Hello and welcome to episode 2 of the Retro Break podcast. I’m really glad that everyone enjoyed the first episode – it did way better than I could have ever hoped for, so thank you so much for all your support. I’m really excited to get started with really doing proper in-depth weekly episodes.
In this first episode, I’m going to be talking about things I wish I didn’t know about retro gaming – things that I kind of found out as I was going along my journey of playing and collecting retro games that have in some ways kind of ruined the experience, while also at the same time improving it and taking it to that next level. It’s a really deep topic and there’s a lot that I want to cover. I might actually end up splitting this up into two different episodes.
And as you’re listening along, if you actually think of anything that you agree or disagree with, if you click the link in the description or if you’re on Spotify, then it should be somewhere on the page but you can actually submit a video response. So if you want to ask me a question or if you want to have some sort of input on what I’m talking about during the podcast, definitely check that out – I’d be really interested to see how it works.
Without further ado, here are a lot of things I was about to say – a number there, but I don’t actually know how many things I’ve got written down here. Here are a lot of things that I wish I didn’t know about retro gaming, and I’m actually going to be talking through these in the order that I found them out or at least I’m going to try and do it that way.
So the first thing, and if you’re from the UK you will definitely feel this one – that is the first time I found out about the difference between 50 and 60 Hertz for games. And when I found that, I honestly felt like my childhood was a lie. I felt like the companies had been deceiving us for years, honestly it was such a horrible feeling but at the same time such an eye-opening experience, and it really explained a lot…
over there I’ve got some CRTs and I always use RGB wherever I can and I’ve actually got a few modded consoles as well like I said earlier I’ll get back to that in just a little bit. But I just wanted to bring this up now to kind of give you guys an idea of just how much different cable types really mean to me and they can really enhance the experience as well. But whenever I see someone using the cable that came with the system rather than one of these better ones that you could buy after I’m always just sort of wishing in my head that they would go out and get better cables and fix the picture issues that they’ve got because it really does drive me crazy.
And another thing that never used to bother me whatsoever – I didn’t even know this was a thing really until maybe until sort of the Xbox 360 and PS3 era. And that is frame rate. And this is a big deal for a lot of people obviously, but back in the day I played games, and bear in mind that the games here ran slower anyway. So if you think the frame rate was bad in America, you actually have to take off an extra 16% for us here in the UK. So one of my favorite games of all time is Ocarina of Time for the N64, of course an absolute masterpiece at the time. No one really cared about the frame rate or at least no one that I knew cared about the frame rate. And obviously reviewers and stuff at the time, they gave it really high praise. But here in the UK, can you believe this actually ran at about 17 or 18 frames a second. And if you were to play a game like that today, you would think something was wrong with it or you just refused to play it outright because it wasn’t 30 or 60 frames a second. But back then, a lot of these N64 games and PS1 and stuff at the time actually had this problem where they could barely get into the 20s in the frame rates let alone 60. Or like I’ve got this screen over here that does 144 frames a second – that was just unthinkable at the time.
So what I’m trying to say is that I never even noticed there was an issue with frame rate. I played all the way through Ocarina of Time, I’ve played it many times since, and it still doesn’t really bother me. But the first time that I actually found out what frame rate was, was actually a boot sale. And I was actually selling some N64 games, and that is a really sad story that I’m going to come back to in a future episode of the podcast. But one of the games that I was selling was Banjo-Tooie, complete in box. And someone came up to me, they wanted to buy a bunch of my N64 games, and they said “Oh, it’s such a shame that Banjo-Tooie runs so slowly, don’t you just hate the fact that the game’s so choppy?” And I was like, “I really don’t know what you mean, what do you mean it’s choppy? It seems perfectly fine to me.” But going back and playing it today, and comparing it to the version that’s out for the Xbox One and the Xbox 360 that came out on Rare Replay, going back and playing the original – you can really, really notice that the frame rate doesn’t really get out of the 20s for the entire game. But back then, it was never an issue.
So that’s something that kind of frustrates me now that I would never have even had a clue about before. So that’s another thing that’s really frustrating to know really. And now going back to the topic of TVs, which is one of my favorite topics and I would love to do more future episodes on this – that is the different TV types and how they actually affect not just the picture quality but the actual gameplay itself. So back in the day I kind of noticed this early on actually, when I went from using a really nice widescreen CRT that I had to my first flat screen when we moved into the new house. It was around 2005, I think, at the time. And as soon as I plugged in my original SNES, N64, Playstation One into this flat screen, I immediately noticed that something was off. I always thought, and up until that point it was true, I always thought that as TV technology improved, the picture quality was bound to improve with it right? Well, that wasn’t really the case, at least for games and consoles that were made for an earlier generation of TVs. Because the way that CRTs work and the way that LCDs work are completely different technology, and at the time I didn’t really understand. So I kind of put up with it for a long, long time. But the difference between a CRT and an LCD, the most important thing is resolution. And the fact that the CRT can have a max resolution of about 480i on a regular consumer CRT at least. And a regular HD LCD at the time was either 720 or 1080p. I didn’t really understand why it looked so bad at the time, but looking back now and understanding more about the technology, the way it stretches the pixels to fill the screen really isn’t ideal. And it’s kind of something that I wish I didn’t notice because I’m sure there’s a lot of people watching this, listening to this – I’m sure you know, a lot of people that plug in these old consoles into modern TVs and don’t even realize anything’s wrong. But for me realizing that I could have such a better experience on an older system on an older TV set was just such a confusing concept to me.
And since then, since I realized that you can actually get better picture quality using an LCD, that got me down a really, really deep and dark and dangerous rabbit hole of buying loads of different upscalers, scan converters, HDMI adapters. You can see where this is going – I got completely obsessed with trying to get the best picture quality in between the days of having a CRT, having an LCD, and now today I’ve kind of given up on the whole thing and gone right back to using CRTs again. Because in my personal opinion, there’s still no better way than playing retro games than playing it on a CRT. Even if you have something like the OSSC or the Retro Tank or a MiSTer, I still prefer the original experience of playing it on the CRT. And these upscalers and mods and stuff, they weren’t cheap either. Like the OSSC is about 200 quid, and basically you’re paying to try and get the experience that you would have had in the past. There’s lots of really talented developers that are making these systems, and they do look absolutely incredible. And they reduce the input lag down to the milliseconds – it’s really impressive stuff. But it’s all trying to solve a problem that if you’re not deep into this retro gaming rabbit hole like I am, you probably wouldn’t even know that this problem exists.
So when you find out that these options are out there, it really does make it very, very difficult to go back to just using an original system with the wires that it came with on whatever TV screen you’ve got available. So in some ways I’m really glad that I know about this stuff, and I’ve got the curiosity and the interest to get all of these different systems and to try them all out. And obviously even to make videos on some of them – I really do love the technology. But at the same time, I wish I didn’t know about it because I could just enjoy the games without having to worry that maybe this pixel’s a little bit too stretched, or maybe these colors aren’t blending properly together. You can see where this is going – it’s a dangerous path. So if you’re listening to this, if you’re just into retro gaming casually, just try and enjoy it for what it is. Don’t try and aim for the perfection, for the perfect kind of input/output.
And another thing that’s kind of frustrating, and since I found out about them I’ve not been able to go back either, and that is something called scanlines. I’m sure a lot of you know, but scanlines are basically what the CRT produced on a 240p image, which is about half the resolution of the full screen. Basically what it would do for the earlier systems to fill the screen is to actually skip out each alternating line going down the screen, and you would kind of have a little black bar that fills in the gaps. And this gave it a really nice, clear image on a CRT. But basically, a lot of modern LCDs don’t really understand the concept of 240p, which is what a lot of older consoles ran at. So what they actually do first is to get that original small little square of a 240p image, and then stretch it out to fill a 480i image, which is sort of the lowest standard definition resolution that they can support. And then they get that already stretched and broken image to fill out a 1080p or 4K display. So that kind of gives you an idea as to why the picture quality looks so bad.
And some of the upscalers actually try and alleviate this problem by keeping the 240p image intact. And one of the ways that they can do that is with artificial scanlines, and they do look absolutely incredible. But once you’ve seen them in action and once you’ve got them dialed in perfectly, it’s almost impossible to go back to a system, an older system at least, that doesn’t have scanlines if you’re playing it on a flat screen.
I love the fact that a lot of modern remakes of games and re-releases actually have scan line options, and usually they do look pretty nice. It was something that I was unsure about for a long time, but over time I’ve really grown to love scanlines – especially with the kind of things that you can do with the OSSC and what you can do with the MiSTer as well. There’s some people that have really, really fine-tuned them to the point where you can actually recreate the pixel grid layout of original CRT displays, and there’s loads of different settings that you can tinker with as well. But the whole thing that I’m trying to get at with this podcast is all of this tinkering, all of these different devices that you have to connect just to be able to enjoy games the way that you would of without knowing any of this in the past – it all kind of builds up this kind of barrier for me personally to be able to go back and experience these if I don’t have these either modern improvements that try and recreate the past, or an original CRT to play them on.
I just thought of another thing that really bugs me as well, and this is about emulators. So obviously back in the day, emulators were fine – they were a great way of enjoying games that you wouldn’t have been able to buy or play normally. But there’s one thing that I found out about in the past few years which really is difficult to go back to, and I can spot it almost immediately. I even spotted this on the Nintendo trailer for when they first showed off their Game & Watch, and this is something called integer scaling. And trust me when you find out what this is, it will be impossible not to notice it and not to be able to try and turn it on at every opportunity possible. Basically what integer scaling is, it’s kind of either doubling or tripling the actual original pixel, so one pixel becomes four in a little square, that becomes eight and a slightly bigger square depending on your screen resolution. And if they’re actually scaled up in integers, so like 2, 4, 8, 16 etc, then you will still retain the right shape and size of the individual pixels. And that means that when the screen scrolls from one side to the other, you won’t get any sort of weird shimmer or artifacts or anything like that.
But when Nintendo showed off their Game & Watch, the Mario one in particular, I instantly noticed that the scaling was off on it. And they’ve actually fixed that on the Zelda one by actually introducing an option to turn on the correct aspect ratio. So that is something that I kind of wish I didn’t know about because it’s ruined a lot of games, and it’s actually ruined a lot of game collections that came out of modern systems that don’t have this implemented properly. It is really difficult to go back to. And there’s so many more little things like this that have built up over time which is kind of really, really interesting in one sense, but also really, really scary in another sense.
So I asked on Twitter and Discord what some of your things were that you found out that makes it really difficult to go back. And I had some fantastic responses. So someone told me that they can’t play on an original Game Boy anymore after experiencing the games on a Super Game Boy, and I can definitely see where he’s coming from. Without, I used to love playing my Game Boy games on the SNES back in the day. And whenever I would put them back into the original brick Game Boy with the screen that you could barely see, it was always such a hassle and I couldn’t wait until I got back home and I was able to actually play them on the big screen.
Someone else had a really interesting answer which has actually got me thinking about a future episode as well. And that is that they preferred playing games when they really focused on just one game, rather than sampling many, many different games for like 10 or 20 minutes each. You’ve really got a lot more enjoyment out of sitting down with one retro game on its own, which is something that’s kind of impossible to do these days – especially if you’re a game collector like I am. But back in the day obviously, I would just have one game to really focus on for probably a month at a time, and I’ve really got so much more enjoyment out of it than I do any games today, where I’m always darting between four and five. So I can definitely see where he’s coming from with that.
Now here’s a really good response from Joel J over on my Discord server. He’s actually mentioned two things that have really improved gaming but at the same time made it really difficult. They are FPGA, which is a fantastic answer and something that I wish I’d thought of actually. So compared to emulation, once you once you actually play a game using FPGA technology, you’ll immediately notice how much more responsive, how much more accurate it is compared to a lot of emulators that you’re probably used to. And it will make it really difficult to go back. So that was a brilliant one.
And the second one was something that I’ve noticed very recently that I really care about, and that is a Game Boy pixel grid. And I’m going to use the Analogue Pocket as an example here, because that has by far the best kind of screen filter that I’ve ever seen – especially for the Game Boy Color games. Not only does the grid recreate the original Game Boy Color screen properly, but it actually also recreates the sub pixels, which make the really specific colors that the Game Boy Color could actually make. And when you lock really closely on the Analogue Pocket, you can see just how much care and attention went into making it as close as it could possibly be, whilst also improving it in a lot of really significant ways. And that is going to make it really difficult not just to go back to the Game Boy Color, not just to go back to even my modded Game Boy Advance, but to go back to anything – even really high quality emulation or even FPGA. The way they did the sub pixels on the screen on this is honestly, it’s mind-blowing. And I wish that was something I’d covered in my review of the system – it’s something that I really started to appreciate after I’d done my review, and after I’d actually started playing it quite a bit more. And I would love to talk about more about the Analogue Pocket on the podcast at some point as well.
So let me know if you’d like to hear more about my thoughts on that. And the final community response here, and another really good one, this one is from “Said No Juan Ever” over on my Discord server. And he said that backwards compatibility – so being able to play things like PS1 games on the PS3, and then the effort of dragging the PS1 out of the closet and hooking it all up just to get a kind of worse experience in all honesty, it really wasn’t worth the efforts. And I can definitely agree with that point as well, and it’s something that I wish a lot more consoles did. I know that the PS5 and the Xbox Series S/X are doing really well with backwards compatibility, but obviously Nintendo’s kind of dropped the ball in recent years. So it’d be great to see more of that in the future with meaningful upgrades at the same time as well. I loved what they did with the GBA, being able to play original Game Boy games on it and stuff. And obviously with the DS and 3DS, and it does make it kind of difficult to go back to the previous generation once you’ve appreciated all of the benefits that the next generation gives you, as well as being able to play all your old games with these improvements as well.
So thank you so much for answering this question – they were some fantastic responses. I would also love for you guys to let me know what some of your things are that you found out about retro gaming that makes it really difficult to go back to these days – that would be really interesting. So like I said at the start, if you check the link there should be a video responses option, and I would love to hear from some of you. I really hope this was an interesting topic for you. I’ve got so many more topics planned – I actually came up with about another five earlier while I was in the shower, so I’ve wrote all them down as well.
Thank you to everyone who’s in the YouTube premiere. Let me know in the comments if you enjoyed this episode – I really enjoyed making it. I’ve had such a bad day today, I’m still in the process of moving house – it is such a slow and painful process, and I’ve been on the phone to solicitors and stuff all day and it was driving me mad. So I was really excited to actually come here and film this and just forget about the world for a minute and just enjoy talking about retro games. Of course, follow/subscribe – whatever you need to do to get this in your ears every week or every few days, I haven’t really decided yet. Anyway, that’s it for this episode, really hope you enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to talking to you all again soon. Goodbye!
I love the fact that a lot of modern remakes of games and re-releases actually have scan line options, and usually they do look pretty nice. It was something that I was unsure about for a long time, but over time I’ve really grown to love scanlines – especially with the kind of things that you can do with the OSSC and what you can do with the MiSTer as well. There’s some people that have really, really fine-tuned them to the point where you can actually recreate the pixel grid layout of original CRT displays, and there’s loads of different settings that you can tinker with as well. But the whole thing that I’m trying to get at with this podcast is all of this tinkering, all of these different devices that you have to connect just to be able to enjoy games the way that you would of without knowing any of this in the past – it all kind of builds up this kind of barrier for me personally to be able to go back and experience these if I don’t have these either modern improvements that try and recreate the past, or an original CRT to play them on.
I just thought of another thing that really bugs me as well, and this is about emulators. So obviously back in the day, emulators were fine – they were a great way of enjoying games that you wouldn’t have been able to buy or play normally. But there’s one thing that I found out about in the past few years which really is difficult to go back to, and I can spot it almost immediately. I even spotted this on the Nintendo trailer for when they first showed off their Game & Watch, and this is something called integer scaling. And trust me when you find out what this is, it will be impossible not to notice it and not to be able to try and turn it on at every opportunity possible. Basically what integer scaling is, it’s kind of either doubling or tripling the actual original pixel, so one pixel becomes four in a little square, that becomes eight and a slightly bigger square depending on your screen resolution. And if they’re actually scaled up in integers, so like 2, 4, 8, 16 etc, then you will still retain the right shape and size of the individual pixels. And that means that when the screen scrolls from one side to the other, you won’t get any sort of weird shimmer or artifacts or anything like that.
But when Nintendo showed off their Game & Watch, the Mario one in particular, I instantly noticed that the scaling was off on it. And they’ve actually fixed that on the Zelda one by actually introducing an option to turn on the correct aspect ratio. So that is something that I kind of wish I didn’t know about because it’s ruined a lot of games, and it’s actually ruined a lot of game collections that came out of modern systems that don’t have this implemented properly. It is really difficult to go back to. And there’s so many more little things like this that have built up over time which is kind of really, really interesting in one sense, but also really, really scary in another sense.
So I asked on Twitter and Discord what some of your things were that you found out that makes it really difficult to go back. And I had some fantastic responses. So someone told me that they can’t play on an original Game Boy anymore after experiencing the games on a Super Game Boy, and I can definitely see where he’s coming from. Without, I used to love playing my Game Boy games on the SNES back in the day. And whenever I would put them back into the original brick Game Boy with the screen that you could barely see, it was always such a hassle and I couldn’t wait until I got back home and I was able to actually play them on the big screen.
Someone else had a really interesting answer which has actually got me thinking about a future episode as well. And that is that they preferred playing games when they really focused on just one game, rather than sampling many, many different games for like 10 or 20 minutes each. You’ve really got a lot more enjoyment out of sitting down with one retro game on its own, which is something that’s kind of impossible to do these days – especially if you’re a game collector like I am. But back in the day obviously, I would just have one game to really focus on for probably a month at a time, and I’ve really got so much more enjoyment out of it than I do any games today, where I’m always darting between four and five. So I can definitely see where he’s coming from with that.
Now here’s a really good response from Joel J over on my Discord server. He’s actually mentioned two things that have really improved gaming but at the same time made it really difficult. They are FPGA, which is a fantastic answer and something that I wish I’d thought of actually. So compared to emulation, once you once you actually play a game using FPGA technology, you’ll immediately notice how much more responsive, how much more accurate it is compared to a lot of emulators that you’re probably used to. And it will make it really difficult to go back. So that was a brilliant one.
And the second one was something that I’ve noticed very recently that I really care about, and that is a Game Boy pixel grid. And I’m going to use the Analogue Pocket as an example here, because that has by far the best kind of screen filter that I’ve ever seen – especially for the Game Boy Color games. Not only does the grid recreate the original Game Boy Color screen properly, but it actually also recreates the sub pixels, which make the really specific colors that the Game Boy Color could actually make. And when you lock really closely on the Analogue Pocket, you can see just how much care and attention went into making it as close as it could possibly be, whilst also improving it in a lot of really significant ways. And that is going to make it really difficult not just to go back to the Game Boy Color, not just to go back to even my modded Game Boy Advance, but to go back to anything – even really high quality emulation or even FPGA. The way they did the sub pixels on the screen on this is honestly, it’s mind-blowing. And I wish that was something I’d covered in my review of the system – it’s something that I really started to appreciate after I’d done my review, and after I’d actually started playing it quite a bit more. And I would love to talk about more about the Analogue Pocket on the podcast at some point as well.
So let me know if you’d like to hear more about my thoughts on that. And the final community response here, and another really good one, this one is from “Said No Juan Ever” over on my Discord server. And he said that backwards compatibility – so being able to play things like PS1 games on the PS3, and then the effort of dragging the PS1 out of the closet and hooking it all up just to get a kind of worse experience in all honesty, it really wasn’t worth the efforts. And I can definitely agree with that point as well, and it’s something that I wish a lot more consoles did. I know that the PS5 and the Xbox Series S/X are doing really well with backwards compatibility, but obviously Nintendo’s kind of dropped the ball in recent years. So it’d be great to see more of that in the future with meaningful upgrades at the same time as well. I loved what they did with the GBA, being able to play original Game Boy games on it and stuff. And obviously with the DS and 3DS, and it does make it kind of difficult to go back to the previous generation once you’ve appreciated all of the benefits that the next generation gives you, as well as being able to play all your old games with these improvements as well.
So thank you so much for answering this question – they were some fantastic responses. I would also love for you guys to let me know what some of your things are that you found out about retro gaming that makes it really difficult to go back to these days – that would be really interesting. So like I said at the start, if you check the link there should be a video responses option, and I would love to hear from some of you. I really hope this was an interesting topic for you. I’ve got so many more topics planned – I actually came up with about another five earlier while I was in the shower, so I’ve wrote all them down as well.
Thank you to everyone who’s in the YouTube premiere. Let me know in the comments if you enjoyed this episode – I really enjoyed making it. I’ve had such a bad day today, I’m still in the process of moving house – it is such a slow and painful process, and I’ve been on the phone to solicitors and stuff all day and it was driving me mad. So I was really excited to actually come here and film this and just forget about the world for a minute and just enjoy talking about retro games. Of course, follow/subscribe – whatever you need to do to get this in your ears every week or every few days, I haven’t really decided yet. Anyway, that’s it for this episode, really hope you enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to talking to you all again soon. Goodbye!