Were you or anyone you knew cursed to play games on a B&W TV as a child?
So we all know that the youngest child in the family often gets the crapiest tv. So I was wondering if you or anyone you knew grew up playing games on a black and white tv. I know it was more common in the 70's during the Atari age but i've never heard stories of anyone playing NES games or later on a black and white tv.
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not my favorite games. And I played SMB and mm2 much more on the same tv. But for some reason the memory of playing smb2 and days of Thunder are like I'm back in that room. It's a very vivid memory and it's giving me the feels right now
We had our NES hooked up to a color TV and my mom had an Atari 2600 that was hooked up to an old black and white TV. She might even still have that old TV. I have lots of memories playing Kaboom, Frogger, Barnstorming, the Star Wars Jedi training game, Volleyball, Warlords, Pitfall, etc. if my brother or sister were playing the NES and I would have to go to the Atari TV. This was up until we got a SNES on layaway, so I think we played that frequently from 1992-1995 or so. Also watched lots of VHSs in black and white. We weren't poor. We was po'
Dude, are you my brother?! Lol, we had the exact same setup.
We first had an Atari 2600 and it was hooked up to a small 12" B&W. It sat on a small night stand that was to the right of our main TV. The games I remember playing most were Missile Command, Tank (I think that was it's name), Pac-Man and Pole Position. My brother and I LOVED Pole Position.
Anyway, we were a couple years late to get the NES but when we did my parents let us keep it hooked up to the main "BIG" 28" family TV. A leap from an Atari to an NES is big enough but going from B&W to Color in the same transition just blew our minds.
This makes me want to find an old B&W and an Atari.
Even my gameboy had color
It blew my mind when I realized that the Starman from Super Mario Bros and Super Mario Bros. 3 was white and not yellow.
So you say cursed to a black and white TV, I say blessed if you had a TV that wasn't in the living room and the main/only TV in the house to play NES on.
Sure nowadays everyone has their own TV, but back then if you had your own TV you were lucky.
I didn't have a TV at all, except our main family TV, so I wired up my NES to my Apple IIc monitor and played games without sound. I would have rather had a black and white TV with sound.
This made me laugh, if you look back to the mid to late 80s, you were lucky if you had a TV you could play NES on that wasn't the main TV in the house, which meant sharing it with everyone else.
So you say cursed to a black and white TV, I say blessed if you had a TV that wasn't in the living room and the main/only TV in the house to play NES on.
Sure nowadays everyone has their own TV, but back then if you had your own TV you were lucky.
I didn't have a TV at all, except our main family TV, so I wired up my NES to my Apple IIc monitor and played games without sound. I would have rather had a black and white TV with sound.
You assume that primary televisions were always color! A black and white TV was our home's only TV growing up.
We still had it when we scraped together the money for an SNES and had to play that in B&W too. Every time we'd find a color TV somehow it would fail in a few months and we'd be right back on the B&W set again.
We had our NES hooked up to a color TV and my mom had an Atari 2600 that was hooked up to an old black and white TV. She might even still have that old TV. I have lots of memories playing Kaboom, Frogger, Barnstorming, the Star Wars Jedi training game, Volleyball, Warlords, Pitfall, etc. if my brother or sister were playing the NES and I would have to go to the Atari TV. This was up until we got a SNES on layaway, so I think we played that frequently from 1992-1995 or so. Also watched lots of VHSs in black and white. We weren't poor. We was po'
Dude, are you my brother?! Lol, we had the exact same setup.
We first had an Atari 2600 and it was hooked up to a small 12" B&W. It sat on a small night stand that was to the right of our main TV. The games I remember playing most were Missile Command, Tank (I think that was it's name), Pac-Man and Pole Position. My brother and I LOVED Pole Position.
Anyway, we were a couple years late to get the NES but when we did my parents let us keep it hooked up to the main "BIG" 28" family TV. A leap from an Atari to an NES is big enough but going from B&W to Color in the same transition just blew our minds.
This makes me want to find an old B&W and an Atari.
Just flip the switch between color and B&W.
I was fortunate enough that most of the TVs I played games on were color, although most of them were on small side. Probably 13" or less. We did have a b&w portable TV at one point with a teeny, tiny screen and I remember playing a game or two or watching cartoons on it out of desperation from time to time. It looked something like this:
I forgot about those! I had a BENTLEY (I think) that was B&W and had a 6" screen. My brother and I had bunk beds and I was on the bottom. I kid you not, I took that thing and kludged together a shelf wired up to the springs from under my brother's bed. On that shelf sat this type of TV and I ran wires to an NES, which I could swap out for the N64. I know this seems ridiculous but when you have a small house and spouses, sometimes you want to carve out your own space, and that's what my bunk bed was. Even though it was B&W, I still used this to have my own tiny, gamer "hole".
Oh, and to get it to work, I kludged together the two wire/screw type leads, to a cabel hook-up, to a cable-to-RCA connector. It was ugly but on a 6" B&W, it didn't really matter.
To the original question, I remember my grandparents having a black & white set. Never got to bring the NES to their house, but I had wanted to try it.
Some folks (a significant part of the male population) have color deficiency in their vision. Some classic games seem to have been designed without considering this.
To the original question, I remember my grandparents having a black & white set. Never got to bring the NES to their house, but I had wanted to try it.
*raises hand*
*nudges Ichinisan*
*twin brother also raises hand*
But it had color. After I cleared out my Grandma's house I took a 1983 Zenith BW. I tried my NES, SNES, and Genesis on it and they work. But I never realized how much color mattered to some games.
I had an old tube TV that the color was getting messed up on. It had some buttons you could toggle off the colour and just go black and white so I did that for awhile. Playing goldeneye in b &w
That's crazy! Still playing on a B&W tv during the N64 era. That game is not very colorful though so it's probably not that bad.
This made me laugh, if you look back to the mid to late 80s, you were lucky if you had a TV you could play NES on that wasn't the main TV in the house, which meant sharing it with everyone else.
So you say cursed to a black and white TV, I say blessed if you had a TV that wasn't in the living room and the main/only TV in the house to play NES on.
Sure nowadays everyone has their own TV, but back then if you had your own TV you were lucky.
I didn't have a TV at all, except our main family TV, so I wired up my NES to my Apple IIc monitor and played games without sound. I would have rather had a black and white TV with sound.
This! I only remember in my earliest childhood that I played Atari 2600 in a B&W small TV. My dad is so cool that he made me a dedicated table with the controller in an enclosure so that I could use it (since I was very little I couldn´t hold it properly, so it was like my own arcade).
I could not game on it though, as both TVs had an integrated antenna and no mean to connect anything else (at least not with my limited knowledge back then), so we connected the NES to our main colour TV.
The last model I had also had an integrated AM/FM tuner and you could plug it in the car! It was similar to Webhead123's TV above.
It meant I could have the Nes in my closet, and play in my room, whenever I wanted. Yea it was small, yea the picture wasnt the best, but the only other tv was a huge old woodframe TV that sat on the ground in the living room. I with 2 little sisters and mom, and the vcr hooked up out there, my playing time would always be limited. I should thank my uncle, he gave me the Nes the year before as well.
Edit: spelling
I'm not the youngest, and I wouldn't say cursed either... but I did play on a black n white TV for a while. My uncle gave it to me when he no longer wanted it. For a while it was a godsend
It meant I could have the Nes in my closet, and play in my room, whenever I wanted. Yea it was small, yea the picture wasnt the best, but the only other tv was a huge old woodframe TV that sat on the ground in the living room. I with 2 little sisters and mom, and the vcr hooked up out there, my playing time would always be limited. I should thank my uncle, he gave me the Nes the year before as well. Edit: spelling
I sense a trend... autonomy trumps quality. This was so true for me and my crappy rig I suspended from the bunk bed above me.