I’m off work recovering from surgery at the moment and during that time my interest in retro games has deepened quite a bit. I’ve spent a long time with the Amiga mini and cataloguing old classic games on there and I’ve also spent time setting up Retro arch on my Linux box and Emudeck on my Steam Deck.

At first I was interested because of the history of games. It’s really interesting to see how they’ve developed over time, and I always find it fascinating when new genres emerge that were possible on old hardware but just nobody thought of it. You couldn’t make a bombastic game like Call of Duty on a 48K Spectrum, but you could have made a survival game, in the vein of Don’t Starve. Nobody thought of it. Or maybe they did, and I haven’t heard of it, and the genre lay dormant through the 16 + 32 bit years only to reemerge later, which is kind of interesting in itself. I’ve been reading 1001 videogames to play before you die which I love because it’s in chronological order, and it’s just really interesting to see the artform evolve over time. Ditto the excellent Amiga and SNES Bitmap books, which are absolutely beautiful, also in chronological order, and you can see how things changed even within one platform.

Over time I realised that part of the fun is making everything work. I remember when I was a kid with my Amiga you’d fiddle around with the software until it broke, and then have fun putting it back to how it was before you broke it. It’s sort of the same satisfaction I get with my job (data scientist), either taking something that doesn’t work and making it work, or even, yes sometimes I do break something (like the server) and have to put it right. There is so much to know about emulators, and BIOS’s, and scraping game information and I’m just sort of immersed in it along with the games themselves- the best Neo Geo games, the evolution of the shooter, the different graphical styles of (say) the Megadrive and SNES.

And at the end of it I like to write it all down. I’d be amazed if more than five people ever read the words I’m typing right now, but I’m really not writing to be read. I don’t ever feel like I’ve understood something properly until I’ve written it down, I’m the same at work- I like to catalogue and codify everything and then just stick it on the internet in case it helps someone else.

So I may pivot this blog to “Amigas and retro games”, perhaps, I hardly want separate blogs about each, and spend some time talking about the history and evolution of games as well as how to play them with modern hardware (one day I shall treat myself to a Polymega, no doubt, but that day has not come yet). In any case, this post serves as a very long winded introduction to a post I’ve already decided to produce, all about the C64 mini