Core77 has photos from the pages of Toshi Omagari's book Arcade Game Typography (only 1000 copies available in hardbound edition, here's the paperback), which reproduces arcade video game pixel typography from the 1970s-1990s.

From the book description:

Arcade Game Typography presents readers with a fascinating new world of typography – the pixel typeface. Video game designers of the 70s, 80s and 90s faced colour and resolution limitations that stimulated incredible creativity: with letters having to exist in an 8x8 square grid, artists found ways to create expressive and elegant character sets within a tiny canvas.

Featuring pixel typefaces carefully selected from the first decades of arcade video games, Arcade Game Typography presents a previously undocumented ‘outsider typography’ movement, accompanied by insightful commentary from author Toshi Omagari, a Monotype typeface designer himself, and screenshots of the type in use. Exhaustively researched, this book gathers an eclectic typography from hit games such as Super Sprint, Pac-Man, After Burner, Marble Madness, Shinobi, as well as countless lesser- known gems. The book presents its typefaces on a dynamic and decorative grid, taking reference from high-end type specimens while adding a suitably playful twist. Unlike print typefaces, pixel type often has bold colour ‘baked in’ to the characters, so Arcade Game Typography looks unlike any other typography book, fizzing with life and colour.

ETA Prime happened to drive past a thrift store a while back so he stopped in and bought a broken Toshiba laptop for $5, a 19-inch display for $5, a PS3 controller for $10, and some cables for $4. He took them home, installed game console emulation software, and ended up with a decent gaming system. Read the rest

Thirty years after its mostly-European heydey, the Commodore Amiga remains a cult favorite with a huge library of excellent and often weird games to discover. But what if emulation isn't your idea of fun? This guy went out and bought a real one.

The Amiga still has an active and faithful community, and it's thanks to them that it's possible to pick up an Amiga and get it upgraded and running all these years later. I also think it's a testament to how important the machine was in the UK and around Europe.

If you're looking to learn more about the booming home-brew game scene during 80's Britain then I can highly recommend "From Bedroom to Billions", it's a little low budget but seems to capture the time perfectly.

The follow-up documentary, "From Bedroom to Billions: the Amiga Years" is also a must watch if you have fond memories of the Amiga.

Interesting how buying a later, more powerful model, obliged him to further upgrade it before games were playable. The low-end 512Kb Amigas were invariably put to use as game consoles, booting right into games, the code given bare-metal access. But it seems fancier models more or less obliged users to launch games from the operating system's GUI, Workbench. And there even 2Mb wasn't enough.

If you like Workbench, though, there's a new simulation of it online. Just for fun! "OS 1.3" is the right one for the legendary A500 era. Read the rest

The Pyua is designer Love Hultén's homage to the NES gaming console of 1985. Cartridges are illuminated under a transparent glass dome. It uses an NT mini to run the games and the wireless controllers are from 8Bitdo.

Hultén's other designs are equally delicious:

[via Core77] Read the rest

Last year, in celebration of International Tabletop Day, the British Museum did several videos of Merlin the Magician, er... Irving Finkel, the Assistant Curator of Ancient Mesopotamian script, talking about and playing The Royal Game of Ur, an over 4-millennium-old game from Mesopotamia.

Finkel has spent the lion's share of his life trying to decipher the history and rules of this ancient, 2-person racing game. The museum had a copy of the board (which Finkel made a replica of as a child), but had no idea which rules set went with it. Fortuitously, among the museum's 3500 clay tablets, Finkel eventually managed to uncover an analysis of the game, written by a Mesopotamian astronomer, and from there was able to reverse engineer the rules (and matched the rules to the mysterious gameboard artifact in the museum's collection).

There are some interesting mechanics here, including using 4-sided dice that have two white tips. An upright white tip counts as a 1. The Royal Game of Ur looks really fun, and surprisingly exciting to play. Finkel points out that it's the kind of game that, when one player falls behind the other, it actually gives them a momentary advantage and that creates a kind of back and forth, quickly changing fortunes dynamic that makes for a tense game. Finkel also points out that the original board had a built-in drawer to house the dice and playing pieces, a design that's still used in chess and other boards over 4,000 years later. Read the rest

Back in 2012, we published a feature about Frank Cifaldi, one of the world's leading collectors of rare vintage videogames and related ephemera. Since then, Cifaldi founded the Video Game History Foundation, dedicated to preserving this vibrant art form's history and culture for the ages.

(Vice) Read the rest

The semi-independent Oregon Tourism Commission has created a playable version of the classic Apple ][-era adventure game Oregon Trail to promote Oregon tourism. Read the rest

Andi McClure's emu-coop is an emulator hack that brings two-player fun to Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, and Legend of Zelda for the NES. It works by enabling players to share in-game inventory over the Internet.

emu-coop (GitHub via Waxy) Read the rest

Commodore's C64 had a famously decisive, if drab set of 16 colors to choose from, a note of artistic intent amid the unthinking mathematical extremities of other 8-bit color palettes. But did you know there were secret colors? Aaron Bell writes up a discovery that blew his mind many years ago and which, 26 years later, he's finally figured out.

If you swap two colours rapidly enough - say at 50 or 60 frames per second - you can fool the eye into seeing something that isn't there. On a machine with sixteen colours, just one or two extra can add a lot to a scene. Since today we all live in the future and you are reading a fully programmable document on a supercomputer, let's try it.

The sad part is that the trick doesn't work for most pairings due to the obvious strobing/flickering effect it generates. But now wily coders can add a whole host of new grays to their vivid Commodore palettes. ("The tartan for the clan McPuke" is definitely the best description of the C64 palette I've ever read. I doubt it'll be topped.)

I read somewhere this is more or less what's done on cheapo monitors to make you think you're getting 24-bit color.

Previously: How the hell did they get 1024 colors out of a 1981 PC? Read the rest

Nintendo's miniature re-release of the NES is, it seems, another one of those several-games-in-one nostalgia toys. But it's a good one, with 30 classic titles, the same great design in miniature, and compatibility with modern wireless controllers. It'll be out November 11 for $60. Read the rest

The 64 is a crowdfunded rebuild of the classic Commodore 64, to ship with an as-yet-unannounced collection of games and software from the beloved gaming platform. Read the rest

The makers of the Coleco Chameleon retro console wanted $2m to manufacture it—and raised more than $80,000 in an Indiegogo campaign. Read the rest

The design perfectly transmutes the cheap minimalist beauty of the classic ZX Spectrum home computer into a unique handheld game console. But does the ZX Vega capture the experience of the early 80's machine?

Indie Retro News reviews it and finds it well-worth your £99, so long as you know what you're getting: a weird British contraption from the early 80s, and only the game-related features of it at that.

Hardcore Speccy fans may have been shouting to have room for expansion but, it's plain to see that this is not what it's about. If you look at this at what it's meant to be, a handheld Speccy to play games on, you can't got far wrong. I agree that you can't beat the original Speccy, the same goes for any original computer but as a pick-up-and-play, it fits perfectly.

GameDock is an iPhone dock that comes with game controller ports. Kyle Orland:

"At $125 per Dock (plus the cost of an iOS device), the GameDock at first looks a bit less attractive than the $99 Ouya, which is self-contained. But the creators note the power of Apple's iOS devices and the existing library of proven, working games as benefits, and say they think keeping the TV interface separate from the actual mobile platform is actually the better way to go."

As I somehow missed this fantastic intro to a nonexistent 8-bit Zardoz game last year, perhaps you did, too! Animator Nick Criscuolo writes: "I realize the audio isn't entirely 8bit, more like 8/16 bit. Maybe more like Amiga game music than Atari or Nintendo. I just couldn't imagine it without the Zardoz voice." [VIDEO LINK. Submitted by jeans] Read the rest