Two-For-One: Angry Birds Pinball Auction; Playing Retro Games On New Monitors

Time again for another variety post, but only two items to speak of right now.

First is something found from The Gameroom Blog, an auction on eBay for a unique homebuilt Angry Birds Pinball machine. Given the nature of AB, turning it into a pinball machine makes enough sense that I’m a little surprised it hadn’t been done already. While only one of these exists, here is a video for posterity provided by the seller. The design used a retro pinball machine, Silverball Mania as a basis so it does not have things like ramps or a DMD but it does have 5 different soundtracks from the game and various sound effects. The auction can be found here.

Next up is something shared by The Stinger Report, that they found through The Verge which takes you to another link to Jason Scott’s blog. He is taking a look at trying to emulate monitors more than the games. This of course has become necessary for those who want the real look of classic arcade games to show through on an LCD which so far has been lacking. One day it would be nice if one of those converter boards that you can use to convert an arcade cabinet from CRT to LCD could employ some on-the-fly monitor emulation technology as I have had to switch a few of the games in my arcade over to LCDs as the CRTs fail and have become a greater hassle to fix. But the quality on the LCDs is not always where I would like it either or the quality of the conversion board. So if you had a board that could not just do the CGA/VGA conversion but also have emulator modes built into it which emulate CRT style graphics, that would be awesome and much more sought after.