Ed Fries, who was vice president of game publishing at Microsoft during much of the Xbox's lifecycle and helped in the acquisitions of Ensemble Studios, Rare - and perhaps most importantly - Bungie Studios, has developed the unexpected--a version of the latter's hugely popular Halo series for the legendary Atari 2600 Video Computer System (VCS). Fries' recounting of the story is copied below. For more details, see the thread on AtariAge, where you can download the ROM for use in your favorite emulator or for transfer to your favorite flash cart for play on the real thing. There's also a browser-based emulator available, as well as an official Facebook page.

Xbox Indie games are still not available in the Netherlands. It is unclear when they will be available in the Netherlands. Dutch Microsoft spokesman, Thijs van Doorn, says "...it is a matter of resources...". Probably they just don't think it is economically viable to pay for license fees in the small country of the Netherlands.

The same happened with the Video store not being available in the Netherlands. Of course there are a lot of games on the service not worth the download, but there are some gems that the Dutch are missing out on dearly.

While my colleague, Mark Vergeer, and I wait for our own Pandora handheld videogame computers to arrive (I'm roughly 750 - 850 in the queue, and they recently passed the 100 shipped mark) and deliver our own coverage, I thought I would share some of the first impressions others have posted for the year-and-a-half+-delayed device. For a written overview, check here (and more detail, here). For a video overview, look below:

Looking at the video of the device both Web browsing and playing Super Mario Kart (SNES version), I must say, my long dormant excitement for the device is starting to come back!

RetrodeJust a quick bit of breaking news that the Retrode (formerly: snega2usb), a USB adapter for playing Super Nintendo/Famicom and Sega Mega Drive/Genesis cartridges legally on your PC, smartphone, laptop, network router, Wii, Pandora, etc., will soon have N64/GB/GBC combi and Atari 2600 plug-in adapters. Great news for a product with an ever expanding feature-set.

Check the official update below for more details or simply visit the Website:

Custom 360 Arcade ControllerI posted this a couple of years ago on another site, but I recently found myself thinking about creating another controller. I thought I would post my work here just for kicks and encourage those of you that want to try "hardware homebrew." It is really a lot of fun.

New Donkey Kong Intellivision (WIP)Anyone remember the mediocre Donkey Kong conversion from Coleco for the Mattel Intellivision? It was a bookend to the awful Atari 2600 version. While I firmly believe there's zero legitimacy to the theory that Coleco intentionally crippled these releases to make their ColecoVision pack-in look all the better, there's no denying that the programmer could have done a better job. Want proof? Thanks to this thread on AtariAge for the reminder, it looks like Beeslife, of stunning Moon Patrol port and update, Space Patrol, fame, just may be at it again with an equally impressive Donkey Kong conversion (NOTE: As of writing this, there's no word of Beeslife involvement, if any, or if this is simply just a proof of concept, since it's still built off of the original Coleco version, despite the addition of the missing screens). Check out the animated screenshot to the left and be sure to visit the Beeslife Website for more of them. Let's hope it gets finished up (whoever that task falls to) and makes it to a release on cartridge! It would be an excellent companion to the upcoming Opcode Games Donkey Kong conversion for the ColecoVision.

Exciting news for ColecoVision fans, as Opcode Games' in-development expansion module for the classic platform, which, among several other things, will provide much needed RAM to the 1K console, has been officially blessed by Coleco Holdings, and will leverage the name of Coleco's original advertised - but never released - Super Game Module, a device with which it shares some similarities. Read about it here for the announcement and here for the details on the module. For those interested, one of the first games out of the gate that will make use of the low cost module is Donkey Kong Arcade...

Some fun news for Commodore 64 fans and enthusiasts--the latest beta for the Commodore 64 .prg generator, C64PrgGen, is now available for download! This nifty utility gives you a handy Commodore 64 program development utility for Windows. Put simply, you can type (or copy and paste) in your Commodore 64 BASIC or machine code into C64PrgGen and it will both assemble and run your code with a single click. C64PrgGen automatically generates a .prg file, which can run directly in your favorite Commodore 64 emulator or on the real hardware using the typical methods for transferring and running "ROM" files. Neat stuff and well worth checking out.

Since I had to pull my Fairchild console out anyway to capture some additional footage for the documentary, I thought I would take a moment to do something I've been meaning to do for some time. This is just a direct capture of the 2009 homebrew Pac-Man cartridge by Tim Ruan and Fredric Blaholtz for the Fairchild Video Entertainment System (VES), which was the first ever programmable cartridge-based console, released all the way back in 1976. This was recorded off of my Fairchild Channel F System II, a later revision of the console that redirected the previously internal sound out to the TV to better match the feature set of later competing systems like the Atari 2600 VCS. Naturally, this game is an amazing achievement for a Fairchild system that has a library of fairly simple and blocky games. The occasional graphical glitchiness in various parts seems to be related to my system and/or my capture device, not necessarily the game itself.