Scheduled Maintenance and New Platforms

Fall is here, Halloween is just a few weeks away, and because it's 2020 life is keeping as all on our toes! Coming up on November 5th PixelatedArcade will be undergoing some scheduled site maintenance; you may find the site intermittently unresponsive that evening, although (hopefully) downtime should be pretty minimal. Additionally, I've begun quietly adding some Nintendo Entertainment System games along with plans for the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, and MSX coming soon. There is an impressive catalog of games for these systems individually, let alone combined, so like everything it will be a slow work in progress! And finally, a few new scans have been added to the PC Games Magazine cover archive with more to come.

Now for some cool stuff found around the web; first, the Nerdly Pleasures blog has a great article on Speech Synthesis in Early Home Video Games. In this day and age the concept of having voices in games might seem rudimentary, common, or even annoying (if done poorly), but the technology to do so was limited back then so when games featured even a limited amount of speech it seemed far more interesting than it should have been! Be sure to check out this list of add-ons allowing what today sounds like robotic, synthetic speech that was often impressive for its era. As I'm hoping to begin adding ZX Spectrum and more ZX 81 games soon, also check out this older article Micro Men on the Digital Antiquarian site. As always Jimmy Maher provides an interesting history of the people and technology of early home video games, this time centered around Sir Clive Sinclair and his company's early computers. And lastly, Ken Williams of Sierra On-Line, Inc. fame has written a book called Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings. As I'm writing this, I don't have a copy yet, but definitely plan on getting one; I'm hoping it's good, as I'm thinking there has to be a lot of interesting behind the scenes stories throughout the company's history. Seems like the book came about from Ken having some spare time during the current pandemic, so this may be one of the very few positive things to result from this mess...

That's all for today; as always, stay safe, take care, remain calm and classic game on!