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.

Realms of Quest III BeastiaryAs you may or may not know, those of us at Armchair Arcade have been following the progress of Realms of Quest III - the amazing Commodore Vic-20 RPG - with great interest for some time now. Well, we're pleased to announce that the full commercial release of the deluxe package is now available. What follows is Ghislain's post about its release, which was originally here, where we were previously discussing it:

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Realms of Quest III is finally available! You can order it here:

Premium Edition: http://www.binaryzone.org/retrostore/index.php?main_page=product_info&pr...

Budget Edition: http://www.binaryzone.org/retrostore/index.php?currency=GBP&main_page=pr...

(premium means you get a plastic jewel case + 36 page manual, budget is disk-only)

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Amazon's Gold Box Deal of the Day, which is a "Build Your Own Gaming PC with the ASUS Gamer Bundle" for $279.99, got me thinking a bit about the concept of "build your own", which we've been discussing a bit lately after I had to quickly order a replacement system for my dead laptop. I love the idea of these "gamer bundles", which give you properly matched CPU, motherboard and video card for a discounted total price. Ultimately though, this goes against the DIY spirit of picking your own components, which leads me to the thought of the day. Wouldn't it be cool if - like you can do at places like Dell, HP, etc., with systems - you could configure your own DIY parts list to have a properly matched set of parts delivered to you, which you can then assemble yourself? Say, pick motherboard A, graphics card C, power supply A, case G, etc., and the built-in configurator would be able to flag any mismatched parts, e.g., power supply A is too underpowered to drive graphics card C, or case G wouldn't fit motherboard A.

Now who's going to build that type of online retail system and make lots of money? If you are, I want in, because you can't tell me something like that (assuming it doesn't already exist), wouldn't be a boon to the DIY crowd. Of course there's also always the danger of people using the configurator to verify a setup's viability and then buy the parts for cheaper elsewhere (a la Crucial and their excellent memory matching retail Website), but if prices were at Amazon or other similar discounter levels, then that would certainly be a rare occurrence...