Items tagged with retro
If you are like me and are a child of the 80s and 90s, then you probably have fond memories of the Nintendo Game Boy. As one of the first truly portable gaming consoles on the market, the Game Boy allowed us to toss in 4 AA batteries and have a few hours’ worth of escapism in games like Tetris and Super Mario Land without being tied to the TV. Nintendo's Game Boy lived on for quite a few generations, and its legacy still resides somewhat in the current generation Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch Lite. But for those that want to call back to the earlier, simpler times of the original Game Boy, there's a new device that's coming to the market from Analogue. Analogue is already a familiar...
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It'd be a gross understatement to say that retro gaming has experienced something of a renaissance in recent years. Nintendo's NES Classic and SNES Classic mini-consoles or the Switch Online's NES and SNES catalogs might be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about older games, but the House of Mario is hardly alone. Sony stumbled into the retro scene last year, and both the Sega Genesis and NEC TurboGrafx-16 (by way of rights-holder Konami) will get their respective official love letters shortly. We'd be remiss, however, if we didn't think about the technology at the heart of all of these fun old games—good old software-based emulation. If it wasn't for SNES9x or Gens,...
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We are finally starting to see light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to the Atari VCS... at least we hope so. We were first introduced to the Atari VCS (previously known as Ataribox) back in July 2017 as a retro Atari console that would offer a more powerful alternative to similar products like the Nintendo NES Classic and SNES Classic. However, the console has been plagued with numerous delays and most recently got a brain transplant in the form of an AMD Ryzen Embedded R1000 APU. Today, we're learning that Atari has advanced past its Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign and has officially cranked up its official presales of the Atari VCS. The console will be available...
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Commodore 65 machines are most certainly a rare appearance these days, and when they do see the light of day, they can fetch astronomical prices. When we last caught up with a fully functional Commodore 65, it was selling for around $28,000 on the eBay's German language auction site. Recently, another Commodore 65 prototype has popped on eBay's UK website. The system itself is said to be in "perfect shape" with no signs of yellowing or scratches on the enclosure. More importantly, the system is fully functional in its current state with a working disk drive and audio output. This particular Commodore 65 unit is being sold with a copy of the manual and Euro-spec power supply (which North...
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Retro gaming is all the rage right now, and companies are trying to replicate the success Nintendo had with the NES Classic and SNES Classic. Amid all the noise, however, is a fun and interesting project that pays homage to the Commodore 64, one of the most popular home computers of all time, while combining a passion for Lego blocks. A self-proclaimed "retroholic" who goes by the name Perifractic wanted to find out if he could build a full-size working Lego Commodore 64, complete with a functioning LED, a mechanical Lego keyboard, and a Lego PCB. "When I saw a mini Commodore 64 made of Lego, I thought 'What about a full-size one'? This started me down a wormhole or discovery and creation. You...
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A few weeks back, we showed you a handful of Commodore Amiga-related hardware projects that were designed to breathe new life into the popular, vintage machines. Even decades after Commodore’s demise, the Amiga user community remains vibrant and new hardware is being introduced at a steady clip, relatively speaking. In that previous post, we showed you some freshly-minted Amiga motherboard PCBs that were reverse engineered by a couple of members of the Amiga community. We also shined the spotlight on the Vampire 4, a Altera FPGA-based device that could eventually be the foundation – or at the very least a precursor -- of a new, standalone Amiga platform in the future. Those projects...
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Apple is widely recognized these days as the most valuable company in the entire world, with a market cap of around $1 trillion. Think of Apple products today and what comes to mind are slickly designed MacBooks, iPhones, and iPods. The earliest beginnings of the company were set in motion by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak working out of a garage to build computers that looked more like science projects, versus what we expect from Apple today. Those earliest of machines back then were known Apple-1 computers that were built in the '70s and they certainly look far different than any current day modern PC. Only 200 of the Apple-1 machines were produced, and working examples are exceedingly...
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Although it has been over three decades since the first Commodore Amigas were originally released, a fan base for the beloved systems is still going strong. Of course, the Amiga install base is a small fraction of what it was during the machine’s heyday, but the community supporting the Amiga is still vibrant and very much alive. In fact, the Amiga community – and many other retro-computing communities for that matter -- seems to be more active now that it has been in years, and a number of exciting new hardware projects have cropped up or hit major milestones in recent weeks. Two relatively new projects, led by popular members of the Amiga community Paul Rezendes and John “Chucky”...
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Retro Games is at it again promising that the smaller retro Commodore 64 console will be landing in the coming months. The first rumblings of the little Commodore 64, called C64 Mini, surfaced in September 2017 promising an early 2018 launch date. That launch date was then "confirmed" as March, but things didn’t shake out for some reason. Retro Games is now saying that C64 Mini will hit North America on October 9. We want to be excited, but we have been down this road before with the console. Details appear to be the same as was promised in the past. It is a 50% scale Commodore 64 that comes packed with 64 games inside from the heyday of the computer system. The C64 Mini will come with...
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Retro gaming is huge right now and the resurgence in tiny versions of classic consoles is mostly thanks to Nintendo starting it all with its NES Classic Edition and SNES Classic Edition consoles that were huge successes last year. Sega now wants to get into the retro gaming action with a smaller version of its classic console the Mega Drive. Gamers in the U.S. who were lucky enough to have one of these back in the day will remember it as the Sega Genesis. During the SEGA FES 2018 stream Sega announced the Mega Drive Mini console to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the launch of the platform. Three decades -- that should make people that bought one of these back when they launched...
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Atari has been trickling out information on its Ataribox gaming console for the past year, and we thought that were getting closer to an official launch. After all, the company announced earlier this week that pre-orders for the Ataribox would launch today, December 14th. However, that pronouncement appears to have been too good to be true. The gaming company announced this morning that the Indiegogo launch has been "officially paused". Interestingly, the company indicates via an emailed statement, "Because of one key element on our checklist, it is taking more time to create the platform and ecosystem the Atari community deserves. Building Ataribox is incredibly important to us and we will do...
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As we inch closer to the release of the retro-tastic Ataribox, more details regarding the console are being revealed. At this point, we know the device will be powered by a custom AMD-built SoC, it runs on Linux, we’ve seen its wood-clad aesthetic, and know that a plethora of Atari classics will be available on the console. Today, we can also give you a glimpse of the Ataribox’s controllers, or at least, one type of Ataribox controller (we think). The Ataribox harkens back to the original Atari 2600, which helped pioneer in-home, living room gaming. For those of you that may not have been around to experience the original Atari 2600, its main controllers were simple, boxy joysticks,...
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For long-time enthusiasts that were around during the ascent of personal computers, the Commodore Amiga remains one of the most beloved systems of all time. When it was originally released back in the mid-80’s, the Amiga could do things that no other consumer-class computer could – its graphics, sound, and multi-tasking capabilities were simply unmatched at the time. That initial sense of amazement at the Amiga’s unique capabilities is one of the reasons why the platform continues to have rabid fans some 30+ years later and why a small group of skilled enthusiasts have designed and manufactured a brand-new circuit board, dubbed the Amy-ITX, that brings actual Amiga hardware to the current mini-ITX...
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Dave Haynie, one of the chief engineers that worked on the Amiga back in its heyday, put it best when he said, “Amiga users make Macintosh users look like PC users”, in the Viva Amiga documentary that was released early this year. Those of us that were around when the Amiga initially debuted knew Commodore had something special on its hands. At the time of its launch, the Amiga was the most advanced personal computer money could buy – bar none. It offered multimedia features that were unmatched for many years, it was affordably priced (relatively speaking), and was the first personal computer with true multi-tasking capabilities, among numerous other things.Despite the Amiga’s superiority, Commodore...
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