Liberator8200

Hmmmmm. A hard choice to make. Would it be the Congo Bongo Intellivision cart for $1? The 7800 console and 34 2600/7800 carts, including some rarities like Mines of Minos and Tapper, for $45? The Up 'n Down 2600 cart my brother-in-law gave me for free (along with his other 2600 stuff)? The free Asteroids Deluxe coin-op? The free Missile Command coin-op? (Sadly, both since given away or sold.) The TV-less $25 Atari Pong coin-op bought at a thrift store? (Still got that one.) Or the boxes of original Odyssey games, most of which got traded to now-retired dealer Jerry Greiner of Atari2600.com?

Atari (2600) generation.

Now that I'm going months/years between new 2600 finds, cataloging is a must. I'm using DB on my Palm, too. Not sure what I'll do once my PDA finally bites the dust. I'd keep my list on the web for easy access, but I can't afford a mobile Internet plan right now.

You're welcome. Now could someone see about unlocking those pages I . . . . Well, look what someone went and did to my Wiki account! I'll try not to go insane with the power.

Atari's "which player's doing better" ads always make me wax nostalgic. And I don't recall seeing this one before!

I briefly saw some of Mexico during my honeymoon cruise and got to spend a month in Australia, but that's been it. Both were many years ago now. And I've visited most of the states between the Mississippi River and New York. Thanks for making me feel good about it.

Oh, boy. Let me think. Numerous "Pongs", including a couple Atari and Magnavox ones Atari Video Pinball Atari 2600 (a.k.a. VCS) Atari 5200* Atari 7800 Atari Jaguar* Atari Lynx Bally Astrocade* Channel F* Coleco ColecoVision At least one Coleco handheld GCE Vectrex Magnavox Odyssey Magnavox Odyssey^2* Mattel Intellivision A couple Mattel handhelds Milton Bradley Microvision Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Super NES Nintendo Game Boy RCA Studio II Sega Genesis Sega Game Gear* Sony PlayStation * Indicates a system/games I've decided to get rid of, as space is becoming an issue. Play them? No, not so much right now. :(

A Radio Shack Electronic Scoreboard (a.k.a. Pong). The speaker was built in to the console, so you couldn't control the volume. You could, however, attempt to play by sound without turning the TV on.

The MagWeasel directed me here during an e-mail exchange.

I was a loyal watcher of Pac-Man and Saturday Supercade back in the day. I sometimes watched Dragon's Lair, but as I recall it was usually up against another show I preferred over it. My kids are really into Sonic.

Okay, I got most of the overall magazine entries (not individual issues) categorized. These were protected and I couldn't edit them: Atari Age, Club Nintendo Magazine, EGM2, Mega Play, Official Dreamcast Magazine, Official Dreamcast Magazine (UK), and Official Sega Magazine (UK). BTW, I forgot to mention one thing about templates. If a template is included on a page that the template has a link to, it's not rendered as a link to itself, but just as bold text.

Yes, I do, but I'm not an expert. And the reason the template documentation is so verbose is because they're very powerful, offering a lot of options. Let me see if I can summarize. In all cases, you can create a new template by entering "Template:Name" (where "Name" is the name you want to give the template) in the search box and clicking Go. If you're logged in, it should then give you a link to create it. First, you have templates that are just the same text over and over again, like the magazine index tables. Just create what you want and hit "Save Page." Then you can use it in the pages by entering "{{Name}}" (no quotes, of course). Then you have templates with parameters, meaning places you want to have custom text. For users, it's usually easiest to have named parameters. To do this, you once again enter the text you want, but where you want to customize it, insert {{{param1}}}, where "param1" is a unique name. Parameter names can be anything except just numerals (e.g. 1, 2, 3), as those are used for unnamed parameters, which I won't get into here. Then, to use the template you do something like "{{Name | param1=Nintendo}}". You should get your template with the word Nintendo in the spot you specified for param1. You can also specify defaults for parameters like {{{param1|Sega}}} in your template. Then, if the user doesn't specify param1, it will automatically fill in the word Sega. That's templates in a very basic nutshell.

It's not a bad idea, but you'd need some logical way to choose the magazines for the timeline. Listing every single title in one timeline would just be insane. In a few cases you could do it by system/company (e.g. PlayStation/PS2/PS3), but who else besides Nintendo Power has been dedicated to their consoles? (Well, I guess there were those international versions.) Maybe one for all house organs like NP and Sega Visions.

Bill Loguidice is working on a video game documentary. One of his interviewees provided him with many issues of Toy & Hobby World and Leisure Time Electronics from 1980 & '81 to archive. The catch? He only had a week, couldn't damage them, and they were too big to fit in his scanner. So what did he do? He took photos of over 630 pages! You can read the blog entry, which includes a link to all the images on Flickr. Perhaps we should inquire about archiving them here?