How are you retro gaming in 2025?

What kind of TV are you using, are you emulating, do you just wait for a remaster or collection to come out, etc.

I messed around with this more in the past year because there's something I like about retro tech, as well as attempts to revitalize/enhance it. I was never a big fan of emulation but I don't know if I tried it all that much, so I did a bit deeper exploring and... honestly, it's still overrated. Stuff does not always work as well or as readily as you would expect it to after years of tech advancements.

I've landed on mostly using the original hardware hooked up to a CRT with flash carts. Flash carts are nice cause I can play ROMhacks, and obviously they have high (complete?) compatibility and accuracy with official releases. The downside of course is that I simply don't own that many consoles, but I'm not exactly in danger of running out of stuff to do, so it's fine.

What is the deal with these retro handhelds? I tried out one that was well rated and was unimpressed. Aside from the unsexiness of emulation, I just don't really get playing non-handheld games on a small screen. The buttons on the one I got sucked, and with these all being weird Chinese gray market products, hardware quality feels like a gamble in general. Reviewers might say the hardware is good, or gloss over it, but honestly... I'm convinced these things just exist as filler content for retro game YouTubers because there are so many videos about them.

My final frontiers would be hardware emulation (FPGAs) or scalers or HDMI out mods, but I'm scared to spend big bucks on this stuff (not to mention risk ruining the ones that require assembly/soldering)

What is my point with my topic? I don't know, I just wanted to talk about something and it's about games

Either with the original systems hooked up to an LED TV or through the Switch's VC (or Wii/WiiU VC, as applicable). I've never really been one to worry about optimizing the experience with CRTs or anything like that.

I have a bunch of old hardware and a CRT in my basement that I could dust off at any time, but most of the time I just go for software solutions like DosBox, emulation, or fan patches.

To be perfectly honest, I never cared for "accuracy" outside of a game running at a reasonably accurate frame rate (part of the reason I can't really play the original Star Fox anymore since most modern solutions fix the bad frame rate I grew up with, even on VC. Makes it play weird for me).

I've been playing Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance.

I've never bothered using old CRTs - I actually got rid of like a half-dozen of them a few years ago.

WTF and you didn't even ask if I wanted one?

The CRT I got cuts off the top part of the screen and there's a little red tint in one of the corners. Oh well, it's adequate overall, and beggars can't be chewsters when it comes to CRTs

Using emulators, mostly. Phones, pc, switch 1/2, but mostly my steam deck.

Using a crt isn't really important to me.

I have an almost 6 month old kid, so gaming on a handheld is really convenient to me. Plus, even if I didnt have a kid, it's nice to go outside or play in bed while gaming.

Have you tried using the filters that many emulators provide?

I don't care about the "CRT look" in terms of scanlines or whatever, it just looks like complete crap otherwise on a modern TV. Emulation does fix this problem (at least enough for my taste) with or without scanlines, but there's an intangible thing I don't like about playing on an emulator. Getting a CRT was a cheap (albeit kinda inconvenient) way for me to make use of stuff I already owned

bachewychomp posted...

WTF and you didn't even ask if I wanted one?

Aside from the fact that no one here was openly begging for them at the time, I sure as hell wasn't about to ship one through the mail. So you'd have had to have met me in a clandestine parking lot in New Jersey, at precisely 1:13am, preferably on the night of the full moon.

If I remember right, I think I got rid of like 5 of them not too long after Covid - I dropped them off at Best Buy when they were still accepting electronics for recycling. Then last year I got rid of three more at my local recycling center (one of which was my mini TV/VCR combo unit I used in college). All of them still worked at the time (though one of them had messed up brightness settings, where it was set to max brightness and still looked like it was almost totally dark).

I should be completely tapped out now, unless I find one hidden away somewhere under the floorboards or something.

My real question is why you had so many in the first place. When we upgraded (to another CRT I mean) I'm pretty sure we took the old one to Goodwill or something. I can understand having a couple but not like eight

Also you probably could've gotten some good money off craigslist for those

I'm on og hardware, on a decent size crt, with a lovely surround sound as a recent "addition".
It certainly makes the games look better than on a hd screen and it's the only way to play virtua cop and house of the dead.
The only mod i have is to play imports on my Saturn. Playstation has an import disc and the dreamcast, well, that console is easy to play without limits.
I have a game genie for my genesis that helps with playing imports.
I may one day get like a flash cart or something for some of my consoles. Maybe a handheld like my ds...

bachewychomp posted...

I can understand having a couple but not like eight

maybe he hosts smash tournaments!

bachewychomp posted...

My real question is why you had so many in the first place. When we upgraded (to another CRT I mean) I'm pretty sure we took the old one to Goodwill or something. I can understand having a couple but not like eight

Bedroom, guest room, and living room from my parents' house, and then bedroom, guest room, living room, and office/game room from my house. Plus my TV/VCR from college. We never really got rid of any of them whenever we upgraded to an HD flatscreen because we were multi-generational hoarders. It basically turned into "Why get rid of a TV that still works? You never know, we might want to use it again some day", and then it got shoved into a closet.

I eventually started pushing to get rid of them when I started redecorating some rooms, and I kind of forced myself to get rid of stuff where I was like, "I need to be honest with myself, I'm never going to use this."

Goodwill actually wouldn't take them when I finally got rid of them. I called them and asked if they wanted them and they said no. I almost always try to offload stuff there (since last year I've been getting rid of a ton of furniture, clothing, and holiday decorations because I've been cleaning out my parents' house), because the "hoarding" mentality that was beaten into me for years was "Never get rid of something if someone might be able to use it". Which is why I still have about 4 VCRs and every video game console I've ever owned (except the two I traded in back in the 90s). So if I want to get rid of something, I always sort of ask around to see if anyone else wants it, and try to get rid of it at Goodwill if it's something they'll take.



bachewychomp posted...

Also you probably could've gotten some good money off craigslist for those

Nah. People looking for them for retro purposes are relatively niche, and I have no interest in going too far out of my way to get rid of them, so it would have been a limited range of potential buyers. And I figured I wouldn't make enough to really justify the effort I'd have to put into selling them. I asked my one friend who sells stuff on Craigslist/Facebook Marketplace pretty regularly if he wanted to sell them and he said no, so I just shrugged and got rid of them.

Honestly, that's the same reason why I'm kind of apathetic about opening an Amazon store to sell my mother's book collection (and/or DVDs) as used items. She had a TON (like 10 full bookcases worth), but most of them won't necessarily be worth THAT much, and it would be a fair bit of hassle to set everything up and run it. So I'm mostly dithering on it (and trying to convince my nephew to do it instead, but he's even lazier than I am).

Emulation is great and at this point, it honestly is the best experience for a lot of older systems, but I still like to fuck around with original hardware. Lately, I've been getting into more softmodding and ODE's. Last year I finally installed an HDD with FreeMCboot on my PS2 and that has been awesome, really breaths a lot of new life into the system. I also got myself a Brooks adapter for my PS2 which allows me to use all kinds of more modern controllers.

I wish I still had a CRT, and I still might get one at some point but it's not really a priority for me now. I got myself a RetroTINK 2X Pro upscaler and I'm over all pretty happy with it. It does have some kinda annoying limitations though, like not being able to accept 480p video which makes it not really ideal for some later SD era systems like the Gamecube, Xbox, or Wii.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Nah. People looking for them for retro purposes are relatively niche

Actually you might be right. I see them listed for sometimes hundreds of dollars on CL regularly, but that doesn't mean they sell . Hell I got mine for I think $25 and it was like a month or more old listing.

It annoys the hell out of me that people do list them for so much, because I'd get a better one than I have now if I could. I don't even know if they eventually sell or people just give up. When I'm selling something and it's not getting hits, I drop the price on the listing, but what do I know...

I'll probably grab a RetroTink one of these days.

bachewychomp posted...

Actually you might be right. I see them listed for sometimes hundreds of dollars on CL regularly, but that doesn't mean they sell . Hell I got mine for I think $25 and it was like a month or more old listing.

I assume it's like when people put books on Amazon for $400+. When it's not a first-edition, signed, or any other aspect that would justify that huge of a price tag, or otherwise "rare" in its own time (and not necessarily even THAT old).

Basically, you throw it up for a ridiculous price to see if anyone is so desperate for the book that they're willing to pay. Then you wait a few months. When no one buys you drop the price down a bit. Then you wait some more. Drop the price. Wait some more. And so on.

It's like fishing - you basically keep slowly lowering the price until you find the highest value at which someone else is willing to "bite".

No sane person is ever going to buy that book at $400, and you never really expected that anyone would - you just needed a sufficiently high price to start with to work your way down. It's like how, when you're part of a culture that has haggling as part of its trade methodology, you always start off way higher than what you think an item is worth so you can be "talked down" to the price you actually wanted to sell it for all along.

I know that's a problem my friend always had selling stuff online. He'd throw an old Xbox 360 listing up for $200 (plus multiple games), and then the first messages he'd get would be people asking if he'd be willing to sell it to them for $150 instead. Or he'd specify in his listing that he wasn't willing to ship something and that anyone who wanted to buy would have to meet in person to pick it up, and he'd get a bunch of requests for him to ship it anyway (with no offer to pay extra to cover shipping) or to drive like 500 miles to drop it off (because the buyer wasn't willing to go out of their own way). People love to haggle, or at least feel like they're getting one over on the person they're buying from.

People with old CRTs probably figure they're so rare and that retro gamers will flock to buy them, so they list them high. Then no one buys them. Then the seller eventually lowers the price until someone is willing to pay. But you won't remember (or even necessarily know) the fact that the TV eventually sold for $20, you just remember seeing it listed for $500.

NES Mini and SNES Mini. You can mod them to make them better too. What "better" means is relative, but those things are amazing. Smaller and more portable, all you need is a long HDMI cable and you're golden. And I'll pay whatever for an N64 Mini too.

crippling addiction to mini consoles

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/a99d6119.jpg

Polymega.

https://polymega.com/

While not quite retro - liked that but many of them require reflexes or at least real time input my impaired right hand cannot provide anymore - I tend to run behind enough in games that I'm halfway in anyway. My current game is Fallout 4, for instance, the VATS giving me a way to handle combat as I can't aim at a moving target anymore. Not until I learn to mouse left and then the right hand can't press keys reliably (this is typed one-handed).

ooger posted...

Polymega.

https://polymega.com/

This seems really weird to me, like it's not even FPGA. So it's just a pricey emulation box? Who is this for? People who only want to play legally dumped ROMs? Support for original controllers is nice but I think FPGA consoles like the MiSTer can do that too.

bachewychomp posted...

This seems really weird to me, like it's not even FPGA. So it's just a pricey emulation box? Who is this for? People who only want to play legally dumped ROMs? Support for original controllers is nice but I think FPGA consoles like the MiSTer can do that too.

It's nicer than a homebrew MiSTer. The collections are pretty fun too.

I played thru Dragon Warrior a couple of months ago on NES via my 27" CRT. It'll depend if I want to go original or if I want to value convenience and just play something available on Switch 2. Also have Launchbox on PC with like, 1000 games. I also have a RGB30 (emulator handheld) but I'm not really a fan of the D-pad.

Oh, and here're the consoles hooked up to my CRT:
NES
Saturn
PS2

I was pretty stoked when I picked up a ODE for the Saturn. I have a few original games but the prices are just stupid.

bachewychomp posted...

Actually you might be right. I see them listed for sometimes hundreds of dollars on CL regularly, but that doesn't mean they sell . Hell I got mine for I think $25 and it was like a month or more old listing.

It annoys the hell out of me that people do list them for so much, because I'd get a better one than I have now if I could. I don't even know if they eventually sell or people just give up. When I'm selling something and it's not getting hits, I drop the price on the listing, but what do I know...

The new trend of listing "retro gaming TVs" is so stupid. I get that the value has gone up, but people need to fuck off. I get $50 for something that's actually quality, or getting more rare (like a CRT+VCR combo), but all the dopes selling junk CRTs for $100-$200 are not actually selling them I assume.

I don't live in Vancouver, but it's actually a good place to get a quality CRT for cheap/free. So many families cleaning out their parent's homes.

ooger posted...

It's nicer than a homebrew MiSTer.

Nicer in what way? As far as the sleekness of the package, I'd have to agree (having only seen pictures/videos of both of course). But FPGA is the best in terms of emulation quality, from what I've generally heard. Eventually I want to try them out when I get a job again

bachewychomp posted...

Nicer in what way? As far as the sleekness of the package, I'd have to agree (having only seen pictures/videos of both of course). But FPGA is the best in terms of emulation quality, from what I've generally heard. Eventually I want to try them out when I get a job again

Better design, better support, better UI, better remakes of controllers, better support for your own controllers.

ReturnOfFa posted...

The new trend of listing "retro gaming TVs" is so stupid. I get that the value has gone up, but people need to fuck off. I get $50 for something that's actually quality, or getting more rare (like a CRT+VCR combo), but all the dopes selling junk CRTs for $100-$200 are not actually selling them I assume.

Forgive the generalization, but there's a lot of uninformed zoomers who think "old = expensive" just because of how the retro gaming market already is. I've had to gently talk some people out of buying a TV and just looking around for a bit. You can still get them for free with a bit of patience.