Retro Thing

$14 MP3 Player With Built In NES Emulator, But...

I still don't have an expensive mp3 player. I listen to music & podcasts all the time, so an MP3 player in my employ is likely to get crammed into a pocket and get knocked around a bit. Since there is such a wealth of perfectly serviceable sub $25 models around, it really doesn't pay for me to splash out for a fancy music player (though I'd still like to get an early iPod one of these days).

I usually end up with an off-brand or non-brand unit from some online surplus outfit. The one I'm using right now is amazingly feature-packed. It plays music that sounds good (not always the case with a cheapie), videos, even e-books... all of this for the amazing price of $14.

So what makes this interesting to the retro crowd (besides the fact that I keep it loaded up with old time radio shows and old Sammy Davis Jr. records...)? It packs a surprise function. This $14 no-name has an extra on-screen menu for "Games". I highlighted the joystick icon to be greeted by what is clearly a not-at-all legal NES emulator. The included game ROM? A game starring a certain plumber in his adventure-ready coveralls. Ahem.

That signature music came on, so I was looking forward to playing NES games on a $14 cheapie that I could recommend to all of you, but there's a significant problem. There aren't enough buttons to actually play the games. You use the fast-forward and rewind buttons to move left and right (the buttons are on top of each other to make gameplay even more disorienting). No buttons on the player make Mario jump or do anything other than move left and right. As you can imagine, this does curtail one's game selection quite a bit. I can't even think of one game that would be fun this way... Arkanoid maybe?

My guess is that my player is reusing firmware from another (possibly less cheap?) MP3 player that hopefully has more buttons built in. I guess that an NES emulator doesn't pose much of a challenge to modern processors - even the sorts of processor chips they can afford to slap into a cheap MP3 player. Let's remain vigilant, retro readers, for any other cheap electronics harboring an illegitimate 8 bit secret.

Pee Wee Harmonica: A Mini Mouth Harp For Big Wheezes

I love miniatures, especially when they still have all the functions of their big brothers (within reason, of course). We've written articles about the tiny film camera that was the top lure of my local grocer's gumball machine, and also an impossibly small AM radio from the 60s. Here's a mini gadget that's even older; the Pee Wee Harmonica. The box tells us that this was manufactured in occupied Japan, so this little mouth harp and its box go way back. My guess is that the Pee Wee was "inspired" by Hohner Instruments' similar mini harmonica "the Little Lady".

Hohner is a harmonica brand that goes back 150 years, though I don't know how long they've been producing keychain-sized harmonicas like the Pee Wee (which I should add was small enough to be the first musical instrument to go into space), but it's definitely been around long enough for mouth harp fans to learn how to get the most of its little eight note range. Here are a couple videos - one from some 70s TV show (that I really want to see now) that features the Harmonitones (a band comprised entirely of guys described as "my one weird uncle") doing a version of "the Can Can" with the teeny tiny harmonica taking the lead.

The second video is much more modern - a slightly uncomfortable closeup of a man's lips whoofing into his webcam with a mini harmonica. He offers online lessons so that you too can play Star Wars, The Cock O' The North (I don't make this stuff up...), and Old Suzanna on the tiny harmonica that you will be keeping in your pocket at all times from now on.


Help Out Retro Thing When You Pick Up A "Little Lady" Harmonica on Amazon

 

Tiny 1979 Article About "The Empire Strikes Back"

One great thing about looking through old magazines is reading about something we now know to be a big deal, before anyone knew it was going to be a big deal. I was thumbing through the spring 1979 issue of Cinefantastique - one of the most consistently outstanding sci fi film and tv magazines until it ceased publication in 2006. I bought the issue because of the lengthy cover story about Forbidden Planet (a film that I occasionally become obsessed with to this day).

The Forbidden Planet article was fascinating, but also fascinating were the tiny little blind items sprinkled through the magazine about upcoming genre films. In one of the margins was this modest little tidbit...

The Empire Strikes Back in 1980

Shooting title of the Star Wars sequel is "The Empire Strikes Back" which began filming on March 5 in Finse, Norway, on locations which will double as for an ice-covered planet. Directing is Irvin Kershner from a script by Larry Kasdan and the late Leigh Brackett. The recent casting a black actor Billy Dee Williams is a revealing move, executive producer George Lucas' token gesture to those who objected to Star Wars' lily-white universe.

Makeup artist Stuart Freeborn, assisted by his wife and son, is creating a mechanically-operated puppet, described as a 3 1/2 foot tall alien who looks like a "wizened old man, human-like, very ancient and wrinkled. Motivated via a series of offstage wires, this creature is important in teaching Luke Skywalker about the mysteries of "The Force".

A miniature land vehicle to be used with animated people inside it is part of the stop motion effects to be supplied by John Berg and Phil Tippett. The film will be released by 20th Century Fox in 1980.

Not exactly breathless with excitement, are they? This may seem a timid description of the sequel to "Star Wars", but audiences really didn't know what to expect. This issue is from 1979, only 2 years after the release of "Star Wars". After the success of the first film, Lucas opened up a bit about Star Wars being just one chapter in a "saga"... but in the movie biz that's just called a "sequel", and sequels didn't traditionally perform as well as the original. For this reason, even after the dramatic worldwide success of Star Wars, Lucas had difficulty raising the money he wanted for Empire. Few wanted to bank on a sequel to what they saw as a fluke hit (releasing blockbuster films in the summer wasn't even popularized yet), especially when the sequel was going to be so expensive.

We all know what happened. "Empire" turned out to be the best film in the series (remember how innocent we all were when we thought that "Return of the Jedi" was the suckiest Star Wars movie?), and Lucas could go on to make any movie he wanted. Like "Howard The Duck", but that's another story.

Confirmation of Star Wars' staying power was still a year away from that issue of Cinefantastique. Before modern-day spoiler alerts, internet script leaks, and trailers that ruin any sense of surprise or suspense, back then we had to rely on genre magazines to report on even the tiniest morsels of info about these films that would go on to change the movie business forever.

Amiga Forever Brings Classic Computing Power To Android

I've got an iPad, and it's a lovely device. Elegant and otherworldly (I can push icons around with my finger!) it's a great way to do a lot of things... as long as what you want to do is exactly what Apple wants you to do. I must have been naive, but when I got the thing, I was surprised at how limited my access is to this very expensive thing I bought. I can't just copy files onto the iPad without getting iTunes' okay, and I can't really run any of my favorite classic game & computer emulators even though the hardware is more than powerful enough.

You can get some classic game pre-packs for iPad, but nothing with the freedom that makes emulation fun. it goes without saying that there are no Nintendo emulators for iPad, and all of the other ones just feel like me paying again for the same games I've owned for 20 years. So if you're a retro gamer on the go, and in the know, you go Android. Plenty of emulators there, and no "walled garden" attitude about what you can put on your Android hardware.

I'm excited about the new release of Amiga Forever Essentials for Android from Cloanto. Cloanto are the creators of the justifiably famous "Amiga Forever" and "C64 Forever" emulation suites that make running these retro platforms on modern computers very easy. Now they bring their Amiga knowhow to the Android market. While there have been a couple of Amiga emulators for Android, Amiga Forever Essentials provides the crucial (and legal!) ROM files that emulators need in order to work. So for a measly 99 cents you can ensure that your Amiga emus have the proper ROM files to get the best emulated performance of my favorite computer from the 80s and 90s. Cloanto worked with the creators of popular Amiga emulators like UAE4Droid and AnUAE4All to ensure that they will auto-detect Amiga Forever's ROM install.

Amiga Forever Essentials includes ROMs for every major revision of the Amiga OS up to version 3.1, and also includes a virtual demo disk with some of the Amiga's famous graphical demos that dazzled us all back in those colorless days of the early mac and MS Windows (shiver). Below is a link to the Android store so that you can become a legal Amiga fan for just 99 cents.

links:

Amiga Forever Essentials at the Android Market
Cloanto homepage for Amiga Forever Essentials

1960s Calrad DM-12 Microphone Got Back

In my line of work, I end up using a lot of microphones. Overwhelmingly these days, a mic is a fairly utilitarian cylinder (with occasional exceptions, of course). However when you cast an ear over microphones of the past, not only do you experience microphones with many different aural characteristics, you also get a wide variety of shapes and sizes.

We all recognize the Shure "Elvis" microphone, the classic RCA capsule shaped mic (and its innumerable knockoffs), and I still get email from people wanting to buy the "Bob Barker" microphone I wrote about years ago. I do remember seeing the curvy Calrad DM-12 around years ago, probably at the local Czech polka hall. The mic is unusually... um... sensual for a microphone. I imagine that the DM-12 was designed to be seen as well as heard - though I don't have the proper cord to tell you whether it sounds as good as it looks.

In poking around online, I couldn't find anyone speaking too much about the actual sound of the microphone, just its looks. Several studios I found will rent these mics to you to capture that "vintage sound", but it doesn't take long to figure out that just because a mic is old, that doesn't mean you're going to get any special results out of it. Several of the vintage mics I have around my office look awesome, but make it sound like I've been gargling chain-saws.

When I record a voice-over, I'm usually alone in a room recording into a stubby gun-metal condenser mic. It does a great job, but there's little pizazz. Maybe a swingin' design like the DM-12 is what I need to give those long recording session a little kick. or maybe I should remember that I just referred to a microphone as "sensual", and call it a day. 

Classic Buck Rogers Rocket Sculptures

In the early days of Retro Thing, we wrote about Cool Rockets, model maker Jeff Brewer's series of superlative rocket powered sculptures. Originally inspired by the 50s, Jeff has gone back further in the past to bring us farther into the future. His newest models are from the world of Buck Rogers, that wild 1920s comic strip that helped give birth to science fiction.

I got to see the Buck Rogers battle cruiser and the Asterite craft recently, and they continue the tradition of high quality coming from Brewer's spacedock. Hand-finished and poised for liftoff, each ship is fueled up and ready to go on those post-depression adventures of the funny pages. While his prior Cool Rockets were imbued with a spark of attitude (several of the designs looked ready to flex and spring into action), the Buck Rogers ships play it straight, serving as a tribute to those designs that launched so many imaginations so long ago.These Buck Rogers rocket sculptures are limited to a thousand pieces, so they won't be in our orbit for long. You can click below to find one on Amazon, and you'll be helping out Retro Thing along the way.

Add Buck Rogers' Battle Cruiser to your fleet

Rare Commodore 65 Hits eBay, Bidding Mayhem Ensues. Again.

Selling to a good (and wealthy) home: One fairly rare working prototype Commodore home computer.

It's not even fully functional because the company never finished the software, deeming the machine too expensive to sell well in the early 1990s. The price? Already an astounding € 5,686 with five days to go in the auction. This will be a fun one to watch.

Retro Thing's Bohus had a chance to play with a C-65 several years ago, here's what he had to say:

After the spectacular success of the Commodore 64, the company barely knew what to do with themselves. They created the Commodore 128 that combined C64 functionality with unique high powered modes of its own, but it didn't really work out. Of course there was the mighty series of Amiga computers from the mid 80's onwards, but Commodore was convinced they could still make good use of the popular C64 technology.

Enter the Commodore 65; in many ways like a C64 that went to "11". It featured a sleek new design, two SID audio chips, a built in 3.5" floppy drive, better graphics abilities, expansion to 8 megs of RAM, and a flat bit to rest your coffee on. Some working prototypes were made in 1990-91, and when Commodore was liquidated after their bankruptcy in '94, some of these machines got out. No one knows exactly how many are out there; estimates range from 50 to several hundred.

This particular unit is owned by Jason Compton, well known Amiga fan, editor of Amiga Report (a hyperlinked online magazine pre-HTML... wow!), and all around super talent. After speaking with Jason about the C65 it seems clear that while the machine had a lot of things going for it, it was simply too late to market. By 1991 Nintendo & the PC were leading gaming and computing away from the standards that the original C64 had set. 

With millions of Commodore 64's sold in the world, it seems like there could have been interest in an improved version like the 65. The C65 went unreleased not because ol' "chicken lips" (the unfortunate nickname for Commodore's logo) was too chicken to offer new products, but because the C65 simply would not have sold in the early 90's. Especially not at the $300-400 projected price. Sadly the evolutionary C65 will go down in computing history as another unfortunate casualty of Commodore's legendary lack of insight.

Want to find out how much it sells for? You can watch the auction here [eBay].