I’ve asked ChatGPT what it thinks about playing games on retro/old hardware vs. emulation:
Playing retro games today is super easy: for many games, there are remakes that still run on modern computers or consoles – you can find them on your favorite gaming platform, like steam, which has a “Retro” tag for search, or from vendors to produce physical copies and big boxes for games, such as Limited Run Games.
Some games or games from studios have a strong community such as the Lucasarts/Lucasfilm games adventures that run on the SCUMM engine, where the community project SCUMMVM provide a modern runtime engine for all modern operating systems, that allows to play old games on today’s computers.
If you want to play your favorite, old game, you don’t have to organize for a lot of things. One challenge you may run into is tied to new editions of old games, that enhance sound or graphics that change the underlying game entirely. If you have memories you want to relive, your search may become a little harder – and you may have to run an old copy of the game you still have or can purchase, in a VM such as DOSBox or SCUMMVM.
The Chatbox is right though – there’s a distinct beauty in playing games on real hardware from the past, and being able to run it the way it was meant to be run, played and enjoyed – with the limitations and odd shortcomings that past hardware had. There’s a strange please for some enthusiasts in switching floppies and sitting there, waiting for a game to load for half a minute or a minute. And there may be the feeling of reliving your childhood or earlier gaming experiences. One of the highlights could be playing with a retro mouse or joystick – or on that classical keyboard that these ancient machines come with. It may be that you want to show the games on real hardware, to younger generations as well.
I am trying to run my favorite games on one of two Amiga 500s – one is still in its original state with a floppy disk – the other, for convenience, modified with a Gotek drive that’s USB-based, from Amigastore. There’s also a Commodore 64 with a 1541-II 5.25″ floppy drive. That gives me a lot of flexibility to run my games and experience them on fantastic hardware. Should I want to play on the go, I can always fire up one of the VMs and load one of the games or game image files on a proper PC and play there.
The hardware itself can easily be found on any decent online platform in varying degrees of condition. If you’re enthusiast and you have a few silver coins to spare, and also patience, it can be fairly cheap. Compared to today’s modern computers and what horse powers you can get for the same price, these old machines are incredibly expensive.
So “old” hardware is not free if you haven’t kept it from before, and depending on the condition, you may need to replace a floppy drive, or extend the RAM on them, or improve playing convenience with a modern USB-drive you load games from – that’s some extra silver coins you need to spend. Some used models don’t come with the right cables to hook up to modern monitors. Or worse – you may need a converter in addition to the cables for the best results (see Upgrading video – blog post). On top, you want to purchase the proper copies for the games that you want to play.
Breaking it down to the hours you mean to play games, you better be sure if you want to invest that money. With the potential risk that the hardware may break, and you may need to replace a few parts over time, or upgrade it further over time, to play all of the games you really want. Openness to explore the interwebs for inspiration and building up knowledge in case things don’t work the way you intend, is also a time investment you’ll have to plan with – in case you don’t remember all of the details from the past 🙂
FRICKELSOFT 