PixelatedArcade News

What a year it's been! I think it's safe to say no one quite expected the events that transpired with Covid-19 creating quite the havoc. However, as we come to the holiday season, it's time for the now traditional end of year roundup. Here at PixelatedArcade we had our own challenges as well this year which included a move to a new house. Despite everything going on, plenty of new content was still added and some fun new games were acquired for our collection...

Well, that didn't go quite as planned! Being 2020, that 5-10 minutes of downtime I mentioned in the last update turned out to be much longer...If you visited the site in the past few days, you may have found some pages not working or the site down entirely. Everything should be back online now, and I'm working on upgrading and updating the backend as well so it may be a few more days before I'm back to adding new content, but the good news is it should be a while before I have to perform a large update like this again and next time I can be prepared for some of the snafus that occurred....

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...

Under normal circumstances I would have spent the past week at Dragon Con and then a few days afterwards editing all of the photos I took. Unfortunately, the event was cancelled; I can't say I blame the organizers, social distancing is quite impossible there and given the current situation with Covid-19 it had the potential to be a real disaster. Instead, I spent the week tending to real life obligations; if you would like to see my past photos, check out the set at PixelatedImages Dragon Con Gallery. I also just learned today that MAGFest (The D.C. area Music and Gaming Festival), originally scheduled for January 2021, has also been cancelled for the year. Same story, and again it's hard to blame the organizers for having to make this tough decision. Other events, while not officially cancelled yet, are (I'm sure) watching the situation closely. Not much of an update this month, but I do have a lot more to add to PixelatedArcade and PixelatedImages, so until then thanks for checking in and please stay safe, stay healthy, and take care!

A while back I started what I intended to be a series on CGA colors and then a pandemic and other forms of real life intervened! Well, after a delay from what was supposed to be some sort of a timetable I'm finally returning to CGA graphics and how they can possibly be improved. In the first chapter, I considered an alternate universe where IBM had made a minor change to the hardware allowing for a different color. This time around, I wanted to keep the possibilities in the real world; given the actual options, what if developers had made a different choice? While many games have chosen a palette that looks pretty decent (at least as much as is possible with only 4 colors), I find other games use a less than ideal selection. As before, what constitutes “better” is highly subjective, and I'm sure not everyone will agree with my opinion...

It is almost July of 2020! You might think a pandemic would be the perfect time to get a ton of site updates completed and content updated due to being stuck at home, but as I mentioned in the previous update we're in the middle of moving here which takes up a large amount of time. The process has, of course, taken three times as long as I originally estimated and when I'm not moving boxes, I'm taking a break to add more information to PixelatedArcade. The exciting news for me is that the final boxes of our game and hardware collection has been moved out of storage just this morning, so plenty more scans, photos, screenshots and more will be coming later this year.

I also wanted to point out a few other cool things which can be found around the web...

Welcome to Memorial Day 2020! Here in the United States it is, more or less, the unofficial start of summer but also don't forget to take a moment to think of those who sacrificed their life serving their country.

Here at PixelatedArcade, we're moving! In real life, not the site; PixelatedArcade is remaining at www.pixelatedarcade.com with plenty of updates and more game information planned! Site updates will be a little slower than usual for a while, however, as we are moving to a new home and the process takes a lot of time to sort itself out...not to mention a lot of our equipment isn't unpacked let alone setup yet...

We're still in the midst of the Coranavirus pandemic; originally my plan to was to come up with a few virus related games and write some mini-reviews for each to keep a theme going with Virus Rage being the first in the list, but as this disaster continues the premise started to look less interesting. Instead, I took the time to do some code updates which have just been released! This time around the update features the usual array of backend fixes and enhancements and also adds some changes to the release information layout. There is also, of course, a lot of work that is still in progress but not quite complete.