The sweet spot for home turntable enthusiasts on a budget seems to be the $200 mark. This might be the best of the bunch.
One can only imagine the sake-fueled club hopping that led to the development of the Seiko Frequency drum machine watch.
Making Vintage Games Look Like They Used To
By James Grahame
A classic Atari game played on a modern LCD doesn't look quite right. The colors are too precise, the graphics too angular. There's no ghosting as the textured phosphorescent tube lags behind the on-screen action. The experience is almost sterile.
Dr. Ian Bogost, an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech, is on a quest to change that. He asked a group of CS seniors to simulate a number of CRT behaviors using an Atari VCS emulator. The result is strikingly realistic.
Bogost identified four traits that give CRT displays their unique look: texture, afterimage, color bleed and noise. He explains, "Many of today's players may only experience Atari games in
emulation. Indeed, many of my students may have little to no memory of
CRT televisions at all. Given such factors, it seems even more
important to improve the graphical accuracy of tools like [Atari VCS emulator] Stella.
[The students] are currently working with the maintainer of the free, open-source
Stella emulator to patch their changes into the main build, where the
effects will be available as a configurable option. Expect to see it
there shortly, where hopefully it will benefit players, creators,
educators, and archivists alike. Given that we'll be placing the code
back into Stella's repository, I'm also hopeful that this software
might be extended for use in other emulators for computer systems that
used televisions as their primary output."
Students Make Atari Games Look Like Atari Again
related:
Racing The Beam: Inside The Atari 2600 [co-authored by Dr. Bogost]
The Poultry That Changed Atari Forever
