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New Trixter video just dropped! Jim Leonard, better known as Trixter, is is among the most knowledgeable PC game historians out there. He also has quite a talent for putting together well researched videos with extremely high production values; I've linked to a few before including his in-depth look at the IBM PCjr. Trixter is also a collector of games and PC related hardware, and in his collection is the insanely rare Mindscape Music Board. What, exactly, is this historical curiousity? This card is essentially a copy of the Mockingboard for the Apple II and generates sound from two General Instruments AY-3-8913 sound chips to provide you six channels of sound and noise. It was included with the program Bank Street Music Writer, and unfortunately never went further than that. For more details and answers to even more questions, check out the latest YouTube video, Do you own the rarest PC sound card in the world?. You'll learn about the card's history, there are interviews with some of its creators, and perhaps most importantly demonstrations so you can hear the card in action (you won't find any emulators supporting this one, at least not yet)...

Somewhat recently a new feature for PixelatedArcade has been quietly rolled out which is intended to document which video mode a game utilizes for supported hardware. For some platforms and games you'll now see this in the technical specs tab; for platforms such as the PC where there is a wide variety of hardware, the resolutions utilized are listed in the display hardware supported section — click the icon there to expand the section and show the list! Other platforms, such as the Commodore 64, are more uniform and don't have different display adapters available. In these cases the resolutions supported are listed at the bottom of the tech specs. And, as it turns out, there's actually a lot of complications in documenting this information; it wasn't unusual for hardware of the era to have some seemingly bizarre design decisions that resulted from the desire to improve the display quality at a cheaper cost, and no matter what the hardware was programmers at the time had some impressive skills that could make whatever the hardware was intended to do null and void by finding clever work arounds. All of this makes it not quite as easy to document something as simple as the resolution a game uses as it may sound. Still, I wanted to get this feature going, so the point of this post is to note a few of the quirks encountered and how they are listed at PixelatedArcade.

Here we are at the end of yet another year...so welcome to the traditional end-of-year roundup! As always, a lot was going on this year so I was again unable to keep up the monthly news/review cadence. But plenty of updates and game information was sorted out, and below another tradition will be continued with a handfull of mini-reviews! This time around I've picked out four games which are presented below in ascending order, from worst to best. Outside of the the classic games realm, what games have I been playing this year? I wish there was more time, so not much and I'm probably not the person to look to if you want reviews of the very latest and greatest. This year, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Wonder have been my games of choice; I highly recommend both, they're outstanding! Meanwhile, my nephew has been engrossed in Minecraft and Roblox; he doesn't seem to be taking to the adventures and RPG's that I love. Could be he's still too young or just has different tastes, but either way I'm glad he's having fun! That's enough rambling for now, let's get to it...