So privileged to be part of the Retro Man Cave experience. And meeting Neil and visiting the Cave itself was an enlightening experience too. To check us out here head on over to ru-vid.com - thanks for watching!
I recently searched for RU-vid videos of LCD games. Hadn't given them much thought since I actually played them in elementary school 35 years ago during lunch breaks. The video would start, it would show the folded "Donkey Kong" game, the presenter would unfold it, the start button was pressed and at the first beep of the speaker? I swear I instantly smelled the smell of 20 kids' lunch boxes being opened. It was so vivid and I was totally unprepared for it. Completely forgot that smell (luckily) and was blown away at how the mind/memory seems to work. Thanx for the vid and the memories!
The Donkey Kong Jr isn't a VFD it's a coloured LCD that reflects on the mirror at the front .. the white plastic at the top is the "skylight" .. it's a very clever way to get colour image without using VFD
The game I remember from my childhood was a Grandstand 'Invader from Space'. Just seeing and hearing one on another video brought back memories, wish I had looked after things like that better when I was younger!
@MichaelOglesby has pointed out on Twitter that TRON IS emulated and you can play it right now online here: archive.org/details/hh_tmtron - so I know what I'm doing this afternoon. Thanks Michael
I had the traditional game & watch as a kid, but my mates had the colour flip ones which let light through the back, and you viewed the game through a mirror. As a kid I used to have the reflexes to beat the scores, and I remember that if you got to 300 without loosing a life, then you would get double points. That's how I remember it anyway. 😁 Astro Wars and Caveman. I used to pay them for hours, the sounds drove my parents nuts.
Give me a OLED screen with Pac-Man and you can take my money. For me personally that would be a better emulation of a CRT rather than the back lit LCD.
Probably the LCD screen is crap quality. If you have a good one, with MVA panel for example or the new iPhone/clearblack smartphone IPS ones (somehow they are much better than iMac /big IPS screens), an LCD actually looks better than the original CRT, especially on Pac Man. The contrast on the CRT was not that great on an original cab, maybe 1:200, and Pac-Man is not really needing the softness.,
very nice video thanks . . . as for me I had the tomy steering wheel thing and those lcd handhelds were quite common things in the early 80s also on the austrian countryside where we referred to them generally as tricotronics which may have been the local distribution brand name of the original nintendo game and watch ones . . . great fun and then got a cpc 464 :) and my favorite lcd handheld was called western saloon
Even though there's not a whole lot of actual "game" to a lot of these, I absolutely LOVE the aesthetic of it! I would love a mini-arcade of certain games.
Ah, so this is where the awesome collection of handhelds in the new cave came from? I've been following GamesYouLoved forever, so good to put a face (and voice!) to the name. 🙂
Another great collection. I remember as a boy on a holiday in Hastings my grandparents purchasing me Demon Driver from Woolworths as a gift. Never easy getting new batteries though! Thanks for sharing!
I loved Astro Wars. I remember even putting a bit of tape over the speaker grill (just above the power switch) wasn't enough to stop it waking up the entire house early in the morning.
Ah, the Game & Watch smell! My strongest memory of getting the Zelda one as a birthday present was the strong plasticky/electronicky smell. I still have it and, although it's weakened over the course of twenty plus years, the smell's still there!
The Game & Watch time was very great. My favorite game was Donkey Kong. maybe I will get a Zelda like that again someday. Greetings from RetroGameCity :-)
Thanks for making an old man happy.😊 I remember a lot of these games 🎮 from the last day of term when we were aloud to take in one toy each. We would all have ago on each others games and no matter how good your game was or what your game was you always thought your mates was better. Maybe just because you had over played your own.
How lovely ,what memories you just dug out for me!! I actually still have 1 handheld left from 1983 when i was 13 😱 and that's Grandstands Pocket Scramble .
I still have my boxed Galaxy Invader 1000. So many happy memories, I’ll never part with it. I also had a boxed Frogger which I sold for £5 back in 1990. Man, I wished I had of kept that!
Im a table top and Game&Watch collector and i have most of these. I love them! You certainly showed the most common models. Alien Attack is great! And so is Gakken Frogger and Gakken Amidar. Theres a total of 4 Nintendo table tops (plus one by coleco with the same case body design)
Who doesn't love astro wars? I had one called Dracula way back. Only watched snippets so far Neil, going to enjoy the whole vid on the train home....if I miss my stop I'm blaming you!!
@@gamesyouloved I remember it being quite good fun. I had scramble, astro wars, Dracula and a sort of rally driving one that had a little steering wheel and gear shift (I think) if I recall correctly the car wasn't a graphic as such more an overlay that you moved about
@@gamesyouloved I've just checked RU-vid the only video I can find of Dracula the machine seems to be red and black. I'm sure mine was yellow and black. The game looks the same though 🤔
yup i had that game to, it was red , you get past the warewolf and chip at a wall to get thru then you pick up all the gold while avoiding the bats the you got open one of about 5 coffins that has a bat apearing randomly on the coffin then hope the one you open has no dracula inside but has the treasure,
@@BazzaHSpeccymad was it scramble or scrabble? there was one similar to it but much better my cousin had it i wanted to swap scramble or scrabble for it he said ill think about it, he never did lol
I had so many of these games and used others at friends houses in primary school at the time. Wow the nostalgia fix right there. The sights and sounds are so good. I still have one Game and watch handheld and a non working Galaxy 1000 which was played to death at the time. Great stuff, thanks.
I had the Invader 2000 when I was young (I think I still have it somewhere in storage). I don't think mine had the badge (so I honestly didn't know what it was called until now). I really liked how you could plug headphones into the top port to get headphone sound. I picked it up second hand at a yard sale when I was very young (maybe 10-12yrs old). @11:22 it seems like you cut the section talking about Invader 2000 and the yellow one (which I have never seen and was very interested in knowing more about. I recently bought my dad a Galaga/Galaxian 1UP Arcade Cabinet here in the United States. He's going to freak at Christmas as he's a serious Galaga player (I've seen him his 3million before and reach levels around 70+ on a single credit easily). I plan to record a video of him seeing it for the first time. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to get him a better gift for the rest of his life, Galaga is the final gift for him really.
I remember so many of these from my childhood. Either games I've owned or friends at the time. I still have (in the loft) the Astro Blaster game which I think is exactly the same as Alien Attack you have their but with a red case. That new 1/4 Pac Man cabinet is something else.
The Galaxy Invader (yellow one) handheld was the only one I had back in the day. I played most of those displayed whilst I was in primary school, during free time just before half terms etc. An awesome array of handheld delights! Thank you gentlemen :)
My childhood on one table! Astro Wars was one of my fave presents from Santa along with Scramble! I always yearned for the Tomy car every time a new Argos catalogue came out. I hope to collect them one day in the not too distant future.
Great vid, that was, I've still got the Grandstand Munchman table top game, ( main Christmas present 1982 ) which was like a clone of Pac-Man, also Grandstand invader from space, both still with boxes & instruction leaflets. They used to eat through batteries, quickly purchased a mains adaptor! Also still got Nintendo game and watch Vermin game, where you knock moles back into the ground. They all still work too, amazing when they're pushing 35 years old, most of these games. Stuff was better made back in those days better quality Japanese components.
I've never known anyone else with a Galaxian machine. My brother had the Donkey Kong. Bought in the US around 1982. I also had the Demon Driver game! Awesome!
1:22 i had that one, space turbo!! on that exact colour! oh man, feeling nostalgic now... pretty basic game but eh, when youre 10 years old, it looked amazing! thanks, mom and dad (it was very expensive back in 85)
Fond memories of my Donkey Kong Jr Game and Watch! Which my dad bought me from Microland in Waterlooville! Also owned the Pacman clone, Puck Monster (very addictive), and the much harder Frogger handheld. Happy days!
My brother still has his grandstand astro wars that you have there. Still works. We used have huge fun with it. He got it for christmas in the early 80’s.
The tabletop Donkey Kong Jr doesn't use a vacuum fluorescent display, it uses a specially coloured LCD display, which is actually situated in the roof of the unit underneath a translucent bit of plastic and the surrounding room light provides the backlighting (you can see the translucent window on the top at 7:12), so the image gets lovely and bright if you put it near a window or shine a desk lamp onto it. There is then a 45 degree mirror that reflects the LCD screen forward out of the unit so you can see it. I've been collecting the old Game & Watch units over the past year and have all but the few unfeasibly expensive ones now, they are wonderful. There were 4 tabletop units released: Mario's Cement Factory, Popeye, Snoopy, and Donkey Kong Jr. They then used the same tech in the more portable "Panorama" series.
I had 'Scramble' by Grandstand, passed down from my older brother...never figured out what happened to it, but i presume its either still in a barn somewhere, or was thrown out years ago when we moved out of London :(
That Authentic Nintendo Smell...ahhhh. Right up there with New Car Smell and New Figure Smell (that fragrance that emanated from a freshly opened Kenner Star Wars Action Figure)
All I really can say Neil, is that I'm really jealous. I'm coming over by 3rd class rate travel by boat to be over, I'll be there in about 3 to 4 months. 8^) Nice work as always bro. Anthony..
Love all the hand held and tabletop games 😁 great to see some of them up and running it brings back memories. Great show and tell episode Neil...😁😁😁 Kim 😁😁😁
Very interesting video :) I only had one handheld multigame thing with tetris and tennis and stuff. Gameboy was to expensive for my parents. In their opinion.
Wow. I had Astro Wars as a kid, I think we rescued it from a boot sale with a Scramble game too. Oh and the Tomy Dashboard! There was a kid at my primary school that always had a Game and watch, I vaguely remember one that had proper joypads.
Bandai FL Zaxxon back in Christmas 1984 & Grandstand Star Force back in Christmas 1985 were the VFD table top games of my childhood! Astro Wars was an annual favourite in the classroom during the 1980s around Christmas during the 1980s as well (along with proper purple blackberry jelly, when it had all the E numbers and tasted awesome)! :-D
I used to have a hand held Battlestar Galactica back in the early 80's which i loved. Also spent many hours on astro wars scoring 9999 nearly every time i played.
I had the Donkey Kong game and watch. I remember a Japanese kid in my class bringing one back from a trip to Japan and everyone in the class including me fell in love with it (Donkey Kong arcade game was still king). First time I saw it in a store here in the US, I **had** to have it, and I did what all kids are wont to do- begged my parents who gifted it to me soon after :D My family also had that Demon Driver game, only it was called Digital Derby here. We also had another Tomy game called Blip. My favorite game the family had (not counting the Donkey Kong G&W!) was one from Entex called Galaxian 2. Sadly, all are long gone.
wow that was freaky... i suddenly had a memory of playing on a turbo tomy from when i was very young.. like literally never recalled that before now, spooky when you suddenly remember something from decades ago!..
I remember those Tiger hand helds being a staple of wet breaks in junior school! We would have brought in our grey brick Gameboys but the headmaster decided they were too valuable and banned them :(
DK Jr does NOT use a VFD. It uses a reverse-polarised LCD lit with daylight through the top of the machine, reflected into a mirror. You can see it more clearly in the Panorama screen handheld version. Same idea was used in that Tomytronic 3d game you had in your hand at 11:40. The downside is they can't be used in the dark. On the other hand a VFD sucks battery, while these don't draw any more power than a regular Game & Watch.
Didn't realise that Space Invaders and/or Galaga and Pacman actually work quite well in whatever that kind of screen is called. Pacman looks much better than the console ports of the time.
Those lcd games where awesome back then, everybody at school had one. But playing them now, ..., the games where eh not the best :D New "bartop" arcade looks cool hopefully better build than those crappy arcade 1 up, but they are a bit pricy
remember having that Demon Driver game - think it was the first electronic game my parents brought for me. also had a Bandai Missile Invader (space invader clone) that was LED based with a 2-digit seven-segment LED display for scoring at the top.. Unfortunately I have no idea what happened to either of them.
6:44 > This uses a VFD Nope! The other Coleco tabletops did. DK Jr. has a printed background, with an LCD used to cover up the unused parts of the game, sort of like a regular game & watch game in reverse. also why it relies on an external light source while the VFDs are self-luminescent
9:26 Used to have that game plus numerous other game and watch but I left it in a vehicle for months and the heat just destroyed it. Vehicles can reach 50 c inside if parked in the sun.
Smelling your electronics...you Brits are alright in my book. I do the same thing with every new game, retro console, tabletop game, handheld device, and even top end cellphones. I have always done this and I started out doing it as a kid. I know I'm about to age myself but I was doing this way back in 1986 with Nes and Master System games. The first time I did this in front of my fiancee the look on her face was priceless. She was probably thinking "Oh great, I went home with a psycho." She was a good sport about it and now she partakes in the smelling of new games as well. Oh...she's a diehard gamer like me that plays everything. She's a good egg...
You are correct! Thanks for pointing that out. I hope you enjoyed the rest of the video. It's a shame RU-vid doesn't let you correct these things/replace a video
I had An early hand held (1979) where red line came down in either 1 of 3 columns and you had to avoid them , I cant remember what it was called. Tandy pocket Simon Bion Borg tennis Astro Wars Scrambler CGL Earth Invaders GrandStand Star Chess (like star trek chess played on TV .still have ) Novex cartridge console (£39 from Rumbelows) Zx81 Zx spectrum Zx Spectrum 48 3 x Atari Lynx (recently sold) Atari Jaguar + CD add-on (recently sold) N64 (recently sold) Game Cube HDMI (recently sold) Xbox 360 Xbox one x (recently sold)
I wish to have and play some of those lcd games. I had only the cheap ones, in the childhood. I can play modern games and older games, emulated on computer or phone, but it will never replace the feeling of holding and playing on original device. I had mainly brick games 99999 in 1 (mainly, because they were cheap, so my parents would buy me them a lot) which obviously was not true, but those gamea were very fun. Those lcd Sonic games, that were given in McDonalds, they were also okay. And I also had some bootleg lcd Mario and Pac-Man games, which both were not so good. Mario was somewhat playable, but Pac-Man was very zoomed in and because of that, you were loosing a lot, as you could not see ghost earlier, than them being very close to you.
I had Alien attack and Astro wars among others .I really loved those things but sadly i was one of those kids who just loved to take things apart and none of them survived sadly " (
