I love games. Computer games, console games, board games, card games, you name it. But among all of these incarnations of gaming there's one category that has a special place in my heart: retro consoles.
We've come a long way since the days of Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, and Sega Mega Drive (or Genesis) and that's a good thing. The Internet has made the world smaller and the life way easier.
Still, I kinda miss the cartridges, the simplicity and the lack of the Internet connection. Especially the last one, as for me playing games over the net just doesn't feel the same to me as playing them in the same living room with friends.
Besides the gaming experience itselt, I'm also fascinated by the technology behind these old systems. Consoles and computers today are so complicated that it is impossible for a single person to understand what every single part in the system is doing. With modern computers that is not even necessary.
In my work I do a lot of programming but I practically never have to worry about the hardware of the system. I just import all the shit from libraries and work on a high-level. With simpler systems that kind of comfort is not possible as the programmer needs keep track on individual memory addresses, handle all the inputs and outputs explicitly and so on. The required low-level understanding intrigues me.
The simplicity and limited computational resources adds up the challenge. It's like Japanese poems, tankas and haikus, where strict limitations in the syllable count is ought to get the creativity flowing. Creative thinking is surely what you need to get the most juice out of the system whose central processing unit is a potato by the modern standards.
In brief, this blog is a hands-on journey into the retro gaming. How? That is the topic of the next post.
On a quest to make the future more retro.
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