Gaming has its origins near the birth of computer technology, and like any first exposure to anything radically unconventional, it always leaves a lasting impression. We’ll look back at the birth of video gaming, its genesis to mainstream culture, and the current renaissance of reliving the retro gaming era through emulation today.Humble Beginnings

I spent most of the summer of 1983 fighting monsters in a multilevel dungeon. By day I was an engineer’s assistant at a disk drive manufacturing plant in Boulder, Colorado. But the instant my workday was over, I’d jump in my car, make a pit stop at a fast-food place to buy a large bag of burgers or tacos, and then head straight to my friend Doug’s house, where he and four other dungeon crawlers were huddled around Doug’s brand-new Apple IIe.

They were waiting for me to enter the password for my character, a dwarf fighter named Phlegm, so we could start fighting bushwackers, bubbly slimes, wererats, giant spiders, undead kobolds, and other malevolent creatures that stood between us and treasure chests loaded with gold and loot.

The game was called Wizardry : Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Figure 1-1). Released for the Apple II in 1981, the game pitted a party of up to six players against a menagerie of brutish monsters, spell-casting evil wizards, and other fiendish enemies that we encountered during our adventure through ten trap-filled levels of a complex maze-like dungeon, each of which was more harrowing than the level above it.

Unlike today’s dungeon crawlers that have built-in auto-mapping, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord required players to draw maps on sheets of graph paper. Woe to anyone who ventured into the dungeons without a map to guide them, for they would soon find themselves enveloped in blackness or hopelessly lost in a diabolical teleport trap. But for me, drawing a map and making up my own symbols to identify a trap door, a pit, a turntable, or a teleportal was part of the fun of playing the game. I felt like I was exploring an uncharted territory (see Figure 1-2).

Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was a relentlessly unforgiving game. It automatically saved the state after every combat encounter, whether we wanted it to or not. And we often didn’t want it to, especially when our characters were killed or had their levels drained by evil priests. And when a character died, it didn’t automatically respawn at the surface, ready for another attempt. No, the corpse laid in the dungeon in the spot it had been killed. If your party happened to include a high-level priest, he or she could cast a resurrection spell to bring the dead adventurer back to life (it didn’t always work); otherwise, surviving members had to drag the lifeless carcass up to the surface and fork over a hefty number of hard-won gold pieces at the Temple of Cant to resurrect the corpse. And if your entire party ended up getting killed in an encounter with an especially nasty group of monsters, you’d have to send another party down into the dungeon to collect the dead. It’s no surprise that it took my friends and me all summer long—with sessions often lasting until 3:00 a.m.—to finally win the game. Our victory was bittersweet, because we no longer had a compelling reason to hang out. No matter, though. The fall semester was about to begin, and we had to get ready to go back to college.

I always remembered that summer I spent with my friends, drinking beer, looking up spells, and discussing tactics. After I graduated and moved to California, I bought my own copy of the Wizardry floppy disks and played it again on my newly purchased Apple IIe, enjoying the adventure as a solo player in charge of an entire party. I sold the computer around 1988, along with all my other Apple II games, including a bunch of Infocom text adventures that I loved playing: Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and the Ultima series of fantasy role-playing video games. By that time, I had a speedy Dell desktop machine with a 80386 processor and a whopping 640k of RAM, and I didn’t think I’d ever be nostalgic about my IIe, with its 64k of RAM and no hard drive (how wrong I was).

Several decades later, when my younger daughter Jane became interested in adventure games, I thought it would be interesting to see if Wizardry would hold her interest. Maybe she could be my fellow adventurer, 35 years after the first time I played the game.

I poked around online and learned that Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was considered “abandonware”—the term used for software that was no longer for sale or supported by the publisher.¹ The software for the game was easily found online, as were emulators to run the DOS and Apple versions. I had a Raspberry Pi and discovered that there was an emulator called DOSBox that could run MS-DOS (Microsoft’s first operating system) programs on the Pi. A few hours later, the title screen of Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord appeared on the display attached to my tiny Pi. It had been over 30 years since I saw it. I felt like a time traveler.

I called Jane into my office and told her a bit about the game. I didn’t know if she be interested, considering she was in the middle of playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild, an incredibly detailed, three-dimensional game, with fantastic music, challenging puzzles, side quests, and thrilling real-time battles with AI-powered monsters. How could the primitive, 1982 wireframe graphics and turn-based gameplay hold a candle to Breath of the Wild?

Fortunately, Jane was instantly enthralled by Wizardry . Creating new characters was basically like rolling dice to create a Dungeons and Dragons character, something she was already familiar with because we’d been in a father-daughter DnD club for a few years. She enjoyed taking the time to read the manual (which we found online as a PDF file), learning about the various races, classes, and spells. We each took ownership of three of the characters and entered the maze. Jane loved the fact that it was necessary to make a map of each level, and every time we had an encounter with a group of monsters, we discussed our options before engaging with the enemy. Our game progress was at the same pace as a regular DnD game, but that didn’t bother us in the least. We were having a blast.

While Jane and I were playing, I started to wonder what other classic computer games were available to play via the DOSBox emulator. I soon discovered that there were thousands of games, including many that I loved playing in the 1980s and 1990s, including all the text adventures like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1985), A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985), Amnesia (1986), simulations like SimCity (1989) and Railroad Tycoon (1990), RPGs like Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985), strategy games like Lemmings (1991), action games like Prince of Persia (1990) and Doom (1993), and dungeon crawlers like Rogue (1983). I was soon hooked all over again on retro-games.

It turns out I’m not the only one who has either rediscovered (or for younger people, discovered for the first time) the appeal of games from the 1980s and 1990s. Though these games had simpler graphics and sound effects, the designers of the games were just as creative as the designers of today, and they were able to overcome the limitations of the hardware of those earlier times and create games that were as challenging and engaging as today’s video games. Millions of people play old games using emulation software for DOS programs, Macs, Gameboys, NES, Sega, and other home console, computer, and arcade platforms. And just about every emulator out there has a version that runs on the Raspberry Pi, the marvelous low-cost Linux computer. Even better, a team of passionate retro gaming enthusiasts have created free, labor-of-love software called RetroPie that integrates a wide variety of emulators that make it easy to install and play retro-games.

A (Very) Brief History of Video Games

Before we launch into how to get started with retro gaming, let’s take a short trip back in time, to the late 1950s, the decade that gave birth to the first video game, so we can gain an appreciation for the early history of video gaming.

Tennis for Two: 1958

Blame it on a physicist named William Higinbotham. He created the first video game in 1958.² With a background in atomic bombs, electronics, and radar system displays, Higinbotham was in charge of the instrumentation group at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. (Instrumentation is the term for measurement equipment, such as scales, thermometers, multimeters, signal analyzers, and oscilloscopes.) The laboratory—which conducted research into peacetime uses for nuclear energy—held an annual visitors’ day, and thousands of people would flock there each year to learn what the scientists were doing. Brookhaven boasted the first nuclear reactor built after World War II, as well as a particle accelerator called the Cosmotron, which had 288 six-ton magnets to direct particles around its circular storage ring. With attractions like that, Higinbotham knew it would be a challenge to pique people’s interest in something as boring as scientific measuring equipment. After thinking about it, he decided it would be fun to make a game that ran on the equipment. He programmed an analog computer to plot arcs of an imaginary ball on the screen of an oscilloscope. He called the game Tennis for Two (Figures 1-3 and 1-4). The graphics were extremely primitive, but it set the template for 2D platform games to come. A long horizontal line depicted the ground of a tennis court, and a short vertical line represented the net. A moving blip represented the tennis ball, and players had to press a button at the right time to hit the ball and send it bounding over the net.

A knob allowed the player to control the angle of the ball’s direction (Figure 1-5). While the game was simple by today’s standards, no one had ever seen anything like it. When the ball hit the ground, it would bounce like a real tennis ball. Despite the simplicity of the graphics and controller, Tennis for Two proved to be a smashing success, and people formed a long line in front of the display, waiting for the opportunity to virtually whack a virtual ball over a virtual net.

The following year, Higinbotham upgraded Tennis for Two, giving players the option to play the game with the gravity level on the Moon and Jupiter as well as Earth. Even though his creation was the hit of Brookhaven’s visitors’ day for 2 years running, he didn’t pursue video games and didn’t seek a patent (even though he was awarded over 20 patents for his work in other areas). Nevertheless, Higinbotham’s pioneering work, and the public’s enthusiastic response to it, foreshadowed the video game revolution of the coming decades.

Spacewar!: 1962

The next major milestone in video game history was Spacewar ! created in 1962 by members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Tech Model Railroad Club, led by 25-year-old Steven “Slug” Russell. Unlike Tennis for Two, which ran on a custom analog computer, Spacewar! ran on a digital computer (a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 minicomputer, which boasted approximately 9,000 bytes of memory) and quickly spread to other academic institutions that had PDP-1 systems, via paper tape with holes punched in it like a player piano roll.

Spacewar! was a great deal, more sophisticated than Higinbotham’s demonstration (Figures 1-6 and 1-7). It was a two-player outer-space dogfight game in which each player controlled a spaceship with a limited amount of fuel and a limited number of torpedoes to fire at their opponent. All the while, players had to navigate their ship around a flickering star with a gravity well that threatened to suck the spacecraft in. The game also had a scoring system and a “hyperspace” panic button that allowed players to get out of a tight spot by teleporting their ship to a random location, but which also carried the risk of disintegrating the spacecraft.

Early versions of the game required players to flip switches on the computer to play the game, but the students eventually built a handheld gamepad, which had controls for thrust, direction, firing, and hyperspace. It really was a marvelous achievement, especially when you consider that the entire game was only 9k in size. The rockets produced jets of flame when players pressed the thruster button, and the game simulated Newtonian physics, so that the ships continued to move even after the thrusters were deactivated. According to the videogame history site The Dot Eaters, Spacewar! was “the foundation of the entire industry and one of the most copied concepts in video game history.”

Computer Space: 1971

In 1969, a 26-year-old named Nolan Bushnell, who had played Spacewar! in the 1960s as an engineering student at the University of Utah and had worked as the games manager at an amusement park, teamed up with his friend Ted Dabney to make a coin-operated Spacewar!-inspired game called Computer Space (Figure 1-8).

Instead of using a PDP-1, which cost $120,000 and weighed as much as a VW Beetle, Bushnell and Dabney built the game with custom hardware to bring the cost down. It was the first coin-operated video game and featured a curvaceous molded fiberglass case. In Computer Space, the player was pitted against two computer-controlled flying saucers. Players who successfully destroyed enough flying saucers were allowed to play another round for free. They installed a prototype machine in 1971 at the Dutch Goose bar in Palo Alto, California, and it proved to be a hit with the Stanford crowd who frequented the watering hole. Bushnell and Dabney ended up selling about 1,500 units.

Magnavox Odyssey: 1972

Around the same time, a 50-year-old by the name of Ralph Baer was busy working on a home video game console system. Baer had actually tried to talk his employer, Loral Electronics Corporation, into making a home video game console in the 1950s, but management rebuffed the idea. Baer tried again in the 1960s, and Magnavox finally embraced the concept, releasing the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972 (Figure 1-9). It had no sound effects, and the display was limited to three small squares. It came with plastic overlay sheets with printed graphics that players could attach to their television screen to play six different games, including Table Tennis, Football, and Roulette. Between 1972 and 1975, Magnavox sold 350,000 units, and it kicked off the home video game industry.

Pong: 1972

Meanwhile, Nolan Bushnell decided that his next game should be simpler than Computer Space, which was complex and difficult to learn. The next year, his new company, Atari, released the first video game to become a household word: Pong. The two-player ping-pong simulation was a nod to Tennis for Two, as well as Odyssey’s Table Tennis game. Pong was a much better seller than Computer Space, selling 8,000 units between 1972 and 1974. In 1975, Atari entered the console market with Home Pong, which sold 150,000 units in 1975. A great number of Pong machines (and clones) appeared in bars, arcades, and home consoles, introducing millions of people to the thrill of moving pixels around on a cathode ray tube.

Video Games Go Mainstream: 1970s–1990s

The era between 1975 and 1981 produced a large number of arcade games now regarded as classics: Breakout (1977), Space Invaders (1978), Asteroids (1979), Galaxian (1979), Pac Man (1980), Defender (1980), Missile Command (1980), Donkey Kong (1981), Q∗Bert (1982), Tempest (1981), and Galaga (1981).

This was also the era in which home gaming consoles became extremely popular. In 1976 Coleco unveiled its Telstar console, and the year after that, Nintendo released a console called Color TV-Game (Figure 1-10). The Atari 2600 (1977) was the first home console to have swappable ROM cartridges and sold an astonishing 30 million units by the time it was discontinued in 1992. The next megahit consoles were the Nintendo Entertainment System, which debuted in 1983 and sold 62 million consoles, and 1988’s Sega Genesis (31 million consoles). In 1989, Nintendo released the groundbreaking Game Boy (64 million handhelds sold), giving people the opportunity to play video games on subways, planes, and playgrounds.

The increasing popularity of home computers in the 1980s meant that people now could play a variety of games on the Apple II, the Commodore 64, the Atari ST, and the IBM PC.

Note

The most popular game console in history is Sony’s PlayStation 2, which was released in 2000 and sold over 155 million consoles. The bestselling handheld is the Nintendo DS, which came out in 2004 and has sold 154 million units to date.

The Raspberry Pi Retro Gaming Community

The Raspberry Pi is an ideal platform for retro-games because it’s inexpensive, easy to configure, and tiny. It draws very little electricity but has enough processing power to run most arcade, PC, and console games from the 1970s to 1990s (and beyond, but not without some lags and glitches). Because of these attributes, the Pi is the most versatile computing platform ever created.

An equally important reason why the Pi is a perfect retro gaming platform is because once people discovered what the Raspberry Pi was capable of, it didn’t take long for them to start creating and porting over emulators that could run on the Pi, as well as building hardware such as buttons, joysticks, power supplies, cases, and displays.

Retro gaming enthusiasts are using the Pi to make a dizzying variety of game playing hardware. There are miniature handheld players no bigger than a car remote. On the other end of the spectrum, there are full-sized arcade machines powered by a Pi. There are players that fit in an Altoids mint tin, players that look like the Game Boys (as seen in Figure 1-11) and Nintendo DS, and players that let you choose from over 20,000 game titles. The Raspberry Pi retro gaming community is huge and very active. There are emulators for every platform imaginable, and many models of handhelds and consoles available online to download and make on a 3D printer or laser cutter.

We’ll cover the basic hardware needed to get up and running in the following chapters, but for now, let’s take a look at the two kinds of software that make retro gaming possible on the Pi—emulators and roms.

Emulators

An emulator is a virtual computer that runs on a computer. Modern computers are so much more powerful than earlier computers that they can emulate them very easily. For example, the DOSBox program I use to play Wizardry is a virtual MS-DOS machine that runs on a Raspberry Pi. (There are also versions of DOSBox that run in Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.) The Raspberry Pi has more horsepower than most computers and consoles from the 1990s, making it ideal for running emulators.

There are two main retro gaming emulation platforms for the Raspberry Pi: RetroPie and RecalBox. Both systems are excellent and allow you to play tens of thousands of classic games on the Pi. In general, RecalBox is a bit simpler to set up and use, and RetroPie has more options for customization. In this book, I’m going to use RetroPie for the projects, but the chapters that show you how to make a retro gaming console, arcade machine, and handheld will work with either platform. Try them both and see which one you prefer.

Let’s Talk About ROMs

You’re undoubtedly familiar with game cartridges (Figures 1-12 and 1-13). If you were to crack open the plastic case on one, you’d find a small printed circuit board with a number of chips mounted on it. One of those chips is a read-only memory (ROM) chip that contains the executable game program.

Game enthusiasts learned how to back up their games by downloading a copy of the data stored on the ROM chip (and on the proprietary hardware of arcade machines, too, but the process is more involved) and saving them on their computer. Today, you can buy hardware to download copies of cartridge ROM files (the process is called dumping) and keep them safely stored on a hard drive or thumb drive. But more interestingly, you can use emulation software to run copies of ROM files (more casually written in lowercase as roms) on your home computer or Raspberry Pi.

Caution

It must be noted that many ROM files are copyrighted and that game publishers have started shutting down web sites offering roms. It’s still trivially easy to find roms for almost any game you want. But you should be aware that of the risks involved with downloading roms from the Internet. If you don’t already own a legitimate copy of a game, it’s definitely illegal to download the rom, and especially illegal to share copies of the rom with other people. What about downloading a rom of a game you already own? That depends on who you ask. Nintendo’s legal FAQ states, “Whether you have an authentic game or not…it is illegal to download and play a Nintendo ROM from the Internet.” Is Nintendo correct? Professor Derek Bambauer, who teaches Internet law at the University of Arizona, told Howtogeek.com that the law is not as cut-and-dry as Nintendo would like you to believe. “If I own a copy of Super Mario World, I can play it whenever I want,” he said, “but what I’d really like to do is play it on my phone or my laptop.” If you download a rom, he says, “You’re not giving the game to anybody else, you’re just playing a game you already own on your phone. The argument would be there’s no market harm here; that it’s not substituting for a purchase. This is by no means a slam-dunk argument. But it’s by no means a silly one.” OK, then what about using one of those devices that sucks the rom out of a cartridge you own so you can play it on an emulator? Nintendo says even that is against the law. Bambauer argues that it’s a gray area. There’s a potential fair use argument for making a copy of your cartridge, but it isn’t that much different from downloading a copy from the Internet. “In both cases what you’re doing is creating an additional copy.” There are, however, two ways to play games on an emulator without worrying about the long arm of the law swooping you up and throwing you in prison. One way to play old games legally is with a USB hardware device like the Retrode (about $85), which lets you plug in your carts and play them with emulation software. Another way is play games that are legal to download as roms. This page (https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/10918/where-to-legally-acquire-content-to-play-on-retropie) has a list of legal roms to get you started. Yet another way to play games on the Pi is to write your own, which is a topic we’ll touch on later in the book. And, in 2018, SEGA made many of its roms available with the purchase of its games on the Steam platform.