I recall with fondness the very first time me and my sister received our first computer one Christmas Day in 1983. It was a Commodore 64 which came with one game called Cybertron Mission.
within 10 minutes we had the computer all set up on the TV and were playing the game.
When I reminisce about playing Cybertron Mission, a warm, vague mist descends and my memory tells me that the game was amazing with full colour graphics and 3 channel sound.
That feeling, more than the actual game itself is why I love retro games, after all many retro games let’s be honest are actually truly awful by today’s standards.
In the case of the Commodore 64, there was the delicious but agonising wait to save up enough pocket money to buy a new cassette from the local store. Then when you had the game in your possession it may have still taken many minutes to finally load into the computers memory. Ah the good old Commodore Datasette.
These days you can now emulate many old computer systems, such as the Commodore 64, Spectrum 48k, Amiga, Atari, even some of the more modern consoles such as the Wii and N64 can be readily emulated on modest modern computer hardware.
If the thought of retro games still gives you goosebumps, take a look at a project called retropie which uses a relatively inexpensive raspberry pi computer to emulate a whole range of old computer and gaming systems. Relive your mis-spent youth waggling your joystick to Daily Thompson’s Decathlon, or smashing the fire buttons on Galaga knowing that you’ll never need to insert an old 10p into the slot ever again.
Watch out for a future article where we will look into retropie in more depth, go through the install process and set up a retro arcade cabinet.
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