The Grand Emperor's Retro Video Gaming Blog

When a year draws to an end there are always two things that amaze me. One is looking back on how fast the year past, and two is looking back on how slowly the year past. I know it's a very contradictory statement, but sometimes a year can be all too fast when it comes to something like spending time with your family and watching your kids grow, and too slow when it comes to those many moments that didn’t make your year the best. When it comes to gaming though it's actually been a pretty good year, and again another area that time passed to quickly on. When I look back and my New Years Resolutions posting from the end of last year I see that I actually did a lot of what I struck out to, even if I missed in some other areas. But before I get into rehashing that I wanted to talk about my blog a little bit. Articles with the most hits have been: 8-Bit Fridays: Out into the Late Night Rift - Part 3: ABC & NBC 2009 Starcade: Nostalgia in the Arcade Trekking...

Usually when we get together as gamers and discuss Christmas memories it's about what we found under the tree the day of. But, this year I wanted to take a different approach and talk about those gaming memories that lead up to the big day. 1992 What's instigated my writing about this are memories I have of playing Metroid 2 during Christmas vacation of 1992. At this point I would have been a Freshman in high school (which in a way picks up where my Black Friday memories left off), and this first true break was greatly needed. Not having school also meant I could go to work with my mom and earn some cash too. With my Mom being a book sales rep for stores like K-Mart, Wal-Mart, and a few other places it also meant I got a chance to see what the electronics sections of each store had. It was on one of this first outings towards the beginning of Christmas vacation I picked up Metroid 2. I never had the original Metroid on NES, but I knew the game was said to be amongst t...

Welcome to the Part 2 Addendum I created to address some of off topic, yet still relevant issues out of Part 2 . The YouTube videos: First of all I need to apologize if it seemed like I was knocking The Lumberjackass video when mentioning the Maximus Arcade initial install. My complaint isn't so much with The Lumberjackass ’s (yes, that's really the name, I’m not being sarcastic) channel or video, but rather that X-Arcade decided to go with a video that skipped a few integral steps. Again, I’m not blaming or degrading The Lumberjackass videos, but if you look at his channel you’ll see that building MAME cabinets is kind of a specialty of his. So his video is kind of aimed at someone who has already been messing with MAME for a while, not someone fairly new to it like me. I do have experience with other emulators, as I’ve written about before but MAME and its idiosyncrasies hasn’t been one of them, so the video left me a bit lost since other important details had bee...

In part 1 I covered getting my X-Arcade, buying the tank stick to go with it, and picking a computer (on-hand) to power the whole thing. It's that last part that I ended with so I could pick it up here. When I left off these were my options for computing: Pine64- A Pine64 is a small computer like that of a Raspberry Pi. The Pine64 was actually the first 64-bit entry into the realm of mini-computers beating the Raspberry Pi 3 by some months. I picked mine up through the Pine64 Kickstarter last year and just got it back in May. I didn't exactly know what I wanted to do with it, but I've had it in mind to use it for MAME emulation, or powering a multiple Jamma arcade cabinet, both ideas of which I back seated shortly after receiving the Pine64 board. The Old Laptop in the Closet - In the back of the office closet lie some electronic items that currently have no home or use in our house. We hang on to them because they do have the potential to one day be useful agai...