I recently rediscovered the virtues of certain Amiga file formats, but Ernie Smith has me beat when it comes to format archeology: 10 forgotten image formats.

Originally developed by AT&T and spun off into its own company in the late 1980s, TGA was one of the first file formats capable of "true color" with the help of its hardware-based image-processing tools.

Here's an Atari ST that's been in daily use since 1985 as a general-purpose business machine at a campground, complete with software written by its single careful owner, Frans Bos. Victor Bart interviews him about his decades of happy computing.

This Atari 1040ST is still in use after 36 years!

The West Chester trademark horcrux has been sufficiently reassembled (or avoided¹) to permit the A500 Mini, which joins the ranks of 8- and 16-bit era systems to get the classic console treatment. It'll come with 25 titles from legendary Amiga devs such as the Bitmap Brothers and Sensible Software, but is ultimately a general-purpose computer running an emulator in an Amiga-shaped box and you can put whatever games you like on it. — Read the rest

Digital painting has truly become an art in itself. Even with artists like Andy Warhol creating digital art on a Commodore Amiga back in the mid-80s, digital painting has mostly been a kitschy bit of artistic fun, not stuff to be regarded as a true masterwork.  — Read the rest

I was too young to appreciate the BBC Micro, the computer of my generation's older brothers and sisters. We had Amigas at home and Archimedes in the school lab. But we also weren't learning any computer science on those fancy machines, either, and it's never a surprise to me that kids learning things about computers by using computers was a phenomenon of Gen X. — Read the rest

Arcade Dreams is a forthcoming documentary series about the 100-year history of arcades and arcade games, stretching back long before the age of Pong and covering everything great in detail. The project is led by Zach Weddington, whose documentary Viva Amiga is one of my favorite game history-flavored comfort foods; the new series is nearing its Kickstarter target with three days left. — Read the rest

Shadow of the Beast, released in 1989, became a hallmark of outstanding graphics, sound and aesthetic completeness. It wasn't much of a game, but it sold a lot of Commodore Amigas in Europe. So tied was it to that machine's peculiar 16-bit hardware that porting it to other systems became a challenge, a joke, even a form of outsider art. — Read the rest

The U.K.'s Royal Mail is putting out a set of stamps featuring screenshots of classic British-made computer games, from 1984's Elite to the recent Tomb Raider remakes. A basic set is £9 at the Royal Mail's shop, with various collector sets on offer too. — Read the rest

How an obscure game character from the 8-bit era ended up at the heart of a very modern YouTube takedown fight

A huge trove of ancient MS-DOS games are now available at the Internet Archive, with in-browser DOSbox emulation and metadata.

End.Game is a dark, dreamy synthpop album, all swooping pads, punchy beats and mysterious retro auras. It's the work of Luscious-235, a joint-venture between Sid Luscious (of 80s fame fronting The Pants) and "the artificial entity known as Unit 235". — Read the rest

Back in the day, I had a Datel Action Replay wedged into my Commodore Amiga. More than just a cheat device, it let you peek into all the internal goings-on of a game, manipulating content as well as a few select variables, scrambling the reality so carefully devised by the developers and artists. — Read the rest

Banjo Guy Ollie's cover of the Shadow of the Beast theme tune is perfect. Composed by David Whittaker for the 1989 Commodore Amiga game, most covers of it are bad because modern synths and DAWs offer high-quality but uncannily electronic flutes, whereas the original's texture depended on a rough simplicity imposed by technical limitations. — Read the rest

Chester Bolingbroke on the three elements that must be well-balanced to make a good computer role-playing game: breadth, depth and immersion.

Breadth refers primarily to the physical size of the game. It can be measured in dungeon squares or tiles, or in modern games the length of time it takes to travel from one end to the other.

In 1982 the 8 bit world was rocked by the Commodore 64, or C64 home computer. For $60 you can relive the glory.

Viznut created a set of bitmapped Unicode fonts for use on your bulletin boards.

Years ago, I noticed that Unicode had a bunch of pseudographic characters that could be used to enrichen Ansi art. However, no one seemed to use them.

Shockingly good work by Banjo Guy Ollie.

Hey Folks. Here's a cover of the Knight Rider theme for a change from video game music covers. I want to do more series too in the future, so expect more like these, like Magnum PI …AirWolf , A Team… yeah tons more

It's usually classic game tunes that get banjoed up by Ollie: OutRun (demonstrating that Splashwave is a superior composition to Magical Sound Shower), Speedball 2, Golden Axe, and Monkey Island. — Read the rest

Designed to look like something running on the Commodore Amiga but with all the modern conveniences, Grafx 2 is pitched as "The ultimate 256-color painting program."

GrafX2 has a long history, with the first versions being published in 1996. The development by the original team (Sunset Design) continued until late 1999, when they stopped working on it because no one had interest in running a DOS drawing tool by then.

Commodore made the world's most successful 8-bit personal computer, the C64, and its most iconic 16-bit one, the Commodore Amiga. But the latter was a weird, complicated, two-faced beast, dooming a badly-managed company to a dead end of its own making. — Read the rest

The Obscuritory offers in-depth reviews of games "unplayed and unknown," lost to the rapid technological changes of the 80s and 90s and the countless mutually-incompatible platforms that came and went as the years rolled by. My favorite pick, though, is Knights of the Crystallion, the wonderfully weird and impenetrable magnum opus of legendary game designer Bill Williams, which baffled Amiga owners in 1989 or so. — Read the rest