I am flying solo for a Zezcast episode where I talk to Antoine Fantys AKA FG Software/Vectrex28. Antoine has Czech heritage, grew up in Switzerland and now lives an works in Tokyo Japan. By day he is a software developer for a large company and by night is an NES / PC Engine homebrew hacker with a great collection of games and demos to his name.

I came to know Antoine over Twitter when I posted photos of a PVM / DV Player combo for sale in a Tokyo Hard Off store. Antoine has previously seen that exact set and noticed from my photo it was now at a discount. He had to get the PVM, take a taxi to the train station, take the 14 inch on the Tokyo subway and then another taxi home, It's a a great tale.

I didn't know Antoine before this talk and we hear about retro consoles available in Switzerland in the 90s, his work as an NES homebrew dev and what the CRT scene is like in Japan right now.

0:00 Start

0:30 Antoine's background & first consoles

10:30 Japan shipping options - post or extra bags?

18:00 Starting off as an NES homebew hacker

28:00 Should Comp Sci courses teach low level languages?

32:00 You can meet OG Famicom devs in Japan

42:00 How does NES code detect NTSC/PAL?

48:00 Whats the homebrew scene like in Japan?

50:00 14" PVM story - bringing it home on the train!

59:00 The recent resurgance of CRT sales in Japan

1:05:00 Japanese online sellers are generally pretty good

Follow Antoine Fantys AKA FG Software/Vectrex28

Twitter: https://twitter.com/FG_Software

Itch for his games: https://vectrex28.itch.io

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Along with my friend Steve from RetroTech we maintain a blog about our projects "The Cathode Ray Blog"

https://www.cathoderayblog.com

You can find the audio on the web or your favourite podcast app

https://anchor.fm/zezretro

Catch us on Twitter

https://twitter.com/zez

https://twitter.com/usa_retro

For all your CRT repair needs, check out Steve's channel

https://www.youtube.com/c/RetroTechUSA