Were original Nintendo players possibly playing on roundies?
 

I am a classic gamer. i love my old atari games and original nintendo. I still have the original Super Mario Bros. in box with manual and cartrige holder.

I was reading the manual, and it was stated that the game was designed to take advantage of the full screen. Some older sets have rounded screens that may block out a portion of the image.

Makes me wonder if some of these early gamers were playing their nintendo and atari consoles on round screens....

This would be the early 80s... There indeed were still PLENTY of round tube color sets in use then. But by my experience as a repairman, most of the roundies were owned by retirement-age people who had paid plenty for them new, and didn't have video games. However, there are cases I remember where they had games hooked up for use when the grandkids came. I used to see most of the early games hooked up to late-model sets. For one thing, the convergence wasn't the greatest on the round sets (due to most techs not bothering to take time to do a really nice job).

Charles

Four-bit Atari 2600 was all the rage at Christmas 1976 when I managed to find one (‘twas like finding an Xbox360 now); popped it right on my venerable CTC10 and settled down to Asteroids. IIRC, it was the pong-type games that were most affected by the lost acreage. Most of the Asteroids action was centered.

see here:

http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=52925

Ok I staged it, but I can easily imagine kids being relegated to playing nintendos or Ataris on the 'old tv in the rec room' or whatever, there were probably a few roundies still working around then that could have only been about 10 years old, and with what people paid for tvs back then they were probably more likely to keep them and repair them than today's throwaway sets.

The last round sets would have been made around '69 or 70 by Magnavox and Philco to provide a low cost color set and use up their stocks of round tubes...I'm sure there were still some in use. I can remember going to kids' houses when young and they'd be playing Nintendos and such on old TV's that were in awful shape...sometimes there would only be red in the picture, etc. Seemed like parents would often hook the games up to old sets in the basement or garage and such so the main set would not be tied up.

I saw that they have a classic Atari on sale at Target. Looks like an old 2600. I think it was really cheap too. I might have to get one.

Take care,

Ed

Wow, playing PacMan on a TV with no blue.... that would have made the ghost-eating a b--ch!

well being one of the youngest members in this group ,i do remember going over to the twins(casy and calvin) house to play super mario bros (im guessing 1988 or 89)and their father who at the time was around his mid 60s had 3 old sets in the back room,one was a full working color rca from around 63,the other two were black and whites from the mid 70s,either way we played on the rca until around 92 or 93 thats when saga came out and it had rca jacks.they moved in 94 and at the time i was into stereos,and they had a real nice maggie tube unit and they gave that to me(i got a shopping cart and wheeled it home ,i was 12)they also said i could get the color set but when i came back a few days after they left it was looked in the garage.

charlie s

Hehe... I've done similar - once I ran across a Ms. Pac-Man machine in an arcade with no red. Of course I played it anyway - I love Ms. Pac-Man. It's pretty playable even with no red, although one of the ghosts only shows up as a pair of eyes all the time. It got hard when I got to the stage where the maze turns red, but it was playable, since I could still see the dots, and I knew the maze from memory anyway. Of course, I couldn't just go by the maze burned into the tube, since that was the first boards - the mazes change. Then there's the board where all the _dots_ turn red. I died there - couldn't see what I'd eaten and what I hadn't!

-Ian

I always played my games on square tube sets. My favorite game back in those days was Super Mario Brothers 3. The NES really never had the best color reproduction anyway, nor the most accurate palette, because it was based on NTSC. Right now, My SMB3 playing cosists of Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Brothers 3 for the GBA, connected to the GB player for gamecube, or the professional GBA to TV display unit, the AGB capture system. I also want to play Half Life 2 on my roundie as well. :)

Jonathan

Last weekend I had my two teenage nephews (who are into Playstation 2) over to the house and sitting on my living room floor playing Fairchild Channel F games on my CTC-16... we couldn't drag them away from the ridiculously crude football cartridge with X's and O's representing the players! Had some laughs talking about how this unit only has 64 BYTES of RAM (yes 64 bytes) and the jittery, flickery, blocky characters on the screen. Guess I have to hunt up a Magnavox 'Odyssey I' machine to make this Channel F look advanced...

the very earliest game
 

the game of all games was dot sequential vs line sequetial circa 1950'

Just got to this post now...

I'm big on classic games as well... Still have all my old NES games and instruction books. I've always wondered if that's what they meant by rounded screens. I'd love to see how my old NES and SNES would look on a roundie someday :D Be very interesting nonetheless....

I actually regularly play all my old systems on my old TVs. They definately have a unique way of displaying it. And it makes it more fun to me to play on an older set than a newer one anyday.

In fact, that's how I got into old TVs in the first place. Playing games on sets older than myself fascinated me.