[Closed] Retro gaming and emulation

Bought my game mad 12 year old a pi with retropie for Christmas (well really for me to relive my youth). He is enjoying it but I cannot phantom how to play the zx spectrum games. They need the keyboard but I cannot configure it. I tried googling but it looked behind my capabilities so we just play the other games now.

if anyone has a simple step by step of how to configure retropie to play the spectrum games That would be great. I am desperate to play jet set willy but need the keyboard to enter the color code and play it.

We need Atari XL recruits over here...

https://atariage.com/forums/forum/60-8-bit-high-score-club/

Its round one and its JOUST 🙂

Waiting for a pi that plays n64 etc smoothly.

Currently:

Got a switch for son. I play the free nes and snes emulators that are included. Awesome.

Got a megadrive and a everdrive cart. Great fun.

Did have a dreamcast with a sd card reader but sold that.

Still have an og ps3 that plays ps1, ps2 games.

Still have a ps1 and ps3! Ps1 is chipped and plays any burnt games.

Just want more sega and more n64.

If I buy a mini megadrive classic you can mod to play megadrive and mega CD.

A mini ps1 can be modded to play more ps1 games.

A great buy is an old Wii. They can be soft modded in less than half an hour and play spectrum, c64, megadrive, master system, nes, snes via emulators. Got one for free and its awesome

My claim to fame is that I am in the O’Reilly Retro Gaming Hacks book because of this project I did many years ago

https://www.phased.co.uk/xmame/

Great thread. I was brought up with my dad heavily into playing with his C64 - had twin disk drives and always ranted on about GEOS (Graphic Environment Operating System). At the time I wasn't bothered about that and just wanted to play games.

Progressed onto Amiga (bought one with my first ever pay check) and then in Playstations. Never bothered with other consoles so all my retro nostalgia orientates around the above.

I'd love to get into retro emulation and have a few toys to do so but every time it turns into a faff with things not working or need loads of configuring so I give up.

Must give it another go - what's considered the best nowadays for things like the above?
I have a raspberry pi (latest one), old PS3 soft modded for emulation and spare i5 old laptop.

Arcade Club now in Leeds (as well as Bury) for anyone that didn't know. Fill your Moon Boots.

I was playing Stunt Car Racer last night as it happens. Someone has converted the ST version to the Jaguar and it runs smoother.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the internet recently..

So have I, but that is comfortably the most awesome thing I've seen this year. Thanks for linking.

I’d love to get into retro emulation and have a few toys to do so but every time it turns into a faff with things not working or need loads of configuring so I give up.

Must give it another go – what’s considered the best nowadays for things like the above?
I have a raspberry pi (latest one), old PS3 soft modded for emulation and spare i5 old laptop.

I bought a cheap-ish (about £150) reconditioned PC off ebay a while ago (graphics card, decent processor and 8GB RAM) which is fast enough to run Sega Dreamcast and Saturn games through Retroarch which is dead easy to set up (it's pretty much plug and play now- I'd certainly struggle to get going if it was any more involved than just downloading stuff!). The 8-year old laptop I'm typing on now will happily run PS1 games and will just about wheeze it's way through Dreamcast games if it absolutely must but has a nervous breakdown if I ask it to run Saturn games.

My parents still have my thirty year old Amiga 500 in their loft.

Apparently, you can buy accelerator cards for it - here which will endow your 7.14mhz Amiga with USB, 128Mb of RAM, an IDE controller, 32 bit graphics and CPU performance way beyond anything envisaged with the 680x0 line of processors.

It's very cool but TBH WinUAE is more than enough for me.

Also just ordered one of these as recommended by B3ta newsletter –

https://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B07LBG2D5Y/b3ta-21?th=1

looks like fun…

It is fun 🙂 Nowhere near 400 games as there are a lot of repeats, but definitely worth a £17 punt. Was playing Paperboy last night, as well as the original Bomberman.

I also didn't know the Switch had an emulator. Definitely on my birthday list now...

Also just ordered one of these as recommended by B3ta newsletter –
> https://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B07LBG2D5Y/b3ta-21?th=1 < looks like fun…

Love it that in the advert for the rip-off Gameboy they're complaining about other Chinese sellers ripping off their product 😂😂😂

Apparently, you can buy accelerator cards for it – here which will endow your 7.14mhz Amiga with USB, 128Mb of RAM, an IDE controller, 32 bit graphics and CPU performance way beyond anything envisaged with the 680×0 line of processors.

A lot of this stuff (accelerator cards etc) was available BITD if you had the £££. I have an A1200 with an original Blizzard accelerator which bumps the CPU up to an incredible 40 MHz IIRC but also adds an FPU which was very rare at the time for a home computer. Allows you to play Frontier at a decent frame rate!! A600/A1200 actually had IDE interfaces as standard, you could buy HDDs but they were pretty small and expensive back then! Obviously you can now retro-fit a more modern one for pennies (or even use a CF card as it's the same interface). Just as convenient as an emulator really (except maybe for the loading times) but WAY cooler 😎 There's still a massive Amiga retro scene with new hardware etc being produced all the time!

I am desperate to play jet set willy

Prepare to be disappointed. Most 8 bit stuff is really just shite, bad graphics and nostalgia. For every Super Mario Bros there are about 100 inferior versions that had bad controls and buggy gameplay. Colour clash isn't worth celebrating either!

Jet Set Willy 2019

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/296869-new-game-released-jet-set-willy-2019/

I have an A1200 with an original Blizzard accelerator which bumps the CPU up to an incredible 40 MHz IIRC but also adds an FPU which was very rare at the time for a home computer.

Once upon a time, I had an A1200 with an '040 and whatnot, built into a Power Tower and with a PCI breakout board. As bragging rights went it was up there, but constantly swapping monitors and working around compatibility issues was a PITA, hence WinUAE. Am genuinely impressed that someone has gone to the trouble of designing and building a board that gives a thirty-three year old A500 AGA compatibility and CPU capacity beyond the wildest dreams of the machine's designers though. I had no idea that there was still a market for it.

There was a bit of skill and timing with 8 bit games, and pixel sharp button presses. My kids, despite playing things that look virtually real, really think these games are really hard. No save progress....

Thing is, they are easy to pick up and put down. Shouting kids now for tea, in the middle of a GT race, or battle..... "I'll be kicked off the servers if I don't finish".

I am desperate to play jet set willy

Easiest way to get a JSW fix (aside from many, many Speccy emulators), a chap by the name of Andy Noble did a sterling PC conversion a few years back. He did Manic Miner also.

Jet Set Willy 2019

On an Atari! Burn the heretic!

Looks like a decent conversion to be fair, that's pretty impressive.

My kids... really think these games are really hard.

Thing is, they're not wrong.

In 8-bit days, many games had to be hard because the severe resource restrictions meant they couldn't always make them particularly lengthy. Granted, as time went one games got more ambitious as programming skills improved.

Eg, I've played Manic Miner till my fingers bled, it's my go-to game when I get a new emulator or platform (like getting it running on a tablet). I can do the first few levels in my sleep and I've completed it with infinite lives, but to this day I cannot complete it in one bounce. Either Solar Power Generator or Skylab Landing is almost certain to do for me, bastard hard rooms both.

Sega Mega Drive classics, now on sale at Humble Bundle/Steam. 50 games for £8.50. Looks like some good stuff.
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/sega-mega-drive-and-genesis-classics

I have the NES, SNES and Mega Drive Classic consoles.
More retro loveliness than I'll ever need, tbh.

I can't be arsed with emulation and the mini consoles function and look great under the TV in the spare room.

Sometimes I wish I'd kept my original Gameboy, SNES,N64 and Dreamcast but they live on with my niece and her husband who have a couple of rooms dedicated to retro consoles.

Don't miss the PS1, still have a PS2, PS3, Gameboy Advance, DS, Gamecube and Wii.

Massive Nintendo and Shigsy fanboy, tbh.

I loved the Dreamcast, absolutely superb underrated roster of games that kept me enthralled for years (Jet Set Radio, Metropolis Street Racer, Crazy Taxi, Shenmue, Ferrari 355, Daytona etc etc), but....

.....for innovation and gameplay, for the sheer joy of it all, it has to be Nintendo for me.

It's true, 8 bit games were

really

bloody difficult. Screen resolutions of 256x192 meant that you had to be pixel perfect with your (digital!) inputs. Don't forget that arcade coin-op games were intentionally difficult so that you had to keep feeding them with 10 pence pieces, so a faithful conversion to a home computer resulted in a very difficult game.

It’s true, 8 bit games were

really
bloody difficult.

Treasure Island ****ing Dizzy. Loved that game, spent hours playing it. But you had one ****ing life!!! Mis-time ONE jump or so much as touch a jellyfish in the tricky underwater section (that you had to negotiate many, many times) and that's it - dead. Start again, from the beginning. Thank **** for Cheat Mode.