the boxed systems and large game boxes in. Some large stackable plastic bin drawers to organize things sanely. Maybe sell off systems that you have multiples of (those Famicoms) or systems that you seldom play (Gamecube & 32X for me), etc.?

Your emulator is doing upscaling in the horizontal direction, and it can do multiples of 256 easily (x2 for example). Then Ys goes into 320-horizontal resolution mode, and whatever emulator can no longer upscale to 640 pixels, so it falls down to 320 (x1) across.

I gotta add that you're hearing that strong Ontario accent, probably. For example, the Vancouver B.C. accent is not too dissimilar to the Seattle accent... no?

I love seeing any Solstice / Solstice II history. But the NES version was released in stores in July 1990, so can this build really be from just one month prior?

A world map written in Japanese, giving statistics such as largest population, largest country, largest lake, etc...

世界の大きい国②はアメリカ合衆国ではなく、※カナダ※ですよ！

My wife ordered an "educational" map. Cute, but I have at least one problem with its accuracy already.
出版社がどこにも書かれていない世界地図。もう文句が一つあります。。。

Yes, I've had those "big bag of prototype cartridges" dreams myself. Always awful to wake up, or even to understand mid-dream that it was a dream...

Hirotoshi Suzuki. Made THE best HuCard soundtrack and yet there's very little info and few other known soundtracks by him.

Devil's Crush on the PCE has absolutely fantastic music, but there ain't no FM synth there at all...

I don't have the manuals, but if it means anything, the data format (where graphics are/how they are stored/ where Japanese menu & lyrics text is) seems close or identical between volume 1&2 and volume 4.

Never pick up the orbs that colour cycle but shoot them until they turn into flashing ones, and pick the orbs up. Your lives counter will turn gold, and you won't have to deal with checkpoints. One insta-revival for each flashing orb that you pick up.

Super UFO 8 SNES copier box

Super UFO 8 SNES copier box top flap

Super UFO 8 SNES copier box (other side)

Some cleaner images of the Super UFO 8 SNES copier box...

Yes, "Game Labo" magazine had an article about this in the late '90s, if I recall. They compared the two (?) different revisions using screenshots from Tomb Raider, even.

Making the mushroom visible in the overworld via Phantos

The Super Mario 2 level data video by @rgmechex.com was really illuminating, making me appreciate the layers of compression the game used. I also wanted to hack the game a bit to reveal the location of mushrooms in the main level. Haven't found the logic yet, but a quick hack can change its tiles:

snippet of Super UFO 8J copier manual

Only Amiga fanzine image collage

GameBoy instruction manual

Volley Fire instruction manual

It was a weekend of finishing little scans and uploading them, I guess. So I've added the Super UFO 8J Japanese manual, GB Manuals, Only Amiga .ADFs, etc. to Archive.org: archive.org/details/@cco...

For some reason, I had the acronym "SNCF" bouncing around my head, and had the odd thought if French people ever pronounced it as « » since each letter is often silent...