Hey look, Target is selling this little "Atari Flashback" machine that will let me play old Atari games on my TV. That will be great right? No. No it will not be great. The machine will suck beyond all suckness. On the other hand, it will lead to the question "So how can I play these games?"
And so the Rabbit Hole begins.
Atari
First up was the Atari 2600. The console I grew up with. I had hoped the old family system would work but alas fixing it was outside of my skillset. Next I moved to a handful of "flashback" machines being sold at the big box stores but either found the game selection or emulation lacking. I finally ended up with the RetronN 77. While I did get the solution to work, I don't think I could recommend it. Under the covers the Retron is nothing more than a computer running the Stella Emulator. While this is a great emulator it does require a fair amount of customization and the company Hyperkin was just not up to the task of patching and updating. Thankfully there was a great team of volunteers that released some patches upgrading this from a meh machine to one that worked great. Moving forward I've purchased a Mister FPGA system as that system seems to have much better support and an active community in case of issues.
2023
Arcade
Time for the originals. Nothing plays like the original arcade games, like the original arcade games. I've been stalled on this for a while trying to get a good setup but the newest combination of a standing desk, X-Arcade controller, and MAME is a winning combination. I'm only a couple weeks in at this point, but there are so many great games this is already a win.
2025
History
09-10-2025
Start Arcade Pages
12-13-2023
Atari 2600 Pages, Part 2
Ok, this project stalled hard. I'm not really sure what happened but I think once I got a good groove going and staring playing through all of the games in the Atari 2600 collection, there just were not that many interesting games. I started this in 2020, but never really fleshed out the pages so I guess it's time for a reboot.
07-30-2020
Atari 2600 Pages, Part 1
Chips Page Complete