My super old vhs videogame archives

[cloudrat7]

I've coexisted with videogames since the 70's with Atari and i'm still very much into current gaming, Back when technology allowed i started recording practically every game i've beaten starting with nes (this goes way back to about 1986 or so) and went on to sega master system, sega genesis, snes, turbografx, sega cd,panasonic 3do, sega saturn, psx, nintendo 64 and dreamcast. (i stopped taping because games became to easy to beat with tons of cheat codes readily available on the internet and the vcr was at it's end..lol) today i found 2 more tapes that i thought were lost forever bringing my total of 9 tapes filled with intros and endings (only missing pt 6). To me videogames are a part of technology history. And it only gets better.

[BoringSupreez]

That's pretty cool. Are you going to put them up on Youtube?

[cloudrat7]

ah man, i should, just imagine these tapes are about 6 hrs each, lol, i know the image quality is poor so itll be painful to watch. i really want to tranfer these tapes to movie files. that would be so sweet.. any ideas as how to go about doing that?

[AppleQueso]

I used to record myself playing through games as a kid

did weird shit with it, was kinda dumb, but kinda fun too

[Hateshinai]

My brother and me used to record ourselves playing SF2. We sucked btw.

[Zing]

I always wanted to do this, but I didn't. My friend did, though.

If you want to convert these to digital, you will need a video capture card for your PC. I don't have any recommendations, as my only experience is with ATI All-In-Wonder cards, which do work well, but are not stand-alone and I have no idea if they are still available.

I still have one in the box in my basement.

[isiolia]

i really want to tranfer these tapes to movie files. that would be so sweet.. any ideas as how to go about doing that?

Easiest way would probably be to get a USB video capture device. The quality of them isn't stellar, but neither is the quality of extended play VHS.
Still, you can find sketchy-lookin' ones on Amazon for $8 or so, or software/hardware bundles in the $25-50 range that seem to be well rated.

What I have for the purpose is an analog/DV converter box (older version of this that just spits out a DV stream to capture in most any software. Bit more expensive ($175-200 range I think now).

Alternatively, if you happen to have a DV camcorder that has input jacks, you could record your tapes first to DV, then go from that into a computer.


I would suspect that the basic USB bundles will encode to a more compressed and/or playable format though. DV is more an editing format.

[cloudrat7]

oh my! the games ive completed.. i viewed the first two tapes. lmaoooo, wow, ghost and goblins for nes? i should list them all but damn its so many..

[ExedExes]

I taped some of my SNES games but purely for messing around. F-Zero, Pilotwings, Donkey Kong Country 2