
Paleotronic's 12 Years of Retro-Christmas Year One: 1980 - empressplay
https://paleotronic.com/2018/12/02/paleotronics-12-years-of-christmas-year-one-1980/
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mgamache
Me: That's a Sony Fricken Walkman and intellivision!

Son (9 years old): Blank stare wondering how long this 'conversation' will
last and he can resume watching game videos on YouTube.

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vidarh
I've had more luck with the shock-effect of starting conversations like that
with "you know, we didn't have Youtube back then" or similar.

The first time I did, my sons retort was to ask if we had electricity.

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codeulike
re: Big Trak: They compare it to a Logo turtle but it was never really as
interesting as that. You could program Big Trak, but only with a straight
series of commands. No loops or anything interesting like that. Also the damn
thing wouldn't turn very accurately, e.g. you ask for 90 degrees, you might
well get 120. So good luck getting it to actually go where you want. It did
look really cool though.

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beamatronic
There was a repeat RPT command/button

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codeulike
Yep but it could only repeat the previous step, rather than a group of steps,
iirc. So difficult to do anything interesting with it.

edit: I stand corrected. The repeat command could be told how many of the
previous steps to loop. But it only looped once. I guess 8-year-old me should
have read the manual.

[http://www.theoldrobots.com/book30/Bigtrak_Operators.pdf](http://www.theoldrobots.com/book30/Bigtrak_Operators.pdf)

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drewg123
I loved my Coleco Electronic Quarterback. It was amazing how just a few moving
LEDs could be filled in by the imagination to be a full football game. I had
more fun with that than I do with my son's Madden on PS4.

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vidarh
Modern football and soccer video games have gotten to the point where to me
(as someone not interested in _watching_ either) they feel more like
interactive TV than games.

The simple game mechanics of those old games meant you didn't need to care
about the subject matter of the game all that much. I even used to play some
text based game about managing a football team quite a bit even though I had
no interest in football and no interest in the teams back then, because it was
a decent resource optimisation game, and the setting was secondary.

I can see how people who _do_ care about the game and the teams can enjoy the
modern ones, though, but they're just entirely different categories of games.

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madengr
Wow! I’m drooling. Brings back memories, as at 9, I was the prime age for this
stuff.

I bought the Big Track re-issue a few years ago. It is quite nice, but they
did not make the trailer option. Also bought the re-issue Mattel football.

I also had an Armatron, and took it apart. All the gears dumped out, learned
allot putting it back together.

I did have the Intellivision, and later decked it out with accessories when
they were dirt cheap.

Had a Little Professor, but it was yellow. I don’t remember the Little Genius.

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aswanson
Off topic but in another thread I saw you did some work with SDR. I'm
interested in getting started in that area. Can you point to some useful
resources to get started in that, and antenna design?

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mysterydip
Not them but since it's offtopic anyway, here's what I used: [https://www.rtl-
sdr.com/](https://www.rtl-sdr.com/) bought the kit off Amazon and was able to
set it up on Windows and Linux after following a few instructions.

There's tons of software and projects out there to expand it, and that website
has links to a lot of them.

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aswanson
Thanks!

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ChuckMcM
Heh, I've got an Armatron in its original box in a closet somewhere. It is the
second of a pair as I attempted to convert one to computer control. The
mechanical artistry inside is pretty amazing, there was no way to directly
convert it as far as I could find, you would have to replace all the
mechanics. So the second one sat untouched...

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gugagore
Yeah, they have only one motor, and a whole transmission system which the
joysticks engage. The 8-bit guy has a video, I believe.

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lowercased
There's a chart where they compare "videogame systems", but "activision" is on
the list. activision was software only, but it's compared to atari vcs,
intellivision, odyssey 2 and the fairchild.

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BurnGpuBurn
Bill Cosby on the cover, ah, the good times..

