Welcome to the world of PixelatedArcade

Long before home computers were a thing, Avalon Hill began publishing board games out of their headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland. Their main successes were in strategy and wargames with many common wargame designs (such as the hexagonal grid) having been of their creation. In 1980, Avalon Hill finally made the leap to computer games with their Micorocomputer Games division. Naturally, most of their games continued their strategy and wargame concepts that had worked so well as board games; many were even computer adaptations of some of these same games. There were original titles too, and they did release a few games outside of their usual wargame and historical simulations genres. I'd like to take a look at one of these titles this time around: Jupiter Mission 1999 for the Atari 400/800 (there is also a Commodore 64 version which is more or less the same outside differences due to hardware).

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.