A project by maker Throaty Mumbo to build a working FPGA-based console that runs VHS video games has prompted Hackaday to look back at the strange, short-lived genre of tape-and-disc-based gaming, and at why those odd machines deserve to be thought of as genuine hacks.
In October 2026, Retro Dodo reported that Throaty Mumbo, after testing an original Action Max unit and finding it deeply unsatisfying, set about building his own replacement using a DE1-SoC FPGA board and an RP2350 MCU. The resulting machine is capable enough that he produced demos of both Super Mario Bros. and DOOM running on VHS tape. On 6 October 2026, Tom’s Hardware also covered the project, noting as background that Throaty Mumbo had previously been seen running Sega games off vinyl records.
The Action Max and the VHS gaming idea
The Action Max, released in 1987, was the commercial embodiment of an idea that sounds better than it plays: combine a light-gun with a pre-recorded VHS tape, shoot at targets as they fly past on screen, and call it a video game. Think Duck Hunt, but with cheesy live-action footage and absolutely no variation, because every run through the tape is identical. The Control-Vision system, co-developed with Steve Wozniak, pushed the concept further by running simultaneous sub-video tracks, switching between them depending on player actions, so the outcome of a scene could change based on whether you caught the bad guys or not. It was never released.
Both systems owed a debt to Dragon’s Lair, which predates them and used video disc technology rather than tape. The disc could swap between separate tracks almost instantaneously, allowing its absolutely marvelously cartoony animations to branch on player input. Almost instantaneously, though, is not the same as instantaneously. A significant fraction of a second of lag existed between joystick input and track swap, and some sections required back-to-back actions timed precisely around that delay. The animations looked astonishing against arcade contemporaries; the gameplay, as Hackaday puts it, was no fun. The later Space Ace was, in Hackaday’s words, equally unplayable.
Hacks in the original sense
Hackaday’s angle on all of this is that each of these systems, from Dragon’s Lair through to Throaty Mumbo’s modern FPGA build, represents the same creative impulse: take a technology that exists for one purpose and bend it into something else. Video discs were designed for passive film playback; Dragon’s Lair turned track-switching into a branching game. VHS tapes were designed for recording television; the Action Max bolted a light-gun onto them. Mumbo’s project continues that tradition by feeding classic ROM-based games through a VHS signal chain.
For anyone curious about the originals, Hackaday points out that an emulator exists for Dragon’s Lair and its spin-off titles, so the disc-swapping experience is reproducible without the hardware. The Throaty Mumbo project itself is documented on his channel, which also carries the earlier vinyl-record Sega work reported by Tom’s Hardware.
