Posted on August 23, 2021
Lan Party
In the city I live in there is a rather large lan party that happens yearly (and sometimes more) that focuses mostly on modern games. There are tournaments for all the popular games and it’s usually a sold out affair with tons of gaming happening all night. I wanted to be different of course so I lugged a retro machine and CRT not with the intent to connect and game with other people but more to meet other retro minded individuals.
A bit attention grabbing? Sure no denying that but the response was phenomenal. Lots of people struck up conversations asking questions or just remembering their own old school gaming days. I’ll be doing this again for sure even though hauling a CRT around wasn’t a joke either. Very fun and I met some cool people to say the least.
One gentleman sitting next to me even mentioned he had some old video cards he might be wanting to sell which made me curious. It ended up that he had a boxed Voodoo 5500 he was the original owner off. We agreed on a fair price and I’m just flabbergasted at finding one in the wild! Definitely expect to see this on the channel in multiple forms and it’ll be an awesome card to have in my arsenal. The box is a bonus!
It was a good day.
Posted on August 20, 2021
Livestream 8/19/2021 – DOS Games on the MiSTer
The MiSTer has gotten a lot of attention from me as of late. I love the device since it has so many uses for me personally. Between exploring old consoles I never got a chance to own or computers I’ll unlikely ever get it fits me like a glove. One of the more intriguing cores on the MiSTer is the AO486 one which aims to reproduce in essence a mid-spec 486. Think 33-50 MHz or so and you are in the right ballpark.
It lacks things such as a math coprocessor and the more advanced features of the Pentium but for what it is I think it’s really cool. Target games from the early 90s on DOS and you can have a great time. The core offers Soundblaster emulation, proper OPL2 or 3 and a ton of other stuff.
For this stream I used an excellent precomplied pack containing 300 DOS games which makes playing a snap. It has some quirks for sure that need to be ironed out but the person responsible is releasing frequent updates. Find the pack here https://archive.org/details/MiSTer_AO486_Exo_Flynn_v17
Either way the stream was fun with some new people stopping by and hey it wouldn’t be a retro computing experience if we didn’t have some issues so there were some of those too. The audio while I spoke had some extra noise because the external spinning hard drive I was using was shaking my desk enough to affect the mic arm! Fun stuff!
Posted on August 16, 2021
MiSTer FPGA Video
I think it’s not a secret how big of a fan I am of the MiSTer project. Aiming to reproduce classic consoles and computers as accurately as possible it’s been a big boon for the retro world. Where emulators, while very fun to play with, have some shortcomings mostly in the lag department the MiSTer truly shines. And endless stream of new features and options are released what seems like every few days. It’s an exciting time for the platform and a better time than ever to dive in.
I’ve wanted to cover the MiSTer as a whole for a long time and here is finally my video on that topic. It’s a huge one to begin to take apart so I kept the video mostly as an introduction or surface level overview of the device. If you are curious about the MiSTer, some of its features and what it can do I’d recommend checking out the video. It was a slog to make but I’m quite happy with the result. Hopefully it’s informative and entertaining!
Posted on August 13, 2021
Livestream 8/12
Few console are quite as iconic as the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES for short. Launched at the tail end of the big video game crash from the early 80s it defied expectations in the US market and went on to completely dominate the industry. You weren’t playing video games you were playing Nintendo.
Since the NES was so popular and was made for so long the library is vast and covers just about every genre of the day. There is plenty of shovelware but also a ton of excellent titles available for play. Playing an NES today the biggest challenge with streaming it is that the best quality output you can get out of the console without modding is composite. While that is still possible to capture it’s not ideal and that’s where the MiSTer comes in. Providing a near true experience to the real thing as far as accuracy and the gameplay goes it’s a terrific way to explore the library.
For the livestream this week then we hopped through quite a few NES games using the MiSTer. Some very well known, some not so much and some likely borderline obscure. Despite some audio issues in the first part of the stream (skip to about 25 minutes if you don’t want to listen to me sound like a robot… long story) it was still super fun to explore some NES games again. I have many fond memories with a lot of these games so I always take the opportunity to revisit them. And there may or may not have been an epic accomplishment in a game I never could pull off as a kid…
Posted on August 10, 2021
Amiga 500 Mini Announced
Retro Games, the company behind the C64 Mini, just announced an upcoming Amiga 500 Mini console. For those not familiar the C64 Mini was basically a single board computer (think Raspberry Pi style) wrapped in a custom molded C64 case leaning heavily on the nostalgia. While the device itself left something to be desired at launch it looked very neat and eventually received software updates extending the use of it considerably. The modding community also released many enhancements and software tricks for it. I bought my C64 Mini on sale later on and it’s a neat device and I use the bundled joystick for other things since it’s USB.
But Retro Gaming is back again with the new Amiga 500 Mini which may be an even better device this time around.
Again we have a nicely molded center device that tries to directly mimic the Amiga 500 design. I think it looks really neat and the included mouse and joypad are a great touch. Those peripherals may be worth the price of admission alone although it’ll be pretty steep at $140 at launch in early 2022. The nostalgia of course is the big part here and while the unit itself so far offers 25 games with the ability to load more as well as emulating (because yes this is of course software emulation) the beefier Amiga 1200 at the end of the day they want your money for your memories.
There are plenty of devices that will emulate the Amiga easily not the least your regular computer but nostalgia is indeed a powerful drug. I’d be curious to see how keyboard centric games fare on this since no that mini keyboard is not functional. I assume an external keyboard will have to be leveraged there but the games announced so far seem to lean more into the joystick/joypad side of things.
Still it’s a neat device and I may consider getting it once it releases if nothing else out of curiousity and the peripherals! The full announcement video is below.
