All of the photos in this set were processed in June 1971. Unlike most of the photos from this batch which were taken in the Lansing, Michigan area, these appear to have been taken on a vacation out west.
The first photo is labeled 'Grand Canyon' which is pretty self explanatory.
Vintage Photos - Lot 6 (505-508):
If you wanted a computer magazine with lots of technical coverage on a variety of systems than Byte was your magazine in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And it covered a lot. This issue from June 1983 is over 570 pages and includes:
Byte: The Small Systems Journal (July 1983)
Before Nintendo and Super Mario Bros. took over there world, there was Atari and Mario Bros. Of course, Nintendo still made the original arcade game but it was popular on Atari (and other) systems of the time more so than the NES. It was of course released for the NES also but by the time the NES gained popularity, the original Super Mario Bros. had the far better Super Mario Bros. to contend with.
Like Super Mario Brothers, Mario Brothers also feature the Italian plumber duo, Mario and Luigi. Even the turtles and pipes will look familiar. However, whereas Super Mario Bros. was a side-scrolling game with many varied levels, the original Mario Bros. was played on a single screen at a time on levels that really didn't vary all that much.
That isn't to say that Mario Brothers isn't any fun. It's a lot of fun in the way that many classic arcade games are. It's just that you aren't likely to spend nearly as much time in one sitting playing it as its sequels. It's a much smaller game in which score is more important than completion.
In the original Mario Bros., the goals are a bit simpler. There is no princess to rescue but just turtles and crabs and flies to knock over and kick. You must first jump up and hit below where they are standing to knock them over then you have a limited amount of time to kick them off of the platform before they right themselves. To progress to the next level you must collect a certain number of coins. This game introduced Luigi and when playing two-players, it is a competition to see who can collect the requisite number of coins first.
The ad and screenshots above are for the Atari versions of the game but it was released on a number of other contemporary platforms and more recently for the Wii, Wii U and Nintendo Switch so there are modern ways to play it as well. It's a fun game worth playing, just don't expect Super Mario level of quality here. I personally like it better than its predecessor Donkey Kong but I'm probably in the minority.
The Sega Saturn, successor to the immensely popular Genesis, was released in North America on May 11, 1995. This was somewhat of a surprise launch as it was four months ahead of schedule. This was done in hopes of getting a head start on the upcoming PlayStation. However, despite being technically impressive and having a head start, the Sega Saturn was a commercial failure and only sold about half of what the PlayStation sold during the Saturn's short three year life. Ultimately, while the Saturn only sold a little over 9 million units worldwide, the PlayStation sold more than 102 million and the Nintendo 64 sold nearly 33 million.
There were a number of reasons why the Saturn failed. First, despite impressive specs, it had a complicated architecture that was difficult to program for consisting of eight processors. These included the following:
In addition, the system featured 16 Mbit of RAM, 12 Mbit of video RAM, 4 Mbit of sound RAM, 4 Mbit CD buffer, and 256 Kbit of batter backup RAM. Each CPU had 4 kB of cache RAM. It was capable of video resolutions of 320x224 and 704x224 and of displaying 16.77 million simultaneous colors. The VDP1 and VDP2 were essentially GPUs but each designed for specific functions. The VDP1 was designed to handle sprites and polygons while the VDP2 was designed to handle backgrounds and large objects. This was a complicated system to program and to make matters worse, available libraries were limited early in the life of the Saturn and most coding had to be done in assembly to avoid the severe performance penalty of programming in C. This situation improved somewhat later on with improved libraries but not enough.
Another reason for the Saturn's failure was the initial slow trickle of quality, high-profile first party games. In fact, Sega would fail to release an exclusive Sonic title on the Sega Saturn. The only Sonic titles released for the system were a slightly enhanced port of Sonic 3D Blast, a compilation of previous Sonic games (Sonic Jam) and Sonic R, a racing game. Sonic X-treme was the planned exclusive for the Saturn and it would have been the first 3D Sonic game. It was scheduled to be released in December 1996 but due to a number of development problems and delays, the game was ultimately cancelled.
In addition, the surprise early launch meant that there were only six titles available at launch. The surprise launch also worked against Sega in other ways as well. It alienated a number of retailers, some of which were not included and did not receive units for the launch. KB Toys went so far as to stop carrying Sega products. Also, the early release of the Saturn was muted by the fact that the price was initially $399 while the PlayStation launch price was $299. Third party titles for the most part were not ready until the originally announced launch date months later.
This dovetails into what is always the Achille's heal of systems that fail. Third party support. While there were ultimately a number of quality first party titles (though mostly arcade conversions), third party support was hampered by the complexity of the Saturn and poor development support from Sega. Sony offered excellent development tools and favorable licensing terms and this made all the difference. The Saturn still managed to have more titles than the Nintendo 64 but Nintendo's first party titles sold better than Sega's and the average game quality was higher. While Nintendo had Sega beat on average quality, Sony had everybody beat on quantity with more than 2,400 titles released for the PlayStation compared to a little under 600 for the Saturn and fewer than 400 for the Nintendo 64.
Still, the Saturn is a nice system to own, particularly if you are a fan of Sega arcade games from that era. Despite the commercial failure of the Saturn, there are still a number of unique and high-quality titles available for it. The successor to the Saturn, the Dreamcast, was a much better and more well though out system in my opinion but it was not able to erase the failures of the previous generation and gain back lost support.
