At what point is retro no longer retro?

[Guest2]

I've recently been thinking about the good old times with my Amiga A500.

I decided to give the A500 mini a shot due to its stated "perfect emulation of not only the original A500 but also the Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA) of the A1200." ...we'll see!
Sure, I could use WinUAE to emulate my favourite games but it takes the fun out of just firing up a game. Anyway, that and the A500 mini is another topic.

Looking at the A500 mini got me interested in the original A500, A500+, A600 and A1200. Specifically what is for sale now a days. The market seems to be ramping up with sales and prices dropping slightly. A500s going for around £170, £220 for an A600 and £350 for an A1200

What I do read with a lot of sales is "no guarantees, no IT support, no returns" probably because of possible 30 year old hardware. Some have upgrades - Gotek drives, CFflash hard drives, CPU expansion modules, new more efficient PSUs, Scart/HDMI adapters and many other things.

All these upgrades surely make the original hardware no longer original, to the point where you may as well just emulate. My A500 memories were of some great games, but also the grinding of the floppy drive, constant load screens, failed read on floppy disks, Guru Meditation, the buzz of the huge PSU and heat it game off (I would use the PSU brick as a foot warmer as a kid!) and things like having to wiggle the RF modulator to get a clear picture on the tv.

Surely there is a point where taking away all the 'retro' bad things makes the original hardware no longer as it was intended. Collecting games was my thing a kid and using XCopy watching (hoping!) the green dots would complete without failures. Its hardly retro having 4000 games on a compact flash drive with instant load times and an A500 that is twice as fast as an original A1200.

 

[Tired9]

I don't have a huge collection, just some games I will replay on my consoles.
Most of all too... ones that definitely cannot be emulated correctly without serious hacks which removes accuracy.

As simple as Tekken Tag Tournament is for example, some stages make it crawl in emulation, the snow level and the catacombs levels are very heavy due to usage of effects.
The Playstation 2 was a system that had little video memory and not the best video output and it used field rendering, however due to it's insanely large for the time memory bandwidth (2560 bit LOL!) It could use effects almost limitlessly.
This is why the HD release of SH2 was so terrible in comparison to the PS2 versions, the XBOX 360 and PS3 were superior in all but one way and yeah those games really hit the niche of the PS2 hardware.
Even MGS2 slows down on a much more powerful console - The Original XBOX.

I consider the XBOX, PS2 and Gamecube retro, it's been almost 25 years FFS.

 

[NinjaCool]

None of my PSU's have buzzing but some crashes do happen as it did with Windows 95 and up
I do remember sometimes returning disks to the store when I found a bad one from a new 10 disk pack.

The biggest irritating issue using a real Amiga today on a modern TV is finding a way to get it to display Amiga's 15khz signal natively and preferable using SCART for best image quality.
Cheap upscalers introduce lag and ghosting but the more expensive ones like the OSSC (OSSC Pro and PixelFX is in development) works great with a modern TV.

 

[ttaskmaster]

Surely there is a point where taking away all the 'retro' bad things makes the original hardware no longer as it was intended. Collecting games was my thing a kid and using XCopy watching (hoping!) the green dots would complete without failures. Its hardly retro having 4000 games on a compact flash drive with instant load times and an A500 that is twice as fast as an original A1200.

It's very retro.
Vintage is something that remains exactly as it was made or done back in the day.
Retro is something modern-made that is merely imitative of a style or fashion from the recent past.

If you were to keep things all original and run them the way they did back in the old days, that would be 'vintage', not retro. If you were to apply any performance improvements that were the same tricks that people used back in the day, that would still qualify as vintage. It's only when you start applying modern solutions, like emulators or 'under the hood' devices that still make it look original that it then becomes retro.
I have a Gameboy Advance SP AGS101, but I use a cart with an SD card that holds a stack of ROMs, because there's no way I'm carrying around 200+ separate carts. What I do is retro, ie imitative of how it used to be, albeit on vintage kit.

What you're seemingly talking about here is taking actual vintage kit and altering it to work better that it ever used to. So long as it end up looking pretty much like the original to an untrained eye, I'd say that's still retro.

 

[Guest2]

It's very retro.
Vintage is something that remains exactly as it was made or done back in the day.
Retro is something modern-made that is merely imitative of a style or fashion from the recent past.

If you were to keep things all original and run them the way they did back in the old days, that would be 'vintage', not retro. If you were to apply any performance improvements that were the same tricks that people used back in the day, that would still qualify as vintage. It's only when you start applying modern solutions, like emulators or 'under the hood' devices that still make it look original that it then becomes retro.
I have a Gameboy Advance SP AGS101, but I use a cart with an SD card that holds a stack of ROMs, because there's no way I'm carrying around 200+ separate carts. What I do is retro, ie imitative of how it used to be, albeit on vintage kit.

What you're seemingly talking about here is taking actual vintage kit and altering it to work better that it ever used to. So long as it end up looking pretty much like the original to an untrained eye, I'd say that's still retro.

Very true. It's the mix of vintage and retro I suppose

Many Vintage machines are transformed to retro with a number of mods. They then lose their appeal somewhat as you may just get a plastic shell which looks retro but inside has nothing original (but does do similar things to original hardware) AKA an emulator inside a vintage look device.

 

[Retro6]

I suppose a Dual Core 2 Duo system is retro now. Its crazy to think because they can still do modern tasks like browse the internet watch youtube etc with no problem but they can also play retro games or at least some. I have a star wars game that plays fine on a dual core 2 duo system but it feels and looks like a modern game of today with very good graphics and effects but the game is still retro as its more than 10 years old.

 

[Timber]

I think there are different 'flavours' of retro and whether it's original hardware, FPGA or emulation all are beneficial and needed. Particularly with something like videogames where the industry is so bad about caring for the past. I.e. try and buy the top-10 films or books in 1989 new vs. the top-10 videogames.

I love that we have it both ways and there is new hardware to run original software; Analogue, Vampire, Polymega etc. Or that we have ways of improving original hardware with QOL improvements; i.e. console loaders that replace the optical drive with an SD card or Go-Tech drives as mentioned above etc. One area where it would be nice to 'be better' is modern updates to hardware - where it be something like the A500 Mini or SNES Mini. I suppose they meet a need for the majority but fail for a more advance user. And I think this is where the community is so important, particularly MiSTer or all the work that goes on with Emulation (i.e. Retroarch, or MAME).