Items tagged with retro gaming
At the risk of dating myself, I remember discussing with my older brother whether we should buy a TurboGrafx 16 or Sega Genesis game console. We unwisely chose the former (I would make a similar mistake when, years later, I bought an HD-DVD player instead of Blu-ray). But while the Genesis proved way more popular, I don't have any regrets, because the TurboGrafx was a pretty good system for its day with some gems. And it is also making another comeback. Meet the Analogue Duo. Reviving retro game consoles is pretty popular these days, especially with companies trying to replicate the success Nintendo has had with its NES Classic and SNES Classic consoles. That is a probably an unrealistic bar...
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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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Hordes of retro gamers woke up yesterday excited to preorder the Analogue Pocket retro game console. The Pocket was highly anticipated by retro gamers, and preorders kicked off at 8 AM PST yesterday. However, gamers were unable to complete entering their payment details before the console was sold out only eight minutes after preorders started. It's unclear how many units Analogue had available to sell, but it is clear they went very quickly. For many people trying to preorder the portable console, they could add the device to their cart, and enter their address. When the shopping cart tried to calculate shipping costs, the loading swirl on the screen just spun because the device had sold out...
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The long-delayed and long-anticipated new Atari VCS console may soon be coming to a living room near you. It was recently announced that the upcoming Atari VCS 800 will be available this autumn and is available for pre-order for $389.99 USD. The console bundles are expected to ship by the 2020 holiday season. The Atari VCS 800 bundle includes the console, Wireless Classic Joystick, a Modern Controller, free Atari Vault of 100 classic games, and access to the Atari VCS game and app store. Users can pre-order the bundle from the Atari website, GameStop, or Walmart, but each site sells a slight variation of the bundle. Users can only pre-order the system in Black Walnut from the Atari website and...
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A glance at the graphics in the SimRefinery image above, and you know that this is an old game. It's actually an old, incomplete game that was recently discovered and made available to download and play on Archive.org. If you think that a game about an oil refinery sounds a bit odd, it wasn't meant for SimCity fans to play. SimRefinery was a game designed in the early '90s by Maxis Business Solutions at the request of Chevron. The idea the oil company had was to use a game that took all the very complex components of an oil refinery and made them visible, just as SimCity did for the parts that make up cities. Anyone who has ever played SimCity will know what they mean. In that game, you have...
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Retro gaming is a big deal with enthusiasts that want to relive the old games they grew up with. Tom Cruise fans may recall his NASCAR racing movie called "Days of Thunder". The Video Game History Foundation has discovered an unreleased version of a video game based on the film that was created by the late Chris Oberth (he died in 2012). He was the developer behind some popular retro games, including Anteater for the NES and Winter Games for the Commodore 64. It's unclear why the video game was canceled, but Oberth had virtually finished the game before it was shelved. The game was discovered spread across 40 different floppy disks acquired from Oberth's family by the Video Game History Foundation...
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In an announcement that came completely out of left field for us today, one of the most storied game publishers that had been previously left for dead has been resurrected. We're talking about MicroProse, of course, whose last game was 2002's Grand Prix 4 (released under the Infogrames umbrella). MicroProse first got its start nearly four decades ago (1982 to be exact), and published many popular games over the years including the XCOM and Civilization franchises. One of my personal favorites, being a big aviation buff and an unabashed fan of the General Dynamics/Lockheed-Martin F-16, was Falcon 4.0. Task Force Admiral The company is now being led by CEO David Lagettie, while Bill Stealey, who...
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Retro gaming fans who want to be able to play their favorite classics on the go may want to check out the Odroid-Go Advanced Black Edition. The Black Edition is an upgrade to the Odroid-Go Advance that launched last year with key upgrades fans have been calling for. The significant upgrades compared to the previous generation include Wi-Fi and the elimination of the large barrel power port. The portable retro gaming console is powered by a Rockchip RK3326 SoC featuring a quad-core ARM Cortex-A35 processor operating at 1.3 GHz with a Mali-G31 MP2 GPU. System memory is 1GB along with 16MB SPI Flash for bootloading and a microSD card slot for storage. The little display is a 3.5-inch unit with a...
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Anyone who falls into the "if it's free, it's for me crowd" will want to hop over to Steam, the Microsoft Store or the PlayStation Store and grab this sweet retro reboot game for free, that usually sells for $12.99. The game is Pac-Man Championship Edition 2, and it launched in September 2016. The game is available for Xbox, PS4 gamers and PC gamers at no cost from today through May 10, according to the PlayStation Store. On Steam, the game doesn't have the best reviews, with recent reviews being mostly negative and overall reviews being mixed. That said, you really can't complain when a game is free, and anyone who remembers playing Pac-Man in the arcade back in the day should want to give this...
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Fully-assembled MiSTer FPGA DIY console It seems like it wasn't too long ago that we crowned the Raspberry Pi 4 as one of the best retro game consoles around. Indeed, the Raspberry Pi foundation's latest single-board computer still a low-cost DIY powerhouse. However, retro gamers are picky about one thing that haunts many software emulation solutions that run on the likes of the Pi 4 or an NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV -- and that's lag. Thanks to a talented group of developers and some off-the-shelf parts, the MiSTer project aims for a lag-free, higher quality, more accurate retro gaming experience. Built on the Terasic DE10-nano (an Intel-based System-on-Chip (SoC) FPGA board), the MiSTer...
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Many vintage Atari documents and projects have been lost to the ages. Thankfully historians, former employees, and hobbyists are working to find and preserve as much as they can. The engineering schematics for the Atari 7800 have been released to the public for the first time. The documents were originally found in a dumpster, but thankfully have been preserved by the Atari Museum History Project. The schematics were released by Curt Vendel, a historian at the Atari Museum History Project and the document is 50 pages long, created between 1983 and 1984. It includes information about the TIA-MARIA-STEPHANIE chip. Vendel noted that the documents could potentially be used for other projects,...
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A key member of the Atari VCS project has quit the team, claiming Atari has not paid him for his work in six months. And by key member, we are talking about Rob Wyatt, the lead architect of the Atari VCS. From the outside looking in, Wyatt's departure is seemingly a big blow to a project that has seen multiple delays. Wyatt is an industry veteran who also helped design and launch the original Xbox console. He joined the Atari VCS team in June 2018, with Atari at the time promoting his expertise and resume in GPU hardware and 3D graphics. "While at Microsoft, Wyatt held roles on the development teams on DirectX and the Windows kernel before becoming the system architect of the original Xbox game...
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Now more than two years in the making, the Atari VCS is finally coming together in a literal sense—pre-production of the retro game console is underway, and at least for the prototype build, a printed circuit board (PCB) with an AMD Ryzen APU installed exists, as shown in the photo above. It has been a somewhat long and turbulent road getting to this point, or an "ongoing journey...filled with plenty of twists and turns," as Atari describes the situation. First revealed as the Ataribox at E3 in 2017, the Atari VCS is finally "nearing mass production," though Atari is not yet ready to change its status on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo from "Prototype" to "Production." The implication there...
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Something new is headed to the Atari VCS, and this time it has nothing to do with hardware. These things are all about the games, in and that regard, the Atari VCS will offer a subscription service that will give retro gamers access to thousands of titles from various platforms through a partnership with Antstream Arcade. "Antstream Arcade is a perfect partner for Atari and its fans," said Atari CEO Frédéric Chesnais. "Anstream’s offering lets players instantly access a vast library of games, including many Atari titles that have not been available for streaming before now. This partnership further cements the Atari VCS as a highly versatile entertainment platform and multimedia...
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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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Back in June, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced their newest single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi 4. This tiny PC packs a quad-core Cortex A72 SoC from Broadcom and up to 4 GB of DDR4 memory at a very attractive price. While aimed at emerging markets for folks new to computers, the Pi really caught on with retro gamers and "makers" in general from the start. The latest Pi has a whole lot more computing horsepower than the last iteration, but software support hadn't quite caught up—until just now. The LibRetro team released Lakka version 2.3 with a ton of new features, a retro gaming focus, and perhaps the most important is official support for the Raspberry Pi 4. Raspberry...
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As of September 6th, 2019, the officially-licensed Evercade retro handheld console is available for pre-order. Like other retro consoles, Evercade is capable of emulating a number of older game systems, and like a few others, Evercade is also a portable handheld. Where Evercade differs from most retro emulation machines, however, is that it doesn't rely on digital ROM files or original release game cartridges. Instead, Evercade ships with its own officially-licensed cartridges, which carry a number of different games from certain publishers. Each cartridge serves as a numbered "Collection" from a Publisher's catalog, and can carry anywhere from 6 games to 20 games. For a full list of...
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8BitDo is well-known for its retro-inspired controllers, adapters, and other accessories. The company has now released its most advanced controller yet. The 8BitDo SN30 Pro+ is a fully customizable controller with multiple profiles and settings. The SN30 Pro+’s Ultimate Software allows users to fully customize their button mapping, trigger, sensitivity, and vibration. Users can also assign sequences and other actions to one button. Perhaps most interestingly, users can create and save different profiles for various games. Once you have saved your different profiles, you will not need to completely adjust your settings every time you switch games. The SN30 Pro+ is reminiscent of Nintendo’s...
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Sega announced a small, retro Genesis console last summer with a list of some of the cooler games that were offered when the original system was first made available. Konami wants in on the wave of gaming nostalgia that is sweeping the world and plans to release a mini version of the TurboGrafx-16 console that was around in the '90s. The pint-sized console is unsurprisingly called the TurboGrafx-16 Mini. In the console's day, Konami had nothing to do with the system; the original console was developed from a tie-up between NEC and Hudson. Konami became the parent company of Hudson in 2005 and brought the operations in house in 2012. That means Konami owns all the brands and properties it held....
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Sega has revealed a full list of games that will come included with its upcoming Genesis Mini console. Having just announced a dozen new titles, including two bonus games—Darius and Tetris—the complete list is finalized at 42 games. That is up from the 40 games that Sega is still pitching on the Genesis Mini's product page. That is a robust library, and as you might imagine, there is a nice mix of genres. Whether you remember playing Shinobi 3, beating up bad guys in Streets of Rage 2, or becoming Mickey Mouse in Castle of Illusion, you will be able to relive those moments. Darius and Tetris make their Genesis and Mega Drive debut in our final 12 title announcements for the Mini....
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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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Nyko has unveiled a new accessory for fans of the Nintendo Switch who have some old-school GameCube controllers lying around they want to use for some Super Smash Bros. action, or the like, on the Switch. The product is called the Retro Controller Hub and offers four ports for connecting your old controllers to the new Nintendo Switch console. All four ports support GameCube controllers, and Nyko says it is ideal for retro gaming co-op play. The hub gets the power it needs to operate from two USB ports on the Switch console dock, giving it the the ability to power the four controllers at once. Gamers not wanting to play with friends or only needing to connect one GameCube controller to the Switch...
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