Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Those of us who first were introduced to home console gaming by the Atari VCS, better known by its retconned name “2600,” may or may not remember what the games looked like when played on the average television of the age. Bad. They were blurry and fuzzy and that’s just all there is to it. However, it turns out that a lot of old games, not just on this platform of course, were designed to be played on old TVs and sometimes took advantage of the effects these old TVs had on the games to smooth ugly patterns into… well, for lack of a better term, anti-aliasing.

Enter emulation. The open source Atari emulator Stella runs these old games crisply in high definition on your computer display, making the graphics crisp and sharp and responsive. Unfortunately, this doesn’t do the games justice, because the effects they were developed to make use of are no longer there. A team of students at Georgia Tech has modified the Stella emulator to allow for settings that bring back these effects, which include texture, afterimage, color bleed and noise, to create a more accurate representation of what these games looked like when we were all, oh, like eight years old or whatever.

This is amazing work, and it’s being rolled into the official release of the emulator shortly. Nice work, class!

Source: Sciencedaily