Items tagged with retro gaming
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,...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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,...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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....
Read more...
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....
Read more...
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...
Read more...
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...
Read more...
The C64 mini is a tiny, retro-console, in the same vein as devices like the NES and SNES Classic Editions and the Sony PlayStation Classic. The C64 mini, of course, is designed to mimic the beloved Commodore 64, which was the best-selling, single model personal computer, of all time – but in a much smaller package. After a couple of firmware updates, the C64 mini has generally been well received. The diminutive system includes a host of games and offers the ability to program or run your own as well. The keyboard on the mini is not functional, however, so you’re forced to plug in a USB keyboard, and figure out which keys are mapped to some of the original Commodore 64’s proprietary...
Read more...
The original Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System, released in 1985, is about as iconic as a video game could possibly get. The history of Mario has been retold a countless number of times, but when you sit back and look at the past 33 years of the mustached character, the amount of progress we've made is really breathtaking. Today, games are hyper-realistic at times, and the capabilities are only going to improve as time goes on. New games obviously stomp older ones when it comes to the graphics department, but not always where gameplay is concerned. Sometimes, simpler is best, and that's exactly why a game like Super Mario Bros. continues to be so admired, despite being well...
Read more...
