I know that with the dead of the offseason upon on, things get a little boring. I also know that BBI has a number of retro-gamers on here as well (playing Atari, Colecovision, Nintendo, etc.) in the 1970s and 1980s.
Anyway, for a long time I had some old emulators that run old games on some of my old computers or an old laptop. I was tipped off by a friend about a micro or mini console called an Ouya (it's roughly the size of rubik's cube). You can look up the details about it and it's history, but essentially it's an android based gaming center that allows for independent game developers to release games to a community. All the games must be free to test and after a while there is a pay wall (for some games). It was one of the most successful kickstarter projects in it's short history, getting over $8 million in funds.
So, what of retro games? Well, on the Ouya, there are a number of emulators that you can download for free in it's Ouya store. In other cases, if it hasn't been released in the store, since the Ouya essentially was made to hack with, you can side load other emulators that work just as well.
Bottom line, you can download more or less any gaming system emulator (most of them completely free), from Atari 2600 up through thru Playstation 1, as well as the old quarter arcades, and it will play it via HDMI on to your TV. You can also map almost any controller to it to play as well, not just the one that comes out of box (so any old xbox controller will work). It takes a little bit to get the mappings set up, and you are on your own to get the game roms to actually play. But you can throw a usb hub on it, add all the roms to an external hard drive and get a cheap usb xbox controller and you are off and running. I'm already busting out a season of Tecmo Super Bowl and it plays flawlessly.
The cost is about $80-$100 for the system, but I highly recommend this bad boy. And it also has an xbmc download on it as well, if you want to stream media as well. Have at it BBI.
I like the idea of things like this. I'd love to find something that made it (easily) possible for the wife-ish to get her beloved old Nintendo games on the TV. But this article wasn't encouraging that Ouya was the solution.
Link - ( New Window )
- Atari 2600
- Colecovision
- Commodore 64
- Nintendo (NES)
- Sega Master System
- Sega Genesis
- Super Nintendo
- Nintendo 64
- MAME (quarter arcades)
- Dreamcast
- Gameboy
- Gameboy color
- Gameboy Advance
- Turbograffix 16
- Playstation 1
There are a bunch of others I haven't tried either. If all you want to do is play these old emulators, it's worth it.
If you want to just hunt and peck for the games, there are websites like coolrom.com that let you download the games.
The easiest thing is to either get an external hard drive, or just a flash drive will do. Create a directory structure, save the roms/games there, and from the emulator you map to that directory, and you are set. The emulators have been kept up to date by the developers so it's more or less just plug and play.
I've got a whole rig setup for retro home arcade including an arcade style joystick, but this guy is nice for on the spot HDMI gaming with a controller you have from another platform.
Ouya is certianly a lesson in the magic and pitfalls of Kickstarter. The thing was a crowd source phenomenon, and it ended up being a total piece of shit.