Categories: Top :: Arts :: Day By Day :: Entertainment :: Living :: Personal :: Silly :: Technology

Gaming: Sony PSP and TV-out; I mean, glorious uber-nerding near the TV like an 8-year-old.
Thu, 06 Nov 2008

I've always been a fan of 'tactile retro gaming' .. ie: using authentic controls if you can't have the actual device around. ie: As an emulation author you'd think I'd be all for the technology (and I am!), but I also collect arcade machines - the full cabinets - and home consoles. It is always "better" (in terms of game feal) on the real thing (and brutal on your space and room aesthetics), and then on emulation if you don't have access to the real beasties. The reason of course is more genuine controls and also some of the magic -- there is something to be said (and also said against) having to insert and flip over floppy disks on a C64 or Atari 800, and type on a nasty old keyboard that was actually made up from calculator keys (no joke there btw, check your Commodore history friends ;)

Consider also the 'knock' noise Q-bert makes when he falls off the maze; thats actually a physical knock made in the arcade cabinet, and it cannot be replicated in emulation _period._ Nor can you replicate the aging monitor and the cigarette burns on the cabinet. But I digress.

What I'm talking about today is plugging consoles, even modern ones like the Sony PSP, smack into your big screen high def fancy pants TV. Its not a genuine display, but it is certainly in the spirit of that -- how many of us sat on the floor far too close to our big 1970's CRT TVs playing with crummy old joysticks that hurt our little paws. Atari 2600, Colecovision, etc. Those are sitting-in-front-of-TV systems -- thats how they were designed. Its also a nerdy social thing, playing games in the family room on the TV, not up on your laptop in an office or bedroom.

And in these modern times, it means firing up Commodore Vic-20 BASIC on 47" of fracking television. YEAH

In my household we're woefully behind times in the entertainment arena, but finally just acquired a new TV. I mean one that is more than 20 inches, and less than that in years old. So I naturally plugged in a SuperGUN (a Super Nova in fact) to bring up Rolling Thunder (the actual arcade game board) on the TV.. AWESOME.

But for normal people, whats the easiest device to plug into a big fat TV? Sure, your XBox or the like, running old games. Nice. You do that, we don't have any modern consoles :)

I picked up the Sony PSP "component cables" (not the composite ones) and jacked my little handheld PSP into the TV. Being on cables and without remote controls means I'm sitting up there, near the TV, wired to it. Like the good old days. Big TV and me, face to face.

First up -- running my ST emu and Xenon 2 Megablast. OH YEAH. Then Dungeon Master and the mummy that scares your pants off in the dark. OH YEAH.

Next up -- VICE emulator in Vic-20 mode, and Cosmic Cruncher. Spiders of Mars. Omega Race.

And then something from this decade.. Wipeout Pure. Sweet racing action.

The only problem here is the PSP letterboxes games, so you don't get the full fullscreen action (for shame!) like the SuperGUN does. Next up I'll have to try the GP2x and see about getting my ST emu going full screen there. Sexy. Or get yourself an X-Arcade stick for your laptop, or use a STELLA-adapter to plug your 20 year old Atari joystick into your computer. Whatever it takes, man.

An hour of true transcendant geeking. Modern TV runs pretty hot and winter is coming -- plug that old small TV gear into your big hot TV and get your game on!

[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / psp ] [link] [Comments]