What makes a system "Retro" - open discussion

[MrBeefy]

I think it could be treated like comics. Just random systems to give the idea.

 

Golden Age - be like your Pongs and 2600

Silver - be like NES to SNES

Copper - PSX to Wii

Bronze to Tin - current to recently current.

[Judge Mental]

I would like to see mini versions of the APF MP-1000, Channel F, Odyssey2, and RCA Studio II with complete game libraries built-in. Sure the fanbase is small, but they can be made as ordered. Oh to dream...

[mbd30]

PS2/Gamecube was the last generation where you just plugged in the game and then played. No online updates, DLC, etc. It was also the last generation intended to be played on CRT. Where to draw the line is subjective but that's where I draw the line.

[No One You Know]

(I have only read the first page of the forum here so far so that I don't forget things I have on my mind or spend too long talking about different things and confusing myself).

 

In my opinion, as Keatah said, something is "retro" if it is associated with a certain era that has gone by, like a DMC-12 car or certain fonts, music styles etc. And that of course almost always makes it relatively old. With cars, they are considered "classic" when they have been around for a reasonably long time, usually significantly longer than the time they were produced for - once a car has stopped being produced, in most cases it is not considered "classic", but after a while it becomes "end of life", when it is "old", like "rubbish old car", but not "old old" if you know what i mean. Then after quite a while they begin to be appreciated more as they are further and further away from what modern cars are like and you can't quite see the same similarities to the new stuff anymore - at this point they really become a "classic", like how SpaceCadet defined "retro".

 

The word "retro" i have always associated with technology (as the equivalent of "classic" for cars) for some reason though it can apply to anything. Of course with words like "retrospective", it probably just means anything that has "passed" if you know what I mean. "Classic" of course also has different connotations; you call something "a classic" usually if it is something great that is venerated - it is well remembered and has seen lots of use, whether it be a joke, a song, an anecdote, a film, a video game etc. So "retro" might be different to "classic".

 

So I think "classic" is usually like how Carlsson described "vintage" in relation to wines, good quality (or the outcome of using it is good even if it is not good quality itself) and venerated (only word I can really think of for that) "retro" is something associated with a time gone by like Keatah said, and I'm not sure what word I would give to something that the modern equivalents are no longer closely related to, or are clearly different to (the car world's kind of "classic", or spacecadet's "retro").

 

Oh yeah, very early on when I was probably 7-8 years old or something like that, probably my dad told me something like "vintage means it is at least 50 years old, and classic/retro means it is at least 20 years old" which is of course pretty absolute and concrete, but that is how at least my brain worked at the time I suppose. I also used to think of "retro" as anything from before the year 2000 (you can have a whole other conversation about the urge to always specify that by "2000" you mean the year), probably because the PS2 was the first machine I used, therefore considering it modern and current; the newest machine i considered "retro" was the Dreamcast and of course it helped that that was discontinued fairly early limiting how new the newest games were, and of course I did not see them "in the wild" often like other retro machines and in contrast with newer things (especially PS2). Anything 80s or 90s was retro to me, and anything newer was modern.

 

In my head now (I am 16), PS2 is still something that is modern but not "new", like an end of life car (monetarily worthless but not massively outdated and not necessarily bad, but not old enough to become worth again). PS2s are also plentiful which helps them to be cheap making them even more comparable to a middle aged car like that. Gamecube feels sort of retro to me because of its unique passed style. PS1 i would describe as retro now, though I didn't use to, as I played PS1 games on the PS2 and could find them in shops which made them feel like a current thing. PS1 games are still relatively easy to find, but now I do consider them "retro". But you can see that I probably used to see things as "retro" (video games at least) when they were things that I couldn't easily find in local shops. I also used to play games on this site call "vizzed" that has emulators that run in the browser (you have to install a plugin though) and it only ever emulated cartridge machines, which helped to cement things like the N64 as "retro" in my head but not the PS1. Now I am not sure if I ever considered the GBA "retro". Anyway, sorry for the incoherence of those last two paragraphs!

[No One You Know]

On 8/9/2020 at 5:53 AM, Judge Mental said:

I would like to see mini versions of the APF MP-1000, Channel F, Odyssey2, and RCA Studio II with complete game libraries built-in. Sure the fanbase is small, but they can be made as ordered. Oh to dream...

Had to look up that first one - never heard of it. You would make those machines very small and cheap I suppose. Much less complex to emulate or replicate than a 4th generation machine. A modern entex adventurevision (ever heard of that) would be pretty cool too so long as it was cheap. Virtual boy-style LED reflection display technology but in 1982. I only know about it thatnks to the let's compare video for defender!

[No One You Know]

On 5/27/2020 at 11:49 AM, Nintendo64 said:

Wouldn't you consider the firmware and bios that were in these older systems, software that is needed for the games to run? I mean its not an OS in the traditional sense, but there were small bits of software written inside these machines in order for the games to be able to be played and for the controller movements to be be detected. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

Maybe I should have worded it differently with older consoles, when the bios/firmware becomes outdated, should that be when we consider it retro?

Well most cartridge machines that I know of have no BIOS. The Lynx does though I think but I only know that from using an emulator once. Machines whose storage medium is not memory mapped (mostly optical or floppy disk machines but I suppose also includes the Lynx) usually have a BIOS to handle loading up the boot sector of the game, compared with cartridge machines (the kind with the game ROM properly in the internal memory map, so not the Lynx which apparently has to load data with requests or something (I still haven't got around to actually trying programming it)) that will just immediately start executing from the beginning of the cartridge without any load procedure needed. PS1s, Saturns etc all have fancy CD player and save management functions in their "OS" too. Not sure why newer PC engine CD games (normal card games don't) need new bios cards; I understand with the RAM cards as they actually expand the capabilities of the machine but I don't know what the BIOS would do on the PCE CD beyond booting, unless the software has some kind of abstraction layer between them and some of the parts of the machine like the CD drive or save SRAM or something.

[Keatah]

If you study the Atari VCS you might discover that each cartridge had its own BIOS. The console had no ROM in it. Each games' developer had to write a Kernel - something that handled a/v and i/o, among other things to accommodate the "game program" It's one of the few cartridge consoles that didn't have a BIOS. Channel F being the other.

 

TRIVIA: Telstar Arcade and Microvision had their main microprocessors inside the cartridge.

 

 

[HoshiChiri]

The annoying thing about this question is, since time keeps moving forward & consoles keep changing, we constantly have to redefine the eras that came before. Plus, there is no definitive cutoff between these eras since there's always a system that's ahead (or behind) its time.

 

For me then, at least, I tend to group things out by some quality that covers most of the major systems of the era, then add in whatever unstuck in time contemporaries those systems had. My head's landed on:

 

-systems pre-NES, which largely ran on f-plug/TV switches.

-post-NES cartridge systems, which (aside from carts) saw the rise of composite & the automatic RF switch. Plus the d-pad was standardized.

-CD based consoles, fairly self-explanatory there

-Internet consoles, which brought the idea of an always connected machine mainstream, as well as moving to HDMI as the standard connection.

 

Is it a perfect system? Of course not. There's always gonna be issues with the outliers- the N64 comes immediately to mind. I put it in the CD era, despite it being a cartridge system, becuase that's what the competition was. 

 

As for where the cutoff from classic to modern is within those eras... right now, i put it in between cartridge & CD. You just don't see a whole of nostalgic excitement for disc-based machines yet. Keyword 'yet'- I think the Playstation's time is coming. Especially when the patents for these machines run out & clone units can come to market, increasing accessibility & awareness. First company to make a good multi-CD clone (ala retron 5, but without the shadiness) is gonna clean up!

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, HoshiChiri said:

The annoying thing about this question is, since time keeps moving forward & consoles keep changing, we constantly have to redefine the eras that came before. Plus, there is no definitive cutoff between these eras since there's always a system that's ahead (or behind) its time.

To make matters more muddy, everyone classifies systems a little differently. Yes, age of the system, age of the gamer, time between systems.. all that.. They're only a few factors that can determine retro or not. There's many more.

 

[Mikebloke]

14 hours ago, Keatah said:

If you study the Atari VCS you might discover that each cartridge had its own BIOS. The console had no ROM in it. Each games' developer had to write a Kernel - something that handled a/v and i/o, among other things to accommodate the "game program" It's one of the few cartridge consoles that didn't have a BIOS. Channel F being the other.

 

TRIVIA: Telstar Arcade and Microvision had their main microprocessors inside the cartridge.

 

 

The PC-50x range is very similar to the Telstar Arcade setup, so its interesting that even in 1st generation machines (as is labelled in mass media) there was very different methods of using hardware. 1st generation was essentially the development of "console-ising" arcades to save space and increase versatility, and then in 2nd gen we get ROM.

 

Quote

I would like to see mini versions of the APF MP-1000, Channel F, Odyssey2, and RCA Studio II with complete game libraries built-in. Sure the fanbase is small, but they can be made as ordered. Oh to dream...

It would be cool as novelty items if their parent companies were ever mad to go back into the games industry - but any RasberryPi system could handle it. We're starting to see FPGA's getting cheaper smaller and better which is allowing the ability to clone multiple systems in one. For Sega and Nintendo, its more a copyright issue, but it would be interesting if it was commercially viable to release dated systems in the future.

[Mr SQL]

 

On 8/19/2020 at 7:37 AM, Mikebloke said:

We're starting to see FPGA's getting cheaper smaller and better which is allowing the ability to clone multiple systems in one. For Sega and Nintendo, its more a copyright issue, but it would be interesting if it was commercially viable to release dated systems in the future.

FPGA's have been advertised as surpassing emulation like the core for the new mini Nintendo console.

 

But I think there is still some form of emulation (not simulation) going on as in the case of MISTer's Atari 2600 core, which is very impressive but not outputting a genuine NTSC or PAL video signal to race the beam but rather an HDMI signal that may not match closely enough for all projects:

 

https://retromaster.wordpress.com/a2601/

 

I utilize the classic VCS hardware in a research project that requires very high accuracy and an NTSC CRT, I could probably use an FPGA Atari provided a classic video signal was generated for CRT.

 

There are also really fun games like this one that use phosphor and NTSC artifact colors to create visual effects that require a CRT Television and are currently lost under HDMI.

 

The future of FPGA:

 

It would be a daunting task, but if an FPGA could be created to simulate a CRT then we could see all of these cool effects under HDMI because as @Keatah had observed it is possible to shoot a video off of a CRT Television and then see the effects happening on LCD, so now all we need is a real time FPGA simulated CRT with that simulated beam to race