Over the past week or so, I’ve come into possession all at once of a motley assortment of terribly outdated technology: A 19″ cathode ray tub television, a tape cassette player, and a record player. This paints a terribly sad and unflattering portrait of me, I realize, but it’s not really so bad as all that. I hope.
The CRT specifically is a Sony PVM medical monitor, whose RGB passthrough capabilities should allow me to capture high-definition direct feed of light gun games for NES (and for other systems, I suppose, but did Super NES or Genesis actually have any worthwhile light gun titles?). I’m waiting on a BNC-to-SCART adapter to arrive so I can complete the circuit, and according to the postal service’s website it’s currently at the local sorting hub waiting for a non-holiday on which it can be delivered. So that’s exciting.
The tape cassette player is for similar purposes—it’s not just a tape recorder, it’s a Famicom Data Recorder, which gave the NES the ability to record game data to cassette in the days before passwords, on-board SRAM, and the Disk System. This device works with, like, four games (plus Famicom BASIC), but I’ve been itching to own one of these for years because it’s a rad Famicom-colored tape player similar to the one I used to use for school projects in elementary school, and I’m looking forward to trying to get it to work with Wrecking Crew and Excitebike. Hopefully it actually will work.
And finally, the record player is… uh, not for Good Nintentions or Game Boy World. I just wanted to listen to all the old LPs my parents dug out of storage and left with me last time they were in town. It’s been a while since I last had the means to listen to vinyl—my turntable (a very nice turntable!) did not survive the move to North Carolina.
I swear I’m not as much of a backwards recidivist as this pile-up of oldness would seem to suggest. Though I wouldn’t complain if print periodicals became a valid media format again in 2016.
“did Super NES or Genesis actually have any worthwhile light gun titles?”
I’ve always been curious about Yoshi’s Safari. Never owned a super scope, but that game looked fun.
I enjoyed it. It’s a pretty easy on-rails shooter, but my recollection is that it had a pretty neat variety of levels, even if it didn’t actually matter to the gameplay whether you were in, say, a fortress or an underwater level.
I seem to remember really enjoying Battle Clash and its sequel Metal Combat on the SNES back in the day.
There is Lethal Enforcers, and The light gun segments of Snatcher on Sega CD. (I suppose Mad Dog McCree to on Sega CD.)
That Famicom branded tape deck is pretty neat. I remember having one (Not famicom branded of course.) for our TI-994A for storage as we couldn’t afford the disk drive when I was a kid. I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work as long as it can play tapes still. And hopefully record them as well.