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.

 

[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.