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Creating The Soundtrack For Bally’s Xenon Pinball

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Ever wondered how those distinct pinball sound effects, speech and music were developed back in the day?

In this short early 80s documentary clip, renowned Electronic Music Composer, Suzanne Ciani, takes us through the creative process of putting together the iconic soundtrack for Bally’s Xenon pinball machine. By lending her voice to Xenon (as the female robot), Suzanne became the the first human female voice in a pinball game!

We absolutely love Suzanne’s body of aural work that spans across many mediums, including film and of course, pinball.

Welcome to Xenon!


source: Tokyo Matt



 

The Amiga 500 Mini Is Coming in 2022

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It was bound to happen! After the success of TheC64 Mini, Retro Games Ltd has announced that they will be releasing an Amiga 500 Mini in early 2022.

Based on Commodore’s iconic 16-bit Amiga 500 (A500), the new The A500 Mini will be able to emulate the original A500/A600 chipset and the Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA) of the latter Amiga model, the Amiga 1200 – pretty darn cool indeed.


source: Retro Games Ltd

The Amiga 500 Mini will come with a 2-button mouse and 8-button game-pad, as well as USB inputs to plug in a standard keyboard and the ability to add your own games (with WHDLoad support). Speaking of games, The A500 Mini will be bundled with 25 games, with the following 12 titles being confirmed at this stage:

  • Alien Breed 3D
  • Another World
  • ATR: All Terrain Racing
  • Battle Chess
  • Cadaver
  • Kick Off 2
  • Pinball Dreams
  • Simon The Sorcerer
  • Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe
  • The Chaos Engine
  • Worms: The Director’s Cut
  • Zool: Ninja Of The Nth Dimension

Other features include the ability to save and resume games, flick between 50Hz and 60Hz screen refreshes and various CRT filters and scaling options.

With a retail price of £119.99 / €129.99 / US$139.99, we won’t be expecting TheA500 Mini to be less than $200 Aussie dollars, which is quite a bit for a Mini, even for an iconic one like the Amiga!



LEGO Ideas: The Karate Kid

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With the popularity of Cobra Kai, of course it was only a matter of time before some clever peep would create the infamous ‘All Valley Karate Championship’ duel between Daniel Larusso and Johnny Lawrence, complete with Daniel San’s all conquering crane kick with Lego bricks!

If you haven’t guessed, this LEGO Ideas design is based on the 1984 The Karate Kid film, depicting the final fight scene between the protagonist, Daniel and his nemesis from Cobra Kai, Johnny.

The posable characters are really cool, so surely all of you The Karate Kid and Cobra Kai fans will give this a vote!

source: Lego Ideas



Linda Guillory’s Awesome World Record Gaming Collection

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Being avid video games collectors, we love seeing other collections, especially the epic ones like Lind Guillory’s Guinness World Record collection – it’s super impressive! To say we would love to just see Lind’a collection in person would be a massive understatement.

As Kotaku reports, Linda has over 3,000 pieces and is still in the midst of growing her collection. Like all of us, Linda steers well away from the cheapie handhelds, like the awful (but yet cool) Tiger Electronics ones. You can’t put a price on collections like this, as they are usually priceless to their collector. Like most collections, we hope they get used, played and enjoyed. Having said that, we were quite chuffed to read that Lind thinks the same way, she was quoted saying, “And if I love them, I’m gonna play them.” Well done Linda, your collection is awesome!

story & image source: Kotaku



Have A Blast With The LEGO Sony Walkman

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What do you get when you cross Lego with an iconic piece of audio history – you get the LEGO Sony Walkman, that’s what!

Forget about your CDs and MP3 files, grab your trusty old cassettes (if they haven’t oxidised!) and blast them on this awesome Lego Ideas entrant – vote here so this becomes a reality!

source: LEGO Ideas – Sony Walkman



Keeping San Francisco’s Musée Mécanique Open to the Public

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We last visited Musée Mécanique in San Francisco in 2012, which was a major highlight for us, so when we heard that this antique arcade was doing it tough, it was definitely difficult to hear.

We had a blast when we last visited Musée Mécanique! To view the album of our visit, go here
Musée Mécanique

The below ‘Nostalgia Museum’ short documentary by Sofie Kodner and Eleonora Bianchi, provides an intimate portrait of owner Dan Zelinsky as he struggles to keep the legacy of this iconic San Francisco institution alive in the face of economic loss and mechanical deterioration.


source: KQED Arts



Atari VCS River Raid in MagicaVoxel Glory

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We love River Raid on the Atari VCS/2600. Heck, we love it on pretty much every other 8-bit platform.

When we saw Mauri Helme’s tweet about a gorgeous looking River Raid made with MagicaVoxel, well, we can say that it was an easy question to answer.



The Retro Gaming Vault – July 2021

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Going deep into our vault for more intoxicating nostalgia for the month of July, we uncover some cult classic JCVD LaserDiscs, tabletops that go pew, pew, pew, a Neo Geo AES, a Sonic VHS tape (remember those!), some old school gaming patches, a Star Wars rip off for the Bally Astrocade and everything in between!

Go on, take a look, but scroll slowly to take it all in! Happy Retro Gaming to you all!

 



Colossal Super Mario Bros. Mural Created By a Robot

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Now this is so darn cool! A robot creates a giant Super Mario Bros. mural out of a record breaking 102,600 dominoes in a little over 24 hours! We bet that this has now piqued Skynet’s interest.

NASA engineer, Mark Rober released the below video and stated that he was happy to finally have it out after 5 years of development. Using precision-engineered toppling dominoes, the clever robot, dubbed “Dominator”, can setup 300 dominoes at a single time – imagine the amount of hands you would need to do the same!

Who said hard work doesn’t pay off?! Well done to Mark and team for creating an ingenious robot that can create impressive murals like this one.


source: Mark Rober



story source: laughingsquid

 

The Pokémon Pinball DS Game That Never Was

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Since last year’s Nintendo Gigaleak, aka: Data Leak (Ed: or more accurately, hacks that lead to the leak!) that brought attention to some Pokémon source code, 3DS debug ROMs as well as the full source code for the Nintendo Wii from the BroadOn’s servers (BroadOn worked with Nintendo on the Wii hardware and software), there has been further leaks emerging in the last week.

From the many recent mouth-watering leakage news (not looking at you Wii prototype games!), the major one that grabbed our attention was the Pokemon Pinball game that was slated for a 2006 release on the DS. As massive pinball fans, this game would have been right up our alley, especially when gaming on the go with the Nintendo DS’ touch and dual screens.

Considering the original Game Boy Color title became a cult classic, this one would have been well received. The game would’ve been developed by Fuse, best known for Super Mario Ball and Metroid Prime Pinball, so we are quite sure Pokemon Pinball on the DS would have been an absolute blast!



More news about the Nintendo data leak on Resetera