Introduction
After a couple of years of not even remembering about this wonderful piece of high-end gaming equipment I got my hands on a 9999 in 1 brick game.
They come in various versions. The number of games may vary (though in fact there are just a few of them, the rest being merely a result of cross product with all possible levels). Colors vary too, but they're all ugly.
Anyway, the device features a whooping 10x20 pixel main screen and a handful additional indicators like play/pause, next element (tetris), etc., and a couple of 7-segment displays, and can get me to spend hours (well okay, minutes) rotating bricks or racing.
So I thought there must be a way to overcome the low contrast of the display and the hopeless feel of the buttons and I started investigating.
Reimplement the whole thing for a PC or a custom device? Nah, too much work, and you loose the best part of it, its vintage-ness. I'll never make it work exactly the same as the original device, so that's not an option.
But what if we just give the thing some new I/O...