It appears that NES, SNES, SEGA, ATARI, and other older consoles are getting some new love. The generation that grew up on these old and busted consoles are starting to stroll down nostalgia road and are clamoring to play some old school games. The problem is that these older consoles do not fair well with the way technology has changed. Fear not though, getting back to retro gaming is not as hard as it seems.
Long gone are the days of coax and CRT televisions. This makes it difficult to hook up an old Nintendo or ATARI and start playing. While you can get them to work, the output is not optimal and more than likely ends up causing frustration rather than a joy to play the games. To combat these issues though, Nintendo and Sony have released their generation-defining consoles on miniature versions of themselves. Nintendo has the NES and SNES Minis available, while Sony released the PlayStation Classic.
Nintendo easily outdid the PlayStation Classic as the Classic had some issues when it was released and the cost was a little hefty. The NES mini, SNES mini, and PlayStation classic all came with games already installed and are not upgradable. It’s great that cartridges are not needed, but a lot of great games are missing from these miniature versions and this is a huge drawback of purchasing one.
In my experience, the best option is to build your own Emulation Station box with a simple $30-$40 Raspberry Pi. The new Raspberry Pi 3Bs are more than capable of running all the old school games and are not just pigeonholed into titles for one system or a default amount of games. One could easily run SEGA, NES, SNES, Apple IIe and more right from a single device with the complete catalog of games for each, as long as you have enough space to store all of them,
Until Sony and Nintendo open up away to upgrade and update their little boxes without doing some crazy hacking, the emulators on a Pi are the way to go. It takes a small amount of googling to find exactly what you need to build one of these little emulation stations and the limits on what they can do and run are endless.
If your interested in building your own, here are some links to help get you started:
First, you need the microcomputer or single board computer to run your games I suggest the Raspberry Pi from Adafruit.
Next, is the micro SD Card that you will need to run your emulator (gaming rig) and the corresponding games.
I suggest getting the biggest one you can find as I am sure you will want to continue adding games. Larger card = more games.
That’s all the hardware you need. Next, you follow the instructions on building the Emulator and adding games. For those instructions, you can go here.
