The Grand Emperor's Retro Video Gaming Blog

Having a gameroom of any kind isn't easy when you have a family, but sometimes you do luck out. In my case it was the a-typical basement that became my mancave or as I preferred to call it my gameroom. When I first moved into my last house the finished portion of the basement was where the spare pieces of furniture and other decor quickly collected. As the first few months passed and the main areas of the house began to become de-cluttered of moving boxes, I finally had the first opportunities to begin transforming the basement into an area for my games. Sadly, time became a premium and what should have been a simple weekend project failed to get done. Then one fateful day when I went to work sick, had an equally bad day at work, I came home to find that my wife and oldest son had taken the day to work on the basement for me including putting up decor. All I can say is that it changed a bad day to a very good one quickly, and I must have just sat down there looking around at eve...

Looks like this has historically been a busy time of year for Nintendo. A few weeks ago we celebrated 25 years of the Gameboy, and today we are celebrating 30 years of the NES in North America. Once again I wish I could have written something more in depth for today, but I'm a bit caught off guard.  For me the NES came into my life later in its life in the Christmas of 1989. My system (which I still own and operate) came with the Power Pad, light gun, and triple game cart including Super Mario Bros, Duck Hunt, and World Class Track Meet . I also believe I was given Super Mario Bros 3  that Christmas as well. My NES and its descendants the SNES to the left and below it the WiiU. My collection also has an N64, GameCube, and Wii on standby.  My NES may not have initially been a huge go to system for me, but it did inspire me back then as well as much later. My NES would be a huge influence on my getting my Gameboy back in 1990 when I was so impressed by my NES, I decided I n...

In the last part of this series I talked about 8-bit's legacy, how its sometimes misinterpreted, and its evolution between the Atari 2600 and the NES. Of course the 8-bit era would extend back before the Atari 2600, and after the NES and its fellow generation 3 counterparts, so if I have forgotten systems like the Fairchild Channel-F and the Nintendo Gameboy you will have to forgive me since both of these systems and others are as instrumental to 8-bit as the systems I did list. With that said, it's often too easy to find some mindsets trapped into interpreting 8-bit based on technical specifications. True 8-bit is usually defined by the central microprocessor a console uses, but in my case what we are talking about here are personal definitions of 8-bit. Or to put it another way those feelings that seem to hit you when you see an 8-bit image from your favorite system, and the way you perceive 8-bit from those feelings. To be honest defining 8-bit in this way almost seems a ...

Ok, I know its pretty much been forever since I last visited this series and its a little odd coming back to it after two years. At the same time though I've learned a lot in the last two years and have had the chance to experience emulations in a lot of more ways than I had originally thought I could. In that same respect I have also found out that there area lot of folks out there who want to give emulation a try but have no idea, how or where to start. Legal Warning Due to copywrite laws it is technically illegal to emulate a game unless you own a hard-copy of said game (i.e. a cartridge, CD-Rom, Etc..), or have purchased your emulated copy through a reputable provider (ala Steam, GoG, Nintendo Virtual Console or the like) and have license to hold an electronic copy of said game. This is just one of those FYI things, although its nearly impossible to know who has "illegal" copies, and/or where they got them from. I can suggest however, that buying electronic cop...