Welcome to the world of PixelatedArcade

Welcome to March 2022! I don't have a particularly substantial update or review this month, but thought I would point a few things out. First is several PixelatedArcade code updates have been pushed live; some changes you won't notice as it's mostly backend administrative stuff, but I did finally enable sorting on game lists! It's a pretty basic feature and embarrassing it took this long to get in place. I've actually had the code in place for a while but not enabled due to some really poor performance; I finally resolved the performance issues so it's available now...

Color monitors are ubiquitous now, but that wasn't so in the early days of computing. On early computer systems and game consoles where support for color displays was even an option, color was always achieved with various trade offs (usually as a result of limited amounts of RAM in order to keep prices low). Some computers simply limited the number of colors available at once; the Amstrad CPC and IBM PC with CGA let programmers set any pixel to any color, but no more than four colors at a time could be on screen (without clever programming that is). Many systems, including the popular Commodore 64, allowed more colors on screen at once with the catch that you couldn't just set any pixel to whatever color you wanted willy nilly; the screen was instead broken up into blocks, and within each block there could only be a limited number of colors (typically 2 or 4) depending on the resolution and computer. And finally, among this list of tricks to achieve color are systems that took advantage of artifacting in NTSC composite video. This oddball technique turned a flaw into an advantage to achieve more colors on the screen with the disadvantage being a loss of resolution and clarity...

It's hard to believe, but another year is just about wrapped up! That means it's time for another end-of-year roundup as seems to be the tradition - essentially just a quick note to say thanks for checking in and hope you enjoy seeing all of the vintage games, both the good and bad ones. Overall 2021 seems like it may have been a slow year for adding new games, scans, screenshots, and more to the site, but it's been busy nonetheless. A big chunk of time was taken up by my Silpheed project, an attempt to envision what that game might have looked like had there been an arcade version. Other cabinets and props were built along with that as well. It's not always immediately obvious, but several updates to the PixelatedArcade codebase were completed as well in order to improve features, resolve bugs, and to overall make administration of the site easier...