As of writing this post, we have blown past our $30,000 donation goal for our winter fundraiser! Thank you again for your support. Your donations will allow us to keep going and keep growing in 2026.
To celebrate, we’re sharing something new that came through the door recently. We were saving this for later, but we figured we’d show you now, as a treat.
In 1992, American Video Entertainment planned to release the MaxiVision 30-in-1, an unlicensed multicart for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The 30-in-1 would have contained thirty games from unlicensed NES developers, including Color Dreams and Sachen, and, of course, AVE.
The 30-in-1 was eventually pared down to the 15-in-1 before release, reportedly because of licensing issues and manufacturing costs. However, before that happened, AVE had already produced an infomercial for the 30-in-1, featuring Hulk Hogan and other WWF superstars.
You’ve heard of the World Wrestling Federation. Now get ready for… the World Game Federation.
This is a new transfer of the MaxiVision Power Video Challenge by the Video Game History Foundation. Although there are already versions of this infomercial on YouTube, we redigitized the original VHS tape from AVE founder Richard Frick, capturing the video at the highest possible quality using experimental VHS capture hardware.
For this tape, we used our Domesday Duplicator, an open-source hardware project that captures analog signals directly from modified video hardware. Although this project is best known for its use in LaserDisc preservation—including the recently emulated Pioneer LaserActive hardware—the Domesday community has also been working on making it compatible with VHS players as well.
We invested in this hardware back in 2023 to digitze art from the making of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. This process requires a lot of time, labor, and (honestly) hard drive space, so don’t always use it for VHS digitization. However, since a copy of this video is already online, we decided to redo it at maximum clarity. We’ve also deinterlaced the video, so you can watch it at beautiful 60fps.
Check out this frame, side-by-side with the same frame from the existing version on YouTube.
Our new transfer has so much more detail, color depth, and even frame size. All the small details (including visual noise!) get lost when doing a traditional VHS capture through composite video, and then even more is lost when uploading to YouTube. Meanwhile, our video was taken directly from the internals of our VCR, before the video signal was even processed.
Honestly, it’s shocking that video at this quality came off a VHS tape. We’re running up against the physical limit of what data you can retrieve from a VHS!
The Domesday Duplicator (and its associated software, VHS-Decode) are still experimental, so it took a lot of trial and error and electronics tinkering to get this right. Thanks to Chris Person, Christa Lee, Josh Richardson, and the members of the Domesday86 Discord for their support!