Retro Thing

Forget The Cans & String - Get Stylish With These Toshiba Walkie-Talkies

I remember this distinctly... when I was a kid, I desperately wanted Walkie-Talkies. My neighbor somehow found out, and set me up doing chores around his place so I could earn some scratch and join the wireless communication revolution of the 70s (could a CB radio or shortwave be far behind?). It took forever, but I finally earned enough quarters to get a pair of cool Walkies. I could talk with my friends without having to go in and beg to use the phone! I remember the "serious gear" styling, and the many summer adventures I had, whether I was the Six Million Dollar Man (my value probably rung up around a buck sixty-eight), or Spider-Man. We were spacemen sometimes, but with these amazingly stylish Toshiba Walkies, I think we'd have been from space EVERY time.

Among the walkie-talkie cognoscenti, these are a desirable collectible. Made around 1965, these totally tubular transmitters (and receivers... I know, I know...) are all metal, and even have a battery meter to keep tabs on the wallet-draining six AA batts that power the beast. Initially I wondered whether these were intended for kids because they're so well built, but I'm pretty sure that the single channel nature confines these units to backyard adventuring. Though I suppose there could have been a more "advanced" model with more controls... that probably would have required even more batteries.

These rarely come up on Ebay, and when they do they command real bucks. A single unit (so you have to find a collector friend with another one) finished last month on Ebay for nearly $150. The accompanying video was part of the auction listing, and gives a great look at the details of this magnificent spaced-out communicator. Really nice voice on the narrator there... he's clearly into his walkie talkies. Though I suppose it would have been more authentic to deliver his lines over a scratchy walkie-talkie transmission, with a few inscrutable morse-code beeps added in for good measure.

Those 80s Electronic Games That Raced Through Batteries

I scanned this image out of an old UK Doctor Who magazine from December 1982. At first I have to admit that I thought it was some kind of spaceship (I'm SUCH a nerd), but it quickly resolved into a race car made out of at least, oh I dunno... $30 worth of batteries these days. The ad promises rebates when you buy certain electronic games.

The games are what's interesting... by 1982 the handheld electronic revolution was in full swing. We were still nearly a decade away from a single efficient handheld that used carts (the MicroVision being a reluctant exception), so these expensive little handhelds only played a single game most of the time. Let's take a moment to remember a couple of those fun-filled battery sucking games...

I actually have this electronic Scramble that's vaguely reminisicient of a mini arcade cabinet. Considering that in the arcade Scramble is a game with a scrolling landscape, it's a minor miracle that they were able to reproduce the fun with an LED screen.

Puck Monster is one of the innumerable Pac-Man clones of the era... a wholesale infringement that could never fly today. Pac-Man is pretty easy to capture in an LCD game, but the title of this game is what's interesting. Originally Pac-Man was going to be called "Puck Man" in the US, but an executive at Midway reasoned that it would be too easy for unruly teens to vandalize "Puck" into saying something else... if you catch my drift (and let's not even think of what could be made out of Pac-Man's nose). "Puck Monster" clearly didn't get the memo, and the poor print quality of the ad does make the title look a little... ahem... questionable.
"Contraption" was sold in the US by Lakeside. Two D cells start the gears in motion, and players try to migrate their colored marbles from one side of the board to the other. I imagine a loud time, but I think that would add to the clanky gear gameplay. Looks like it would be fun for adults too. Gotta try to find one of these...

Touch N' Tell is more of an educational game. Created by the same geniuses at TI who created Speak & Spell, Touch N' Tell has replaceable color sheets that invite pre-schoolers to point to items named by the not-at-all-sinister robot voice. Today the Touch N' Tell is a frequent platform for "circuit-bending", experimental audio devices created by kitbashing old electronics. I'd characterize the results as possibly "interesting", but the rest of the band might stop telling you when practice is...

The original magazine ad's rebate offer sounds like a generous chunk of change, but it's money that will go right back into Duracell's pockets since these games tended to burn through batteries. Remember how quickly your dead battery pile grew after a few hours of electronic excitement? Now we all know what to do with those dead batteries... build a vague model of a race car that isn't going anywhere.

$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