Alien Attack
''Alien Attack'' is a 1979 handheld electronic game made by Coleco using a VFD display. It is housed in a bright orange, futuristic-styled case. The controls are a joystick A joystick, sometimes called a flight stick, is an input device consisting of a stick that pivots on a base and reports its angle or direction to the device it is controlling. A joystick, also known as the control column, is the principal cont ..., fire button, and move button. The player's ship can fire in any direction by moving the joystick with the fire button pressed. Movement only occurs when the move button is pressed. Firing while moving is not possible. There is a grid of barriers representing a city that the player can use for cover. References * 1970s toys Coleco games Handheld electronic games Single-player video games {{shmup-videogame-stub ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Coleco
Coleco Industries, Inc. was an American company founded in 1932 by Maurice Greenberg as The Connecticut Leather Company. It was a successful toy company in the 1980s, mass-producing versions of Cabbage Patch Kids dolls and its video game consoles, the Coleco Telstar dedicated consoles and ColecoVision. While the company ceased operations in 1988 as a result of bankruptcy, the Coleco brand was revived in 2005, and remains active to this day. Overview Coleco Industries, Inc. began in 1932 as The Connecticut Leather Company. The business supplied leather and "shoe findings" (the supplies and paraphernalia of a shoe repair shop) to shoe repairers. In 1938, the company began selling rubber footwear. During World War II demand for the company's supplies increased and by the end of the war, the company was larger and had expanded into new and used shoe machinery, hat cleaning equipment and marble shoeshine stands. By the early 1950s, and thanks to Maurice Greenberg's son, Leonard Gree ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Multidirectional Shooter
Shoot 'em ups (also known as shmups or STGs ) are a sub-genre of action games. There is no consensus as to which design elements compose a shoot 'em up; some restrict the definition to games featuring spacecraft and certain types of character movement, while others allow a broader definition including characters on foot and a variety of perspectives. The genre's roots can be traced back to earlier shooting games, including target shooting electro-mechanical games of the mid-20th-century and the early mainframe game ''Spacewar!'' (1962). The shoot 'em up genre was established by the hit arcade game ''Space Invaders'', which popularised and set the general template for the genre in 1978, and spawned many clones. The genre was then further developed by arcade hits such as ''Asteroids'' and ''Galaxian'' in 1979. Shoot 'em ups were popular throughout the 1980s to early 1990s, diversifying into a variety of subgenres such as scrolling shooters, run and gun games and rail shooters. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Single-player Video Game
A single-player video game is a video game where input from only one player is expected throughout the course of the gaming session. A single-player game is usually a game that can only be played by one person, while "single-player mode" is usually a game mode designed to be played by a single player, though the game also contains multi-player modes. Most modern console games and arcade games are designed so that they can be played by a single player; although many of these games have modes that allow two or more players to play (not necessarily simultaneously), very few actually require more than one player for the game to be played. The ''Unreal Tournament'' series is one example of such. History The earliest video games, such as ''Tennis for Two'' (1958), ''Spacewar!'' (1962), and ''Pong'' (1972), were symmetrical games designed to be played by two players. Single-player games gained popularity only after this, with early titles such as ''Speed Race'' (1974) and ''Space Invade ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Handheld Electronic Game
Handheld electronic games are very small, portable devices for playing interactive electronic games, often miniaturized versions of video games. The controls, display and speakers are all part of a single unit. Rather than a general-purpose screen made up of a grid of small pixels, they usually have custom displays designed to play one game. This simplicity means they can be made as small as a smartwatch, and sometimes are. The visual output of these games can range from a few small light bulbs or LED lights to calculator-like alphanumerical screens; later these were mostly displaced by liquid crystal and vacuum fluorescent display screens with detailed images and in the case of VFD games, color. Handhelds' popularity was at its peak from the late 1970s into the early 1990s before declining. They are the precursors to the handheld game console. History Early handheld games used simple mechanisms to interact with players, often limited to illuminated buttons and sound effec ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Handheld Electronic Game
Handheld electronic games are very small, portable devices for playing interactive electronic games, often miniaturized versions of video games. The controls, display and speakers are all part of a single unit. Rather than a general-purpose screen made up of a grid of small pixels, they usually have custom displays designed to play one game. This simplicity means they can be made as small as a smartwatch, and sometimes are. The visual output of these games can range from a few small light bulbs or LED lights to calculator-like alphanumerical screens; later these were mostly displaced by liquid crystal and vacuum fluorescent display screens with detailed images and in the case of VFD games, color. Handhelds' popularity was at its peak from the late 1970s into the early 1990s before declining. They are the precursors to the handheld game console. History Early handheld games used simple mechanisms to interact with players, often limited to illuminated buttons and sound effec ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Vacuum Fluorescent Display
A vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) is a display device once commonly used on consumer electronics equipment such as video cassette recorders, car radios, and microwave ovens. A VFD operates on the principle of cathodoluminescence, roughly similar to a cathode ray tube, but operating at much lower voltages. Each tube in a VFD has a phosphor-coated carbon anode that is bombarded by electrons emitted from the cathode filament.Chen, J., Cranton, W., & Fihn, M. (Eds.). (2016). Handbook of Visual Display Technology. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-14346-0 page 1610 onwards In fact, each tube in a VFD is a triode vacuum tube because it also has a mesh control grid. Unlike liquid crystal displays, a VFD emits very bright light with high contrast and can support display elements of various colors. Standard illumination figures for VFDs are around 640 cd/m2 with high-brightness VFDs operating at 4,000 cd/m2, and experimental units as high as 35,000 cd/m2 depending on the drive vo ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Joystick
A joystick, sometimes called a flight stick, is an input device consisting of a stick that pivots on a base and reports its angle or direction to the device it is controlling. A joystick, also known as the control column, is the principal control device in the cockpit of many civilian and military aircraft, either as a centre stick or side-stick. It often has supplementary switches to control various aspects of the aircraft's flight. Joysticks are often used to control video games, and usually have one or more push-buttons whose state can also be read by the computer. A popular variation of the joystick used on modern video game consoles is the analog stick. Joysticks are also used for controlling machines such as cranes, trucks, underwater unmanned vehicles, wheelchairs, surveillance cameras, and zero turning radius lawn mowers. Miniature finger-operated joysticks have been adopted as input devices for smaller electronic equipment such as mobile phones. Aviation Joystic ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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1970s Toys
Year 197 ( CXCVII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Magius and Rufinus (or, less frequently, year 950 ''Ab urbe condita''). The denomination 197 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. Events By place Roman Empire * February 19 – Battle of Lugdunum: Emperor Septimius Severus defeats the self-proclaimed emperor Clodius Albinus at Lugdunum (modern Lyon). Albinus commits suicide; legionaries sack the town. * Septimius Severus returns to Ancient Rome, Rome and has about 30 of Albinus's supporters in the Roman Senate, Senate executed. After his victory he declares himself the adopted son of the late Marcus Aurelius. * Septimius Severus forms new Roman navy, naval units, manning all the triremes in Italy with heavily armed troops for wa ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Coleco Games
Coleco Industries, Inc. was an American company founded in 1932 by Maurice Greenberg as The Connecticut Leather Company. It was a successful toy company in the 1980s, mass-producing versions of Cabbage Patch Kids dolls and its video game consoles, the Coleco Telstar dedicated consoles and ColecoVision. While the company ceased operations in 1988 as a result of bankruptcy, the Coleco brand was revived in 2005, and remains active to this day. Overview Coleco Industries, Inc. began in 1932 as The Connecticut Leather Company. The business supplied leather and "shoe findings" (the supplies and paraphernalia of a shoe repair shop) to shoe repairers. In 1938, the company began selling rubber footwear. During World War II demand for the company's supplies increased and by the end of the war, the company was larger and had expanded into new and used shoe machinery, hat cleaning equipment and marble shoeshine stands. By the early 1950s, and thanks to Maurice Greenberg's son, Leonard Gree ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Handheld Electronic Games
Handheld electronic games are very small, portable devices for playing interactive electronic games, often miniaturized versions of video games. The controls, display and speakers are all part of a single unit. Rather than a general-purpose screen made up of a grid of small pixels, they usually have custom displays designed to play one game. This simplicity means they can be made as small as a smartwatch, and sometimes are. The visual output of these games can range from a few small light bulbs or LED lights to calculator-like alphanumerical screens; later these were mostly displaced by liquid crystal and vacuum fluorescent display screens with detailed images and in the case of VFD games, color. Handhelds' popularity was at its peak from the late 1970s into the early 1990s before declining. They are the precursors to the handheld game console. History Early handheld games used simple mechanisms to interact with players, often limited to illuminated buttons and sound effects. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |