Introduction

It might seem odd to play retro games. After all, do people carry around old
Nokia brick cellphones instead of modern smartphones packed with features?
Are there die-hards out there who exclusively use the first version of Microsoft
Word and stick with their AOL email addresses?

We all have our reasons! Nostalgia is a part of the attraction of vintage games
these are tried and true titles that weve enjoyed for decades. Playing them is
like going home to old friends; we know well enjoy spending time with them,
regardless of our age. They carry a sense of familiarity, and yet we often discover
things about them that didnt strike us on our first play through way back when.

And whats more, there are no monthly fees and no micro-transactions. Theres
also no DLC, no patches, and no necessary hardware upgrades. You just plug
and play! You dont have to build your character, select a map, and youll never
need to download that 3 GB day one patch. And you probably wont even need to
spend time blowing on cartridges or cleaning CDs.

 To me, retro gaming used to just be gaming I was playing all the
now-classic consoles when they first came out. But from a modern
perspective, retro gaming can be one of two things. For the older
fan, its nostalgia, a remembrance of our past, a simpler time when
we didnt have bills, mortgages or thinning hair, but for the young-
er fans its a gateway into an era they didnt get to experience, a
1980s simulator, if you will.

The cool part is that, either way, these games arent being
forgotten, or neglected simply because their graphics are out of
date. They have something to offer everybody, and still remain fun
decades later.

My only regret is I never kept the original boxes darn!

- Ben Heck
A Brief History of Hardware Hacking and Video Games
by Spanner Spencer
Before we get into some element14 projects meant for retro gaming, we should note that there
is actually a long and noble tradition of hardware hacking for the sake of playing games, and
it reaches back further than most people realize, to the very b eginnings of computers. In fact,
some of the worlds most powerful machines in their heyday were pressed into the service
of gaming.

OXO
The first-ever example of a video game was a
fine example of hacked hardware. A graphical
version of tic-tac-toe was created in 1952
by British professor of computer science
Alexander Sandy Douglas at the University
of Cambridge on the institutions EDSAC
machine. Effectively a powerful calculator
used for academic research, the EDSAC was
successfully turned to frivolous use when
Douglas managed to display the game on the
systems low resolution CRT monitor.

SPACEWAR!
In what would become a rich tradition of
misusing expensive university computing
equipment, MIT student Steve Slug Russell
turned the massively expensive PDP-1 computer
into a sci-fi game epic called Spacewar!, in
1962. Ships battled it out on the round PDP-1
display as they circled a gravity well, and in one
of its earliest incarnation Spacewar! set the de
facto standard for the upright arcade cabinet
that we know and love.
PONG
In what would become a rich tradition of misusing expensive university computing equipment,
MIT student Steve Slug Russell turned the massively expensive PDP-1 computer into a sci-fi
game epic called Spacewar!, in 1962. Ships battled it out on the round PDP-1 display as they
circled a gravity well, and in one of its earliest incarnation Spacewar! set the de facto standard
for the upright arcade cabinet that we know and love.

MS. PACMAN
After causing coin shortages in Japan and the US, Pac-Man was quickly established as
a gaming phenomenon. More interesting, in terms of its hardware development, was the
sequel Ms. Pac-Man, which wasnt actually developed by Namco. The game, which boasted
a new character with a bow on her head, floating fruit and shifting mazes, was the result of a
hardware add-on to the original Pac-Man PCB, cobbled together by US electronics engineers
General Computer Corporation. To this day, Ms. Pac-Man is the best selling American arcade
game of all time, despite originally being Japanese built and based on a hacked
hardware platform.
Retro-Gaming in the Mainstream
Despite the accolades that the Playstations
1 and 2 and the Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles
received during their lifetimes, there was one
machine that ultimately reigned supreme in
sales, and retro gaming had a part to play in
its success. The Nintendo Wii, with its massive
appeal to casual gamers, also benefited from
Nintendo embracing the nostalgia value of its
back catalog.
As the Wii made its debut in November
2006, Nintendo launched an online service
known as the Virtual Console, a way to re-
release classic games for a new generation
of players using its current machine. With
over 10,000,000 downloads in its lifespan,
the Virtual Consoles library included past
games from the NES, Super NES, Game Boy,
Gameboy Color, N64, and more.
Though Nintendo was arguably the first to
embrace retro games on newer generation
consoles, it was by no means the last. Sony
soon followed suit, with PS1 Classics hitting
the PlayStation Store also in November 2006.
And while it lacks some of the retro titles
available to Nintendo and Sony due to its
shorter history in gaming, Microsoft has also
continued to support backwards compatibility
across its consoles. Finally, the popular digital
distribution platform Steam has 534 classic
titles available for PC gamers, and 359
tagged retro.
Jump forward to March 2017 and the release
of the Nintendo Switch with its notable lack
of Virtual Console support and Nintendo
once again gave itself an avenue to re-sell
its classic titles: the Classic Editions. The NES
Classic was released in early November 2016,
with the 2.3 million units shipped selling out
almost immediately. Though initially intended
as a limited release, the high demand for the
NES Classic prompted Nintendo to announce
that they would produce another batch to
coincide with the September 2017 release of
its successor, the SNES Classic Edition.
But the nostalgia appeal of retro gaming
hasnt been the exclusive province of the
major console makers. In the early 2000s,
both Europe and North America saw the
emergence of amusement arcades with
bar-gaming hybrids, commonly known as
beer-cades or game bars. And, as the
technology surrounding gaming has improved,
its actually become far easier for developers
to create their own titles. These games tend
to bear a strong resemblance to retro titles,
due to the simplicity of their production, and
theres still a strong desire for a new game
that conjures the same feelings as a classic
Mario or Metroid.
PIK3A Retro Gaming Table
Part 1
From Pong to Mortal Kombat, Space Invaders to Street Fighter, arcade machines
have both been part of the origin of video games and a source of their continuing
technological development. Fully electronic arcade games first appeared in the
early 1970s, and they still have a place in the world of gaming, as in the growing
market of bars that double as arcades. And in the modern era we can take many
of these classics home or play them on the go, no quarters necessary.

Retro gaming and the Raspberry Pi have a symbiotic relationship:

not only is the Pi a great device to use for the purposes of gaming,
gaming projects are also an excellent way to gain experience
developing with the Pi. And this element14 classic is a fantastic
example of that, a project testing a number of different hacking skills
with a result that you can use to wow your friends for years to come:
a cheap IKEA end table turned into a retro gaming machine.
PIK3A Retro Gaming Table
Part 2
 hen we at element14 update one of our projects, we dont just change the
W
characters outfits or add anti-aliasing; we put in some serious new features.
The big question we had was what to call our revision to the PIK3A table.
PIK3A ONE X? PIK3A-STATION PRO? Heaven forbid, the PIK3A-CAST?
maybe not that last one.

The Raspberry Pi turned 5 years old in March of 2017, so

in honor of that milestone Spanner Spencer and the e14
team decided to update one of our most popular projects,
The PIK3A Gaming Table. We scaled up that original
design to make this a multiplayer machine, with a larger
screen and illuminated controls for four players. The
PIK3A Deluxe still fits comfortably into your living room,
and its a much better conversation starter than
any coffee table book.
Retro Computer Pi
Its incredible to imagine that
computer gaming has gone
from the late 1970s trinity
of the Apple II, Commodore
PET, and the Tandy TRS-
80 systems to the modern
era, where the League of
Legends World Championship
is watched by 43 million
people and has a top prize of
$1,000,000 for the winners.
But PC gaming has always
been a flexible environment,
as compared to the walled
gardens of Nintendo, Sony,
and the like. The fact that PCs
were the early innovators in
networked gaming over the
internet clearly provided a
boost to the format.

e14 member Xavier Lazaro teamed up with his

daughter Iris to build himself a nostalgia machine,
but for her it functioned as a gateway into
gaming history she had never experienced. Their
TOUKOMPUTER is built into a snazzy custom case
in electric blue, uses an SD card to run different
emulators, and can connect to external USB devices.
Ben Hecks Super Soldered
Atari 2600
Released in September 1977, The Atari
2600 is credited with popularizing the use
of microprocessor-based hardware and
ROM cartridges containing game code, a
format first used with the Fairchild Channel
F video game console in 1976. This format
contrasts with the older model of having
non-microprocessor dedicated hardware,
which could only play the games that were
physically built into the unit.

It turns out Ben loves to solder, so in

episode 226 he took the chips out of an
Atari 2600, put them on a separate PCB,
and wired the entire circuit manually.
But of course the team couldnt let
that hard work go to waste, so they
decided to build a custom
3D-printed case to create a
portable 2600 unit. All of the
information you need to
recreate this build
is available on GitHub.
Ben Hecks Giant Game Boy
The Game Boy was an 8-bit
handheld device developed
and manufactured by
Nintendo and first released
in Japan and North America
in 1989 and in Europe in
1990. The Game Boy was
Nintendos second handheld entire shipment of one million
system, following the Game
& Watch series introduced
in 1980, and it combined
features from both the
Nintendo Entertainment
System and Game & Watch.
Upon the Game Boys release
in the United States, it sold its
units within a few weeks.

The original intention of the Game Boy was to shrink

a system down to a size you could throw in your
backpack. Jump forward a few decades, and The
Ben Heck Show decided to invert that concept and
scale the classic portable back up, building a three
foot tall version with a D-pad the size of your hand.
Check out the video, and the documentation at the
link if you want to take a crack at it yourself.
Ben Hecks Portable N64
The Nintendo 64 was
Nintendos third home
video game console for
the international market.
Named for its 64-bit central
processing unit, it was
released in 1996 in Japan
and North America and
1997 in Europe. It was the
last major home console
to use the cartridge as its
primary storage format, until
Nintendos seventh console
the Nintendo Switch in
2017. It was named Times
Machine of the Year, and
featured legendary titles
like Super Mario 64 and The
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina
of Time.

The portable N64 was the most

requested build from the e14
Community, so the Ben Heck team
had to do it! Ben miniaturized the
controller using an Arduino Pro Micro
and Playstation Vita analog stick. The
N64, the bane of Bens existence, is
notorious for being difficult to hack.
Its easily damaged due to all the
rewiring needed. Ben even turned to
the e14 Community for help getting
the RAM expansion to work.
Ben Heck ZX Spectrum Builds
The ZX Spectrum was an 8-bit personal
home computer released in the United
Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research. The
Spectrum was among the first mainstream-
audience home computers in the UK, similar
in significance to the Commodore 64 in the
USA. The introduction of the ZX Spectrum led
to a boom in companies producing software
and hardware for the machine, the effects
of which are still seen. Some credit it as the
machine which launched the UK IT industry.
Some 24,000 software titles have been
released since the Spectrums launch and
new titles continue to be releasedover 100
in 2012.

Bens first attempt at miniaturizing the ZX

Spectrum was to recreate the classic device
hand-wired using breadboards. For this version he
wanted something a little more sleek and portable,
yet also visually similar to the original unit. He
designed his own PCB in EAGLE, used original
components, and 3D printed an attractive case.
The Future of Retro Gaming?
Its fascinating how retro titles have come to
interact with modern technology; games that
used to require dedicated machines and had
their content spread across four CD-ROMs
can now be played on a cellphone. And the
companies who have for so long produced the
latest releases are continuing to cautiously
embrace retro gaming, with virtual consoles,
backwards compatibility, and re-releasing
modern versions of their own retro systems.
In the same way that the current crop of titles
one day becomes the retro collection, does
the audience for vintage gaming change over
time as well? Is it older people who grew up
with Nintendo and Atari, or is there a cohort of
young folks who are curious about what the
early Zelda titles were really like after they
played Breath of the Wild? Or, you could even
be an old-school gamer who discovers new
titles through retro gaming, like element14
member Dan Simmons, who won Ben Hecks
portable Atari 2600 in a giveaway.
With all of this in mind, what do YOU think the future of retro gaming will look like?
But there is one challenge to the idea that
modern titles will some day become retro
favorites: the recent reliance upon internet
connectivity. Have you ever wanted to play a
game on your PS4, only to have it lock you out
until youre online? This is standard with so
many games now, so imagine 30 years in the
future, when Ubisoft has closed its doors, and
the server that hosts your favorite game no
longer exists.
Perhaps there is a solution for this problem:
preserving the servers needed to run popular
titles. One example of a preservation effort
is the Elysium Project, which endeavors to
host servers for the outdated (and therefore
no longer supported) out-of-the-box World of
Warcraft. Unsurprisingly, The Elysium Project
has had to deal with the company that owns
the IP trying to stop their efforts, but hopefully
this issue becomes more apparent and more
archivists take up arms in preserving our
digital history.