Category Archives: Computers/Tech/Games

Apple II, Commodore 64, Computers/Tech/Games, Main, Reviews

SLLEA RCA Video Adapter – You Get What You Pay For

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The old saying “you get what you pay for” is usually true.

Recently I had a brilliant idea. Instead of hooking up my old computers and video game consoles to a large television, wouldn’t it be nice if I could hook them up to a small flat screen monitor? I have a couple of 4:3 ratio flat screen monitors out in the garage that could work for just such a project. The only hurdle is that those monitors only have VGA inputs, and my old computers and video game consoles all have RCA (composite) outputs. If only someone made a cheap RCA-to-VGA converter…

Enter SLLEA, who sells just such an adapter on Amazon for $20. Before I go any further, I must mention two things. One, SLLEA is one of a dozen companies selling essentially the exact same product. The external plastic cases of these devices are slightly different, but based on the layout of the inputs and outputs, inside, they’re all the same. And second, all of these devices hover around the $20 range.

In the top picture, you can see the ins and outs (literally) of the device. In the second picture, you can see the series of buttons that allow you to configure the device. The fact that the word “MENU” is misspelled on the label gives you some insight to the quality of the manual.

Without belaboring the point, here were my results with SLLEA’s adapter.

Yikes.

The first thing you’ll notice is that large rainbow-colored bar running across the top of the screen. That’s… not normal. I should also point out all the vertical “noise” lines running through the bottom half of the screen, and the blurry (and fading) text across the top portion. Sometimes phone cameras can introduce distortion into a photograph of a computer screen, but I can assure you, it looked just as bad in person.

For a thorough test, I decided to load up a game and see if it fared any better than plain text.

When I saw this screen, I got my hopes up. The distortion bar across the top is still there, but it’s barely visible. The Commodore 64 in particular has a border around the main portion of the screen. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all?

Unfortunately, once the game entered “full screen mode,” the bar returned.

I tried two additional systems for testing — an Apple IIe computer, and an original Nintendo Entertainment System — and got the same results. To be completely fair, I rescanned the device’s Amazon reviews and found several people who said it worked for systems newer than the Super Nintendo. Specifically, I read positive reviews from people who tried it with a Nintendo GameCube and a Sony PlayStation 2. If you’re looking for a Composite-to-VGA solution for one of those systems and feel adventurous, maybe you’ll have better luck with one of these devices. If, like me, you’re hoping to connect some old 8-bit systems up to a VGA monitor, this probably isn’t the device for you.

Apple II

Give it Away, Give it Away, Now

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If I were to tell you I purchased the computer currently sitting on my dining room table fifteen years ago, you might wonder what I was doing with such an ancient piece of technology. The truth is, when I purchased the computer back in 2003, it was already 20 years old!

The machine is an Apple IIc, the fourth machine in Apple’s line of “II” computers — there was the original, followed by the II+, the IIe, and finally the IIc. Despite weighing almost eight pounds, the “c” in the computer’s name stood for “compact,” and, relatively speaking compared to other computers in 1984, it was. The computer’s built-in handle allowed owners to carry the computer around like an expensive attache case, leaving their other hand free to carry the machine’s power supply, a monitor, and any required diskettes. It wasn’t exactly portable, but we were getting there.

The reason I have an Apple IIc computer set up on my dining room table is because my friend Robb in Denver recently expressed interest in owning one, and I happened to have a spare one gathering dust out in the garage. I originally purchased this one back in 2003 at a video game swap meet in Chicago. I thought it would be fun to hook up and play old games on, and for a while, it was. Here it is in our old house, not long after I purchased it — it’s the one on the far left, playing Karateka.

Back when vintage computers were easily found and could be purchased inexpensively, that’s what I did. I’d buy a computer (and maybe one or two “spares”) just to play around with them, and occasionally donate them to a friend who was wanting to do the same. Unfortunately due to eBay, prices are too high for that today. I might have been able to make a hundred bucks by selling this one on eBay, but it makes me a lot happier to gift one to somebody that I know is looking for one and will actually use and enjoy it.

Before shipping the IIc I wanted to test it, and the best way to do that was to use it to play some old games. Using my Aplpe IIe, I was able to copy a few games like Choplifter, Lode Runner, Ghostbusters, and Law of the West over to floppies. The IIc played them all fine — a little too fine in fact, as I had the computer set up on the table a couple of days longer than I had planned as I did more “testing” than I had intended.

My garage and computer room are filled with things like this. Not necessarily complete computers, but things I purchased over the years for various reasons: because I wanted to play with them, because I needed a spare, or because I knew someone who could use it. What I never intended was for all this stuff to sit around gathering dust, which is what it’s been doing.

No more.

Apple IIc playing Lode Runner

Console Video Games, Main

Here We Go Again: The All New Atari VCS

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What’s old is new again. This time it’s the Atari VCS, a new game console aimed directly at the nostalgic hearts of those of us who grew up in the late 70s and early 80s playing the Atari 2600. If you’re wondering what the Atari VCS is, what it does, how it compares to the Atari Flashback, and whether or not it’s worth buying, read on.

Those who were there (and any retrogamer worth their weight in buried E.T. cartridges) knows that Atari’s original console released back in 1977 was also known as the Atari VCS. It wasn’t until the release of the Atari 5200 that the original system was renamed the Atari 2600. For the remainder of this post, I’ll refer to the original console as the Atari 2600, and the modern revisioning as the Atari VCS.

Also, I should get this out of the way — Atari, the company, isn’t really “Atari”, the company. The original Atari, the one founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in the 1970s, hasn’t existed for a long, long time. In the early 80s, Atari split into two companies: one for software and game development (Atari Games Inc.), and one for hardware (Atari Corporation), which was sold to Jack Tramiel. Since then, Atari was purchased by JT Storage, JT Storage was purchased by Hasbro, and Hasbro was purchased by the French company Infogrames Entertainment. The only difference between the modern company calling itself Atari and any other hardware or software developer is that Atari purchased the rights to use the company’s logo.

In the summer of 2017, rumors of a new “Atari” (I’ll drop the snarky quotation marks hereon out) console began to hit the internet. After more than a year of rumors and computer renderings, Atari has finally released the specs of their new console, the (new) Atari VCS.

According to the Indiegogo launch page, the Atari VCS is a Linux computer (running Ubuntu) with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. It supports Bluetooth and USB controllers, HDMI video, and comes with Atari Vault pre-installed. The pre-sale collector’s edition comes with two controllers and a system for $299.

There’s a lot to unpack in that paragraph.

The Indiegogo video shows the Atari VCS playing vintage Atari 2600 games, and with hardware specs like that, it should be able to with no problems. The Indiegogo page specifically mentions that the console ships with Atari Vault. Atari Vault is a collection of Atari games (mostly 2600 games, with a few arcade ports thrown in) that has been on sale for a few years. Atari Vault was released for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS in 2016, and is available on Steam for $9.99. If you are planning to purchase the Atari VCS solely for the purpose of playing vintage Atari 2600 games, know that you can do that right now on your computer for a ten-spot.

(Atari emulation is nothing new. I have Atari emulators on all my computers, modded game console, and even my iPad.)

If the “living room experience” is important to you, don’t forget about the Atari Flashback system. The Atari Flashback 8 Gold (~$60 on eBay) contains 100+ Atari games, two joysticks, and HDMI out. It won’t offer some of the advanced features the Atari VCS is touting, but if all you want to do is play Atari 2600 games, this is a much more inexpensive plug-and-play option.

That’s not all the Atari VCS claims to be able to do, of course. The project’s launch page also mentions features like web browsing and video streaming, which, if it’s running Ubuntu Linux, make sense. Other than access to Atari’s new proprietary game library/store, everything that’s being advertised can be performed by a $35 Raspberry Pi computer, which also runs Linux. I have written several posts about the Raspberry Pi, and one specifically discussing RetroPie. Setting up a Raspberry Pi to play RetroPie is not as effortless as hooking up an Atari Flashback or (I’m assuming) a new Atari VCS. Setting up a Raspberry Pi takes some Linux knowledge and a bit of tinkering to get up and running. It’s not an out-of-the-box solution by any means. That being said, if you’re like me and have set up a $35 machine that can play essentially every Atari, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and Sega Genesis game (along with hundreds of thousands of titles on other console and computer platforms), the idea of paying $299 for a console that does the same (or less) doesn’t excite me.

The Atari VCS Indiegogo page mentions their partners and online store without divulging many details. Roughly two-dozen confirmed partners are listed on the page. There are a lot of references like “we hope the new Atari VCS will inspire even more creativity!” along with lots of “we plan to” and “we intend to” that make me nervous. What makes me most nervous is that the plan sounds just like Ouya’s business model. The Ouya was a similar Android-based console released a couple of years ago. It too ran emulators and offered an online store, but failed when neither the chicken nor the egg materialized. Developers stopped making games for the system when people stopped buying games for the system because nobody was developing new games. The Puya launched in 2013 and was dead by 2015.

Here is my current biggest problem with the Atari VCS.

Payments made to Indiegogo are not guaranteed presales. The company says so, underlined and in bold on their own site that “Indiegogo is unable to guarantee that projects will succeed or that perks will be delivered or deemed satisfactory.” Even if Atari has the best of intentions and fully plans to deliver the new Atari VCS a year from now in the spring/summer of 2019, there is no guarantee when or if you will receive one. Payments on Indiegogo are early investments in a product or a dream. Even if I were inclined to spend $300 on an (in my opinion) overpriced Linux machine, I certainly wouldn’t do it through Indiegogo, and I most certainly wouldn’t do it a year prior to launch.

When Nintendo announced their NES Classic Edition, I predicted that there would be no market for the limited console and that it would be a big flop. I was wrong. The console sold out almost immediately and has been in high demand ever since, despite a long list of cheaper and better alternatives. I’d like to say the same for the Atari VCS, an expensive Linux machine, but through Indiegogo people have already invested $2.5 million in the past week. For their sake, I hope Atari comes through and delivers a gaming experience worthy of the price tag. For that matter, I hope Atari delivers anything at all.

Arcades/Arcade Games

A Donkey’s Fall From Grace: The Billy Mitchell Controversy

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In 2013, I traveled to Denver, Colorado to attend the Kong Off 3, an officially sanctioned national Donkey Kong tournament. That weekend I got to see some of the world’s greatest Donkey Kong players play live in person, people like Hank Chien, Steve Wiebe, and Robbie Lakeman. Of everyone there, the person I was most excited to see play was Billy Mitchell.

Rob O'Hara at the Kong Off 3

At least in video game circles, Billy Mitchell became a household name after the release of the 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. The film follows two gamers, Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe, on their race to break one million points the classic arcade video game, Donkey Kong. In the film, Wiebe is both the underdog and the outsider. He practices for hours by himself on an arcade cabinet that sits in his garage. Mitchell, on the other hand, is a judge for Twin Galaxies, the self-declared official keeper of video game high scores.

Throughout King of Kong, Mitchell is presented as a conniving backstabber, while Wiebe is that guy who is destined to fail. When Wiebe finally breaks the world record and submits the required VHS recording of his game play, it is revealed Mitchell beat him to the punch. The amount of editing and the veracity of the order of events in the film as been argued to death, but the bottom line is, it was ultimately Mitchell’s name that went into the record books as the first person to break 1,000,000 on Donkey Kong.

Back to the Kong Off. In 2013, my personal Donkey Kong high score was around 100,000, about tenth of the score these guys were achieving. I wanted to look over their shoulder, and see how the pros racked up these gigantic scores. One of the people I watched play was Billy Mitchell. And while I’m sure the guy’s good, he wasn’t great that day. Out of 22 competitors in the tournament, Billy Mitchell came in 22nd place. Dead last. Mitchell failed to crack the 600,000 mark on a day when the top nine contenders each broke a million.

Anybody can have a bad day, but I couldn’t help but feel that something wasn’t right.

Over the past couple of months, digital sleuths began investigating into Billy Mitchell’s record breaking scores. In one YouTube video, eagle eye viewers spotted some inconsistencies in the game’s motherboard as it is being removed. Even more damning, however, has been the video recording Mitchell himself presented as proof of his record-breaking score. I won’t bore you with the details; suffice it to say that when the video footage is slowed down slower than the naked eye can see, the way individual graphic components on the monitor are drawn reveal that the obtained footage came from a game being played on a computer, and not a real Donkey Kong machine.

In the world of arcade competition, this is a pretty big deal. The only way global competitors can keep the playing field fair is by all playing on the same hardware using the same settings and controls. Emulating an arcade game on a PC might be close enough to the real thing for home gamers and hobbyists, but not for world record holders. In fact, it’s explicitly against the rules of Twin Galaxies not to disclose, the organization Billy Mitchell was a member of.

Based on this discovery, Billy Mitchell’s world record as the first person to break a million points on Donkey Kong has been revoked, as have all his other high scores. He has also been banned for life for submitting new scores.

Harsh? Perhaps. Some people think only his records that have been proven to have been played through emulation should be removed. Others feel like once you’ve been caught cheating, all of your records are suspect.

The year after attending the Kong Off in Denver, my family and I took a vacation to Florida. On that trip, we went out of our way to stop by Rickey’s Restaurant and Lounge, in Hollywood, Florida. Rickey’s is “Billy Mitchell’s restaurant,” according to King of Kong. I wanted to ask him what happened at the Kong Off 3. Was it just a bad weekend?

Rob O'Hara at Billy Mitchell's Restaurant

Mitchell wasn’t there. In fact, the waitress we talked to said she couldn’t remember the last time he’d been there. In the small arcade that sat off to the side of the restaurant there were two arcade machines: a Jurassic Park pinball machine, and a Ms. Pac-Man arcade cabinet. I don’t know why I thought I might find Billy Mitchell, a Donkey Kong machine, or the answer to my question at that restaurant. In the end, I found none of those things.

For his part, Billy Mitchell says this is a witch hunt. He says he has an explanation for the whole thing, one he is carefully preparing even though he chose not to respond to any of the charges brought against him or comment on any of the findings. I, for one, will be interested to hear what he has to say.

Adventures, Computers/Tech/Games

Speaking to the Association of Information Technology Professionals

Last night I had the honor of speaking to the Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) at the University of Central Oklahoma about my experience as a computer specialist for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Approximately 100 students showed up last night to listen to me ramble about my life as a federal employee. I had originally planned to focus my presentation about experiences working with security, but a couple of weeks ago I learned that last month’s guest was a security pen tester, so I decided to expand the scope of my presentation a bit and cover my entire career instead. Whether I was working in security, communications, or as a domain/enterprise admin, my official job title has always been “Computer Specialist,” and so that was the theme of my talk — that even in the FAA alone, there are lots of varied job opportunities for IT professionals to pursue.

Fifteen minutes before I was scheduled to go on, my heart was racing. Even though the auditorium was relatively small, public speaking always gets my adrenaline pumping. By the time I hit my second slide, my nerves began to calm and I hit my stride, such as it is.

I had an hour time slot for both my presentation and any questions. I prepared 30 slides, planned to talk for 45 minutes, and actually hit 50, leaving me ten minutes for questions. I was afraid I’d put the audience to sleep, but I got a question, then two, then five or six more — so many that I went fifteen minutes over my allotted time, and got cut off! Imagine that — me talking too much!

I like speaking opportunities because it gives me a chance to practice a skill I don’t know that I’m great at, but I especially enjoy it when I’m speaking to an audience that, for lack of a better term, wants to be there. I once spoke to a college class about the history of video game development, and thirty seconds into my presentation a kid on the front row inserted ear buds into his ears and closed his eyes — always great for the morale! Fortunately, that was not the case last night. As I looked out into the auditorium seats I saw a the next generation of IT professionals about to start their own journeys politely listening to a battle-worn computer specialist recalling some of his own adventures. I know those students are going to do great, and whatever company they end up working for will be lucky to have them.

Thanks to Patty Blevins and the Association of Information Technology Professionals at the University of Central Oklahoma for having me out last night. I felt privileged for the opportunity.

Now I’m off to find some more training so I can stay one step ahead of these guys!

IBM PC

An Old Drive Bites the Bits

In December 2002 I splurged and bought my first DVD burner: a Sony DRX-500UL. I paid $430 for the external unit, which burned DVDs at a whopping 2X (30 minutes per disc). At the time, a war of formats was brewing between DVD-R (DVD “minus” R) and DVD+R (DVD “plus” R). The Sony was one of the first I found that could burn discs in either format, so even though it was a bit more expensive than some other drives on the market, I was covered no matter which format ultimately prevailed.

On March 20, 2003, I made the mistake of leaving my laptop bag in my car overnight. When I woke up the next morning, the window had been broken out of my car and my laptop bag, including my brand new $430 DVD burner, was gone. Home owner’s insurance wouldn’t cover the loss because the car was parked in the driveway, and because we only had liability insurance at the time, I was simply out the money.

I waited three years to replace it with the drive you see pictured above: a Sony DRX-820UL. Like the previous drive this one was able to burn both plus and minus discs, but it could also burn dual-layer discs, and was also much faster. It was also just as expensive as the previous drive; maybe even a little bit more.

For many years, that DVD drive was my primary burner. It was external and USB, so it frequently got shared between systems. This became important later as I began purchasing laptops that no longer came with a DVD drive, but I hadn’t quite given up on physical media. Trust me when I say I got my money’s worth out of this workhorse.

Sometime around 2010, the drive stopped working. It wouldn’t recognize DVDs, and got to the point where the tray wouldn’t open. In a moment of frustration I threw the thing across the room, breaking off the door and cracking the case. Somehow, this fixed the problem. From there on out the thing looked like a piece of garbage, but still performed like a tank.

I was cleaning my computer room last week and ran across my old friend in the back of a closet. I plugged it in, but time got the best of it. The gears that open and close the tray appear to be gummed, and even once I forced a disc inside, it would no longer read it. With piles of other drives laying around, all smaller, lighter, and faster than this one, I decided it was time to part with my old friend. For the second time in its life it got thrown across the room — this time, for good.

Computers/Tech/Games

iPad 3: The Light is Fading…

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My wife once told me we shouldn’t have a television in our bedroom because Oprah said so.

That’s not the real reason. The real reason is because Susan can’t sleep with the television on, and it doesn’t bother me at all. If it were up to me, I’d start a movie every night before bed and fall asleep during the murky middle. If it was a good movie, I’d watch the end the next night. If it wasn’t, I’d start another one.

But Oprah didn’t say anything about iPads, so I put one on my nightstand. Except for road trips, that’s where it lives 100% of the time. Sometimes I watch movies on it, sometimes I check email and social media sites from it, but most of all, I just read the news on it. Every night as I’m falling asleep, I turn on the iPad and click through each one of my installed news apps: CNN, Fox News, TMZ, the local news, and lastly, the AP News. The AP News one is my favorite because it has three or four categories I enjoy (top news, entertainment, technology, and oddities).

Last night as I was in bed scrolling through news headlines, a notification popped up my AP News app. A small window informed me that the application would require an update after Apple’s newest operating system (iOS 11) was released. I wasn’t sure when that was, so I looked it up. It’s coming next week, and it won’t run on my iPad.

I bought my third-generation iPad (let’s call it the iPad 3) the week they were first released in 2012. It has a quad-core processor, 64GB of storage, and cost $699. Next month’s iOS 11 will render it unusable.

Not overnight, of course. But over the next a few months, a growing number of apps will begin to require the newer OS, and older hardware is shown the door sooner rather than later.

If your plan is to stick your head in the sand and ignore the update, that won’t work. It’s easy to forget that very few apps store all of their data on your device. My AP News app, for example, connects to a server somewhere to pull down its headlines. While the developer cannot remove the app from my iPad, what they can do it deny connections from older versions, which is what they will eventually do. Once the old version of the app no longer receives updates it’s essentially dead, and if the new version requires an iOS update that my iPad won’t run, then it’s game over. Before long it won’t just be the AP News app. It’ll be all of them.

Imagine if the people who built cars also controlled gasoline, and every few years they changed their gasoline so that it no longer ran your car. Nobody’s forcing you to upgrade to a new car, but eventually the gas in your tank would run out and then it would become quite worthless. If you still want to drive, you’ll have to buy a new car that works with the new gasoline. Maybe you’ll even park it next to the old car, which still looks great, but no longer runs.

The reason I know how this story ends is because in another room, mounted to the wall above our treadmill, is my old iPad 1. I paid $500 for that one back in 2010. Its multiple pages of icons serve as a sort of digital graveyard — a catalog of things that used to work. There are still icons for Netflix and Spotify and all my old news applications on it, but none of them work anymore. When you try to open one, a little wheel appears and spins and spins until the app times out and informs my that today’s gasoline won’t work on my antiquated seven-year-old iPad.

I really hate forced obsolescence.

It frustrates me that a magical screen with a quadcore processor requires any sort of update at all to receive news stories (text) from a remote server. This is, without a doubt, the absolutely lowest task any internet-enabled device could possibly perform. A $35 Raspberry Pi machine possesses 1,000x the amount of processing required to do this. Can you believe my 35-year-old Commodore 64, with its 1MHz processor and 64k of RAM, can (thanks to a bit of modern hardware magic) connect to the internet and pull down news updates? My Commodore 64 was built almost fifteen years before the first time I even heard of the internet! The general idea that an iPad 3 is outdated or requires any sort of update to perform the same task is preposterous. It could run forever and never need an update to keep doing what it’s doing.

Which of course is the point; that business model doesn’t sell new iPads.

Main, Raspberry Pi

Enabling the Aux HDMI Ports on an LG Hotel Television

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I’m away from home this week, working in Texas and staying at a large hotel chain. I’ve been messing around with my Raspberry Pi a bunch lately, so I decided to bring one with me, assuming that the television in my room would have one or two unused HDMI ports that I could connect to. It did — it’s a 40″ LG television, with two HDMI ports available on the side.

When you press the “Aux” button on the remote…

…this is the menu that pops up.

And when you select the second HDMI port, this is what you get:

Nothing.

I rebooted the Raspberry Pi, but still could not get any video. To make sure everything was working, I disconnected the HDMI connection from the wall and plugged the Raspberry Pi into that port and it worked just fine. For some reason, the hotel chain had disabled the HDMI ports on the side of the television.

There’s another connection on the back of the television, an RJ-11 connection that looks like a phone cord. It connects to what looks like a small IR port on the front of the television. Once I disconnected the RJ-11 (phone jack) from the back of the television and hit the “Aux” bottom on the remote again, I got a different menu on the television.

From this menu, I was able to select and use the television’s other inputs.

Success!

The bad news is, with the cable disconnected, you can no longer change cable channels. The good news is, you can easily restore the television back to its prior state by reconnecting the RJ-11 cable. After doing it once I found I was able to easily reach up and disconnect the cable without moving the television or messing with any of the other cables.

Before leaving the room, be sure to reconnect the cable so the next person who stays there has a functional (but crippled) television. I’m not entirely sure what the rationale is in regards to locking customers out of the television’s additional HDMI ports, but if you need to enable them, now you know the trick.

Console Video Games

Free NES/SNES Controllers (Review)

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In early June I ran across an ad on Facebook for free USB NES controllers. The offer was posted by Epictronics, who said all one had to do to qualify for the offer was “Like” their company on either Facebook or Instagram and cover shipping costs. Not a bad advertising gimmick in my book.

I don’t need another USB game pad, but they’re handy to have around, especially when setting up and playing with Raspberry Pis. Besides, Epictronics had me at “free.” Two minutes after seeing the ad I had already Liked their Facebook page and was busy filling out my order. Along with an NES game pad, I noticed the company also offers a free SNES game pad! Cover the additional shipping and you can add that to your cart, too!

(Note that the URL works whether or not you have liked Epictronics on Facebook or Instagram. Your morals are your own.)

It didn’t take me long to figure out how Epictronics can afford to offer “free” (there’s those quotes again…) game pads in exchange for Facebook and Instagram likes. Shipping for one free controller is $10; for two, it’s $16. Conveniently, Epictronics accepts PayPal for their free game pads. The website was optimistic in predicting the controllers will take 2-3 weeks to arrive to the US. My package from Wang Shang took 5 weeks.

The controllers arrived inside an unpadded plastic bag, wrapped in a thin sheet of foam. Each controller came in its own baggie. The USB cord attached to the SNES pad was neatly coiled and tied with a bread tie, while the NES controller had no tie and the cord was just coiled up inside its bag.

When placed next to authentic NES controllers, you can see that the mold for the new controller is essentially identical. The color is a lighter shade of gray and the word “Nintendo” is missing from the label, but from five-feet away it would fool anyone who hasn’t seen on since the console’s original heyday.

Once you actually pick up the controller, all bets are off. The first thing you’ll notice is that the controllers are so light that you would swear they’re empty inside. The NES controller in particular feels about half as heavy as an originally controller. My thumbs instantly noticed that the A and B buttons were convex instead of concave, which doesn’t feel right. None of the buttons, including the d-pad, feel like the original. On the USB controller, all of the buttons have a poppy feel to them, where the originals felt more mushy. I do have to say the almost 5′ long cord was nice.

Installation could not have been simpler. Windows 10 recognized the controller as a “usb gamepad” almost immediately, and that was that. Ten seconds later, I fired up MAME and played a quick round of Donkey Kong using the NES pad. The buttons felt a little “punchy,” and I suspect they might require breaking in.

Bottom line? You get what you pay for. There are much better USB game pads on the market for just a few dollars more, and if you’re a stickler for authenticity, companies like RetroUSB sell USB adapters for most vintage controllers.

I can only recommend these “free” controllers if, like me, you have half a dozen Raspberry Pi systems that you’re constantly reloading and testing. They’re okay for testing purposes or for letting the kids play with, but real gamers will want a real game pad pretty quickly after using one of these.

Console Video Games, Raspberry Pi

Old Skool NES Raspberry Pi Case

Last year, Nintendo released the NES Classic Edition. It was a game console that looked like a tiny version of the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) from the 80s. It had 30 built-in games and cost $59.95. Nintendo woefully underestimated demand for the console. Stores couldn’t keep them in stock, and when they did hit shelves, scalpers scooped them up and resold them online for huge profits. And then, with thousands of potential customers begging Nintendo to ramp up production, the company confusingly cancelled the product instead.

This led lots of techie people to roll their own solutions, the most common of which was to install emulators on a Raspberry Pi (which made my list of NES Classic alternatives and which I wrote installation instructions for). It’s a nifty and inexpensive solution, but physically it’s missing the nostalgia form factor.

Enter the “NES inspired” Raspberry Pi case by Old Skool Entertainment System.

Not shaped exactly like an original NES, the Old Skool Entertainment System is the perfect shape for a Raspberry Pi. The case, which was designed to hold a Pi 3, 2 and B+, splits apart at the middle and includes four screws that goes up from the bottom into the top while holding the Pi in place.

Like any good case, there are openings that line up with all the Pi’s ports, so you won’t need to remove the case to access anything on the Pi. The front flips open to provide access to the Pi’s USB ports. While I appreciate the throwback to the original NES design, this does mean that all your USB cables will be routed out the front of the case. If you have an Ethernet cable running to your Pi, the lid will always be in the up position.

The case currently sells for $20 on Amazon and is available for Prime shipping, but there’s one thing on the packaging that worries me:

The absolute worst thing you can do when making a third-party product is mention Nintendo licenses by name. Claiming that your case was merely inspired by the original NES might be enough to skate past Nintendo’s lawyers, but mentioning characters by name and including instructions on how to download emulators and install ROMs is usually enough to draw the ire of suits. Hopefully when (not if) Nintendo’s lawyers come calling, all Old Skool will have to do is change their packaging, and not pull their case completely off the market.

So yeah, I like it. It’s no custom Commodore 1541 Raspberry Pi case, but it’s close.