Retro Gaming Hacks

Emulate the Earliest Game Systems

Bring the Odyssey, Adventurevision, and more back to life on your PC.

I’m starting this chapter off with a few dinosaurs. Odds are you never had one of these machines, and you might never even have known that there were video game systems before Pong and the Atari 2600. It’s unlikely now that you’ll ever find a Magnavox Odyssey game system in the wild (although you might want to try hunting one down [Hack #2] ).

So if you’d like to get a sense of what some of the very first video game systems played like, without breaking the bank buying one or going through the hassle of hooking it up to your modern television set, you might want to try some of the emulators that have been written to mimic the systems. In this hack, I look at how to use your PC to emulate the Odyssey, Entex Adventurevision, and RCA Studio II hardware.

Odyssey

Another hack in Chapter 1 will tell you a bit more about the history of the Odyssey [Hack #2] . There is indeed an emulator that will let you see what the very first video game system looked like on a TV screen. It’s called ODYEMU, and its official home page is http://www.pong-story.com/odyemu.htm.

Tip

The Pong-story web site, where the ODYEMU page is hosted, is an excellent resource center for all things pertaining to the origin of video games, from the legal battles surrounding Magnavox and Atari to the great debate over who really invented video games.

Unlike practically every other console emulator in existence, you don’t ...