Wednesday, March 14, 2012

The History Of The Old Video Gaming Machines | Oregon Attractions

There have been home video games for about 45-50 years. I remember plugging a video game machine into our TV via the aerial socket; the screen went blank; you switched the machine on and the screen would go black and white. In tennis mode, you had to move a paddle up and down your side of the screen to hit the ball back

In a later version, you could challenge an opponent other than the machine and there were other games as well, such: as shooting ?deer? in the form of small oblongs with a gun; ?Space Invaders? and ?Break Out?. Cafes were full of the larger video games in the early Seventies and you literally had to line up to be able to put your 10p into the machine.

We are now on the Seventh Generation of games machines. The first of this new generation was Microsoft?s Xbox 360 and that was closely followed by Sony?s Play Station 3 (or PS3) and Nintendo?s Wii, all of which have proved to be highly successful. Gamers have their favourite machines and type of game.

It is amazing though how fast a favourite video game machine may be replaced by a better model and left to collect dust at the back on a cabinet. Three-Dimensional (3D) games are already in the shops such as the latest version of Mortal Kombat, sometimes called Mortal Kombat 9. Mortal Kombat first came out in 1992 ? 20 years ago!

The first home computers for which games were programmed were Clive Sinclair?s ZX80 and ZX81. They had tiny memories and poor graphics, but they were very popular. However, they were soon outdated by the Sinclair Spectrum and the Commodore 64. These were real computers but with idiosyncratic operating systems.

As the cost of chips fell, powerful, devoted gaming machines were brought out like the Atari 2600 and later the Atari 5200. These were devoted gaming machines although there was also the Atari 256 and Atari 512 and later the Atari 1024 which were computers that could play games.

These Atari gaming machines had the reputation for being difficult to program games for because of their limited technology. However, they were popular amongst gamers in the late Seventies and early Eighties until they=y were superseded by the Atari 7800 Prosystem in June 1986. The Atari 7200 Prosystem was intended to win back market share from the machines of Colecovision and Intellivision

The Atari 7800 was an odd hybrid, because it could be upgraded to a real home computer by adding chips and memory. Atari went bankrupt not long after this and gamers were disappointed by the lack of games obtainable for their machine. The Atari 7800 was soon withdrawn as a hopeless case.

There have been dozens of other gaming machines, but none of them lasted long. It seems that in the Eighties and Nineties, gamers preferred to have a computer that also played games instead of paying lots of money for a games console.

However, the pendulum appears to have swung to the other extreme now because all the best 7th Generation video consoles will go on line and read and send email.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on numerous subjects, but is currently concerned with Mortal Kombat Trophies. If you have an interest in gaming, please go over to our web site now at Mortal Kombat 4.

Source: http://oregonattractions.net/travel-leisure/the-history-of-the-old-video-gaming-machines/

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