Retropalooza

I was recently at Retropalooza in Arlington this past October (2022). I love retro gaming and we have a booth at both Retropalooza in Arlington and Retropalooza Houston. While we were at the convention, a couple we know stopped by to see us and check everything out.

One of them was asking me about the demographics of these types of conventions. I explained that it was mostly a 30 and older crowd giving the age/generation of the games. Most of the people here grew up playing these games and enjoy collecting them and playing them to this day.

He then turned to me and asked “people really buy these so they can play them? Why wouldn’t you just emulate them?”. This is when it hit me. In my 30+ years of gaming, I had never given this any thought. For both consoles and PC, I played whatever was current at the time. Upgrading a necessary.

When it comes to retro gaming (which is mostly the type of gaming I do now), I play everything on a modern PC that I built. Everything from ROMs of 1980s games to MS-DOS and Windows games. I said, “with patches, rereleases, remasters, backwards compatibility and emulation, why would I bother with old hardware?”. He agreed…

Side note, I am an avid video game collector. But I collect them for displaying in my game room, not to play them.

The Itch

The last day of the convention I was walking around to see if there was anything I wanted to buy. And the conversation from the previous day was starting to get to me. I started to second guess the way I have been gaming all these years. Was the idea of gaming on retro hardware simply hipster mentality or was the experience better? Was the juice worth the squeeze?

I started to search online for some insights and what I started to notice was that even with emulation, many people are using mods, filters, and other settings to replicate the experience of gaming on old hardware. Things like scanlines, the shine from the old CRT monitors and TVs and other small aspects.

At this point, I knew what I had to do. I had to get some old hardware, play some games, and see for myself.

The Idea

I had given it some thought and concluded that I would perform two experiments.

• Experiment 1 – Build a retro gaming PC setup to play games from the DOS era through the 2000s Windows era
• Experiment 2 – Acquire a retro console, a CRT TV, and some games

I separate these two experiments because the process is different, and I suspect the outcomes may be different.

I will be documenting these experiments in their entirety and posting them here for all to see. There are two main goals here.

• Goal 1 – To see for myself if it the method for playing retro games matters
• Goal 2 – To give others’ instructions for repeating these experiments if they so choose

Read part 2.