Welcome to the world of PixelatedArcade
A museum of vintage video games featuring photos, information, screenshots, artwork, and more.

Recent Site Updates
Recently added games:
Recent changes and additions:
- New screenshots: Donkey Kong 3
- New screenshots: Alcazar: The Forgotten Fortress
- New technical information: Alcazar: The Forgotten Fortress
PixelatedArcade Site News
The March Miscellaneous Mischief
Code, Books, and Squirrels

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...
Do Not Attempt To Adjust The Picture
Actually, DO Adjust It For These Games

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...
Happy Holidays 2021!
The PixelatedArcade 2021 End of Year Roundup
