Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

From Geekcomix:

The Nintendo Entertainment System was released in America in 1985, after some limited success in Japan as the Famicom. Over the next few years, its user base would grow exponentially until the NES surpassed the Atari VCS/2600 peak set in 1982.6 As of 1990, there were over 19 million NES systems in the United States alone.5
In addition to the tremendous success of the system, its games had a great deal prosperity. For example, Super Mario Bros. 3 released in 1989 grossed over $500 million just in America. In the field of entertainment, only the movie E.T. has made more revenue.3 Super Mario Bros. 3 would sell more than 7 million copies in America and 4 million in Japan, which is more copies than any other game in history. Sheff wrote, "By record-industry standards, 'SMB3' went platinum eleven times. Michael Jackson is one of the few artists to have accomplished this feat."9
By 1990, the money earned from Nintendo's NES and its games allowed Nintendo to usurp Toyota as Japan's most successful company. In the entertainment business, Nintendo netted as much as all of the American movie studios combined, and more than the three television networks had in the previous two years. In the five short years since the system was released, the NES could be found in more than a third of the household in America and Japan. 9
This monopoly gave Nintendo significant control over the market during the Fourth Generation, which they utilized in various malicious schemes. Despite all of this, they are still one of the most popular and well-known companies in the world.
Nintendo's only competitor in the 8-bit market was Sega with their Sega Master System. While the Master System did have many more features than the NES (which is evident in a side-by-side comparison) it lacked the third party support that Nintendo had and was not much competition. The Master System sold a total of 2 million units and at times had a market share of 11%, these were the only reason the system survived as long as it did.

Ms. Pac-Man Trivia

A Ms. Pac-Man machine has a storyline based around it in the Friends episode The One Where Joey Dates Rachel. The plotline revolves around Chandler entering rude words onto the game's high-score screen and then attempting to beat his scores (thus removing them) before Ross's seven year old son arrives. In reality, Ms. Pac-Man doesn't have a high-score screen, displaying only the single best score, and the game doesn't allow players to enter their initials.
In one series of strips in Bill Amend's popular newspaper comic strip FoxTrot, Jason Fox, who is in fifth grade and still detests girls, has a nightmare in which he is romanced by Tomb Raider heroine Lara Croft. In one of these strips, Lara keeps trying to persuade Jason to play her game, and Jason declares that he'll never play a video game starring a girl. At this point, Lara says, "Permit me to reintroduce you to someone," and Ms. Pac-Man appears: "Hi, Jason. Remember me?"
A Ms. Pac-Man unit appears in the 1983 movie "WarGames", in the 1983 movie "Joysticks", in the 1984 movie "Tightrope" (the cabinet appears in the background of the bar scene), in the 1990 movie "The Grifters", in the 1999 movie "Man On The Moon" and in the 2002 movie "Van Wilder".
A Ms. Pac-man machine is seen in Scrubs in the episode My Own Private Practice Guy. Todd comments "Oh Ms. Pac-man I would sex that bow right off your head. Eat those dots you naughty, naughty girl."
The Ms. Pac-Man world record of 933,580 points was achieved by Abdner Ashman, of Queens, NY, on Thursday, April 6, 2006 at the Apollo Amusements showroom in Pompano Beach, FL, as verified by official referees from the Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard, who were present to witness the accomplishment.
Some versions of the game had an "expert" level, where if you hold the joystick up while pressing the start button, the whole game speed doubled (including music and sound effects). Others have Ms. Pac-Man going twice her speed while the rest of the game went normal speed. The latter allowed for people to obtain much higher scores.
Many people have mistakenly called the game Mrs. Pac Man, which can upset many a video game purist.
In the 1980's cartoon version of Pac-Man, she was named Pepper (while the male Pac-Man was often called Packie) because she was never given a name.
In 1982, R. Cade and the Video Victims recorded a song titled "Ms. Pac-Man", using sound effects from the game, and released it on the album "Victim of the Video", a lesser-known video game song album.
While not inspired by the game, the song Game Over by rapper Lil Flip samples heavily from it.
In the movie Are We There Yet?, Lindsay tells Nick that Kevin had a bad dream playing Ms. Pac-Man at the mall but refers to her as Lady Pac-Man.
There is an obscure glitch in the original arcade game. If the player inserts a coin at the title screen, before Blinky appears, and begins, the walls of the first maze will be blue instead of pink.
At least one version of the game (found in a diner near the Kansas-Nebraska border) has the monsters turn into blue mice when Ms. Pac-Man eats the energizers.

Activision History

Prior to the formation of Activision, software for video game consoles was published exclusively by the makers of the systems for which the games were designed. For example, Atari was the only publisher of games for the Atari 2600. This was particularly galling to the developers of the games, as they received no financial rewards for games that did well, and didn't even receive credit in the manuals. After watching a number of games turn into multi-million-dollar best sellers, a number of programmers decided they had had enough and left. Activision became the first third-party game publisher for game consoles.[1]

The company was founded by former music industry executive Jim Levy and former Atari programmers David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead. Atari's company policy at the time was not to credit game creators for their individual contributions; Levy took the approach of crediting and promoting game creators along with the games themselves. This was an important draw that helped the newly formed company attract experienced talent. Crane, Kaplan, Levy, Miller, and Whitehead received the Game Developers Choice "First Penguin" award in 2003 in recognition of this step.

The departure of the four programmers, whose titles made up more than half of Atari's cartridge sales at the time, caused legal action between the two companies which was not ultimately settled until 1982. As the market for game consoles started to decline, Activision branched out, producing game titles for home computers as well, and acquiring smaller publishers.

In 1982, Activision released Pitfall!, which is considered by many to be the first platform game as well as the best selling title on the 2600. Although the team's technical prowess had already been proven, it was Pitfall! that turned them into a huge success. This not only resulted in a legion of clones, including stand-up arcade games, but can be said to have launched the entire platform genre which became a major part of video games through the 1980s.

In 1985, Activision merged with struggling text adventure pioneer Infocom. Jim Levy was a big fan of Infocom's titles and wanted Infocom to remain solvent. However, about six months after the "InfoWedding", Bruce Davis took over as CEO of Activision. Davis was against the merger from the start and was heavy-handed in management of them. He also forced marketing changes on Infocom which caused sales of their games to plummet. Eventually, in 1989, after several years of losses, Activision closed down the Infocom studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts extending to only 11 of the 26 employees an offer to relocate to Activision's headquarters in Silicon Valley; five did.

In 1988 Activision started to get involved in other types of software besides video games, such as business applications. As a result, Activision changed its corporate name to Mediagenic in order to have a name that would globally represent all its fields of activities.(Mediagenic is often mistaken to be a company that purchased Activision but in reality it was only Activision with a different name). Despite this change, Mediagenic continued to largely use the Activision brand on its video games of the various platforms it was publishing for, notably the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Master System, the Atari 7800, Commodore 64 and Amiga. The decision of the company to get involved in various fields at the expense of video gaming proved to be a move so bad that in 1992 Mediagenic filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The new Activision
The failure of Mediagenic resulted in a reorganization and merger with The Disc Company with Mediagenic again being the acquirer. After emerging from bankruptcy, Mediagenic officially changed its entity name back to Activision in the state of Delaware on December 1992. At that point Activision moved its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Southern California. While emerging from bankruptcy, it continued to develop games for PCs and video game consoles and resumed making strategic acquisitions. Activision chose from then on to only concentrate itself in video gaming and nothing else.

In 1991 Activision packaged 20 of Infocom's past games into a CD-ROM collection called The Lost Treasures of Infocom sans most of the "feelies" Infocom was famous for. The success of this compilation led to the 1992 release of 11 more Infocom titles in The Lost Treasures of Infocom II.

In 2003, Activision, along with several other game software publishers, was investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for its accounting practices, namely the use of the "return reserve" to allegedly smooth quarterly results.

In 2004, the company marked its 25th anniversary, and stated that it had posted record earnings and the twelfth consecutive year of revenue growth.

In 2006, Activision secured the video game license to make games based on the world of James Bond from MGM Interactive. An exclusive agreement between the two begins in September 2007 with Activision's first game set to be released in May 2008.

Sega 32X - Quick History and Specs List

The 32x debuted in 1994. It was an add-on for the Genesis. It connects to the Genesis by plugging-in the unit into the Genesis's cartage port. It is said that the 32x increase the speed of the unit by 19x! This increase in performance is possible thanks to its 2 RISC based processors.
The 32X
The Sega 32X added better color (finally), faster performance, and 3D graphics to the Genesis and Sega CD. The whole idea is sort of strange considering that when you get the Genesis and attach a Sega CD and the 32X you now have a huge chunk of hardware worth well over $400 with massive parallel processing power that still pales in comparison to say a Saturn. Still, the whole thing wasn't too bad with some great translations like Virtua Racing Deluxe and Virtua Fighter. The system had a few notable titles released before it's quick demise at the release of the Saturn and Playstation.
The idea of emulating every aspect of the 32X is quite a challenge. You'd have to emulate both the Genesis and the Sega CD first, and then write up your SH-2 core and God knows how the 32X sound processor works. The 32X is another case of someone reverse-engineering the hardware to gain the knowledge to emulate the machine. Even though the 32X, (for the most part) takes over the Genesis unit, it still allows you to play Genesis games by passing through the data from the 32x to the Genesis unit.


Quick Specs List:

Released: 1994

Processor: Dual Hitachi SH2 RISC Processors (one master and one slave)
operating at 23Mhz each

Co-Processor: 68000, Z80, VDP (Genesis) 68000 (Sega CD)

Data Path width: 32-bits within 32X

Color Palette: 32,768

On screen: 32,768

3D Capabilities: 50,000 Texture Mapped Polygons per second

Sound: Stereo PCM plus an extra 2 channels to the Genesis and Sega CD

Ram: extra 512 Kilbytes for the Genesis and Sega CD

Cart Size: 16 - 32 Megabit

Atari Jaguar CD - Review - Console History

The Atari Jaguar CD or Jag CD was a CD-ROM peripheral for the Atari Jaguar video game console.
Late in the life span of the company, Atari released this long-promised CD-ROM unit. The device sat atop the Jaguar console, plugging into the cartridge slot, the physical design of the system sometimes compared to a toilet. The drive had its own cartridge slot to allow cartridge games to be played without removing the CD drive. There was a separate "Memory Track" cartridge for storing saved game position and high scores.
The Jaguar CD unit featured a double speed (2x) drive and built-in VLM (Virtual Light Machine) software. The VLM, which provided a sophisticated video light show when an audio CD was played in the machine, was as popular among buyers as the games themselves. Packaged with the drive were two games (Blue Lightning and Vid Grid), a music CD (Tempest 2000 soundtrack), and a Myst demo disc.
Jaguar CD games could include as much as 790MB of data, considerably more than conventional CD-ROMs. The designers chose to ignore established CD-ROM formats and instead created their own based on the audio CD format. While allowing for dramatically more storage on the disc and foiling casual piracy, the format only provided limited error correction.
The drive was manufactured for Atari by Phillips in the United States. The initial shipment was 20,000 units. Comments from Atari a few weeks after the unit was launched stated that the entire inventory had been sold, and that another batch would be ordered. However, with the JT Storage reverse takeover looming just a few months away, it is possible that those 20,000 drives were the only units ever produced.
While the ratio of CD to cartridge games is fairly low, the CD add-on unit has always held an interest to gamers. In particular, the value of the CD add-on has gone up dramatically in the past few years, mainly due to low supply. Also, it is now possible to (legally) download and burn several encrypted demos (Black Ice/White Noise, Native, Atomic) to play on an actual CD unit with no modification. Due to this, the homebrew sector is active with several titles in progress (Eerievale). However, a third-party cartridge (Protector SE, B&C's cart) is still required for unencrypted games (Painter).