Anyone here into retro gaming?

[Stuart Sweet]

If you look through AliExpress and places like that you can get handhelds with tens of thousands of actual games from the 20th century.

From what I understand you can get game roms on the internet archive for pretty much anything from your childhood and run them using free open source emulators.

Obviously there are copyright issues, the way copyright works in the U.S. every piece of software ever written is still protected. But it seems to me if that doesn’t bother you, you can trick out a device so that it has everything you ever dreamed of. Has anyone tried this?

 

[savarese04]

It won't be a handheld form factor, but honestly, much easier to just get a raspberry pi and install Retropie on it. There are PLENTY of online docs for this

 

[Yespage]

I'd say that there used to be a time where getting the ROMs wasn't nearly as risky as it is today. Fishing for that stuff comes at a large security risk (you get what you pay for). The other thing to consider, some of the devices being sold with all of these games can very likely have something on them that you don't want exploiting your home network. If you don't know who is making the device, you really shouldn't buy it.

Most of my retro gaming is via emulators via Nintendo or the PC games I still have or in some cases Steam, and transitioned to different media to keep my access to it (5-1/4 to 3-1/2 to CD to USB). I don't have any cartridge ROMs.

 

[Stuart Sweet]

Appreciate the warning. Seems to me that a lot of these standalone devices don't need network access so that makes me feel more comfortable.

Been watching a lot of youtubes about these things and there are some people who go pretty crazy, taking a $20 device and spending $100 and 50 hours to trick it out. But then I think we've all been there with one hobby or another.