So we now live in a time we are utterly spoilt for choice. Modern games are just too easy , with such services such as gamepass etc it feels like games offer less personal value these days. At the moment other than having too many PC's and not enough time to use them to their potential , i was looking for some lounge action from the sofa to satisfy some Retro old skool gaming , such as the likes of Mario etc etc. My Xbox series X now has RetroArch , Dolphin & XBSX2 on and its giving untold pleasure and re-living the old challenges from the Arcades ( as i grew up in a seaside town ) and old PS2 games .. and im loving this! Clearly at 46 im no spring chicken but have run the gaunlet of being a gamer since ... well the Acorn Electron days really. My point of thread is ... what ya playing? How you doing it? Are you loving it? and any other advice / help or anything that can pass on this wonderful thing to others.
We are quite the retro gaming fans in our house. Have the SNES and N64 hooked up to the TV pretty much constantly, PS2 comes out occasionally and we also have a Mega Drive/Genesis for when anyone fancies a little Sonic. Favourites are probably Mario Kart and Super Mario World on the SNES and a little Goldeneye deathmatch on the 64. I did try installing RetroArch on a Pi I had lying around but, performance was underwhelming (only a Pi 1B) so may get a Pi 3 or 4 and give that another go.
I have a LOT to get through atm . Currently playing some super mario world which myself and my Mrs loves on said Xbox stated above. She has her original SNES up in the loft with a good 30 or so games .. not sure what. Also playing Sega Rally from the Saturn which i have very fond memories of. Id forgotten how many amazing games the PS2 had .. i think i got hold of about 24 games so far .. Crash Wrath of Cortex Metal Gear 2 & 3 Resident Evil 4 Gran Turismo 4 and a lot of the popular / highly rated titles Ive managed to fill a 128GB USB3 stick .. looking to get more I did look at building something i could use a Pi , but the Pi 4 looked an expensive option.
Our SNES is also the one my wife had originally back in the 90's. The PS2 has also been in my possession since I bought that from new around 18 years ago, some of the games are replacements of some that disappeared when I was in a house share. I can't remember ever having played on a Saturn. Was that the one between the Mega Drive and Dreamcast? Any good/ worth looking into getting? I agree, the Pi 4 very expensive. If you can find them in stock.
Yes between the Mega Drive & the Dreamcast , owning the latter and i thought it was utterly brilliant back in the day .. got rid of my PS1 for it. Quake 3 on the Dreamcast!! only ever a 4 on 4 though ... 16k built in modem if i remember. Re-volt was RC style racer that i loved and a really tough little racer .The only game i ever play was Sega Rally on the Saturn, its an arcade racer roughly 5 minutes playthrough a go but the competitiveness with a couple of mates was brilliant. So really enjoying that atm. I think there was a lot of Sonic games on it which i am not a fan of. https://www.romsgames.net/roms/sega-saturn/ Decent list there.
I used to have a massive vintage collection, but two kids and a house move later it's a lot smaller. I've still got: Commodore 64, Commodore 128, large number of games, multiple floppy drives, a modem(!), keyboard... Commodore Amiga 500P with 68010+68881 upgrade plus 512kB of trapdoor RAM, a PiStorm accelerator I still haven't fixed after a pin snapped off, and an Amiga 1200 with Blizzard IV (50MHz 68030, 50MHz 68882, 32MB of RAM), Squirrel SCSI adapter, and an Ethernet adapter, plus fewer games than the eight-bit stuff but a decent selection. Nintendo PlayChoice-10, a NES-based eight-bit arcade cab that lets you buy time and choose from ten games. 39 original games, covering all the common ones and a handful of the less-rare ones, plus some bootlegs I built myself and an adapter to accept real NES cartridges. Sega Dreamcast, four controllers with VMUs and rumble packs, keyboard, modem. The second one I owned, this, and I only have a few games - but I've got Crazy Taxi, Soul Calibur, both Shenmues, and Power Stone 2, so what more do you need? Sinclair ZX81. Actually, I think I've got two of these - one of which I built myself from a NOS parts kit. (Custom PC readers might remember that issue!) Science of Cambridge Z88. Love it. Whole bunch of the "mini" emulator stuff, from memory: NES Classic Mini, SNES Classic Mini, Mega Drive Mini, Mega Drive 2 Mini, TheC64 Mini, TheA500 Mini, that little Neo Geo arcade cab thing, Sega Astro City Mini, PC Engine Mini... I'm sure there's more, but I forget. Small number of handhelds including a Game Boy Micro, Game Boy Advance, two Game Gears that *both* need recapping, DS Lite, 3DS. A Wii that hasn't been turned on since before both my kids were born. I should find out if it still works... Two Gamecubes. I need to get shot of one. An N64 with RAM pack, so it'll play Perfect Dark and Goldeneye. That one was my missus', originally. Do I have time to play on any of 'em? Do I chuff.
So you you've had a few then The Nintendo Playchoice looks utterly brilliant. Im sure i see something similar in the arcades when i was a kid. First real "computer" was the Acorn Electron which i had to drag my father to Tandys in Sheerness and point at to say "i want" and after that its all history. Couple of mates whos parents were willing to splurge more on them had the Atari and the Amiga's .. i ended up with a Spectrum +2 which i was blown away with at 9 years old , long as i could play Bubble Bobble nothing else mattered. I have no time either sadly hence the PC and the man cave basement with Sim Racing rig etc is getting no use so the Xbox setup has been a blessing , work , gym , walk dog 1 hour of Super Mario and then cook diner. Rinse and repeat.
Oh, this is after I got rid of (again, from memory): Sega Master System II, Sega Mega Drive and Mega CD, Sega Saturn, my first Sega Dreamcast, a ZX Spectrum 48k with a *huge* collection of games, an Atari 1040STe upgraded to 4MB with high-res monitor and even *huger* selection of games, NOS Atari Lynx II, Atari Jaguar, Amstrad CPC464 with mono monitor, Amstrad CPC6128, Amstrad GX4000, this weird old 6502 trainer system called TINA that used to belong to the RAF and filled an entire desk, Sinclair ZX81 with the first-run "cockroach" bodge, Schneider EuroPC II with amber monitor, original C64, other C64C... I'm sure there was more, but I can't bring it to mind right now! I had *so many* boxed Mega Drive and Mega CD games. Miss 'em. Decent selection of Saturn games, too. And my Atari collection was something to behold. Funny story on that one, actually: I mentioned on Twitter I was getting shot of it when my second kid came along and I had to downsize the office, and a mate offered me an amount that I figured was below market rates. I thanked him but stuck it on FleaBay instead, where it promptly sold for less than he'd offered me. Guess who the winning bidder was? He did offer to pay me the difference, bless him, but I refused - I should suffer the consequences of my own greed!
Thats Brilliant. I cant remember but wasnt it you that was trying to convince me i needed the Atari Jaguar ? .. I only want to play 1 game which is Tempest 2000 . Ive downloaded a ROM for RetroArch and it works but the sound is utterly sh*t .. which was one of the best parts of the game.
I was trying to convince everyone they needed the Atari Jaguar. Finally wore @Byron C down, and it's his to find room to store now! EDIT: No, that's not right - Byron took the Atari 800XL (which I forgot to include in the above list) and a spare C64. It was a mate of @Otis1337 who took the Jag!
Lucky boy. A truly great machine in the day , i remember paying £90 in a shop for Virtua Racing ... It was a very expensive beast.
I had an 800XL too . My dad had it after me and actually wrote some sort of flying game for it from a book ...
We still have one, it gets turned on once in a blue moon to weigh and pass patronising digital judgement on me. Not sure what happened to the BBC B and ZX Spectrum, they were my dad's after all and he had a habit of doing a tip run to anything not bolted down every six months. Funnily enough I had a thought of him the other day and after a bit of trawling found a little program he had published for a simple game in Acorn Programs that's been archived online. Me, I just have the PS1, PS2 and PS3 boxed upstairs.
Oof. I always wanted a Beeb - we had one at school - but I've never owned one. I did have an Acorn Archimedes A2000 (A4000? I forget) that slipped my mind, and I've *still* got an Acorn Risc PC salvaged from a skip. It's got a CD-RW, Zip-250 drive, the works. Lovely thing. I added a 486 card, too, so it can run DOS and Windows alongside RISC OS. Hmm. If you own more systems than you can actually remember... is that a sign of a problem?
Archimedes, wasn't that the successor? I remember one turning up at school but our programming was all done on Model Bs there too. Now it occurs to me I have my dad's old laptop somewhere. Chunky old thing, I'll have to dig it out to remember what it is. I do know it had an external floppy disk drive (it all seemed very posh at the time, the only kind of thing you'd get via a workplace - laptops weren't really a common thing then) Jeez, I hate retro threads, they just make me feel, sorry realise, I'm old.
Yeah, the Acorn Atom was the company's first, followed by what would be launched as the BBC Micro Model B and Model A. Then the Electron, which was a cut-down Beeb designed to appeal to home users... and which they massively overproduced on the back of nod-and-a-handshake orders from WH Smiths and other retailers. By the time they'd left the factory, though, the market had crashed and the orders disappeared... sending Acorn down with it. Olivetti rescued 'em from the scrapheap and the Acorn RISC Machine (later Advanced RISC Machine) project was given priority. Enter the Archimedes, the first ARM-based systems. The Risc PC was the follow-up to the Archimedes, then the ill-fated and BRIGHT-CHUFFING-YELLOW Phoebe... and then Acorn gave up and concentrated on licensing the ARM IP to others (and making set-top boxes and digital TV gubbins.) And, of course, became Arm.
Can always rely on you for a well rounded tech history lesson G My old dad mumbled about getting one of them when our Model B went on the blink and as young as I was I'm glad I talked him out of it. A child scoffing at the idea must have been persuasive. Thankfully he had a mate who knew about electronics and he managed to get it running again. Must have been one of the coal powered steam pistons that went or something. As for retro gaming specifically, I have problems with that. My brain just isn't good at doing it, it never matches the memories for me - I wish it would.
Half the problem is the visuals, but not in the way you think. Vintage games were designed for use on CRTs, which means free-aliasing. They weren't the sharp square pixels you see today if you fire up an emulator on your LCD TV or monitor. Stick Sonic the Hedgehog on your 4K OLED and it'll look crap; drag a 28" CRT out of hiding and it'll look much better. I did an entire two-page spread about it for Custom PC once - specifically looking at how GLSL shaders can make your modern displays look closer to how you remember. Here's a shot I did for it: (Clicken to embiggen) The left is the Moonstone re-release from GOG, running in the stock DOSBox emulator. Big sharp pixels, wrong aspect ratio, not nice. The right is the same game running in a customised DOSBox with a CRT-emulating GLSL shader in there. Right aspect ratio, fake free aliasing, way nicer. Best way, of course, is to actually use a CRT... but who's got room for that these days?
Fun fact - Before the BBC signed them up, Acorn's followup to the Atom was originally going to be named the Acorn Proton, to fit nicely into the naming scheme they'd planned.
Sod the room I don't think I have the physical strength to move one of those behemoths anymore. Damn they had phat asses.
