An almost forgotten treasure has been dug out: Ghost Manor on the unexpanded Commodore VIC-20 computer is an action-packed arcade-style jump’n run game. Not to be confused with the commercial XONOX product Ghost Manor was a listing in the popular german 64′er magazine consisting of three parts which had to be typed in and subsequently run. The game is a clever mix of Assembler and Basic programming languages and there also is information on which variable contains what value – making it easy to modify or ‘train’ the game yourself! These were the days…

Felix wants to share his knowledge about the world in general and programming in particular. He studies the facets of human interactions with objects – mostly computers. With Programming Basics and MEGA he hopes to leave a positive effect on the local education. His first game was DUNGEON KEEPER II.

The first day of the Programming Basics study group at Joseph-Heckler-School Bensheim/Germany was a great success. Eight boys and two highly motivated girls participated in the work shop and wondered how quickly time flew by.

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Programmier1x1 (programming basics) is a new venture of MEGA to provide children with no previous knowledge of basic concepts and methods of programming.

Playful the creative and explorative use of computers is learned and practiced. In particular the development of own games combines different media types such as text, graphics and sound. In addition logic understanding and independent learning is promoted. To gather their own programming experience is an important step for the sensible and competent use of media, especially in this digital age.

The project “Programmier1x1″ aims to guide, motivate and support children in creative digital application.

Today we resurrected another obscure japanese game console: The Epoch Cassette Vision (カセットビジョン), not to be confused with the more popular Super Cassette Vision. It sports a µPD7801G microncontroller and 128 bytes RAM, but is capable of 128 Sprites and displaying 16 colors. The game you see (no, it’s NOT Flappy Bird) is a variation of the arcade hit Scramble and comes with horizontal scrolling, varied world and a nifty end-boss.

In the 1970s printed or fake wood was very popular for video game consoles. Here are some images from our archive showing the Coleco Telstar Arcade, world’s only triangular game console with triangular game cartridges (1977), the Coleco Telstar Colortron (1978) which introduced colors to the classic game of Pong and the fist ever commercial light gun for the Magnavox Odyssey (1973).

Max studies Animation & Game at Darmstadt university. He loves to draw, is interested in sequential art and plays video games of course. His first game was “Duck Tales” on the Gameboy Color. Welcome Max!