Tales From Storage: The VCR Fandango
I finally dragged myself across the finish line for Some Games I Played In 2022, and the one for last year is close to being done too. Did I ever mention that was published? It still needs some editing but you can read what’s done, if doing such a thing is something you would do.
The sprites section got updated, featuring stuff for Black Tiger, Block Legend DX, Brutal: Paws of Fury, Dino Quake, Escape Goat, HeroQuest, Looney Tunes Collector, Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, Neutopia 1 & 2, Rampage, Saint Seiya on PSP, Snow Bros., Trog, Wizorb, and a bunch of Bomberman games.
I think I might’ve made some minor tweaks to the sprite tutorial too? It’s due some updates to better explain some of my processes (and probably repair some links knowing ROMhacking.net is going offline shortly, oh no), but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
In between fatigue and crises and other fun surprises, I’ve been trying to do some spring cleaning this year! Ostensibly in the hopes of making a push on all the guff I need to scan and get it out of the house (with the unspoken intent to probably sunset my scanning ambitions, because I’m too exhausted to keep up this line of work!), but just having less crap in the house doesn’t hurt either.
One of the things I uncovered was an NTSC VCR I’d imported from the States, and you better believe I wrote several thousand words tangentially related to that subject.
So, B-Daman Bakugaiden is an anime that’s loosely tied in to Bomberman. It’s also a bunch of other things, but I’m trying not to digress here. I believe it got some video-CD releases in Taiwan, but it’s never been released on DVD and the rips available online a decade ago were relics of the 240p age, so I figured, somebody’s gotta step up to plate and give us something better to work with.
So, uh, I bought the entire run on VHS and got it shipped to my apartment. For the uninitiated, the first series was released across twenty four tapes, and the second across thirteen, plus a few miscellaneous releases for recaps, bonus content, and god knows what else.
It was a very big parcel.
I have chosen not to remember how much it cost.
In any case, I had a PAL VCR player that was region-free; its video output was a little bit cropped at the top and bottom, and I couldn’t vouch for whether the content was playing at its full framerate in the conversion to PAL, but it did the trick! Though I figured if I want to do this justice, I ought to get a video player that runs in native NTSC, and preferably has output a little more luxurious than a duff old RF cable. Let’s order an American one!
So… I’ve never used original American hardware before! Or at least, not ones that need plugged into the wall.
Pal Rage Quitter 87 has told me horror stories of importing American and Japanese games consoles, the need for voltage converters and plug adapters, and how at least multiple Dreamcasts have up and exploded on him. I’d assume they do that anyway even without foreign power adapters, the Dreamcast was not a spectacle of engineering in my experience.
Anyway, I gave zero thought to what I’d do with an American player — I’ve used plug adapters for shavers and whatnot, but I figured a video player is a different kettle of fish…! I bought a VCR; I paid for postage that cost twice as much as the player itself; I picked up a dodgy, cheapie, mysterious second-hand plug adapter I did zero research into; and the setup didn’t work. Shocking, I know!
It’s safe to say I’d just gotten in over my head and given myself too many factors to diagnose. Was the VCR itself toast? It looked good inside and out, but I’d also no idea what problem signs to be looking for. Did the converter not work? With absolutely nothing else to test it on, I couldn’t vouch one way or the other! Did the converter kill the VCR? It wouldn’t surprise me, honestly; I’m convinced I’ve killed a laptop or two by not knowing which charger was intended for it.
In any case, it was a whole lot of bother and a good deal of money down the shitter, all for an endeavour that ultimately never really panned out. And so it sits, waiting ’til I have the guts to take it to the dump, or hope someone might have some use for this thing.
My PAL VCR served me well and continues to do so — with it I was able to preserve the entirety of the Bakugaiden video line (minus one bonus video that I believe Kiddo Cabbusses recorded, who was also tackling the series with better results); a good chunk of Hudson Soft’s promotional videos, including the elusive source of the Mr. B-Bee music video (still salty at your lack of source citing, ASSEMBLERgames!), as well as obscure films Legend of the White Lion and Grimm Douwa: Kin no Tori.
The latter I pursued because artist Shenanimation spotlighted it, and I wound up plonking about £70 on the thing in a bidding war. The previous version available online was a Greek video transfer with dreadful colour levels and cropping out the wazoo, so this sated people’s curiosity… until the film was broadcast on Japanese TV like a month later, with a brand new HD transfer that rocked the socks off of my duff recording. Welp!
(I appear to have lost that recording and its YouTube upload has since been terminated; all I’ve got is this comparison between the rips — Greek in the centre, mine as the green-tinted surrounding it, and the modern HD rip on the border. A lot of picture gets cropped without the right know-how, and colour levelling is a dickens…!)
And that’s the long and short of my career of VHS ripping, pretty much! The biggest efforts I’ve made kind of wound up almost immediately irrelevant. Bakugaiden has since made available on Japanese streaming services — it’s not quite a HD transfer, but it’s a darn sight nicer than the VHS artifacting we’ve put up with for all these years. I can’t imagine White Lion or Hudson’s videos making a resurgence, but you never know…!
Someone on Twitter had talked about a new method of ripping from VHS, tapping in to the raw magnetic data and getting the cleanest possible picture that way. The age and quality of the tape still impacts the results, obviously, but the results looked remarkable. I don’t know if the tech is out there, or if it’s simply sending this guy your tapes to preserve them on your behalf, but it’s so satisfying to see new means of preserving this media without having to fight with croaky old hardware!
It’s a field of preservation I’m quite happy backing away from. There was a brief moment I was scouring eBay to see what random tapes hadn’t been digitised yet, but I don’t need another bloody hobby. These pursuits for productivity are why I never get anything done in the first place! I’m glad my Bakugaiden rips served as the basis for the fansub released last year, but I’m in no way qualified to repeat that stunt.
I’m glad there’s folks who preserve those things, and it’s always a wee bit melancholy to acknowledge what we considered the bumph of that era — commercials, bumpers, etc. — are now what’s most cherished about them. So many dumb old ads or PSAs that remain wedged in my memory (“My friends say, I’m a tube, for not smokin’?! Aye, dead on!”), or even minor things like the way BBC2 would seamlessly hide commercial breaks in its run of The Simpsons.
People wax nostalgia on how technology and the internet has slowly eroded what means of freedom and creativity people had, like YouTube channel pages and the like, but what was more empowering than literally recording whatever dang thing you wanted onto a video tape? I guess playlists on Spotify and the like are meant to evoke that same mix-tape vibe, but the sheer power that was in our hands with a VHS tape really is to be commended.
