MY RETRO LIFE

PERSONAL STORIES ABOUT OUR SHARED PASSION

How ageing machines have added new challenges to Nick’s hobby

I had a rotten run of luck with consoles breaking last year. It all started when my Dreamcast gave out during a stream – those of you familiar with the console will know it can develop a tendency to randomly reset, and that’s what happened to mine. That’s an easy fix, but the hits kept coming in the summer. My Xbox gave up the ghost five minutes into a Jet Set Radio Future stream, and my PS3 only just struggled through a Tokyo Jungle stream, both of them suffering from failing disc drives. At the end of the year, I went to compare the Game Gear to the Analogue Pocket while reviewing the latter, and found that the old handheld had failed too. While it’s a high-maintenance machine, I’d had it recapped as recently as 2015 so I was mightily annoyed.

This is an unfortunate but very real facet of the retro-gaming hobby. If you’re playing on real hardware, dealing with machines that have been around for at least a couple of decades, you’ve got to expect hardware failures. I learned that at a young age when the power supply for my Atari 2600 stopped working. Thankfully, my uncle was able to repair that. Then in 2005 I managed to wear out my Dreamcast’s GD-ROM drive, and from there I’ve experienced a variety of faults, both on cherished childhood consoles and untested items I’ve picked up.