retro
Latest
The smart typewriter is here
Find it nigh-on impossible to focus when writing on your computer? You now have a dedicated device to help you shut out the social networks and other distractions: after more than a year's wait, Astrohaus has started taking orders for the Freewrite (formerly the Hemingwrite). Plunk down $549 ($449 in the first 24 hours, or $499 through the end of March) and you'll get a smart typewriter that lets you cut out non-essentials while keeping the conveniences of modern tech. You only have an E Ink display and a mechanical keyboard to work with, but there's WiFi under the hood to sync your masterpieces with Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive and other cloud services. You also have onboard storage for over a million documents, in case you're particularly prolific, and the 4-week battery life will keep it running through an epic-length camping trip.
Olympus PEN-F camera takes you back in time with its looks
Olympus had a busy 2015, having introduced a number of cameras for people with different levels of expertise. This year, the manufacturer's first announcement was its Stylus TG-870, a ruggedized compact shooter that offers niche characteristics. And now Olympus is introducing the PEN-F, which is bound to turn some heads. Other than the retro looks it brings to the table, it's sporting a new 20-megapixel Live MOS sensor and TruePic VII processor, as well as built-in 5-axis image stabilization and an ISO 80 equivalent in low mode -- that's going to help with night shots.
Game Boy Macro mod breathes new life into your Nintendo DS
Your Nintendo DS is no longer the hottest handheld on the block, but that doesn't mean it has to sit in the closet gathering dust. Modder Anthony Thomas recently started up Game Boy Macro, a service that turns the DS into a giant Game Boy Advance player -- as the name suggests, it's basically a Game Boy Micro writ large. You lose the second screen (and thus native DS games), but the result is arguably much cooler. You can even specify custom case colors if you're eager to recreate the look of your old Game & Watch.
Kodak's Super 8 camera is retro in all the right ways
One of the nicer surprises at this year's CES was Kodak's Super 8 camera announcement. Perhaps more surprising is the fact that the company isn't leaving the film development up to aspiring film makers. In the $50-$75 development cost, you can expect to get a film reel and a digital copy. Pretty neat. Being the curious folks that we are here at Engadget, I stopped by Kodak's booth for a closer look at the Super 8 prototypes.
Recreate the old-school internet with this web browser emulator
Sure, you can visit the Internet Archive if you want to see a website the way it looked years ago, but it won't recreate the feel of browsing that site when it was fresh. What if you want both? That's where the new Oldweb.today tool might save the day. It not only grabs an archived version of the website, but gives you a choice of old browsers for the visit. If you want to know what the Space Jam movie page looked like in an era-appropriate version of Netscape Navigator, you can do it.
Vintage Electric's latest e-bike gives you more retro power
Vintage Electric drew a lot of attention when it unveiled its retro e-bikes a couple of years ago: it managed to fuse the classic look of early 20th century board track racers with a decidedly modern electric motor. Well, it's back for another year... and it's clear that the company has learned a lot in a short space of time. Its newly launched 2016 Tracker ups both the performance and the nostalgia quotient. It's 15 percent more efficient than last year's Tracker, but produces 20 percent more torque and carries a larger 70 watt-hour battery good for 35 miles of real-world travel. At the same time, you'll find clever new touches like stainless steel accents and pewter badging.
Lost 'Sonic' arcade game will soon be playable
Even the most diehard Sonic The Hedgehog fan could be forgiven for missing out on playing Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car. The 1991 arcade game was released exclusively in Japan for small kids, placed within a car-shaped cabinet that was big enough for junior and their adult minder. Thankfully, the title, which had been thought lost for the better part of two decades, has now been found. If you're prepared to wait a little longer, then the game will be available on the MAME arcade emulator along a forthcoming software update.
Old Atari games had graphics glitches because of CPU bottlenecks
Now that we know how the graphics worked on the Nintendo Entertainment System and Commodore 64, The iBookGuy wants to tell us all about how the Apple II and Atari 2600 got their groove on. In the latest video he says that the Apple II actually used two different techniques for producing visuals depending on whether you had a monochrome or color monitor unit. And the reason white text on a black background appears almost rainbow-like in nature on color machines has to do with pixel placement. For example, blue and green being next to each other on screen requires perfect alignment lest you want white mages to have spots of the former bleeding into them.
Spy on a vampiric slumber party in the browser port of 'Night Trap'
There's a Night Trap fan group on Facebook. This isn't too surprising, considering Night Trap's storied past in the video game industry and its unabashed, nostalgic charm. It's a full-motion video game (FMV) -- meaning it stars real people, just like a live-action movie -- released in 1992 for the Sega CD and later ported to Sega 32X, 3DO, MS-DOS and Mac OS. Night Trap follows a group of young women at a slumber party that turns deadly when vampiric creatures show up, looking to feast on the girls' blood. Players, viewing the party via hidden cameras, attempt to trap the evil beasties and save the girls. For this unconventional premise, Night Trap holds a permanent seat in video game history alongside Doom and Mortal Kombat: These titles were partly responsible for the creation of the ESRB rating system, following a series of congressional hearings on "violent" video games in the early 1990s. Concerned groups accused Night Trap of encouraging kidnapping and featuring ultra-violent content, although compared with many modern, award-winning games, it's a truly tame experience. So, of course there's a Night Trap fan group on Facebook. It's precisely this Facebook group that Dave Voyles, a technical evangelist at Microsoft, turned to when he was seeking inspiration for his next programming project a few weeks back. Now, Voyles is knee-deep in Night Trap's code, reworking it to run in any browser for a new generation of fans to enjoy.
You'll need a leather jacket for this retro e-bike
If you're worried that the future will make us lose our sense of style, you should check out what the e-bike industry has been up to. In order to accommodate the electric motors and batteries, designers have thrown off the shackles of minimalist design to make retro-styled vehicles that ooze '50s B-movie chic. Vintage Electric's new Cruz is one such offering, boasting a 1900's motorcycle design and a top speed of 36 miles per hour.
Shoot retro space bullets at friends' phones in real time with 'Dual'
Dual is more than a retro-styled space shooter. It's even more than a mobile game, and if developer Sebastian Gosztyla has his way, it's more than a video game, period. He wants Dual to be a catalyst for physical interaction. Dual is a two-player, cross-platform competition designed to get players moving in the real world, even as they sling reams of geometrical bullets from their mobile screens and onto friends' in real time. "It requires people to be aware of both screens in order to get a full picture of everything," Gosztyla says. "This makes the players' bodies become part of the experience. They become aware of their proximity and movements to each other, and create rules about how to play. I have seen people hide screens, get a little physical, use their height as an advantage or just turn around and ignore the other screen altogether."
Exploring the ZX Spectrum's glorious rebirth as a gaming keyboard
I remember it like it was yesterday. I'm sitting there, in my parent's lounge, as my dad comes down the stairs with what looks like a black box. He peels back the paper sleeve to reveal a polystyrene insert that houses a small black keyboard with stubby rubberized keys, a huge power brick and a handful of cassette tapes. I quickly learn that the keyboard is a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, an 8-bit personal home computer that relies on a cassette deck to load and save games. I played it off and on for a year, getting to grips with games like the The Hobbit and Horace Goes Skiing, but my interest waned when I finally got a Sega Master System and immersed myself in the world of Sonic and friends. The Spectrum was returned to its polystyrene home and placed back in the attic, where it remains to this day.
P.A.C.O. is why you should never help bandits escape prison
P.A.C.O., an acronym meaning "prison action climbing obstacles," is yet another game that falls into the genre of ridiculously simple to play yet ridiculously challenging and addictive. The one-armed bandits are trying to escape from prison switching from ladder to ladder and you're helping them out. When the timing is right, you have to tap the screen so the bandit makes the jump from one ladder to the other. Tap too soon and he misses and falls, but tap too late and the security guard catches him. Timing is key. P.A.C.O. is free with in-app purchases for iPhone and iPad and requires no earlier than iOS 7.1. The app description boasts that the title is "the hardest game you've ever played." I'm not sure if that's objectively true, but I don't doubt that many players agree it's pretty difficult. A quick scroll through the ratings and reviews in the App Store support that theory. P.A.C.O.'s controls don't expand any further than a single tap on the display. The bandits move on their own up the ladders pretty quickly, but your tap is what switches them between the two ladders, or more like pieces of ladders. There are four different characters: Paco, Peco, Chico and Rico. You're randomly assigned one as your own player every time you play or replay. Right below the currently active bandit is the security guard chasing him, whom you have no control over. The tutorial does a pretty poor job of explaining anything about the game other than to tap at the perfect time to avoid losing. For the first few rounds I thought I was controlling both the bandit and the guard. The ladders also have green lines toward the top of them and I had no idea what those meant. It turns out they're guides for when to switch ladders. It's best to tap when the bandit's entire body is above the green line, but this doesn't always guarantee success. P.A.C.O.'s design is very retro and it's clear the game overall got some of its inspiration from the notorious Flappy Bird. P.A.C.O. is the more challenging of the two. Timing matters in Flappy Bird too, but this makes Flappy Bird look amateurish in terms of difficulty. Somewhere in the world someone must hold that sweet formula for making a successful game that's easy to play, hard to win, yet captures everyone's love and affection. If it's just a little too hard or even a little too easy, it loses its magic. Unfortunately, P.A.C.O. seems to err a tad too much on the side of being difficult. It's fun to keep trying, but after making so little progress, it becomes downright frustrating. P.A.C.O. also integrates with Game Center for achievements and leaderboards, plus includes one in-app purchase for US$0.99 that gets rid of the admirably modest ads. The game needs to get a tad easier so it reaches that sweet spot of euphoric gameplay and desperately needs to improve upon the tutorial for beginners. It's rough around the edges, but I look forward to that update, if or when it ever arrives. At any rate, P.A.C.O. is free in the App Store for iOS.
Mesmerizing Quake demake runs on a decades-old oscilloscope
Before Wiis and PlayStations, before you boasted about how many bits your console had, and before Ralph Baer's Odyssey first hit Sears shelves, a bored physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory cobbled together a little digital diversion called Tennis for Two. Those early days of gaming were spent lobbing a lurid green ball back and forth across a tiny oscilloscope screen, so it's only appropriate that you can now tear through Quake's corridors on a similarly screwy screen. Finnish programmer/artist Pekka Väänänen runs through the process of converting an intensely visual game into a series of sounds that an aging Hitachi oscilloscope interprets as the building blocks of a world here. The end result? Well, it's nothing short of mesmerizing, a simultaneously foreign and familiar take on an experience most of us have long since committed to memory. Don't just take our word for it, though: There's video evidence waiting for you after the jump.
Sony's PlayStation '94 Shop: where 20th Anniversary PS4s are £19.94
It's 10:30am on a cold Wednesday morning. A small crowd gathers outside an unassuming grey shop in the middle of Bethnal Green Road, London. Four multi-coloured neon symbols suddenly come into view -- it's 1994 all over again and I'm suddenly feeling nostalgic. It's been hard to miss, but it's been two decades since the OG PlayStation went on sale. To celebrate, Sony's returned to its retro roots, and the gaming public are loving it. It started with the unveiling of the 20th Anniversary Limited Edition PS4, which sold out in minutes in the US, moving on to a retro-inspired theme for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3 and PS Vita owners. To mark the console's UK launch, it's opened this new pop-up PlayStation store in Central London.
The ZX Spectrum has been reimagined as an all-in-one gamepad
The ZX Spectrum was a landmark computer in the 1980s that gave Britain classic video games such as Elite, R-Type and Manic Miner. Now it's coming back as the Sinclair Spectrum Vega, an all-in-one controller and console that's styled after the original, but uses modern advancements to make it sleeker and cheaper. The new model has been put together by Retro Computers, a startup backed by Sinclair Research, the company founded by ZX Spectrum inventor Sir Clive Sinclair. A working prototype has been completed and now the team is pitching on Indiegogo to get the first 1,000 consoles in production.
Mini DayZ is what DayZ would have been like in 1994
You can now play DayZ for free using a web browser ... kind of. Mini DayZ, a fan-made tribute to Bohemia Interactive's zombie apocalypse survival game, has been posted to the publisher's website and is now free to play via Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Opera. It's missing a few features - namely 3D graphics and multiplayer - but if you ever wondered to yourself, 'What if we gave DayZ a top-down camera and retro graphics," now is your chance to find out. Mini DayZ is the work of CannedBits, a Russian player of Dean "Rocket" Hall's DayZ (which, in case you need a history primer, is a standalone game that began life as a mod for Arma 2 and arguably boosted the multiplayer survival genre into prominence). In posting the news about the game's availability via Bohemia to Reddit, CannedBits even caught the attention of Hall himself: "I have to say, I absolutely love Mini DayZ," Hall wrote. "I think it's awesome, amazing, addictive, and brings something really new to the experience. I'm so glad you've been able to make it even better! Ignore the haters, the vast majority of people think it's fantastic and I am one of those people." [Image: Bohemia Interactive/CannedBits]
Crossing Souls: 80s RPG about friendship, death and adventure
Call 2014 the Year of the Souls: Titan Souls, Wayward Souls, Dark Souls 2 and now coming from Devolver Digital and Fourattic, Crossing Souls, an action-adventure RPG with hints of neon and 1980s nostalgia. Crossing Souls stars five friends who discover an ancient relic that allows them to interact with the world of the dead, calling forth people and things from the past while they accidentally embark on a truly epic quest. Watch to the end of the trailer to see just how epic this thing may get. The cutscenes in Crossing Souls are done up in the trailer's retro cartoon style, while gameplay is pixelated and action-packed. The Fourattic team wants to reignite the magical feeling of 80s entertainment found in Teen Wolf, Weird Science, Back to the Future and ET. "With Crossing Souls the team want to revive those childhood feelings," Fourattic writes. "Those adventures that could happen to anyone. We want to develop a funny and profound game, with a great plot that can make the player remember those times with a bit of nostalgia: more than one has used a towel as a cape, a broomstick as a sword or have had a hidden cabin." Fourattic has launched a Kickstarter for Crossing Souls, seeking $45,000 to finish the game for PC, Mac and Linux by 2015. The game will be available on Steam, Humble and GOG.
The iWatch mockups from yesteryear
Old smartwatches don't die, they just need new batteries. I was going through some old bookmarks last night and I ran across a site called Wrist Dreams, which had a sad but funny list of smartwatches from 7 or more years ago. Listed among the fish finder watch and "thinking" watches, there's a link to a bunch of crazy Apple concept devices. On that list: some Apple watches, before THE Apple Watch was announced. Look at the watches on Wrist Dreams, however. They remind me of those clunky tablets before the iPad, or even more of the slide Steve Jobs put up showing what state-of-the-art smartphones from 2007 looked like. Full of buttons, a real hot mess. Then again, we didn't have 7 years of iPhone design language, so it's not surprising how dorky these old things look.
Space Age is an enticing adventure on any planet
Space Age is a brand new game featuring a team of space explorers who have just landed on an unpopulated, very retro planet named Kepler-16. While they don't initially have a mission to fulfill, after wandering around a bit, the team soon realizes that there's much to be uncovered in this new, yet oddly familiar territory and an adventure is set in stone. The title is now in the App Store for iPhone and iPad at US$3.99. Have you ever walked into a situation and had a strange thought echo in your mind that you aren't exactly sure what's going on or what's about to happen, but you're pretty sure it will turn out well? That's how I felt not long after launching Space Age. The game takes place in 1976, which is "the future." You are a private that just landed on Kepler-16. The environment isn't all that different from what might be found on Earth: green grasslands, trees (albeit they're purple,) lakes, rocky hills, etc. Don't judge a book by its cover: Space Age isn't some wild action game where you have to constantly battle graphically intense alien specimens. In fact, quite the opposite: it's an adventure where the characters are tiny and pixelated and the writing exudes a compelling sense of humor. Yes, occasionally (mainly later in the game) you must confront aliens and battle it out, but that doesn't seem to be what the developers are focusing most on. The game is pretty heavy on dialogue. That's not uncommon for an adventure game, but comparatively it's still chatty. That's not a fault though for two reasons: necessity and humor. The dialogue is mostly essential to understanding what you have to do in game and why it's even relevant to the rest of the story. Since reading all that gets boring, it's helpful that much of it is offers up a chuckle here and there. The writing ranges from sarcastic to witty to just wholly funny while of course being informative. It's truly well done. So what should you expect out of Space Age's gameplay? In short, a lot of mystery, but I guess that's the whole point of an adventure. Most of the time you don't know what's going to come next because you're just following life as it unravels on Kepler-16. You meet new people, complete tasks, flashback to times on Earth and fight aliens. Much of your path is in complete darkness until you walk to that area when it brightens up to reveal its contents. It has somewhat of a cone-of-vision effect. This adds to the gameplay though. Certain missions that require you to locate missing items, for instance, need that effect for Space Age to have its challenging component. Since the controls are limited to a single finger, sometimes I found it confusing to figure out how to complete certain tasks. The game tells you what you need to do, but doesn't explicitly state how. If you need to unlock a gate, it's up to you to figure out which character can do that and what they need to tap with minimal aid. Space Age is the type of adventure game I've been waiting for on iOS. I've been playing it for the past few days and it's hard to put down, but not because it's addictive like half of the iOS games starring birds. The Kepler-16 adventure is just too engaging to want to quit. The dialogue and design are stellar, too. Space Age is available for iPhone and iPad (and soon Mac too!) for $3.99.
