She's one of, and maybe the best explainer of vintage hardware I've ever encountered. Her entire site is so, so worth reading if you're into this kind of thing.
There's also a strange appeal, at least for me, in being able to play around with old games and hardware using far more powerful tools (and more time) than the original developers could have dreamt of.
I also like, sometimes, that we can now own hardware that would have been exorbitantly expensive in its heyday. An arcade machine was thousands of dollars in the 80s, but you can sometimes buy the board for cheap and supply your own JAMMA connector and display. Fun.
Just treat her as a human being, there's no reason whatsoever to bring up gender here.
I can assure you, as a guy who enjoys many traditionally feminine activities: when you're doing something contrary to gender norms and people constantly bring that up, even in a positive way, it feels extremely limiting and frustrating.
Just let people enjoy stuff, especially when the result is awesome and fascinating articles like this.
Rather than talking about "taboos," which sound sort of mysterious and arbitrary, let's take a look at why commenting on her gender wasn't the best thing.
First I have no doubt that the original comment up there, commenting how it's odd to see a woman involved in such a hobby, was made completely innocently!
But even if something is both correct and innocent, it's not always like... the best choice. It was off topic for sure and more to the point, it winds up simply reinforcing the stereotype.
Imagine a comment along the lines of, "oh -- a black valedictorian! don't see that often!" Awkward at best, and the fact that you're pointing out the perceived exception to a perceived stereotype is evidence that you're kinda bought into the stereotype.
We were lucky enough to have one of these at my (now defunct) arcade bar a few years ago. Absolutely gorgeous on a CRT. I never noticed the pixels feeling particularly large — I’ll have to remember to check that out the next time I (hopefully) see one in the wild.
my uncle bought one an it stayed at my grandmothers house for years. i played with my brothers and cousins a ton. when she passed it went to my aunts house. they may move soon and i said i would come pick it up and keep it in my basement to play with my son.
screen is very dark and has a ton of burn in. it might be a nice project to repair and restore. residual crt voltage scares me to this day. gotta get some rubber gloves or something.
(The photo for step 9 is a bit confusing, as it doesn't show the alligator clip attached to the screwdriver shaft.)
I grew up in the era of tube TVs (not just the CRT, the entire circuit was tubes). One of my earliest memories was being the family TV repairman, which meant pulling out all the tubes, going to the corner grocery with my dad to test them, bringing home the replacement for the bad tube, plugging them back in and the TV worked!
Dad showed me how to discharge the CRT, and we used the same tools and technique described in the WikiHow article. The loud "pop" it makes is really cool.
I played the Atari version of Popeye and always wanted to play the arcade version but they never had it around. Funny because Al Copeland was a friend of a family friend and Popeye and Popeye's was huge business around town. Most of my childhood friends managed to be on TV for "Popeye and Pals," a studio show where they'd show Popeye cartoons in between interview segments with the kids in the audience who were all busy munching down on 2 piece boxes of fried chicken.
I recall it being at either Space Port or Tilt in the Lake Forest Plaza. I bet it was around Fun Arcade too but I wasn't allowed to bicycle all the way out to Metarie at that age.
It was not at either fun arcade any time that I visited which was quite a bit. I do remember it being at a showbiz pizza though. I think the one by the Kmart and the sporting goods store off
Vets.
> The very first arcade game with a CPU was Midway’s 1975 port of Gun Fight.
Cool, I used to have a portable clone of that game: https://www.cnet.com/culture/80s-handheld-game-still-hits-th... The glowing VFD had a certain mistique that the by then more common LCDs lacked, and the game itself was really fun, either against the CPU or against another player. And it played the iconic "funeral march melody" when your gunslinger died, which has been stuck in my head ever since...
Thanks for sharing this. This month there was a interesting Retronauts podcast episode [0] about Popeye in which not only this version, but also Don Priestley spectrum version was discussed
My gf is obsessed with this game at our arcade bar now. It’s a great game. I played it on my Commodire 64. It didn’t look quite as good but I never noticed. :)
I used to play that online via emulators. I loved it! Being a child of the 2000s, I never noticed how much more graphically intense it was compared to other 8-bit offerings
Cool article. I didn't like this game, but I was always impressed by the smooth scrolling when the screen bounced in response to Bluto jumping around. It gave the game a "big-budget" or arcade-quality feel, which frequently distinguished arcade games from home adaptations. This despite my having an Atari 800, whose hardware provided silky-smooth fine scrolling and sprites.
The glow of multicolor game characters on a CRT just brings back the excitement of arcades. I wonder if anything has that kind of entertainment value for kids today.
