Retro Gaming

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Anyone else here interested in the retro-scene? I generally get more enjoyment out of older games; everything from the early eighties to the 16 Bit era. The only next-generation games that interest me are Championship Manager and Grand Theft Auto.

I have the following systems:

Commodore VIC 20 x9
Commodore 64 x1
Amiga 600 x3
Amiga 1200 x1
Atari ST x2
Game Boy Advance x1
Sega Game Gear x4
Sega Mega Drive x2
XBox x1

I also have about two dozen emulators on my laptop for various systems.

I miss my old Amiga 500, and have gamed on a few other systems over the years (Atari ST, BBC Micro, C64).
I wouldn't mind starting to learn about emulators and spending some time playing Elite again

Atari 2600, heavy sixer
Atari Flashback 2.0
Atari 600 XL, though technically I'm only borrowing it, but I'd love to mod it.
NES, one model 2 (with composite mod), and I don't know how many broken model 1s.
Sega Genesis, one model 2, and one model 1 that I use (overclock modded), hooked up to a model 2 CD.
SNES
Gameboy Color, technically, not mine
N64, with expansion RAM of course
PSX, still works if I set it on its side
Gameboy Advance
Dreamcast
Game Cube
DS, fat
Gameboy Micro, I love this thing
Wii

...I think that's everything?

Good 'ol Elite. They really did a bang-up job using everything they had available to put together a really great game.

The vast majority of emulators are available for free under public licence. All you have to do is download them, open the zip files with an archiver (WinRAR) and you're laughing.

Most emulators these days allow you to plug in and play from the off, but some require configuration. As long as you have a basic idea of how the real system works, you shouldn't have much trouble filling in the blanks.

I would like to play some of the games from my old BBC Micro again. The problem is that those games are on cassettes (like music tapes). The emulator that I've downloaded can read tap images as audio files but I think you need a special connector that can connect a tape recorder to the line-in socket on the computer to make them. Does anyone know where to get such a lead?

I'm not that familiar with the BBC Micro, but I imagine the games you want to play have already been uploaded onto the internet and are available to download from various websites. If you want to upload homebrews or download games and play them on a real BBC Micro, I daresay there is some kind of flash device available. Surf the net and see what you can find.

Today's interpretation of plug and play is mis-leading. The original stuff that wasn't plug and play meant you had to do a lot of tweaking. Therefore, by this standard; there are a few emulators out there that are NOT plug and play.

This website has a wide variety of emulators to download and has a brief description and rating for each emulator.

http://www.emulator-zone.com/

Thanks. In order to make tape images, I think you need to record sound files (such as .wav files) from the cassette the same way some musicians do from their audio tapes. The emulator can read the data from the sound files and convert them to tape images. I just don't know where to get the adapter needed to record sound files from audio tapes. I believe the Commodore 64 also used tapes. They were cheaper than floppy disks at the time.

@Jono

You should be able to find the games you want at the following link:
http://www.thegamearchives.com/?val=0_2 ... _2_0_0_0_0

If you look around, you can probably find a BBC Micro forum where you can get more advice about uploading tape images. You're kind of reinventing the wheel, though.

I had an A500 too. I'm running UAE:

http://www.winuae.net/
(Site is down at the moment...)

I'm running Shadow of The Beast, Defender of the Crown, Elite, and a bunch of other classics. UAE is a flawless emulator. Every game ever made for Amiga will run under it. It supports mice and joysticks and the different graphics modes, and sound; pretty much everything you would ever want.

You need two things to get it going, besides the emulator. One, you need the Amiga ROM. They are copyrighted, but if you own an Amiga I don't see why you couldn't download a ROM from somewhere. And two, you need a floppy disk image of your favorite games. Most of the old games are abandonware so you can download them freely. Google!

XBox... Classic? Retro?

I dunno... I like the old PC stuff... The Sierra games and... Alley Cat.

I was just listing the systems I own. Most of the time, I only use my XBox to watch DVDs.

Since you brought the subject up, some people regard the PS1 as a retro-console. It's about 13 years old now. For me, the Playstation represents the death of everything I love about video gaming. I will never have feelings of nostalgia for that era. That's why it's not a retro-system.

I don't consider anything newer than a PlayStation to be retro either. Some folks love that era, and there were one or two good games I played on mine (which worked just fine up until I gave it away last year). But I've never been a big fan of console gaming and find some of it very hard to get into - especially the realtime 3D run-and-jump stuff, and some of the complex controls (which require better motor control than I have).

I don't consider NES to be retro. It's classic, but not retro.
I consider retro to be a certain time period, the Retro Era, which preceded the Modern Era of video gaming.
The beginning of the Modern Era is approximately the release date of Super Mario Bros.. (By the way, I was born in 1990.)
I've played on a ColecoVision, and I would call it retro. ...And all of the games suck.

And what's so bad about the 5th-Generation? I remember getting an N64 in 1998 with Banjo-Kazooie and Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Go ahead and try to explain how those aren't awesome.

And on the subject of the PlayStation, I never owned one, but I've recently started playing it's games on a PS2 (that I wasn't playing before). Now, I don't like the PlayStations, but that's not due to the games. The only reason for my dislike of the Sony platforms is...




THE CONTROLLER!! !!

Okay, dramatic reveals don't work so well in text. But the original PlayStation controller was (almost) fine, the only problems being that there was a hole in the middle of the D-pad, the L2 and R2 buttons weren't inset like they should've been, and the shoulder buttons were sitting on these weird humps that made their use awkward. But then Sony added analog...

So, should we design the controller around an analog stick like Nintendo did?
No, and 1 analog stick wouldn't be enough; Sega has analog triggers.
So, should we reshape the controller like Sega did?
No, let's just tack 2 sticks onto the thing and be done with it. (Note: I'm aware of the Dual Analog Pad, but Sony replaced it fairly quickly, so it doesn't count.)

The result was that they introduced additional flaws to an already flawed design. ...And they've kept it unchanged for 2 generations.

Anyway, I have most of the major consoles. (Still need to get a Saturn!)