There is also a copyright notice on the bottom dated
2004 for
This little gadget has a joystick, a few pushbutton switches, and
composite video and a sound output. It allows one to play vintage Ms.
Pac-Man, Galaga, Pole Position, Mappy, and Xavious by connecting it to a
standard TV's video and audio inputs. I mention this here because I
just thought it was really cool to be able to play these vintage games,
and some might be in the same uninformed group with me. :-) FWIW, my
daughter says there are a number of other similar units with different
games, and the web seems to confirm this.
Wanting to see if the web site is WOT approved, I googled
jakkstvgames.com and it seems to only be referred to by other web sites.
I finally got brave and typed it in to the Firefox URL entry and was
rewarded with "403 Forbidden" and "You don't have permission to access
/
on this server." Sounds pretty scary to me.
BTW, I have absolutely no connection with this company - whatever it is
- Jakks Pacific? It says it is made in China, of course. The thing is
plastic, but seems to be remarkably well made for something that only
costs 20 bucks. Of course the possibility of hacking it for other
purposes never crossed my mind. ;-)
Jakks Pacific was a legit company, but have since folded, near as I can
tell.
Most of those games-in-a-stick systems are based on a variant of the NES-
on-a-chip. This is a very popular architecture for these sorts of toys;
the games are not emulated, but rather reprogrammed. This turns up in that
the games are close, but not quite like, the originals (see, for example,
the Intellivision-in-a-controller).
Curt's Flashback 2 and Jeri's C64 joystick are shining exceptions.
--
------------------------------------ personal:
http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems *
www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at
floodgap.com
-- I don't mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy. -- Samuel Butler ----------------