Items tagged with retro
Perhaps somewhere in a parallel universe, the Commodore 65 kept the good times rolling for Commodore, and was even more successful than the legendary Commodore 64 that old folks like myself cut their teeth on way back when. In this universe, however, the C65 never made it past prototype status, leaving us to wonder what might have been. We'll never know, but a modernized resurrection of the little-known prototype is up for pre-order, and may actually see the light of day. Prototypes of the original C65 pop up on eBay from time to time, with sellers looking to score a big payday for the vintage hardware. In 2018, for example, a Commodore 65 prototype (also known as C64DX) was listed for around...
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The quirky little Playdate handheld gaming console is finally getting closer to release. Panic, the company behind the eye-searing yellow device, says that it will finally be available to preorder in July. And if all goes according to schedule, the Playdate will start shipping later this year. Unfortunately, Panic isn't more specific on the official preorder date but said that the Playdate would come with a $179 price tag. That's $30 more expensive than initially announced, but Panic promises to make it up to customers when it comes to games (more on that later). As for the console itself, it's powered by a miserly 180MHz Arm Cortex M7 SoC with 16MB of RAM, paired with 4GB of NAND flash (up from...
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Released in 2001, the original Xbox has become a classic gaming console that millions of people have played even to this day. Just over 20 years later, it seems there are also still easter eggs to be found on the device. With a little bit of work, Xbox console owners can see a list of members on the Xbox Dashboard Team hidden within the System Info menu. Yesterday, a developer for the original Xbox who wished to remain anonymous spoke with Kotaku about a previously hidden easter egg within the Xbox Dashboard. This person came forward because they “didn’t really expect it to be found, not unless the source code leaked or somebody reverse-engineered the Dashboard.” Interestingly,...
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If you want to step back in time and play some retro games for nostalgia, it can be more difficult than it needs to be. Moreover, you do not get the fun of playing with friends on the same screen as everything is now done over the web. Evercade has decided to go against the grain and take the hassle out of emulation and allow up to four friends to play games in person with a brand new console announced today. Last year, we covered the Evercade Handheld, an ultra-small and portable console that allowed users to play their favorite retro games anywhere. Of course, you still needed to bring your game cartridges with you, but it would not be much fun nor nostalgic if you just had a silly little SD...
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There has been a lot of interest in the Analogue Pocket, an intriguing retro gaming console that was first announced back in late 2019. The console was supposed to launch in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the date out to May 2021. Now, as we approach May, Analogue has announced another delay. According to the company, the Pocket will now ship in October 2021 due to "sudden and severe electrical component shortages as well as logistical issues leading to a domino effect of challenges for nearly everyone in the industry." While it's only a five-month delay, it's likely disappointing to the lucky few that were able to preorder the handheld. According to Analogue, when preorders went live...
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JamHamster is a self-described nerd, tinkerer, and lunatic; and we are inclined to believe it after seeing them hammer away on a Raspberry Pi Zero on Twitter. Electronic atrocities aside, they have some pretty cool projects on deck including a wildly awesome ZX Spectrum emulator built with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, which fits inside a cassette tape. JamHamster showed off the project on the /r/raspberry_pi subreddit, where it amassed a healthy 2.5k upvotes. To get the project to the state you see in the image above, Jam had to figure out how to cram a Raspberry Pi Zero into a cassette tape, which was not easy. What they ended up doing is dremelling away parts of the board, which you can see below....
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In 2019, popular retro-style controller manufacturer 8BitDo released the SN30 Pro+, a fully customizable controller with a host of settings and features. Now, the company is taking things up a notch with the new 8BitDo Pro 2. This new controller should allow users to "play like a pro with 8BitDo's most advanced controller ever" at a fraction of the cost of competing options. Supposedly, the Pro 2 is an evolution of the Pro+ in every way, and while it does not necessarily look that way, we will take 8BitDo's word for it. As we hinted at, the exterior design appears largely the same, with the only major noticeable difference being that there is now a grippy texture on the back of the controller....
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On this episode of HotHardware's Two And A Half Geeks podcast, we'll be talking up AMD's recently announced Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 series processors, Google's new Pixel 4a 5G and Pixel 5 Android smartphones, the latest 5G Apple iPhones, a vintage eMachines system reborn with Ryzen and Radeon firepower and details of our EK Fluid Gaming PC giveaway, which is winding down... Show Notes: 05:08 - Apple Unveils 5.4-Inch iPhone 12 mini Starting At $699, iPhone 12 Pro Rocks LIDAR And Dolby Vision HDR Video Capture 14:09 - Google Pixel 4a 5G Review: Big Screen, Great Camera And Value 23:12 - Rage Against The eMachine: A Ryzen And Radeon Retro Revival 29:46 - AMD Unveils Ryzen 5000 Series With Up...
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The late 90s and early 2000s was a special era for personal computing. We saw PC prices drop drastically, we moved from dial-up to broadband, and we dealt with Windows ME while waiting for XP to arrive. While some of us went the DIY route at the time, many started with a prebuilt rig purchased from a brick and mortar retailer. One of the more notable brands during that era's race to the bottom was eMachines, founded in 1998 and later acquired by Gateway, which was then acquired by Acer. Plenty of "Never Obsolete" eMachines systems were sold to budget users back then and they helped introduce a generation to ATI Rage II and Rage Pro graphics. A Rage LT Pro AGP integrated graphics card is what...
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Analogue turned a lot of heads in October when it announced that it would be bringing its new “Pocket” handheld to production. The Pocket looks very much like the classic Nintendo Gameboy that revolutionized mobile gaming in the late 80s and 90s, but includes some serious upgrades when it comes to specifications. We’ve got some good news and bad news for you today concerning the Analogue Pocket. First, the good news: it has been announced that pre-orders for the console will open up on August 3rd at 11am EST at the previously announced price of $199.99. Now for the bad news: the console has been delayed. As if often the case with delays related to tech gear in 2020,...
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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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