TITLE The Bastich By Hart
PANEL 1 (Hacker-lad approaches Bastich, who is sitting on a couch holding a game controller) HACKER-LAD: Whatcha got there, 'Stich? BASTICH: I just got a Super Game Boy! Isn't it rad? HACKER-LAD: Oh yeah.
PANEL 2 (A view over their shoulders reveals a heavily-pixelated game playing on a large CRT television) HACKER-LAD: Now you can play your 8-bit four-color portable games on a 16-bit, 256-out-of-32,768-color console! Kind of like a 32K for the SEGA Genesis, only backwards. BASTICH: ...and your point is..?
PANEL 3 (Faith appears pointing to some boxed software she is holding) FAITH: Hey guys, look! I just got the Pong Emulator for my Macintosh! BASTICH: Whoo-hoo! HACKER-LAD: Where will this retro-madness end?
CREDITS (c) 1995 Joshua Adam Hart
Commentary
This was a quick mid-week bonus strip, probably thrown together in excitement at having a quick-and-easy idea.
The Super Nintendo wasn't powerful enough to emulate Game Boy hardware, so the Super Game Boy was essentially a headless Game Boy console crammed into a SNES cartridge. It had some extra tricks like color schemes and fancy borders to fill the extra space on a 4:3 display. It was a cool idea but there was no getting around the fact that the graphics were never intended to be blown up 10x their original size.
Meanwhile, software emulation was just starting to pick up some steam, with i486 and Pentium PCs being just barely able to run NES and Sega Master System games at playable speed. I still had all of the original hardware, but I had a lot of fun getting clean screenshots to paste together level maps for my old SMS games like Alex Kidd (since there wasn't anything like Nintendo Power to spoil the fun for us Sega fans!)
In Hacker-Lad's mind, using a Mac to emulating Pong is a distinction without a difference.