Thoughts on retro gaming?

[Chaosolous]

I like old games. Both old PC games and retro systems. I grew up playing SNES and NES games though.

[Ulfrinn]

Publicado originalmente por Dutchgamer1982:

It has gotten expensive...

1 : no new old. pc hardware is being made despite it could be done for pennies with todays production capacity.

2 : still working old hardware stocks are depleting cause of idiots scrapping it for resourcesm

3 : a handfull of maniacks have hoarded hundreds of old systems.. and are not selling any..

4 : many who never gamed in that era want to experience it.. bloody hipsters drive prices up.

I sold my system in 2005 for 20 euro.. to a poor person who did not have any pc..
**pentium 4 3200mhz
**4gb 133mhz dram
**360gb hd ide 7200rom
**geforce 2 500ti / voodoo 4 4500 agp (i owned both)
**creative audigy platinum
**plextor 16x8x48x cdrw
**pioneer 16x56x dvd
**floppydrive
**10/100/1000 ethernet
**21 inch crt triniton flatline 1600x1200

what I would not give to own it again.. these parts are imposdible to find now and likely it would cost nearly 10000 euro to get them all even if you did.

The way to preserve old PC games isn't necessarily by preserving the hardware, but by making the old games compatible with today's hardware. For example, a modern GPU will not support DirectX 8. DirectX 9 came out in 2002, and all modern GPUs support this, but 2002 and prior games likely won't. This is where the biggest compatibility concerns are running them on modern hardware.

There are simple DLL patches that you can drag and drop into those game folders to convert the game itself to use DirectX9. And there's dgvoodoo2 which is a compatibility layer making old games think your modern hardware is a 3DFX Voodoo 2 graphics card. The solution here is to make those games compatible with today's tech, and for that all you really need is a low cost AMD APU, or even the mini PCs coming out now that use them.

[Devsman]

The classics never die.

I just finished a PS2 game, and I'm planning on playing through a PS1 game soon.

And one of these days I'm gonna go back and do another Mega Man playthrough. I used to do pretty much all of them that you can reasonably expect someone who speaks English to be able to get their hands on (except the BN and SF games because they're way too long) about once a year. The earliest of those are for NES. But I haven't had time for that in almost a decade. Still, I've been thinking lately about just shunting all my other gaming and just spending a couple months on it because those games are just so stinkin' good.

NES is pretty much as old as I go, though. Home gaming before then was rough. The late 80's were by no means free from shovelware and just plain crappy games but legit like twenty of the more than 600 Atari 2600 games are not literally unplayable. And I mean literally literally. Like Steeplechase, the game where no matter what you do, your... uh... horse (I think?) just stands there and the CPU wins. Or 3D Tic-tac-toe, the game where they didn't bother to give it AI or even detect a win condition, or even alternate Xs and Os automatically.

Or Swordquest, the trilogy of adventure games where you have to figure out what room to put what object in, by referring to the accompanying comic book. Which is a neat idea, except the game graphics don't look anything like anything. I can know the dagger goes in the kitchen all I want but I still have no clue which of these collections of black dots is supposed to be the dagger or which one of these radically differently colored empty screens is the kitchen.

There are a handful of (non-arcade) games from that era that are remembered fondly, and rightly so, but there's more just total trash than you would ever have believed possible.

The PC space wasn't much better. My brother had a iic, which he eventually handed down to me, and while its library generally worked and made sense and even a handful were fun (Torpedoes Away is such a great game), they were absolutely as simple as it gets. Especially if you had a monochrome monitor, like I did.

[sleeps]

the hype behind it is so high i might die of how overwhelmingly big it is.

[sleeps]

that aside, i like retro games but calling it gems or any of those buzzwords is too far from what i consider what the game would be

[☎need4naiim☎]

Publicado originalmente por TheCreepyTank†™:

.... I am not a fan of modern gaming as the expectations don't meet my standards of having a good time. Current gaming is just grinding and "getting it done." It honestly feels like work, but video games are meant to be an escape from reality, not to mimic it....

Now, THAT, Mister, is the core of the problem.

That's why i think gaming will return to its roots in the future, with one way or another. Because we know where the problem persists.

Thank you for your valuable contribution.

[Marius]

Retreogaming is awesome. No online, no patches, no forced online, no MTX/DLC. It is what it is. I liked it. I do own a RPi4 with Recalbox. Can play from NES till PS1. Hopefully someday PS2, Xbox 360, etc. with RPi5 or 6 or so. Using a real CRT monitor/tv (a professional one that was used by BBC UK) *Ikegami 20-17R and a Sony PVM 146E* Awesome stuff.

If it was for my I would use a PC CRT Monitor too, but it needs a old Radeon with VGA output. HDMI to VGA converters are baaaaaad.

In the end pc games from between 1998 till 2009ish do have their charm, and consoles games from 1985 until PS2-ish as well. Maybe PS3-era too.

[Romaki]

I enjoy playing GBA and DS games, lots of them aged pretty well or bring back fun memories.

[Meister Donut]

My parents would never buy me rice bowls for gaming as a kid so I grew up pretty much with pc only. And I'm kinda glad they did, since pc seems to be winning at the end.

[gugnihr]

Publicado originalmente por Donut:

My parents would never buy me rice bowls for gaming as a kid so I grew up pretty much with pc only. And I'm kinda glad they did, since pc seems to be winning at the end.

I love retro consoles, even if today PC is the best choice for sure.
My parents bought me only an Amiga 500 and back then I used to envy a lot both PC, SNes and Mega Drive owners.
I liked my Amiga but reading what they said on gaming magazines at some point I started to believe that the Amiga was the worst choice.
Now I know that I would have ABSOLUTELY hated a PC from that era, the SNes was not much better than my Amiga for my taste (I appreciate the SNes, it's a great console, but the Amiga was good too) and even if I actually like the Mega Drive more than all those other alternatives, back then probably I would not have3 been able to enjoy it as much as I enjoyed it playing its games later.
Save states are a very big plus in games like Sonic 1, and the games were very expensive and I'm sure that I would have miss many good games and bought some bad ones by mistake back then, so becausde of this reason I think one should not complain too much about the choices their parents made in that regard. Even if they did not made the best choices for your taste, it is very unlikely that back then you would have made the right ones either, if one still enjoy games after growing up then they can decide in a much better way which games they really like and which ones they doi not like that much.

[swillfly]

retro gaming = nostalgia

you can enjoy them but never quite like when the tech first came out decades ago

[Ulfrinn]

Well yeah, the issue with the Amiga was that it was cost prohibitive meaning they didn't sell nearly as many of those as they did other gaming hardware. This meant if you were a game developer in the early 90s, your focus was going to be SNES and Genesis first... DOS if there's a third target. So the Amiga library ended up pretty bland.

[Ulfrinn]

Publicado originalmente por swillfly:

retro gaming = nostalgia

you can enjoy them but never quite like when the tech first came out decades ago

The vast majority of retro games I've played over the past few years have been completely new first time playthroughs. Like prior to a few years ago I never played a Metroid game, never a Spyro, Crash, none of the handheld Mario or Zelda games, never played Parasite Eve, or Brave Fencer Musashi... I can't really have nostalgia for something completely new to me, and those games have been way more enjoyable than the vast majority of modern stuff, based purely on the fresh experiences alone.

[Dutchgamer1982]

Publicado originalmente por swillfly:

retro gaming = nostalgia

you can enjoy them but never quite like when the tech first came out decades ago

well some games were great because of shared experience.. playing them in lanparties...
talking abbout them with friends.
downloading mods with 56k modem.. or by typing over lines of code from magazines.
-that part sadly never returns you can try learning you kinds to like the old things.. but they usually pick thr shiny new thing anyway...

[Mr. Tex]

I'm a big fan as well. It's fun and interesting to explore old games.
I would even say that I prefer old games over new ones, especially over modern triple-A.

Retro gaming on console is quite expensive, so I stick to PC only. Although I wouldn't mind buying an original Nintendo in the future at some point.

[sleeps]

tbf, i play older games just because of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ hardware. i could have just play mobile games like cool kids but most of them have good phone while my phone is a brick. anyway, i don't have any nostalgia towards old games even with heavy exposure with it (that means no, games like grand theft auto san andreas is not that much of a masterpiece. it's great but not that kind of great). some old games have relatively simple graphics and actually look majestic with simple texture mods. games like system shock 2 look stunning when you installed texture mods into it. it won't make the game modern but definitely make the world more immersive as the terminals finally have words into it rather than just a weird cryptic stuff