HARDWARE SPOTLIGHT: Caanoo, the greatest console with repeating vowels in its name since the Wii

You've likely never heard of the Caanoo, a Linux-based handheld video game system. That's because its creator, an ambitious South Korean startup called GamePark, has seen some trouble since its foundation in 1996. Due to protectionist trade regulations, South Korea does not import technology products from China, so the vast majority of its video game market is in PC games. GamePark was founded with the help of the South Korean government to help create an indigenous game industry, and it released several portable consoles between 2000 and 2005. Despite critical success, however, the consoles were a commercial disappointment, and the company went belly-up in 2005. Several former employees, however, have re-formed GamePark and purchased the former company's trademarks. Their resulting product may be one of the most pleasant surprises I've come across in the video game industry for some time.

Creepy disembodied hands love the Caanoo!

GamePark says the Caanoo is not intended to compete with Nintendo's Game Boy Advance or DS, but one look at the device's front panel certainly invites comparisons with the more famous machines. The Caanoo's operating system, however, is what really sets it apart from other portables in its price range. Not only does it have an SD card slot, 6 hours of battery life, and aspeedy processor with impressive 3D rendering, but it also features an Linux-based open source operating system that can be modified, hacked, and upgraded to your heart's content. Plus, in addition to games officially released by GamePark, there are dozens of compatible emulators for nearly every console under the sun available online thanks to the GamePark's robust online community of users. With just a USB cable and a few minutes, the Caanoo can be your personal, portable, arcade paradise.

Unfortunately, the Caanoo is only available in North America via importers, and instructions are only availble in Korean. However, user-generated forums, like GP32x.com and Caanoo News, make it easy for anglos to get set up. It can currently be found on online auction sites for about $200. Anyone who knows a more reliable way to get your hands on a Caanoo, please leave a comment and let me know!

Atari 7800 Expansion Module: a useless accessory for an even-more useless system

The 7800 Expansion Module: it also plays LaserDiscs

Once in a blue moon, I see a retro-gaming accessory that's so wonderfully dorky and useless that it brings a tear to my eye. The soon-to-be-released Atari 7800 Expansion Module may look like a prop from the lost Dark Crystal sequel, but if you're one of the 3 people who still has an Atari 7800, you can preorder it right now from Legacy Electronics. It even comes with a nifty Silver Atari-style box and instruction manual!

The Atari 7800, Atari's third video game console, was the company's attempt to unseat Nintendo from its dominance of the video game market after the release of the NES. Though it came nowhere close to accomplishing this, it was nevertheless a reasonably successful console with impressive capabilities and a solid library of games. Plus, the 7800 was backwards-compatible with Atari's famous 2600 system, giving it an extra library of thousands of well-known games for its users to choose from. According to Legacy's website, the 7800 Expansion makes the 7800 even better by adding 128K of extra available program memory, a built in High Score capability, and a 15 PIN/Serial port to enable use with keyboards, disk drives, printers, and modems.

Jack Tramiel would be proud.

It's a wonder why anyone thought that 2011 would be a good time to manufacture and produce an accessory for a 20-year-old discontinued toy, and at more than $100 with shipping, it's a pretty steep asking price. But considering its limited availability and authentically cheesy packaging, it's not too much of a stretch to say that this thing could be the ultimate Atari 7800 collectible (which, to be fair, isn't saying much). And if you've got a stack of Atari 2600 games lying around, or some old Atari 400 accessories, the 7800 Expansion may give your collection a new lease on life.

Atari User Magazine: All the news that's fit to bleep

This week I thought I'd give a quick shout out to the folks at Atari User Magazine, which bills itself as "the world's only Atari magazine." While I'm not quite sure that's true, Atari User is an enjoyable and lovingly-prepared published monthly online by Anglo Press, a team of bloggers from Germany.

Atari User is a revival of a newsgroup that was started by a group of Atari 8-bit users in the 1980s. Members later started a monthly newsletter, available on a floppy disk by subscription. Though this publication is now long gone, this new reincarnation explores the same themes as the former publication, and includes a wide variety of articles to satisfy every nerd's curiosity.

Each issue includes reviews of new homebrew titles, as well as profiles of systems, publishers, and other historical information from Atari's heyday. If you get excited by discussing the merits of PAL versus NTSC (if not, why are you reading this?), I highly recommend you head on over to Atari User's website; they certainly deserve a few of your bucks.

DON'T GET RIPPED OFF: Flash Carts

This week, I humbly present to you another installment of my series, Don't Get Ripped Off!, in which I give you my best advice regarding things to spend your hard-earned money on. This week, I discuss flash carts, a range of ingenious devices that are definitely on the must-have list for any hardcore nerd.

Extreme Flash Advance, a Game Boy Advance flash cart, with a USB cable plugged in.

Flash carts are flash memory devices, similar to those USB storage devices found on keychains everywhere. Instead of plugging into your computer's USB slot, however, however, these devices plug into your vintage game console. This enables you to plug in your flash cart to your computer via a special cable, load up whatever game or program you like, then play it on a real, live, physical console. Neat, huh?

Flash carts are primarily used by programmers wishing to test their games during the development process, but they're also tremendously useful for gamers who want the authentic experience of a game console with the convenience of an emulator. There is a staggering variety of flash carts available online from online retailers like Amazon.com and eBay; most are made in China and are of poor quality. The most common ones are made for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance and DS.

Atarimax Ultimate SD, for the ColecoVision (also Atari 2600 compatible).

Generally speaking here, the more expensive units are the best. A 512mb GBA cartridge can cost as much as $200, but it's probably not necessary to spend that much, as most games are relatively small in size and need very little memory. Nevertheless, expect to pay at least $100 for a new unit; consider any price lower than this to be suspicious. Used carts are cheaper, but since flash memory has a limited number of read/write cycles, they will likely fail earlier. Some flash carts are actually memory card adapters, which are simply an adapter for a memory card (like an SD or CompactFlash card) built into a cartridge. These should be avoided like the plague. With a few exceptions that I list below, these adapters are unauthorized Chinese-made copies and are very flimsy and unreliable.

Flash carts for consoles other than the GBA and DS do exist, but are generally boutique items and not commonly offered for sale. Below are a few I've found to be well-recommended:

• The Atarimax Ultimate SD is an SD card adapter for the ColecoVision console. It includes a 32mb SD card and a high-speed bankswitching card that can handle very large games (up to 512K). Made by Steven J. Tucker and available now online.
• The Harmony Cartridge is an SD card adapter for the Atari 2600. It is currently in development, though the creator is taking orders on the product's website. It includes a 2gb SD card and a USB cable for connection to a PC or Macintosh.
• The Cuttlecart is another Atari 2600 flash cart produced by Schell Electronics. Versions were also created for the Atari 7800 and Intellivision. All are long discontinued and quite dated (Windows compatibility only, requires a serial cable). It is, however, very reliable, and occasionally pops up for sale on eBay.

If anyone finds other flash carts they'd like to recommend, please comment and let us know! Happy hunting, and remember: caveat emptor...

REVIEW: "Downfall" for Atari Jaguar

Once the undisputed king of the North American video game market, Atari's downfall in the early 1990s was slow, painful, and awkward. The company was devoting most of its attention to its line of Amiga computers, which left its video games division underfunded and understaffed. Nowhere is there a more obvious piece of evidence of this identity crisis than the Atari Jaguar, Atari's last and least successful video game console. Released in 1993, the Jaguar billed itself as the world's first 64-bit system. Though the system did see some great games (including one of my all-time favorites, Tempest 2000), lack of developer support and mediocre processing power had killed the Jaguar by 1996, having sold less than 250,000 unites.

Despite its status as a footnote in technology history, the Jaguar maintains a devoted base of fans who continue to develop homebrew games for it. Why anyone would do this is beyond me, as the Jaguar's odd CPU structure and limited graphics memory make programming for it an exercise in frustration and self-torture. Nevertheless, Jagware, a prolific programming collective that's released numerous other Jaguar games, has just announced its newest release: Downfall.

Downfall is a simple game that bears a striking resemblance to Man Goes Down, another homebrew game for the Atari 2600 written back in 2004 by Alex Herbert. The player controls a man continuously falling down as platforms scroll up the screen; you must survive as long as you can falling downward onto the platforms without falling off the screen. In this way it somewhat resembles the old NES game Ice Climbers, except in the other direction and without the cutesy cartoon characters.

Downfall's simplicity won't convince the uninitiated to immediately order a Jaguar on eBay, but it is a fun little diversion on an emulator. The scrolling background is detailed and highly fluid, controls are simple (though I can't imagine how it plays on the actual Jaguar controller), and the background music is catchy and clearly rendered. It is, however, ridiculously easy, and since the game has no variations or extra modes, you've pretty much seen all there is to see after about 15 minutes of gameplay. It almost resembles a programming exercise more than a full-fledged game.

A worthy effort for an perenially unappreciated console, but I certainly wouldn't spend money on a cartridge version. I'll stick to Tempest 2000 for my taste of early-90s Atari.

This is your Game Boy after a tour of duty in Iraq

It's official: the Game Boy is the most durable machine ever conceived by human minds. Built to withstand a nuclear holocaust, the mighty grey wonder is made, not from plastic, but hardened plutonium reinforced with the cracked skulls of Roman barbarians. 

Anyone who's a member of the Game Boy generation like I am has a story to tell about the horrible treatment their little green-screened buddy endured. I, for one, distinctly remember diving into the Chesapeake Bay with my brand-new Game Boy in my swimming trunks. A friend of mine left his  on a bench near my middle school's playing ground for a week before it turned up in the Lost & Found. (Both our Game Boys survived their respective ordeals, by the way.)

But the undeniable winner of the "Takes A Lickin' & Keeps On Tickin'" award is this original Game Boy, a veteran of the Gulf War:

This disfigured, melted, charred Franken-Boy was the property of a soldier whose barracks were bombed in Iraq in 1991. Amazingly, the Game Boy survived functionally intact, even though its plastic body was partially exploded. It was shipped back to its owner after his tour of duty, and serves as a testament to the power and durability of Japanese industrial design. Now, its home is at the Nintendo World store in New York City, where it has been happily playing Tetris ever since.

Now, surviving a war zone is pretty remarkable, but personally, I won't be impressed until it survives an episode of Will It Blend?. But that's just me.

Trend: Commodore 64 music - all your eardrum are belong to us

I don't make a secret of my love for the Commodore 64. It was the iMac of its time - small, inexpensive, simple enough to use right out of the box, more powerful than most of its competitors, with an impressive library of games that still frustrate me to this day. (Damn you, Miner 2049er!)

Part of the secret to the Commodore's success was the SID, or Sound Interface Device. One of the first integrated sound chips on any home computer, the SID was a capable digital sound synthesizer built into a tiny chip, enabling programmers to include music soundtracks and sound effects miles beyond anything else available in 1985. The SID's distinctive, crunchy sound arguably did more to influence video game music than perhaps any other single piece of hardware. In fact, it's so coveted that a music synthesizer based on the SID, known as the SIDStation, was sold in the late 2000s by Swedish firm, Elektron:

The sad news is that the SID hasn't been made since 1987, and though its patent expired in 2007, no new SID chips are being made. Therefore, the only way to get your hands on a SID chip nowadays is to rip one out of a broken Commodore 64 - which is exactly what the creator of the MIDIBox SID did:

The MIDIBox SID is one of the more elaborate Commodore 64 hacks I've seen. (Still not as elaborate as the Commodore 64 Laptop, but close.) The body was created from a broken C64 body, with the MIDI and Serial ports on the side of the machine, and the keyboard replaced by a sophisticated adonized-steel front panel with 15 knobs and a small screen for data input. Its sound is hard to adequately capture with words, but let's just say it'll simultaneously remind you of a late-night rave in early-90s Detroit and a game of Montezuma's Revenge.

The MIDIBox SID is unfortunately not commercially available, but the plans are downloadable if you're savvy with a breadboard. They do, however, show up on eBay and other auction sites from time to time, but be prepared to burn a $1,000-sized hole in your wallet. I'd rather buy a used Commodore 64 and a program like MSSIAH or Cynthcart for a fifth of the price. Still a nifty piece of hardware hackery, though.

The Replica-1: All the low-tech fun, without going bankrupt

I've been inspired by the success of Apple's iPad 2, which recently enjoyed the most successful first week's sales of any technology product in history. In honor of this, I'm typing this week's post on an iPad borrowed from Oberlin College's library. My stiff, untrained fingers are havign a bit of trouble with the onscreen keyboard, so forgive me if the occasional syntax error slips in. (This keyboard is by far my biggest gripe with this thing: I'll take an IBM Model M over this shit any day.)

Frankly, I'd much rather be typing this week's post on one of these puppies:

Its power supply is a hamster on a treadmill.

This gorgeous wooden computer is the Apple I, Apple Computer's very first product, released way back in April 1976. They were handbuilt by Steve Wozniack in his parents' garage in Palo Alto, CA, and sold via mail-order for $666.66 (about the price of a MacBook Pro in today's money). Only around 40 survive today; when they are sold, they typically change hands for astronomical sums of money. One working Apple I sold last year for $213,000. That's roughly $26,000 for every kilobyte of memory. Quite a nice chunk of change just to play Breakout!

Luckily for us mere mortals, the wonder of modern CPU technology means you don't have to mortgage your house to afford an Apple I. Thanks to Vince Briel, super-nerd deluxe and owner of Briel Computers, you can now own the Replica 1, a faithful recreation of the Apple I, for less than $200.

Like the original, the Replica 1 is sold either pre-assembled or as a kit. It does not include a keyboard or monitor, but it does include a USB interface for saving programs on a modern computer, replacing the original Apple I tape interface. Functionally, the Replica 1 is an exact copy of Apple's model, but it uses a greatly simplified motherboard layout and dramatically improved DC power supply for faster performance and lower power consumption.

If an Apple I doesn't suit your fancy, Briel also sells kits and pre-assembled replicas of other obsolete classics, like the legendary Altair 8080. The Replica 1, however, is the only one of Vince's products that's officially approved by Steve Wozniack himself. This is a suprising and welcome move from the Apple founder; if only more Silicon Valley multi-billionaires released the plans for their early computers to fans! (Homemade Atari 400, anyone?)

I recommend the Replica 1 as a gift for the aging computer nerd in your life. In fact, if anyone out there in internet-land would like to spare two hundred bucks and send me a kit in the mail, I'd be happy to do a full review right here on This Old Box. (And, of course, I'd be happy to repay you with sexual favors.)

COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT TUESDAY: A Bootleg NES, from China with Love

It's been a while since I posted; I've been spending my spring break in fabulous scenic Bergen County, NJ, roaming its famous Garden State Plaza mall begging for change to afford a copy of Lego Star Wars III. All that wandering around suburban New Jersey made me misty-eyed about my crappy childhood, so today I thought I'd introduce a new column, Copyright Infringement Tuesday, where we explore the glorious world of "bootleg" (unlicensed) video games. Today we're taking a trip down memory lane with one of these bad boys:

Now with 3 times the Retron!

Do you remember these? I know my local Walgreens stocked them by the dozens. They're unlicensed copies of old video game systems, made by shady factories in southeast Asia and sold by street hawkers and five-and-dimes the world over. I have dozens of them in my attic right now, and if I remember correctly many of them are quite creative. The one above, for example, impressively dubbed the "RetroN-3," is actually three systems in one box (NES, Super NES, and Genesis). It even comes with wireless controllers!

Are you dorky enough to use this in public?

This one, the "Game Theory Admiral," is another terribly creative example of the lengths these Chinese sweatshops are willing to go to to grab a bit of the American video game market. It looks like a Game Boy Advance, and it plays just like one, except that it's actually a handheld NES. Unfortunately, it's made for use with Japanese cartridges, so it requires a rather awkward adapter (see above picture) for use with North American games. Still, it'll make you a celebrity if you pull it out at a bus terminal or during study hall.

But my favorite by far was sold in Brazil - it's called the "Mega Kid MK-1000:"

Robocop's computer of choice.

Not only does the Mega Kid include two PlayStation-style controllers and a light gun in the shape of a miniature Kalashnikov, it also features a full keyboard, resembling a futuristic Commodore 64. It's also compatible with games from all over the world, making it an ideal system for importers. It can even be programmed in BASIC!

But hey, you may be asking yourself, this is a blog about homebrew games. How are these shitty things at all relevant? The answer lies in a tiny little chip, aptly named the "NES On A Chip." You see, the patent on Nintendo's secret lockout system for the NES expired in 2000. This left the NES wide open for hackers, and sure enough, NES clones soon flooded the market in countries where traditional video games were not affordable or not sold. For many in the developing world, and many low-income families right here in the US, these bootleg systems were a family's first contact with the world of video games.

Besides, I'm sure these things are just begging to be modified by some resourceful techno-freak with a soldering iron. Next time on Copyright Infringement Tuesday, we'll take a look at some mind-blowing mods that may cause you to take a second look next time you see a "Retro-N'3" at your local CVS.