Reminiscing, Part 5

Going Retro

Here are some modern “retro” videos I found that harken back to the 8- and 16-bit era. I just thought they were neat.

“Move Your Feet”, by Junior Senior

A friend introduced me to this music video a few years ago. It harkens back to the olden days of blocky but colorful 8-bit graphics. I’m sure none of these graphics were generated on an actual 8-bit computer. Anyone know what they used?

 

“Atari Robot Demo”, by Alistair Bowness

This is a clever piece, splicing together video from a bunch of 8-bit games using professional video editing.

In the very beginning you see a demonstration of what Atari users actually had to do to load a binary program. You had to go to a DOS (Disk Operating System) menu, which you loaded from disk, select “Binary Load”, and then type the name of the machine language program you wanted to run, at a prompt. The rapid-fire, high-pitched “beeps” you hear are the actual sound you’d hear out the TV or monitor speaker as the program loaded into memory from floppy disk.

It starts out with video of a real Atari 8-bit demo (video link) Atari used at the trade shows to show off the Atari XE series. Bowness took the music from the real demo and created a remix of it with a modern bass and drum track.

Atari and Commodore 8-bit games are shown, along with some coin-op games. There’s a little Commodore Amiga stuff in there, too.

It surprised me that the video included an Atari 8-bit game called “Dropzone”. It flies by rather quickly. It’s the screen before Dig Dug shows up. I was surprised because my memory is this was a little known game. I tried it out in college. The graphics performance on it was amazing. It was fast–too fast. The movement of graphics around the screen was very smooth. I remember I got killed all the time because I had a difficult time calibrating my movements on the joystick with what was going on onscreen. I’d make dumb moves, crash into stuff and die. Some of the graphics in it were a dead-ringer for the coin-op “Defender” game.

 

“An Atari Adventure”, by Golden Shower

I read how they made this song and video. “Atari Adventure” is an actual music title you can get from Golden Shower. What they did was they recorded real 8-bit game sounds, digitized them into their music system, and used them in the song, along with some 8-bit-like synth sounds they created themselves. The graphics for the video were created entirely in Photoshop, and maybe some other modern graphics packages. The 8-bit-like graphics look an awful lot like the real thing, but none of it was generated on an 8-bit machine.

 

This is a video of a small personal computer museum in Canada. Just about all of the computers that came out in the 1970s and 1980s can be seen, and used by patrons. You see some kids playing some of the old video games.

As you can see, a LOT of different personal computers were created in this time period. It shows you what I meant when I said earlier that everybody and his brother was coming out with their own personal computer in the early to mid-1980s.

I said earlier in Part 4 that this would be my last post. I lied…I’ve got one more coming up.