The Internet Archive Console Living Room harkens back to the revolution of the change in the hearth of the home, when the fireplace and later television were transformed by gaming consoles into a center of videogame entertainment. Connected via strange adapters and relying on the television’s speaker to put out beeps and boops, these games were resplendent with simple graphics and simpler rules.The home console market is credited with slowly shifting attention from the arcade craze of the early 1980s and causing arcades to shrink in popularity, leaving a small percentage of what once were many.
Through use of the JSMESS emulator system, which allows direct access to these programs in your browser with no additional plugins or settings, these games can be enjoyed again. Simply click on the screenshot or “Emulate This” button for each individual cartridge, and on modern browsers the games will just start to run. As nostalgia, a teaching tool, or just plain fun, you’ll find hundreds of the games that started a billion-dollar industry.
These games are best enjoyed in an up to date version of a modern browser. Currently, there is no sound in the games, although that feature will be added soon.
Please read carefully regarding key mappings of the games and programs, to use them in your browser.
Simply click on a system below to browse through available games and cartridges and try them out. Where possible, links to manuals and additional information are available for reference.
My first was an Amstrad of some description I believe, I had a game called ‘Harrier Attack’, was wicked. Then I got a Super Nintendo, Killer Instinct was probably my favourite game I had for it.
nice one ; although I have never been much good at playing computer games (not got the attention span and some 3D ones give me motion sickness because the screen is moving but I am not), I did try coding them in the 1980s (made about £200 for a fruit machine simulator coded in a mixture of BBC Basic and 6502 assembler on an Acorn Electron.
This didn’t have a disk drive, everything was stored on analogue cassette tape so you couldn’t swap your development software in memory with the program code/data,and it used a 16 colour graphics mode; literally had to squeeze every last byte out of the memory) Another headache with assembler coding on a machine like that is if you fuck up just one bit of the code it crashes the whole lot and you have to reload the sourcecode from the tape (which took some minutes!)
An Amstrad console would most likely have been based on their microcomputers of the same era which were a fairly decent copy of the BBC Micro (same graphics chips) but using a Z80 processor. IIRC they even had BBC Basic or at least the built in assembler.
In 1989/90 I did have a go at Z80 assembler coding using a ZX Spectrum (to write a platform game which was going to be based on trying to get to a warehouse rave) with microdrives and Interface one; the whole lot sitting in a box file which was not too big to take in my school bag (was in 6th form then); it weighed no more than a modern laptop; although needed 230V mains and a TV set – but I could use the large telly in study rooms for the display; although due to other pressures such as exams and simply growing up never managed to complete that one.
the whole trauma of A levels, University as well as a few dysfunctional employers etc near enough killed my passion for computers and technology had it not been for drugs/psychedelic culture; and I have half forgotten a great deal of what I knew 20-25 years ago (thankfully the Internet means you can download all the course papers from various profs and refresh your memory).
As a coincidence I was using Internet Archive yesterday to test the media player I am building for the projector installation; and found this 🙂 (although nearly everyone else here is way too young to have seen this programe and Angel may well have had better computers in her high school)
You all heard of MAME, the Mulitiple Arcade Machine Emulator. You can play many, many thousands of different arcade ROMS using it. There are plenty of sites offering the emulator and ROMs, as well as emulators and ROMs for all the old consoles.
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